Fantastic Freedom on the march!

From some Bush doners much is expected. To some, often the same ones, much is given.

“I knew nothing about the deal. I need to know exactly how it happened,” said the President. He referred to the announcement that Texas oilman Ray Hunt had been granted an oil concession in Iraqi Kurdistan, the one happy corner of Bush’s New Middle East.

Hunt is not a stranger to Bush, or presidential monumentalism . The New York Times’ Paul Krugman recently pointed to his Bush appointments. Hunt also gave Southern Methodist University $35 million to buy the land for the expected Bush Library. And he grew up in a a mansion designed as a Mount Vernon replica.

Look Away!

Archaeologists have wrapped up digging at President’s House, the Philadelphia site where George Washington lived during the city’s period as the Capitol. They have covered the remnants of the slave passageway discovered while investigating the site as the city and the National Park Service ponder how to memorialize the location and it’s past residents, including Washington’s slaves.

Finalists in the site design competition are available on-line.

From the Philadelphia Daily News’ reporting on visitors reactions they may have a hard time pleasing some quarters.

Discussing the Father of the Nation’s slaves seems to set off some visitors, who offer the 18th Century version of JFK-was-about-to-pull-out-of-Vietnam: “George Washington wanted to end slavery, but he was concerned that it would start a civil war at a time when the nation was just being formed,” a white historian claimed to an archaeologist working on the site. She was also asked why at least two of Washington’s slaves would want to escape such a “nice house.”

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Father of His Country[‘s Evasions]

The archaeological dig underway at the Philadelphia home Washington lived in as President has uncovered a passageway apparently designed to keep the slaves he had on sight out of view.

First in war, first in peace, part of the herd when it came to justice and his own convenience.