Console me, I am near tears to find out that my favorite politician... isn't.


Sure, I was disappointed when Jon Kasich left, and Susan Molinari, and so on.


But nobody can replace Julius Caesar Watts - the best... /images/frown.gif /images/frown.gif /images/frown.gif


Now I know how all those saps at the mall will feel when Julia Roberts dies.


JC Watts for president. He is the best, at least since Ronald Reagan. /images/frown.gif


eLROY

My two favorite Ronald Reagan stories:


1) When I first moved to California in 1966, Reagan was running for governor. On election day, he took forever in the polling booth. When he came out, the reporters asked him what took him so long. He said he was reading the ballot propositions.


Now I was 13 years old at the time, and it struck me as odd that he had been running for governor and hand't yet read the propositions. Of course, no reporter asked a follow-up question.


2) When he was elected President, Reagan was invited by Tip O'Neil to tour O'Neil's house. After an extensive tour, they arrived at Tip's office and he told Reagan that the desk he was looking at was his pride and joy, having originally belonged to Grover Cleveland.


Reagan remarked that this was quite a coincidence, as he had played Grover Cleveland in the movies. O'Neil politely reminder Reagan that he had played Grover Cleveland Alexander, not Grover Cleveland.


Sorry, but Reagan was dumb before he was sick.

The USSR was defeated by the massive military spending of the United States beginning with the Truman Doctrine, coupled with their own inefficient economic system. Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with this. In fact, throughout his public career, his was a harsh critic of our Cold War policies, precisely those policies that resulted in "victory."


Reagan simply assumed that the USSR was behind everything he didn't like in the world without bothering to check facts. At one of his first press conferences, he talked about what had happeened in Vietnam. Every sentence in his comments was false. He justified our interference in Nacaragua by calling it a "totalitarian dungeon." This was a Big Lie as defined by Orwell.

Yeah, the tax code sure is simple now.


Reagan believed he could lower taxes and increase defense spending while balancing the budget. He based this on the picture drawn on a napkin by Arnold Laffer, the famous Laffer curve. The results, of course, were the biggest deficits in our history and billions of dollars worth of debt.


Reagan was always against high taxes ever since he became Lew Wasserman's first client to make $1 million a year. He paid Wasserman back for his excellent representation when he was the head of the Screen Actors Guild by giving MCA a blanket waiver to become a producer at the same time they were agents. This gave MCA almost unlimited power in the entertainment industry as they could produce a show and hire their own actors. Quite a coincidence that Wasserman was Reagan's agent.


When Reagan testified before a grand jury about this, he said he couldn't remember. Sound familiar?

this story is similar to the ones you mentioned:


while on a tour of monticello, al came across two busts. a throng of reporters were present. he asked a monitcello tour guide who the busts were. who were they: thomas jefferson and george washington.


Pat

news reports say that he was frustrated with Republican leadership. Dick Armey and co. did not let him have much of a say in republican decision making and, despite Watt's seniority, he wasn't going any further in the Republican house. Now you can say its racism or its purging of the Newt Gingrich faction. maybe both. I dunno.


whoops. did I bring that subject up again?

Yes, Reagan did think that, because Democrats promised him spending "cuts" in the "out years."


Federal revenues rose by a multiple of 5 during his tax cuts - proving lower rates do not create lower revenues.


Problem was, after the prior inflation, the Congress had become addicted to a thing called the "current services baseline."


Revenues rose much more than defense spending or inflation during the Reagan years, but there was no curbing the "baseline" trajectory.


The Federal Register, meanwhile, shrunk tremendously, and a less distorted allocation of capital after tax shelters precipitated the financing of companies like Compaq, Oracle, and MCI.


And Heaven forbid somebody should be a producer and agent at the same time(?), they must have been eating babies.


Andy, you don't even know the meaning of "unlimited power."


In fact, the press talked downed Reagan's economic success so vehemently with a bunch of what-goes-up-must-come-down scare tactics, they were actually partly responsible for Black Monday.


(If you remember, the main demographic of investors at that time consisted of people with firsthand memories of The Great Depression).


eLROY

He was the first major politician who wasn't afraid that we had better copy the USSR to beat them.


Reagan knew the free-market system would prevail in the long run.


Prior politicans, like Kennedy, argued we needed more central planning of economic production to outmatch them.


And Nicaragua, I am sure, was a leftist deathtrap.


If you're ferreting out lies, go after the economic statistics coming out of the USSR which Jimmy Carter feared we could never best, or anything ever uttered about the Vietnam War by the enlightened Democrats who ran it.


eLROY

"Console me"


Go vibrate your own air.

We never copied the USSR; we always took the lead and the USSR followed. Their inefficient economic system made them spend more for the same bang, eventually driving them into bankruptcy.


We all knew the "free-market" system would triumph. Reagan just doesn't know how it works.


