July 4th

**1 Corinthians 13:13 Agape love never fails**A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. --W. H. Auden**A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. -- Francis Bacon**It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music. --Honore De Balzac

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

[Column 1]
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

[Column 2]
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

[Column 3]
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

[Column 4]
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

[Column 5]
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

[Column 6]
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton

Reagan

Ronald Reagan: a legacy of crack and cheese
June 16, 2004

by Bob Fitrakis

The mainstream media spent an entire week mythologizing Ronald Wilson Reagan. Why did the corporate for-profit media spend so much time creating a cult of personality around a former President with an estimated 105 IQ? Because the actual historical reality of Reagan’s life are so shockingly reactionary you need the pageantry, majesty and imagery of a Hollywood-scripted finale to cover up the thousands of damning facts.

Reagan was a snitch during his Hollywood years. As Anthony Summers makes clear in his book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, the “Gipper” had his own code name – “T-10” – and regularly provided the FBI with information on Communists, real, imagined and manufactured. Victor Navasky’s Naming Names documents as well how Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, kept the FBI well informed about “disloyal” actors. During Reagan’s Moscow Summit, the President met with Russian students to discuss communism and capitalism. In a speech too simple to be included in Communism for Idiots, the President dusted off his old theoretical writings from Reader’s Digest and Boy’s Life and told the students why Marx was evil and unbridled capitalism good.

As his B-actor career faded, Reagan became a mouthpiece for General Electric, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers. Reagan’s one clear talent was the ability to read a Teleprompter or memorize his lines on the glories of free enterprise. While his skills were sub-par by Hollywood standards, he was able to parlay bad acting into good politics. Reagan understood the uncritical nature of the American public and their appetite for neo-American hokum. As E.L. Doctorow pointed out in his 1980 article, “The Rise of Ronald Reagan”: “…his tenure as GE spokesman overlapped the years in which the great electrical industry price-fixing scandal was going on.”

“While Reagan extolled the virtues of free enterprise in front of the logo, G.E., along with Westinghouse, Allis-Chalmers and other giant corporations, was habitually controlling the market by clandestine price fixing and bid rigging agreements, all of which led, in 1960, to grand jury indictments, in what was characterized by the Justice Department as the largest criminal case ever brought under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act,” Doctorow noted.

As a child I watched Reagan pitch the joys of 20-mule team Borax on Death Valley Days, two reoccurring themes on the Old West show were the joys of imperialist conquest and genocide against indigenous people. All of it was served up by the smiley-faced Gipper. Bertrand Gross would later assess the Reagan administration as “friendly fascism.”

Caught up in the Goldwater conservative movement, Reagan realized that he could deliver the right-wing reactionary script better than the much more intellectual Senator from Arizona. Thus, in 1966, Reagan took his highly-honed hokum and became the ultimate shill for the far right. As the New Republic pointed out during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California, “Reagan is anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th century.” Reagan campaigned against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the student rights movement and the Great Society. In his fantasy world, Reagan equated giant price-fixing corporations with small town entrepreneurs. As every long-hair in the late 60s knew, Ronald Reagan was “the drugstore truck-drivin’ man, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.” He said if the students at Berkeley wanted a bloodbath, he would give them one. James Rector was shot dead soon after.

The real legacy of Reagan can be found in Philadelphia, Mississippi where he announced his candidacy for the Presidency in 1980. Previously, the most important political event in Philadelphia had been the deaths of civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in 1964. Reagan appeared, sans hood, to talk in those well-known racist code words about “state’s rights.” This was no mistake or misunderstanding. Reagan was signaling the right-wing movement that he would carry their racist agenda. Remember in 1984, his political operatives accused Walter Mondale of being “a San Francisco-style Democrat.”

Reagan reached out and embraced the racist apartheid government of South Africa through his policy of so-called “constructive engagement.” Reagan’s solution to the de-industrialization of America was to build the prison industrial complex. His centerpiece was a racist so-called “War on Drugs” while his friends in the CIA used narcotics peddlers as “assets.” And then Reagan’s El Salvadorian Contra buddies began bringing in crack.

Reagan's response to the 1981-1982 recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, was to declare ketchup a vegetable, release federal cheese surpluses, and shackle the strike leaders of the air traffic control union hand and foot and lead them off to jail. My most pronounced memories of the Reagan years are the three hour cheese line and the German care packages to unemployed workers in Detroit.

In the first two years of the Reagan administration, his policy was a forced economic recession and de-industrialization of the United Stated. He cut federal low income housing funds by 84%; his tax cuts for the rich, his “trickle-on” the poor and working class economics ended up tripling all previously existing U.S. government debt. So, when I think of the Reagan legacy, I think of urban decay, crack, homelessness, racism, rampant corporatism and the destruction of the American dream. Amidst the growing homelessness and despair, I remember seeing graffiti all over inner-city Detroit that simply said: “Ronald Wilson Reagan 666.” Reagan’s policies so marked him as “the beast” in Detroit, blue-collar workers actually cheered when he was shot. The hottest song on underground radio was “Hinckley had a Vision.” The song’s refrain, “He knew, he knew.”

When the mainstream media was analyzing Reagan's legacy and actively participating in the mythologizing of the 40th president, they conveniently ignored volumes of work by mainstream reporters. Wall Street Journal reporter Jane Mayer and Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus documented Reagan's diminishing mental capacity in Landslide:

In March 1987 a memo was written by Jim Cannon to Howard Baker, Reagan's new Chief of Staff. His first recommendation: "Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th amendment might be applied." The amendment allows for the removal of the president when "the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." Mayer and McManus reported that staffers told Cannon in confidence that Reagan had become "inattentive and inept ... He was lazy; he wasn't interested in the job ... he wouldn't read the papers they gave him - even short position papers and documents ... he wouldn't come over to work - all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence." Scholarly works have been written on Reagan's confusion of facts with Hollywood images.

The problem with the great communicator was the content of his messages. Reagan was a paid shill of the plutocrats, who used his charm and acting skills to hawk, like soap, mean spirited social policies and sell a fantasy version of the American Dream to common folk that trusted him.

--

Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press (http://freepress.org), a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace.

America

In a town-hall meeting Obama was explaining why economy is bad -- accurate in simple terms. I agree with what he said. It's best for Americans to crash markets. Then, All will deal with reality. AMERICANS SHOULD BE VERY, VERY BEARISH, and whoever think otherwise, it is lunatic to think otherwise.

$COMPX 2101.36 -7.88 -0.37% 2,648,047
$INDU 9732.53 -41.49 -0.42% 1,707,459
$INX 1027.37 -3.34 -0.32% 0

~~ Sell, Sell, Sell~~

• • • Friday Jobs Report Could Divide Bears From Economists

      The June jobs report Friday could provide more fuel for bears, even as economists hold onto the view that the economy is not double-dipping. Greenspan: Stocks' Decline 'Typical' LatAm Economies Roaring

    • Australia Strikes Compromise Tax Deal With Miners
    • Could Jobs Report Put Bottom In S&P?
    • Why Congress Extended the Home Buyer Tax Credit
    • Mortgage Rates Drop to Lowest Rate in 50 Years
    • Market's Swoon Prompts Fears of Dreaded 'Death Cross'
    • Video Game Sales Have Smaller Drop in May

    • The Hottest Video Games of 2011

    • Sen. Cantwell Will Support Financial Regulation Bill
  • Economic News Gives Investors More Reasons to Sell
    • Manufacturing Growth Slows
    • Pending Home Sales Plunge
  • Mortgage Rates Drop to Lowest Rate in 50 Years
  • Ford, GM Sales Up From Last Year, But Fall in June
  • Unpopular TARP Could Make Its Exit Early
  • Treasury Gets $10.5 Billion From Citi Share Sale
  • Economies in Latin America Race Ahead
  • Spain Sells Bonds; Moody's Downgrades 5 Regions
  • House Passes Reform Bill; Bank Tax Still Alive?
  • Lawmakers React to House Passage of Financial Reform
  • Video Games: Shooters Thrive As Court Case Looms

Kagan is aggravating American anger.

KAGAN NIGHTMARE: Make no mistake about it; Elena Kagan wants to ban books. She thinks there is nothing wrong with banning books based on their political content. Period.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=172653

That makes her the most dangerous person ever nominated to the Supreme Court and singularly unfit to sit on the court.


It would be one thing if she had simply said this one time. She has said it repeatedly. She has even argued to the United States Supreme Court that political pamphlets could be banned.

As far back as 1996, Kagan argued it might be necessary to ban speech that is offensive to society or to the government!

There are countries that have banned speech that is offensive to the government. The old Soviet Union, Communist China, Iran, Pakistan, Taliban controlled Afghanistan, Cuba, Nazi Germany and other dictatorships. Dictatorships ban speech, not America. But Kagan wants to ban books. I have a better idea, let’s ban Kagan.

Over the last year and a half, so many times we have called on you to step up to fight for our country and once again, we must do that. Kagan must be stopped. Obama may end up as a one term President, but his Supreme Court nominees serve for life! Kagan could easily be there for 30 years. Imagine the damage she could do.

Here is what we need you to do:

First, forward this email to everyone you know. Call your Senators and ask them to do the same. Tell them that we do not
want a Supreme Court Justice who thinks it’s okay to ban books.

Join us at www.teapartynation.com and discuss this in our forums!

We have all seen the film footage from Nazi Germany, where the Brown Shirts are throwing banned books into the bonfires. Never could I have believed that an American Supreme Court Justice would ever support the banning of books. If we do not stop the Kagan nomination, we will have just such a Supreme Court Justice.

Save America. Stop the Kagan nomination.

Also, our friends at Young Americans for Freedom are holding a rally today at the Supreme Court Building in Washington. This is the kind of 1st Amendment expression Elena Kagan opposes!

YOUNG AMERICANS TO RALLY AT SUPREME COURT AGAINST KAGAN - 7/1/2010 12:30 pm

Where: U.S. Supreme Court Steps, 1 First Street, NE Washington, DC 20543
When: Thursday July 1, 2010 12:30 - 1:30 pm (lunchtime)

Visit Tea Party Nation at:
http://www.teapartynation.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network