The PFCAuctions house says the vial contains some of Reagan's dried blood residue. The auctioneers say it was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington.

Officials at the Ronald Reagan Foundation in California have told BBC News that the sale is despicable.

Auction house spokeswoman Kylie Whitehead told The Associated Press that the blood is being sold by a man whose late mother took it from the laboratory with permission weeks after the tests were made.

Bidding for the vial had passed the 7,000-pound ($11,000) mark Tuesday.

Reagan required emergency surgery after he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel.

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Of course, Chait is overstating the current depths of liberal despair, given that the outspoken frustration of some left-of-center commentators hasn’t exactly trickled down to the liberal masses, and that overall support and enthusiasm for Obama has fallen more significantly among non-liberal Democrats than among liberals. Joan Walsh did a nice job earlier this week of pointing this out, and of addressing many of the specific points Chait made about Obama’s record.

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 Reagan announced that his administration had sent “small amounts of defense weapons and spare parts to Iran” not to trade arms for hostages, but to improve relations and support moderate mullahs. There was “one aspect” of the operation that, the President said, he had been “unaware of.” His attorney general, Edwin Meese, then stepped forward to describe how “private benefactors” had transferred profits from those sales to counterrevolutionary forces, the contras, fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.  No U.S. officials were involved, according to Meese, in this “diversion” of funds that linked two seemingly separate covert operations.

The focus on the diversion, as Oliver North, the NSC staffer who supervised the two operations wrote in his memoir, Under Fire, was itself a diversion. “This particular detail was so dramatic, so sexy, that it might actually—well divert public attention from other, even more important aspects of the story,” North noted, “such as what the President and his top advisors had known about and approved.”

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Noonan has been out in the "real" part of the country talking to people and she sees "a kind of new patriotism among our professional class" and it inspires her, but back East, where the bad politicians live, people are too obsessed with "The Narrative," which she knows because she read Ron Suskind's book:

Throughout the interview the president seems preoccupied with "shaping a story for the American people." He says: "The irony is, the reason I was in this office is because I told a story to the American people." But, he confesses, "that narrative thread we just lost" in his first years.

Then he asks, "What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?" He answers: "What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people" about where we are as a nation and should be.

Tell a story to the American people? That's your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?

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I already talked about what Obama left out of his Lincoln story. Complaining that in today's climate, unhappy progressives would even have attacked Lincoln's proclamation because it didn't free all the slaves, Obama ignored that some progressives of Lincoln's day did exactly that. Now Republicans are invoking Reagan as the great tax cutter, to argue that he would back their decision not to include any revenues or taxes in deals to raise the debt ceiling. Democrats correctly note that Reagan raised taxes 11 times, and raised the debt ceiling an astonishing 17 times. Even better for Democrats, he made a fiery speech attacking those in Congress who wanted to hold the debt ceiling hostage for "bringing the country to the edge of default before facing its responsibility."

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Ever since Ronald Reagan first attempted to make supply-side economics a reality and proceeded to inaugurate an era of persistent government deficits and growing income inequality, it has become harder and harder to make the trickle-down argument with a straight face. But we've never seen anything quite like the disaster that's playing out right now.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that corporate profits are looking quite strong for the second quarter of 2011. Even the Journal can't sugarcoat the basic facts:

While the U.S. economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Depression, American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter -- exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy.

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The statue will "stand alongside statues of other American presidents such as Franklin D Roosevelt and Dwight D Eisenhower," a couple of guys who actually helped the U.K. survive a world war.

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Here's what we know: The Toronto Sun reported that the assistant, Fred Seaman, is quoted in a new documentary saying that, "John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on [Democrat] Jimmy Carter." Seaman added:

"He'd met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event... Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that... He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

"I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who's an old-time communist... He enjoyed really provoking my uncle... Maybe he was being provocative... but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.

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On Monday, Slate's Dave Weigel captured Pawlenty's most recent obeisance at the altar of Ronald Reagan.

"When Ronald Reagan cut taxes in a significant way," said Pawlenty, "revenues actually increased by almost 100 percent during his eight years as president. So this idea that significant, big tax cuts necessarily result in lower revenues -- history does not [bear] that out."

