Ronald Reagan

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“Her Signature Was Tension Disguised As Pride”

March 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

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Nancy Reagan married well. A starlet who never came close to shuffling free of the suffix, she wed a marginally more successful Hollywood player who graduated from the studio system to the political machine. He enjoyed shocking success, first in the California Governor’s mansion and then the White House.

As an older First Lady, she always displayed grace and looked the part, advised the children to simply “just say no” the way a grandmother can because she doesn’t have the responsibility of actually raising the kids. She was a mixed blessing for the country, asinine with astrology and awful on AIDS but admirable with Alzheimer’s. Perhaps most importantly, she was on the right side of history when a thaw in the Cold War seemed possible. The stars were aligned correctly.

The opening of the great critic Tom Carson’s MTV obituary of the First Lady:

Once upon a time, a now-forgotten saloon singer named Francis Albert Sinatra recorded a tune called “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” A sentimental fellow whenever he wasn’t threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, Frank thought it had been composed in honor of his newborn daughter, and the songwriters decided they’d let him roll with that illusion. It wasn’t the truth, but it was only a song. 

Decades later, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” entered political history. Now a lot burlier, more reliant on toupees, and even more prone to threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, the self-same Frank Sinatra sang it — with revised lyrics — at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural. What’s a bungled notion of hailing your daughter compared to celebrating the new first lady of the United States?

The sad thing is that Nancy Reagan’s face was never exactly renowned for its bubbly gift of childish laughter. She did have a nice smile, like a superbly arranged bunch of white bullets greeting you below two anxious, frozen blueberries. But spontaneity wasn’t her specialty. The facial expression she was most famous for — others had tried, but she perfected it — was the Adoring Wife as Ronnie made one more of his gazillion speeches. At least on TV, her signature was tension disguised as pride.

She had reasons for the tension. Yet she also had reasons for the pride.•

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Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. “Harry Truman played the piano…Nixon played the piano…they could entertain you also,” he said in defense of the aspiring Actor-in-Chief. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.

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“Trump Launched A Political Campaign That Tore Into Reagan’s Record”

March 6, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Donald Trump, who hopes to have a long and thick political career, is less chameleon than outright liar.

It’s no surprise the GOP frontrunner dropped to his knees before the memory of our 40th President as soon as it was announced Nancy Reagan died. After all, Beefsteak Charlie is a person without a shred of honesty or shame. While the hideous hotelier today trolls President Obama and claims China is destroying America, he behaved similarly in the 1980s toward Reagan and Japan. Trump could claim he’s changed his opinion as he’s matured, but clearly this is a man who hasn’t grown an inch (not a penis joke).

From Michael D’Antonio at Politico Magazine:

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.

The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•

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“Reagan Would Be A Moderate In Today’s GOP”

February 9, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump mostly wants to be President so that he can giver Fireside Chats about his erections.

There are plenty of reasons why a vulgar clown like Trump is a viable candidate in the current race, but I do believe the decline of the GOP as a serious party began with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, their coded language of divisiveness (“welfare queens”), assault on the middle class and utter disdain for environmentalism. In many ways, Reagan was ultimately a reasonable man, but he pushed the right into a nostalgia for a past that had never quite existed except in Peggy Noonan’s greeting-card grade prose. The repeated inability of conservatives to deliver the impossible has driven the true believers over the edge.

Jacob Weisberg, who’s written a biography of Reagan, just did an AMA at Reddit, answering questions about 40. The writer’s contention that Reagan wasn’t a womanizer is naive, but it’s a lively give-and-take. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Which of the Republican candidates do you think has views that are closest to Ronald Reagan’s?

Jacob Weisberg:

Reagan would be a moderate in today’s GOP — he signed the biggest-ever immigration “amnesty” (his phrase) into law, supported handgun regulation, and played a huge in making abortion legal — and keeping it legal, by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. There’s no one running who supports those positions. In policy terms, I’d say the closest is John Kasich, because he’s more moderate than the others. Temperamentally, Marco Rubio seems the most Reagan-like to me. Rubio is optimistic and future-focused, where most of the others are pessimistic and negative about America’s future.

