Strom Thurmond

Telecommunications giant AT&T urges customers to reach out and touch someone, but a former Columbia man is suing the company for $20 million because no one was able to reach out to him.Lloyd Bender, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, alleges that his company selling commemorative military belt buckles folded because his toll-free number was wrongfully cut off at a crucial time for his business."

Death penalty moratorium thwarts justice Del. Obie Patterson could not be more wrong when he suggests that Gov.-elect Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. should continue the death penalty moratorium ("Before lifting moratorium, end disparity," Opinion Commentary, Dec. 12). The delegate must not have paid attention to the election results and the actions of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who sent the sniper cases to Virginia because that state actually enforces its laws and punishes criminals.

WASHINGTON -- The number of guns confiscated fro schoolchildren has risen sharply over the past four years, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported yesterday."

Dear Mr. Baseball:Years ago, outfielders and some infielders left their gloves on the field. Now they bring them into the dugout. When did the change occur?Joseph NooneGlen BurnieDear Joseph Noone:Mr. Baseball has no memory of this practice but developed an answer to your question by drawing on recollections from longtime baseball fans, including U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, veteran comic Red Buttons and former Marlins pitcher Charlie Hough.The panel confirms your point: that fielders of long ago dropped their gloves at their positions, giving little thought to the chance that their abandoned mitts might interfere with balls in play.

A Republican tide last night swept the GOP into control of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. The biggest surprise was in an apparent gain of some 40 or more seats projected for the Republicans in the House, a triumph well in excess of even the most optimistic GOP projections.If confirmed by final figures, it will give the Republican Party control of the entire Congress for the first time since 1954 and make Rep. Newt Gingrich, the aggressive Georgia conservative, speaker of the House and Sen. Bob Dole, a presidential hopeful, majority leader of the Senate.

PRESIDENT CLINTON, newly re-elected but facing a formidable 10-vote Republican majority in the Senate, is putting together a brand new foreign policy team. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Secretary of Defense William Perry are leaving. With the world in perpetual crisis or semi-crisis, Mr. Clinton can ill-afford protracted confirmation fights over his nominees to fill these two key posts. If he really wants to work with the GOP opposition, here is where he has to start.Would-be successors at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon will face hearings before two crusty Republican southerners -- Sen. Jesse Helms, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Strom Thurmond, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

HOW UTTERLY appropriate and somehow reassuring that Strom Thurmond's Democratic colleagues allowed him to preside over the Senate in their final moments of controlling the chamber for who knows how long. At almost 100, the South Carolina Republican is leaving the Senate after a tumultuous 47 years, during which he often took positions bitterly opposed by Democrats -- notably his record-setting 24-hour filibuster of civil rights legislation in 1957. Yet they praised him warmly for his positive contributions and extraordinary personal grit, and they gave the former Senate president pro-tem one last turn at formally adjourning the body, to which he poignantly added the post-script, "That's all."

TRENT LOTT inadvertently did his Senate Republican colleagues and the entire Grand Old Party a big favor. He effectively forced himself out of the job of Senate majority leader and made way for a successor who can more credibly reflect the egalitarian views many modern Republicans espouse. Senator Lott was simply bowing to the inevitable, of course, when he announced Friday that he would step down from the leadership post he has held since 1996. The segregationist sympathies the Mississippian seemed to be expressing in offhand comments at Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party two weeks ago put his colleagues as well as the Bush White House in an untenable situation.

A PUBLIC man, a private heart, a Southern secret, a daughter's duty: In setting straight the record of her birthright, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher yesterday confirmed the power of decency to trump a scandal. "I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I feel completely free," announced the mixed-race and out-of-wedlock daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. With that, she spared her four children, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren the lifetime burden to which she'd been a conspirator: She endured almost eight decades of rumor, whispers, innuendo.

WHATEVER happens or fails to happen from 2003 onward will not be the fault of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., or Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. Their respective decisions not to seek re-election in 2002 ends two controversial careers on the far right wing of national politics. True believers will lament their departure. Moderate Republicans in mid-Atlantic and Middle American states will be relieved of this burden - moderates truer to the traditions of the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower than Senators Helms and Thurmond ever were.