The dig at the Knob Creek site, roughly seven miles east of Hodgenville on U.S. 31E, is a prelude to next month's Kentucky kickoff of a sprawling, two-year national Lincoln bicentennial -- celebrating the man many consider to be the greatest leader in American history. Kentucky will play a pivotal role in that celebration, officials say....

The inaugural event happens on Feb. 12 when President Bush has been invited to deliver the keynote address at a ceremony at Lincoln's birthplace in Hodgenville. A day earlier, Louisville will be host to a gala at the Kentucky Center, with music, displays and an appearance by TV actor Sam Waterston as Lincoln.

In a single week three New York Times columnists have addressed the question of Ronald Reagan's intentions in 1980 in starting his campaign for the presidency near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the notorious murders of civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.

First was David Brooks, the Times's sole in-house conservative columnist, in a piece titled, History and Calumny, which started with a thinly veiled allusion to fellow NYT columnist Paul Krugman's attack on Reagan in his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

A day later came Krugman's response on his NYT blog:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

Then, two days later, came the response of Bob Herbert, the Times's only black columnist: Bob Herbert:

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

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Despite high hopes and heavy lobbying, Pope Benedict XVI yesterday declined an invitation to celebrate mass at a major religious gathering in Quebec City in June. Organizers were counting on the pontiff's presence to boost attendance at the International Eucharistic Congress and to draw world attention to Quebec City's anniversary party.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Quebec, said the Vatican cited a busy schedule and health concerns for backing down.

The international visibility was already hampered by the fact the federal government did not invite Queen Elizabeth II to attend. A similar 400th-anniversary celebration last summer in Jamestown, Va., made global headlines once the Queen arrived.

Jewish organizations have been trying for years to underline the similarities between the plight of Jewish and Arab refugees, and this was a clear indication that the narrative has begun to seep into US administration thinking.

According to the official,"One of the points that came up in this [Bush's] discussion was the number of Jewish refugees that were created in this period after 1948. The president is very conscious that the Jewish refugees came to the Jewish state, and I think that's a parallel situation."

The official said,"A lot of the people now in Israel were refugees, they were one way or another made to feel unwelcome in the countries around the region. A lot of them lost property, and in some cases - in Iraq for example - they very narrowly escaped."

The sprawling Gothic Revival cottage, likely to be Washington's next niche tourist attraction, lies only three miles north of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But it's 300 feet higher than the swamp-level White House, hence is breezier and as much as 7 degrees cooler, according to Frank Milligan, the director of the President Lincoln's Cottage Project.

That might have been enough for Lincoln, who, between 1862 and his death in 1865, commuted 45 minutes each way daily by horse or carriage from June well into fall to escape the various forms of pestilence in the Civil War capital and to read, think and relax.

Despite a seven-year restoration by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Lincoln's cottage is like many summer houses: It doesn't look like much.

The exterior is pale brown stucco with green shutters and dark brown trim with modest scrollwork, more grand Ohio farmhouse than mansion. Inside, it has 12-foot ceilings and public rooms with good bones. If it has 34 rooms, as Milligan and National Trust President Richard Moe say, most are closed-off servants' warrens in the eaves.