“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event… Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that… He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

“I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.

This story was promptly picked up by Drudge, Newsmax and Commentary. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website hailed the claim as evidence that Lennon “might have grown up before his untimely death.” A writer at Pajamas Media mourned the loss of a could-have-been conservative icon: “I wish he’d had the courage to come out of the closet. His assassin may have robbed us of more than a great musician.”

So what really happened?

First of all, Lennon had indeed met Reagan several years earlier when they were both guests in the Monday Night Football booth, hosted by ABC. Some video from that classic appearance:

In the years before his assassination in December 1980, Lennon had become increasingly apolitical, at least in his public statements and songwriting. He stopped giving interviews to the press in 1975 in favor of life as a “house husband” with Yoko and his young son, Sean. But he reemerged to promote a new album in 1980. The New York Times noted in a September 1980 article that, “The new songs are ‘personal,’ many of them deal with ‘dreams and fantasies;’ there isn’t a political or topical song in the lot.”

But as Lennon biographer Jon Wiener notes today, Lennon was involved in left-wing politics to the very end. In November 1980, he offered a public statement of support to union workers striking for higher wages from the company that made Kikkoman soy sauce:

“We are with you in spirit. . . . In this beautiful country where democracy is the very foundation of its constitution, it is sad that we have to still fight for equal rights and equal pay for the citizens. Boycott it must be, if it is the only way to bring justice and restore the dignity of the constitution for the sake of all citizens of the US and their children.”

Peace and love, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York City, December, 1980.

President Reagan, in contrast, was no fan of strikes or boycotts. Less than a year after Lennon’s death, Reagan fired thousands of striking air traffic control workers, dealing a devastating blow to the American labor movement.

Bottom line: It’s impossible to say whether Lennon spoke fondly of Reagan, but it seems clear he was never a right-winger.

Finally, here’s classic footage of a younger Lennon talking about peace and war:

WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) from Yoko Ono on Vimeo.

On Monday, Slate’s Dave Weigel captured Pawlenty’s most recent obeisance at the altar of Ronald Reagan.

“When Ronald Reagan cut taxes in a significant way,” said Pawlenty, “revenues actually increased by almost 100 percent during his eight years as president. So this idea that significant, big tax cuts necessarily result in lower revenues — history does not [bear] that out.”

So what really happened during Reagan’s term of office? The short version is that the Gipper passed a huge tax cut shortly after taking office, but without equivalent spending cuts, deficits ballooned so fast that he had to undo about half of his initial cuts with a series of big tax hikes. The economy did surge, but much of that probably had to do with Paul Volcker’s successful crackdown on inflation and a collapse in oil prices. Meanwhile, the increase in tax revenue per capita, adjusted for inflation, did not come anywhere close to what was achieved after additional tax hikes during Bill Clinton’s term of office.

But why take my word for it? How about listening to what people who were there have to say?

Earlier this year, David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, summarized the relevant information for Salon:

The tax burden rose during the Reagan era as well. Specifically, when Reagan left office Federal taxes accounted for 18.4 percent of GDP — a figure slightly higher than the 1960-80 average of 18.0 percent. More importantly, nearly half of the massive 1981 tax reduction — festooned as it was with every manner of special interest tax breaks that K-Street lobbyists could conjure — was recouped during the next four years in a series of annual deficit reduction bills that a bi-partisan majority was able to persuade the President to sign….

The wrong lesson was taken from the 1980s. We didn’t cut back government at all; government got bigger. We didn’t reduce the tax burden, we just avoided increases. But the conclusion was drawn that there was a great prosperity in the 1980s due to the Reagan tax cut. I don’t believe that at all. I believe that the expansion that we had for a few years was due to the fact that Paul Volcker’s Fed crushed inflation.

Bruce Bartlett, an official in Reagan’s Treasury Department, breaks down Reagan’s tax cuts and hikes here. A quote from a 2003 Bartlett column puts them in perspective:

In 1982 alone, [Reagan] signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year and the Highway Revenue Act raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.

Reagan did initially lower the top income tax bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent, and there is some academic evidence that reductions in very high tax brackets can result in some positive tax revenue. But the lower you go, the worse the impact on overall revenues becomes.

