Happy Days Ahead! 
Nancy Reagan speaks to Vanity Fair‘s beloved Reagan conduit Bob Colacello, and we learn she communes with the deceased former chief executive.
“I see Ronnie. At nighttime, if I wake up, I think Ronnie’s there, and I start to talk to him. It’s not important what I say. But the fact is, I do think he’s there. And I see him.“
But these apparitions are apparently but a foretaste of the glorious communion to come, when Nancy and Ronnie are somehow reunited in death.
‘Cause Billy Graham told her it was so!
“I said to him, ‘Just tell me if I’m going to be with Ronnie again. Just tell me that and I’ll be O.K.’ He said, ‘You are.’ And I said, ‘O.K.“
No word on if the aged evangelist’s thinks Nixon or the Jews will be coming along.
To A Higher, Better Place  
 Making Waves?   
Gone but not forgotten, former Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s self-defenestration has already been reduced to trivia in America, withmembers of MSNBC’s online beloved community invited to sort out his death details, multiple choice style!
MSNBC asks, “Are you smart?”
How much do you remember about the week in news? Take msnbc.com’s weekly quiz and find out what you can recall.

6. In South Korea, meanwhile, the nation was shocked when a former president, Roh Moo-hyun, disgraced in a corruption scandal, committed suicide. How did he end his life?
By throwing himself off a cliff in the mountains near his home
By shooting himself at his party’s headquarters
By asphyxiating himself in his car
By hanging himself
Friday In A Hall With George             
Former President Bill Clinton’s joint appearance with his despised [ if not quite as much as before] successor has not gone unnoticed.

And:

Bill Clinton: A Disgraceful George W Bush Enabler
A thoughtful George W. Bush once said his successor “deserves my silence.” Would that his predecessor felt the same.
Turning The Page, Civil War Edition 
                  “The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.”   Â
The organizer of an historians’ petition asking President Obama to stop coddling racist traitors and their defenders offers an after-action report: it’s sort of a step forward, two steps back.
James W. Loewen’s petition challenged Obama to kill off a beloved tradition dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s crypto-confederate administration: the annual dispatch of a wreath to Arlington Cemetery’s Confederate War Memorial.

Obama fudged, continuing to honor a straightforward defense of the Southern Cause which denies it had anything to do with slavery, but now yoking it with Washington’s African American Civil War Memorial. The President seems to have lifted the idea from a Washington Post op/ed by University of Pittsburgh art historian Kirk Savage.
The classic role of the Washington Post op/ed pages is identified by Loewen: thoughtfully dismissing and refuting arguments that have never appeared in the paper.
“The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage’s op-ed opposing it. “
Loewen explains why two wreathes are not better than none:
“Why.. should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?…Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage’s idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument. Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice. However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it. They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery. Surely both sides are not of equal moral value. “
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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 BushÂ
 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.
