Week of Feb. 12, 2007

Perhaps the most striking thing about the new presidential coin released yesterday is that Congress has asked the United States Mint to issue one for every president from George Washington to Gerald Ford. With four new coins coming out each year, it will be hard to complain about the 2007 series, which offers a bumper crop of Founding Fathers. Washington, who appeared yesterday, will be followed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The down side of this inclusive approach, though, is that not every year will be so glorious.

The year 2010, for example, stands out as looking particularly dispiriting. The first coin will bear the likeness of Millard Fillmore, who may be best remembered today for signing the Fugitive Slave Act into law. The next will belong to Franklin Pierce, a hard-drinking military man who was derided as the “victor of many a hard-fought bottle.”

Collectors who hold out until 2014 will be rewarded with a dollar bearing the visage of Warren G. Harding. A shiny dollar may be a fit commemorative for a president whose administration is best remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal, when lots of oil money sloshed corruptly around Washington. And later that same year, there will be a coin for Herbert Hoover, who presided so unsatisfactorily over Depression-era America. For Hoover, the dollar may appear to be poignant commentary.

From there it is a short two years until Americans get their hands on the first Richard M. Nixon dollar.

Austrian rifles sold to Iran are showing up in the hands of Iraqi snipers. Iran is notorious for its black market arms smuggling (in which Ronald Reagan and Ollie North once got involved). I guess now Bush will have no option but to go to war with Austria. I hate to tell Arnie, this, but Washington has been known to intern foreign nationals in California of countries against whom we are at war . . .

When John Edwards talks about the economy, you think he’s running for the Democratic nomination of 1932.