Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Inaugural Awe

I recall the Carter change stuff being about honesty, since he was coming in off the Nixon/Ford administration. And Carter was an honest president, no doubt about it. (Though that's about the only nice thing I can say about that administration...Wonderful man, not a good president!)

I do think he is the best *ex*-president our country has probably ever had though!

Yahooo!! I hadn't seen that and thanks for pointing it out.

Fukyama was the guy who said History was Over right before 9/11. He has as much credibility as the Dow 15000 people do.

Here is what we owe Reagan.

Reagan destroyed the attempted Soviet takeover of the SAG in the 40s at great personal risk to himself and his family. He displayed great personal courage during the riots in Hollywood and supported people on both sides of the spectrum (when he was a Lefty) during those difficult years while his acting career and marriage went down the toilet. This was a personal triumph for him and a great one for the SAG and the Entertainment Industry.

Similar battles were fought by others at the same time in Minnesota for the Dem Party and within the AFL/CIO. Note that was the Left at the time that did this.

Reagan, as President, was able to build a coalition composed of Unions and Conservatives in his party whose goal was the defeat of the Communists. Which he did.

The "mess" today has been going on since the mid-1990s. Deficits, blocking of oil exploration at home, political meddling in the markets - has led to a huge transfer of wealth from the US to others while injecting vast amounts of junk debt into the securities market. Both sides of the aisle in Congress have been living on Fantasy Island for 12 years now.

And we have a much longer term problem of the unfunded liabilities of the US which will push US Bonds to AA status in the next 1-3 years. The problems today are NOTHING compared to the downgrading of US Debt. Since much of it is in short-term notes that get re-issued, the US will no longer be able to raise money at good rates when this occurs. We will be on par with Mexico.

Its going to get worse before it gets better as none of the bills in Congress faces this issue.

In effect, our kids are being indentured to foreign creditors to pay for consumption today.

We will agree to disagree. And yes if you read Fukyama's work of History being over as verbatim instead of considering it in the realms of how history has been recorded in the importance of the human factor who dictates it than maybe you can make the blanket statement. But I love the deeper picture and understand that all information we read as history has to be considered with many angles. I think I can relate with his message in the idea of how can we record history when the historian has his/her own upbringings that interfer with the purity of the information. We can't and because of his philosphical approach than I can further read between the lines. Basically, he opened my eyes.