Local Hero 
President Bush has hinted before that he’ll live in Dallas after this year, but he’s dropping more. 
He referred to Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert at a recent meeting, saying “I have to be good because my mayor is in the room.” The Presidential Library presumptive at SMU continues to be plotted behind closed doors, and the temporary home for his archives has been rented in a Dallas suburb. 
He should be able to find a house. The region is a national leader in home foreclosures.
Blanket Agreement 
Yet another thing we can blame on the nation’s most distinguished placeholder, Gerry Ford. After he left office!
Along with doing down Reagan, Nixon, much of the 70s, and the Clintons, Ford in the tell-all “Write It When I’m Gone” lets it be known that he was responsible for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It happened at a 1993 Clinton sleepover in Colorado.
“Up until that point, President Clinton cared less about NAFTA. He wasn’t interested. I spent most of my time with him promoting NAFTA, urging him to take action, to get going … I honestly can claim full credit for getting him off dead center on NAFTA,” Ford recalled in May 1994. “Now, once he got interested, he did a damn good job. He twisted arms, he browbeat Democrats and he put on a good event in the East Room with Carter, Bush and myself. You know, he’s a helluva salesman.”
And the blessings poured fourth! Ourmostathleticpresident
can take the credit and the blame.
For fashion icon Subcomandante Marcos… 
…but also for the NAFTA Superhighway maps which infest the web
[choose one!] 
The blessings continue today. The new year saw the fall of more barriers to American agriculture crushing Mexican farmers.
“The population working in the primary sector (agriculture, livestock, forestry, hunting, and fishing) fell drastically, from 8.2 million people in 1991 to 6.1 million in 2006… Those working in the primary sector represented 26.8% of the total working population in 1991 but only 14.6% in 2006. According to a study commissioned by the government, the number of agricultural households diminished from 2.3 million in 1992 to 575,000 in 2002.”
Wherever did all those farmers go?
The problem with Gerry’s story is that Clinton endorsed NAFTA before the 1992 election. So never-mind.
Start Over? 
Those boho scenesters at the Storefront for Art and Architecture are aiming high. The Chronicle of Higher Education may have their back ‘o the envelope Bush Presidential Library contest; the Storefront is re-doing the White House.
Your submissions for replacing the old dear 
with a “Presidential Palace of the future” may be offered starting March 1st. The contest closes April 20th, with winners to be announced in May. Cash money prizes!
How its done in Kosova 
“a small field of usefulness*” 
Who’s Firemens Field’s friend?
The question is posed by dueling Oyster Bay Long Island web sites.
www.savefiremensfield.org was formed by opponents of a proposed Teddy Roosevelt Museum to be located on Firemens Field near the town center. A mischievous proponent of the project then launched www.savefiremansfield.org, apparently to snare the unwary.
The Theodore Roosevelt Association wants to build the museum, and claims no relationship with either site. But the pro-museum site uses a TR photo with the Association’s permission on it’s banner:
What was Roosevelt saying and to whom in this endlessly quoted “Man In The Arena” speech?
Roosevelt’s speech was in part a mash note to the French from America, “the only two republics among the great powers of the world.” Roosevelt swooned for France, how “the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership narms and statecraft*.”
The French were certainly up to their necks in the “rough work of the world*” as they stumbled into a century of slaughter and surrender at home, and then massacre and withdrawal from their colonies.
The speech and most of Roosevelt’s public persona today are a relic, a fetish for nostalgists pining for the days of manly, unapologetic imperialism over the lesser races. And some spectacularly wordy tough talk.
*Who’s the Man?
Seen at the Crime 
Rehab efforts continue at the Nixon Library.
Hundreds gathered to mark Nixon’s 95th birthday, the Navy sent a wreath, and Admiral Raymond Berube identified the Disgracedformerpresident
as that fail-safe superlative, a difference maker. 
“He inherited a country weighed down with war and political instability,” the Orange County Register quotes Berube, implying Nixon in some way moderated these phenomena.
One Register reader ain’t buying it:
“He woul dhave been 95 and if there was justice in this country he would just now be eligible for parole.”
