Whether you agree or disagree with his views, I don't think it's right for people to gloat over somebody's death.

I agree that his death is a good thing, but not in a horrible way, but becos of the awful condition he's been in these last few years and that now he's finally at peace.

I used to be in favor of free trade, but recently I've been accepting that it's not always good, or indeed always free.

Free trade, like anarchy, is something that might be good if everybody was responsible, but people generally aren't. That's why we need laws and government, and despite what the far left and ultra-capitalists might think it doesn't make you a facisit or a socialist to think there should be some kind of code to ensure people aren't exploited and harmed, or that the enviroment isn't ruined for our descendents.

And while I think drug abuse (and that include alcohol) is something that should be fought, I think the war on drugs was foolish and totally unfair on the very victim of drugs, the user.

But I do agree that the USSR was an evil empire and I don't see the problem with "Star Wars". We should get rid of all our WMDs, but why we shouldn't build DE-fensive arms is beyond me!

That aside, Nancy and their children have my sympathy.

my sympathies lie with the people of Cuba and Grenada. Two of the worst hit countries by Reagans "War" on communism/marxism.

People in Cuba continue to live under terrible trade sanctions whilst Reagans family live in the lap of luxury in California.

How can you sympathise with Reagan's family???

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, President Reagan cut back on funding to inner-city health clinics, which led to the development of antiviral medicine-resistant tuberculosis. When clinics saw their budgets slashed, they cut back on compliance programs, such as directly observed therapy, and patients would stop taking the entire regimen of antibacterial TB drugs.

So with a $6 per month (that's about three pounds fifty) per patient cutback, you ended up with a superstrain of TB. This is one public health reason why Medicaid (the tiny, chronically underfunded Federal healthcare program) should provide clinical care and services to people with illnesses like TB and HIV-infection. But Reagan, like Bush today, would rather that poor patients died horribly, and didn't care about a super-TB epidemic sweeping through the ghettoes.

I barely escaped from the US in the 80s, when I developed a serious heart condition but not enough private health insurance for the necessary surgery. I would have died, except for the kindness of a few doctors. They sneaked me through the hospital admission system, so I could live long enough to fight off the accountants. Later, as I sat recovering in bed from the surgery with medical tubes coming out of my nose and chest, with my wife struggling to make the accounts dept clerks wear masks when they came into the room to hound me for payment, I watched on TV as Reagan bombed Libya. This was a moment of sudden clarity for me: I finally saw the connection. We left the US as soon as I was well enough to travel.

Now I live here in the UK, doing a vital job, paying taxes, contributing to the economy, doing volunteer work for a charity at weekends, etc.: all things I couldn't have done if I'd stayed in the US. I wouldn't dream of going back, and I feel a tremendous debt of gratitude to the people of this civilized nation.

47 million US nationals still don't have any healthcare at all. The ones who don't die from treatable illnesses are often forced out of work. What a waste! They live in constant fear of getting ill. Reagan was at the vanguard of destroying even the tiniest protection these people had.

Reagan's disregard for healthcare funding played a notable role in his presidential politics. He was obsessed with expensive military projects like the "Star Wars" SDI program. He cut federal funding to medical care for the poor and turned a large number of mental patients out onto the streets. As president he also failed to allocate adequate research money for numerous diseases, including the budding AIDS epidemic of the 80s, and even the very same Alzheimer's disease from which he suffered and died. What goes around, comes around, eh.

Sympathy for this vicious murderer? Give me a break! I call it poetic justice.

hondures, el salvador, nicaragura guatamala - hundreds of thousands butchered by the usa and their trained proxies. Even if the old sod was to far gone or too stupid to actually be behind the planning, he consented without hesitation, to people like negroponte and bush[1] ... and thats only part of [south america] it!

On his watch were signed away american freedoms, millions around the world felt the strain of his happy little jingle - usa no.1, repeated ad nausium - in job losses, market shrinkage and moral rectitude (god was on his side too).

Fuck the little twat, even if he did tell good jokes.

Want more? Trace up his association with the world church movement and Dr[sic]J.West - mind control devotee and responsible for attempting to de-program an entire generation of the politically active and for the jonestown sucide(yeah right) party. A good bagman and money raiser for the spikey end of the NWO, reagan liked to ensure that those that crossed him politically or otherwise were made to pay, drumming out more talented actors and artists from his apple pie hollywood and crushing them on the wheels of macarthyism.

All american hero. Dead now. Like the dream his country once had.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Jon. I always wondered why there aren't more Americans leaving the US - any ideas?

You anarchist 'people', and i use the term loosely, are sick in the brain. Just fucked up losers.

R.I.P. President Reagan.

Look matey - and that goes for your prissy "don't speak ill of the dead" Liberal chum - if you want to shed tears over the dead and treat them with "respect" then you could do a lot worse than blub about the thousands of people who die every day from the kind of policies and actions that the likes of Reagan inflicted on them, quite callously, with no thought for their suffering, their whole lives.

