Nancy‘s Back! 
Presumably refreshed by her late night seances with Commander In Chief and departed husband Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan made a triumphant return to Our Nation’s Capital Tuesday.
She saw Reagan immortalized in stone at the Capitol, watched President Obama sign a bill creating a Reagan Centennial Commission, and lunched with Michelle Obama.
A ‘joyful‘ Reagan knocks out California’s statue honoring Thomas Starr King, credited with keeping California from seceding during the Civil War, replacing it with a memorial to the man who wrecked everything.
The Sculptor’s Pre-Joy Work Elsewhere 
Reagan’s placement in the hallowed halls is owed to Representative Ken Calvert, previously best known for consorting with prostitutes and jailed lobbyists, so scurvy that even conservative organ Human Events runs best-of hit pieces on him.
Ken draws inspiration from the Gipper, but struggles to articulate just how:
“”Madam Speaker, there are too many accomplishments for me to name here, but it is clear that President Reagan was a Californian, an American, and a Patriot.“
As a bitter few have repeatedly complained, previous presidential centennial commissions have had broadly representative boards This entity will be a creature of the Reagan Foundation, which will hold the majority of seats. We can look forward to the Regan Centennialists federalising whatever crackpot schemes the Reagan Library cares to put across.
Let’s hope for more detail on Nancy’s dinners and dresses, possibly cross-referenced with day-by-day time-lines drawn from his diaries and letters to Nancy.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE ROTUNDA
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      When you walk into the Presidential Museum and Leadership Library, the first thing you should see is the rotunda and what is exhibited there.
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Odessa Texas’s Presidential Museum threatens to close July 1, despite being on track to attract some 3,650 visitors this year. They have somehow managed to survive for 45 years, given a boost when the semi-local Bushs stumbled to the top.
The museum is an exciting confection of early Bush 
 home replication, the vaguely presidentialy related, and misinformation.
      “We have some very rare, interesting items for our visitors to see. An example is the registration desk used by President Eisenhower when he was commander of the European forces during WWII. The museum acquired this piece in the 1960’s and it serves to illustrate the unique collection we have, it is not all about buttons and posters.“
The museum’s web page is a melange of odd choices and factual errors. Their timeline for the 1860s and 1870s finds no space to mention either Lincoln’s election or assassination, but the Chicago Fire gets a mention.
Prize oddity comes when they sound the alarm in the 20th Century:
AREA 7:
DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II
AMERICAN SOCIALISM: WHAT HAPPENED?
 “Not satisfied with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its initial work/relief programs, left-wing politicians Louisiana’s Huey Long and California’s Father Coughlin advocated radical changes to the American system-tax the rich to provide welfare for the poor.”
What ever are they saying here?
 Long is usually viewed as a populist and/or fascist, rarely as a man of the left.
 Father Coughlin was a Detroit based fascist, although the Townsend Movement for old people’s pensions started in California.
Richard Nixon: His Shameful New Roll 
Remember when Barack Obama shocked America, demeaning his high office-to-be by producing a President-Elect logo 
which traduced the sacred presidential seal?
The feigned outrage was briefly energetic, and then the circus moved on.
Let’s all brace ourselves for new outbursts, as the Nixon Library Foundation has found an exciting new use for the emblem.
Anthony Clark’s dogged explorations of presidential libraries’ seamy underbellies are documented on his prezlibs blog. Clark reports the Nixon Library Foundation announced White House seal toilet paper, then apparently thought better of it.
” I’d love to link directly to it, but sometime in the last five days the product was removed from the Nixon Foundation’s web site. Here is where the item in question used to appear on the Nixon Library online store. You’ll notice that the main product area is blank.“
We Choose To Sell Out       
Further East, even in whoring for commerce the Kennedy Library as always out-swanks Nixon, signing up the late president to flog watches.
It Hurts Too Much To Cry   
Nixon Library gets joke, sells it.
Seeing what the kids are up to, the Nixon Library Foundation has introduced snappy new gear for youthful Nixon fans, and those broadly engaged in irony.    Â
Their commercial predecessors are a little more creative on the appropriation of images front however.  
Calling Card 
Bush biographer Bill Minutaglio takes to Newsweek’s never too rich and too thin pages to update us on the former president’s goings on, and he appears to have a rather open schedule.   “Bush has always been friendly,” Minutaglio comments, and the Ex is going out of his way to show it.
The local college kid who sold many Bush neighbors “Welcome Home George & Laura” signs found himself besieged by Bush phone calls, and a 14 year-old commanded 90 minutes of Bush’s time for a frank exchange of ideas.
Things are more mixed further from Preston Hollow. Bush got a big welcome when he first returned to Midland as ex-president. Even a Bush minion was amazed:
“They turned out 30,000 people here,” says his longtime Texas accountant, Bob McCleskey. “And that’s without giving out food and beer.“
But an effort by a hometown state legislator to congratulate Bush on his torture achievements was stopped by
heroic state representative Lon Burman.
