From Arianna Huffington’s blog in the USA::
Comedy writers all across America have been buoyed by news that President Bush is looking to raise half-a-billion dollars to build his legacy-burnishing presidential library.
The punchlines write themselves: What’s it going to house, 100,000 copies of The Pet Goat?
Will there be exhibits on waterboarding and the quaintness of the Geneva Conventions?
A room devoted to the nobility of the Hanging Chad? The Abu Ghraib Game Room?
But it’s no joke that the names of donors to the library don’t have to be made public.
Bush 43 may be a lame duck, but he still has two years left in which he can throw open the doors of the White House favor bank. Whatever happened to the concept of government transparency?
Bush on 9/11 after the reading of My Pet Goat: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
*Buying a legacy* at FLACK CENTRAL
Posted by: “hapi22” hapi22@earthlink.net robinsegg
Tue Nov 28, 2006 7:57 am (PST)
I may be wrong about this but I think this is how it goes with
presidential libraries:
First, the presidents and their “friends” raise the money to build them,
BUT then the American taxpayers pay to run them.
Rightwingers in this country went ballistic when President Clinton
announced plans to build his $100 million dollar library (which then
ballooned to $200 million) — they claimed Clinton was spending all that
money to spin his legacy.
What will those SAME rightwingers say now that Bush has made plans to
build a presidential library expected to cost $500 million dollars?
Bush will also have a permanent fund to pay rightwing writers and
scholars to write articles and books that rewrite history and create his
legend. Bush plans to call his think tank, peopled by rightwing writers
and scholars, “Institute for Democracy” or some such thing, but I call
it “Flack Central.”
Furthermore, I think it is time for Congress to write a law placing a
limit on how much tax money can be spent maintaining these presidential
libraries. Pretty soon those libraries — each one of which has to be
more grand than all the ones before — will start looking like those
pyramids the Egyptian pharaohs built to burnish their reputations.
I heard Arianna Huffington speaking about this issue on Keith
Olbermann’s program last night and she made the excellent point that we
NEED to know the names of the donors to Bush’s library, since Bush will
be in power for another two years and well placed to REWARD magnanimous
donors for their large contributions.
WRITE to your Congressman and senators and urge them to pass legislation
REQUIRING the publication of the donor list along with the amounts
donated. Bush apparently plans to ask his big donors for $10-$20 million
per donor. No one gives away that kind of money without expecting some
perk or favor (or some right to drill or mine in Yellowstone Park, for
instance) in exchange.
———————————————————-
*Buying a legacy*
by Tim Grieve
Salon.com
Nov. 27, 2006
There are two ways to build a legacy as president. You can do such an
amazing job in office that the world remembers you warmly long after
you’re gone, or you can hire some people to rewrite history after the
fact in the hopes that you’ll come off better later.
George W. Bush seems to have chosen the latter path.
According to the New York Daily News, the president and his people hope
to raise $500 million to build a presidential library at Southern
Methodist University in Dallas. “The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an
institute, which several Bush insiders called the ‘Institute for
Democracy,'” Thomas DeFrank writes. “Patterned after Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative
scholars and ‘give them money to write papers and books favorable to the
president’s policies,’ one Bush insider said.”
We thought Fox News was already doing that job for free.
How will Bush raise $500 million — more than twice what he raised for
his 2004 reelection run — when he’s not the most popular guy around and
won’t be in the position to dole out favors down the line? DeFrank says
that Team Bush hopes to get “megadonations” of $10 million or $20
million each from “wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of
industry” who won’t be susceptible to the limits that apply to campaign
contributions and who won’t have to have their names revealed to the
public.
Read this WITH LINKS at:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/11/27/legacy/index.html
LikeLike
Pingback: Artist makes Bush portrait from porn magazines | Dear Kitty. Some blog