Desert Foxy   
There is a special moment in every president’s life when the Saudi check for his presidential library arrives. But Ronald Reagan did better than that.
New Mideast tell-all A World of Trouble is packed with important revelations, but for our purposes the story that matters is about a man and a horse. Or several. And a briefcase full of diamonds.
Author Patrick Tyler shows Ronald Reagan scheming to keep two horses given him by our gallant Saudi allies, plotting with then [and current Bush] White House Counsel Fred Fielding to hide them on a neighbor’s ranch. The law required the president to donate the horses to the public.
Tyler points to a previously published excerpt from Reagan’s diaries confirming the scheme:
Nancy got $2 million dollars of diamonds, stashed at Harry Winston.
Reagan was endlessly photographed with his horse “El Alamein,” which Reagan received while in office from distinguished side-burn wearer 
and Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo.
 How the horse was snuck past the lawyers is not known.
How all this squared with Reagan’s legendary rules to live by is also unknown.
“Reagan kept several horses at the ranch stable. He made sure that the Secret Service horses ate from separate hay troughs, because he did not want American taxpayers paying for his own horses feed. “
Glory Days  
Richard Nixon’s death-grip on the American political imagination has brought us opera, theatre, film and books beyond measure, but somehow the era’s creepiness never fades.
Now the impresarios of nixontapes.org, your go-to guys for hours of he-man presidential chatter, offer up the image of Watergate criminals whiling away their golden years listening to their younger selves plotting crimes with the Chief Executive.
The nixontape-ists are trying to corral the remaints of the Nixon era into its schemes by making them special mix tapes of their White House recordings.
At last, Brookings Bomber wannabe Chuck Colson can review his glory days before Jesus, in the comfort of home, office or car.
Fun Bunch 
Michael Wiseman in The Washington Post asks an interesting question as the Bushies leave Washington: who gets their stuff?
There’s a lot of it.
“In February 2001, the Bush administration began an extraordinary portraiture deployment across all levels and locations of government. It’s time to call those troops home.”
Wiseman’s Post piece focuses on the personality cult photo homage assembled outside her office by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. She has accumulated 130 photos in this one area of the sizable Labor Department building. Thirty-nine of them feature Chao solo, twenty more with President Bush and other administration greats, and fourteen Chao-less of Bush solo or with minions.
An Air About Her 
Chao has been there since the beginning, the only Cabinet Secretary to survive the entire Bush era. When she’s not giving dental technicians incurable lung disease Chao is half of a Washington Fun Couple with beloved Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, currently masquerading as the defender of the taxpayer against an Obama economic stimulus and killer of the auto loan.
Now that the Bush people are leaving, what to do with these iconic images of has-been hacks?
“The Bush-bunch icons are public property. I suggest that all of them be auctioned to souvenir hunters. The money raised might be used, in part, to restore the lights in the Roosevelt Memorial or to repair a Metro escalator or two. “
Or perhaps to repay taxpayers for their $14 million dollars spent in part on the Elaine Chao Auditorium at the University of Louisville’s Mitch McConnell Center.
 How the horse was snuck past the lawyers is not known.
