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The top story in the NYTimes online at this hour is the loss of six more US soldiers in Afghanistan, killed when a van loaded with explosives blew up at an outpost manned by US/NATO and Afghan troops. Many Afghan and US soldiers were wounded in the attack, for which the…
Read More »“All the President’s Men” is one of my favorite movies, and I believe the dynamic duo of “Woodstein” should be remembered with a statue on the mall in Washington, DC, some day, but I’m not a fan of the Washington insider books that Bob Woodward has been churning out for…
Read More »In today’s NYTimes, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes about Susan Retik and Patricia (Fleming) Quigley, who co-founded Beyond the 11th after their husbands were killed in the 9/11 attacks as a way to reach out to women in Afghanistan who, like them, lost their husbands in violent incidents. Patti (Fleming)…
Read More »What to say about political and cultural commentator Frank Rich in today’s NYT? He’s on a tear against Left, Right, and Center. The only satisfaction he finds in our messed up world today is Jonathan Franzen’s new and already-blockbuster novel “Freedom,” which Rich says nails the psyche of the time like…
Read More »I’m not the first to say this is a powerful book. Filkins won awards from the National Book Critics Circle and NYTimes Book Review. It was a best-seller in hardcover. I lent my first copy to someone, and it went into the book-loan twilight zone, which is why I bought…
Read More »Writing for TIME, Joe Klein offered up a sober assessment of President Obama’s speech to the disabled vets a few days ago that marked the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq by our country. You can read the August 2 blog post here. It’s not unusual for a writer to…
Read More »Columnist and “talking head” Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT has his fans and his detractors; he turned off a lot of people with his support for the Iraq invasion. The current mess in Afghanistan can be traced in large measure to the bad decision to start a second war in…
Read More »I couldn’t resist the urge – this photo of Rachel Maddow – fellow resident of Massachusetts – not “in mufti” needs to be seen as “captioned.” Maddow with her crew and NBC correspondent Richard Engel is currently in Afghanistan where she will spend the next couple of days reporting in and from the field. The…
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