President Reagan attending the Bob Hope Salute to the United States Air Force 40th Anniversary celebration with Kirk Cameron, Phyllis Diller, Lucille Ball and Emmanuel Lewis at Pope Air Force base in Fayetteville, North Carolina. 5/10/87.
You will notice Kirk Cameron in the picture above. Cameron appeared in one of my favorite movies, “Fireproof.” That film really touched me, and I especially liked the end of the film. Here is a clip below.
Did you know that the movie “Fireproof” only had a budget of 1/2 million dollars and it opened #4 at the box office. It has earned over 33 million while in theaters and more than that in dvd sales. In fact, it ranked #41 in dvd sales for 2009 which outpaced many big budget films.
The book referenced in the movie “The Love Dare” has sold over 5 million copies and was on the NY Times Best Seller list for over a 100 weeks.
“Fireproof is about a firefighter, Caleb Holt, whose marriage has grown cold,” Stephen Kendrick, the writer and director, said. “Caleb’s father, a strong Christian, challenges his son to delay the divorce to read The Love Dare, which calls for 40 consecutive days of learning to show selfless love.”
Day One is the disarmingly simple idea that “love is patient.” Initially Caleb’s wife, Catherine, resents his efforts, which she sees as too little too late. Midway through the 40 days, Caleb despairs about her response and his own capacity to love. At that point, he accepts God’s sacrificial love for his sake. With his father’s encouragement, he sticks with it, learns to accept and give love, and ultimately restores his marriage.
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You will notice Lucy in the picture above with Ronald Reagan. Here below is a clip of Lucy trying to sell Vitameatavagamin
In a prophetic speech concerning the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” I am posting in the coming days excerpts from one of Reagan best speeches ever. He addressed the members of the British Parliament on June 8, 1982.
Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall, that dreadful gray gash across the city, is in its third decade. It is the fitting signature of the regime that built it.
And a few hundred kilometers behind the Berlin Wall, there is another symbol. In the center of Warsaw, there is a sign that notes the distances to two capitals. In one direction it points toward Moscow. In the other it points toward Brussels, headquarters of Western Europe’s tangible unity. The marker says that the distances from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal. The sign makes this point: Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.Poland’s struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted. Gladstone, defending the Reform Bill of 1866, declared, “You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.” It was easier to believe in the march of democracy in Gladstone’s day — in that high noon of Victorian optimism.
We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention — totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order, because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates the truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It is that the Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an opposition party were permitted, because everyone would join the opposition party.America’s time as a player on the stage of world history has been brief. I think understanding this fact has always made you patient with your younger cousins — well, not always patient. I do recall that on one occasion, Sir Winston Churchill said in exasperation about one of our most distinguished diplomats: “He is the only case I know of a bull who carries his china shop with him.”
But witty as Sir Winston was, he also had that special attribute of great statesmen — the gift of vision, the willingness to see the future based on the experience of the past. It is this sense of history, this understanding of the past that I want to talk with you about today, for it is in remembering what we share of the past that our two nations can make common cause for the future.
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Little known presidential facts:
- James Abram Garfield (1831-1881) is the first president to ever talk on the phone. When he spoke to Alexander Graham Bell, who was at the other end 13 miles away, he said: “Please speak a little more slowly.”k
- Twenty-ninth president Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) repeatedly made love to a young girl, Nan Britton, in a White House closet. On one occasion, Secret Service agents had to stop his wife from beating down the closet door.e
The Daily Hatch 