I got "sucked in"

[Peter McGuire]

I voted for Carter which was an anti-Ford vote. Even then, I believed that Ford and the Warren Commission were wrong. I voted for Reagan, discarding President Carter. Of course, interest rates were 20% and things were looking bad. By 1980, however, I benefited from the "road show" that was going around college campuses but did not know about Reagan's blocking of key documents during the Garrison investigation. Oh well. Reagan probably did not know who he chose for Vice-President either, so I guess that kind of makes us even.

Edited April 11, 2011 by Peter McGuire

[Peter McGuire]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt1fYSAChxs&feature=related

Reagan 1964 speech. Interesting.

Reagan was never going to help us regarding the JFK assassination. He knew nothing, but he was no better than any of the others who could have made a difference because he was the type of man who should have had the integrety to do so.

[Greg Burnham]

IMO, the best thing Reagan ever did was to order the bombing of the French Embassy in Tripoli after the French government refused to allow us the use of their air space when we were retaliating

for the Libyan terror attacks in which American servicemen were deliberately targeted and killed. The French refusal caused undue risk to our personnel and was arbitrary--even mean spirited.

They received enough advance warning of the "accidental miss hit" to their embassy for all of their personnel to be evacuated...but, they got the message. There are few things about Reagan that

I praise--very few. But, that is one of them.

[Peter McGuire]

Wow. That was brave move by Reagan to the French! Nothing better than an ass kicker - and Reagan was at times. He was "My President," in that he was the president that resided in my young, dumb and full of energy years - my mid twenties.

But as I look back at those times, and the Reagan years, I question certain things that I did not at the time.

Edited April 11, 2011 by Peter McGuire

[Greg Burnham]

Yeah, Peter. I know what you mean. I generally don't subscribe to such tactics as I described above, but in that particular case...I agreed. Over all, I really didn't care much for Reagan.

"Cowboy methods" don't suit my best judgment these days.

[Peter McGuire]

Yeah, Peter. I know what you mean. I generally don't subscribe to such tactics as I described above, but in that particular case...I agreed. Over all, I really didn't care much for Reagan.

"Cowboy methods" don't suit my best judgment these days.

Thanks for your input, Greg. Glad to hear from you.

Peter

[Peter McGuire]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aip-a3qEJ2s&feature=fvwrel

Since President Reagan had a decendent from Kent, he must have been Irish.

Great music from there!

[Peter McGuire]

Wow. Americans, "my country tis of thee" is the British National Anthem!

[David Andrews]

Reagan was the first overt announcement that the fix was in. He made possible the charade of the G. W. Bush administration.

[Peter McGuire]

Reagan was the first overt announcement that the fix was in. He made possible the charade of the G. W. Bush administration.

that sounds like a good thing. Thanks

Want to get depressed? Listen to this:

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen, and down the mountain side

The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying

'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow

Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow

'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow

Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

And if you come, when all the flowers are dying

And I am dead, as dead I well may be

You'll come and find the place where I am lying

And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.

And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me

And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be

If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me

I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.

Edited April 12, 2011 by Peter McGuire

[David Andrews]

From Jackie Wilson, former Detroit Catholic school boy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvITGrZqWCk

A hard life, with moments of intense ecstasy.

Edited April 12, 2011 by David Andrews

[Guest Tom Scully]

Just say the words and I'll be only too happy to make this thread invisible.

I can't wrap my mind around what some of you must have had going on inside your heads when you looked positively on anything having to do with Reagan. Don't you think it might never be a good thing to bomb the embassy of an ally over a disagreement related to a unilateral air strike on a third party sovereign nation?

Suicide bombings and events like the Pan Am jumbo jet raining down on Lockerbie are the pushback effect coming from those who have the same thirst for blood revenge that Reagan surely exercised, but who cannot hope to respond in kind? Those inflamed by the effects of demonstrations of military superiority in their cities respond as they are able to. The unrelenting "grass roots" retaliation against Israeli military superiority has taught us nothing.

Can you understand that Reagan was a symptom of the malignancy that is right wing American extremism...the lack of any balance to counter the rise of corporatism? Did any of Ike's military industrial complex, speech sink in, at least by 1980?

