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host · 11-25-2007, 05:10 PM

Charlatan, you live in Canada, and I am assuming that you have not had the experience of living among so many, who out of partisan indifference or an uninformed and/or incurious nature, were "just fine" with this:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Jun9.html
A Day of Ritual and Remembrance
Reagan Saluted From California To the Capital

By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A01

...."Ronald Reagan was more than just a historical figure. He was a providential man who came along just when our nation, and our world, needed him," said Vice President Cheney beside the light-bathed and flag-draped coffin.

"Fellow Americans, here lies a graceful and a gallant man."

So began Washington's first state funeral in more than 30 years, on a day steeped in tradition but also unnervingly 21st century. Just hours before Reagan's body reached the Capitol, the building was evacuated in a panic amid reports that an unidentified aircraft was closing in. The plane turned out to be a private craft carrying Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) that had briefly lost contact with ground controllers.

Virtually every police officer in Washington was on duty and at high alert; bomb-sniffing dogs inspected flag-decked light poles; the federal government declared a "National Special Security Event," which Attorney General John D. Ashcroft declared "a sad commentary . . . [on] modern life in Washington."

The public commemoration of the man whose conservative politics and infectious optimism transformed American public life will continue through tomorrow's funeral at Washington National Cathedral. More than 20 heads of state, past and present, planned to attend -- the largest gathering of dignitaries the city has seen in at least five years. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Britain's Prince Charles have accepted invitations.

Lech Walesa, the former Polish leader whose anti-communist Solidarity movement thrilled Reagan during the last years of the Soviet empire, will attend, as will the last premier of the Soviet Union that Reagan so long and stoutly opposed, Mikhail Gorbachev....

Bearing the above in mind, and considering the actual "career", accomplishments, and "endearing principles" of the "revered one", consider the talent, vision, and contribution of this man:

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...5026-1,00.html
Master Planner
Monday, Oct. 17, 1960

<img src="http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/imgs/Alumni/California_Monthly/2004_Feb/kerr_time.jpg">

...What happens when the vast generation of war babies (now 15-19 years old) really hits the public campuses? Nobody has spent more hours seeking precise answers than Clark Kerr, president of the mammoth, seven-campus* University of California (47,895 students), the largest college complex in the U.S. Few states are growing faster than California: whether by birth or by migration, the population increases by one a minute. Each year California's growth matches the size of San Diego. Each day it needs one new school. Already it has the nation's biggest public school system (3,300,000). Already it has the nation's highest number of Collegians (234,000 fulltime), and 80% of them are on public campuses.....

http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumn...ng_Mr_Kerr.asp

....The New York Times wrote that, as Berkeley chancellor and UC president in the 1950s and 1960s, Kerr “created the blueprint for public higher education in the United States.” “There isn’t anyone who had as large a role in higher education as Clark Kerr did in the post-World War II 20th century,” summed up Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl said that Kerr was, “without question, a legend in higher education.”.......

<h3>Versus the man who launched his political career by targeting Clark Kerr:</h3>

Quote:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...6/09/MNCF3.DTL

counter argument to above article: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...18/ai_90041180

<h3>and aiding in the destruction of this man, as a part of "the process":</h3>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet.html#1969
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, <h3>blinding one man (Alan Blanshard) and killing another</h3> (James Rector). That evening, California Governor Ronald Reagan calls in the National Guard and the California State Highway Patrol to restore order. <h3>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."</h3>

On May 20, National Guard helicopters tear-gas a peaceful demonstration on Sproul Plaza, setting off several days of rioting and confrontation by Berkeley's students and citizens. National Guard continues to occupy Berkeley until all protesters are subdued and/or incarcerated. [Rorabaugh, pp: 156-166]

View clip from People's Park (Newsreel, 1969)
(Courtesy of Roz Payne Archives)

<h3>...and nothing changed during his presidency:</h3>

Quote:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=1962220

....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 <h3>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.</h3>

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.

Today it is hard to believe that Reagan had such success using the Civil Rights Act as a whipping boy. 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......

Can Partisan Spin Rehab 3rd Consecutive GOP President's "Rep" But Kill Our Pol.Forum
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=120775

....At his news conference, Walsh said it was "very disturbing" for him to be pointing fingers at people he didn't prosecute, but justified it as a requirement of the independent counsel law designed to make such prosecutors fully accountable for their actions, both in what they did not do as well as what they did.
He said the provision was enacted out of congressional concerns following the Watergate investigation when special prosecutors issued "a rather condensed report" and then went on to write books about their work.

Walsh also acknowledged that he made "some mistakes of judgment" in the course of the $36 million inquiry, particularly at the beginning when "I thought I could handle it with 10 lawyers." He said he did not expand his staff significantly until Congress began talking of granting immunity to key figures such as North and Poindexter, a step that ultimately resulted in the voiding of their criminal convictions.

For the first time, Walsh publicly discussed his view that Reagan believed he was acting in the public interest, even if wrongheadedly. Walsh said the bare facts would suggest Reagan had "knowingly participated or at least acquiesced" in a coverup, but "such a conclusion runs against President Reagan's seeming blindness to reality when it came to the rationalization of some of his Iran and hostage policies. . . .

"The simple fact is that President Reagan seems not to have been ashamed of what he had done," Walsh said.
"He had convinced himself that he was not trading arms for hostages."

Recalling his last questioning of Reagan in July 1992, Walsh said the former president's "memory had obviously failed. He had little recollection of the meetings and details of the transactions" even when his own diary notes were read back to him.

By contrast, Walsh charged in his report that Bush apparently "had little intention of cooperating with the independent counsel" in the final stages of the investigation. According to a 1993 FBI interview with a former associate White House counsel for Bush, Janet Rehnquist, lawyers in the White House had decided to tell Walsh's prosecutors to "pound sand" in response to interview requests.

"Their position was that interviews had already been done, that an election was going on and that enough was enough," the FBI report of the intervew stated. After the election, Bush insisted that any interview be limited to his failure to tell prosecutors until mid-December 1992 about a diary he kept during the Iran-contra period.

As a result, Walsh said, "the criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete." He said his only recourse, a grand jury subpoena of the former president, would have been inappropriate, in part because it would have smacked of retaliation for the pardons.

Responding for Bush, Bell said that Walsh "refused to consider any reasonable limitations" on the scope of the questions.

Charlatan, you prefer "funny" posts, over the ones I author. You live in a country enjoying a sound and rising currency, universal medical treatment expense coverage, a trade balance of payments surplus, energy independence, amongst a citizenry concerned that the total wealth in the hands of the top ten percent has risen from 52 to 58 percent.

As this thread indicates, three months before I joined TFP, no discussion was taking place on this forum:
<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=58578">Reagan - An alternative viewpoint</a>

For a discussion to take place, i'm assuming that the folks who could have posted in the 2004 thread at the preceding link would have been required to defend the indefensible, and they couldn't do it then, and they cannot, now.

Consider that, in our "Reaganized" American era, I have nothing to discuss with a large portion of my countrymen, nor they with me. Under these circumstances, this forum becomes a place to highlight and display "the evidence", which is what I, with no possibility of discussion coming, as long as a majority are unoffended by what Reagan, said, did, and "stood for", ...am doing here.