Michael O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20^th-century president. In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, [whereas] Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms.”

Moreover, argued O’Donnell, Reagan influenced today’s politics for the worse. O’Donnell calls him “the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society…The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank.”

In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased spending on certain domestic programs.

“As violent deaths from war and terrorism decline,” wrote McElwee in a Sunday piece for Salon, “the greater threat to Americans is their failing infrastructure, costly healthcare system and incoherent environmental policy…In addition, [America’s] ability to lead by example is threatened by poverty, homeless[ness] and rampant inequality.”

McElwee concluded that “Americans need to realize that today, the larger threat they face is their own fear leading them to underinvest in vital services. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously warned, ‘the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.’”

During the Thursday afternoon edition of Your World With Neil Cavuto, the Fox News Channel business host responded to the accusation from Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show that the people at Fox “hate poor people.”

“I think he's very fast on his feet even if he sometimes gives me a few good kicks,” Cavuto said about Stewart. “That's fine. I can take it and take him. What I can't take is this: that we at Fox actually hate the poor. Now, even by Jon Stewart's Fox-bashing comedic standards, that's a little rich and more than a little unfair.”

New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear specializes in one-sided fawn-a-thons over President Obama, and Wednesday's report on a panel discussion at Georgetown University featuring Obama talking race and poverty, was the work of a master of the craft: "Obama Urges Unity in Poverty Fight." Shear, who carried Obama's water over the President's anti-business "you didn't build that" comment, and even bragged about the president's NCAA basketball bracket in 2011 ("Mr. Obama knows his hoops"), failed to issue a single critical comment on Obama's big-spending solutions to racial problems.

With Camden Yards set to hold its first fan-attended Baltimore Orioles game in over two weeks tonight, it's a good time to go back to a May 2 item by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics.

Readers may remember the Duke-"educated" Shiner as the person who was flabbergasted that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz cited "God-given rights" when he announced his candidacy on March 23, tweeting in part: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made ... When Constitution was man-made?" Few will be surprised that Shiner's interview of Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings is an income inequality-obsessed de facto puff piece which lets Cummings completely off the hook for worsening conditions in the district he has represented since 1996.