Maybe I cannot relate to the question asked in this thread becaue I was "saved" (or cursed?) by a high school english teacher who required everyone in his class to subscribe to the weekday issues of the NY Times. I actually read the articles on the first page and ed and op-ed pages. By the time I had to make a decision about the Vietnam war draft, I was politically aware enough to decide not to cooperate with it in any way.

I educated myself and my anger and shock in reaction to how extreme right oriented everyone seems to be has only escalated over the years. Why aren't you angrier...with yourself, and with your countrymen? In reaction to the Levy Institute study telling us that as of July, 2009, 20 percent of the US population owned 87.3 percent of US wealth, the tea party swept the house of representatives and Obama still has an approval rating of 45 percent. IMO, compared to Reagan, Jimmy Carter was a saint. obama gave Carter's energy indepence speech again....3 weeks ago. Reagan dismantled the bi-partisan energy program voted in under Carter's leadership. Five years later the petroleum industry had bought out and buried the solar technology industry co-financed by tax dollars under the Carter reform legislation. Reagan stacked the Syn-Fuels corp. with his crony hacks and sabotaged and defunded it.

The country stopped and mourned for a week when the senile husk that had been Reagan, finally expired in 2004. IMO, the US has already destroyed itself with its right wing cancer driven war mongering, wealth concentration, and engineered sequential bubbles of malinvestment disguised as economic "booms"! Rise and shine, boys! Sit alongside and watch the horror movie I've been watching since high school. One party America, the property and propaganda party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Kerr

Clark Kerr

...Kerr was criticized both by students for not agreeing to their demands and by conservative UC Regent Edwin Pauley and others for responding too leniently to the student unrest.[1]

[edit] Blacklisting

In 2002, the FBI released documents that had Kerr blacklisted[clarification needed] as part of a campaign to suppress people at UC deemed subversive.[2] This information had been classified by the FBI and was only released after a fifteen-year legal battle that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. President Lyndon Johnson had picked Kerr to become secretary of Health, Education and Welfare but withdrew the nomination after the FBI background check on Kerr included damaging information the agency knew to be false.

Edwin Pauley approached the CIA Director John McCone (a Berkeley alum and associate) for assistance. McCone in turn met with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.[3][4] Hoover agreed to supply Pauley with confidential FBI information on "ultra-liberal" regents, faculty members, and students, and to assist in removing Kerr. Pauley received dozens of briefings from the FBI to this end. The FBI assisted Pauley and Ronald Reagan in painting Kerr as a dangerous "liberal."

Kerr's perceived leniency was key in Reagan's election as Governor of California in 1966[citation needed] and in Kerr's dismissal as president by the university’s Board of Regents in 1967. In response, Kerr stated that he left the university just as he entered it: "fired with enthusiasm."...

1969 FBI memo re: Ronald Reagan's purge of UC Berkeley, p.3.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet.html

April-May 1969 On April 18, the underground paper The Berkeley Barb runs an announcement calling for interested individuals to bring building materials to a university-owned vacant lot near Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue in order to build a community park. A large crowd assembles to create "People's Park".

In early May, UC Berkeley administrators decide to reclaim the land, and on May 15, 250 Berkeley police and California Highway Patrol officers are called in to enforce this edict. The park is bulldozed, and a large chain-link fence is erected. As construction the fence began, a crowd of 6000 moved towards the park after rallying at nearby Sproul Plaza. Police fired tear gas at the approaching crowd. Protesters threw rocks and bottles. Sheriff Deputies retaliated with double-0 buckshot, blinding one man (Alan Blanshard) and killing another (James Rector). That evening, California Governor Ronald Reagan calls in the National Guard and the California State Highway Patrol to restore order. Reagan is quoted on May 15, 1969 in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying "If there has to be a bloodbath, then let's get it over with."

Ronald Reagan launched political career using the Berkeley campus ...

Jun 8, 2004 ... Ronald and Nancy Reagan, 1964, Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan aboard a boat in California, August, 1964 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) ...

