(St. Petersburg, Russia) The French and Greek elections of May 6, 2012 signify the beginning of the end for the “Europe Project”. The competing visions of two remarkable Frenchmen- Jean Monnet and Charles De Gaulle- have been decisively...
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(Hilton Head, S.C.) As the United States moves through the second of its four years of commemorating the sesquicentennial of its’ Civil War (1861-1865) it is instructive to reflect on the interplay of History and national memory.
For tho...
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Clearly Mitt Romney is the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics. He "gets no respect"- anywhere. A strange consensus has emerged among the Punditocracy of both Left and Right. They even seem to be using the same phrase book.Romne...
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(Centennial Fellow) During the campaign for ratification of the U.S. Constitution James Madison, wrote to John Randolph in 1788 extolling the concept of Federalism - saying that "this system allows each state to indulge their own governmental peculia...
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(Centennial Fellow) Oh, what a relief it was when actual voters- normal human beings- began to cast real ballots! After fourteen months of the punditocracy telling us what voters would do, should do, or might do based more on Inside the Be...
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(Rome) If one would conjure in imagination what Gibbon called the “Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome” a worthwhile approach is to set sail upon Homer’s “wine dark sea” and in select ports of call...
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(Centennial Fellow) After suffering the only defeat of his long political career in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, election the young “Tip” O’Neill was flabbergasted to learn that his own barber had voted for his op...
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(Vancouver) Jefferson’s decision to purchase the Louisiana Territory from the French for the bargain basement price of fifteen million dollars in 1803 is one of the most stunning exercises of Presidential authority in our history. Yet whe...
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(Nantucket)The 18th century English political sage Edmund Burke wrote that the vigor of any society can be measured by the “balance between its impulses of innocence and decadence”. He further noted that when that balance tilts deci...
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(Dateline: Boston) When Lord Cornwallis marched his defeated British Army out of Yorktown in 1781 after surrendering to George Washington he regarded this turn of events as so unthinkable that he ordered his regimental bands to play an old music hall...
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