Meanwhile, the converse claim, that tax hikes automatically hurt the economy, is simply not supported by recent history. As I wrote just a few months ago:

If you look at the raw numbers of federal tax revenue over the last 40 years, you will notice a striking phenomenon — the numbers almost always go up, except in the case of deep recessions. This is basically a function of population growth, and it happens whether taxes are cut, or raised.

But the raw totals don’t tell you much, because of inflation. In 2006, Time business columnist Justin Fox adjusted the raw federal tax income revenue totals for inflation, and discovered an interesting thing. Revenue fell in the first few years after both Reagan and Bush’s tax cuts, before growth resumed. In 2008, Paul Krugman adjusted for both inflation and population growth, to try to figure out the per-capita tax revenue increase for each decade since Reagan, and found something even more enlightening. Real revenues per capita rose 19 percent from 1980-1988. From 1992-2000, real revenues per capita rose 41 percent — after tax hikes by both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton! And the numbers for George W. Bush? Pure disaster.

I know this will be nearly impossible to believe, especially when the mugger in the “DISCO” shirt shows up less than 30 seconds in, but this does not appear to be a joke:

Haha what? What is this? Explain, Huckabee:

Sure, kids learn about history in school, but between their “boring” textbooks and lectures, kids today are simply not excited by the incredible stories and lessons of our past. What’s worse, some teachers and education boards are using history and social studies classes as their soap box to promote their own political opinions and biases! And to me, that’s simply unacceptable.

The videos are about some teenagers who travel through time, learning about American Exceptionalism. So it’s sort of like the popular U.K. series “Doctor Who” except it’s cheaply produced political propaganda. (Instead of cheaply produced science fiction.)

If you order “The Reagan Revolution” now, for just $9.95, you’ll also receive “The History Exploerer Shoulder Sack” (a $15 value!) and “The History Explorer Quick Focus Binoculars” (a $26 value!) — free! (Also, if you order now, you will automatically be signed up to purchase all future videos in the series, “for just $11.95 plus $3.95 s/h billed conveniently to your credit card.”)

In case you’re curious, there is no hint of Franklin Roosevelt in the World War II video:

These are a million times better than Newt Gingrich’s endless series of documentaries about the pope or whatever. Also it really looks like Mike Huckabee is not running for president, because I don’t think presidents need such bizarre moneymaking schemes? He’s like a male evangelical Lucy Ricardo, this guy.

It was, the governor says, “one of the defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency.”

There’s some irony here.

Sure, Walker (probably) had no idea he was talking to an impersonator, but the simple fact that someone claiming to be David Koch could (apparently) reach him with such ease speaks to the stature Koch — a billionaire tycoon who has been called “the Tea Party’s wallet” — now enjoys on the right. And to conservatives like Walker, Reagan is now regarded with god-like reverence. What Walker may not remember, though, is that the same David Koch he thought he was speaking with actually tried to derail the Reagan Revolution.

In the late 1970s, the political climate wasn’t much different from today. A Democrat sat in the White House, the economy was struggling, and conservatives were seething — furious not just with Jimmy Carter’s policies, but with the lack of ideological purity on the Republican side. Anti-government sentiment was surging, with tax revolts afoot in California and Massachusetts, and “impure” Republicans like Clifford Case, Ed Brooke and Jacob Javits were facing serious headaches in GOP Senate primaries. It was in this climate that Ed Clark, a corporate lawyer from Los Angeles, ran for governor of California in 1978 as a libertarian (technically, he was listed as an independent on the ballot, since the Libertarian Party, which had been established just six years earlier, was not officially recognized at the time). In the same election in which Californians endorsed the anti-tax Proposition 13, Clark received 5.5. percent of the vote — a jarringly high tally for the an unknown, underfunded minor party candidate.

On the strength of that showing, Clark became the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president at the party’s September 1979 national convention in Los Angeles. To fill out his ticket, Clark turned to an heir to a massive oil fortune and the president of a New York-based chemical company: 39-year-old David Koch. The pairing was a smart one for the Libertarians: As a candidate himself, Koch could sink his personal fortune into the Clark-Koch effort. With his money, the party would be able to afford a 50-state ballot drive, television ads, and a full-fledged national organization.

