Politics

Even the St. Paul Public Library is getting into the political act as the Republican National Convention approaches.

The library will host political analyst Mark Halperin on Monday and pundit Susan Estrich on Tuesday to talk about the election.

Both events will be held at Metropolitan State University as part of the library's political series. Dozens of political commentators are expected to descend on the Twin Cities for the September convention in St. Paul.

If you didn't manage to save some of the last four years Bush bytes in your computers cache, not to worry.

Preservation efforts are underway to preserve more than 100 million Web pages from President Bush's second term, similarly to what was done in 2000 and 2004, to document the Web pages of President Clinton's first term, and the first half of the Bush administration. The 2004 end-of-term collection has about 75 million addresses for Internet resources, known as Uniform Resource Identifiers, or URIs.

The Library of Congress and Government Printing Office, in partnership with the California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries and Internet Archive, will harvest and archive all Web sites that could change under a new presidential administration. The total amount of data in the collection, which will focus on executive and legislative branch sites, is expected to reach 10 to 12 terabytes.

Check this out. Image Comics 'Savage Dragon' drawn by Erik Larsen shows his support for a certain candidate in Issue 137.

The new issue goes on sale Sept. 3, and one in five copies will have the endorsement cover. NYTimes blogger George Gene Gustines adds "No word at this point whom Superman plans to vote for."

That dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy (previous coverage) has been in the news again recently, complete with the purported LexisNexis search terms that were used to screen candidates:

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

More at Washington Monthly.

Faced Monday with a report that a rogue lobbyist urged an exiled Central Asian leader to support the Bush library to curry favor in Washington, library officials promised that no foreign money will be accepted until President Bush leaves office. On Tuesday, it became clear the public will have to take them at their word.

The foundation isn't promising to identify all donors, or the dates and sums of their gifts.

"Current law only requires annual disclosure of the total sum raised," said Dan Bartlett, the former White House counselor, speaking for the foundation that will build the Bush library and research center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "We're working through all our decisions but ... at a minimum, we are not going to be accepting donations from non-U.S. residents before he's out of office."

No sooner does Last Thursday's column check up on the troubled D.C. library system four years after four branches were shuttered than along comes Mayor Adrian Fenty to announce that he's going in a different direction than his libraries chief. There on the blog Friday , a more detailed look at what's happening to replace those libraries--and what's holding up the works.

It's Monday, there's a new New Yorker out, and on the cover, a caricature of Barack Obama and wife Michelle portrayed as Islamic terrorists.

Tongues are wagging and words are flying from the Huffington Post, Politico, Editor and Publisher, Washington Monthly, etc.

Obama...and McCain agree--"it’s tasteless and offensive.”

The New Haven Advocate reports on the removal of a naif-style
doll modeled after Mayor John de Stefano at an exhibit in the New Haven Free Library. Here's a promotion on YouTube for the art show.

Could it have been a slap in the face to the politician who recently announced massive budget cuts to balance the city's huge budget gap? Over 100 city employees were laid off. When the exhibition opened on June 21 the doll, by local artist Kim Mikenis, was a part of it—but a week later, it was gone. Mikenis claims that this particular doll was only the first in a series portraying Connecticut mayors, and was not meant as an exclusive statement about DeStefano.

The decision to remove it was made by James Wellbourne, city librarian. According to Kathy Hurley, the library's spokeswoman, Wellbourne was concerned that the "personal" reference to an identifiable individual "within the community" could be locally offensive.

You be the judge...as they say.

What has become of our freedoms in these United States.

Feisty Denver librarian and journalist Carol Kreck, 61, received a citation and was threatened with incarceration for showing up OUTSIDE a McCain rally with a sign that said "McCain = Bush". Video of the proceedings shows us the progression of her ouster from the rally area, and here's the Denver Post's report.

Article in the New York Times.

Article in the Christian Science Monitor commenting on the book and the NYT story. Article in the CSM is titled: The new world of book marketing

Love what the NYT says on the subject: "With just a few days left until Father’s Day, way to make us all look bad, Meghan McCain."

