Suspect Sheen?  
Governor Tim “The Smiling Face Of Pain” Pawlenty of Minnesota shocked assembled Republican governors last week with his bold assertion that endless Reagan regurgitation might not be the path back to power.
To demonstrate his loyalty to the legend, Pawlenty claimed he was Gobbed For the Gipper.
“We all grew up in the age of Reagan,” he said. “I passed out fliers for him; I got spat on by hippies. But he was president a long time ago.”
Where did all this airborne hatred spring from? Pawlenty turned 21 the year Reagan became President, and didn’t hold public office until he joined the Eagan Minnesota city council in 1991.
Assuming that he was a precocious south suburban lad going into the Twin Cities to harass the scruffies for Reagan, when did this rendezvous with moisture take place? Did the chill winds of the North Country preserve sixties leftovers so they might spring into action against young Tim far into the eighties?
The fogginess of the tale and distance in time recall the great myth of the Vietnam War, the claims returning troops were spat on at arrival airports.
The story congealed in Rambo’s claim, speaking lines in a screenplay, that he was spat on, and got legs with Bob Greene’s “Wipe the spit from my heart” epic Homecoming.
Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke’s Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam says it never happened!
“The stories besmirch the reputation of the anti-war movement and help construct an alibi for why we lost the war: had it not been for the betrayal by liberals in Washington and radicals in the street, we could have defeated the Vietnamese. The stories also erase from public memory the image, discomforting to some Americans, of Vietnam veterans who helped end the carnage they had been part of. “
We can only hope Pawlenty’s presence in the Republican comeback attempt keeps this tale before the public so the damp details can be nailed down.
Herbert Hoover As You’ve Never Seen Him  
Times are tough in America’s Heartland
, but plucky Midwesterners are buckling down.
Iowa’s Herbert Hoover National Historic Site has so few visitors that early this year it dropped it’s admission charge to save the money spent trying to collect it.
Hoover is a punching bag for all seasons. Distant relative Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the “Joe the Plumber” of the multiple homes set and deranged ex-Hillary supporter, used her faint connection to bolster the Obama-is-Hoover argument of the sinking McCain campaign.
Now the Hoover Museum on the Historic Site has turned to a beloved folk figure to try and drag in some bodies.
Elvis-themed Christmas trees are somehow to draw the otherwise Hoover-averse to the Hoover Museum within the Historic Site.
America’s Next Great Presidential Library? 
Chicago photographer/architecture writer Lee Bey has nominated a great South-Side Chicago location for the inevitable Barack Obama Presidential Library: the remaints of the Pullman railroad works.
Pullman was the scene of an epic 1894 battle 
for workers right to organize, crushed by federal troops dispatched by Grover Cleveland.
With the additional benefit of being near where Obama got his start as a community organizer.
Pullman was built as a model company town, but when the workers struck to oppose a wage cut a violent strike spread across the country as workers boycotted Pullman-built railroad cars.
Future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs  
rose to prominence as the strike leader 
of the American Railway Union.  He was jailed after the strike, read Marx, and emerged a socialist.
What’s left of the works is owned by the state of Illinois.
Pullman In Happier Times 
Good Luck With That! 
Clinton representatives continue negotiations with the Barack Obama transition, trying to cut a deal allowing the disinfectant of democracy to shine upon the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Library, and Bill himself, reflecting their glory back upon America’s hoped for champion abroad, Hillary Clinton.
From press accounts it seems all rather murky.
What’s at stake is what Bill Clinton has, where he got it, and what he discloses. He’s not giving up without a fight, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources:
“Mr. Clinton’s willingness to disclose future charitable and profitable ventures is consistent with his pledge during his wife’s presidential campaign. While he refused to release past donations and payments, these people say, he said he would disclose information going forward if Sen. Clinton became president. His pledge now to reveal some prior donations is a concession to the Obama team.”
And if anyone makes a fuss, he did it for the children:
“Mr. Clinton wouldn’t return any money already collected from foreign political and business leaders, even if it has stirred controversy, according to one person close to the talks, largely because those funds have been spent on programs such as campaigns to alleviate AIDS and hunger.”
The Hillary Clinton people appear to be giving themselves a defense in advance against any Bill Clinton money blow-back:
“One Democrat who advised her campaign said few of her senior strategists knew anything about the former president’s business arrangements and whether they would hold up under scrutiny if she won the nomination.”
And besides, so’s your old man:
“One Clinton adviser noted that former President George H.W. Bush has given paid speeches and participated in international business ventures since his son, George W. Bush, has been president — without stirring public complaints or controversy about a possible conflict of interest. “
The best part of the Journal story is that the Clinton negotiating team includes Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s dickish assistant.
Band’s comic stylings enlivened Senator Clinton’s sinking Presidential campaign, when writing as “The Office of Former President Clinton” he unleashed a weird and meandering complaint about a Todd Purdam’s Vanity Fair story saying Bill Clinton had lost it.
Part of Purdam’s offense to all things decent and Clinton was a claim that Band’s handbag magnate wife was insulted in the piece, apparently by the mention of handbags.
Lincoln As She Never Saw Him  
As the nation enjoys Barack Obama’s ham-handed efforts to resurrect Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincolnesque “Cabinet Of Rivals,” actual Lincoln historians try to spoil the party with facts.
Dickinson College Civil War historian Matthew Pinsker challenges the renowned plagiarist, pointing out that Lincoln angered his supporters by taking in his opponents, who largely failed him.
“Lincoln’s Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous…Lincoln was a political genius, but his model for Cabinet-building should stand more as a cautionary tale than as a leadership manual.”
