RIP Jack Kemp

[Tonitrus]

WASHINGTON (CNN)  -- Former congressman and Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp died Saturday at age 73 after a battle with cancer, his family announced.
Kemp was Bob Dole's running mate on the Republican ticket in the 1996 presidential election.

A onetime professional football player, Kemp served nine terms in Congress as a representative from New York and was former Sen. Bob Dole's running mate in 1996. He was a leading advocate of "supply-side" tax cuts, advancing the argument that cutting taxes would boost economic growth and yield more revenue for the federal government.

"The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea, and I like to think that I have spent my life trying to promote good ideas," he told CNN in a 1996 interview.

Kemp "passed peacefully into the presence of the Lord" Sunday evening, a family statement said. He disclosed his illness in January.

"During the treatment of his cancer, Jack expressed his gratitude for the thoughts and prayers of so many friends, a gratitude which the Kemp family shares," the family said.

Kemp quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills to back-to-back American Football League championships in 1964 and 1965, before the merger that created the modern NFL. When he retired in 1970 after 13 seasons, the California native ran for Congress and represented the Buffalo area for 18 years in the House of Representatives. Photo View photos of Jack Kemp's life »

"He championed free-market principles that improved the lives of millions of Americans and helped unleash an entrepreneurial spirit that all of us still benefit from today," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement issued late Saturday.

The 1981 tax cuts signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which cut marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent, bore Kemp's name as a co-sponsor. Critics mocked the policy as "trickle-down" economics and pointed to the decade's growing budget deficits as evidence that supply-side theories didn't work, but it has been GOP orthodoxy ever since.
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Kemp mounted an unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988, losing the Republican primaries to George H.W. Bush. But once in office, Bush made Kemp his secretary of housing and urban development -- a post Kemp used to promote what he called an "empowerment" agenda of tax breaks for urban businesses and expanded home ownership.

Unlike many of the other conservatives of his era, Kemp actively courted African-American support. In 1992, he told CNN's "Larry King Live" that the GOP "could be a Lincoln party in terms of attracting black and brown and men and women of color and low-income status and immigrant status who want a shot at the American dream for their children."

[katmai]

Marcin,

Feel free to start another thread.

[Martinus]

Marcin,

Feel free to start another thread.

There is a double standard on this board. Not all RIP threads are treated like this.

[Syt]

Double standards on Languish? NO WAY!

[katmai]

Marcin,

Feel free to start another thread.

There is a double standard on this board. Not all RIP threads are treated like this.

Yeah there sure is to some extent.

It's been a long standing policy since 1.0 version of Languish that if you want to bash someone start another thread and not to comment in RIP thread.*


If you have problems with the late Mr. Kemp please tell us all in your own thread.

[Sophie Scholl]

There is a double standard on this board. Not all RIP threads are treated like this.

It'll be ok... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7p4mioawIA

[Martinus]

Marcin,

Feel free to start another thread.

There is a double standard on this board. Not all RIP threads are treated like this.

Yeah there sure is to some extent.

It's been a long standing policy since 1.0 version of Languish that if you want to bash someone start another thread and not to comment in RIP thread.*


If you have problems with the late Mr. Kemp please tell us all in your own thread.

I haven't seen you being so touchy in the RIP Uday Hussein thread.

[katmai]

I haven't seen you being so touchy in the RIP Uday Hussein thread.

yeah Jack Kemp =Uday Hussein


I see you still fail at comparisons.

[Martinus]

Ok I will try to be more sensitive.

I hope he didn't have a colon cancer, because otherwise it would hurt like a bitch when he gets sodomized by the devil in hell. And I hope it's not just about sex, but they form a mature relationship based on mutual understanding.

How's that?

[katmai]

Ok I will try to be more sensitive.

I hope he didn't have a colon cancer, because otherwise it would hurt like a bitch when he gets sodomized by the devil in hell. And I hope it's not just about sex, but they form a mature relationship based on mutual understanding.

How's that?

I see your Momma never taught you how to just keep quiet if you have nothing good to say at all about a person.. Ah well.

[Razgovory]

Jack Kemp dies yet Marty is still at large.  Where is the justice in that?

Who'd of thought Kemp would have died before Dole?  Maybe McCain will out live Palin.

[grumbler]

Didn't like Kemp's policies, but liked him a lot as a person.  He believed in what he said believed in.

RIP.

[derspiess]

Didn't like Kemp's policies, but liked him a lot as a person.  He believed in what he said believed in.

RIP.

Ditto, for the most part.  He was a good guy-- the fact that Marty hates him raises him another couple notches in my book.

[katmai]

I'd say sorry to hear about his degree of homophobia (maybe not right term, but after seeing some of the bills he supported sounds most apropo), but also know he was big on immigration reform and the past need for affirmative action programs.

[Martinus]

Well, one of his famous quotes was: "While I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals, I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in schools."

What civil liberties did he believe in then? Not putting homosexuals in death camps? Must be a moderate!

He was a homophobic scum, who himself was rumored to suck dick when he wasn't fighting against basic rights of gay Americans or against rights of HIV-positive patients (while he opposed any funding for HIV research or any legal protections for HIV+ people against discrimination etc., he actually supported a bill requiring mandatory testing for HIV, with the results being public). He was an evil man.