Clarity at Last
“Americans are sick hearing about Vietnam so telling them Russia was the ‘real’ enemy was FRESH” ....from the 80's
~History~
Early on in the Reagan administration the president was not treated with the appropriate “respect” by many federal employees’ & thought of him as a B movie actor. Reagan's people who believed the motto “image is everything” made him look “tough”. To quickly do this he made an example out of striking air traffic controllers.
The build up of weapons system to protect America form the “Evil Empire” happened in the 80’s for many reasons, The brilliant part of the were to create high paying high tech US jobs, thus quickly improving the economy and securing his reelection.
In order to get congress to pass legislation that would include “lots of spending” American’s had to believe the threats were sincere and to have “respect” from congress and the American people. The president made many speeches and spoke using words that grabbed the hearts of "everyday/average" America.
In California President Reagan’s home state LOTS of the weapons contracts were given. People were able to “enjoy the good life” with weekend trips to the Napa Valley and buy BMW’s. I learned in the 80’s that “good paying” government jobs (physically done in the USA) create a “good” economy for many times more jobs are created. To me that’s the “trickle down” theory.
“To ensure the President’s legacy in the history books the new strategy is for Reagan to end communism”… “After we terrorized everyone about ‘the bear’ why???”
“To give him Mount Rushmore status” ….“The American people need to be onboard with peace & so do the Russians”… “OK”
Back then I had a “different theory” maybe I got it from traveling.
~History~
Growing up my dad was a 747 pilot and my mom took advantage of the “free flights”. We went ALL over the world.
In some countries in the 70’s being an American traveler was not fun. Because I was an American people all over the world spit at me (literally). I learned that America did make some political mistakes in the past and I truly felt the “fallout”. What i like about Ronald Reagan is he made being American fashionable and people in "my country" were once again PROUD to be American.
Going to Thailand as a little girl and having other children called me “round eyes” and told me to “go away” & that woke me up in the 70's.
??? Why me. ??? Why could my family simply travel like everyone else to Disnyland. My mom told me someday memories from her trips would change my life. OK mom I finally “get it”.
In Amsterdam we stayed at the same hotel John and Yoko did for their “peaceful protest”. I learned on that trip Anne Frank had a picture of a Hollywood celebrity in her hiding place during WW2.
We traveled to Lisbon during the Carnation Revolution. I remember a drive to the hotel and we passed y a historic statue that had fliers all over that had the communist flag. Thinking we were in the wrong country I asked my mom “??? I thought we were in Portugal” she then explained to me about upcoming elections and the importance of democracies. I got mad another “political” vacation "boring" & that vacation was the worst. A week of eating saltine crackers and drinking Lancers wine (Yes!!! I was a kid but I was told "when in Rome do as the Romans" also I think the lady watching me wanted me quiet) The hotel had limited electricity due to public service strikes and the water did not work when the toilet got full the hotel would just let us change rooms they had LOTs of rooms available. ??? Wonder Why.
Everywhere we traveled I would watch the TV and NOTHING would be in English and to me the commercial were the most entertaining to watch. This is what "really" influenced me.
~Fast Forward to the USSR~
“There’s a big push to end communism"... "It needs to end fast so Bush doesn’t get the credit”…“OK”
A lot of people made attempts to reach out to those on the other side of the curtain. Many thought preaching the word of Jesus was the message to communicate. My “theory” was to motivate the Russian people with “Bling not bibles” and I hauled a bunch of Cosmopolitan magazines to prove my point. WOW!!!!! The reaction was phenomenal. Young women were taking pages from my magazines and I finally had to communicate to them ONLY ONE PAGE per person. I had people surrounding me just for an ad for cover girl lipstick.
The intourist guide in her 50’s did NOT like me and I believe she’s the one that contacted the KGB.
In the middle of my 3rd night she and many men entered my hotel room and I was taken by force (kicking and screaming) worse they strapped to a board. Maybe from my screaming someone came to my room and intourist guide yelled out “She’s sick going to hospital…. (she glared at me ) You have cough”. They took me away in an ugly van & drove me around for a long time and the men were smoking cigarettes laughing listening to music, I kept screaming “My Country Knows I’m here”, and the music got louder.
I got to an abandon building that could have been a hospital in the past. They had cats roaming all around. I was put in a room that had a small very dusty table with some medical supplies but I never saw a doctor or a nurse. Instead people just kept staring at me sometimes they’d surround me, then they’d leave and & they’d yell. I kept hearing footsteps. This kept repeating. I was NEVER touched. I feared they’d give me shot and was told before the trip to NEVER have an injection due to dirty needles and Aids.
