Editor’s note: Last month’s Gallup Poll gave President Bush his first-ever approval rating of less than 50 percent—49 to be exact, an 11 point drop from his early-January standing. Bush also trailed, according to Gallup, in a head-on match with the now-almost-certain Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts—46 percent to 53 percent for […]

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Yet Another Media Monopoly—The Comcast Corporation, already the largest cable-TV titan, with 22 million subscribers, is planning to tighten its hammerlock on what news and entertainment Americans can receive. It is trying to buy the Walt Disney Company, which includes the ABC radio and television network, and Disney’s movie studio and theme parks, for $56 […]

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Listening to President Bush delivering his State of the Union address—a poorly camouflaged 2004 campaign speech—made us think more sharply about the months to come before Election Day and the fate of the union if he wins a second term. Opinion polls and pundits agreed. So did voters in the February 3 primaries and caucuses. […]

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Clean Them Up—The first state-by-state ranking of corruption in local and state governments rates Mississippi as the worst and Nebraska as the best. The Corporate Crime Reporter, a vigorous investigative newsletter, dug into each state’s number of public corruption convictions from 1993 to 2002. In addition to Mississippi, the nine other states on the “10 […]

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Editor’s note: Margie Burns is a vigorous and scholarly writer who uses the Internet to advantage, as we first saw in her exposé of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former employer Halliburton. Her article on the Texas-based oil company appeared in our September 15, 2003, issue. In her on-line research she finds a lot of revealing […]

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