Poles and Polls

Just up the street from our hotel in Paris, is the site of the Bastille. The famous prison is long gone, and in it's place stands the Colonne de Juillet (July Column), commemorating the overthrow of Charles X in July 1830.

At the Place du la Concorde, on the site where a public guillotine once executed 1,600, is the 75 foot high Obelisk of Luxor, a pink granite monolith that was given to the French in 1829 by the viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali. It once marked the entrance to the Amon temple at Luxor, is more than 3,300 years old and is decorated with hieroglyphics portraying the reigns of the pharaohs Ramses II and Ramses III.



A big poll of another kind
President George W. Bush's approval rating hasn't exactly been stellar. Now a recent poll of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network shows: 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history.


Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.

At least two of those who ranked the current president in the 31-41 ranking made it clear that they placed him next-to-last, with only James Buchanan, in their view, being worse.