Free Republic

<p>Let's get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn't even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late. Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation's homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.</p>

In a column set to be published on Sunday, NEW YORK TIMES Frank Rich writes: 'During the Reagan show the O.J. Simpson impact was sometimes literally acted out: the gratuitously attenuated aerial shots of the hearse streaking on California freeways to Simi Valley carried an eerie visual echo of the Bronco chase.' On Public reation to Reagan Death, Rich claims: 'The dirty little secret of the week: The outpouring didn't live up to its hype. 'There was this kind of extraordinary outpouring not by the public but by reporters who should know better,' as Morley Safer told Larry King after...

Liberals have found a new hobby: belittling the dead. They find the term “Rest in Peace” objectionable. Counterpunch.org published a piece by Phil Gasper called "Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004: Goodbye and Good Riddance." "Ronald Reagan has finally died at age 93," Gasper wrote. "Predictably, politicians from both major parties have issued gushing tributes to this venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers' wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class." Political cartoonist Ted Rall, when asked about a previous statement...

Last week we paid respect to Ronald Reagan, saluting his optimism, his ability to communicate and his grandfatherly affability. But Reagan was an ideological politician. He championed ideas that helped forge a conservative era. Reagan was largely on the wrong side of history and his era is exhausted, his ideas part of our problem, not part of our solution. Consider that if Reagan was right, then Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong. Reagan called King a communist. He wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights laws. He pushed to give tax breaks to colleges that practiced...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A college disc jockey who was initially fired after devoting a radio show to celebrating the death of Ronald Reagan will be reassigned to another job until he can respond to complaints about his actions, officials said Friday. Scott Hornyak, a 28-year-old undergraduate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was told Friday that he was fired from his paid position as business manager at KSUA-FM, a student-run station. A university spokeswoman later said the firing was premature and the decision was rescinded until Hornyak had a chance to respond to complaints about the Sunday show. "The...

June 10, 2004 Alaska School DJ Off Air for Reagan Remark ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - A disc jockey at a university radio station who turned a Sunday radio show into a "celebration" that Ronald Reagan "was finally dead" has been suspended. The disc jockey, a University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate who goes by the call name "Spider Bui," said his show was a reaction to the media's positive portrayal of Reagan after his death Saturday. Managers at KSUA-FM said the show was in poor taste and was put on without permission. Neither the student nor station staff would...

I was returning home from the farewell to Ronald Reagan and switched over to WOL(the black talk radio station here in DC)which is also carried as the X-M 169 the Power. The mid-afternoon host is a leftist named Berrie McCain and he was talking with fellow Radio Host Joe Madison and they were whining about all the coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan. Joe for his part tried to stay away from the partisan politics and basically stated "That his grandmother said you are suppose to only say good things about a person in death." Which McCain in "It...

The Associated Press 6/11/04 9:39 AM CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. (AP) -- An upstate teacher could be punished for criticizing the late President Ronald Reagan to students during a moment of silence in his honor at the high school. Shenendehowa school district spokeswoman Kelly DeFiciani said once the investigation is finished, the unidentified teacher "could be subject to disciplinary action." The district is investigating whether her comments violated the district policy against staff making political endorsements at work or on school property. The teacher, who has taught in the suburban Albany district for more than 20 years, made "negative" and "inappropriate"...

Praise for the late President Ronald Reagan's sunny resonance with the common man has been rasping all week on the ears of many activists and social workers who watched in vain as homelessness exploded under his watch -- and they hope the history books remember one thing: Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it -- they were seemingly everywhere. And America had a new household...

The free rag spews forth on thursdays and I happened upon this sour grapes article on the occasion of former President reagan's death. The author went to Simi valley and slagged people there and Reagan and then claims to have met and talked to Free Republic people. Here's the tripe: Lying in StateThis bier’s for you, Gipperby Steven Mikulan The handmade banners began appearing on freeway overpasses long before the turnoff for Moorpark College. “God Bless You, Nancy and Ron,” said one. I was heading to view the late president’s casket at the Ronald Reagan Library and, like everyone else,...

This will not be popular, on this day before the state funeral in Washington for Ronald Reagan. But the fact is, he was not my favorite president, and I mean to say why. I will grant that he was charismatic, was a wonderful public speaker, that he had a healing effect at a time the nation was psychologically hurting, that he seemed to be an all-around nice guy. He also deserves applause, and thanks, for helping to end the Cold War — although I think Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin may have had more to do with it. As did...

