Seance In Springfield
Fresh on the heels of their hundred thousand dollar purchase of a Lincoln portrait by artist cheezemeister LeRoy Neiman, the Lincoln Museum is aiming higher. They are now spending as much as twenty million dollars for a private Lincoln collection.
Museum officials claim the presence of relics such as Lincoln’s hat will allow future visitors a “personal relationship with their historical figures,” letting “ghosts arise.”
Pinch me. Carried along by their own powerful vision, the museum gets cloudy on who pays. The Executive Director told the AP that “no tax money is involved. Instead, the foundation is working with the city of Springfield to issue bonds to pay for the collection now, and private fundraising will pay off the bonds in years to come.”
Or won’t, and twenty years or so hence taxpayers may.
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!
Lincoln Logs Off
The Lincoln Library was billed as Disney on the prairie when it opened, and like the Magic Kingdom they’ve discovered the joys of copyright.
A video produced for the museum illustrating the course of the Civil War was briefly popular on YouTube, and you’d think they would be grateful for the attention. Instead they had it yanked.
Prairie Dog
The Lincoln Library has clearly run out of ideas on spending it’s spare cash. It’s latest acquisition is a likeness of Old Abe by renowned cheeseball artist and mustache enthusiast Leroy Neiman, purchased for $100,000.
Neiman is not too proud to spare himself the same smeary treatment. 
Visitors to the great man’s web site are treated to likenesses of a host of renowned world leaders circa sometime in the mid 60s, including a mysterious “Degaulle.”
Beating The U.S. In Internet Penetration But Still Reduced To This?
An outgoing President searches for a location to build the suitable monument to his greatness, and ends up where he came from.
But in this case It’s not Reagan V. Stanford or Nixon V. Duke. The Pharaoh contagion has spread abroad. Yet another Korean President is piling up paper and making plans for the hereafter, with the “Roh Moo-hyun Memorial Library†to be built at Inje University.
Roh caught the bug early, supposedly spending the night he was elected reading a book of Lincoln speeches. He wrote “Roh Moo-Hyun Meets Lincoln” in the aftermath
Roh’s self monumentization follows the construction of the “Kim Dae-jung Presidential Library” by his illustrious predecessor, home to seemingly every nick/knack the man ever received. Highlights include “Costa Rica National Parks,” souvenir of his state visit there.
Roh is born along in his folly by the unstoppable power of net involved citizens, mobilized through Rohsamo, meaning “People Who Love Roh Moo-Hyun.”
