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Decisive U.S. elections? Try this one

The upcoming election for president has already been called "the most important" election of this century, and perhaps, the most important of all time. There are rivals, of course. The election of 1860 brought Lincoln to power and tripped off the Civil War while the election of 1864 helped to ...

The states stated their cases in 2023

The states really are the "laboratories of democracy." Despite frustrations expressed from time to time with good old American federalism – the idea that the 50 individual states have a sovereign stake in this vast continental country of ours – there's always a light at the end of the ...

Wright, Pittsburgh and Fallingwater

The greatest living architect poured scorn on the idea. Frank Lloyd Wright, famous in these parts (and elsewhere for that matter) for Fallingwater, his iconoclastic residential design set off in the woods of Fayette County, criticized the notion of saving the Pittsburgh "Triangle," as he put ...

A hope for tolerance at Christmas

The idea that the past has something to teach us is time-worn: we say it, but do we really mean it? Mostly, the answer is no. However, this particular moment in our national history may be, could be, the exception. If it happened once, it can happen again. Fingers crossed. Eleanor Roosevelt, ...

Biden’s political problems are acute

Not only is President Joe Biden tied, or even behind, Donald Trump in some recent public opinion polling, but he has two severe foreign policy crises at a time when his public focus should be on framing his domestic agenda as well his prospective election opponent as a mortal enemy to American ...

The rabbit hole of commie fixation

"I am not a communist," pleaded an obscure coal miner by the name of John Cassol, who went on to ask a high-up union official to please try to save his livelihood. "I was always a good union man.... My job means a lot to me. I have a large family." Another miner, caught in the same dragnet, ...