People with nobody to stick up for them or make a big fuss in the media about what "great statesmen" they were when they died.

You are the sickos my friend. You care nothing for the thousands of people - people you have more in common with than some distant elite class - while acting all fuckin' mawkish when one of the oppressors - and sorry, but that's what they are - croaks of natural causes at an advanced age.

Now *that's* disgusting.

"I never knew anything above Cs."
--President Reagan, in a moment of truthfulness, describes his academic record to Barbara Walters, November 27, 1981

"They told stories about how inattentive and inept the President was.... They said he wouldn't come to work--all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence."
--Jim Cannon (an aide to Howard Baker) reporting what Reagan's underlings told him, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President: 1984-88

"This President is treated by both the press and foreign leaders as if he were a child.... It is major news when he honors a political or economic discussion with a germane remark and not an anecdote about his Hollywood days."
--Columnist Richard Cohen

"What planet is he living on?"
--President Mitterand of France poses this question about Reagan to Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.

"During Mr. Reagan's trip to Europe...members of the traveling press corps watched him doze off so many times--during speeches by French President Francois Mitterrand and Italian President Alessandro Pertini, as well as during a one-on-one audience with the Pope--that they privately christened the trip 'The Big Sleep.'"
--Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency

"He demonstrated for all to see how far you can go in this life with a smile, a shoeshine and the nerve to put your own spin on the facts."
--David Nyhan, Boston Globe columnist

"an amiable dunce"
--Clark Clifford (former Defense Secretary)

"Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears."
--British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

"...like reinventing the wheel."
--Larry Speakes (Reagan's former press secretary) describing what it was like preparing the President for a press conference, Speaking Out: The Reagan Presidency from Inside the White House


"The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan's ears is a challenging one for his aides."
--Columnist David Broder

"He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless"
--Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan), talking about her father, The Way I See It

"This loathing for government, this eagerness to prove that any program to aid the disadvantaged is nothing but a boondoggle and a money gobbler, leads him to contrive statistics and stories with unmatched vigor."
--Mark Green, Reagan's Reign of Error

"President Reagan doesn't always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing."
--former president Jimmy Carter, March 6, 1984

"His errors glide past unchallenged. At one point...he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year."
--Simon Hoggart, in The Observer (London), 1986



Uncommon Wisdom from "The Gipper":

"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"
--Ronald Reagan (Governor of California), quoted in the Sacramento Bee, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park, March 3, 1966

"I don't believe a tree is a tree and if you've seen one you've seen them all."
--Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, September 14, 1966

"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."
--Ronald Reagan (Republican candidate for president), quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980. (In reality, the average nuclear reactor generates 30 tons of radioactive waste per year.)

"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time magazine, October 20, 1980. (According to scientists, Mount St. Helens emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day at its peak activity, compared with 81,000 tons per day produced by cars.)

"Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1980. (According to Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, industrial sources are responsible for at least 65 percent and possibly as much as 90 percent of the oxides of nitrogen in the U.S.)

"Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Sierra, September 10, 1980

"I've said it before and I'll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1980. (According to the USGS, the Saudi reserves of 165.5 billion barrels are 17 times the proven reserves--9.2 billion barrels--in Alaska.)

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
--Ronald Reagan, campaign speech, 1980

"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1980. (The U.S. Department of Transportation calculates that a 14-car train traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980 auto carrying an average of 2.2 people gets 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.)

"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
--Ronald Reagan (candidate for Governor of California), interviewed in the Fresno Bee, October 10, 1965

"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war [in Vietnam] than the people have been told."
--Ronald Reagan, in the Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1967

"...the moral equal of our Founding Fathers."
--President Reagan, describing the Nicaraguan contras, March 1, 1985

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time, May 17, 1976

"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself."
--President Reagan, in an interview with foreign journalists, April 19, 1985. ("In costume" is more like it. Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood.)

"They've done away with those committees. That shows the success of what the Soviets were able to do in this country."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Washington Times, September 30, 1987. (Reagan longs for the days of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the HCUA witch hunts.)

"We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years."
--President Reagan, quoted in USA Today, April 26, 1983

"What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."
--President Reagan, defending himself against charges of callousness on Good Morning America, January 31, 1984

"I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary."
--Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1965

"I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
--Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1966

"If there has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with."
--Ronald Reagan (Governor of California), quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 1969. (Reagan reveals how he intends to deal with student protesters at the University of California, Berkeley.)

"Today a newcomer to the state is automatically eligible for our many aid programs the moment he crosses the border."
--Ronald Reagan, in a speech announcing his candidacy for Governor, January 3, 1966. (In fact, immigrants to California had to wait five years before becoming eligible for benefits. Reagan acknowledged his error, but nine months later said exactly the same thing.)

