Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Why not plan a surprise attack?

Why announce (((IN A CRAZY WAY))) that you're going to do this?

Don't you think you'd actually get somewhere in a more productive way with a calm, rationally executed approach?

The emotional outbursts are going to hurt you, not help you.

_________________
little
yellow
different

On 2005-10-09 09:51:00, sammiegirl wrote:

"

I am sorry that some sick childish emotionaly disturbed whacko is threatening you.

I pray that you continue to be safe and healthy.



I have to say that it is a shame that some ANON sicko is using this forum to threaten your children. I am sorry that this has gotten out of control. If it were my children I would turn his threats over to the authorities, or at least keep record of his posts. Just incase. I myself am going to consult my Atty to see if his postings legaly infringe upon my civil liberties. The blubbering doesnt hurt its the accusation that I am a pedophile and that I collected state and federal funds. This I believe is Liable and I think that the others should look into it also.

sammie"

Why make it BROADCAST NEWS?  ::

Another reason never to get AOL.

You're not helping your case Jordan.  :roll:

Sure man. I just wanna see what all the hype's about. C'mon Anonymous, find me a good juicy link.

How about artman[insert many ones]? Got anything good?

Anonymous, man oh man. Get a grip. Are you a girl?

http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.1 ... agans.html

The Truth About Reagan and AIDS

By MICHAEL BRONSKI
FORWARD CORRESPONDENT

For the past two months I've been teaching a course entitled "Plagues and Politics: The Impact of AIDS on U.S. Culture" at Dartmouth College and have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the AIDS pandemic. So when the political flap over the historical accuracy of "The Reagans" ? the CBS miniseries on the lives and White House years of Ronald and Nancy Reagan that was pulled from the network's lineup and dumped on its sister cable outlet, Showtime ? hit the headlines, I was intrigued to see that one of the main complaints against the series was that the original script (no one actually has seen the final version of the series itself) accuses President Reagan of religious intolerance and prejudice against homosexuals. In a scene in which Nancy Reagan asks her husband to do something to help people with AIDS, he responds by answering, "Those who live in sin shall die in sin."

Elizabeth Egloff, who authored the script, has conceded that Reagan's answer is a fictionalized invention, and indeed, Reagan rarely employed religious sentiments or metaphors in political situations. The show's critics have made a strong, salient point: Having Reagan use the language of conservative Christianity to explain why he and his administration did almost nothing for the first seven years of the AIDS epidemic is historically irresponsible and highly misleading.

From everything that we can ascertain from the historical record, Reagan's religious background, feelings or beliefs had nothing to do with the political response to the AIDS epidemic. Rather, his appalling lack of leadership and vision ? which led directly to enormous setbacks for HIV/AIDS research, discrimination against people with AIDS and the lack of any comprehensive outreach for prevention or education work, thus adding to the already-staggering tally of deaths ? was a product of indifference, disdain, self-imposed ignorance and a political capitulation to the rising wave of a new, staunchly reactionary and religious Republican constituency that was to reshape not only the party but the state of American politics.

As we read about and discuss the history of the American AIDS epidemic in class, my students ? all Reagan babies, born between 1981 and 1985 ? are often dumbfounded when faced with simple facts. Although AIDS was first reported in the medical and popular press in 1981, it was only in October of 1987 that President Reagan publicly spoke about the epidemic. By the end of that year 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. How could this happen, they ask? Didn't he see that this was an ever-expanding epidemic? How could he not say anything? Do anything?

But the public scandal over the Reagan administration's reaction to AIDS is complex and goes much deeper, far beyond the commander-in-chief's refusal to speak out about the epidemic. Reagan understood that a great deal of his power resided in a broad base of born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a deeply reactionary social agenda of which a virulent, demonizing homophobia was a central tenet. In the media men such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell articulated these sentiments that portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers such as Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina hammered home this message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the administration's policies.

What did this mean in practical terms? Most importantly, AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire's Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire's Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.

When health and support groups in the gay community were beginning to initiate education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987 Senator Helms amended a federal appropriations bill to prohibit AIDS education efforts that "encourage or promote homosexual activity" ? that is, efforts that tell gay men how to have safe sex.

When almost all medical experts spoke out against mandatory HIV testing (since it would drive those at risk away from being tested) and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal Defense Fund were attempting to combat discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, Republicans such as Vice President George Bush in 1987 and Dannemeyer (in a California state referendum) in 1988 called for mandatory HIV testing.

Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan said nothing and did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagans, was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out as president. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times opinion article, called for mandatory testing for HIV and said that HIV-positive gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV-drug users on their arms) Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence), when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop's too-little-too-late initiative. Reagan, again, said and did nothing. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.

My students ask me how all of this could have happened. They are all smart, they understand politics, they understand the fear of AIDS, they understand how complicated ? and confusing ? history and life can be. But they cannot understand such indifference, even when politically motivated. I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.

The protests against "The Reagans" are really nothing more than a political sideshow with conservatives flexing their muscles (and threatening an economic boycott) to protect their own version of history. The genre of the television miniseries, even one based in contemporary history, is by its nature a project of interpretation ? a fact that seems to have escaped the protesters. But the irony is that portraying Reagan as being anti-gay because of his religious convictions, while wrong, is, in fact, the kind interpretation. Looking at history it is clear that Reagan's inaction during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic was due to indifference, emotional callousness and greed for political power. In the end I agree with those who protest "The Reagans" ? CBS should have told us the truth.

Michael Bronski is a film critic for the Forward.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040605/D83136KO0.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - Ronald Reagan, the cheerful crusader who devoted his presidency to winning the Cold War, trying to scale back government and making people believe it was "morning again in America," died Saturday after a long twilight struggle with Alzheimer's disease, a family friend said. He was 93.

He died at his home in California, according to the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The White House was told his health had taken a turn for the worse in the last several days.

Five years after leaving office, the nation's 40th president told the world in November 1994 that he had been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's, an incurable illness that destroys brain cells. He said he had begun "the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life."

Reagan body was expected to be taken to his presidential library and museum in Simi Valley, Calif., and then flown to Washington to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. His funeral was expected to be at the National Cathedral, an event likely to draw world leaders. The body was to be returned to California for a sunset burial at his library.

Reagan lived longer than any U.S. president, spending his last decade in the shrouded seclusion wrought by his disease, tended by his wife, Nancy, whom he called Mommy, and the select few closest to him. Now, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton are the surviving ex-presidents.

Although fiercely protective of Reagan's privacy, the former first lady let people know his mental condition had deteriorated terribly. Last month, she said: "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him."

Reagan's oldest daughter, Maureen, from his first marriage, died in August 2001 at age 60 from cancer. Three other children survive: Michael, from his first marriage, and Patti Davis and Ron from his second.

Over two terms, from 1981 to 1989, Reagan reshaped the Republican Party in his conservative image, fixed his eye on the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism and tripled the national debt to $3 trillion in his singleminded competition with the other superpower.

Taking office at age 69, Reagan had already lived a career outside Washington, one that spanned work as a radio sports announcer, an actor, a television performer, a spokesman for the General Electric Co., and a two-term governor of California.

At the time of his retirement, his very name suggested a populist brand of conservative politics that still inspires the Republican Party.

He declared at the outset, "Government is not the solution, it's the problem," although reducing that government proved harder to do in reality than in his rhetoric.

Even so, he challenged the status quo on welfare and other programs that had put government on a growth spurt ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal strengthened the federal presence in the lives of average Americans.

In foreign affairs, he built the arsenals of war while seeking and achieving arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

In his second term, Reagan was dogged by revelations that he authorized secret arms sales to Iran while seeking Iranian aid to gain release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Some of the money was used to aid rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua.

Despite the ensuing investigations, he left office in 1989 with the highest popularity rating of any retiring president in the history of modern-day public opinion polls.

That reflected, in part, his uncommon ability as a communicator and his way of connecting with ordinary Americans, even as his policies infuriated the left and as his simple verities made him the butt of jokes. "Morning again in America" became his re-election campaign mantra in 1984, but typified his appeal to patriotrism through both terms.

At 69, Reagan was the oldest man ever elected president when he was chosen on Nov. 4, 1980, by an unexpectedly large margin over incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Near-tragedy struck on his 70th day as president. On March 30, 1981, Reagan was leaving a Washington hotel after addressing labor leaders when a young drifter, John Hinckley, fired six shots at him. A bullet lodged an inch from Reagan's heart, but he recovered.

Four years later he was re-elected by an even greater margin, carrying 49 of the 50 states in defeating Democrat Walter F. Mondale, Carter's vice president.