Word: ascendant
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...Congress and the states set about eliminating present and potential injustices inherent in the Electoral College. The Supreme Court having made a clear commitment to the one-man-one-vote principle, it is intolerable that a candidate who loses the popular vote should be permitted, even in theory, to ascend to the presidency. The present system also institutionalizes other weaknesses and abuses: it cancels out the minority vote within each state; it ignores population shifts among the states between census years; it cripples third-party-movements; most ominously, it could throw an election into the House where vote is cast...
Blueprints of the Mind. Passion stamps the paper that the artists have sketched on. Most of the works in Sachs's collection are small. A ghostly group of apostles in bistre (a soft soot brown) watch Christ ascend off the paper in the deft dreaminess of the quattrocento hand of Andrea Mantegna. Sachs loved the graphics of Edgar Degas (he owned 21), and one of the best is the 12-in. by 9-in. brush drawing A Young Woman in Street Costume. Despite its smallness, the purity of the girl's soft profile gives it the monumentality...
...narrative viewpoint is clouded, seemingly drifting between dream and drowsy waking. In the transitions, a county-fair balloon ascension becomes associated with an erection the narrator wakes up with: "The man in the train compartment is to have an erection/ which in turn will cause the giant balloon to ascend." Meanwhile, soldiers on the train, who "always sleep erect/ as though in training for an awkward death," have become the subjects of negative antimilitary associations, and gun down the balloon erection...
...brothers turned out thousands of panoramic Venetian views whose impeccable architecture and exquisite plays of light have since delighted generations, while Pietro Longhi mastered a mellow irony to reveal the domestic texture of Venetian life. But it remained for an extraordinarily forceful young artist named Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to ascend that decaying stage and transform shimmer and shadow into one last dramatic moment for Venetian painting...
...Firemen ascend the ladder toward the sixth-floor window on the courtyard side, carrying a three-inch hose. They break through the unbroken corner of the window with the nozzle and bring the fire under control...