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Question:

There has been much discussion of the unusual age of the 2016 presidential election frontrunners vis a vis Reagan, with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders all being at least as old upon potential inauguration as Reagan was. Is there such a thing as “too old” in your opinion, and if so how old is it?

Jacob Weisberg:

Life expectancy keeps increasing, and being 70 now doesn’t mean what it meant in 1980 – let alone what it meant in 1880. On the other hand, the presidency is physically very taxing — I’ve heard it said that a year in the White House takes the physical toll of two years outside of it. Reagan was a vigorous, healthy man when he took office, but he suffered from a number of health problems tied to age. I don’t know that there’s an age when you’re too old per se. Sanders definitely pushes the limit. It’s hard to imagine someone over 80, which he would be in a second term, being up to the demands of the job. But there are better reasons to not vote for Sanders, IMO.

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Question:

Who was Reagan’s favorite President? And how did he feel about Lincoln in particular?

Jacob Weisberg:

The President he admired the most in his own lifetime was FDR. He consciously modeled himself on FDR in many ways – including his Saturday Radio addresses, which were a reinvention of Roosevelt’s fireside chat. He borrowed some key phrases from Lincoln, like the America as the “last, best hope” of man on earth. But like all great political speechmakers, he borrowed liberally from his predecessors.

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Question:

What was your conclusion about his role in the end of the Cold War?

Jacob Weisberg:

I give him a lot of credit. Reagan was unusual on the right in thinking — as far back as 1962 — that communism might just collapse, because it was a ridiculous system. And he improvised to help it do so, moving from nuclear hawk in his first term to disarmament radical in his second. Both the push he gave the Soviets, and the support he gave Gorbachev, were crucial to the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire.

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Question:

It’s commonly stated in leftist circles that Reagan was barely functioning in his second term due to advanced dementia/Alzheimer’s. In your opinion, how much truth is there to that assertion?

Jacob Weisberg:

Not just in leftist circles. His son, Ron Jr, thinks Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was affecting him pretty significantly by 1986 – the middle of his second term. There’s a lot of evidence to support that, including a study by some Alzheimer’s researchers I cite in my book that looks at his use of language in press conferences. That doesn’t mean he was barely functioning. Like a lot of people in the early stages of that disease, he had better days and worse days.

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Question:

Was he the womanizer that I have heard? Never met a female co-star he didn’t really, really like.

Jacob Weisberg: 

I wouldn’t call Reagan a womanizer. He does write about the tendency to always fall in love with the leading lady when he was younger. But I’ve never heard it argued that Reagan was anything other than faithful in his two marriages. During the period in between, after he divorced Jane Wyman, he definitely played the field and slept around in Hollywood. But I don’t think he enjoyed that very much — he was eager to settle down with someone, and Nancy ended up being his true soulmate.•

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“Trump Launched A Political Campaign That Tore Into Reagan’s Record”

October 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Fred Trump had many things–money, cars, houses–but sadly lacked a vasectomy scar.

That absence unfortunately led to the existence of his deplorable son Donald, a vicious bullshit artist who seems to have been fertilized more with venom than semen. While Beefsteak Charlie is currently sliming one set of politicians and minorities, the act is nothing new–only the targets have changed.

Trump once directed his adult-baby hatred at Republican icon Ronald Reagan, before he decided to belatedly deify the 40th American President and instead vomit his vitriol against more convenient foes. Nothing is sincere about this cretin except his copious self-loathing that’s wholly free of self-examination and directed outward.

Of course, Trump isn’t alone in his Reagan flip-flop. Newt Gingrich once compared Ronald Reagan meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev with Neville Chamberlain visiting with Adolf Hitler in 1938. The Speaker became close friends again with Reagan after the former President died. But not even Gingrich is as dishonest as Trump.

