JUST SAY NO...MORE

Discussion relating to current events, politics, religion, etc
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
kv
Posts: 8743
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 3:08 pm
Location: South Bay, SoCal

JUST SAY NO...MORE

#1 Post by kv » Sun Mar 06, 2016 3:53 pm


User avatar
Hype
Posts: 7028
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:44 pm

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#2 Post by Hype » Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:20 pm



Good riddance!

User avatar
SR
Posts: 7838
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:56 pm

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#3 Post by SR » Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:37 pm

Exactly what I decided not to write. :nod:

User avatar
Artemis
Posts: 10344
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:44 pm
Location: Toronto

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#4 Post by Artemis » Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:48 pm

My thoughts too.

A funny tweet I read said " Finally we can say "YES" to drugs with a clear conscience." :lol:

User avatar
Angry Canine
Posts: 143
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2015 9:08 pm
Location: Digging for fire in No. KY/Cincy

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#5 Post by Angry Canine » Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:54 pm

I said no to drugs....but they insisted.

User avatar
Hype
Posts: 7028
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:44 pm

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#6 Post by Hype » Mon Mar 07, 2016 7:59 pm

She's no Barbara Bush... is what I'm saying. :neutral:

User avatar
SR
Posts: 7838
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:56 pm

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#7 Post by SR » Tue Mar 08, 2016 6:10 am

And neither is Michelle Obama.

User avatar
Hype
Posts: 7028
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:44 pm

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#8 Post by Hype » Tue Mar 08, 2016 7:17 am

Image

User avatar
mockbee
Posts: 3468
Joined: Mon Oct 17, 2011 12:05 am
Location: Portland, OR

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#9 Post by mockbee » Fri Mar 11, 2016 5:52 pm

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
wtf :hs:

I think hillary needs to get some good rest or something....ho jeeez :scared:


“It’s almost tempting to interpret this as withering, devastating sarcasm,” Gawker wrote. “The Reagans ‘started a national conversation about AIDS’ in the same sense that George W. Bush ‘started a national conversation’ about Iraq.’”

User avatar
Artemis
Posts: 10344
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:44 pm
Location: Toronto

Re: JUST SAY NO...MORE

#10 Post by Artemis » Sat Mar 12, 2016 7:19 pm

I was rather surprised by Hilary's gaffe yesterday. If one of her people wrote those words for her, he or she should be sacked! :no:

The New Yorker had a good piece yesterday.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-com ... n-and-aids
MARCH 11, 2016
Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and AIDS
BY MICHAEL SPECTER

It will take somebody with more psychiatric sophistication than me to figure out how Hillary Clinton could have come to praise Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as she initially did earlier today, for having started the American conversation about AIDS “when, before, nobody talked about it.”

President Reagan’s first speech on the subject wasn’t until May 31, 1987. By then, more than twenty-five thousand people, the majority of them gay men, had died in the United States. His Administration ridiculed people with AIDS—his spokesman, Larry Speakes, made jokes about them at press conferences—and while I do think it rude to speak ill of the dead, particularly on the day of a funeral, this issue cannot be ignored. Nancy Reagan refused to act in any way in 1985 to help her friend Rock Hudson when he was in Paris dying of AIDS. (Last year, Buzzfeed published documents that make this clear.)


Clinton’s comments caused an outcry and she apologized rapidly, writing, in a statement issued on Twitter, “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS. For that, I’m sorry.” She deserves recognition for that. But her correction, while not nearly as offensive as her earlier comments, was also misguided.

In the nineteen-eighties, I covered the AIDS epidemic and the stem-cell wars for the Washington Post. I do not recall any occasion on which Ronald Reagan said or did anything that could be considered as “strong” advocacy for stem-cell research. One son, Ron, Jr., was in favor of the research and said so at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the year his father died. That same year, Michael, Reagan’s other son, made a statement about that issue to anti-abortion-rights publications, which nobody ever contradicted: “The media continues to report that the Reagan ‘family’ is in favor of [embryonic] stem cell research, when the truth is that two members of the family have been long time foes of this process of manufacturing human beings—my dad, Ronald Reagan during his lifetime, and I.”

The idea that Ronald Reagan finally did focus on AIDS, if only belatedly, is also a fiction. Reagan was outraged in 1986, when his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, one of the great heroes of the AIDS epidemic, issued a report that, as I wrote when Koop died, recommended a program of compulsory sex education in schools and argued that, by the time they reached third grade, children should be taught how to use condoms.

In 1990, when Ryan White died of AIDS, Reagan wrote a letter that ended with the words, “Ryan, my dear young friend, we will see you again.” But that letter really just shows the limits of Reagan’s sympathy. Ryan White was an absolutely delightful Indiana schoolboy who, in the early nineteen-eighties, received a transfusion of H.I.V.-infected blood. So he was an “innocent” AIDS victim, unlike the gay men Reagan did not like to mention. It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable singling White out to honor, nor is it by chance that the single biggest piece of H.I.V. legislation ever enacted in the United States is called the Ryan White Act. If the boy had happened to be a gay teen-ager, does anyone think Ronald Reagan would have written that letter? (I want to stress that this is not meant in any way to diminish the courage of Ryan White, whom I knew and wrote about more than thirty years ago. He was a wonderful person. It wasn’t his fault that he happened to be a straight white teen-ager from the Midwest, rather than a gay man from San Francisco.)

In the end, as Clinton wrote, Nancy Reagan was indeed “strong” on stem-cell research and on Alzheimer’s disease. Her conversion came when her husband plunged into the darkness of the disease. She was desperate, and would have done anything for him. It was a deeply admirable stance, and rare in her conservative world. Millions of other people, however, would surely have benefitted from that kind of support—had she offered it when her husband was capable of doing something to help alleviate so much suffering.

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.

Post Reply