text:
Arthur J. Finkelstein

Arthur Jay Finkelstein (May 18, 1945 – August 18, 2017) was a New York state-based Republican Party (GOP) consultant who worked for conservative and right-wing candidates in the United States, Canada, Israel, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe over four decades.

With his brother, Ronald, Finkelstein ran a political consulting and survey-research firm based in Irvington, New York. His specialties were polling, strategy, message, media, ad placement, and advising on general campaign management.

Early life and education
Finkelstein grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family, living in Brooklyn's East New York section until age 11, then in Levittown, New York, and later Queens. He and his two brothers attended local public schools; Finkelstein ultimately graduated from Forest Hills High School. Their parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the father worked as a cabdriver and did various jobs in the garment trade. While a student at Columbia University, Finkelstein interviewed and helped produce radio programs for author/philosopher Ayn Rand, and was a volunteer at the New York headquarters of the Draft Goldwater Committee in 1963–64 (the famous "Suite 3505"). He eventually earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Queens College in 1967.

1968–76: Buckley, Nixon, Helms, and Reagan
In 1968, Finkelstein did behind-the-scenes election analysis for NBC News, part of the network's team working under former Census director Richard M. Scammon and exit-polling pioneer Irwin A. "Bud" Lewis.

In 1969–70, he worked as a computer programmer in the Data Processing department of the New York Stock Exchange at its offices on 11 Wall Street in lower Manhattan. During this period, he was a familiar face in Greenwich Village, where he often argued politics from a street-corner soapbox. In his spare time, he aided State Senator John Marchi in his unsuccessful Republican-Conservative campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1969.

F. Clifton White, mastermind of the Draft Goldwater Committee, was Finkelstein's political patron and consulting partner in the early 1970s in the firm, DirAction Services. The young pollster's first electoral success came at age 25 in 1970, with the independent Conservative campaign of James L. Buckley for senator from New York. This was one of several New York statewide contests where he was able to maneuver his clients to victory in three-way scenarios. Buckley won a plurality upset victory over GOP incumbent Charles Goodell and favored Democrat Richard Ottinger. Of that election night, Buckley later wrote, "By 10 pm, ... Finkelstein (my volunteer analyst who called the final results within one-tenth of one percent based on a Sunday-night telephone survey) assured me that I had won." Finkelstein encapsulated Buckley's message in the catchphrase, "Isn't it about time we had a Senator?"

Finkelstein's work in New York led to his serving in 1971-72 as one of several pollsters for President Richard M. Nixon's re-election campaign developing sophisticated demographic analysis.

The 1972 election also saw the first of his three victorious campaigns to elect Jesse Helms as U.S. senator from North Carolina. After the election, Finkelstein worked with Helms political aides Tom Ellis and Carter Wrenn to establish a permanent conservative organization, the National Congressional Club, which lasted until 1995.

Finkelstein and White went their separate ways in the mid-1970s, and he founded his own firm, Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates (often later shortened to AJF & Associates). In the 1976 presidential primaries, White supported Gerald Ford, while Finkelstein worked for Ronald Reagan's insurgent campaign.

He helped Helms's Congressional Club turn around the faltering Reagan effort with a victory in the April North Carolina primary. His work continued in the subsequent Texas primary. "Finkelstein had been a key figure in 1976, when he helped orchestrate Reagan's campaign-saving comeback in North Carolina" which was crucial in Reagan's further political advancement.

At Finkelstein's urging, Reagan made a major issue of the impending Panama Canal Treaties, which Gerald Ford was negotiating and which infuriated conservative voters. (This proved to be Reagan's signature issue throughout the late 1970s.) As Jules Witcover later reported, "Tens of thousands of Wallace voters were gradually cut adrift during his slide [in the primaries] ... and Reagan media man Arthur Finkelstein recruited a Wallaceite from Fort Worth to radio and television spots for Reagan ... It was dynamite." The Associated Press's Mike Robinson wrote Finkelstein was "viewed by many as instrumental in Gov. Reagan's 1976 primary successes in North Carolina and Texas."

1975–80: NCPAC, Senate, and Reagan
Passage of the post-Watergate Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) amendments, and the subsequent 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo, drastically altered the rules by which Presidential and Congressional contests were waged. Finkelstein was among the first to sense an opportunity, and pioneered the concept and execution of independent expenditure campaigns, which would operate as a third force in an election beyond the control of candidate or party officials.

Beginning in 1975, Finkelstein was the chief strategist behind the most successful IE operation of this period, the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Its Executive Director was Finkelstein protégé Terry Dolan. In 1981 New Right activist Richard Viguerie wrote, "NCPAC relies heavily on research and polling, a reflection of one of its founders, conservative pollster Arthur Finkelstein."

In 1978, NCPAC was instrumental in the defeat of Democrats Dick Clark in Iowa and Thomas J. McIntyre in New Hampshire. Both liberal senators were replaced by committed conservatives. NCPAC ran hard-hitting ads for television, radio and newspapers, crafted by Finkelstein. A central idea behind the strategy was to expose the liberal words and actions in Washington of elected officials, usually senators, whose moderate or conservative public image at home was at odds with their actual voting record.

NCPAC hit its peak in 1980, operating IEs in six states, its ads and organizing efforts helping to topple liberal Democrats in Iowa (John Culver), Indiana (Birch Bayh), Idaho (Frank Church) and South Dakota (George McGovern). Less well-known were NCPAC's TV ads in the presidential contest, both negative (one featuring Jimmy Carter in a 1976 debate, another with Edward Kennedy shouting "And no more Jimmy Carter!") and positive (footage of Ronald Reagan speaking on values); Finkelstein concentrated these ad buys in closely contested Southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama), all of which switched from Carter to Reagan in 1980.

Finkelstein believed in the usefulness of third forces to help conservatives win elections, but not a conservative third party (a much-discussed option in the mid-1970s). At a February 1977 conference, he told activists, "The development of a third party may very well hurt conservative options in the future by diluting them," warning that traditional and emotional ties to party labels would keep many conservatives in their present parties. He said the Watergate scandal had cost the GOP the one clear advantage it had over the Democrats – the perception by voters that it was the more honest of the two parties. Nevertheless, he counseled against third-party option, saying this would succeed only in drawing conservatives out of both parties, creating a weak satellite party and leaving the major parties more liberal.

Besides NCPAC, Finkelstein found particular success during this period in guiding individual Senate and House campaigns. Reagan backer and political unknown Orrin Hatch won a resounding 56% victory in Utah in 1976 against a three-term Democratic incumbent. In 1978, he was consultant to the successful re-election campaigns of Jesse Helms in North Carolina and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina — the latter being Thurmond's last seriously contested race (he served until 2002, age 100). That same year, Finkelstein shepherded Carroll Campbell to his first win in South Carolina's Greenville-area 4th Congressional District.

After a brief interlude early in 1979 as adviser to conservative Congressman Phil Crane, Finkelstein returned as one of the pollsters advising Ronald Reagan's primary campaign. His services were also reportedly sought by the George H. W. Bush campaign.

In 1980, he engineered the improbable Senate victory of Long Island supervisor Alfonse D'Amato over incumbent Jacob Javits, another three-way contest where the Democrat (Congresswoman Liz Holtzman) was favored. He advised the successful campaign of 31-year-old State Senator Don Nickles for U.S. Senate from Oklahoma. Most unlikely was the victory (aided by National Congressional Club allies) of John East in the North Carolina Senate contest; East was a little-known professor who used a wheelchair, recruited for the race by Jesse Helms and elected through the efforts of Ellis, Wrenn, Finkelstein and the Helms organization.

Besides Campbell, House winners included Duncan Hunter in California and Denny Smith in Oregon (both 1980), the latter toppling House Ways and Means Committee chair Al Ullman. Finkelstein also had his share of Senate losses, including two by previous client James Buckley (1976, New York, and 1980, Connecticut), and with Avi Nelson (1978, Massachusetts). Finkelstein was also pollster-strategist for Maryland Congressman Robert Bauman, who narrowly lost his seat after he was charged in DC with homosexual solicitation, one month before the November election.

1980s
During the 1980 campaign Finkelstein was a Reagan pollster and had been "aboard the Reagan campaign" since mid-1979. from the early primary days all the way through November. Having ridden (and driven) the Republican wave of 1977–80, he found the 1980s a period of consolidation, helping clients grow their base and win re-election.

