Oops, it wandered onto Wall Street by accident (just keeping with today's Reagan theme).

Oh yeah, and...no blood in ants!

Ants have no blood!

OK, maybe a little.

The towering bronze statue pictured above stands guard over the entrance of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley -- it's called "After the Ride" and it depicts Ronald Reagan -- Midwesterner-turned-movie-star-turned-governor-turned-president - in the mythical guise of something he was not (except in a couple of "B" movies), a swashbuckling cowboy. Stetson hat in hand.

It's quite a tribute -- but almost every week now there is one like it somewhere in America, often in places that Reagan never set foot, like Covington, La. -- where just this week an even larger bronze statue of the Gipper was unveiled , some 9-feet tall, standing watch over a trail head in a town where neither the public or its elected officials had asked for it. Instead, the world's largest Reagan statue was placed there and paid for by the foundation of late oilman Patrick Taylor. The Louisiana entrepreneur started Taylor Energy in 1979, the year before Reagan was elected and two years before Reagan dramatically reduced taxes on big oil and began slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. Today, Taylor's widow is said to be the richest person in the entire state, worth $1.6 billion; it's surprising the statue wasn't cast from solid gold.

But why wouldn't there be Reagan tributes from coast-to-coast, from New Hampshire's Mt. Reagan to the brand-new Reagan Medical Center at UCLA, a branch of the school that Reagan himself once decried as a hotbed of socialism and orgies? Haven't you been paying attention to the 2008 presidential race?

It was Reagan who not only single-handedly won the Cold War and toppled the Berlin Wall but also caused the greatest economic turnaround in American history, and that's not all. It was Reagan who looked Iran in the eye and caused them to give up our hostages in a matter of minutes, who taught us that "deficits don't matter" and was steadfast about never increasing taxes, who never compromised, who reduced federal spending and ended big government -- as so many political candidates have told us. He was the most popular president in modern American history -- and if only he were still in the White House today, he would have dealt sternly with illegal immigrants and appointed hard-line conservatives to the Supreme Court -- but we know he would never negotiate with terrorists, "cut and run" from a difficult military situation, or talk to our enemies.

As Reagan himself said (attempting to quote John Adams) in 1988, "facts are stubborn things." OK, actually when he said it, it came out initially as "facts are stupid things." The irony is that nearly 20 years after Reagan left office, neither is true -- facts are largely irrelevant, especially as we create these false idols of our 40th president. There is a Ronald Reagan myth in this country, and it is already causing great harm to our politics, and will do even more damage if we don't tackle it head-on.

The image of Reagan was all but hijacked by an ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party in the late 1990s when its movement was at low ebb, lacking in new ideas and charismatic candidates. Amazingly, they've managed to whitewash both what was horrible about Reagan's record (the growing gap between rich and poor, the Constitutional abuses of Iran-contra, and ignoring of homelessness and AIDS) and a few things that were actually pretty good (his willingness to talk with the Soviets and other enemies, reluctance to use force that would cause civilian collateral damage, which he called "terrorism itself," and pragmatism on some other issues) to create a Reagan who never existed, who would continue to cut taxes no matter how large the debt and who believed not just in a strong military but in throwing its weight around.

Reagan's distorted legacy will loom over our next president, whether it's John McCain, who flip-flopped on taxes to appease key GOP power broker Grover Norquist, the head of the Reagan Legacy project, or Barack Obama, who has cited Reagan's political optimism as an influence and whose recent moves to the political right is raising new doubt about whether he can alter the course that was set nearly three decades ago.

Unless something is done to correct the myth.

I'd be ignoring the stubborn facts if I didn't acknowledge that there are a lot of books about Reagan -- but none have truly tackled what has happened in the years since he vanished from public life and his 2004 death, his distorted legacy and its warping impact on our political debate. That's why I'm more excited about the project that I am currently working on than anything I've done before: A full-length, hardcover book about the Reagan legacy that will be published in the early part of next year by Free Press, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. There's already a working title and a cover and a proposed release date, but for several reasons I'm going to continue to keep those under wraps for now. As the market for progressive volumes grows, I'm hoping to be able to take both this book and the underlying issue to a broad audience with the help of Free Press, my friends in the blogging community, and -- as they say on public TV -- people like you.