From Michael D’Antonio at Politico Magazine:

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.

The ads, which cost more than $90,000, came after Trump had visited the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. (A few years earlier, Trump had offered himself as a replacement for Reagan’s nuclear arms control negotiators, whom he considered too soft.) Trump followed his letter to America with a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where voters were eyeing the candidates in the 1988 primary. There he spoke to the Rotary Club, which met at Yoken’s restaurant, where the sign out front featured a spouting whale and the slogan, “Thar she blows!” In his talk, Trump sounded some of the same themes he offers today, except for the fact that the bad guys who were laughing at the United States were the Japanese and not the Mexicans or Chinese.•

 

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“Mr. Obama Lowered The Bar”

October 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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You have to be drinking a lot of gravy to buy any of the nonsense dished out by former Reagan scriptwriter Peggy Noonan. Two doozies from her latest grab-bag of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal followed by my comments.

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The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

  • As Peg would have it, the reason why the GOP national election process has hit the skids isn’t because the party’s decades-long appeal to the baser instincts in voters with coded, divisive terms (“welfare queens”) has grown into full-on hate speech, but because Barack Obama, someone she deems an unqualified celebrity, ran for President. Denying Obama, a Harvard Law President and Senator before winning the White House, is a serious-minded person with a sense of history, something you couldn’t assign to the Trumps and Carsons, is as dishonest as telling Americans that postwar prosperity was caused by the free market alone and not because it was matched to a severe, bordering on socialist, tax code. The so-called Reagan Revolution was always based on nostalgia for an America that never existed.

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[Joe Biden] would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump…

  • Like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Noonan thinks Trump’s a gas, with the way he refers to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and African-Americans as “lazy” and sees women as bloody servants. She thinks that Biden’s penchant for awkward foot-in-mouth moments (sometimes in support of equality) is similar to the bigoted rantings of a fascist combover who’s politically inferior to a Kardashian. Now there’s some false equivalency.•

 

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“I Think A Lot Of People Are Very Relieved I’m Not In Journalism Now”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

it was like Godzilla vs. ...

“It was like Godzilla versus…

... King Kong.

… King Kong.”

It’s not yet certain that it will end for Nikki Finke the way it did for Muammar Gaddafi. Time will tell.

The facacta, constantly dying, yet often useful Hollywood journalist, has reached a settlement with former boss Jay Penske after a poisonous parting and is rebranding herself as a publisher of show-business fiction with Hollywood Dementia. She just did an AMA at Reddit and came across as shockingly normal. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Who is the craziest executive still working in Hollywood?

Nikki Finke:

Oh my. That’s an incredibly long list. The producer Scott Rudin probably is #1 followed close behind by studio chief Harvey Weinstein. I recall one time when the two of them were fighting: it was like Godzilla vs King Kong. I made one of them promise to give a donation to a charity if what I was reporting was wrong: it wasn’t, but they never made the donation, dammit.

I’d have to add Ryan Kavanaugh to that list. But since his company is going belly up (bankruptcy), he may not be around much longer. Which is a shame because who will Hollywood have to kick around now? He was a laughingstock, or should have been.

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Question:

Which scoop have you witnessed go beyond entertainment that possibly affected politics, world events?

Nikki Finke:

Well, I scooped the world about Ronald Reagan’s final weekend and death. And I used to report on U.S.-Russian strategic arms talks and summits between leaders. But when Benghazi broke out, and an anti-Muslim movie was blamed, I kept reorting on what was true and what wasn’t. Plus, I scooped that Oprah was leaving her syndicated show – and that was pretty earth-shattering, LOL. I couldn’t believe what a big deal that was.

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Question:

How’s your relationship with Matt Drudge these days?