In 1981, Finkelstein was one of four pollsters designated to do work on behalf of the Reagan White House, paid by the Republican National Committee. (The others were Richard Wirthlin, Robert Teeter and Tully Plesser). Newsweek reported in 1982 that "each of the President's top three advisers has his own numbers man: "Wirthlin became Edwin Meese's pollster, Teeter became James Baker's and now Finkelstein has become Michael Deaver's."

Throughout Reagan's first term and into the 1984 re-election campaign, Finkelstein advised Deaver, conducting polls and planning events and visuals (e.g. Reagan's trip to France for the 40th anniversary of D-Day). As The Washington Post reported: "For the White House, Finkelstein is more of an idea man than a pollster, specializing in media events such as the president's "spontaneous" drop-ins on disadvantaged individuals and institutions."

He also began dabbling in gubernatorial contests—in New Jersey (1981), for Jim Wallwork (defeated by Tom Kean in the GOP primary); and in New York (1982), for Paul Curran (defeated by Lewis Lehrman for the nomination).

In 1982, Finkelstein client Orrin Hatch sailed to re-election in Utah, while in Florida, banker Connie Mack III won his first campaign for the House. But his efforts on behalf of Democrat-turned-Republican Congressman Eugene Atkinson of Pennsylvania ended in defeat, as did the Congressional campaign in Westchester County of John Fossel, chairman of Oppenheimer Funds.

That year, NCPAC (with Finkelstein as pollster-strategist) was successful in only one targeted race (helping to oust Democrat Howard Cannon in Nevada), failed in several others (e.g. Maryland), and thereafter declined in influence. The pitfalls of running IEs and campaigns at the same time were illustrated when NCPAC was sued for running ads in early 1982 against New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan—around the same time as Finkelstein was working for GOP Senate candidate Bruce Caputo.

In 1986, a federal court ruled against NCPAC, and The Washington Post editorialized, "Both NCPAC and the Caputo campaign used the same pollster, Arthur Finkelstein. They could hardly be said to be independent unless the Caputo side of Mr. Finkelstein's brain refrained from communicating with the NCPAC side." (Finkelstein himself was not sued or charged; ironically, Caputo's campaign had imploded after revelations he'd lied about serving in the military, and Moynihan was never seriously challenged.) As late as 1987, Finkelstein was doing surveys for NCPAC (e.g. in New Mexico).

During the early 1980s, Finkelstein became involved in international polling, for groups such as Canada's National Citizens Coalition and (in 1986) the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario after losing their majority in the Ontario Legislature following the 1985 elections.

The 1984 election cycle saw him involved in three pitched battles for the Senate, the most heralded being the challenge of Democratic Governor Jim Hunt to Helms in North Carolina. The Ellis-Wrenn-Finkelstein team used the permanent assets of the National Congressional Club to wage a three-year campaign to undermine Hunt, including a groundbreaking opposition-research and advertising effort that redefined the popular governor as a tax-raising national Democrat. Helms won with 52%, in what was then the most expensive Senate race in history. However, this was the last Helms campaign on which Finkelstein would serve as pollster. Before Helms' 1990 re-election campaign, Finkelstein told the North Carolina team he couldn't work for the Senator any more. According to Carter Wrenn the New Yorker was polite about it, didn't offer a reason and recommended one of his proteges, John McLaughlin, handle the survey and strategy work. At the time, Helms was becoming one of the leading critics of the gay rights movement. "I took it that Arthur wasn't comfortable with Jesse's stand on the social issues," Wrenn said, and chalked it up to Finkelstein's libertarian views.

in November 1984, Finkelstein also found success in New Hampshire, as he aided freshman conservative Sen. Gordon Humphrey in overcoming a tough challenge from long-time Democratic Congressman Norman D'Amours. But in Massachusetts, after winning a contested primary against Elliot Richardson, businessman Ray Shamie lost a close uphill battle to Lt. Gov. John Kerry for the Senate seat vacated by Paul Tsongas. Another client, Congressman Tom Corcoran, failed to dislodge incumbent Charles Percy from the Senate nomination in Illinois, despite tough ads (attributed to Finkelstein) suggesting Percy was personally close to PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

His Congressional clients in 1984 included three New Yorkers – Joseph DioGuardi (who won election in Westchester County), Robert Quinn (who lost in Nassau County) and Serphin Maltese (who lost a close race for Geraldine Ferraro's seat in Queens). He helped guide Bill Cobey to an upset victory for Congress in North Carolina against incumbent Ike Andrews.

In 1985, Finkelstein polled for the gubernatorial campaign of Virginia Attorney General Marshall Coleman, losing the nomination to Wyatt Durrette (who was then defeated by Democrat Gerald Baliles).

Republicans lost their Senate majority in the November 1986 midterm elections. Nevertheless, Finkelstein's leading clients won re-election — Alfonse D'Amato in New York, and Don Nickles in Oklahoma. However, his candidate to succeed John East in North Carolina, David Funderburk, lost his primary, and he fared no better in Ohio, where Congressman Tom Kindness made little headway against incumbent Sen. John Glenn as well as in Illinois, where state legislator Judy Koehler failed to dislodge Senator Alan Dixon. Finkelstein also steered Californian Elton Gallegly to his initial victory for Congress, but failed to push State Sen. Ed Davis to victory in the California U.S. Senate primary.

In 1985–87, Finkelstein was part of the team advising former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick for a possible campaign for the Presidency. Kirkpatrick ultimately declined to run.

The Florida Senate contest of 1988 — closest in the country that year — was among Finkelstein's signature efforts. Congressman Connie Mack III won a tougher-than-expected primary, but his campaign did not wait for the results of the early-October Democratic runoff. Finkelstein determined (correctly) that Congressman Buddy MacKay would emerge from the bitter face-off, and began running TV and radio ads re-defining MacKay through his liberal voting record, with the tagline, "Hey Buddy, You're a Liberal." MacKay's primary and runoff campaign had focused on ethics — appropriate for defeating Democrat Bill Gunter, but useless against Mack — and he failed to blunt the ideological attack. Still, the "Hey Buddy" ads were unpopular with the press, and 22 of 23 Florida daily newspapers endorsed MacKay.

Mack continued to press the liberal vs. conservative contrast in debates and ads, closing with endorsements by the highly popular Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, plus footage of MacKay endorsing various tax increases. A slight majority of voters casting ballots on Election Day backed MacKay, but an aggressive GOP absentee-voter program had already banked a margin of tens of thousands of votes, and Mack was elected senator by a total of 34,512 votes out of 4 million cast.

Finkelstein also advised Joe Malone in his campaign against Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy; Malone lost with 34%, but gained enough positive recognition that, in 1990, he was elected Treasurer in the overwhelmingly Democratic state. Another client, Joseph DioGuardi, lost his congressional re-election contest in New York, 48% to 50%, to Nita Lowey. But, in another tight contest decided by absentee voters, Denny Smith won re-election to Congress in Oregon.

1989–94: Focus on New York
Brooklyn native Finkelstein had long advised local and state party organizations in New York (e.g., the powerful GOP committees of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk Counties, then dominant in all three suburban areas).

In 1989, he dove into the contentious world of New York City politics. Rudolph Giuliani's initial candidacy for Mayor was met with a primary challenge by cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, backed by Sen. D'Amato and guided by Finkelstein. The Giuliani-D'Amato feud had begun in 1988 over the selection of Rudy's successor as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; it colored Republican politics in the Empire State for the next several years. In this first skirmish, Lauder's millions of dollars' worth of hard-hitting advertising failed to prevent Giuliani's winning the GOP nomination. (Giuliani later blamed Lauder's primary ads for his narrow loss to David Dinkins that November.)

