Word: asks
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...Just ask Billy Collins, who served from 2001 to 2003. He says one of his predecessors told him that being poet laureate means you basically spend a year explaining what the poet laureate is. "In my case," Collins says, "that meant explaining that it is not a presidential appointment, which is what a lot of people think...
...then there's the correspondence: dozens of e-mails a day from verse-challenged citizens who aren't afraid to go straight to the top. "Requests from schoolteachers asking you to give advice to students on how to read literature," Simic says, "or from a business association in Topeka asking you to read a poem at the opening of a convention. My cell phone would ring, and a high government official would ask me to fix a poem written by her late father to read at his memorial service. Sometimes I wanted to go just to see who these people...
Today Congress is holding its first hearing in 15 years on the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy barring bisexuals, gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The hearings, called by a House Armed Services subcommittee, are likely to be more notable for the fact that they are being held at all rather than anything of substance they may produce. The simple fact that the hearings are taking place offers the most significant indication yet that the U.S. is finally reconsidering its strange policy of enforced hypocrisy that came to be called "Don't ask...
...ask, don't tell" was itself a misnomer, a media-friendly term that did not accurately describe the 1993 law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by President Clinton. The law did not actually prevent the Pentagon from "asking" any service member or potential service member whether he or she is gay. The Pentagon did agree to stop asking about sexuality in recruitment forms and interviews, but it never agreed to stop investigating whether those serving in the military are gay. That's why discharges of gays did not substantially decrease after the law was enacted. Compare the period...
Nunn has never repudiated his tactics, and although he recently said that the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy should be reevaluated, he has not said whether he personally opposes it. (Which is why activists have told the Obama campaign that picking Nunn would cause problems with gay fund raising.) For his part, Obama has long said he would repeal the policy, but he has not said how or when he would do so. Because the law gives the Secretary of Defense the sole power to devise the "procedures" under which homosexual conduct or statements are discovered, a President...