Nikki Finke:

I’ve known Matt Drudge for seemingly forever. He was one of the true online pioneers. What’s amazing about Drudge is his reach into every facet of power in every field. He truly has clout. Media outlets like The New York Times beg him to pick up their stories. He and I both are finding the Trump phenom right now very stimulating and interesting for the media – if it lasts.

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Question:

Ben Affleck and the Nanny, yes or no? How about JLo?

Nikki Finke:

Thank god I’ve never done celebrity gossip in my long career. I have zero interest in it. I believe everyone is entitled to a private personal life. I don’t and won’t go there. But from a professional standpoint, Ben Affleck was one of the most humble actors/directors/producers I ever came to know in Hollywood. And that’s saying a lot. I remember the night he won the Best Picture Oscar for Argo, he called me from his car as he was leaving the ceremony. And even though everyone knew he was going to win, he was still gobsmacked about it, almost in shock.

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Question:

Hi Nikki! It seems like the journalism world is very cutthroat and competitive — do you have advice for young reporters just starting out about forming relationships with their peers? Is it sometimes hard to make friendships with people you’re competing against in media?

Nikki Finke:

When I was a young journalist, I found that the older journalists hated me. They threw shade because they knew I was working harder than them and scooping them which made them look bad to their editors. (No journo likes to hear, “Why didn’t you have that story?” from their editors.) It took me a few years to ignore them and that. You must have balls of steel to go with a thick skin. The only thing that matters is working your sources and getting as close to the truth as possible. Who cares if no one likes you for it? Isn’t that why people get dogs? In recent years I’m so used to getting bad press about how I “bullied” Hollywood that I was shocked when anybody had anything nice to say about me. I think a lot of people are very relieved I’m not in journalism now.•

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“Why Can’t We Do This Here?”

January 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A switch to electric cars which get energy from solar sources is seen by some conservatives as a vast left-wing conspiracy, but California’s Governor Ronald Reagan, still the GOP standard-bearer, was completely on board with subsidizing EVs when he first witnessed the Enfield 8000 in 1969. An excerpt follows from a 2013 BBC article.

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“In November 1969, the Enfield 8000 was shown off at the first ever international symposium on electric vehicles, held in Phoenix, Arizona, where it caught the eye of Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California.

“We took a truck across America with two Enfields on the back,” says Sir John Samuel, who was leading the delegation. “Some people just looked at them and laughed, but Ronnie Reagan was astounded, and he said, ‘Why can’t we do this here?'”

Governor Reagan offered to find a factory site in California, promising healthy subsidies and guaranteed orders. He even suggested giving the cars to all home-buyers on the island of Santa Catalina off the California coast, where the use of petrol-driven vehicles was – and still is – heavily restricted.

But Enfield Automotive’s owner John Goulandris, who was from a wealthy Greek shipping family, turned down Reagan’s offer and chose to continue production in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.•

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The original BBC report about the Enfield 8000 at the 1:15 mark:

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“[Miss Quigley] Had Made Her Celestial Recommendations Through Phone Calls To The First Lady, Nancy Reagan”

October 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Astrology is complete bullshit, and the leader of the free world being governed by it, as President Reagan was, is a scary thing, though, luckily, those dice rolled well for international relations. The opening of Douglas Martin’s New York Times obituary of Joan Quigley, stargazer to the Reagan White House:

In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.

“Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

In an interview with CBS Evening News in 1989, after Reagan left office, Miss Quigley said that after reading the horoscope of the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, she concluded that he was intelligent and open to new ideas and persuaded Mrs. Reagan to press her husband to abandon his view of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’ Arms control treaties followed.•

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“The Influx Of Rooftop Solar Has Turned This Model On Its Head”

July 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Each time I see the above images of solar panels being added to the White House, I become incensed knowing that Ronald Reagan removed them after taking office. Some in this polarized country may long for Reagan’s willingness to compromise on budgetary matters, but he was the beginning of lunatics running the asylum. From Giles Parkinson’s Guardian report about rooftop solar in Australia counteracting the call for coal:

“Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.