A year later, in the disastrous 1990 gubernatorial election, GOP nominee Pierre Rinfret nearly finished in third place (behind Conservative Party of New York State upstart Herbert London). D'Amato, and by extension Finkelstein, assumed dominance over the moribund state party apparatus. Long-time Rensselaer County activist William Powers, a staunch D'Amato ally, was named chairman, and began the rebuilding process. (D'Amato allies had started their own state PAC in 1989, the Committee for New York, in order to aid Republicans independent of the decaying party team. )

At this time, the Reaganite Finkelstein was not a fan of the current Administration of George H. W. Bush. In a rare public appearance in February 1991, after the GOP's poor national showing in the November 1990 elections, he reminded a conservative audience that Reagan prospered through unabashed ideological appeals that drew crossover votes from sympathetic Democrats. But Bush and other GOP candidates "kicked that away" in 1990 by raising taxes, sidestepping abortion and other social issues, and soft-pedaling their anti-communism while rooting for Mikhail Gorbachev to succeed. "We are going to have to go back to the things that got us here," Finkelstein said.

Meanwhile, D'Amato faced mounting ethical problems, and these occupied much of Finkelstein's time in 1990 and 1991. Though the New York senator was ultimately cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991, he was the subject of ceaseless negative news stories and editorials.

When CBS's 60 Minutes ran a highly damaging story on D'Amato, Finkelstein produced a response program that refuted many of its charges and misstatements. All the while, D'Amato's aggressive casework program and advocacy for New York interests was emphasized in paid and earned media. Nevertheless, going into his 1992 re-election campaign, D'Amato was shown in surveys to be a near-certain loser to most prospective challengers. The indictment of his brother, Armand D'Amato, on two dozen counts of mail fraud in March 1992 darkened the clouds further.

When the Democrats nominated Attorney General Robert Abrams in September, Finkelstein's polls showed D'Amato down 25 points, just seven weeks before the election. With the huge lead enjoyed by Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton in New York, the Bush-Quayle ticket was a positive drag on D'Amato. As with the Mack-MacKay race in 1988, Finkelstein moved to define Abrams by his liberal positions on issues. Support for a single-payer national health scheme was translated into "a 6% tax on every job in America"—a contention never challenged. His backing for other tax increases was documented and publicized in TV and radio ads, with the tagline, "Bob Abrams: Hopelessly liberal".

The D'Amato campaign was no less bold on the ethics issue, repeating pay-for-play charges made by ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro during the Democratic primary, with ads featuring excerpts from the Abrams-Ferraro debate. When news stories late in the campaign revealed the nominee's disallowed business-tax deductions, Finkelstein's closing ad ran: "Bob Abrams never met a tax he didn't like ... except his own." On Election Day 1992, as Bill Clinton was winning New York State by 16 points, D'Amato won re-election by 1.2 points, a margin of 80,794 votes — with a wave of Clinton-D'Amato split-ticket voting in Brooklyn, Queens and Buffalo the deciding factor.

Finkelstein had several other results that day. In North Carolina, he helped the Ellis-Wrenn-Congressional Club team guide businessman and former Democrat Lauch Faircloth to victory over incumbent Sen. Terry Sanford. Don Nickles easily won a third term as senator from Oklahoma. But in Illinois, the candidacy of Rich Williamson failed to defeat Democrat Carol Moseley Braun to replace Sen. Alan Dixon.

D'Amato's comeback win had demonstrated the Republicans' window of opportunity in New York City's outer boroughs, among working-class Catholics and (especially) Jewish voters angered by Democratic leaders' handling of the Crown Heights violence and subsequent incidents.

The senator's ticket-splitting performance had the effect of shielding downticket candidates from the Bush debacle, and Republicans actually made Congressional gains in strong D'Amato areas — e.g., working-class Buffalo (Jack Quinn), and suburban Long Island (Rick Lazio) — while holding the majority in the powerful State Senate, which strengthened the hand of D'Amato, Finkelstein and Powers going into 1993 and 1994.

Giuliani's second Mayoral campaign in 1993 benefited from the resurgent New York GOP. He had made a point of endorsing the Senator for re-election, and D'Amato and Finkelstein did not again back a primary challenger. This time, Giuliani ran a more effective race, riding to victory on a wave of discontent with incumbent David Dinkins, with even stronger turnout among ethnic Catholics and Jewish voters than in 1989, and in the same areas where D'Amato had done well a year earlier.

In New York City in November 1993, Finkelstein and Ronald Lauder also guided to victory a measure limiting the terms of elected city officials. The New York Times called this vote "a terrific defeat for the city's mostly Democratic political establishment, which had fought in court throughout the summer to kill the referendum, only to have the state's highest court order it on the ballot just two weeks [before the election]."

Finkelstein had specialized in federal elections to this point, and it was uncertain how he would adapt to the localized issues and personal style of a gubernatorial contest. Reluctantly at first, and only after considering several alternative candidates, he and D'Amato settled on supporting little-known State Senator George Pataki of Peekskill for Governor in 1994. They guided him through the State Convention in May, and to a smashing 3-to-1 primary victory in September over Nelson Rockefeller's longtime political wheelhorse Richard Rosenbaum.

The main challenge was defining the race against Cuomo. Finkelstein's first ad radiated disappointment and sowed seeds of disbelief: "Desperate candidates do desperate things ... Mario Cuomo could have been senator or President..." Subsequent spots, often as brief as 10 seconds, highlighted Cuomo-era failures (e.g. snarled traffic and record-high utility rates in Long Island), and especially the litany of tax increases over his 12 years. The persistent tagline: "Mario Cuomo: Too liberal for too long."

Pataki introduced himself in ads first as a gentle reformer, then angry in responding to Cuomo attacks, and finally enthusiastic (in excerpts from rally speeches at campaign's close). Cuomo defended his record and played up D'Amato's sponsorship of Pataki's campaign (to the tune of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al"), but had trouble overcoming the anti-incumbent tide. Pataki had a slight lead in public surveys when, on October 24, Giuliani endorsed Cuomo, with attacks on his fellow Republican quickly becoming a staple on evening news programs. Poll numbers fluctuated wildly, with Finkelstein's own tracking survey showing a Cuomo lead ballooning to 13 points within days. It required a swift response. He elected to attack Giuliani's endorsement as a corrupt deal with Cuomo, the ad using headlines citing suspiciously timed New York State grants to the City to suggest the Governor had used taxpayer money to buy the Mayor's backing. Pataki relentlessly pushed this argument in public appearances.

The pendulum swung back, with negative reaction to Giuliani especially strong Upstate and in the Metro North and Long Island suburbs. (GOP protestors even chased the Mayor's plane on an airport tarmac during a statewide flyaround for Cuomo.) Pataki closed the sale with an energetic tour of the state, appearing alone on a WCBS-TV Election Eve program when Cuomo refused a one-on-one debate. The final result: Pataki defeated Cuomo by 4 points. In an historic Republican landslide year, Mario Cuomo was the most prominent Democrat to fall. As Todd Purdum of The New York Times wrote that November, "For good or ill, Mr. Pataki's campaign [wa]s almost entirely a creation of Mr. Finkelstein."

Delaware provided another win for Finkelstein in November 1994, as longtime Senator Bill Roth coasted to victory for his fifth term, 56% to 44%.

1995–98: NRSC, Netanyahu, "Outed", and New York
Following Election Day 1994, D'Amato and Finkelstein were handed new challenges and opportunities, as the 14-year incumbent was named by his Senate peers as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), one of the four permanent GOP campaign operations in Washington. They had a tough act to follow—Phil Gramm of Texas had just piloted Republicans to a 7-seat gain and recaptured control of the Senate. For Finkelstein, it was his first bow as an inside player on a Washington campaign committee, his dealings previously being as representative of an individual candidate. Now he and D'Amato were responsible for helping to direct Senate campaigns in 33 states simultaneously.

One of their first moves was to break the cycle of hiring parochial-minded Senate aides to manage the sprawling committee; their choice for Executive Director was John Heubusch (later a top executive with Gateway Computers and head of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation). Other key hires were Jo Anne B. Barnhart as Political Director, and Gordon Hensley as Communications Director. Barnhart was a long-time aide and campaigner for Senator William Roth, and later served as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. All three were singled out by Roll Call newspaper in 1996 as among national "Politics' Fabulous Fifty."

The NRSC faced several challenges beyond their control, many emanating from the two dominant Republicans of 1995-96, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. The Oklahoma City bombing had given President Bill Clinton an opportunity to marginalize his opponents, and slowed the momentum of the reform-minded Republican Congress.