The people that were mean to me were all older. At one point I really just wanted them to kill me and get it over with. Maybe those emotions came from being tired physically. I did not sleep for 2 days and hearing the yelling and footsteps OVER AND OVER AGAIN terrified me.
At the same time a few visitors that were younger were kind and they wanted my american belongings . They treated me with respect (while they were looking in my coat pockets) they seemed facinated by me. They were not angry & hostile like the older men that scared me.
Looking back they really did not know what to do with me. (This I wrote last January on this blog)
The 2nd day I got heat. That was fantastic. I got homemade stew and I could tell that people were trying to be
nice. Still every time the door opened I had no idea what they would do with me next. I did not sleep …. That I remember too well. A lady came into my room and told me how to get out of the building. It was like she learned English to tell me this specific set of instructions. Other than what she told me she could only speak Russian. I was told to leave the building and walk toward the road….. “Go to the road”. OK. I got out and this building was in the middle of “NO WHERE”. A few tire tracks but lots of snow. I kept thinking they were going to shoot me. Nobody was there. It was “HORRIBLE”. I had to trust this person. So I kept walking and ate snow because I was dehydrated. I probably walked less than 2 miles but it felt like a hundred. Finally a road and a car pulled up with a couple and they told me to get in. They took me to what seemed to be a hotel and there another woman used a rag to wipe me down (clean me up) and she put make up on me. It was weird. I knew then I’d be OK because I figured out they wanted the US government to see me clean and healthy. She had some pills and wanted me to take them I panicked said “NO” and started screaming. A man came into the room and said “Valium”. Immediately took the pills. Another person took me and dropped me off in front of the American Consulate office. And they raced away. With no passport I had to tell the marine my story and immediately I was taken into the office. I was interviewed by a staff member then a Foreign Service officer, then taken to a Finnish hospital for an exam and back to the consulate office I had dinner with the consulate general and that night I got to stay in the same room that Richard Nixon stayed in when he was visiting Leningrad. For this history buff I was happy. The next day I went to Moscow.
Just to speed up the memory and get back to my point. A marine took me to red square on my last day. The words out of my mouth “it’s beautiful”. The Marine profoundly said “it looks good on the outside but on the inside it’s a mess”. WOW!!!!
FYI- Comparatively I was treated BETTER by the KGB then the Franklin police i Williamson County Tennessee.
What terrifies me MOST is that I was treated inhumanly in America “ my turf” . I forgave the Russians years ago for I understood the “culture” and the “political climate” also I was “invading their space” when it comes to Tennessee I was taken to jail “twice” by a warrant “sworn out” by the man from NISSAN that I’ve documented harassing me for OVER a year.
I’m mad and I need to make sure what happened to me does NOT happen to another American.
Also, In Russia I was “right” about the BLING JJ
Bottom line at Nissan and in Williamson County people need to read a new "dictionary" and make an effort to use words that unite and are polite. Respect for ALL People is needed for economic success.
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President’s George H Bush and George W Bush drew from the Reagan strategies but they “tweaked” thus sending America to 2 “real” wars and jobs went overseas and the profits were not scattered amongst the American people instead their “buddies” reaped the monetary rewards.
Ronald Reagan never put our troops “in the line of fire”….
Except for Granada which I was told a “dog and pony” show”.
The elderly don’t like President Obama’s Health Care but they “don’t get” the TRUE STORY.
House GOP Reverses Role from 2003 Medicare Rx Vote
With its talking babies and warnings of government takeovers and terrified seniors, the grandstanding by House Republicans during Saturday's narrow 220-215 passage of the Democratic Affordable Health Care for America Act was entirely predictable. And if that vote count sounds familiar, it should. Six years ago with the AARP by its side, it was the House GOP which eked out a victory for its deeply flawed and unfunded Medicare prescription drug program by an identical margin. But while the roles may be reversed from 2003 to 2009, the Republican objective of stopping Democratic gains at the polls is unchanged.
A quick glance back to November 22, 2003 in the national rear view mirror shows a mirror image of last night's House vote. The Bush White House, which flip-flopped on adding a prescription benefit within the Medicare program in order to win over elderly voters as the 2004 campaign neared, put last minute pressure on the caucus to back the program. President Bush touted the AARP's backing for a 678-page bill his administration duplicitously claimed would cost $400 billion over 10 years. Bill Thomas (R-CA), the legislation's architect, sounded a refrain that Democrats would repeat this week:
"If we are trying to destroy Medicare, why is the AARP supporting us?''