For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.

‘Negative pricing’ moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.

That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.

The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head.”

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“Do Not Ask For Whom The Bell Tolls”

May 28, 2014 in Books, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Maya Angelou, who sadly has just passed away, appearing with Merv Griffin in 1982, voicing her concerns about the beginning of what she believed was a politicized class war on less-fortunate Americans, of Reaganomics trying to undo the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society.

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“The Attitudes That Put Lion Cubs On Store Shelves Is Not Completely Gone”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Private zoos have existed almost as long as abodes themselves (here and here) and Animal Planet and the like have only persuaded Americans to take on pets they’re unable to wrangle (scroll down to second entry). Of course, the trade in illegal animals and the staging of private hunts goes beyond national boundaries–it’s a global problem. The opening of “The Exotic Animal Trade” by Alex Mayyasi at Priceonomics:

“According to a popular story, when Ronald Reagan called the Animal Kingdom pet shop at Harrods, the luxury London department store, and asked if the store sold elephants, the agent on the line replied, ‘Would that be African or Indian, sir?’

As of this year, the world famous store closed the Animal Kingdom to make way for more racks of women’s apparel. A London tabloid dubbed its closing the end of ‘one of the most extraordinary eras in retail history.’ For decades, Animal Kingdom was a fantasy come to life. The above story appears to be a myth — Reagan actually received a baby elephant from Harrods as a gift from the exiled crown prince of Albania, who lived in California when Reagan was governor. But wealthy Harrods customers did buy lion cubs, rare birds, and even an alligator. The Daily Telegraph quoted a patron: ‘It’s a great shame, it’s a London institution and an amazing place to go.’

Animal rights groups cheered the news, although no more than the closing of any pet shop. (They prefer responsible breeders and rescue operations.) The Animal Kingdom lately featured mostly a pet spa and overpriced animal collars. Due to increased animal welfare concerns and legislation such as the Endangered Species Act (passed in 1976 in Britain), more commonplace dogs, cats, and hamsters long ago replaced lions and elephants on the store shelves.

Patrons and store representatives described Animal Kingdom as emblematic of a past that contrasts with today’s concern for animal welfare and appreciation of endangered species. Yet the attitudes that put lion cubs on store shelves is not completely gone. The most well known example for Americans is the former boxer Mike Tyson, whose ownership of 7 tigers inspired jokes in the movie The Hangover. Rather than being an outlier case of an eccentric celebrity, however, the purchase of exotic animals is a multi-billion dollar industry straddling the border between legal and illegal.”

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“It Would Make Obama The First President Since President Jimmy Carter To Go Green”

August 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I knew that Jimmy Carter had installed solar panels on the White House in the late 1970s, but I never realized that Ronald Reagan had them removed roughly a decade later. Dipshit. President Obama is putting them back as the solar-energy biz enjoys a renaissance. From Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica:

“On Thursday, a White House official confirmed to the Washington Post that President Barack Obama would finally make good on a 2010 promise to install solar panels on the First Family’s residence. The panels are being installed this week.

Once complete, it would make Obama the first president since President Jimmy Carter to go green. Carter’s solar panels were installed in 1979, but President Ronald Reagan had them removed in 1986. It also makes the Obama family part of the rapidly expanding growth in solar energy across the United States.

According to new industry data from GTM Research, solar panels have fallen in price, and their installation and collective energy-generating capacity has consequently skyrocketed. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s existing solar panels have been installed in the last 2.5 years.”

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“I’m The Hottest Thing In Hollywood”

July 10, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Did you have encounters (sexual and otherwise) with Liberace, Loretta Lynn, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson? Of course not. But Scott Thorson, the source of Behind the Candelabra, says he has. He stopped by Howard Stern’s show recently to overshare about these people and so much more. Language absolutely NSFW, unless you work in an S&M dungeon.

Scott and I are just friends.

Scott and I are just friends.