And yes, there's a practical reason I'm telling you this now. Although the project is surprisingly far along, I'm going to be taking my 2008 time off between the July 4 holiday and sometime in mid-August to finish the writing. That means that Attytood will be on something of a summer hiatus -- my tentative plan is to put up daily open threads so you guys can keep talking to each other, but probably nothing else (unless if there's more news related to the book). I'll be back full-time for both conventions and the excitement, hopefully, of the fall campaign, and the election of our 44th president.

Who won't be Ronald Reagan -- no matter what he tells you.

This has nothing to do with Barack Obama -- it's Gitmo again:

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

For some reason, I feel oddly compelled to note here that Vice President Cheney is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

Just in time for the July 4 weekend, Brett Myers gets his AAA card.

Couldn't happen to a more well-deserving guy.

UPDATE: The Phils are running wild tonight, up 5-0 in just the third inning. I'm sure that's making Brett feel much better.

...this?

Longtime readers recall (as noted by my favorite commenters frequently, as recently as today in fact) that I spent some time in 2007 working on a book project called "The News Fix," which was in some ways an outgrowth of a 2006 conference that was held here in Philadelphia about a new kind of news organization called a "norg." The idea was to keep a role for journalists and journalism in 21st Century society, by ditching the traditional orientation toward newsprint first, and by strengthening ties with the local community and with engaged citizens. The book idea was exciting for two reasons -- a) the timing was surely right for a discussion about saving journalism as opposed to cataloguing what's wrong with it, which seems pretty well known at this point and b) the whole approach to publishing and marketing the book itself was a fairly experimental thing, working directly with progressive bloggers through an outfit they had launched called Vaster Books.

The word "experimental" connotes newness, excitement -- and the possibility of failure. The idea of bloggers publishing and using their social networks to market and sell books is a great concept -- but at this stage of 2008, it is still a concept, unproven. I hope it works some day, if not for Vaster then for someone else. So to make a long story short, "The News Fix" won't be published by Vaster. Obviously, I've known that for a while -- OK, a long while -- but I held off saying anything here on the blog until a had a better idea what would happen next, and now there is good news on a couple of fronts.

Although I wouldn't rule out parts or even much of "The News Fix" appearing in book form at some future date, I also looked into the idea of sub-dividing parts of it into magazine articles as well, and that plan is bearing fruit. This summer, American Journalism Review will be publishing my article on the gap between journalists and the communities that we cover, one of the original themes of the book. I'm looking forward to linking to the online version when it's published. In the short run, though, publishing any more from "The News Fix" is on hold -- because of a very exciting new project that I'm working on.

It's funny, but one of the things I really learned in working on "The News Fix" -- Dan Gillmor, a former Silicon Valley tech writer who is now a guru of journalism reform and I had a long chat about this -- is that failure, and a willingness to accept the risk of failure and actual failure itself, is critical on the path to success. The discussion was about newspapers, but ironically, "The News Fix" itself, at least in its original form, ended up a failed experiment -- but in chasing it I not only learned a lot but I also greatly expanded my world of friends and contacts. Now, that in and of itself would have been a good thing, but in this case it led me to this new adventure.

Which I'll be telling you about later this week.

Where's the beef? Not here.

Wesley Clark:

“John McCain is running his campaign on his experience and how his experience would benefit him and our nation as President. That experience shows courage and commitment to our country - but it doesn't include executive experience wrestling with national policy or go-to-war decisions. And in this area his judgment has been flawed - he not only supported going into a war we didn't have to fight in Iraq, but has time and again undervalued other, non-military elements of national power that must be used effectively to protect America. But as an American and former military officer I will not back down if I believe someone doesn't have sound judgment when it comes to our nation's most critical issues.”

Good for Gen. Clark. While most can agree that his phrasing -- responding with the same phrase that his CBS questioner, Bob Schieffer, had tossed at him -- is something that causes political problems, if only because he should have realized how the mouth-breathers among the media would handle it.

But the essential truth is this: McCain's POW experience makes him a hero, but how you apply that heroism -- and your other personal qualities -- in the broader arenas of politics and leadership is what makes you a president. And McCain's judgment here, as we've seen with Iraq, is not good.

Olbermann, who else?

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that one of your favorite bloggers is mentioned about 80 percent of the way into it.

This is the funniest thing I've seen in ages. (More here).