Weepy Reagan Tribute-Free Zone June 9, 2004 BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST "That's it. While I'm sorry Reagan is dead -- though at 93, we saw that coming, didn't we? -- I'm going nuts with the tributes. It's as if he was a 16-year-old couple who drove into a tree, with the candles and the floral tributes and such. We've become a culture of babies, where every death is Princess Diana's. It's enough to sour you on the departed. Over the years, I nudged closer to a grudging respect for Reagan, but this overkill is sending me back toward being...

WASHINGTON Sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a nation mourn. And sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a paternity suit.At every opportunity, as the extraordinary procession solemnly wended its way from California to the Capitol, W. was peeping out from behind the majestic Reagan mantle, trying to claim the Gipper as his true political father.Finally, there is a flag-draped coffin and military funeral that President Bush wants to be associated with, and wants the rest of us to see."His heart belongs to Reagan," Ken Duberstein declared about Mr. Bush on CNN, in a riff on the old Cole...

DERRICK Z. JACKSON Reagan's heart of darkness By Derrick Z. Jackson | June 9, 2004 PRESIDENT Bush proclaimed: "Ronald Reagan believed that God takes the side of justice and that America has a special calling to oppose tyranny and defend freedom." In the first three days of news reports on the death of the former president, not a single major American newspaper, television station, or politician has dared to exhume this counterpoint to the Reagan's legacy: "Immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian." These were the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, spoken on Capitol Hill at a House hearing in late 1984....

"Ray Lamb had been on the streets since 1981.....Reagan would have left out the rest of Lamb's story, the part about how he had been working and functioning up until 1981, when Reagan fired all of the country's air traffic controllers because they had launched an illegal strike. Lamb had been a controller for 17 years.......Almost since the day he left office, those who were captivated by his idea that the selfish life could be a morally upstanding one have sought to turn Reagan into an icon....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrats paid tepid homage to Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), the man most political observers credit for the steady rise of the rival Republican party during the past two decades. Since Reagan's death Saturday at age 93, Democrats have been in a quandary, needing to pay at least token tribute to the late president, praised by his admirers as one of their country's greatest leaders ever. But Democrats see in Reagan the figure whose social policies contributed to an epidemic of homelessness and the decline in prowess of labor unions, and whose economic policies led to...

Some congressional Democrats will not return to Washington this week to participate in the pageantry of a state funeral for a president they bitterly opposed. It was unclear how many rank-and-file Democrats in both the House and Senate would opt to stay at home and miss the largely procedural and symbolic votes to honor the 40th president’s life. But roughly half of the House Progressive Caucus was contemplating not trekking back to Washington for a legislatively inert week, filled only with tributes to a president they often clashed with, spokesmen for the lawmakers said. But despite the indifferent responses of...

Back in Washington, staffers at the Democratic National Committee stopped a couple of interns who were lowering the flags to half mast outside their headquarters. "The interns were just doing what they thought was right," says a DNC staffer, who heard about the incident. "But somebody a bit more senior told them not to lower the flags until they absolutely had to, I guess when President Bush announced that all flags should be lowered. There was only an hour's difference. It was pretty petty, but that's how bad things have gotten around here."

Monday, June 7, 2004 NOVEMBER 9, 1989 Do you remember November 9,1989? Do you remember thousands of West Berliners waiting on their side of the wall with bottles of champagne while East Germans were breaking through? Just wondering ... but did any Democratic president ever ask the Soviet Union to tear down the wall in Berlin. The truth is that Ronald Reagan was the president who won the Cold War. Within just a few days the Democrats and their media myrmidons are going to be working full-bore to deny him that legacy. The Cold War, you see, was really World...

While some long-time critics of President Ronald Reagan stifled their inclination to criticize the dead, others launched the kind of venomous attacks that marked his long career in politics. Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy said yesterday he regretted Reagan died without ever standing trial for 1986 air strikes he ordered that killed the Libyan president's adopted daughter and 36 other people. Ronald Reagan ordered the April 15, 1986, air raid in response to a discotheque bombing in Berlin allegedly ordered by Khadafy that killed two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 229 people. "I express my deep regret because...