Remembering history the way they wished it had been
As so often before, it has fallen to Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Congressman and former Reagan speech writer, to find the bright side of the some 80,000 items missing at the Reagan Library.
“Missing memorabilia adds to the mystique of the Reagan years”
I’m Back!
The Maine artist whose Bush and Cheney murals were yanked from a Kennebunk art exhibit has won their return.
Painful local discussion panels to still follow.
The Offenders 
Flag Desecration OK, but don’t offend the Bushs.
We will probably have to wait until the next even numbered year for a stormy Congressional Flag Desecration vote, but George H.W. Bush’s inland neighbors in Kennebunk Maine are focusing instead on what really matters: caricatures of the current President and Vice President.
Artist and apparent local crank G. Bud Swenson 
makes paintings in part from cut up flags. A Kennebunk Free Library show was fine with that after some hesitation, but at the last minute demanded he yank two paintings.
The Library’s director told seacostonline that the paintings “crossed the bounds of acceptable community standards.”
The show went on without our leaders’ portraits, and the library hopes to bore everyone into silence with two “public forums” and a little dialoguin’
Crime Scene
The eyes of all the people are on Ronald Reagan‘s Museum Upon A Hill, where the Los Angeles Times reports a National Archives Inspector General finding that the Reagan Library has had some inventory shrinkage.
“The audit found that the Reagan library was unable to properly account for more than 80,000 artifacts out of its collection of some 100,000 such items, and “may have experienced loss or pilferage the scope of which will likely never be known.”
The suspects are incompetent record keeping and light-fingered staff. We are assured that measures will be taken.
This isn’t the first time that items have wandered off from the Reagan. When White House staffers were researching then Supreme Court nominee John Roberts they traveled to the Reagan to study Roberts’ paper trail as a Reagan White House staffer. And an unknown number of Roberts documents went missing.
So why again do we have these little islands of documents and valuables scattered over the countryside?
The Berlin Wall has been down 18 years today, but America never tires of the old concrete chunks left over. Pieces grace all your finer Presidential Libraries, no matter how strained their relationship is to the Wall.
And we usually display them West side out with all the pretty graffiti.
Roosevelt: 
only link is this hideous sculpture made by a Churchill Granddaughter from Wall.
Truman: 
see where she got the semi-human shapes above? Still more Churchill relative art at Westminster College where Truman invited Churchill to let rip.
Eisenhower: none – Wall but a gleam in Walter Ulbrecht’s eye then. 
Kennedy: 
because it was built on his watch?
Johnson: sadly, no.
Nixon: 
because it existed simultaneously with his Presidency?
Ford: 
same as above, and US established diplomatic relations with DDR.
Carter: none.
Reagan: 
leapt into the future and tore down his own-self.
Plus one inside: 
Plus at the Ronald Reagan Building in DC: 
Plus one at the “Reagan Ranch” [downhill from it in Santa Barbara]: 
Bush: 
fell while in office.
Another, indoors: 
Other Americans have different ways of displaying the Wall: 
