The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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Presidents on Presidents Day

By Barth on Sat, 02/14/2009 - 2:10pm |
It's been so long since we had a President with an appreciation of what this country---this nation---means, and how important our history is to what we are today, that every time he speaks seems to be an astounding event. The...
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What the president meant

By Barth on Sun, 02/08/2009 - 2:03pm |
I generally put new posts here on Saturdays, the only day I can really spend writing things for which I do not get paid.  With not much time for writing here today, I will let a few presidents do my...
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The Consequences of Our Failures

By Barth on Sat, 02/07/2009 - 12:29pm |
In July, 2007, we watched the debates in the United States Senate over the progress in Iraq and was struck by the huge gulf between the views of the elected representatives and that of those they represented. That "disconnect" as...
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Shibboleths

By Barth on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 3:01pm |
In one of the endless number of great West Wing episodes, the biblical story of the shibboleth comes front and center as only WW could do. The point of this diary is not to repeat that story, or its West...
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Rabbit Remembered

By Barth on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 5:16pm |
Josh's postI never met Ted Williams and never met John Updike.  They are somewhat intertwined in my head, of course, because of this essay from 1960, republished in the Boston Globe on the occasion of Williams' death.Now Updike has passed...
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The State We are In

By Barth on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 6:08pm |
By all rights, this week should be a celebration of the return of our nation to its role as the beacon of liberty and freedom throughout the world. We all know people, or stories of people, born in other countries...
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reruns

By Barth on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 2:44pm |
I have two.  One is from 1961 and will help get you set for the day's doings on Tuesday. The other is from last year and was entitled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr....
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The West Wing comes to life

By Barth on Sat, 01/17/2009 - 3:22pm |
We sat there for all those seasons wondering why we could not have a real President Bartlet, with all those smart people worrying about our country and its problems. When the Bartlet administration came to an end, and the series...
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Charles Morgan Jr. or asking not what one's country could do for him

By Barth on Sat, 01/10/2009 - 7:31pm |
There is an airport that serves our national capitol which is named after Ronald Reagan and when he died, and almost daily since then, we are forced to listen to discussions about his greatness. The other day a man named...
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A Public Service

By Barth on Thu, 01/01/2009 - 4:15pm |
The World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001 just as I finished reading this Tom Friedman column (a link that may not work unless you subscribe to the NY Times):[T]he status quo is politically quite tolerable for both...

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