I had the button that read "jane wyman was right". always amused me that some people got it, others were clueless.

Much as some will be living the Bu$h nightmare for a long time.

I wasn't old enough to vote yet (11th grade), but I followed politics even back then and was very liberal.

Like you, I've been living with the consequences of '80 and '84 ever since.

I was 29 in 1980. I voted for the other guy. Not that it did much good. If there is any justice Ronny the Raygoon is rotting in his Christian Hell.

That didn't make living with the fact any easier. I do remember getting very drunk the weekend following the election.

Second only to His Chimperial Highness as the Worst President of the last 100 years.

Because of Ronald Shitface Reagan, I wasn't able to finish law school. Goodbye law career.

I did get a 4 year degree but not what I planned and not where I planned. The career I end up with is not nearly as fulfilling or earnings.

when he became screen guild president and that was *why* he became president.

"Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say." Whether it was Donald Regan or the rest of his cabal, it was all pre-scripted. At the end, Nancy was standing behind him, prompting him. I always said that if Ronnie hadn't had his 3 x 5 cards, he would have been caught in the headlights.

His name is on my UC diploma. Breaks my heart. He began the siege against one of the best public university systems in the country.

back in the day, who was good friends with my first husband's parents (my FIL was a cameraman
in Hollywood for many, many years). He confirmed
that Ronnie never had an original idea and was really not very smart, but
very good at being congenial and sticking with a script.

And yes, his signature as governor was on my diploma from UCLA, too.

president matthew douglas in "my fellow americans".

pat brown wrote it in 1976 due to reagan's presidential run that year.

i read it in during the run-up to the 1980 campaign. i know it sounds like sour grapes from someone who lost an election; but, especially knowing the effect reagan had on our country, it's an incredibly insightful read, in part because there are actually a lot of parallels between what reagan did to america when president and what he did to california as governor.

the book reads more like someone who got to know reagan well, and is trying to save america from electing him president.

It was in Kitty Kelley's book on the Reagans and Selene Walters pretty much agreed with the account except she didn't call it "date rape" because she said she never got the chance to have a date with him he forced her on the couch in her apartment after appearing at her door.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/1999/03/gipper_the_ripper.html

"...In Kitty Kelley's 1991 book Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, actress Selene Walters claims that Ronald Reagan forced her to have sex with him in the early '50s. According to the book, Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, met Walters in a Hollywood nightclub. He asked for her address, and she gave it to him. Later at 3 a.m., he arrived unexpectedly at Walters' door and forced himself on her, Kelley alleges. ..."

I guess the prerequisite for President is messin with women in a demeaning or worse way. It seems to be am epidemic among Presidents.

He had lots of help. You didn't think he thought it up all by himself, did you? that was way beyond him. He didn't know anything about governance, he was just an actor.

That's pretty much what most actors said when asked to name a strength Ronnie possessed as an actor.

Ron Reagan Cosby did the same thing to America as he did to Piper Laurie . . .. with, of course, some help from Donald Regan, Edwin Meese, Lee Atwater and, of course, the "Reaganomics" team; they were mostly salespeople, not economists.

When she was known as Nancy Davis she got put on the black list and Saint Ronnie was the man to see about such things. Nancy wound up getting knocked up, and they had to get married to keep the scandal from ruining both their careers.

…in the late of evenings when he stayed at the infamous *Garden of Allah* in Hollywood in his younger years.
The man, Ronnie, was a known womanizer in Hollywood. It has been said, Reagan was also an adulterer stepping out on his then wife, actress Jane Wyman for his later wife AKA FL Nancy Reagan.

When he ran for president against Carter, he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which is only known for one thing - the killing of three Black freedom riders back in the 60s, and the main emphasis on his speech was states' rights (wink-wink).

TlalocW

....our disparate communities have and have had, so that no one walks alone in the struggle.

And yeah, St Ronnie was a jerk.

California had a beautiful model public education system, pre-Raygun. It cost me $10/cr hr. to go to San Jose City College, my books cost more than my tuition. Then Ronnie screwed the state with Prop 14 (? 11?) so millionaire real estate magnates had their bills cut to mere pennies and new home owners had to pay through the nose to make up the difference AND college tuition went up 100% or more. So glad I was out of college before that happened.

Raygun is in hell, where he belongs.

It was passed by the voters several years after Governor Dumbass was out of office. I was a California public schools kid and I watched things crumble rapidly after that travesty.

but I thought that Raygun really pushed that through? Is my old memory failing me?

The amendment was also known as "Jarvis-Gann" after anti-taxers Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann. Jarvis (on right below) kind of looked like Reagan.



Reagan left the governorship in '75 and this came along three years later. However, Reagan's presidential run was associated with this anti-tax stuff.

as wel as the presidential run for Ronnie that I'm remembering. Gann personally cut his own tax bill by millions of dollars and passed that on to far less wealthy new home buyers. Sick jerk!

