We overlooked Nixon's 100th birthday. Fortunately my fix for today didn't: they resurrected this number from their Sept. 1971 issue. Click each image to enlarge.

http://www.madmagazine.com/?page=1&action=on_the_stands

He certainly was a mixed bag. He was a very complex man leaving me with very conflicted feelings about him. He was certainly deeply flawed with prejudice and paranoia, but also a very accomplished chess player in foreign affairs and a domestic progressive before his time. If only the Dems had worked with him on his health care proposal of 40 years ago. He is the father of the Environmental Protection Agency which is one of his progressive accomplishments.

Even though I think he was probably our second or third worst President (behind Bush 2 and maybe Reagan, I flipflop Reagan and Nixon from 2nd and 3rd worst all the time), I've always wanted to go to his museum which is only a couple of hours from where I live. Maybe I'll do that this Spring.

If memory serves, RMN also proposed a negative income tax in place of the wildly conterproductive welfare system of his day (in effect a national floor for cash income for the poor). Sen. Daniel Moynihan's idea originally, if I remember right. Of course that would have meant turning out hundreds of thousands of paper shuffeling welfare workers, so the Dems were lining up to oppose it.

I don't know how the numbers would work out now, but at the time, you could have doubled the income of the poor and still cut welfare costs by about 1/3, just by getting rid of the welfare bureaucracy. Yep, yep, those were the numbers.

Amazing how factoids like that can stick in your head for 40 years.