By late 1995, unrelenting Democratic/press attacks, and his own missteps, had turned Gingrich into a pariah through much of the country (2-to-1 unfav-fav ratio in surveys); meanwhile, Dole was running for President, and allowing ambition to overshadow his Senate work. In mid-1996, Dole resigned from the Senate to campaign full-time, but by then he was behind Clinton to stay, and eventually polled less than 41% nationwide.

D'Amato remained personally devoted to Dole, but Finkelstein and the NRSC team urged Republican Senate candidates to cut loose from unpopular national leaders and carve their own individual profiles on issues. D'Amato remained a champion fundraiser and the committee found new legal ways to deliver assistance to Senate campaigns and local parties. The NRSC paid particular attention to blunting the wave of millionaire political unknowns (e.g., Tom Bruggere in Oregon, Elliott Close in South Carolina) recruited that year by the Democrats. It shored up many endangered incumbents, including Bob Smith (New Hampshire), John Warner (Virginia), 75-year-old Jesse Helms (North Carolina) and 94-year-old Strom Thurmond (South Carolina).

On Election Night, as Clinton defeated Dole by nearly 9 points and Gingrich's House Republicans lost a net 8 seats, Senate Republicans won open seats in Alabama, Arkansas and Nebraska, while losing South Dakota. In a poor GOP year, the D'Amato–Finkelstein NRSC had gained a net 2 seats (and narrowly missed another gain in the Max Cleland – Guy Millner race in Georgia).

Finkelstein was not a consultant to the Dole Presidential campaign, despite his closeness to several of its top staffers. But, in the election's waning days, Time magazine reporter Erik Pooley detected the New Yorker's influence on strategy, writing:

"For Arthur Finkelstein, this week might have been a vindication: Bob Dole finally started labeling Bill Clinton a 'spend-and-tax liberal,' using a crude but often effective strategy known as 'Finkel-think' by some Dole advisers, because the secretive Republican strategist has been deploying it on behalf of his clients for 20 years ... These days, Finkelstein is exercising a kind of remote control. The Senator's latest brain trust is dominated by 'Arthur's Boys' ... And Dole is rushing around the country chanting the Finkelstein mantra. 'Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!' he cried in St. Louis, Missouri."

His own statewide clients in 1996 showed a mixed record, with Senator Larry Pressler (South Dakota) and ex-Senator Rudy Boschwitz (Minnesota) both losing, albeit in close races. Bob Smith survived with a 49% plurality win. New Jersey Congressman Dick Zimmer was defeated in his Senate bid against Robert Torricelli.

Earlier in 1996, he also helped Benjamin Netanyahu oust Shimon Peres as Prime Minister of Israel in a close upset. According to The Jerusalem Post, "Finkelstein was largely responsible for the strategy that brought Netanyahu victory in the 1996 general elections."

According to the Times of Israel, "Finkelstein was behind the "Peres will divide Jerusalem" slogan that helped Netanyahu overcome Shimon Peres who had been forecast to sweep to power in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the previous November. That election was credited with changing the tone of Israeli campaigns, bringing more American-style, aggressive and negative campaigning to Israel." But his expertise helped in subtler ways as well; biographer Neill Lochery wrote in 2016 that Finkelstein was behind such ideas as dyeing Netanyahu's salt-and-pepper hair gray to give him a more statesmanlike appearance.

Jeff Barak of The Jerusalem Post, a harsh critic of Finkelstein and Netanyahu, called the strategist "the brains behind Netanyahu's first election victory in 1996. Netanyahu's campaign back then, from which he has never wavered, was that you're either for him or an enemy of the people. His campaign slogan at the time, 'Netanyahu is good for the Jews,' encapsulated this. By implication, if you're not for Netanyahu then you're not good for the Jews, and therefore an enemy. And if Netanyahu is good for the Jews, then this also not-so-subtly hints that Netanyahu's bad for the Arabs, regardless of the fact that they are supposedly citizens of equal standing who comprise around 20% of the country's population."

Finkelstein's greatest personal challenge that year came with the August issue of Boston magazine, which revealed his private life as a homosexual; the ostensible excuse for the outing was that several Finkelstein clients had voted against gay-rights measures in Congress, and his work to elect them was therefore inconsistent and/or hypocritical. In September, D'Amato said, "I don't think a person's sexual orientation, his private life — a person's private life should be brought up and I think the question is offensive, it's wrong. He's a wonderful, decent person and whatever his sexual orientation is, that's his business."

Finkelstein's next two years anchored him again in New York, for the simultaneous re-election campaigns of Senator D'Amato and Governor Pataki in 1998. The contests were as different as the candidates themselves, with the calm, earnest Pataki winning high approval ratings and discouraging stronger Democrats from challenging him. New Yorkers' approval of Republican executives was signaled with the landslide re-election of Giuliani as Mayor in November 1997.

Finkelstein crafted a highly positive campaign for Pataki, focusing on fulfillment of promises from 1994 (e.g., tax cuts) and policy innovations (the STAR tax program for seniors ) Raising $21 million, Pataki defeated New York City Council President Peter Vallone by 21 percentage points, polling 54.3%, the largest share by a Republican for Governor since Nelson Rockefeller in 1958.

D'Amato was another matter; since his narrow victory in 1992, his profile had grown more partisan Republican in this still-heavily Democratic state. Summoning First Lady Hillary Clinton to testify before his Senate committee in 1995, and aggressive campaigning for Dole in 1996, damaged D'Amato in a state where Bill Clinton crushed the Kansan by nearly 2-to-1 (60% to 31%), doubling his 1992 margin over Bush.

D'Amato's decision to divorce his wife after a long separation and announce his engagement to a young socialite did not help his favorable ratings, while others recalled his mock-Japanese impression of O. J. Simpson case Judge Lance Ito in 1995 (for which he was forced to apologize on the Senate floor).

D'Amato raised a record $26 million for the 1998 campaign, and Finkelstein went to work early shoring up his client's "Senator Pothole" image of close attention to local needs and the problems of individual New Yorkers (as he had done successfully in 1992). State polls showed a swing back to such issues as health care and social concerns, which needed to be addressed. The tagline of these ads: "Al D'Amato Cares, Al D'Amato Makes a Difference, Al D'Amato Gets Things Done."

The Democratic primary was ultimately between Queens politician Geraldine Ferraro and U.S. Representative Charles Schumer of Brooklyn. Finkelstein prepared for both eventualities. When Schumer won by a surprisingly large margin, he immediately began ads that raised questions about the candidate's work ethic. (As Congressman, Schumer had missed an inordinate number of committee meetings.) The unexpected line of attack stymied the Democrat in late September and early October, and despite his weaknesses D'Amato gamely held onto a lead.

All this collapsed in late October, after a remarkable show of hubris and bad judgment at a closed-door meeting with Jewish supporters in Brooklyn. First, D'Amato did a waddling impression of then-obese Democratic U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Later in the meeting, he referred to Schumer as a "putzhead" (a mangling of the Yiddish vulgarism "putz"). He later denied using this characterization, during questions from reporters (but was swiftly contradicted by his own supporters, present at the meeting, including Ed Koch). Film of the denial was turned into a Schumer TV ad within days.

Finkelstein's tracking survey the night of D'Amato's "putzhead" comment showed the senator leading Schumer by 10 points with two weeks to go. But the meltdown was quick and decisive, especially among Jewish voters, with Schumer's ads relentlessly driving the message of D'Amato's dishonesty and dislikeability. The Democrat's closing tagline was itself a homage to Finkelstein: "D'Amato: Too many lies for too long." Schumer won, 55% to 44%—a 20-point turnaround.

In other races that year, Senator Lauch Faircloth—who had earlier replaced Finkelstein for his 1998 reelection campaign in North Carolina — brought him back into the fold in the closing weeks of the race. (Faircloth ultimately lost a close contest to Democrat John Edwards.)

International
In the 2000s, Finkelstein spent more time working overseas than in previous decades, with clients in Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Ukraine and Azerbaijan (the last, in coordination with George Birnbaum. ) He continued to consult in Israeli elections, working again for Benjamin Netanyahu  in 1999, Ariel Sharon (whom he helped become Prime Minister in 2001 ), and finally Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beytenu party.