McCain just finished writing a flattering children’s picture book about her father’s life [no Ron Reagan she], set to come out just as her father accepts the Republican nomination in September.

The book illustrated by Dan Andreasen, follows Mr. McCain’s life from his childhood as a Navy brat up until the Republican National Convention in September. Ms. McCain deals delicately with some of the less kid-friendly topics, such as his 5.5 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “He didn’t get the right kind of medical care for his broken bones, and the food was really bad,” she writes, accompanied by a somber drawing of Mr. McCain, looking apprehensive if not scared, sitting on the floor in a bare corner.

“We really focus on what he learned during that period,” said Mark McVeigh, an editorial director at the Simon and Schuster imprint Aladdin.

A Maine public relations firm has been tapped to assist a grassroots effort aimed at stopping George W. Bush's presidential library, museum and think tank from being built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Rev. Andrew Weaver, an SMU graduate from New York, says P&S Associates of Maine LLC has been hired to design ads and to coordinate the effort.

Community college faculty from 20 different states travel to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont Ohio to learn how 19th-century political cartoons can be used to help students understand the social, political, and economic issues that faced Gilded Age Americans. A total of 50 educators are to participate in two workshops taking place this week through Friday and June 1-6.

Titled Illustrating the Gilded Age: Political Cartoons and the Press in American Politics and Culture, 1877-1901, the enrichment sessions are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities' We the People initiative. Humanities and social studies faculty from community colleges anywhere in the country were eligible to apply. Twenty-five applicants were accepted for each of the two sessions.

Refresher on President Hayes: He was elected President by one electoral vote after the highly disputed election of 1876. Losing the popular vote to his opponent, Samuel Tilden (Dem-NY), Hayes was the only president whose election was decided by a congressional commission, (but not the only president NOT decided upon by the electorate).

The Presidential Center offers a link to this website, The Opper Project, that advises teachers about using political cartoons to teach history.

News-Messenger has the story.

Guess what was said at the SMU Commencement this weekend?

National Archivist Allen Weinstein, who oversees America's 12 presidential libraries, assured 2008 graduates of Southern Methodist University that the 13th (The George W. Bush Presidential Library) will be an asset to their alma mater – despite being the greatest controversy during their time at the school.

More on the event and Weinstein's comments from The Dallas News.

Digital Transition Looms, but Do Americans Have a Right to TV?

The huge information campaign and an incentive program are casting American taxpayers up to $1.5 billion. And it's illuminating to put the government's $1.5 billion allocation in perspective. Consider: The proposed 2009 federal budget for adult basic and literacy education is $574.6 million. The Rural Development program has approved 85 loans totaling $1.68 billion since 2002 to help fund broadband infrastructure rollout in underserved areas. Is nationwide availability of speedy Wikipedia queries as important as delivering Ryan Seacrest digitally to your living room?

See Also: IMLS Budgets [PDF]

One never knows how and where information may be encoded.

Take the case of an Bell telephone engineer back in the early 40s. He noticed that an oscilliscope seemed to spike every time the brand new, fancy, and highly top secret encrypted teletype machine coded a letter. He figured out that, if one studies the spikes, they could read the plain text the machine was encrypting.

And thus was born TEMPEST, the US Government's top secret method of gathering information based solely on the electromagnetic waves that all electronic devices give off. Newly de-classified documents recount the history of this still highly confidential information gathering system.

It's going to be difficult to wait (there is no pub date yet for the currently untitled work)...but wait we will. Donald Rumsfeld is working on his autobiography which according to this article from Publishers Weekly has been picked up by Sentinel Publishing, the adult division of Penguin Group. According to Penguin, Rumsfeld is going to donate all proceeds from the book to his recently founded nonprofit, The Rumsfeld Foundation (which was established to fund microfinance projects). Rumsfeld, in the giving spirit, is also ditching the advance. Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Sentinel and Portfolio, said that the book will include "previously untold stories and events" from Rumsfeld's Depression-era youth, his time in Congress and his stints with the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, as well as his career in the private sector.

Another former member of the President's cabinet, Alberto Gonzales is having much more difficulty putting his time to good use. Maybe he'll be the next to publish a book.