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Oh Yes, There’s More! 

After Black Friday, the nation looks ahead to Tapin’ Tuesday.

  The Nixon Library releases still more Nixon tapes December 2nd!

Herbert Hoover As You’ve Never Seen Him  

Times are tough in America’s Heartland, but plucky Midwesterners are buckling down.

Iowa’s Herbert Hoover National Historic Site has so few visitors that early this year it dropped it’s admission charge to save the money spent trying to collect it.

Hoover is a punching bag for all seasons. Distant relative Lynn Forester de Rothschild,  the “Joe the Plumber” of the multiple homes set and deranged ex-Hillary supporter, used her faint connection to bolster the Obama-is-Hoover argument of the sinking McCain campaign.

Now the Hoover Museum on the Historic Site has turned to a beloved folk figure to try and drag in some bodies.

Elvis-themed Christmas trees are somehow to draw the otherwise Hoover-averse to the Hoover Museum within the Historic Site.

America’s Next Great Presidential Library?

Chicago photographer/architecture writer Lee Bey has nominated a great South-Side Chicago location for the inevitable Barack Obama Presidential Library: the remaints of the Pullman railroad works.

Pullman was the scene of an epic 1894 battle

for workers right to organize,  crushed by federal troops dispatched by Grover Cleveland.

With the additional benefit of being near where Obama got his start as a community organizer.

Pullman was built as a model company town, but when the workers struck to oppose a wage cut a violent strike spread across the country as workers boycotted Pullman-built railroad cars.

Future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs   rose to prominence as the strike leader  of the American Railway Union.   He was jailed after the strike, read Marx, and emerged a socialist.

What’s left of the works is owned by the state of Illinois.

Pullman In Happier Times

Good Luck With That! 

Clinton representatives continue negotiations with the Barack Obama transition, trying to cut a deal allowing the disinfectant of democracy to shine upon the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Library, and Bill himself, reflecting their glory back upon America’s hoped for champion abroad, Hillary Clinton.

From press accounts it seems all rather murky.

What’s at stake is what Bill Clinton has, where he got it, and what he discloses. He’s not giving up without a fight, according to the Wall Street Journal’s sources:

“Mr. Clinton’s willingness to disclose future charitable and profitable ventures is consistent with his pledge during his wife’s presidential campaign. While he refused to release past donations and payments, these people say, he said he would disclose information going forward if Sen. Clinton became president. His pledge now to reveal some prior donations is a concession to the Obama team.”

And if anyone makes a fuss, he did it for the children:

“Mr. Clinton wouldn’t return any money already collected from foreign political and business leaders, even if it has stirred controversy, according to one person close to the talks, largely because those funds have been spent on programs such as campaigns to alleviate AIDS and hunger.”

The Hillary Clinton people appear to be giving themselves a defense in advance against any Bill Clinton money blow-back:

“One Democrat who advised her campaign said few of her senior strategists knew anything about the former president’s business arrangements and whether they would hold up under scrutiny if she won the nomination.”

And besides, so’s your old man:

“One Clinton adviser noted that former President George H.W. Bush has given paid speeches and participated in international business ventures since his son, George W. Bush, has been president — without stirring public complaints or controversy about a possible conflict of interest. “

The best part of the Journal story is that the Clinton negotiating team includes Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s dickish assistant.

Band’s comic stylings enlivened Senator Clinton’s sinking Presidential campaign, when writing as “The Office of Former President Clinton” he unleashed a weird and meandering complaint about a Todd Purdam’s Vanity Fair story saying Bill Clinton had lost it.

Part of Purdam’s offense to all things decent and Clinton was a claim that Band’s handbag magnate wife was insulted in the piece, apparently by the mention of handbags.

Damp But Determined  

The New Nixon reports on efforts to protect the Nixon birthplace from fire,  with continuous hosing down by Nixon Foundation staff.