Florida
Having twice steered Connie Mack III to Senate victories in 1988 and 1994, Finkelstein was in demand for the 2000 Florida contest upon Mack's retirement. His candidate was 10-term Congressman Bill McCollum, and he helped clear the Republican field early in anticipation of a tough general election against Insurance Commissioner Bill Nelson. It was a nail-biter with many echoes of the 1988 Senate campaign, but with a different outcome. As enthusiasm among Republican voters faltered in the final days (after revelations of George W. Bush's 1976 DUI conviction), GOP coattails and McCollum's slim lead disappeared, and Nelson was elected, 51% to 46%.

McCollum ran for the other Florida Senate seat on Democrat Bob Graham's retirement in 2004, but succumbed to eventual Senator Mel Martinez after low fundraising allowed the challenger to overcome his early lead. But McCollum was more successful in 2006, when he was the consensus GOP choice for Attorney General, and defeated Democrat Skip Campbell, 53% to 47%, polling well in a poor year for Republicans.

In 2009 and 2010, Finkelstein helmed McCollum's campaign for Florida Governor, where he was the favorite of the state's GOP Establishment. These plans were upended by the surprise candidacy of wealthy businessman Rick Scott, whose bottomless spending that year ($75 million from his personal coffers) led to a furious contest for the nomination. McCollum fought gamely, but lost the bid to Scott, 44% to 46%, who went on to win election to the Statehouse that November against Democrat Alex Sink.

A 2004 open seat in Florida's 14th Congressional District allowed Finkelstein to help create a political dynasty, as he steered State Rep. Connie Mack IV to a narrow victory in a four-way primary, then general-election wins in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

Finkelstein served as strategist for Mack's Senate campaign in 2012; a late entrant in the primary, the Congressman won the GOP nomination with 58%, but was defeated by incumbent Bill Nelson by a million votes in the Obama re-election year. (Mack IV later became a lobbyist, whose clients included the government of Hungary, whose leader Viktor Orbán was a leading Finkelstein client in the 2010s.)

New York
Pataki's third gubernatorial campaign, in 2002, provided some fresh challenges to Finkelstein, including a contest for the Conservative Party of New York State nomination, a still-shrinking Republican base, and a strong third-party challenge from millionaire B. Thomas Golisano, running again on the Independence Party line. Finkelstein positioned Pataki as an economic conservative but far more moderate on social and spending issues than in previous campaigns. This shift won the endorsement of influential union leaders such as Dennis Rivera and Randi Weingarten. Pataki enjoyed a 15-point victory, polling 48% to 33% for state Comptroller H. Carl McCall, and 14% for Golisano.

Finkelstein tried to make use of Pataki's likely coattails by helming the campaign of David Cornstein for the state Comptroller slot being vacated by McCall. Cornstein, a successful businessman and Giuliani's appointed chief of Off-Track Betting, brought personal resources and a strong finance team to the table. He was a longtime ally of both the Mayor and Governor, with a City/Long Island base and unusual appeal as a Jewish Republican running as a moderate-conservative. But party regulars instead fell in decisively behind former Upstate Assemblyman John Faso, a onetime legislative leader for the GOP minority, and Cornstein abandoned his run in 2001. (Faso further failed to expand his appeal beyond the limited Republican base, losing with 47% in November 2002; in his subsequent 2006 bid for Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer crushed him, Faso polling just 29%.) In 2017, Cornstein was named U.S. Ambassador to Hungary.

Back in New York in April 2005, Finkelstein announced the organization of Stop Her Now, a 527 committee dedicated to defeating then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2006 New York U.S. Senate race. Clinton sailed to an easy re-election, and the PAC was not a factor in the contest.

In the titanic struggle over new stadium construction on Manhattan's West Side, Finkelstein was hired to defeat the proposal by Cablevision, MSG and its allies; they ultimately prevailed, and the new Yankee Stadium was instead built in the Bronx, next to the old ballfield site, opening in 2009. It was the only time that the Finkelstein firm filed disclosure forms as a lobbyist (the filer was Ronald Finkelstein, not Arthur).

Finkelstein advised former Congressman Rick Lazio during his campaign for the 2010 Republican nomination for New York Governor.: Lazio lost the GOP nomination contest to businessman Carl Paladino.

North Carolina
Finkelstein continued to partner with Carter Wrenn on Tar Heel State races after the demise of the National Congressional Club. In 2000, former Charlotte mayor (and UNC basketball star) Richard Vinroot sought the Governorship, to succeed the term-limited Democrat Jim Hunt. Vinroot won a contested fight for the GOP nomination, but the drop in Republican-voter enthusiasm in the closing days (noted above in Florida) hurt here as well, and Vinroot was defeated by Mike Easley, 44% to 52%.

In one of Finkelstein's last major races before his death, he worked with Wrenn in 2016 to win a spirited primary fight between two sitting Congressmen – George Holding and Renee Ellmers. Wrenn had helped Ellmers pull one of the shocking House upsets of the 2010 election, but she abandoned the veteran consultant after her swearing-in and allied herself closely with House GOP leaders. In this primary, Wrenn backed Holding (a former US Attorney he'd guided to victory in 2012 and 2014), after a court-ordered redistricting combined the constituencies of the two suburban-Raleigh members. Aided by Wrenn's management and Finkelstein's polling and advice, Holding crushed Ellmers, 53% to 24%, and went on to a 56% re-election in November against Democrat John P. McNeil.

Other states and presidential
In Delaware, Finkelstein continued as pollster in 2000 to Senator Bill Roth, but the 30-year lawmaker fell to a 56–44% defeat that November to Thomas Carper.

Texas businessman David Dewhurst first approached Finkelstein in 1993 about running for Governor; he advised Dewhurst against challenging George W. Bush, who stormed to victory a year later. In 1998, he shepherded the millionaire to victory for the post of state Land Commissioner, then to two successive wins in 2002 and 2006 for the job of Lieutenant Governor. In 2012, Finkelstein worked against Dewhurst in the U.S. Senate primary, polling for the campaign of former ESPN broadcaster Craig James.

Finkelstein also served as pollster for the 2004 primary challenge by conservative Pennsylvania Congressman Pat Toomey against moderate incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter, pairing with strategist Jon Lerner. Specter averted defeat narrowly only after massive assistance from the NRSC and Bush White House (and then switched parties after the 2008 election); Toomey was elected to Specter's seat in 2010 and 2016.

In 2005, Finkelstein polled for the gubernatorial campaign of Doug Forrester in New Jersey; he was defeated by Jon Corzine.

Connie Mack IV's 2007 marriage to Congresswoman Mary Bono led to Finkelstein's aiding her sharply contested (but successful) California campaign in November 2008, defeating Democrat Julie Bornstein in Obama's triumphant year. Bono finally lost in 2012, after her Riverside County seat was redistricted, falling to Raul Ruiz.

Finkelstein returned to New Hampshire in 2009-10, taking on the insurgent campaign of Bill Binnie for the GOP Senate nomination. Binnie was defeated by former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, who went on to election that November.

In May 2011, Finkelstein told an audience in Prague that three presidential candidates had asked him to serve as pollster on their campaign for the 2012 Republican nomination, and he had turned all three down. (He further noted that Ron Paul was not one of those three.)

Campaign style and reviews
Finkelstein was known for his hard-edged political campaigns, which often focused on a single message with great repetition. He is credited with helping to make "liberal" a dirty word in the United States during the late 1980s and 1990s through the use of commercial messages such as this, intended to damage the image of Jack Reed:

"That's liberal. That's Jack Reed. That's wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you."

While often successful (as with NCPAC's attacks on seemingly moderate Democrats, or the D'Amato and Pataki campaigns in New York), Finkelstein's tactics sometimes backfired – in 1996, his repeated attacks against Minnesota U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone (calling him "Embarrassingly liberal. Decades out of touch." ) may have helped galvanize Wellstone's liberal grass-roots base. Republican Sen. Rod Grams eventually condemned Finkelstein's negative ads against Wellstone as excessive; however, his client (former Sen. Rudy Boschwitz) came closer that year than any GOP challenger to defeating a Democratic incumbent.

Finkelstein refused the notion he engaged in negative campaigning, a phrase he said connotes false accusations: "It just means that you speak about the failings of your opponent as opposed to the virtues of your candidate"—a strategy he called "rejectionist voting"—a formula based on slogans that disparaged adversaries.

