Steel guitarist Bobby Koefer, one of the last surviving members of the Texas Playboys who recorded and toured with Bob Wills, has died at the age of 95. Here is Bobby's obituary, written by western swing historian Buddy McPeters for publication here at BatesLine: John Robert 'Bobby' Koefer, passed away...
Dusted off from the drafts pile: Occasionally I dump links and quotes in a blog draft on a particular topic just to have a record, with the possibility of expanding later into an actual published entry. Rarely does the published entry happen, but here's how "winning columnists" Barry Friedman and...
I have finally gotten around to reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, in anticipation of the Martin Scorsese film to be released in October. I'm about halfway through, and I was skimming ahead. (It's OK. I already knew who the bad guys were.) I was surprised to...
First-ever Wayback Machine snapshot of BatesLine.com, from August 5, 2003 Twenty years ago today at 6:01 am, the first blog entry at batesline.com came into being, an automatically generated entry proclaiming, "MovableType 2.63 has been successfully installed!" The first blog entry authored by a human followed at 12:22 pm,...
More short takes, this time on the races for Federal office on the June 28, 2022, Oklahoma Republican primary ballot: Both Senate seats, an open race in the 2nd Congressional District, and challenges to incumbents in Districts 3, 4, and 5. If you're on the home page, click the "Continue...
Campaign contribution reports show that the two registered Democrats running for Tulsa school board, District 4 incumbent Shawna Keller and Susan Lamkin, running for the open District 7 seat, are heavily backed by Tulsa's leftist establishment -- the band of philanthropists, politicians, and their hangers-on who hate Oklahoma's conservative values...
To journalists, photographers, and visitors, pilgrims this week of the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Welcome to Tulsa. Some context may help you interpret what you see and hear this week.
Every February, the National Latin Exam gives students of the language the opportunity to show what they know, with the potential of earning prizes and scholarships. One of the challenges for doing well in the exam is that the exam syllabus does not align well with many popular Latin curricula....
Here are the candidates I'm recommending in the Oklahoma primary elections on June 30, 2020, plus links to detailed analysis and recommendations from other trusted voices.
Cheryl Baber is the conservative choice in the Oklahoma Senate District 35 race to replace term-limited Sen. Gary Stanislawski.
The United Kingdom will hold a general election tomorrow, Thursday, December 12, 2019. All 650 seats in the House of Commons, the popularly-elected house of the national legislature, will be on the ballot. Voters cast a ballot only for their local Member of Parliament (MP), but the leader of the...
A memorial tribute to Charles G. Hill, Oklahoma's best-loved and most-enduring blogger, who died in September 8, 2019.
This conversation is well worth an hour and a half of your time. The topic is critical race theory and intersectionality and how those ideas destroy any community that grants them entrance. It is essential listening for understanding the times, a comprehensive overview of these concepts and their impact, delivered...
St. John's College is famous as the college that pioneered the Great Books curriculum in 1937. Still known as "The New Program," the single track takes all students through the progression of western literature, mathematics, philosophy, science, and music, through the authors and works in which the great insights of...
William Newbill, who was a political activist in Tulsa in the 1970s and 1980s, emailed me a few days ago to ask whatever had happened to Accountability Burns. I haven't spotted him recently. The perennial candidate, who ran for mayor as recently as 2009, would be 91 years old. Over...
On Friday, January 12, 2018, Oklahoma City mayor and candidate for governor Mick Cornett was interviewed by Pat Campbell on 1170 KFAQ. Cornett offered no real answers to Campbell's questions, but spun out a full bogroll of vague platitudes. The impression is that he just wants to be liked and...
On the occasion of the death of Jerry Lewis, Harry Shearer has posted his contemporaneous feature story about the 1976 Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. That was the year that, during a live appearance by Frank Sinatra, Lewis was reunited with his old partner in...
There was some excitement among Tulsa history buffs when it was learned that the Smithsonian Channel would be showing colorized clips from home movies showing Greenwood, Tulsa's historic African-American district, as it was in the mid-to-late1920s. Instead we have another instance of the erroneous notion I call the "Greenwood...
But Trump is Cyrus or Constantine or something.... Yahoo News: Trump's executive order disappoints religious conservatives "The executive order on the whole looks to accomplish very little of substance, against the backdrop of a lot of show," said John Inazu, a professor of law and religion at Washington University in...
Republican presidential electors have been deluged with pleas to vote for someone other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is still unfit to be President of the United States (as is Hillary Clinton, as is Gary Johnson, each in their own way). I wish that, when the Electoral College meets tomorrow...
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