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml -

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0617-06.htm

Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by the Free Press / Columbus, Ohio

Ronald Reagan: A Legacy of Crack and Cheese

by Bob Fitrakis

........Caught up in the Goldwater conservative movement, Reagan realized that he could deliver the right-wing reactionary script better than the much more intellectual Senator from Arizona. Thus, in 1966, Reagan took his highly-honed hokum and became the ultimate shill for the far right. As the New Republic pointed out during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California, “Reagan is anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th century.” Reagan campaigned against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the student rights movement and the Great Society. In his fantasy world, Reagan equated giant price-fixing corporations with small town entrepreneurs. As every long-hair in the late 60s knew, Ronald Reagan was “the drugstore truck-drivin’ man, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.” He said if the students at Berkeley wanted a bloodbath, he would give them one. James Rector was shot dead soon after.

The real legacy of Reagan can be found in Philadelphia, Mississippi where he announced his candidacy for the Presidency in 1980. Previously, the most important political event in Philadelphia had been the deaths of civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in 1964. Reagan appeared, sans hood, to talk in those well-known racist code words about “state’s rights.” This was no mistake or misunderstanding. Reagan was signaling the right-wing movement that he would carry their racist agenda. Remember in 1984, his political operatives accused Walter Mondale of being “a San Francisco-style Democrat.”

Reagan reached out and embraced the racist apartheid government of South Africa through his policy of so- called “constructive engagement.” Reagan’s solution to the de-industrialization of America was to build the prison industrial complex. His centerpiece was a racist so-called “War on Drugs” while his friends in the CIA used narcotics peddlers as “assets.” And then Reagan’s El Salvadorian Contra buddies began bringing in crack. ..........

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1962220

....Ronald Reagan was key to the South's transition to Republican politics. Goldwater got the ball rolling, but Reagan was at his side from the very beginning. During the 1964 campaign, Reagan gave speeches in support of Goldwater and spoke out for what he called individual rights -- read that also as states' rights. Reagan also and portrayed any opposition as support for totalitarianism -- read that as communism.

In 1976, Reagan sought the Republican nomination against the incumbent President Gerald Ford. Reagan's campaign was on the ropes until the primaries hit the Southern states, where he won his first key victory in North Carolina. Throughout the South that spring and summer, Reagan portrayed himself as Goldwater's heir while criticizing Ford as a captive of Eastern establishment Republicans fixated on forced integration.

Reagan lost the nomination to Ford in 1976. But when the former California governor ran for the presidency again in 1980, he began his campaign with a controversial appearance in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been brutally killed. It was at that sore spot on the racial map that Reagan revived talk about states' rights and curbing the power of the federal government.

To many it sounded like code for announcing himself as the candidate for white segregationists. After he defeated President Carter, a native Southerner, Reagan led an administration that seemed to cater to Southerners still angry over the passage of the Civil Rights Act after 16 years. The Reagan team condemned busing for school integration, opposed affirmative action and even threatened to veto a proposed extension of the Voting Rights Act (the sequel to the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed a year later and focused on election participation). President Reagan also tried to allow Bob Jones University, a segregated Southern school, to reclaim federal tax credits that had long been denied to racially discriminatory institutions.

The genial Californian Republican denied there was any racism implicit in those policies. Even when he was characterizing poor women as welfare queens driving around in pink Cadillacs, he said it was a merely matter of encouraging people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The America he seemed to envision had no need to deal with racial divisions, and he said his only desire was to encourage self-sufficiency for all Americans and to reduce all Americans' dependence on government programs.

<b>Today it is hard to believe that Reagan had such success using the Civil Rights Act as a whipping boy.</b> The Civil Rights Act is now so widely accepted that it doesn't attract controversy in any region of the country -- including the South. There is no debate about the right of black people, Hispanics or Asians to stay in a hotel, shop in a store or to apply for a job without fear of racial discrimination......

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/jan-june04/historians_reagan_6-7.html

.....Domestic policy

GWEN IFILL: Roger, let's talk about his domestic policy. Pick up where Michael left off and say how did this Reaganism translate into domestic policy in a way that still reverberates today.

WilkinsROGER WILKINS: Well, Reagan was an incredible combination of a person who was very optimistic, upbeat, but underneath there were some really ugly parts of his politics.

He was, I said once before on this program, he capitalized on anti-black populism by going to Philadelphia and Mississippi , for example, in the beginning of his campaign in 1980.

