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(William F. Buckley - so excited over the thought of a Reagan White House he called him "Mister President" a year before the election)

Early on in his campaign, then-candidate Reagan made an appearance on the Firing Line program, hosted by William F.Buckley on January 27, 1980. So taken back by the thought of a Reagan White House, Buckley kept referring to Reagan as "Mister President", asking questions that almost seemed like a coaching session for what would be the grueling campaign for an election that would take place some eleven months later.

Buckley fawned reverential, asking the most maleable of soft-ball questions, as if he didn't want to know if there were any chinks in the Reagan armor, didn't want the audience to feel there was any other candidate even worth mentioning - acting as though the Carter Presidency was already over - it was merely a waiting game until inauguration.

During the one hour session, Reagan gets into domestic policy with a couple of samples:

Reagan on Domestic Energy: “ Vast areas, known to contain minerals and possibly such sources as oil and natural gas are rapidly being taken over by the Federal government. They’re formerly federal lands but they’re now being withdrawn from any multiple use, and restricted to . . .as wilderness areas where the only people that can possibly use those public lands is that small segment of the public who maybe has the energy and the time to go backpacking and hike up to a hill and say ‘isn’t that beautiful’ but none of the rest of us will ever get to see it because they won’t allow you to put a road in.”

Reagan on Education: “I would like to dissolve the 10 billion dollar National Department of Education created by President Carter, and turn schools back to the local school districts, where we built the greatest public school system the world has ever seen. I think I could make a case in the decline of public education when federal aid became federal interference.”

He also makes no bones about his eagerness to do away with regulations citing, among others, the EPA as an evil agency, bent on destroying free enterprise.

All in all, it's a fascinating glimpse into the Candidate Reagan, with a certain amount of goodnatured bumbling tossed in for good measure.

And Buckley loved every syllable of it.

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(E. Howard Hunt. Murky pasts and clandestine motives)

Shadowy figures from our deep-dark past. The name E. Howard Hunt will always be synonymous with Watergate and Nixon, but his ties to the CIA and clandestine activities go back further. It's interesting how, with all the revelations and allegations regarding the Bush Administration, there had to be some model established, some precedent set for a White House run amok. It's been said that Karl Rove looks like a rank amateur compared to the likes of Hunt. Between this interview and the deathbed confession, that assessment would seem to be spot-on.

Here is an interview, in its entirety from the Firing Line series hosted by Hunt's long time friend, Godfather of his children and executor of his wife's estate, William F. Buckley from May 12, 1974.

(When the White House withholds "certain details")

"In my judgment, the President was fully justified, if in fact it is true, that during 1969 and 1970, he secretly bombed the occupied sectors of Cambodia because of American troops on the other side of the frontier." - Pat Buchanan

Taken from an interview as part of the Firing Line series hosted by William F. Buckley, this piece features a very young and very loyal White House Speech writer by the name of Pat Buchanan, discussing Presidential privilege and National security.

Makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the Bush White House. Particularly where the question of good judgment is concerned.

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Brent Bozell during a discussion on William F. Buckley Jr.'s book The Reagan I Knew on C-SPAN's Book TV opining over the state of the media today and wondering if William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan would have had their voices heard in today's television media. He makes the huge stretch of comparing Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on cable news today to Walter Cronkite, David Frost and Merv Griffin, like they had the same audience.

While I completely agree with Bozell that way too many on the cable news networks are forced to come on television and try to make a point in two minute sound bytes and that does nothing to add to any real political discourse in this country, him using that pretense to say that either Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley Jr. would not have had their opinions propogated by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" is a complete joke.

Other than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann we don't have any progressives controlling the narrative out there... period, on any of the cable news networks or on the big three. We have sorry milk toast excuses for surrogates that supposedly represent the "liberal" side of an issue and the Democrats apparently have not gotten the message yet that the press is not their friend. When they decide to break up these media monopolies that are controlling everything we watch and listen to I'll feel that maybe they have started to get a clue.

I had a conversation with a friend that I sadly found out liked Sean Hannity recently. It made me wonder how much time I wanted to spend with her in the future since it is hard to have sane conversations with someone who's basically been brainwashed, but at least we had an honest dialog that evening about where this country is headed and she answered a question I had for her about how many progressives she even knew existed.

She had no idea who Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers were, and she had no clue that any of the major much less lesser read liberal blogs out there even existed. I named a bunch of them off and let her know that if she didn't know who those people were she actually had no idea what the other side of the story was, and what an alternative view point to Sean Hannity was.

Brent Bozell may not be happy that the conservatives of our time actually have a couple people out there taking them to task on the TV machine as Rachel puts it, but to try to pretend that conservatives haven't had a chance to put their narrative out there because Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been allowed to be on the air on MSNBC is an utter and complete joke. And comparing them to anyone who anchored a major news network when that's all the public had to watch at the time during the era of Cronkite is an even bigger joke.