Time magazine in October 1996 reported the Liberal-branding strategy was dubbed "Finkel-think" by leading Bob Dole advisers, and the presidential nominee was (belatedly) employing it against President Bill Clinton.

Political scientist Darrell M. West, in 1996 said ". . .He uses a sledgehammer in every race ... I've detected five phrases he uses — ultraliberal, superliberal, embarrassingly liberal, foolishly liberal and unbelievably liberal."

Philip Friedman, a Manhattan consultant who got his start working for Finkelstein's frequent Democratic rival David Garth, described the pollster as "the ultimate sort of Dr. Strangelove, who believes you can largely disregard what the politicians are going to say and do, what the newspapers are going to do, and create a simple and clear and often negative message, which, repeated often enough, can bring you to victory".

Republican strategist Roger Ailes, who worked with Finkelstein on numerous races in the 1980s, described "Art" as "a polling guy with creative talents",

John Fossel, chairman of Oppenheimer Funds, characterized him as "basically sort of a mad scientist". Finkelstein polled in Fossel's unsuccessful Republican Congressional campaign in Westchester County in 1982. "We had a knock-down, drag-out over whether busing was an issue in Westchester. His polls told him it was. I said, 'I don't think it is, but if it is, it isn't to me,' and we didn't use it."

Carter Wrenn, who worked on Republican campaigns for 44 years with Finkelstein in North Carolina, called him "one of the most creative people I have ever worked with ... He is brilliant in terms of analyzing polls and numbers. He has a unique combination of an analytical and creative mind ... This guy's a workaholic. He must work 18 hours a day ... If you need him, he comes."

Tom Ellis, cofounder of the National Congressional Club said "Just knock on his head, and he'll give you an idea."

In 1990, Randall Rothenberg of The New York Times documented the rise of political and other ads intended to create controversy (in and of themselves), as well as to persuade. While Roger Ailes was credited by some as pioneering the tactic, "other Washington political hands give credit to Finkelstein, another Republican consultant, who deployed numerous news-generating commercials in his 1982 work for the National Conservative Political Action Committee."

Finkelstein's early style is described in a scholarly account of a Congressional primary race in Arizona, published in 1979 in the "Quarterly Journal of Speech".

Finkelstein gave advice to political candidates or elected officials to perform the "dance of the honest man", a metaphor for responding to "questions about transparency, honesty, or integrity" by imagining oneself as a typical, honest voter.

Britain's The Daily Telegraph credited Finkelstein with using polling data to pinpoint the division of Jerusalem as an issue over which Israelis would reject a deal with the Palestinians, during the 1996 election in Israel. The newspaper attributed Benjamin Netanyahu's victory in part to Finkelstein's "scare-mongering".

Other businesses
Finkelstein's office shared a small building with Diversified Research, a separate but related firm that executes telephone surveys and packages their results for political and business consultants (including some media pollsters). The firm, long based in Irvington, New York, had formerly been located in nearby Mount Kisco.

Finkelstein also had interests in Murphy-Powers Media Inc. (whimsically named for two young campaign-manager proteges), and Multi-Media Services (a media-buying firm helmed for years by Tony Fabrizio).

"Arthur's Kids"
Over four decades, Finkelstein was responsible for the early hiring and training of many successful Republican consultants, operatives and managers—collectively called "Arthur's Kids" or "Arthur's Boys" —including Tony Fabrizio, Alex Castellanos, James Hartman, Craig Shirley, George Birnbaum, Beth Myers, Mitch Bainwol, Ari Fleischer, Carter Wrenn, Kieran Mahoney, Zenia Mucha, Jon Lerner, Rick Reed, Patrick Hillmann, Jim Murphy, the pollster brothers John and Jim McLaughlin, Rob Cole, Ron Wright, and Adam Stoll. Others who worked with Finkelstein and have gone on to have successful independent careers include Frank Luntz, Larry Weitzner, Charles R. Black Jr., Roger Stone, Chris Mottola, John Heubusch, Barney Keller, Gordon Hensley, and Gary Maloney.

Personal life
In 1996, Boston Magazine outed Finkelstein as a homosexual in a feature story. In April 2005, Finkelstein acknowledged that in December 2004, he had married his partner of forty years in a civil ceremony at his home in Massachusetts.

Finkelstein was a self-identified libertarian conservative, and once did polling work for the Free Libertarian Party. In his final years he increasingly distanced himself personally from social conservative elements within the Republican Party while nevertheless still working for many conservative candidates. In a 1979 interview, he denied he was "a hard-core right-winger," but noted there was hardly "a serious conservative over the last 10 years [i.e. 1969-79] whom I haven't been involved with."

Finkelstein died of lung cancer on August 18, 2017, aged 72, in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Survivors included his husband, Donald Curiale, of Ipswich and Fort Lauderdale; two daughters, Jennifer Delgado of Danvers, Mass., Molly Finkelstein of Alpharetta, Ga.; two brothers; and a granddaughter Maryn Baird-Kelly.

Quotes

 * "A crook always beats a fool." (frequent saying)
 * VARIANT of above: "When you allow people to choose between the corrupt and the stupid, they will go for the corrupt." (Said in reference to a 2003 Israeli campaign)
 * "The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know." (frequent saying)
 * "Stupid people say stupid things." (Hebrew language paper Maariv in 1999)
 * "I have been criticized for 20 years for running ideologically arched campaigns. I plead guilty. I will continue to run ideologically arched campaigns as long as there are more conservatives than there are liberals, rather than more Democrats than there are Republicans." (Speech to Conservative Political Action Conference, 1991)
 * Finkelstein insisted he never lied – "I do not slander somebody without proof."
 * "In politics, it's what you perceive to be true that's true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true.  A good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he will tell you a few things that are untrue, because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue." (2011 speech in Prague)
 * "The political center has disappeared, and the Republican Party has become the party of the Christian right more so than in any other period in modern history ... Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian Right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next Republican president."
 * "From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat."
 * "She will put off Democrats from the center. In terms of the Republicans, Hillary Clinton is a wonderful candidate for the presidency." (Maariv, 11/04)
 * "I think I'm the playwright or the director, and not the actor. And the actors need to be onstage, not the director. And I think it's absurd that people who do what I do become as important, as celebrated, as the ones who are running."
 * Speaking to GOP congressional hopefuls in 1978: "If any of you do get elected, and chances are 19-to-1 you won't ... don't run your own campaign; don't let your spouse do it; and don't listen to the nice lady who praises the brilliance of your speech—she probably was the only one in the audience who thought so." He said Proposition 13 (just passed in California) shouldn't be interpreted as "evidence people want services cut. They want taxes cut," and voters aren't sophisticated enough to understand that one leads to the other.
 * He cited the 1965 New York mayoral campaign of John Lindsay, elected because "he promised to cut the budget in half and double the services. Four years later, when it was apparent that he had doubled the budget and cut services; Lindsay said, 'Yes, I made a mistake,' but he was re-elected when he promised to help end the Vietnam War."
 * Said in 1979 that there are three kinds of candidates' wives—the wife "who hates politics and refuses to come out of the house," the wife who is reluctant but "will do what she is asked," and the wife "who wants to be the candidate and loves politics more than her husband does." He put Rosalynn Carter and Arlene (Mrs. Phil) Crane in the last category.
 * After being praised for his winning advice in a Nassau County election: "I'm a hero, but the first time a town clerk loses an election after my figures show him winning, I will be over the hill and a bum."
 * Longtime associate George Birnbaum: "I would always say, 'Arthur, do you realize how much we're changing history?' He would say, 'I don't know how much we're changing history; we're touching history."
 * In 2011, in one of his last public speeches, he said: "I wanted to change the world. I did this. I made it worse."

title: Arthur J. Finkelstein


text:
Antiskeptic

Antiskeptic is a rock band based in Melbourne, Australia. The band has enjoyed over twenty years of successful touring nationally, releasing three full-length albums, three EPs, one live album and two DVDs. The band have toured with many successful groups, including Midnight Oil, Jimmy Eat World, Anberlin, The Get Up Kids, Unwritten Law, Millencolin, MxPx, Jebediah, Bodyjar and Dashboard Confessional. Antiskeptic are known for their energetic live shows and powerful performances as much as the uplifting and encouraging lyrical content of their songs.

