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...Christian and??conservative Republican, but I can't help hoping that Obama will become our next President. I believe he is wrong about abortion, but he has acknowledged in a refreshingly Socratic way that he can't just dismiss the views of those on the other side. That may be politicking to earn my vote, but if a pro-life Republican ultimately sends us into a third world war with status quo Republican rhetoric, a pro-life position is kind of pointless...
This bluff and??vigorous Ford film, based on the Edwin O'Connor roman à clef about four-time Boston Mayor James Curley, winks at the chicanery involved in getting into office and staying there. Spencer Tracy, right, is Frank Skeffington, on his final run for a job he believes is his by divine right. Doing favors, making deals, smiting enemiesto Frank, that's just politics. Has anything changed in 50 years? The big-city machine the film elegizes may be gone, but the malady lingers...
...Sorrow and??rage grew in equal measure as I read Hannah Beech's unsettling account of the Chinese government's persecution of legal activist Chen Guangcheng [Sept. 4]. Disgust threatened to turn to despair. What hope is there for individuals like Chen, outgunned and outnumbered? But then I recalled the words that novelist Lu Xun wrote 85 years ago, at the end of his short story My Old Home: "Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin...
...scores are out, and??buried in them is a sign of hope for American education. True, the scores are actually a bit lower than last year's; the combined average for the SAT's math and reading sections fell 7 points, to 1021, the biggest single-year decrease since 1975, when the score dropped 16 points, to 1010. But statistically speaking, a 7-point decline (out of a possible 1600 on those two sections) isn't much. It's less than the value of a single question, which is about 10 points. Also, the SAT was radically changed last year...
History has no record of Grover Cleveland and??Grover Cleveland ever sitting down together. That's odd, since the two Presidents occupied the Oval Office just four years apart--Cleveland from 1885 to 1889, and Cleveland following him there in 1893. Had it not been for the four years Benjamin Harrison served as President between them, the country could have transitioned from one Cleveland to the other without even changing the monogrammed bathrobe in the White House residence...