Memo to Canadians: We certainly did not mean to insult you, so before the story gets out on your side of the border, please accept our assurances that it was all just a mistake. And come see us soon, y’hear? Memo to U. S. border states tourist industry: No, your government is not trying to make your life more difficult; Read More ›
We have all grown up with that picture of President Harry Truman on the day after his surprise 1948 re-election gleefully displaying the early edition of the Chicago Tribune and its headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The Gallup organization that year stopped polling a week before the election, imagining that Dewey would maintain his six-point lead. In fact, Dewey lost by Read More ›
His political art appears artless. He is a partisan truly loved by colleagues in the opposition party, as well as in his own. Fellow politicians appreciate his unusual habit of giving credit rather than taking it. In four elected offices over a cumulative 32 years, he remains one of the few candidates who promised a voluntary limit on the terms Read More ›
An almost evenly divided federal government is the main product of the Great Stalemate Election of 1996. Either the two parties now will pursue their aims through more fruitless confrontations or they will seek out at least a few areas where statesmanship might serve the best interests of both. The toughness legislative problems facing the country may be Medicare and Read More ›
Never have so many politicians worked so hard and spent so much to achieve so little change. With the White House still in Democratic hands, Congress still Republican and exactly the same partisan division of governors, the nation’s politics are roughly where they were a year and a half ago when history’s longest presidential campaign began. What was achieved? Altogether, Read More ›
The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe. Richard Dawkins is widely known as the theory’s uncompromising champion. Having made his case in The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden, Dawkins proposes to make it yet again in Climbing Mount Improbable. He is Read More ›
The historically significant Washington State campaign on school reform is continuing to develop in curious ways. There is an old political adage, “If you can’t win an argument on an issue, argue about something else,” and that is just what opponents of the two school reform initiatives are doing. In the past week, with the election fast approaching, proponents of Read More ›
Initiatives are blunt instruments, but they sometimes are necessary to get the attention of the establishment. If the common sense of the people had been heard earlier on the issue of mandatory bussing, it would not have taken five years to reverse that misguided policy. Washington state residents soon will vote on two initiatives to give parents real choices in Read More ›
Pontius Pilate’s cryptic question “What is truth?” is a phrase that launched a thousand sermons, maybe millions, over the intervening centuries. It also haunts any attempt to discuss the volatile questions asked about Christians and other religiously motivated citizens when they take their faith into politics. For the followers of Jesus, he is the “Truth,” which converts an abstract answer Read More ›