Ronald Reagan

The Washington Post's John Kelly rarely gets political in his Metro section columns, but when he does, they can be real doozies. So it's not all that surprising that Kelly found it irresistible to attack the late President Ronald Reagan in today's column in which he opposed a new bipartisan proposal by Missouri's U.S. senators Claire McCaskill (D) and Roy Blunt (R) to rename the federal city's…

Don't you love it when liberals look back through history? Who knows what novel interpretations will follow! Radio host and former California Democratic Party chief Bill Press provided a stellar example of this while talking about the decades-long alleged imminent threat posed by climate change, previously known as global warming until the climate characteristically refused to cooperate. (…

Another educational illustration, on FX’s The Americans, of the alliance of interests between Soviet communists and the Left in the West during the 1980s, when both worked to undermine the Reagan administration’s defense policies. (The series, set in the early 1980s, revolves around “Philip and Elizabeth Jennings,” undercover KGB agents living as an ordinary American husband and wife in suburban…

Once again, as it did a month ago in two separate stories, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, left the name of Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who ran its section on tax-exempt organizations, out of its headline and opening paragraph. This time, for good measure, AP reporter Stephen Ohlemacher didn't reveal Lerner's name until Paragraph 3. Before getting to Ohlemacher'…

Chris Matthews's recent book Tip and the Gipper examined how President Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill sometimes set aside their ideological differences in favor of compromising and dealmaking. In a Tuesday post, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer also portrays the '80s O'Neill positively, but in her case it's to contrast his statesmanlike reaction to terrorist attacks that occurred on…

A new biopic about Ronald Reagan is in pre-production, and Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter relayed that Manifest Film Sales has picked up international sales rights and will introduce the project to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival. The producers of the $25 million film, simply called Reagan, "inked a deal for a U.S. release on 3,000 screens and $35 million in prints and advertising."…

Comedian Don Rickles told David Letterman, on Friday’s Late Show, that “the highlight of my life was doing the Ronald Reagan Inaugural,” the 87-year-old (88 on May 8) recalled of his legendary career. He reminisced about how Frank Sinatra used his clout to overcome opposition to his inclusion by Reagan aides concerned Rickles would “make us all look like jerks.”

On the Saturday, April 26, Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post substitute hosted a segment celebrating efforts by the Obama administration to reduce the number of convicted felons in prison in aftermath of signing a law in 2010 reducing mandatory sentences. Panel member Martin Glenn of Just Leadership USA -- who was introduced by Capehart as having a…

Sounding remarkably like American liberals and journalists at the time – not to be redundant – last week’s episode of FX’s The Americans set in the early 1980s (a new episode runs tonight), included a scene in which a KGB operative, working in the United States, sputtered in disgust at President Ronald Reagan on her TV: “Look at him. He’ll do anything. He doesn’t care. Kids, nuns, journalists --…

Former liberal CNN contributor Roland Martin launched a left-wing tirade on his TV One news program on Wednesday, aimed mainly at conservative opponents of President Barack Obama's foreign policy: "Who the hell is America fooling to tell somebody else in another country who you can invade and cannot invade?...the United States, under President Reagan, invaded Grenada....Yet, here we are telling…

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went on PBS’s Charlie Rose show Monday night and defended President Obama’s soft foreign policy approach to the crisis in Ukraine. [Video below. MP3 audio here.] Of that approach, which so far has consisted of sanctions against 11 Russian and Ukrainian officials, Friedman said:

As he was rushed into the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital, a grievously wounded President Ronald Reagan prayed for John Hinckley, the man who had just tried to kill him. "He was a mixed-up young man from a fine family," Reagan wrote in his memoirs, "An American Life." "That day, I asked the Lord to heal him, and to this day, I still do." (Audio after the jump)

In December, NPR, the New York Times, National Journal, and other establishment press platforms gave the Republican National Committee grief over the following tweet: "Today we remember Rosa Parks' bold stand and her role in ending racism." The tweet erronseously shortened the following sentence from a longer GOP statement: "“We remember and honor Rosa Parks today for the role she played in…

Season 2 debuts tonight of The Americans, the FX drama centered around husband and wife KGB undercover agents (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as “Philip and Elizabeth Jennings”) who live with their kids as ordinary Americans in suburban Washington, DC when Reagan becomes President.  In the next to last episode of the first season, at a scene in a restaurant sometime in 1982, a source tells “…