It’s A Jubilee!
All debts forgiven, all slaves set free! The Nixon museum goes federal at 11 am EST today.
Watch for tales from the crypt as the archives releases new tapes and documents.
The Greats Give Back
The Washington Post today takes note of a Manhattan Institute study exploring and deploring the decline in public schools named for Presidents and other Greats.
It’s all about the civic virtue, they claim. By Naming Names we ritually affirm the greats who’ve gone before and the superior system they represent, although the linkage of this with the surprising numbers of schools named for Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan unclear.
St. Louis boasts the McKinley Classical Junior Academy, “Home of the Goldbugs.” 
Their continued pressing down upon the brow of labor is to be admired, but what do they actually learn by it?
The Manhattanists claim to be puzzled more schools aren’t named for Martin Luther King what with all the multicuturalness and all. They seem disappointed they can’t beat that familiar dog once more.
That the Institute is a magnet for right wing oddities goes unmentioned in the Washington Post article. One leading light is Myron Magnet, a Martin Van Buren reenactor 
whose Big Idea is that hippie LSD consumption in the 60s led to those black folk signing up for welfare[“The Dream and the Nightmare]. The Washington Post laid out this crackpot’s influence on George Bush before the election in 2000, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.
The Newest Nixon
The LA Times provides a scene setter for the Wednesday Nixon museum changeover from triumphantly biased to federally certified objectivity.
Incoming Director Timothy Naftali boldly signals his new broomness by describing the demolition of the old Watergate exhibit, to be replaced by one where you can interact your way to making your own cool conclusions on the whole darn mess. “It’ll be up to the visitor to decide,” he vows.
The day has come at last when Nixon may catch a break from the death of objective truth conservatives spend an inordinate amount of their time hunting down and denouncing.
Even better, Naftali is going all meta on the old dead exhibit. It’ll live on in format of the day digital photographs to be displaced on, yes, plasma screens. Sort of like when Disneyland made over Tommorrowland to be less about the future and more on the past’s view of the future.
Naftali. Tie-less, natch.
In Defense Of The Bush Library
The beast they could not kill.
Perhaps America’s unfunniest Bush Library joke appears to have ninety-nine lives. The nation’s Internet jokesters are getting ahead of the expected site announcement by endlessly recycling variations on this rib-tickler:
“Crawford , Texas (AP) — April 4, 2007
A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential bathroom. Both books were completely consumed by the waters, various floating human excrements, and melted crayons. A presidential spokesperson said the president was devastated, as he had almost finished coloring the second one.”
This thing appears almost every day somewhere, sometimes with a current date to take away that no so fresh smell.
Let’s pace ourselves. We all anxiously await the opening of a widely hoped for humor resource which can serve the nation for decades to come. Until then can we maintain a dignified silence unless we’re actually funny?