Proposal to remove Grant dishonors America

In an instructive essay, Sean Wilentz, the celebrated American historian, writes :

...the proposal to substitute his (Ronald Reagan's) image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. ...

As president, Grant...fought hard and successfully for ratification of the 15th Amendment, banning disenfranchisement on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. When recalcitrant Southern whites fought back under the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan, murdering and terrorizing blacks and their political supporters, Grant secured legislation that empowered him to unleash federal force. By 1872, the Klan was effectively dead...

Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

The article is linked

Palin resurrects dire warning against dangers of Medicare!

Sarah Palin closed her debate with Joe Biden by quoting Ronald Reagan:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.


What was the threat to American freedom that Reagan feared?

Incredibly, it was Medicare, the nation's old age health insurance system.

The quote comes from a a recording Reagan made for Operation Coffeecup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were encouraged to organize coffees for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

You can't make this stuff up.

Medicare has been around since 1965. Former President Harry Truman was the first person to enroll in the program. Republicans have tried to undermine it through cuts and underfunding ever since, but it remains an efficient and valuable program that provides basic coverage for millions of senior citizens.

Reagan was employing scare tactics in a futile effort to stop legislation that the Republican Party opposed.

What was Palin thinking, or was she, when she resurrected a projection that was so wrong?

Maybe Tina Fey will provide us with an answer Saturday night!

Joe Klein: Republicans appeal to mythical past

Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes that Reagan's "...vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street...at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth. "


It's an interesting take on Palin's appeal.