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“I Know It Was Right To Sink Her”

April 8, 2013 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, who just passed away, in a brief on-air spat with David Front in 1985 during the Falklands War. Thatcher, an iron-fisted conservative and the European parallel to Ronald Reagan, was often derided for being cruel to have-nots. She is not warmly remembered in her country while Reagan largely is in his. What does that say? Anything?

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“It Is Startling To Realize That Some Of Our Most Cherished Memories May Never Have Happened”

February 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Oliver Sacks’ new article in the New York Review of Books about memory distortion, a passage about Ronald Reagan “misremembering”:

“Daniel Schacter has written extensively on distortions of memory and the ‘source confusions’ that go with them, and in his book Searching for Memory recounts a well-known story about Ronald Reagan:

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot’s heroic response: ‘Never mind. We’ll ride it down together.’ The press soon realized that this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source.

215Reagan was a vigorous sixty-nine-year-old at the time, was to be president for eight years, and only developed unmistakable dementia in the 1990s. But he had been given to acting and make-believe throughout his life, and he had displayed a vein of romantic fantasy and histrionism since he was young. Reagan was not simulating emotion when he recounted this story—his story, his reality, as he believed it to be—and had he taken a lie detector test (functional brain imaging had not yet been invented at the time), there would have been none of the telltale reactions that go with conscious falsehood.

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”

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“It’s A Surplus That Was Achieved By The Largest Tax Increase In The History Of California”

August 23, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Gore Vidal visits Merv Griffin just days after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

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“Mr. Saul Alinsky Has Become Sort Of The Pet Revolutionary Of The Church People In America”

March 29, 2012 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Saul Alinsky, the community organizer who’s been burned in effigy repeatedly by the GOP, predicted the rise of Reagan’s faux nostalgia years before it became reality. Here he meets with William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1967.

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“Persons Twisted And Gyrated In Sensual And Provocative Fashion”

February 14, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Two videos of Ronald Reagan, who twisted and gyrated plenty while in Hollywood, asserting his right-wing philosophy during the 1960s.

Reagan denounces hippies at UC Berkeley, 1966:

Reagan and RFK play defense over Vietnam, 1967:

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“Their Way Lit Only By The Moon And Iranian Television Lights”

December 9, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Walter Cronkite on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and the American hostages in Iran returned home.

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“Their Fears And Their Frustrations….Can Turn Into Political Paranoia And Demonize Them…Making Them Ripe For The Plucking By Some Guy On Horseback”

October 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Community organizer Saul Alinsky became an enemy of the American Right all over again three decades after his death, thanks to a posthumous link to President Obama. Amusingly enough, Alinsky pretty much predicted the American drift into Conservatism and the Presidency of anti-government traliblazer Ronald Reagan and the more extreme iterations that followed him. From a 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky, which was conducted just months before he died in California from a heart attack. 

“Saul Alinsky: The middle class actually feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor do. And this creates a situation that’s supercharged with both opportunity and danger. There’s a second revolution seething beneath the surface of middle-class America — the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives — for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right, making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them scapegoats for their misery — blacks, hippies, Communists — and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.'”

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“I Was Never In The Business Of Managing The National Economy…And Neither Was Ronald Reagan”

July 29, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Hunter S. Thompson’s campus tour during the Gipper administration.

More Hunter S. Thompson posts:

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“Harry Truman Played The Piano…Nixon Played The Piano…They Could Entertain You Also”

July 27, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Frank Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.

Another post about a celebrity political endorsement:

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Featured Video: John Lennon Appears On Monday Night Football (1974)

November 27, 2010 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

John Lennon offers his take on American football to Howard Cosell during halftime of the December 9, 1974 Monday Night Football game, as the Washington Redskins were on their way to defeating the Los Angeles Rams. If I recall the story correctly, California Governor Ronald Reagan, who was also at the game, tried to explain NFL rules to the baffled former Beatle.