All major politicians of both parties wanted a bigger military-industrial complex to fight the Cold War Eisenhower's disingenuous warning notwithstanding..


Nicaragua was a death-trap because the United States used murdering thugs to carry out our foreign policy. Nicaragua was a rightist death trap, to be sure.


Deception, of course, is a staple of political discourse. The politicians of both parties refined it to a fine art during Vietnam.


Economic statistics coming out of the USSR should always have been seens as faulty or duplicitous. It is not surprising that politicians used the numbers to suit their own purposes.

The political arena is a nasty one and many people are chewed up and spit out. Watts also said he needed to make more for his family, which is a reality for congressmen. Some are in debt and struggle financially because of their campaigns and such. Four years ago we had a primary for congress and I got to know one of the candidates. He went deep in debt (6 figures) on his campaign. The guy who won has had to publically report his substantial credit card debt. These guys pay a price to get to congress certainly. The more about politics I see, the less I want to be involved and the more I question why anybody would want to be involved. I hope Rep. Watts goes on and does well.


And as far as Republican leadership, well, it's incompetent. Will it be fixed? No.

Just like the idea that somehow 1980's tax-rate cuts - which resulted in revenues that rose several times over - caused deficits, it is wrong that we were leading the Soviets in the late 70's.


Really, we stopped leading around the turn of the century, but there is no question that 1) the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 2) the Johnson programs, and 2) the Carter philiosphy all revolved around a more or less ambitious federal vision for the daily lives of citizens.


These people coming out of the sixties were just plain scared. They beleived in intellectually-managed solutions to world problems, and they were just plain afraid the Soviets were smarter.


When you say "we knew the free-market system would triumph" this just isn't true. Reagan and his followers believed it, but Carter and his followers definitely did not.


Course, just like you don't know what "right-wing" means (going back to the French Assembly and today), you also may not know what "free-market" means.


All these words, Nazi, liberal, fascist, right-wing, have all been commandeered by propagandists pursuing an indentical program, and yet trying to insist that it is different.


Fascism was a word used by Stalin to differentiate himself from Italian socialism. FDR insisted that, before he came along, the "free-market system" had "never been tried."


People are still denying that "Nazi" means national socialist, and that "liberal" means more government regulation - which is designed to "liberate" people from the economic slavery of need, and its counterpart, work.


eLROY

I really don't think you set out to be a lying, obfuscating swine. But for the sake of winning a political debate, you so automatically revert to the basest lying crap dished out by left-wing hustlers. Like, I said,


"Reagan simplified the tax code."


Your response was,


"Yeah, like the tax code is so simple today."


BUT REAGAN DID SIMPLIFY THE TAX CODE! It's almost like you don't even care if the tax code is simpler or more complex, you just want "the good guys" to win.


And you said,


"Nicaragua was a death-trap because the United States used murdering thugs to carry out our foreign policy."


That's a really neat cause-and-effect statement - if you have an IQ of about 16. Nicaragua was a third-world nation caught in a war against communist revolutionaries! And yet you are at least parroting people who may actually think Nicaragua would have been a utopia but for that evil actor from CA. For crying out loud, communists build walls to keep you from running!


Finally, it is just so pathetic that a guy who can add and even play poker, would spout this nonsense about Reagan tax cuts causing the deficit. Have you ever actually looked at the revenue figures for the Carter, Reagan, and Bush years!? Reagan collected so much more money than Carter, even adjusted for inflation, it's just ridiculous!


In truth, the only way we could have collected enough money to spend as much as the Congress insisted on, and not have a deficit, would have been to effectively shut down most businesses and put people out of work and just print the stuff. Which is the program that was being pursued by Carter, out of fear of the USSR.


eLROY

He's the head of the Ku Klux Klan

And when summer comes rollin' around

We'll be lucky to get out of town.


(yeee-hah!..)

yeah that's the ticket....gl


suite, judy blue eyes...gl

"Federal revenues rose by a multiple of 5 during his tax cuts - proving lower rates do not create lower revenues."


Have you documentation for this? And are we talking about federal income tax revenues?


And in any event, the idea was not his. See my post below.


"Heaven forbid somebody should be a producer and agent at the same time(?)"


If everyone had the same option, it would have been something else. But it was always a no-no for obvious reasons: acting as a producer, the agency could hire its own clients to the exclusion of others. Not much free-market there. Reagan granted his own agency, run by his own agent, a waiver. Then he lied about it to a federal grand jury. In some circles this is known as being a crook.


I do know the meaning of the term "unlimited power." MCA took over show business. This is a well-known and well-documented incident that is indicative of the character of the man.

I don't remember the press talking down Reagan. I remember his being very popular. I remember his being called the teflon president. The press gave Reagan a free ride.

"I really don't think you set out to be a lying, obfuscating swine. But for the sake of winning a political debate, you so automatically revert to the basest lying crap dished out by left-wing hustlers"


Why do you so feel the need to resort to immature name calling? Let's discuss the issues and, hopefully, learn something.


Also, since we disagree on almost everything, you shouln't be disappointed with me at this stage of the game.


Telling me Reagan simplified the tax code tells me nothing. Give me specifics of what he did to simplify it. It is certainly not simple today. Whatever he did didn't do the trick.


I'm not interested in winning a political debate with you. Please do educate me as to how the tax code was simplified by Reagan. Unlike you, I don't profess to know everything.


Certainly whatever simplification ideas there were, were not Reagan's. He had no ideas. Here are what some Republicans who worked with him had to say about him:


Don Regan:


"The President regarded the schedule as something like a shooting script in which characteres came and wwent and plot was advanced one day at a time. He listened, acquiesced, played his role and waited for the next act to be written."


Martin Anderson:


"He made no demands, and gave almost no instructions. Essentially, he just responded to whatever was brought to his attention and said yes or no, or I'll think about it. At times he would just change the subject, maybe tell a funny story, and you would not find out what he thought about it, one way or the other. Rarely did he ask searching questions and demand to know why someone had or had not done something. He just sat back in a supremely calm, relaxed manner and waited until important thing were brought to him."


Colin Powell:


"Reagan would say litle at the morning NSC briefings until Frank [Carlucci] had laid out the options and given his recommendation. And then the President would merely acknowledge that he had heard him, without saying yes, no or maybe. Frank and I would walk down the hall aferward with Frank mutering, 'Was that a yes?' One morning after we had gotten another decision by deagult on a key arms control issue, Frank moaned as we left, 'My god, we didn't sign on tto run this country!'"


Bob Dole:


I neger had a private meeting with Reagan. He did invite a few of us up to the study, twice that I can recall, for Cokes. I don't think I talked to him on the phone about business more than two or three times." (Dole was the chair of the Senate Finance COmmittee in Reagan's first term and the minority leader in the second.


Jim Baker:


Our staff had drawn up a detailed plan for Reagan's first hundred ays, and worried about presuming to tell a man they hardly knew how to spend his first three months in office,prepared for the presentation as for an exam, trying to anticipate the questions he would ask and working up background material in case he pressed them on any point. But when we made the presentation, Reagan asked no quesitons at all. 'Sounds great. Go to it,' was all he said.


Henry Kissinger:


"He would try to avoid policy discussions. He would tlak from his cue cards, then he would tell some Hollywood stories. It's very unusual to have a president who is not interested in policy at all."


John Sears:


"You could do almost anything you wanted and you didn't have to check with anybody. You could do all these amazing things. Reagan wasn't involved. He let everybody do anything they wanted."

Reagan was wrong about Nicaragua. He was wrong because he either lied or honestly didn't know. My sense is both, since his history of public speaking on issues reveals both in equal amount.


The leaders of the totalitarian dungeon Reagan labeled Nicaragua held elections in which they were voted out of office. All of the human rights groups who studied the situation in the country during the contra era concluded that the vast majority of violence was caused by the U.S. backed contras. Civilian life, the lives of nuns, meant nothing to these thugs. Our thugs. To blame the violence on the Sandanistas is the barest lying crap dished out by right-wing hustlers.

Reagan took some of his best lines from the movies. He had a habit of quoting lines from the movies he was in without any attribution. He sometimes described movie scenes as if they had happened in real life.


In his eight years as governor of CA, he never worked long hours because the day-to-day work of governance, by his own admission, did not interest him. "For eight years, somebody handed me a piece of paper every night that told me what I was going to be doing the next day."


After Sprio Agnew resigned in disgrace, having accepted bribes in both the Maryland governor's office and the Vice President's office, Reagan maintained that Agnew was a decent man who had been treated unfairly. This would be a logical position to maintain by a man who himself had been a crook and gotten away with it by lying to a grand jury.


He spent 345 days of his presidency at his California ranch, nearly one year of his eight in the White House. As a White House aid said, "You thave to treat him as if you were the director and he was the actor, and you tell him what to say and what not so say."


In 1961, he predicted that the entire world would either be all slave or all free by 1970. He implied that anyone in favor of a graduated income tax was a Communist. He denied the existence of the Hollywood black list even though he helped draft it. Lies, lies, lies, and then, when those don't work, "I can't recall."

Now I am remembering more accurately.


I believe the total Federal receipts for all income taxes went from something like 398 billion to 914 billion.


I had been thinking 2 to 9 (almost "5" times), when the accurate number is 4 to 9. I spoke hastily.


And I believe annual personal, individual income tax receipts went from 287 to 473, approximately.


This is going from TEFRA in 1982, I think (Tax Equality and Fiscal Reform Act) to COBRA in 1990, I think (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act).