Ronnie did indeed bear more than a passing resemblence to a compulsive liar, as did Kneepad Nancy.

He was a complete dolt. Sounds like James Garner (as quoted above) had him pretty well pegged.

I never saw him in any of those pictures.

somewhat 'far' left stuff.

Brando, Poitier, Dylan and more: Stars who shined at the 1963 March on Washington

Also mahalia Jackson, Jackie robinson, joan baez, Sammy davis jr, Charlton heston, burt Lancaster, harry Belafonte, james Baldwin, Ossie davis, Ruby dee, Diahnne carroll and of course, james garner, who I used to have a crush on.

















Can anyone ID the women & the guy behind heston and the guy to his left? all of them look familiar to me but there's no caption on the photo source.



I forgot peter paul and mary:




I also forgot Paul Newman!!! He's the guy with the beard next to diahann carroll and garner!!!




Others who were there = lena horne and Josephine baker. Here's baker in her French resistance uniform from WW2. She made a speech at the March on Washington.




attribution to "history chicks" and "social work helper" websites, as well as kpbs and 'the grio'

about the other people.

If you haven't seen the movie Hombre with Paul Newman, Diane Cilento the great Frederic March, and of course Richard Boone, you really should see it. Frank Silvera is really good in it.

Tony Franciosa had quite a career, too. His role in A Face In The Crowd is wonderful. Both really great flicks.

BTW Jimmy Garner says in his recent biorgraphy that he punched out Tony Franciosa. Great book by a great liberal and a great man.

and to me silvera looks like the former secretary of labor.

Tony Francioso to Heston's left, Rita Moreno in front. I think, who's the other female?

He was every bit as nice as his persona was. A warm, down-to-Earth man.

He said that the homeless are that way because they choose to be. That's a dick thing to say.

It's when I cut the cable and stopped watching TV. The fawning over him made me hurl. He was a B actor of limited intelligence who thought the presidency was just another role. It's the start of the path that put us where we are today.

praising him.

IMO.

But, there are an awful lot of people out there who need to be reminded of it. Thanks for posting that so we can all use it to refresh their memories.

It's a common thing with Republicans.

whose only agenda was the advancement of Richard Nixon. Reagan was the front man for the founders of the New Fascism/Corporate State we still see being put in place today. It all started with the simpleton Reagan.

It never crossed Nixon's mind for a nanosecond to consider unmaking the New Deal. For every Repuke since Ford that has been the first order of business.

As Seth Rosenfeld proved, JE Hoover and the FBI and the secret
power of the federal government installed Reagan as governor.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/subversives-seth-rosenfeld/1101089723?ean=9781429969321

Iran Contra affair
Robert Bourke
Disaster of Lebanon
gross abuse of executive power through executive orders (really gets me considering the con's hypocritical outrage a the much more reasonable degree that President Obama uses his)
complete and willful lack of policy on HIV when it was early on and much could have been done, and MANY lives could have been saved.


Just a few of the ones that stick out right off the top of my head.

He should have been tried for war crimes, and crimes against humanity.. yet is the golden jackass of the republican party.

would take the better part of a year, but let's not forget Pappy Bush with his CIA connections, Ed Meese kowtowing to the Donald Wildmon cult, Ollie North dissembling about the Iran Contra debacle, and James Watt, the petty criminal--one of 138 Reagan administration officials to have been convicted, indicted, or investigated for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. "In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever."

And, let's not forget that the Dick Cheney was one of Reagan's "earliest supporters."

I'm sure we have no idea who actually installed St. Ronnie...

Silverspoon has him beat. However, he is far and away the most overrated president ever.

I tend to leave with Raygun because he opened the door for Shrub and his cronies. Also, Raygun's Laffer curve trickle down BS plagues us to this day.

set the stage for GWB to perform on. Reagan gets my vote for worst ever.

Yes, a DUer with more than 32,000 posts actually wrote that.

Obama is "Way to the right of Nixon, slightly to the right of Reagan. He has killed the party by driving millions of hopeful young people to complete disillusionment."



Sid

That revisionist history of Reagan always raises a red flag with me.

are Right Wing Lying Hating Using1% Misogynist Racist Homophobic Bigots.

Oh wait...



So THATS how you get 35 million posts in an hour on a Liberal UNDERGROUND site...

THANKS!!

Got it now!

Put people out of work and their damn propaganda made us fell even worse because we were not picking ourselves up It was our fault were were out of work. I was a casualty of the Farm Crisis of the 1980's. Ronald Reagan led. I would love to urinate .......

