Word: facto
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...there any other offense, even the defrauding of widows and orphans, for which a Mario Cuomo would today be warned about the risk of eternal punishment? To ask this is not to deny that abortion is a serious matter, or that its casual use as an ex post facto contraceptive is a national scandal. But to decide whether an individual is guilty of committing an act deserving of hell, one needs to know whether the deed was done with malice and full consent. As O'Connor wisely observed, only God can know that...
Despite the harsh words directed at his programs over the next three days, Gorbachev, who has been known to lose his temper in public, betrayed little emotion. He made a point of exchanging pleasantries with Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, the de facto leader of the conservative opposition, when Ligachev returned to his seat after delivering a demagogic rebuttal to Gorbachev's platform. When the vote to approve the document was finally taken -- and passed with only one dissenting vote, from populist Boris Yeltsin -- the Soviet leader broke with tradition and invited the 108 candidate members of the Central Committee...
...peaceable than "bombs bursting in air," but America, the Beautiful lacks drama. My Country 'Tis of Thee was stolen, note for note, from the British national anthem, God Save the Queen. And God Bless America has obvious problems with the separation of church and state, but it has de facto status as the anthem of the Philadelphia Flyers, who won the Stanley Cup in 1974 after Kate Smith inspired them with the ode to the land that she loved. Still trotted out for big games courtesy of videotape, the late Kate has compiled an enviable lifetime (and thereafter) record with...
...lead to a national curriculum, inviting education by remote control from Washington and causing schools to turn out carbon-copy students. With its long history of local autonomy, the U.S. is unlikely ever to adopt such a system formally. Still, even traditionalists concede that the U.S. has a de facto common curriculum, driven largely by widely used standardized exams and the homogenized fare dished up by textbook publishers...
...Harvard policy of favoring legacies thus amounts to de facto discrimination against minorities. When white legacies occupy a disproportionate share of spaces in the first-year class, fewer spaces can be allotted to Blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics...