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As a hard-partying teenager, Patrick Kennedy met President Reagan at a fundraiser for the JFK Library, a meeting captured in a photograph that the former Rhode Island congressman now hangs in his home office. He used to think of it as a funny episode, a collision of Camelot’s cocaine kid and America’s foremost opponent of illegal drug use. But Kennedy took his last hit of anything in 2009, and he’s since honed an anti-drug message that sounds a bit like Reagan with a Boston brogue. Kennedy believes there is "an epidemic in this country of epic dimensions when it comes...

Every conservative by now should have noticed that February has become Ronald Reagan Month for Republicans. The man’s birthday was last week, February 6, the forerunner to Lincoln’s birthday (February 12), Washington’s birthday (February 22), and President’s Day (February 17). Throughout the nation, county and statewide Republican groups have been changing their longtime annual Lincoln Day dinners into Reagan Day dinners. I’m speaking on Reagan multiple times this month, including at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, where we’re releasing (pardon the plug) my new book that endeavors to answer the question “What is a Reagan conservative?” Thus, this...

Coke’s Super Bowl ad, featuring a montage of America the Beautiful in eight languages amidst scenes of beautiful people and landscapes wins this year’s controversy award. At one level, it’s just a company selling “sugar water,” in Steve Jobs’s famous phrase. But, of course, there’s more to it. Coke spent untold millions to produce a message touching social, cultural, and political nerves to make us notice and talk about it.Coke succeeded. The ad is beautiful, manipulative, disingenuous, and subversive. Critics have struggled to express what troubles them, some thoughtfully and some in blunderbuss fashion. It’s elusive because the piece...

EUREKA — Neil Reagan’s contributions to Eureka College have often been overshadowed by his younger brother. Not quite as much Thursday when the college used the 159th anniversary of Eureka’s founding and what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 103rd birthday to announce a $1 million gift from the estate of Neil and Bess Reagan. Neil Reagan, of course, was the first brother, the only sibling of the country’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan, another Eureka alumni. “With only 700 students, the size of the gift will have a strong impact,” said John Morris, director of the college’s Ronald Reagan Society. The...

Aaron Burr, Patriot and Vice President On February 6, 1756, a boy was born into privilege in Newark, New Jersey. Young Aaron Burr, Jr. was son of the president of the College of New Jersey, and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian regarded as a leader of the evangelical movement of the 18th century, an equal to the great preacher George Whitfield. Privilege then wasn’t quite what privilege is today, of course; there were no Rolls-Royces to drive, no Waldorf Astorias to stay in during constant vacations, no jet-setting to Monte Carlo, no celebrity photographers and magazines to put...

Happy 103 Birthday to Ronald Reagan. We sure could use man like you in the White House today. The Al baby household still holds you and Nancy in our hearts and prayers.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. -Ronald Reagan

In celebration of the Gipper's birthday, Townhall is featuring a series of concise examples of Mr. Reagan's wisdom, mostly in his own words, drawn from The Reagan Resolve, a monograph compiled by the Carleson Center for Welfare Reform. Ronald Reagan recognized that the expansion of the welfare state was the greatest threat to federalism, and fighting it was a driving force throughout his political career. California in 1971 was heading toward bankruptcy because of the massive growth in welfare spending. As Governor, Reagan discovered he was greatly hampered by federal welfare rules and policies. But, working with his welfare...

Should the new downtown bridge be named after Ronald Reagan?

Larry Speakes, who spent six years as acting press secretary for President Ronald Reagan, died Friday in his native Mississippi. He was 74. Speakes died at home in Cleveland, Miss., where he had lived the past several years. Bolivar County Coroner Nate Brown said Speakes had Alzheimer's disease.

By shifting the spectrum of debate, here's how America's rightward march has been normalized throughout history. From Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Paul Ryan and Chris Christie today, leaders who’ve shifted America to the right have been aided by moderating misrepresentations. In the case of Reagan, it was not just the man, but conservatism itself that received the flattering reinterpretation. That was a difference that mattered; it goes to the heart of why Reagan is the American right’s touchstone. But the more general process of misrepresenting and reinterpreting increasingly radical ideological figures as if they were normal,...

Nancy and I are very happy to send our warmest greetings and best wishes to all those who are celebrating Christmas. We join with Americans everywhere in recognizing the sense of renewed hope and comfort this joyous season brings to our nation and the world. The Nativity story of nearly twenty centuries ago is known by all faiths as a hymn to the brotherhood of man. For Christians, it is the fulfillment of age-old prophecies and the reaffirmation of God's great love for all of us. Through a generous Heavenly Father's gift of His Son, hope and compassion entered a...

Russia and India: Defenders of Decency, Bogeymen of the Gay Lobby Russia remains stalwart in its laws that aim to curb the influence of the West's gay-friendly culture on Russian youth. Meanwhile, last week, in a stunning turn of events, India's high court reinstituted a nineteenth-century law against sodomy. On cue, the ligbitist kibitzers are going crazy in such homophile haunts as the New Yorker and the Guardian, expressing total outrage that there should exist, anywhere on the globe, nations that do not think it's normal or appropriate to subsidize and celebrate men sodomizing boys. I cannot blame Russia, India,...

Sickened by service: More US sailors claim cancer from helping at Fukushima By Perry Chiaramonte Published December 20, 2013 FoxNews.com When the USS Ronald Reagan responded to the tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, Navy sailors including Quartermaster Maurice Enis gladly pitched in with rescue efforts. But months later, while still serving aboard the aircraft carrier, he began to notice strange lumps all over his body. Testing revealed he'd been poisoned with radiation, and his illness would get worse. And his fiance and fellow Reagan quartermaster, Jamie Plym, who also spent several months helping near the Fukushima nuclear power...

Why did one of the most politically savvy leaders ever to occupy the White House—Lyndon Baines Johnson—decide not to attend the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965? And why didn’t he send his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey? Questions remain nearly 49 years later. Nearly 100 world leaders are now making their way to South Africa for the state funeral of Nelson Mandela. It will be a who’s who of global power-players. It’s important for them to be there, because it’s a risky thing to miss a great man’s funeral. President Obama invited George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and...

"Apartheid is an affront to human rights and human dignity. Normal and friendly relations cannot exist between the United States and South Africa until it becomes a dead policy. Americans are of one mind and one heart on this issue." So said Ronald Reagan in his 1986 message to Congress vetoing the "sweeping and punitive sanctions" Congress was seeking to impose. Reagan equated the sanctions to "declaring economic warfare on the people of South Africa." His Treasury Secretary James Baker said Sunday that Reagan likely regretted this veto. But having worked with the president on his veto message and address...

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, on his return to England after signing the ill-fated Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, declared triumphantly but tragically that “peace with honour” was at hand and the deal he inked with Adolf Hitler would usher in “peace for our time.” History has not been kind to the naiveté of Chamberlain – a character flaw that convinced an emboldened Hitler that Britain was a patsy at the negotiating table. Less than one year later, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, formally launching World War II, the true extent of the Prime Minister’s...

This year marks not only the 50th anniversary of the shooting of John F. Kennedy but also the 45th anniversary of the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, which occurred in June 1968. Was there a common source motivating the assassins of both Kennedys—that is, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan? That renowned political philosopher Mick Jagger speculated on a source. “I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’” asks the lyrics in the 1968 song by The Rolling Stones. “When, after all, it was you and me.” The song was titled, “Sympathy for the Devil.” It was, The Rolling Stones suggested,...

In all of the many film documentaries, news stories and other media programs about the life and death of President John F. Kennedy, few if any mention one of his major legacies: cutting taxes to, in his words, "get America moving again." Democrats and President Obama, for whom "tax cuts" is an "expletive deleted", despise the idea and never talk about JFK's across-the-board, income tax rate reductions which led to a decade- long burst of economic growth. What Kennedy proposed and got through a Democratic Congress deserves our attention now more than ever. With the Obama economy still "stuck in...

The ninth of November marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably the most important historical event since World War II and the most important lesson about human freedom experienced within the living memory of most of us. Presumably, next year there will be more of a commemoration, but the salient question now is how this lesson is being taught in the nation’s classrooms. For while those of us in our forties and older remember the fall of communism and its causes, today’s teenagers are wholly in the dark. What, then, are the high-school students of...