Early years & Memoirs of a Common Man (1999–2003)
Formed in Melbourne in 1999, the band was originally only a side project for guitarist/singer Andrew Kitchen and bassist/singer Sean Daly. At the time, the men were performing in another band named Dispersia. Dispersa later broke up and gave way to Antiskeptic. Initially named TSP (an acronym for the Side Project), Andrew Kitchen came up with the band's name whilst treating an infected ear piercing; Kitchen misread the label on a bottle of antiseptic and suggested it to the other members. Shortly after, Nick Coppin became the band's drummer and the trio began to write material and play live shows. The band issued a self-titled EP in 2000 and complemented the release with a low-budget video clip for the track 60% Intentional, which was featured on Australian music video program Rage. The success of the EP and 60% Intentional saw the band begin touring outside of Melbourne for the first time, and scored festival slots at the Black Stump Music and Arts Festival in New South Wales and Forest Edge Music Festival in Victoria.

In 2001, the band released a second EP, Change My Ways which featured two forthcoming tracks from the debut album that was still being recorded by Producer David Carr. The EP also featured three previous unreleased songs and a short video clip of interviews and liver performances. In June 2002, Antiskeptic released their debut album. Titled Memoirs of a Common Man, the album propelled the band to new heights. Lead single "Called" featured on high rotation on national radio stations Triple J and Triple M, with the track and video clip also featuring on Triple J's famous Hottest 100 compilation (CD and DVD, Volume 10) after being voted number 92 in Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2002. The success of "Called" also lent itself to more festival dates, including the M-One Rock Festival with Nickelback, Midnight Oil and the Goo Goo Dolls and the Homebake festival with Gerling, Jet, Pnau and others.

Aurora (2003–2005)
In 2003, Daly made the decision to leave the band and pursue other interests. He toured and recorded with his side project, sunsetsallday and also married his partner. He was replaced by Shane O'Keeffe, who contributed bass on "Nothing to Say", the lead single from the band's second album, Aurora. However, the then 18-year-old decided that the pressures of moving from Queensland to Melbourne were too great, and he made the decision to leave. This left the band without a bass player for the remainder of the Aurora recording sessions and the planned national tour to promote the new album. Daly and album producer David Carr recorded the remaining bass tracks and friend Corey Sleap was able to fill in for the tour while they continued to search for a full-time replacement. Despite the setbacks, lead single "Nothing to Say" featured on Australian radio, the music video also ran on national programs such as Rage and Channel V. As the band went on a national tour to support the album, "Clear to Pass" was issued as a free single available through the band's website, complete with artwork. The single achieved some modest radio play, being picked up by Triple M and Sydney independent station FBI.

At the beginning of 2004, it was announced that Daly had rejoined the band after temporarily filling in for the band in December 2003. On returning the band, Daly described the reunion as follows: "The band was in a position when they were trying out some bass players and they were in a spot with some shows. They contacted me and asked if I’d come back as a fill in, which I was thrilled to do because I’d had a break and was feeling great about it. After one show they said we’ve got these other shows booked, how would you feel about filling in for those. Then those three shows became five and it became a case of why don’t I just stay." The reunited trio released a single and music video for "Beautiful in White" and followed up with re-recorded version of the Aurora track "More Than Kind" on vinyl, complete with new vocals by Daly. While the band had reunited, Coppin moved to Brisbane, but remained a full member of Antiskeptic.

In March and April 2004, Antiskeptic headlined the Renegade Festival which toured Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Others on the bill included I Killed the Prom Queen and After the Fall. The band also played the Gold Coast's Festival of Beers, Push Over Festival in Melbourne and the Cosmonautical Festival in Perth during the same period.

In September 2005, Antiskeptic played at Youth Alive 2005 in the Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne. The concert was filmed, and would later be released on the DVD accompanying Monuments.

Monuments and split (2006–2008)
Following the release and tours for the last of the Aurora singles, the band re-entered the studio to record the EP/DVD release Monuments. The recording was originally supposed to be an album, but the band became concerned that the new studio sessions were too similar to that of the previous album; "we had predominantly focused ourselves on writing another album...but we found that the more and more we tried, the more and more we came up with, it was just sounding like Aurora part two. So we put ourselves to the task of writing something really different and that takes time," stated Daly. The result was a four-track EP that was cut down from 13 demos which showcased a brand-new musical direction for the band, with the group exploring more hard rock and progressive territory. The band supported Dashboard Confessional on their Australian tour, before conducting their own national tour in support of the release.

The band appeared on Rove Live on 19 September 2006 as the show's house band.

In March 2008 at the Easterfest music festival, the band made a statement during their performance that the band was finishing up as of September 2008. Recalling the decision to call it quits, drummer Coppin elaborated that "when we finished up in 2008, priorities had shifted in the band and we were unable to continue doing it in a way that was respectful to all members."

Their 'Goodbye Goodnight tour' was to be their final tour, with only one Adelaide show, one Sydney show and two Melbourne shows, the last of which was on 20 September 2008 to a sold-out home crowd at the Hi-Fi Bar. In celebration of their career, they recorded one final single entitled "I'll Follow", which was available for free download on their MySpace, and released a DVD called Memoirs of a Common Band, which is essentially an overview of their career. The final live performance was recorded and filmed. The concert audio was made available to the audience immediately after the performance on the band's final CD release titled Goodbye Goodnight – Live at the Hi-Fi. A full-length CD/DVD of the performance with enhanced audio and features was released in 2011 through El Shaddai Records.

Reformation and Stare Down the Ocean (2011–2015)
In March 2011 it was announced via the band's Facebook page that its members would reunite for a special one-off performance at Melbourne's iconic punk/metal venue The Arthouse to commemorate its closing. Tickets for the show sold out in minutes and the band was joined by fellow Melbourne rock trio Horsell Common. The band played a brand new song titled "The Kids Aren’t Scared" and was also the first time people could purchase the full-length CD/DVD Goodbye Goodnight – Live at the Hi-Fi 2008. Following the show, Kitchen and Coppin decided they wished to continue on following the success of the Arthouse show. Following a series of discussions, Coppin and Kitchen decided to reform the band permanently, without Daly; "We got some feedback that Antiskeptic was the chemistry that we all had, but Nick and I were keen to proceed," recalled Kitchen in a 2012 interview. "We all talked about it. A few days after we made that decision, Nick and I walked in on a new frontier. We had gigs booked, and with only two active members. A day or two later, one Bodyjar show was confirmed and we knew we made the right decision from then on." Coppin also expanded on the reasons for the band's reunion and why they would reunite without Daly in a 2012 interview; "weʼd had discussions about doing Antiskeptic again after The Arthouse show, but it was clear that he (bassist Sean Daly) was not on the same page as Andrew and I. This was the reason why things had finished in the first place, so after having had three years to think about the dissolution of the band – there was no way I was going to allow myself to be put back into that position of limitation and constriction. With all due respect to Sean, I now feel that we can lift off the park brake in the car and move on and dream again."

In early November 2011 the band's complete reunion was formally announced, with the addition of new members Tavis Wardlaw of No Love For Lexi and Ryan Mclerie of House Vs. Hurricane. At this time, Antiskeptic announced a reunion tour of Australia; combining club shows with festivals, including headlining performances at Easterfest in Toowoomba (Queensland) with P.O.D., Rapture Ruckus and Mercyme in April 2012, and Victoria's Forest Edge Music Festival with Ivoryline in March 2012. The remainder of the dates will include shows at traditional live venues in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The band also played a one-off show with its contemporaries Bodyjar and One Dollar Short on 31 March in Melbourne, to celebrate the limited edition release of Bodyjar's landmark album No Touch Red on vinyl

When queried on the future of the band, Coppin stated in January 2012 that it was open-ended; "the plan for Antiskeptic is to have fun. We are now in a position where we are open to anything. We have four dudes in a band that are passionate about playing music and performing for people and that is feeling really exciting and invigorating. We want to continue to tour, we want to record and we want to have a blast doing it!"

In late March 2012 Kitchen announced via the band's Pozible webpage that the quartet would head into the studio to record an album which would be released in 2013. The band will be tracking the majority of the album in Kitchen's studio and are having it mixed and produced by Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Dead Letter Circus, Cog).

Antiskeptic performed at the Black Stump festival in September/October, and was part of Newcastle's two-day CityFest lineup in November with Evermore, New Empire and Stan Walker.

