A Never to Be Canceled Moment
Takes a lickin…
[epic length coverage of the glorious Albanian days at Our Man in Tirina
The Abe Effect
As Clinton was to cows, Lincoln is to the Korean War? The Clinton Library is often credited with bringing Heifer International to Little Rock as neighbor. Now Korean War vets hope to catch museum mania across the street from Springfield Illinois’s Lincoln Library.
Perfect. Springfield will gain a new tax expenditure black hole in addition to Honest Abe’s local, state and federal subsidies. The prospective museum’s planners are already angling for Congressional earmarks, and Springfield is sprinkling tax increment financing [TIF]on a downtown lot with buried gas tanks.
The beauty part of TIF is it allows a body like the City of Springfield to beggar all the other taxing districts which draw from local property taxes. TIF takes the taxes on increased property values in an area, attributes them to X project, and usually dumps the cash back on X as a subsidy. The City forgoes any benefit from the development and hopes that someday somehow they make it back in sales taxes on tourists, or something.
In this case the other local taxing bodies include the Lincoln Land Community College District, Springfield Community Unit School District, Capital Township, Sangamon County, Springfield Park District, Springfield Metropolitan Sanitary District, Springfield Airport Authority, Springfield Metropolitan Exposition and Auditorium Authority, and the Springfield Mass Transportation District.
Enjoy your museum folks!
In Reagan’s Cause
President Bush is the latest to wrap himself in the warm memory of Communism crumbling at the sound of Ronald
Reagan’s voice.
He chose the 20th anniversary of the Berlin tear down speech to dedicate an anti-communist memorial in DC, perhaps hoping for a little of that post administration re-write all presidents aspire to.
Those who’ve actually looked at the period point out that Reagan saw the speech as a one off, a feint right in order to cover his effort to come to an accommodation with the Soviets. Communism’s fall and the subsequent creation of Berlin Wall chunks as presidential museum cliche came as a happy accident later.
A Ford In Your Future
The dog days of August will be brightened when the new Gerald Ford stamp goes on the market on the 31st. Nostalgic swooning for the liberator of East Timor will echo through the empty streets of Washington, with Stephen Hess leading the band.
Never has the Nation’s need to feel good about itself felt so good, or will feel.
The Washington Post mentions that the Ford family chose dead August, passing up the chance to issue the stamp on Ford’s July birthday. But we know where the Ford’s will be in July:
Bandar Bush Banned?
12-Jun-07
It could be another bad week for America’s favorite ambassador from the unspeakable. Fresh from accusations he received a whopping two billion dollar bribe [some allegedly filtered through Washington’s quietly mourned despot’s depository, Riggs Bank] Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan may one of the bigger losers Wednesday when a Senate committee takes up a bill to open presidential archives. The Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will consider a bill to overturn President Bush’s Executive Order which has effectively closed Presidential papers except those Formers, their descendants and stray former Vice Presidents chose to let loose. The House has already passed a version. Disclosure may shed light on decades of Bandar’s dealings with two generations of Bushs, from Lebanese car bombings through presidential library building to the magnificent anti Shia alliance he has helped cobble together in the Middle East. The Committee is also looking at greater disclosure for donors to the libraries.