Nobody had ever heard of Philadelphia and Mississippi outside of Mississippi , except as the place where three civil rights workers had been lynched – in 1964 – he said I believe in states rights.

Everybody knew what that meant. He went to Stone Mountain , Georgia , where the Ku Klux Klan used to burn its crosses, and he said Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.

He was rebuked by the Atlanta newspapers – they said we don't need that any more here. He went to Charlotte, North Carolina one of the most successful busing for integration programs in the country and he said I'm against busing and again the Charlotte papers rebuked him. And the impact of that plus his attacks on welfare women, welfare queens in Cadillacs, for example. And his call for cutting the government. He didn't cut the government; the military bloomed in his time. But programs for poor people day diminished entirely and America became a less civilized and less decent place. .....

...The sentiments in your post harken to Reagan's. spoken more than 30 years ago:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22...n&scoring=a

Reagan's sly with racism .

Eugene Register-Guard - Google News Archive - Feb 16, 1976

Everyone knows that "strapping buck" is a code phrase that conjures up images of of some "burly" black male, chomping down T-bones courtesy of the food ...

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=DBMRA...an+linda+taylor

Eugene Register-Guard - Google News Archive - Feb 9, 1976

real- it, but Linda Taylor, a 47-year-old Chicago welfare recipient, ... Former California Ronald Reagan has referred to her at nearly every stop, ...

Edited April 12, 2011 by Tom Scully

[Thomas Graves]

Since President Reagan had a descendent from Kent, he must have been Irish.

???

Anyone with an ancestor from Kent very likely has some Celtic blood in them (and Roman and Jute and Angle and Saxon and Norman), but probably not Irish per se. A lot of people confuse "Celtic" with "Irish." The ancient Celts lived almost everywhere in continental Europe (and yes they lived in England and Ireland, too). For example, Bohemia got its name from the Celtic "Boii" tribe that used to live in the western half of what is now the Czech Republic, and Paris, France got its name from the Celtic "Parisii" tribe that used to live along the river Seine in the Paris basin. But you're right about one thing; Ronald Reagan was probably Irish in ancestry. And I'm pretty sure he could have spelled "potato"(sp?), too, because he probably would have delegated that cerebral task to someone else. LOL

--Thomas William Graves (adoptive)

--Thomas Michael Mahon (biological); proud to be "Celtic" in general, Irish (and Swedish and Ukranian} in particular...

Edited April 12, 2011 by Thomas Graves

[David Andrews]

Just say the words and I'll be only too happy to make this thread invisible.

A death to this thread.

[Bernie Laverick]

IMO, the best thing Reagan ever did was to order the bombing of the French Embassy in Tripoli after the French government refused to allow us the use of their air space when we were retaliating

for the Libyan terror attacks in which American servicemen were deliberately targeted and killed. The French refusal caused undue risk to our personnel and was arbitrary--even mean spirited.

They received enough advance warning of the "accidental miss hit" to their embassy for all of their personnel to be evacuated...but, they got the message. There are few things about Reagan that

I praise--very few. But, that is one of them.

Greg/Peter I cannot let this go by without comment. You characterise the French as being "mean spirited" for not allowing use of their airspace. But bombing an ally's embassy is surely a little more than 'mean spirited' don’t you think, if not an outright war crime!

Incredibly, many Americans believe that the Iraq war was in some way a 'retaliation' for 9/11. Too bad that too many trust their governments when they are told it is necessary to unleash some expensive violence.

Just because your government decides for its own ends to attack another country please don’t expect that the rest of the world’s duty is to stop what they are doing and focus on America’s aims. “Or we’ll bomb your embassy!” And then call the French “mean spirited” for not doing so.

This my friends is precisely why no one will ever uncover the real facts behind the JFK assassination. You do know don’t you that the same governments who have repeatedly lied and prevaricated in order to uphold the laughable official WC conclusion are the same governments making you believe it is necessary to bomb Libya or Iraq…or Vietnam…or Iran (maybe next year eh?).

Why do you so fervently disbelieve them in one scenario but automatically assume they must be truthful when giving reasons for bombing Libya? Are you so positive, given what you know about the JFK conspiracy, that the government must have been telling the truth when it claimed Libya were responsible for those service people’s deaths? Or was it just expedient for other reasons to have you believe that?