"...a faceless mass, waiting for handouts."
--Ronald Reagan, 1965. (Description of Medicaid recipients.)

"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
--California Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1966

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
--Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964

"But I also happen to be someone who believes in tithing--the giving of a tenth [to charity]."
--Ronald Reagan, from The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, February 8, 1982. (He may believe in tithing, but he doesn't practice it. Reagan's total charitable giving of $5,965 did not approach 10% of total income. It was more like 1.4%.)

"[Not] until now has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."
--President Reagan revealing a disturbing view about the "coming of Armageddon," December 6, 1983

"History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government.... When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness."
--Ronald Reagan, in Time, April 14, 1980. (History shows no such thing. Income tax rates in Europe have traditionally been far higher than U.S. rates, while European crime rates have been much lower.)

"Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything."
--Ronald Reagan, in Newsweek, April 21, 1980. (Wrong again.)

"Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close."
--Ronald Reagan to aide Stuart Spencer, 1966

Quotes are from Reagan's Reign of Error by Mark Green & Gail MacColl, and The Clothes Have No Emperor by Paul Slansky

 http://www.geocities.com/thereaganyears/

He'll be long remembered for the Iran-Contra affair, one of the most striking examples of the cold, calculating hypocrisy of US foreign policy:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair

How many innocent civilians died by this man's signature? And how many in the mass graves we're finding now in Iraq were of Iranian conscripts, fighting with weapons sold to both sides by the evil old fucker?

R.I.P. President Reagan. Roast In Pieces, you sick, twisted bastard. Hope your henchmen Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Abrams, Negroponte and the rest join you soon to keep you company. I should make a special visit to California to piss, shit and vomit all over your grave.

May you rest in peace alongside the victims of your time in office from
Chad 1981-82
Grenada 1983
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90

..... Jamie, I must keep missing your posts in which you express your disgust at the lack of remorse "our" leaders have for the victims of their atrocities who they deem unworthy of a body count!!!

does anyone know who painted this???

Boo Hoo Hoo

Will Thatcher be next or will she just rust?

Hot favourite to bite the big one next is Maggie!

Rectal cancer: 15/1
Heart attack: 14/1
Stroke: 12/1
Aneurysm: 6/1
Choking to death on a bowl of thin gruel: 5/1

Place your bets NOW!
 http://www.ladbrokes.com/

If the media concentrate this much on Reagan, just imagine when Thatcher dies?!?! It will be as bad as Diana I reckon!

THat Liberal bloke hasn't got a fucking clue. He has been indocrtinated with the western-anti-communist bullshit from the media...

He should watch Dr. Strangelove - they are going to put fluoride in the water!

Hello Mr "British Liberal" and welcome to Indymedia (probably your first time eh??). Just let me explain how things work here: You make stupid comments and people rip you to bits!!

So, here's mine:

First thank you for providing us with yet more hilarious Lib Dem quotes!! First there was the "I'm aginst the Iraq war until it breaks out, then I'm completely in favour of it", then there are these corkers:

"I'm against the war on drugs but we should fight drug abuse"!! No comment!

"The USSR was an evil empire" -...so it's ok to support the Contras then because they were skinning "Commies" alive (literally!!) in Nicaragua an Honduras??

"I'm in favour of WMD so long as those who own them promise not to use them" Ah, this is why we have "international law" I suppose then -to make sure evil people don't use their WMD??

...and to add to this you could say: "We should oppose all dictators and international terrorists ...until they die ...then we should feel sorry for them ...and their poor wife and kids"

Maybe we should spare a thought for Mussolini and his wife too when they were executed by the Italian resistance?? Or Adolf Hitler and his poor wife after he popped that cyonide pill down his throat in the bunker?? Or Polpot?? Or Stalin?? or...

THE MAN WHO INVENTED US STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM IS DEAD. GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE!

Don't forget to add your marvellous quotes to the "Charles Kennedy book of pathetic and ridiculous quotes"!!

Ah but yes. Us "far left" types surely do feel some regret about his death??



...I REGRET I WASN'T AT THE THE BEDSIDE IN HIS LUXURY HOSPITAL (THAT MOST AMERICANS CAN'T AFFORD!) SO I COULD PULL THE PLUG ON THE BASTARD!

Pass the Champaigne!!

Pass the Champaigne!!

cling

nicely put Andy, cheers

He's dead ........... good, but there are still to many of these dangerous, calous, greedy fuck wits left on our planet.......and what i think is the only sad and upsetting thing about his death (and it will be the same for that bitch Thatcher no doubt)is that they r able to live to a natural age and die in relevant comfort, and our nations weep and fuck wits make stupid remarks about anarcho types being disgusting for not pity the evil murderous scum passing over........No Justice (and hopefully he cant rest in) No Peace.

It will be a time for celebrations and street parties when that sick old hag Thatcher finally kicks the bucket....