California Republicans Blew It

George Skelton on California GOP legislators' poor discernment:

Republicans...blew yet another chance to be relevant in this blue state by not capitalizing on their clout over a two-thirds vote. A little give here and there and they could have had pension rollbacks, business regulatory relief and even a spending cap. All for just putting a tax question on the ballot.

Democratic legislators essentially did their job. They basically cut in half a $26-billion deficit, mostly with spending cuts principally aimed at the poor, the disabled, the aged and the tuition-paying university students. Republicans wouldn't even vote for all that whacking.

With Friends Like These

A GOP congressman from southern California calls the Obama administration "Nixonian."

Bet The Picture Reminds You Of The Flintstones

Chris Lehmann:

British archaeologists are seeking to authenticate what could be a landmark discovery in the documentation of early Christianity: a trove of 70 lead codices that appear to date from the 1st century CE, which may include key clues to the last days of Jesus' life. As UK Daily Mail reporter Fiona Macrae writes, some researchers are suggesting this could be the most significant find in Christian archeology since the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947.

Hat tip to Suzy Hardy

Obrevity, Please

Roger Cohen reluctantly supports the Libyan intervention reluctantly ordered by President Obama but describes the clear and present dangers in the shifting sands:

There was an Allied offensive during the North African campaign called “Operation Brevity.” It had mixed results, but I’d borrow the name. Speed in ousting Qaddafi, the objective from which Western leaders cannot retreat, is essential. We all know what happens if this Mad Max war festers: The coalition fractures, jihadists seep into a failed state of porous borders, mission creep begins.

The Domestic Freedom Agenda

A former GOP state senator from Iowa makes the conservative case for permitting gay marriage.
Hat tip to Susan Russell

BTO Watch

Michele Bachmann is raising more money than Mitt Romney.

My Parents' Hands

When I think of my mother Jean's strong fingers, she's typing 75 wpm on a Royal manual in a newsroom or the stylish Olivetti in the blue case that she carried to Jerusalem on a reporting trip after the Six-Day War. I think of my father Harvey's slim hands massacring Beethoven piano sonatas or squaring off his cigarette lighter on top of a pack of Chesterfields next to his martini on the coffee table.

I've been thinking today about hands and handing over. Fifty years ago -- yes, on an April Fool's Saturday; it probably explains a lot -- they hand-wrote inscriptions in the King James Bible they presented on the occasion of my baptism by the Rev. Canon Howard McClintock at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

I was six, which is old for an infant baptism. My genial but abstracted father, also a journalist, moved out when I was two, and even before then, as I understand it, it was never dull, because of the music and martinis. My mother worked long hours as a pioneering general assignment reporter for the Detroit Free Press to support us and finally pay my father's attorney to divorce her, since otherwise that might never have happened, either. I was lucky to have received the sacrament as early as I did.

Harvey died in 1975. My mother doesn't type as much as she used to, though she can still write an eloquent and whimsical e-mail. I type like crazy, when my fingers aren't itching to play the guitar. On my father's beloved piano, I only got as far as massacring Mozart sonatas. After decades of air guitar I bought my first dreadnought on my 40th birthday and have learned to play well enough to accompany myself singing folks songs. I play with church friends and for St. John's School students during chapel. Last weekend in the mountains, friends sat politely as I struggled through two Tom Russell songs and one by John Prine. When I'm playing guitar a lot, I'm blogging less, and then the other way around. Kathy definitely prefers the blogging, but I love them both, because I was anointed by my parents' hands and blessed by the things they loved.

Getting It Over With

Historian Maarja Krusten spotted this at the web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

The late President Richard M. Nixon approved a new, candid, exhibit on Watergate for the Nixon Library in southern California.

Neat trick, since he died in 1994, and work didn't begin on the new exhibit until 2007. But it reminded me of a conversation at the library yesterday with reporter Andrew Gumbel, who asked me what Nixon would've thought of the exhibit and the day.

Reading the mind of the dead is an invitation to opportunism. But I'd had to run the risk many times before. As co-executor of Nixon's estate, I tried to do what I thought was best for his legacy when making decisions about his will, White House materials, and library.

His family was sometimes part of the discernment. He had battled for years to keep his tapes and other records under wraps, but within weeks of his death, buoyed by the encomiums at his Yorba Linda funeral, they made it clear they wanted the fight with the National Archives to end. If they were wrong to think that his death had secured his place in history, they were right about laying down our sword and shield, since it sped the opening of the presidential records that will be the foundation of his legacy in the long term.

As for the new Watergate gallery, the master of realpolitik would have appreciated two realities of presidential museum politics. Library director and exhibition curator Tim Naftali put the first one best yesterday: How can a museum expect visitors to take seriously what it tells them about the successes if it Whitewaters the failures? Besides, though Nixon's White House men looked at it differently when it came to their Watergate oral histories, it doesn't make sense (and is elitist besides) to withhold information from museum-goers that scholars and journalists can find a few steps away in the archives.

So to Gumbel, I said this about what 37 just might have said: "I don't like it. I wish they didn't have to do it. But if has to be done -- if we have to get through this day so I can get a shot at redemption -- then they should do it and get it over with."

The Lost Generation

At the Nixon library yesterday, National Archives officials praised two generations of federal archivists who'd worked to preserve and organize Richard Nixon's White House records. Historian Maarja Krusten reminds her readers that there was a third.

Remember That '70s Band BTO?

Bachmann Tea party Overdrive.