The "tax simplification," to my memory, mainly involved eliminating shelters and subsidies, which had pushed the wealthy into all a manner of ridiculous activities, which saved them from either paying any taxes at all, or investing in anything useful.


If I remember correctly, the 1982 package was designed by Kemp and Roth (or was that 1986?), and the 1990 deal, which Bush got suckered into, was a compromise between Dick Darman and William Sasser.


The deficit didn't really slow as a result of the 1990 or 1993 budget deals, but not until the Republicans got control of the Congress, and restrained baseline budgeting.


And Christopher Columbus started the McDonalds corporation in San Francisco in 1906.


But I know my tax-receipts numbers are right. I've just been out of the political-debate thing for so many years, I only remember the main points.


Employment increased much greater under deficits in the 1980's, than if we had attempted to either tax or print, because people will work for bonds, but not for nothing.


Finally, I admit Reagan was mainly a salesman for all this. And that is why I will miss JC Watts, because people like me need someone like him to get the word out.


JC Watts was our best and purest philosophical salesmen, in my opinion, since Reagan.


So far as the press giving Reagan a free pass, it just isn't true. Something like 89% of Washington bureau correspondents admitted to voting against him, I think.


And I acknowledge that it's been a long time since I used to read so many old magazines, and watch so much old political footage.


Anyway, I don't remember Reagan being called the teflon president, though I'm sure the press was pretty up-in-arms about the Ollie North thing.


So far as MCA "taking over" show business, that sounds like Galbraith economics and, in any case, of no signigicance to me. It sounds kind of provincial and fleeting.


eLROY

I guess that is why you probably prefer what Clinton did, and I prefer what Reagan did, behind closed doors:)


eLROY

Thanks for the detailed response. I'd be interested to see the receipts for income taxes when rates are steady, and when rates go up. Sometimes statistics can be deceptive.

I am by no means saying your statistics are wrong. I am thinking that the reasons you give for the numbers might be subject to another interpretation (particularly by us lefty hustlers).


89% of the Washington bureau correspondents may have voted against him, but I don't think you have much of a case that the press was against him. There's an excellent book on the subject by Mark Hertsgaard called On Bended Knee about the press and the Reagan presidency.


MCA's show business history has nothing to do with Mr.Galbraith. It's has to do with facts, amply documented in Garry Wills's Reagan's America and Dan E. Moldea's Dark Victory (which prints the complete testimony of Mr. Reagan in front of the grand jury). It might be provincial and fleeting were it an isolated instance (although I would not characterize it as such); but the Reagan response, to cover up and dissemble, repeated itself during the Ollie North "thing."


The Ollie North "thing" was a pretty serious "thing."


Anyway, I weary of this discussion, not because of you, just I'm tired. So I'll respond to you if you've responded to my other Reagan posts, and then let you have the last word.

You're going to run afoul of the 2+2 policies against foulmouthedness.


I think Clinton is a terrible person and was nott much better of a president.


But accusing all liberals or progressives of being Communists is exactly what led our foreign policy down the path of disaster, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Guatemala, and a host of other places. The disaster was much greater for the people of those places who were slaughtered by our "good" guys in the name of a non-existent democracy.


Reagan always saw the world in simple terms, black and white. He was a simple man who didn't understand complicated issues. Here is what he said about Vietnam, for example, in 1982:


"If I recall correctly, when France gave up Indochina as a colony, the leading nations of the world met in Geneva with regard to helping those colonies become independent nations. And since North and South Vietnam had been, previous to colonization, two separate countries, provisions were made that these two countries could by a vote of all their people together, decide wheter they wanted to be one country or not.


And there wasn't anything surreptitious about it, that when Ho Chi Minh refused to participate in such an election--and there was provision that people of both countries could cross the border and live in the other country if they wanted to. And when they began leaving by the thousands and thousands from North Vietnam to live in South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh closed the border and again violated that part of the agreement.


And openly, our country sent military advisers there to help a country which had been a colony have such things as a national security force, an army, you might say, or a military to defend itself. And they were doing this, if I recall correctly, also in civilian clothes, no weapons, until they began being blown up where they lived and walking down the street by people riding by on bicycles and throwing pipe bombs at them. And then they were permitted to carry sidearms or wear uniforms. But it ws totally a program until John F. Kennedy--when these attacks and forays became so great that John F. Kennedy authorized the sending in of a division of Marines. And that was the first move toward combat troops in Vietnam."


Not one sentence in the above is accurate or truthful. Make up the facts and declare the war a "noble cause." Incredible.


Anyway, I rest my case here, you get the last word.

http://www.almartinraw.com/


interesting website.


basically claims that bush ran things (as you said, it sure wasnt reagan, whoever it was.).


big on the financial fraud/ government abuse.


writing is a bit tedious, but has numbers and stuff.


brad

.....only to God.


I betcha you voted for Clinton, didn't you?