He may roll over in his grave before he even gets there.

That'd be cool if it happened while lying in state (which is sort of what he did in office, too).

Yup, my husband (at BPA) has the day off, lucky duck. I have my doubts about the courts in Nevada, tho.

"Irony is naming the nation's busiest airport after the President who laid-off all the air-traffic controllers"
I think Reagan's lay-off of the controllers was great - but I love the joke.

Yeah, I think the big shutdown is overdoing it. Wall Street is closing? C'mon, get back to work. I repsect Reagan a lot and I think his memory deserves it. But the shutdown seems overdone.

sure we'll do it for Carter. we can invite Castro and Ceausescu's ghost and all of his favorite dictators and madmen and have a real party
lars

Oh, but Reagan's party would have a much larger guestlist. Let's see, Khomeini, Marcos, Hussein, bin Laden, Savimbi...

Regardless of whether you liked him or not, he did a great deal of good (look for blog comments posted by various people from former Eastern Bloc countries), and was very popular.

Tell you what. You don't grumble about a day of mourning for Reagan, and I won't grumble about a day of respect for Clinton.

We can, however, grumble about who should get such a day off. Personally, I'd prefer either nobody or everybody (within reason), but I can live with Wall Street and (sigh) the government. Heck, I probably would have worked anyway.

If they did it for Nixon, they'll do it for the rest of them. And when the federal government closes down, so does a wide swath of Washington. What a racket ... a glorious, glorious racket.

We can have a day off for Kennedy and Clinton. The Country can spend the day cheating on their spouses and taking hard-earned tax dollars off working people to give to corrupt urban politicians to buy reelection votes.At the end of the day, we can have a "Who Killed Vince Foster Contest", along with a WWF Tag-Team Match of Hillary Clinton and Gerald Nadler against Dick Cheney and Tonia Harding.

I used to love it when I lived in DC and the Fed didn't have to work that day. As a non-govt employee, traffic was mercifully light on those days.

I think there's a lot to honor Reagan for, in much the same way as FDR, who was one of Reagan's heroes. Like FDR, he spent America's way out of an economic pickle (if you're old enough to remember looking for work in 1980 you know what I'm talking about). With our ability to manage huge deficits, America was able to have guns AND butter... the Soviet Union couldn't afford both, and went broke. I do think, though, that we should have thrown a life-line to Gorbachev.. the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union was a big factor in the destabalization of the Balkans, and subsequent genocide.
On the whole, though, Reagan made good on his promise of making things better, not worse. The economy recovered, he didn't drag us into any big conflicts and for the first time in my memory I did not go to bed wondering if we would be nuked during the night (although he really pushed the envelope to get there). I think he's more deserving for honor than most of our former presidents.

Here's one illustration of the impact his death has had on people.

Traffic sure won't be light in DC this week. The hotels are already booked. The government is letting people get away without coming to work starting today. Sadly, in unofficial Washington we still have another day left this week.

Ronald Reagan shifted the tax burden for social programs to the States, raised my taxes and took out a loan in my name, and the name of my children, to buy WMD's that we really didn't need. He sowed the seeds of the corporate media (fear factory)that exists today.

I will remember him as the guy who increased my college tuition and privatized the student loan program raising my interest rates. I will remember him as the guy who wouldn't answer the questions put to him at press conferences, but instead, answer some other question that had a better sounding answer.

I will remember him as less of an embarrassment than the current president.

> took out a loan in my name, and the name of my children, to buy WMD's that we really didn't need

Revisionist history.

I'm not that sad, either. Thank you Jack for telling it like it is!!

Here is a picture of Rumsfeld, then special envoy of Reagan, shaking hands with our friend Saddam Hussein.