Tuesday, October 29, 2002

We were there The preceding item below is only one of many memorable quotes from the greatest President of the last fifty years.  Here are more, selected from the PBS site featuring the film "Reagan", from the series The American Experience.  October 27, 1964 (from "The Speech") "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." 1980 (during the 1980 presidential campaign) "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." July 17, 1980 (from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention) "[The Democrats] say that the United States has had its days in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view." May 17, 1981 (from a speech at Notre Dame University) "The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism; it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." (For those who still believe that Reagan's triumph over the Soviet Union was something accidental and unintended, this one is worth rereading.) August 15, 1986 (in remarks to the White House Conference on Small Business) "[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." September 15, 1986 (in an interview with "Fortune" magazine, describing his management style) "Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere." June 1987 (in his famed speech near the Berlin Wall) "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" February 3, 1994 (Republican National Convention Annual Gala) "Our friends in the other party will never forgive us for our success, and are doing everything in their power to rewrite history. Listening to the liberals, you'd think that the 1980s were the worst period since the Great Depression, filled with suffering and despair. I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully tired of the whining voices from the White House these days. They're claiming there was a decade of greed and neglect, but you and I know better than that. We were there." 11:25:38 PM     The worm turns "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience." - Ronald Reagan, age 73, October 21, 1984 His opponent, Walter Mondale, was 56 years old then. Now Mondale is 74 and finds himself running against 53-year-old Norm Coleman for the Senate. 11:19:33 PM     The cost of music Aimee Deep, the MusicPundit, posts a graphic taken from Soundscan and purporting to show where the money goes when a customer plunks down $16.98 for a CD.  The graphic lists as the top two items:  Recording label profits - $5.00 to $5.50  Wholesale, distributor, retail store profits - $3.00 to $4.00 The intent is to contrast these figures with the figure for artist royalties - fifty cents to two dollars per CD.  The reference, however, to "profits" for the label and all parties in the chain of distribution is misleading, and this leads me to suspect the motivations of those who calculated the figures.  These are gross revenues, not profits.  The people who developed this graphic have a point to make, but they tergiversate, I believe, in using the word "profits" as a pejorative.  9:53:47 PM     Down to the wire Today's Detroit News includes a side-by-side profile of Posthumus and Granholm, with the candidates providing the text.  On the issue of slavery reparations, Granholm's formulation is more blather and double-speak: "Grant reparations to the descendants of slaves through equal opportunity and abolition of predatory lending, redlining and racial profiling." A word to Ms. Granholm, who is currently serving as Attorney General and should know this:  That isn't reparations.  That's the law.  That's the law as it is now.  (A letter to the Free Press says "I guess she has been educated by the same handlers as Bill Clinton." Good point.) And George Weeks has an interesting comparison in quoting Doug Campbell, the Green Party candidate for governor, on his two rivals during the recent debate.  (Granholm did not participate.)  Given the Greens' liberal agenda, you would expect him to favor the Democrat if his own race were lost. On Posthumus: "He's a man of integrity who delivers the same message to every different audience, has the courage to stand up and debate me on live television, and I think he honestly wants to do what's best for Michigan." On Granholm: "[She's] a lady who gives lip service to issues when she addresses them at all. . . I don't think she stands for anything more than self-aggrandizement and blond ambition."  9:10:32 AM

© Copyright 2002 Franco Castalone. Last update: 11/2/2002; 2:45:49 PM.