President Reagan with actress Victoria Principal during a photo opportunity with the Arthritis Poster Child of the Year in the Oval Office. 5/29/86.
From Oct. 28, 1980 in Cleveland, here is part 8 of the Carter-Reagan Presidential Debate, as taped from WJKW-TV, CBS. Amazing how things have changed…and yet stayed the same…in almost 30 years!!!
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Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation wrote an excellent article on Ronald Reagan and I wanted to share it with you. Here is the first portion:
Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with several important political advantages. He had an express mandate from the American people who knew what he intended to do — cut income taxes from top to bottom, reduce the size of the federal government for the first time since the New Deal, and make the U.S. military Number One in the world. To help him in this revolutionary task, he had a Republican Senate and a feisty Republican minority in the House determined to avoid legislative gridlock.
And he had something else, something that neither Robert Taft nor Barry Goldwater could have counted on if either of them had been elected president — a vital, committed conservative movement. Reagan could turn to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and other think tanks for ideas.
He could call on groups like the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the American Conservative Union, the National Rifle Association and the National Tax Limitation Committee for political muscle.
He could staff his administration with professionals who had gotten their start in the movement. In the White House alone, there were conservatives Ed Meese, Richard V. Allen, Martin Anderson, Robert Carleson, Lyn Nofziger, Tony Dolan, and Kenneth Cribb, all in senior positions. And he could draw on the neoconservatives for respected foreign policy experts such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and Elliott Abrams.
Outside his administration, Reagan could depend on the support of opinion molders like columnists George Will, Patrick J. Buchanan, William F. Buckley, Jr., James J. Kilpatrick, and John Chamberlain. Will and Buchanan would become major television commentators before the end of the decade; Buckley, it seemed, had always been a major TV presence. Reagan could rely for guidance on the analytical skills of the editors and writers of a wide range of journals like National Review, Human Events, The American Spectator, Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.
And thanks to direct mail, there was sufficient money to fund the activities of the conservative movement — and those of the Republican party, especially when Reagan signed the letter.
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The Orsini murder trial was very intense. Take a look at this story from the Arkansas Times.
Carol Griffee, 1937-2011
Posted by Leslie Newell Peacock on Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:03 AM
Former Arkansas Gazette reporter and later independent journalist Carol Griffee died last night in hospice, we just learned from an e-mail from historian Michael Dougan.
“The Grif” was all business — she recently called Max to matter-of-factly inform him that she was dying and was putting her affairs in order — and in addition to her memorable work on the Vertac plant in Jacksonville and other environmental stories, colleagues remember her labors covering murderess Mary Lee Orsini. In her Gazette Project interview, Griffee told interviewer Michael Haddigan that she “should never have been involved in covering” the Orsini case. “It just made a total nervous wreck out of me. I [laughs] nearly lost it a couple of times.”
An excerpt from the Gazette Project interview on the Orsini case:
MH: Well, I want to make sure I ask you this question. There’s an often-told story about you coming to work and walking across the parking lot with a shotgun.
CG: Absolutely!
MH: What was that about?
CG: I carried a double-barreled shotgun.
MH: Was that . . .?
CG: I was being watched. No, this was just during the McArthur thing.
MH: Right.
CG: I was being watched, and I knew it.
MH: Who was watching you?
CG: I have a feeling it was Orsini, but I don’t really know for sure. But I was quite aware of it. Not only that, but there was one day when John Woodruff had to come to the house to get me out of my house, that’s how scared I was! [Laughs]
The Daily Hatch 