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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

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.”

Sheriff Don’t Like It 

The Associated Press speaks with the Chicago wiseguys around Barack Obama, and has learned there’s no need for a late Bush Era pardon watch.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s giving Torturers Against Terrorism a pass.

Hope still lives in the lands across the seas, where wiley miscreants have mounted numerous so far failed efforts to snag Donald Rumsfeld.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy told AP that it’s Europe or bust. “In the United States, no.”

Who Was Barack Obama? 

The hope’s barely dry for the Obama Administration, but an exhibit on the Senator’s rise to greatness looms.

Denver’s Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library and Museum has some odds and ends left over from the Democrat’s convention week in town, and they’re putting on a show!

This handsome number  is the centerpiece of the jump-start backwards glance.

Comedy is best when fresh, so the plucky lads at carbolicsmoke.com launched a barrage of humor at the prospective Obama Presidential Library before he was elected!

Brace self for raucous laughter: 

“The first floor of the library will feature a spectacular Hall of Hope that will emphasize Obama’s famous speeches more than his accomplishments.

“It is rhetoric that moves a nation and defines us as a people,” Obama explained.  “Accomplishments, on the other hand, are overrated.”

Faithful readers are encouraged to watch the skies for the endless Internet replication of this side-splitter – but it will take effort to match the the timeless classic “PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY DESTROYED BY FLOOD,” which haunts the web.