Hopes were high. In their inaugural national effort, the Libertarians had attracted fewer than 5,000 votes nationally in the 1972 presidential election (though a faithless elector defected from Richard Nixon and voted for Libertarian John Hospers). In 1976, they’d jumped to nearly 175,000. But now they had serious money to reach the millions of angry, anti-government voters who were growing louder everyday. This energy helped the party field 550 candidates for office across the country. It was only the beginning, Clark and Koch promised.Their goal for the ’80 campaign was to break ten percent in the presidential race, a feat that would give the party momentum and automatic ballot status in most states. By 1982, Libertarian candidates for Congress would begin winning elections, and by the end of the decade, the Libertarians would eclipse the GOP as the nation’s second major political party.

The Libertarians’ massive ’80 push was no small concern to the Republican Party and its candidate, Ronald Reagan.  The general election was supposed to be close. It was still assumed that Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia, would sweep the South, making it critical for Reagan to win elsewhere. But by the summer and early fall, Clark began moving into double-digits in polls in some Western states; in Alaska, his support reached over 20 percent. Pundits had long assumed that the race’s other third party candidate, John Anderson, might play the spoiler role. But now Anderson’s numbers were fading, and while Reagan was scrambling to moderate his own image for the masses, Clark was winning new fans on the right. It seemed entirely possible that the the upstart Libertarian nominee would deny Reagan just enough votes in just enough key states to prevent him from unseating Carter.

Of course, that’s not how it worked out. In the race’s closing weeks, support for Clark and Anderson — and, for that matter, for Barry Commoner, the other other third party candidate — cratered and Reagan rolled to a 44-state landslide. Anderson finished with 5,7 percent of the vote, while the Clark-Koch ticket tallied 1.1 percent, or just over 900,000 votes. It wasn’t quite the breakthrough showing they’d envisioned, but it still stands as the best performance — by far — for a Libertarian national ticket. (Running in an election that attracted nearly 40 million more total voters, for instance, Libertarian Bob Barr attracted just 523,000 votes in 2008.) After ’80, the Libertarians fell victim to infighting. No members of Congress were ever elected on the Libertarian line and the party ended the ’80s nowhere near Clark’s goal of major party status. For Libertarians, the Clark-Koch campaign still represents the glory days.

And if those glory days had gone just a little better for them, there would have been no President Reagan to fire the air traffic controllers in 1981 — and to inspire Scott Walker all these years later.

Then there was some sort of lengthy panel about Ronald Reagan. My favorite part was when a speaker began an anecdote by saying, “Ron Reagan Jr. — don’t boo …” (Second-favorite part was when a guy said that Reagan “was even more tea party than Jefferson.” He was more like the Founders than the actual Founders, themselves.)

There was a horrible panel about gay marriage and other “social issues,” with two black religious conservatives. One of them, Bishop Harry Jackson, attempted to whip the crowd into a frenzy with an anti-gay, anti-”civility” mini-sermon, but was forced to say to the lily-white crowd, “somebody needs to clap or shout or do something in this place” to get a response.

Rick Santorum entered to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” I guess everyone finally forgot the ’90s.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre played a clip of Charlton Heston bemoaning people who try to exploit tragedies to advance their political agendas. Then he repeatedly invoked the names of people killed in shooting massacres, asserted that they were murdered by “gun-free zones,” announced that “our women” were being raped as he spoke, and even played a harrowing 911 call from a victim of a home invasion. I am not even particularly left-wing on the subject of gun control and I found it to be a breathtakingly shameless and disgusting performance.

While Justin already covered the weird Donald Trump appearance, there was one line of Trump’s speech that bears repeating: “If I run, and if I win, this country will be respected again.” Right. Once we elect the bankrupt TV make-believe tycoon huckster, people around the world will say to themselves, “They finally got it right.”

Donald Rumsfeld arrived to accept his “defender of the Constitution” award. There were boos. Dick Cheney, introduced to introduce Rumsfeld, was called various names, though the boos were then drowned out by “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants. As Cheney began his lengthy, boring story about his “meet-cute” with Rumsfeld, the crowd mostly settled down, except for scattered shouts from, I presume, antiwar Ron Paul supporters, who were promptly shouted down by patriots.