Remembering history the way they wished it had been
For you all you Presidential who-went-where-when obsessives, The 48th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry/ Civil War Musings blog has a roundup on Presidential visits to the Antietam battlefield near Washington.
With the special bonus of extensively documenting future President McKinley’s participation in the battle, where he heroically shuffled coffee to the front lines under fire.
?
Community meetings on the proposed Oyster Bay Long Island Theodore Roosevelt museum are rolling along, with residents are asking Theodore Roosevelt Association President James Bruns some entertaining questions.
One questioner asked what exactly they’d put in the 100,000 square foot building since Roosevelt’s papers are at Harvard and the Library of Congress.
Bruns says they don’t need paper when they have pizazz!
Another pest inquired how much of the estimated $120 million cost is at hand.
“Mike Giardina asked, “How much money does the TRA have in the bank?”Mr. Bruns said they have pledges of $1 million.
Mr. Giardina: “And in the bank?”
Mr. Bruns, “I’m not going to divulge that.“
Mr. Gardina: “You have zero. You have no website*. Come on.”
[*They have one, but it’s pretty useless on the proposed museum] 
Mysteries of Texas 
The Financial Times sheds some light on one of the 2008 Presidential campain’s oddities: how George H.W. Bush came to host Mitt Romney for his Mormon 2.0 speech at the Bush Library. The FT discussed how the many candidates have related to not-for-profits in the past as clues to their prospective administrations.
“Of concern with Mitt Romney and Giuliani is their assessment about the judgment of people they associate with in the non-profit sector. As a board member of the Points of Life Foundation, Romney was involved in the organisation’s merger with the Hands On Network, which chose Neil Bush, the president’s brother, as vice-chair and chair-elect. Bush does not convey an image of the highest standards of non-profit probity thanks to a history of dubious business and non-profit endeavours. These include the Silverado Savings and Loan collapse (costing American taxpayers $1.3bn) and having his mother, Barbara, pitch for charitable donations that would be designated to help school systems buy his learning software.”
Mama Tried 
They are letting Neil off easy. His Asian whore mongering while in the service of dubious businessmen is legend.
Ignite!’s stuff is comically bad.
Reaching today’s teens through the universal language of Rap, a bored singer intones Machines and Profit in World Cultures, Europe in Transition, Topic 4: Industrial Revolution:
“with government out of the way, industrialists ruled the day…and got the pay”
And yes, they are on the YouthTube.
Bush’s business model focuses on getting local schools to buy one of his expensive “Cows” [“Curriculum on Wheels”], which appear to be a tricked up box of notebooks.
With wheels! 
Ill-starred Presidential filmmaker Oliver Stone now threatens a George Bush biopic, with a leading man offering all the “same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush.”
Stone’s “JFK” was an incoherent mash-up of as many conspiracy theories as sleepy Kevin Costner could carry, and “Nixon” was just dull. 
My personal hope is that Stone’s Bush takes a flashback to the Reagan/Bush 80s and 90s, and somehow finally explains what the hell Jim Belushi’s “Doctor Rock” character was doing in Salvador. 
“Stone Says I’ve Got It” 
Bush marks MLK Day.
“My frame of reference is what worksâ€
Thank goodness Barack Obama isn’t invested in the 60s like those tiresome boomers.
But he appears to replace their obsessions with his own free-floating grab bag of Time “Man of the Year” cliches. If he doesn’t care for the 60s perhaps he can catch up on the 80s.
Obama’s Reagan Mania recalls the grimly practical Deng Xiaoping, ”It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
And has Democratic Hall Monitor Paul Krugman points out, the Reagan Era wasn’t such a buoyant time, boyish charm aside.
“… the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan…Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.”