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I know this will be nearly impossible to believe, especially when the mugger in the "DISCO" shirt shows up less than 30 seconds in, but this does not appear to be a joke:

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It was, the governor says, "one of the defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency."

There's some irony here.

Sure, Walker (probably) had no idea he was talking to an impersonator, but the simple fact that someone claiming to be David Koch could (apparently) reach him with such ease speaks to the stature Koch -- a billionaire tycoon who has been called "the Tea Party's wallet" -- now enjoys on the right. And to conservatives like Walker, Reagan is now regarded with god-like reverence. What Walker may not remember, though, is that the same David Koch he thought he was speaking with actually tried to derail the Reagan Revolution.

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Mitch McConnell, this morning: Opposing campaign finance reform was "like trying to get a deaf dog off a meat truck."

David Bossie: "There's only one man who can claim to have balanced the federal budget, and that's Newt Gingrich."

Newt Gingrich entered to "Eye of the Tiger." (I think he does this all the time, actually.) Then he compared the supposedly anti-job Obama administration unfavorably to ... the German government. You know, the one with the VAT and the high personal income taxes and the mass unionization. Gingrich then suggested replacing the EPA with the "Environmental Solutions Agency." (Maybe he thinks the "P" stands for "problems"?)

Then there was some sort of lengthy panel about Ronald Reagan. My favorite part was when a speaker began an anecdote by saying, "Ron Reagan Jr. -- don't boo ..." (Second-favorite part was when a guy said that Reagan "was even more tea party than Jefferson." He was more like the Founders than the actual Founders, themselves.)

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For example: Jon Chait flags an encomium to the glory days of Ronald Reagan's energy policy, written by the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton, that enormously misrepresents what actually happened. Let's take a closer look:

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In politics, both Carter and Reagan sought to exploit the "white backlash" in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution that had led many white Southerners and white Northern "ethnics" to defect from the Democrats to support third-party populist candidate George Wallace. Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered three Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights."

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Today, though, you'd never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan's image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan's image makeover -- and the reality of his record as president -- in his 2008 book "Tear Down This Myth." We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there's any truth to it.

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His appearance Saturday night comes as conservatives are newly energized, after elections last year in which Republicans gained ground in Congress and in many statehouses around the county.

Cheney, who had broad influence in George W. Bush's White House, has heckled the Obama administration at many turns and has predicted President Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

The group sponsoring the event -- the conservative Young America's Foundation -- was founded to promote conservative ideas on college campuses and purchased Reagan's former ranch in 1998.

Sarah Palin addressed the group Friday.

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Not all are fans of the governor turned vice-presidential candidate, most notably Reagan's son, Ron Reagan. He told the Associated Press that he sees nothing in common between his father and Palin.

Sarah Palin is a soap opera, basically. She's doing mostly what she does to make money and keep her name in the news. She is not a serious candidate for president and never has been.

Reagan's former speechwriter, Kenneth Khachigian, praised the choice of Palin to honor the 40th president, saying Palin's philosophy and political fortunes were shaped by the Reagan presidency. "She can reflect on that as well as anyone could," he said.

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That comment comes as no surprise to regular War Room readers; we've spent a fair amount of time documenting the former speaker's relentless merchandising. His ex-wife memorably told Esquire that she doesn't think Gingrich will ever mount a presidential bid because he's too busy getting rich selling junk to the conservative masses. 

So it's perhaps the least surprising development of the week that Gingrich is attempting to profit off of the Reagan centennial, which is sure to be a cash cow for conservative publishers and moviemakers.

Gingrich is going all out. He and his ever-present wife, Callista, wrote the foreword to a new coffee table volume, "Ronald Reagan: A Life in Photographs."

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Of course, Reagan was wrong. Poverty declined sharply after the war on poverty commenced. According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, in 1959 the individual poverty rate was 22 percent. It hovered there until about 1964, when it began to drop; by 1973, it was 11 percent. Then it began to climb again, to 15 percent in 1983. Thanks to the economic boom at the end of Reagan's tenure, it dropped by about a point, and then jumped back to 15 percent by the time President Clinton took office. Under Clinton, it fell to 11 percent. Under George W. Bush, it climbed back over 14 percent, and it has continued to inch upward under Barack Obama.

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