Thanks to Memere’s email delivery service…. with a couple of slight corrections…

The George W Bush Presidential Museum is now in the planning stages. It was supposed to be a library, but the planners kept resigning. You’ll want to be one of the first to make a contribution to this great man’s legacy.

The Museum will include:

• The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can’t remember anything.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t have to even show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one will be able to find.
• The Iraq War Room, where they make you go back. After you complete your first tour, they make you return for second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
• The Dick Cheney Room, in an undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery. If you have the right connections, you might get there, but there are no promises about your location in relation to the gun.
• The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy – or just steal – an election.
• The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators in an informal location.
• Last, but not least, there will be an entire floor devoted to a 7/8 scale model of the President’s ego.

To help you find the President’s accomplishments, the museum will have an electron microscope.

President Bush said that he didn’t care so much about the individual exhibits as long as his museum was better than his father’s.

I don’t know – and I truly don’t care – whether or not John McCain had a “romantic involvement” with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Honestly, I keep expecting him to start referring to her as “that woman.” Give me a break. Can’t we break this obsession with our politicians’ sex lives?

John and Cindy McCain been married for a long time and been through a lot together, but I can’t help thinking an unkind thing. Cindy McCain reminds me of Cruella DeVille. Blond tresses notwithstanding, Cindy McCain’s bionic eyes on that manni-kin body give me the serious creepy crawlies.

People had problems with Hillary as First Lady. They ridiculed John Kerry’s wife Teresa. I haven’t really seen any serious coverage of Cindy McCain yet. All I can tell you is that in a very superficial way (I admit it), I’m not liking what I see when I picture her as First Lady. Given what I know about McCain, I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if he was straying.

Take it further. Vicki Iseman looks a bit like a younger version of Cindy McCain, no? Has no-one noticed the resemblance between these two women? Or are they just too hesitant to say it?

It’s easy to think that John McCain simply fits a certain stereotype of the power-drunk man looking to update to the current model, right?

But somehow that’s not what went through my mind.

What if that assumption is what drives this whole thing? It’s as though Vicki were made to order.

What if she were?

Given the following anecdote about about McCain met (second wife) Cindy, it would be a simple matter to draw up a battle plan that included a kind of mata-hari woman who could “push his buttons.” How do you win friends and influence people in politics? Power, money or charisma – preferably all three, right?

Cindy and John met in 1979 at a military reception in Honolulu. John: “She was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident. I monopolized her attention the entire time, taking care to prevent anyone else from intruding on our conversation. When it came time to leave the party, I persuaded her to join me for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By the evening’s end, I was in love.”

If you were highly motivated to influence McCain, wouldn’t it make sense to identify McCain’s likes and dislikes, his attractions and repulsions? With all his rhetoric against lobbying, wouldn’t it be silly not to notice that it might take more than money to move this bear?

Everything I’ve heard about this story is focussed on the wrong end of it. I think it’s a story about using sexual attraction as one more lobbying strategy. Ask any doctor about the hunks and chicks they send to push the new drugs out onto the market.

For election coverage, I would prefer to see more criticism of McCain’s actual record. There’s plenty there to examine.

And please, I beg of you please, please stop using that photo of McCain hugging Bush. Stop using it. I found the whole thing disturbing enough at the time.

Keith Olbermann Countdown Special Comment on FISA: “President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist”

The lot of you, are the symbolic descendants of the despotic middle managers of some banana republic, to whom “Freedom” is an ironic brand name, a word you reach for, when you want to get away with its opposite.

Thus, Mr. Bush, your panoramic invasion of privacy is dressed up as “protecting America.”Thus, Mr. Bush, your panoramic invasion of privacy is dressed up as “protecting America.”

Thus, Mr. Bush, your indiscriminate domestic spying becomes the focused monitoring, only of “terrorist communications.”

Thus, Mr. Bush, what you and the telecom giants have done, isn’t unlawful, it’s just the kind of perfectly legal, passionately patriotic thing for which you happen to need immunity!

Richard Clarke is on the money, as usual.

That the President was willing to veto this eavesdropping, means there is no threat to the legitimate counter-terror efforts underway.

As Senator Kennedy reminded us in December:

“The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity.

No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he’s willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.”

Take Action: Tell Congress: Reject Bush’s Cuts to Public Broadcasting

Once again, President Bush is trying to cripple the public broadcasting system by slashing its funding.

I just signed a petition to Congress to reject these proposed cuts, and I hope you will too.

Mr. Rogers would be proud of you.

In 1969, Richard Nixon attempted to cut PBS funding by 50%. A senate hearing chaired by “hatchetman” Senator John Pastori couldn’t push it through as long as there was someone like Fred Rogers to speak for at least some of the reasons that public broadcasting is important.