I hope what I said isn't hurtful.

and the Republicans, so rather than allow her to explain her evolution they seek to revise history to make Reagan seem like a moderate who just happened to be anti gay, anti choice, racist and wrong about the economy. No politician is worth such rewriting of important history.
I am still trying not to blame Warren for her supporters who ask 'Was AIDS really all that bad?' and things like that to play down Reagan/Bush conservatism so it seems reasonable that a person like Warren would support them. But it was not reasonable, she was wrong. Wrong about all of it, including the economic policies she says motivated her to overlook the racist bigotry and anti woman materials. Wrong. And if she can't stand up and explain it, she's not worth any thought at all.
Sorry if that bothers some here, but I was fortunate to live through those times and I will not betray those who died in those times for some political millionaire's convenience.
Knowledge= Life
Silence = Death

But anyone running for office today who has a history of supporting the Reagan/Bush debacle owes the voters an explanation. If I don't find her excuses to be plausible, I won't support her. One thing I will say, though. Even if we had had a Democrat in office, there's no guarantee that he would have had a better record on AIDS. That would have taken someone with compassion and someone who saw us as worthy individuals. People like that were sorely lacking in 1980's America.

time required great compassion. All it required was a lick of commons sense. There were over 5,000 dead and no action at all when Republicans like Warren voted for Reagan a second time. By the time her choice so much as mentioned the word, there were over 20,000 dead. US numbers currently are around 650,000 with a global toll of around 36 million.
To take no action was a deliberate act of violence against LGBT and African American people. To endorse that required stupidity, racism, homophobia and inhumanity beyond measure. When asked, Warren shrugs off the massive loss of life and says 'I only cared about the markets'. That means she supported Reagan's economic policies. Strongly enough to overlook racism, sexism and massive death. But were those economic policies good policies? No, they were awful policies.
She has taken power in this Party without ever having to talk about these things. This makes me dislike the Party intently. I feel betrayed by her boosters who do not require her to explain how she could be in a hateful anti choice, anti gay Party of racists for 30 years.
And you know, her boosters attack Clinton for being a 'Goldwater Girl' when she was too young to vote. I don't care much for Hillary, but one thing I like even less is hypocrisy. Any person who happily supports a candidate who was a Nixon through Bush loyal Republican voter who also slams another candidate for having had Republican parents is a hypocrite running the very sort of double standards upon which all bigotry is built. 'Rules for thee, never for me'.
It repulses me.

We don't know for certain who she voted for, whether it was Reagan, Carter or Anderson in 1980 or Reagan or Mondale in 1984. She made it clear that she supported candidates of both parties. It sounds like she was non-partisan until she became a Democrat in 1995, which coincides with her move to Massachusetts and the arrival of the Gingrich Congress.

She said that she was with the Republicans for awhile, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she identified as a Republican, just that there was one period during her independent years when she was tilting GOP. Even being a registered Republican in the early 90s doesn't mean much. She might have registered with them to vote in a primary for a county election and never bothered to switch back.

For the record, I am not looking for Warren to run in 2016, although I do like her. And I agree that it is reasonable to seek more answers on this matter. I'm just saying that we don't currently have them.

I am mainly interested in knowing whether she voted for Phil Graham in 1984, when she was living in Texas, or Rick Santorum in 1994 when she was living in Pennsylvania. They ran for the U.S. Senate in those election years.

And I agree about Ronald Reagan. He was one of the worst presidents in American history.

In an interview with The Daily Beast released on Tuesday, Warren, 62, who recently began a bid to unseat Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) admitted that up into her early 40s she was a Republican.

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore," Warren said. "I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role."
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/189657--liberal-favorite-elizabeth-warren-admits-she-was-a-republican

So she says she was a Republican, not an independent. She says she thought the Republicans had better fiscal policy, that was Trickle Down policy. She says government was 'too activist' in regulation of the markets. Wanted less government regulation, Nixon through Bush she got what she wanted, got her millions of dollars.

I'm not sure what any of that is appealing to any Democrat.

First, Warren never said she was a Republican into her early forties, that is not part of the direct quotes. The writer says that about her. Second, if Warren stopped being a Republican in her early 40s, then that means she stopped identifying as such some time around 1991--right when she registered GOP for the first time. Third, we don't even know if she voted for Reagan, she didn't say.

My point is that we just don't know exactly what she meant or what the total history is. A lot of people go back and forth in their party ID, especially when we're not even talking about registration. She didn't say how long she was GOP for, or when she was GOP, or most importantly, how passionate a Republican she was (or wasn't).

We also don't know which portions of this interview wound up on the editing room floor. She might have provided a more complete story that didn't find its way to print.

I agree that at some point she is going to have to provide more concise answers, including whether or not she voted for Reagan. I am just saying that we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

Isn't there any part of you that likes her? Don't you like anything she has said or done?

And to think at how many places/objects are renamed after reagan, thanks yo Grover Norquest, the guy that gives the muppet character a bad name.

our last liberal president; he's the pres who gave us SSI and some other stuff, the last gasp of the welfare state.

In fact, that might have been his best attribute!

I no longer felt like I belonged in America. I remember desperately wanting to move to Hawaii, because they had gone for Carter and it was far away. I never made it, but did get out of Texas.

Hawaii remains my dream.

you are about to hear that giant sucking sound coming from Texas here shortly if gas prices continue to tumble.

The election of Ronald Reagan was an utter disaster for the US and the world. It was the only election that made me cry. The man oozed evil. I have never understood how people could not see what an absolute monster he was.

Bette Davis and James Garner were actually far too kind to him, but they were good people.

1. Deduct credit card interest on my tax return.

2. Deduct a car loan interest on my tax return.

3. Social Security was not taxed.

4. Call 12 friends for cocktails that died while he and his fucking wife played with astrologers in the White House.

I would happily piss on his grave.

He and his administration did a lot of horrible shit in their time at the White House. We went from arguably the most honorable and honest Presidents in history to one of the least.

And it never will.

Fuck him and his odious "legacy".

especially to blacks and the poor (between trickle-down, "welfare queens", rising unemployment, and wiping out the Black Panthers), and was just another Republican warmonger (Cold War). Some DUers claim that he was more left-wing than Pres. O, but there was very little that was left-wing about Reagan.

but a lot of people have forgotten:

... exemplifying the banality of evil.

The complicity of the press during his presidency turned me into the foul mouthed cynical son of a bitch I am today.

The senior George Bush and Dick Cheney are going to hell to be fucked over by demons with cholla cactus dicks. Reagan and Junior Bush will be the rags these demons wipe themselves off with afterwards.

how you know all of the details regarding the future of our exulted GOP leaders, but I, for one, am thrilled to hear that somewhere, somehow, justice will be served!

he f-ed California up before he f-ed up the rest of the country.

...and that he, and Nancy, and his "brain" trust, *knew* he had it. A cover-up bigger than Wilson or FDR, using a cardboard cut-out front man, an ill one, to forward their ideology...

I saw him in person, a confused old man who didn't know where the hell he was or what he was doing there.

But his acting skills, such as were left to him, allowed him to fire off a few reassuring words to the media and that's what everyone saw on the television machine.

and I the ONLY people who knew he had alzheimer's when he was gov?"

a spy and a stooly and was never a 'liberal' at all. If he ever had been, he was turned and bought long before he became president of SAG.

His value was he could read a script and do what he was told.

...and he was oblivious to it all. He couldn't even remember the names of his own cabinet members. He toasted the people of Bolivia when he was in Brazil. He floated the idea of a US-Soviet alliance against aliens from outer space to Gorbachev. He told a fake story about a Medal of Honor recipient to a group of real Medal of Honor recipients.

But even before that Saint Ronnie just didn't have that much brains to rot away in the first place.

He was dumb as a brick but he could remember his lines, at least before his brain started to deteriorate. A perfect stooge/pitchman for the successors of the people behind the Wall Street Plot of the 1930s. Nothing more. The quintessential empty suit.

They came in thinking all the laws favored minorities and left qualified white males behind.

Especially good, solid conservative Republican voting white males.

They were on a mission to save those future "job creators".

Idiots pick idiots to idolize.

He undermined working class Americans.

Reagan gave ignorance a voice.

We are still feeling the negative effects today.

is Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge...The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
804 pages.

Also, by Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm...Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

And Nixonland...The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

I've read the first 2 and am halfway through the third. And every night I go through the same frustration of not being able to keep my eyes open long enough to read more than 20 or 30 pages. It's the best American history I've ever read, and I'm curious about what the author is working on next.

How does Invisible Bridge compare?

are fucking brilliant books. Couldn't put either of them down. I lived through all of it - especially the '76 campaign, which I followed religiously, and learned so much. Perlstein's also a throughly engaging writer. READ THESE BOOKS!!

When I was 17, I was mesmerized by Reagan. I blame the media. lol.

latest republican caused recession, that was about how it was during the Reagan regime, the whole time
he was in DC.

last 35 years and it doesn't look like it'll let up for a while if ever.


fuck the gipper. If I could get to his grave I'd piss on it.

K&R

NRA hero for racial equality?

One has to wonder what turned him around, he sure got into the latter role didn't he?

I believe he also ended up with dementia.

General paranoia is often an early sign of approaching dementia--also a defining feature of NRA types.

That's easy:

[font size=7 color=green] $ [/font]

It is the obvious answer after all.

book on Reagan with all the dirt on him?

Whether it qualifies as a "good" book is a matter of opinion. The problem is that a muckraking approach can lead to a lowering of quality control standards. It's like a book that promises "all the dirt" on Hillary Clinton that includes the murder of Vince Foster.