1984-"I have signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. "

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17393#11

August 11
Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school

1772: Explosive eruption blows 4,000 feet off Papandayan Java, kills 3,000.

1775: The Nestuccas, a branch of the Tillamook tribe, conduct trade warily with American ship Lady Washington off the coast of Oregon.

1828: First labor party in U.S. formed in Philadelphia.

1834: A mob led by Protestant truckmen and brickmakers ransacked and burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

1861: The New York Daily News has its postal privileges revoked, and was suspended for 18 months, as a consequence of its hostility to the Civil War, an action taken by the U.S. president with by far the worst record on trampling civil liberties and ignoring the Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln.

1882: Birth of Voline, Russian revolutionary and anarchist historian.

1894: Federal troops drive some 1,200 jobless workers from Washington DC across the Potomac River. Led by an unemployed activist, Charles "Hobo" Kelley, the jobless group's "soldiers" include a young journalist named Jack London and also William Haywood, a young miner-cowboy called "Big Bill."

1937: ILWU receives CIO charter.

1945: Striking Mexican filmworkers bar distribution of U.S. films.

1952: Philip Morrison, a Cornell Professor of Physics, expresses doubts about atomic warfare, resulting in his forced appearaince before a Congressional committee investigating communists.

1961: Berlin Wall completed.

1964: Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie arrested with explosives under his kilt trying to cross into Spain to assassinate the dictator Franco.

1965: Arrest of Marquette Frye triggers a week of rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles; 34 dead, $200 million in damage.

1970: United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez begins a hunger strike to protest union harassment by Teamsters officials.

1978: American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed. Significant portions of the bill have since been eroded by conservative court rulings.

1982: South African army kills 314 in an incursion into Angola.

1983: Soviet nuclear-powered submarine reported sunk, North Pacific.

1984: During a radio voice test for which the speakers were inadvertantly left on, Pres. and Idiot-in-Chief Ronald Reagun jokes, "I have signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

1996: Warner Creek road occupation, near old growth forests southeast of Eugene, Oregon, broken up by police after 11 months.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17393#11

:sarcasm:

Never mind that the USSR had (and Russia still has) a nuclear arsenal on hair trigger alert status that could blow us to smithereens at that sort of provocation. Yeltsin almost did over a Norwegian weather balloon. Good thing he wasn't in charge then.

July 10
Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school

1984: Acting Pres. Reagan claims that his environmental record is "one of the best kept secrets" of his Presidency. When a reporter asks where former EPA head Anne Burford fits in that record, press secretary Larry Speakes steps forward and orders the lights turned off. Reagan, believed by many to be the most powerful man on the planet, stands behind his aide, saying, "My guardian says I can't talk." And so the secret was kept.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=17214

Lived in DC then -- Just say no, kids... just say no.