Is Nixon Burning?
16-Nov-08
Hope Lives   
So far the Yorba Linda fires appear to be west of the Nixon Birthplace, Grave, Wedding Chapel and Museum, but watch the skies! 
Excitable locals are monitoring the situation.
Who Was Barack Obama? 
The hope’s barely dry for the Obama Administration, but an exhibit on the Senator’s rise to greatness looms.
Denver’s Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library and Museum has some odds and ends left over from the Democrat’s convention week in town, and they’re putting on a show!
This handsome number 
is the centerpiece of the jump-start backwards glance.
Comedy is best when fresh, so the plucky lads at carbolicsmoke.com launched a barrage of humor at the prospective Obama Presidential Library before he was elected!
Brace self for raucous laughter:Â 
“The first floor of the library will feature a spectacular Hall of Hope that will emphasize Obama’s famous speeches more than his accomplishments.
“It is rhetoric that moves a nation and defines us as a people,†Obama explained. “Accomplishments, on the other hand, are overrated.â€
Faithful readers are encouraged to watch the skies for the endless Internet replication of this side-splitter – but it will take effort to match the the timeless classic “PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY DESTROYED BY FLOOD,” which haunts the web.
Spot The Uninvited Guest!
  The Nixon Legacy lives on, in the form of the desperate schemes his presidential library was forced to undertake before they collapsed into the arms of the National Archives.
Now the Archives runs a lot of the place, but the Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation still controls some of the buildings and grounds.
The centerpiece of their tiny realm is a “recreation” of the White House East Room, 
  if the East Room had monster skylights.
In the words of Nixon daughter Julie Eisenhower, “It’s more beautiful than I expected“.
Wedding guests do the usual classy wedding things…
Plaster the bride with bills 
Wear unfortunate shoes 
Pose with available machinery 
Bring mystery guests to the table 
 & pose by the Nixon grave! 
New Math For Tired Arguments    
America’s ceaseless quest for a New Reagan has taken myriad forms, from Charlie Crist, to Sarah Palin, to Barack Obama.
That last one has proven controversial!
Now Reaganauts of the true faith are fighting back, mobilising the armies of infectious optimism to carry John McCain over the last mile.
A hilariously ignorant ad by neverfindout.org shows it’s the economy, stupider:
“MAN 1: Senator McCain, history has shown us your economic plans will work.
WOMAN 1: When Ronald Reagan took office, the economy was far worse than it is today.
MAN 2: You understand that Reagan’s plan worked. Senator Obama does not.”
What were His wonder working ways?
             “Ronald Reagan cut spending and reduced the size of the federal government. Senator Obama plans to increase spending by nearly a trillion dollars. So who’s right?”
Gosh, if by “cutting” you mean increase by a quarter, and if by “reduced” you mean added 200,000 federal workers, then they are right on track.
Bill Clinton was actually closer to their mad dream. He cut heads, and shrank the government portion of GDP by twice what Reagan did.
 What Reagan did do is jack up unemployment, cut incomes and goose the stock market, and Clinton beat him on that last marker too.
| Average Annual Change | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s |
| Real GDP | 4.4% | 3.3% | 3.1% | 3.1% |
| Productivity | 2.9% | 2.0% | 1.4% | 1.9% |
| Employment | 1.9% | 2.4% | 1.7% | 1.3% |
| S&P 500: Real Returns | 6.6% | Ã0.5% | 12.9% | 15.9% |
| Real Weekly Wages | 1.45% | Ã0.27% | Ã0.72% | 0.28% |
| Real Median Family income | 3.21% | 0.76% | 1.01% | 0.95% |
| Average Level of Inflation | 2.3% | 7.1% | 5.6% | 3.0% |
| Average Level of Unemployment | 4.8% | 6.2% | 7.3% | 5.8% |
 source: Dollars & Sense
“MAN 5: Senator McCain, we are hopeful.
MAN 4: Because your economic policies are the policies of Ronald Reagan.
MAN 2: As a nation in crisis, we’d be fools not to embrace your ideas.
ANNOUNCER: What happens when we pick the alternative? Please America. Let’s never find out. “
 Take Nancy Reagan, Please!  Â
“The Divine Gift of Motherhood” desperately tries to process the Palin Clothes Express into the simple country girl narrative, and somehow comes up with the haunting parallel of…..Nancy Reagan!
Elizabeth Kathryn Gerold-Miller’s calls Palin a misunderstood Everygal in need of a beauty boost:
Indeed.
Further point-missing erupts when Gerold-Miller takes comfort from history, in this case the sunny version of herself Nancy Reagan presented last year in a White House fashion retrospective at the Reagan Library.
Nancy Reagan took dresses as gifts, didn’t report them, promised to reform when she got caught, and kept doing the same thing throughout Reagan’s administration.
….And choose to present herself as a great philanthropist by retroactively donating some of her ill-gotten gains.
The show closes next week, although Betsey seems to think it opens then.