A basic principle of democracy is that every person's vote should have equal weight. So we might expect some public discourse about the fact that the U.S. Senate is fundamentally undemocratic. But it's a complete non-issue among politicians and journalists alike.

One of the key roles of news media should be to raise important questions that powerful people in government don't want to ask -- or answer. However, while thousands of reporters and pundits stay busy with all kinds of stories about politics, they keep detouring around a central tilt of the national legislature's upper chamber.

Like the "purloined letter" openly displayed in a famous tale by Edgar Allan Poe, the Senate's huge structural flaw is right in front of us all the time -- but we don't see it as anything more than an eternal legacy of the nation's political heritage.

The past has ways of enduring. Today, in the 100-member Senate, cattle may be more equitably represented than people.

For instance, Montana -- with a total of 902,195 residents, according to the 2000 census -- has a pair of U.S. senators. So does

AUSTIN, Texas -- In 1901, a Henry T. Finch, writing in The Independent, reported: "Women's participation in political life would involve the domestic calamity of a deserted home and the loss of the womanly qualities for which refined men adore women and marry them. ... Doctors tell us, too, that thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effect of untimely political excitement on their mothers."

I'm trying to imagine an Al Gore speech that would provoke "untimely political excitement."

Actually, what I'm trying to do is remind y'all of the fine American tradition of everybody and his hamster feeling free to make vast, sweeping prescriptions for the entire female gender. We have just been through a modest little media orgy over both Karen Hughes' decision to resign from the White House and Sylvia Hewlett's book pointing out that it gets harder to have babies as we get older.

Everybody gets to have an opinion about Karen Hughes' resignation, as though we were somehow entitled to sit in judgment of her. Feminists supposedly feel (although I haven't been able to find one who

To the editor,

While the legal struggle to save Dysart Woods might be immensely complex, the current situation is simple: those who value our last .004 percent of remaining ancient forest in Ohio need to speak up fast or it will be gone. Please try to attend an upcoming public hearing at 2 p.m., Wednesday May 15 in Belmont County.

Ohio Valley Coal Company (OVCC) has pending permits to mine all of Dysart Woods and its watershed with longwall and room and pillar mining. Dysart Defenders’ expert hydrologist and forest ecologist both say this would be disastrous for the old growth forest and would take away its uniqueness of being a remnant original forest that can be studied as a benchmark for what used to cover 95 percent of Ohio.

The Ohio Division of Mineral Resources scheduled a meeting May 15 at 2 p.m. at the Belmont Technical College Red Room for Ohio Valley Coal Company’s Permit D-0360-13 (-13 for short) which would allow access from the -7 permit area to the -12 permit area, which includes all of Dysart Woods including the old growth forest.

If granted, Ohio Valley Coal Company could argue that the state must issue the -12 permit to mine under Dysart Woods since it permitted the -13 entrance main to the -12 permit. Further, the permit includes more than 20 acres of mining in the watershed buffer zone of Dysart Woods, which the Lands Unsuitable Petition appeal requests to be made off limits to mining.

Dysart Woods is among the most endangered ecosystem in the world according to a 1996 U.S. Department of Interior report. A map of the proposed mining permit, and the already approved and appealed -9 permit is at

Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Mineral Resources has yet to deem the -12 permit complete, which would undermine all of Dysart Woods, including all of the old growth forest areas with longwall and room and pillar mining.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Great, now everyone who thinks Ariel Sharon is a screaming disaster for Israel has been read out of the pro-Israeli camp. This excommunication comes not from Israel -- where quite a few people think exactly that -- but from William Safire and his fellow grandees of the journalistic right, who apparently have no doubt about their own authority to decide who is for Israel and who is not. Some of us who think Sharon is a walking catastrophe have been under the apparently misguided impression that we, too, were devoted to Israel's best interests.

But ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft informed me that worrying about cancellation of the Constitution was the same thing as aiding terrorists, it has been clear to me that I mustn't think what I think. I need to be instructed what to think by people who think the way he does. This is the same attorney general who spent $8,000 to cover up the tits on a statue and who believes calico cats are a sign of the Devil, but I am not allowed to conclude that the attorney general is something of a nincompoop because that would aid terrorists.