The Republican Party should have never survived the Great Depression. Maybe this time we will drive a stake through the elephant's heart. But don't count on it. Last time, they made their comeback calling people communists. Wonder what it will be this time?

Rich people will always have a party to represent their interests, and there will always be enough dumb people to keep them in power.

As a savvy politician Obama knows that you do not do yourself any good by attacking popular figures. That is why all of the Democratic attacks on Republicans through the campaign and until today have focused only on the Bush II years while the seeds of the disaster were put in place in 1980. Reagan remains very popular in spite of the clear fact that his presidency was a disaster for the great majority of Americans.

In his press conference tonight, Obama mentioned at least twice that Republicans had doubled the national debt in the last eight years. He did not mention that Reagan and the first Bush quadrupled it in twelve--and they did.

The Reagan years were a complete contradiction: he claimed to cut taxes, but really just shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to everyone else by cutting income tax rates while raising social security taxes. Sixty percent of Americans saw their taxes go up during the Reagan years. He claimed to be an opponent of big government, but achieved the highest level of peace time government spending ever seen, as a percentage of GDP. Over seventy percent of all new income generated during the Reagan years went to the richest one percent of the population, ending the American dream for most Americans.

The only thing one can say in defense of Ronald Reagan is that he was too stupid to be held morally culpable.

It is time to finish off the Republican Party, as the Country should have done in 1930. It is time to hold the real facts about Ronald Reagan up to the light.

Please don't forget: the Reagan years saw the national debt multiplied by a factor of four. He outdid GWB by a landslide. It was Reagan who made the national debt a problem by running huge deficits in relatively prosperous times.

The clowns who protest on Tax Day are just people who are too stupid to understand the tax system or how they are being screwed by it for the benefit of billionaires--or people who are whores for the billionaires.

I am a geezer who has been reading the NY Times nearly every day since 1960. I want it on paper so I can fold it to do the cross word puzzle. I care terribly that it and other great newspapers are threatened.

The twerps who are so happy to see print journalism die really should consider where we would be without the reporters who uncovered the crimes on the Nixon administration, or who exposed the torture memos of the last gang of thugs to run the country.

My biggest grouse with the younger generations is their idea that intellectual property is free and that nothing on line should carry a cost. The pirates in Somalia are not the biggest threat to civilization.

What are the bloggers going to blog about when there is no real news at the base? The term "circle jerk" comes to mind.

When the first pictures of prisoner abuse surfaced, it was clear to me as a psychologist that my people had been involved. Those redneck MP's from West Virginia might have beat the crap out of those guys, but they would not have come up with sexual humiliation. That meant the responsibility went way up the chain of command. (The NY Times did not publish my letter on the subject at the time.)

So far, as best I remember, only a few enlisted people have been held accountable. I think one (female) officer was forced to resign.

That's one more causality of the Bush administration: the honor of the Army. So much for the responsibility of command and even the ethic of looking out for the troops.

If the people behind the systematic torture of prisoners are not held accountable, the country is a joke.

The Republican Party should have never survived the Great Depression. They drove the country into the ground by refusing to tax rich people and regulate business. They then opposed measures to relieve the suffering of the victims. They also, just incidentally, opposed resisting the rise of Fascism because they were basically fascists.

They made their comeback in the '50s calling people Communists and have had pretty good success since 1964 by sucking up to every group of bigots in America.

Now they have done it to us again in almost exactly the same way they did it in the 1920s (the details are different, the principles exactly the same). Moreover, since the last election they have pursued a policy of rule or ruin with almost total party discipline. Why would anybody who is not a multimillionaire conceivably vote for a Republican--anywhere for any office? (the answer, of course, is stupidity)

The Republican Party should never get more than 2% of the vote in any election. They should be driven from the stage. Some other party will emerge to offer opposition to whatever Democrats are trying to do, so we will not have a single party government for long.