Six years later, Cosell would report Lennon’s murder live on another Monday Night Football telecast: “Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City–John Lennon outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that news flash.”

A little more than a year later, Ronald Regan would, of course, survive an assassination attempt.

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Decoder: Dick Cheney’s Comments On This Week

February 17, 2010 in Humor, Politics | Permalink

Let me handcuff you to a chair and slap you around. It's for national security purposes, of course.

Dick Cheney: The White House must stop dithering.

Decoder: Obama needs to quickly make bad decisions without thinking them through and stubbornly stick to them. That’s how it’s done.

Dick Cheney: I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.

Decoder: Americans are queasy about the word “torture,” so I’ve started referring to it as “an enhanced interrogation program.” Sounds classier.

Dick Cheney: I think the President made the right decision to send troops into Afghanistan. I thought it took him a while to get there.

Decoder: He paused to think. W. never gave me trouble like that. My incredible sense of arrogance tells me that I’m smarter than everyone else despite my unimpressive track record, so I think people should do what I want without question. Also: Bush and I never got around to focusing the military on terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we were too busy fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq, which was based on incorrect evidence about nonexistent WMDs.

Dick Cheney: But I do repeatedly see examples that there are key members in the administration, like Eric Holder, for example, the attorney general, who still insists on thinking of terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts as opposed to acts of war.

Decoder: Eric Holder has not ruled out prosecuting me, so he’s officially a meanie. I will try to paint him as an out-of-touch liberal despite the fact that he worked in the Reagan administration.

Dick Cheney: I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. We got rid of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century. We took down his government, a man who’d produced and used weapons of mass destruction.

Decoder: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 even though I insisted there were. So I’ll try to divert from that by mentioning that there were once weapons there. Worth a shot.

Dick Cheney: I think the–the proper way to–to deal with the Christmas Day bomber would have been to treat him as an enemy combatant. I think that was the right way to go.

Decoder: The Bush administration didn’t put shoe bomber Richard Reid into military custody, but that was nine years ago, so people probably forgot.

Dick Cheney: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques.

Decoder: I forgot to call it “enhanced interrogation techniques” the first time, but I quickly caught myself.

Dick Cheney: Twenty years ago, the military were strong advocates of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I think things have changed significantly since then.

Decoder: Every now and again, I like to take another man to a quiet place on a ranch and give it to him in the face really hard.

Dick Cheney: The reason I’ve been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had helped us put those policies together.

Decoder: The reason I’ve been outspoken is because if my underlings get prosecuted, then it’s just a matter of time until they come for me. And Dick Cheney ain’t going to the Graybar Hotel.

Read other Decoders.

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Old Print Ad: Stop Dot, A Game From Mattel

December 17, 2009 in Misc. | Permalink

stopdot

Never enjoyed the market dominance of Connect Four.

This print ad for a Mattel game called Stop Dot comes from the October 30, 1970 issue of Life magazine. The issue cost 50 cents and had a cover story about Dick Cavett, who was then turning out for ABC what still is the best talk show ever produced on U.S. television. Most of the Cavett article focuses on how nervous he was about performing on TV. There is a gallery of work by Austrian photographer Hans-Peter Klemenz. an advertisement for the unfortunately titled AYDS Diet Plan, an article about Ronald Reagan’s presidential aspirations, a piece about separatist violence in Quebec, a story about an Australian Outback tough guy Larry Dulhunty and a long piece about Double Helix scientist James Watson and his search for a cure for cancer.

The advertisement for Stop Dot game refers to the 3-D toy as “that op-art looking thing.” The instructions are as follows: “To win, you have to make a straight row of five dots in five different colors, without putting any dot next to a dot of the same color.”

The product apparently never caught on. According to Boardgamegeek.com, the game was manufactured by Mattel only in 1969. There are two for sale currently on eBay, one for $7.99 and one for $69.95. This particular issue of Life magazine currently sells on eBay for anywhere from $1.99 and $24.99.

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