While only one of 177 Republicans supported Saturday's health care reform bill, six years ago 204 House Republicans voted yea on the Medicare prescription bill. Among them were current GOP leaders John Boehner (R-OH) and Eric Cantor (R-VA).
And to be sure, the Republican position then as now wasn't about preserving conservative principles, but instead a GOP majority at all costs. As House Majority Leader Tom Delay defended his party's fiscal recklessness that November night:
"We must forget about ideological absolutes."
But the similarities between Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi's victory last night and that of her Republican predecessor Dennis Hastert end there. From the GOP leadership's strong-arm tactics and the administration's budgetary chicanery deployed to secure the bill's passage to the industry giveaways it offered, the dirty dealing behind the Medicare
drug plan showcased typical Republican politics in action.
For starters, consider Tom Delay's unprecedented machinations on the House floor to round up the needed votes. As the New York Times recalled:
Under heavy pressure from President Bush and Republican Congressional leaders, lawmakers backed the legislation by a vote of 220 to 215, sending it to the Senate, which is expected to act in the next few days. The vote, which ordinarily takes fifteen minutes to record, was kept open for an extraordinary three hours as Republicans struggled to switch votes and obtain a majority.
And what happened during those three hours was a new low, even for Tom Delay. As the Washington Post later reported, the House Ethics Committee later reprimanded Delay for trying to buy votes for the Medicare bill:
After a six-month investigation, the committee concluded that DeLay had told Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) he would endorse the congressional bid of Smith's son if the congressman gave GOP leaders a much-needed vote in a contentious pre-dawn roll call on Nov. 22.
Then there's the matter of the Medicare bill's price tag. As I wrote four years ago ("Medicare's Prescription for Failure"):
A White House desperate for an election year win on Medicare deliberately misrepresented the program's costs in order to ensure passage. On December 8, 2003, President Bush rolled out a program he claimed would cost $400 billion over 10 years. Within two months, however, the White House notified Congress that the real price tag would approach $550 billion. When Medicare actuary Richard Foster sought to present the true price tag to Congress in late 2003, then agency chief Thomas Scully threatened to fire him. Fast forward two years and the estimated 10 year price tag for the Medicare prescription plan now exceeds $720 billion for its 43 million beneficiaries.
(As the Times reported in 2004, the GAO ultimately concluded that the Bush administration "illegally withheld data from Congress on the cost of the new Medicare law" and that Scully "should repay seven months of his salary to the government." While Scully was later fined for other ethics violations, he was never held accountable for his role in the Medicare fraud. Today, Thomas Scully "now works for a law firm and a private investment firm, has registered as a lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories, Aventis
Pharmaceuticals, Caremark Rx and other health care companies.")
Then there's the small matter of public policy itself. From its inception, the Republicans' Medicare prescription benefit was designed to fail. With its confusing and costly "donut hole" limiting payments for beneficiaries and its prohibition on direct government price negotiations with pharmaceutical companies, Medicare Part D was a headache for recipients and a windfall for the drug companies.
For starters, the White House and its GOP allies on Capitol Hill insisted that the final December 2003 Medicare Drug bill prohibit the government from negotiating prices directly with drug companies, a key demand of the pharmaceutical lobby. The same price leverage enjoyed by the Veterans Affairs Department and its program beneficiaries was surrendered by Medicare, with the predictable results described in a 2006 House analysis.
That report released by Democratic staff on the House Government Reform Committee showed that under the new Medicare plan, prices for 10 commonly prescribed drugs were 80% higher than those negotiated by the Veterans Department, 60% above that paid by Canadian consumers and still 3% higher than volume pharmacies such as Costco and Drugstore.com. The report concluded that:
"The prices offered by the Medicare drug plans are higher than all four benchmarks, in some cases significantly so. This increases costs to seniors and federal taxpayers and makes it doubtful that the complicated design of Medicare Part D provides any tangible benefit to anyone but drug manufacturers and insurers."
Which is exactly as Louisiana Republican Bill Tauzin designed it. Just months after shepherding the Medicare prescription bill he wrote through the House, Tauzin, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, left Congress and accepted a $2 million-a-year job as president of PhRMA -- Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
And so it goes. Five days before proclaiming the House health reform bill "the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen," the man RNC Chairman Michael Steele is now calling "Speaker Boehner" warned it was "breaking the bank." But six years ago, Boehner stood with President Bush and 203 House Republicans to bring American voters the Medicare prescription bill just in time for the 2004 elections.
