We were not alone in finding that the extravagant, massively policed, $40-million presidential inauguration parade and the chief executive’s wimpy acceptance speech, followed by the 10 expensive ballroom galas, were bad news. A headline in the New York Times Week in Review section called the Bush oration “A Speech About Nothing, Something, Everything.” In his 21-minute inaugural […]

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To most of us the Electoral College is so inscrutable and immutable that we don’t grasp how much it is also so undemocratic and inequitable. Now we have just seen it go through its antique antics again. Under the chairmanship of Vice President Dick Cheney, a joint session of Congress met in the House of […]

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You might have thought that, three years after a devastating terrorist attack on American soil, a period which has featured two wars, radical political and economic legislation, and an adjustment to one of the biggest stock market crashes in history, the campaign for the presidency would be an especially elevated and notable affair. If so, […]

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The Liberal Press?—Maybe so—a little. The media magazine Editor & Publisher found that 36 newspapers that ran editorials endorsing the election of Bush in 2000 flip-flopped this year and went for Kerry. All told, Kerry led Bush in editorial endorsements, 142 to 123. The pro-Kerry list included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, thePhiladelphia Inquirer, the Detroit […]

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Some scholarly speculation has placed the beginning of Native American civilization in about 5,000 B.C., roughly 6,500 years before 1492 A.D., when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Although he was an avid ocean crosser, Columbus made four trans-Atlantic voyages from Spain, but never reached North America. Because he knew the earth was round, he reasoned […]

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