Or, start reading Brad Thor books and join his reader forum.

Negative and critical can look like the same thing. Pessimism is purely negative response. Criticism is negative in it’s assessment but (good) criticism offers an alternative to the status quo.

My take on Gramm (as if anyone cared) is that he nailed it but it wasn’t the best time, place, or manner given his current position. Straight talk is a thing I treasure, but you have to use a carrot with the stick if you’re in a position to be noticed.

Yep, Cranky – you need to either be cold or hot on the martini thing – lukewarm half-measures are self defeating. Tell me it involved gin… (I’m dry these days but I can dream)

I only meant that the media spin had me totally sold on their pessimism. Any minute, the Japanese were going to send out eviction notices because they owned all our real-estate. I was a college student at the time and believed that Conservatives wanted to nuke the world, bankrupt the country and drain us of our vital fluids.

When the world didn’t end in 1990 I started to grow a little skeptical.

Trish, good point. I’m too lazy to look it up, but there are two quotes side by side on the unemployment rate. The numbers are the same, but one is touting the healthy economy under Clinton and the other is wailing about the sluggish one under Bush 43.

Nothing more howl inducing than to tell a pessimist that they’re being unnecessarily pessimistic.

Ok, I’m with you now, I think I caught it. You’re correct in more ways than one, I believe.

Reagan sure scared the poop out of the soviets.

Richard Nixon was such a bizarre mix of goofy eccentricities, I’m kind of surprised that he was elected. There’s an awful lot of things done in this day and age that would make the Founding Fathers’ skin crawl because it just isn’t rooted in the constitution or oversteps the powers granted to congress/government issue.

It’s all in how you define your terms.

And I posted my earlier comment w/o clarifying a point to Michele – I used the word “distinction” but I really meant that I need to remember to distinguish between the two in my dealings with my kids.

I’m hearing the word “recession” bandied about quite a lot recently. I have two issues with that – we have not yet met the criteria for a depression is my first gripe. My second is based on an observation – people gasp in terror at the fact that the DJIA is below 11,000. This isn’t bad, it’s a market adjustment. Everyone should have been gasping in terror as it rose to 14,000. At that record high it was a baseless exuberance that came along with this financing debacle. Talk about the ultimate in mass hedonism. Now people are crying as if it were the end times just because the market is returning to where it ought to have been all along. That doesn’t mean that things couldn’t get worse – but the media is not doing anyone any favors when they replace solid facts (boring) with hysteria (sells like hotcakes).

Sorry for prattling on, folks. Concerned, but more concerned with what I perceive as people’s overreaction to the wrong things. Hysteria solves nothing.

Wrong. Ronald Reagan only scared people who didn’t believe what he said.

Reagan scared everybody because they believed what he said whether they thought he was an idiot or not.

I think that was because he didn’t actually use a lot of useless rhetoric – it was backed by some sort of real action at some later point. I would pretty much stand on my head if it meant he could take a third term.

After Nixon, Ford, then Carter… we had no where to go but up, but only by finding a leader with cojones.

I’ll check out the graph once I put the kids down.