Courting and Counting 
Hanukkah! Festival of Lights! A special time for goy politicians of all persuasions to pause and suck up to the Great Jewish People.
Until recently, Richard Nixon had even been doing it from beyond. Each year the Nixon Library would mark Hanukkah, albeit often folded into it’s “Christmas Around the World” program. [Hanukkah, of course, is how Jews celebrate the birth of Our Lord.]
Not so this year. Did the cumulative evidence of Nixon’s Antisemitism do them in?
2007 provided the climax to date, with the release of Fred Malek‘s memos about counting “the other demographic criteria” [i.e., Jews] at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2005 it was all so different:
Hanukkah Celebration
Join family and friends at the Nixon Library on Sunday, December 11 for a special Hanukkah celebration. This free-admission event begins at 5:30 p.m. and features remarks from U.S. Congressman Gary Miller, the Lighting of the Menorah by Rabbi David Eliezrie and traditional music performed by the Temple Beth Tikvah junior choir, the Tarbut V’Torah choir, the Heritage Oak Singers, and Celebration USA.
It’s Cultural!
A Politico “Senior Political Writer” has read the entrails of the Krugman Reagan=Racist debate, rejects the thesis, and wanders even further back in the Huffington Post to find the Republicans pretty much blameless going back to the Twenties.
While claiming Reagan’s appeal wasn’t racist, David Paul Kuhn [author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma] makes the bizarre argument that if Northern white males voted Republican it somehow absolved pols and white Southerners of racism.
And he tries to make the case that Republican Southern gains were due to a host of factors:
“Twenty years earlier, when both parties mostly ignored the plight of blacks, Republicans won half the South. The 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith was a Catholic running in the Protestant South. But it was more than that. Smith was against Prohibition. The GOP successfully painted him as a big city politician who had little culturally in common with the Southern everyman…In short, the first significant Republican success in the South was based on an entirely non-racial culturally populist appeal.”
“Populist” is a broad church, but to draw sharp distinctions between racism and attacks on the big cities, their swarthy ethnic inhabitants and their libidinous ways is an interesting defense.
Kuhn has a following. The ludicrous Joe Klein breathlessly asked Time‘s readers recently, “Does Merle Haggard Speak for America?”
Klein recalled his working class youth singing along to “Okie From Muskogee” and melding the aging country icon with Kuhn’s musings about living right and bein’ free.
Haggard 
“We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”
The York Pennsylvania National Watch & Clock Museum is thinking big, readying an exhibit of presidential time pieces.
The topic has exploded in recent years, from interest in Bill Clinton’s 
Ironman, to George Bush’s watch theft 
[or not] 
in Albania, to…well that about does it.
The Museum starts off with four items: a pocket-watch and clock from James Monroe, a Gerald Ford clock, and for the young people, Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s wristwatch.
How to fill the gaps? Relying on the people!
” the museum is looking for people in the region who might have presidential clocks and watches that they’d loan to the cause.”
Who’ll Watch the Watches? 
This Close to Outa Here
The Bush Administration is lying very still and hoping troubles pass them by on the Presidential papers front.
The President has declined to appeal a federal judge’s invalidating part of a Bush Executive Order, part of which effectively hid papers forever. But the judge did not yet touch Bush’s giving Presidential descendants right to control papers into the future. Bush also gave ex Vice Presidents and their descendants the same, although they had never had such powers previously.
The Executive Order has slowed public release of past President’s papers to a crawl. Legislation to overturn all of Bush’s Order is stalled by a Republican Senate “hold.”
Is the strategy to keep as little of this as possible before the public for as long as possible?
Greeting Previous Mormon Candidate
Let’s see what he says, who’s in the audience and if he takes questions. Until then the breathless “Mitt’s Kennedy Moment” stories are kinda beside the point. 
Kennedy spoke to the Baptist beast, Mitt faces the angry throngs of the Bush Library. And Kennedy took multiple questions from the assembled clergy after his speech.