Antiskeptic announced in February 2013 that Ryan Mclerie had left the band due to commitments to House vs Hurricane. He was replaced by Jarrod Salton of City Escape. The band played with MxPx on the Adelaide leg of their national tour in early March, before making a second appearance in as many years at the Forest Edge Music Festival, also with MxPx. The band began recording the new album in May.

'Stare Down The Ocean', Antiskeptic's third full-length album was released in 2014 and was met with positive critical reviews Australia wide and became the Album of the Week on the national Triple M 'Homegrown' radio program.

In support of the album Antiskeptic undertook an extensive national tour with Queensland rock band Young Lions in support. Throughout 2015 the band hit the road for separate tours with American rock bands Switchfoot, Everclear and Lifehouse before calling it a day at the Lifehouse show at Melbourne's Forum Theatre.

Reunion Instincts (2019–current)
In May 2019, Antiskeptic performed a one-off show in Melbourne with their original lineup (Andrew, Nick and Sean), supporting Anberlin on their 2019 Australian tour at The Forum. The response was so positive from fans that the band made their return official and followed with a tour supporting The Get Up Kids in October that year. December 2019, Antiskeptic celebrated their 20th anniversary playing to a sold out show at the Evelyn Hotel, Fitzroy and announced further shows in 2020 and that writing had begun on new material.

In March 2020 the band performed alongside fellow rock/punk veterans For Amusement Only, Seraphs Coal and Wishful Thinking for a successful run of shows on the east coast which was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2022 the band released a 20th Anniversary Remastered Vinyl edition of the 2002 debut album Memoirs of a Common Man and tolerated a hardcore/metal band called Dark Antiskeptic releasing heavy and twisted re-recordings of the bands back catalogue which coincided with the vinyl release.

In November 2022 Antiskeptic made a triumphant return to the stage with fellow Melbourne 3 piece Horsell Common for a sell-out hometown show where the band announced their new album Instincts was in development and performed new material live for the first time in 7 years.

Current

 * Andrew Ridley Kitchen – vocals and guitar (1999–present)
 * Nick Coppin – drums (1999–present)
 * Sean Daly – bass guitar and vocals (1999–2003, 2003–2008, 2019-present)

Former

 * Shane O'Keeffe – bass guitar (2003)
 * Corey Sleap – bass guitar (2003)
 * Ryan Mclerie – guitar and vocals (2011–2012)
 * Jarrod Salton – guitar and vocals (2013–2019)
 * Tavis Wardlaw – bass guitar and vocals (2011–2019)

DVDs
Late in their career, Antiskeptic released a number of DVDs. The first was packaged with the EP Monuments and contained studio footage, as well as a selection of videos from the band's performance at Rod Laver Arena. Memoirs of a Common Band was released prior to the beginning of the Goodbye, Goodnight tour and features extensive footage of the band throughout their first ten years, including interviews, performance videos, live clips and sundry. Goodbye, Goodnight – Live at the Hi Fi captures the band's 2008 performance in Melbourne, at the time believed to be the band's final show. Unlike earlier releases, this DVD features the entire concert. The special features of Goodbye, Goodnight include Memoirs of a Common Band in its entirety.

Video clips
A number of video clips have been commissioned for Antiskeptic to promote singles/releases. The following is a list of official promotional videos.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Antiskeptic


text:
File:Martha And The Muffins - Danseparc album cover.jpg

Summary
Martha And The Muffins - Danseparc. Original UK LP album cover

Licensing
Original UK release album cover - album covers are fair use. Picture scanned by me Ian Dunster from original UK LP album.


text:
In flagrante delicto

In flagrante delicto (Latin for "in blazing offence"), sometimes simply in flagrante ("in blazing"), is a legal term used to indicate that a criminal has been caught in the act of committing an offence (compare ). The colloquial "caught red-handed" and "caught rapid" are English equivalents.

Aside from the legal meaning, the Latin term is often used colloquially as euphemism for someone being caught in the midst of sexual activity.

Etymology
The phrase combines the present active participle flagrāns (flaming or blazing) with the noun dēlictum (offence, misdeed, or crime). In this term the Latin preposition in, not indicating motion, takes the ablative. The closest literal translation would be "in blazing offence", where "blazing" is a metaphor for vigorous, highly visible action.

Latin America
In many Latin American countries, being caught in flagrante (en flagrancia, em flagrante) is a common legal requirement for both detention and search and seizure. Naturally, being caught in flagrante makes convictions easier to obtain; in some jurisdictions where the police are not adept at investigation and the use of forensic science is not widespread, it may be difficult to get a conviction any other way. On occasion, governments with such constitutional requirements have been accused of stretching the definition of in flagrante in order to carry out illegal arrests. In Brazil, a member of the National Congress cannot be arrested unless caught in flagrante delicto of a non-bailable crime, and whether or not a member's detention should continue is decided by their parliamentary peers.

Japan
In Japan, the phrase's translation, Genkōhan (現行犯), is used to refer to citizen's arrest, and is listed under Section 213 of the Code of Criminal Procedure as such.

title: In flagrante delicto


text:
Template:GBvosi

This template Links to //www.old-maps.co.uk/

title: Template:GBvosi


text:
J. Richard Gott

John Richard Gott III (born February 8, 1947) is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. He is known for his work on time travel and the Doomsday argument.

Exotic matter time travel theories
Paul Davies's bestseller How to Build a Time Machine credits Gott with the proposal of using cosmic strings to create a time machine. Gott's machine depends upon the antigravitational tension of the (hypothetical) strings to deform space without attracting nearby objects. The traveler would follow a precise path around rapidly separating strings, and find that he or she had moved backwards in time. Gott's solution does require that the strings are infinitely long, though: a theorem by Stephen Hawking proves that according to general relativity, closed timelike curves cannot be created in a finite region of space unless there is exotic matter present which violates certain energy conditions, while cosmic strings would not be expected to violate these conditions, so strings of finite length would not work.

Gott also proposed a "time mirror": a time travel device based on the principle of time delays. The device would be situated near a black hole some hundred or more light years from Earth. The device would act as a light collector and would power the light rays deformed and curved by the gravitational depression of the black hole. The collector would then reveal the past as detailed by the photons that had originated from Earth.

Since Gott believes that time travel is not cosmologically excluded, he has presented the possibility that the universe was created out of itself (at a later time). This controversial suggestion was published with Li-Xin Lin, and it was described by Gott as "it would be like having one branch of a tree circle around and grow up to be the trunk. In that way, the universe could be its own mother."

In his own book, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time, Gott argues that travel to the past is quite possible, although probably only after the construction of a working device (during its existence), and certainly not onto the time traveler's own past timeline (he argues that either the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics must be invoked to overcome the Grandfather paradox, or that all time travel remain self-consistent, i.e., one can visit the past but not change it, as in the Novikov self-consistency principle). Although he is keen to emphasize that time travel itself is a commonplace physical phenomenon, by this he means time travel into the future at varying rates through special relativity, he is not completely committed on the subject of time travel to the past. The book does say that nothing known excludes such travel, but he does not completely rule out the possibility that future research may prove it impossible.

Copernicus method and Doomsday theory
Gott first thought of his "Copernicus method" of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he did not think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 50% confidence that it would not be there in 1993 (1969 + 8·(1.5/0.5)).

In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his "Copernicus method" to the lifetime of the human race. His paper in Nature was the first to apply the Copernican principle to the survival of humanity; His original prediction gave 95% confidence that the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years. (Brandon Carter's alternative form of the Doomsday argument was delivered earlier that year, but Gott's derivation was independent.)

He made a major effort subsequently to defend his form of the Doomsday argument from a variety of philosophical attacks, and this debate (like the feasibility of closed time loops) is still ongoing. To popularize the Copernicus method, Gott gave The New Yorker magazine a 95% confidence interval for the closing time of forty-four Broadway and Off Broadway productions based only on their opening dates.

Education work
He received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in acknowledgment of his work on the National Westinghouse/Intel Science Talent Search high school student science competition. He is an active promoter of the public awareness of science at the popular level, and Princeton students have voted him the school's outstanding professor several times.

Gott was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He is a Presbyterian who distinguishes physical from metaphysical questions by their teleology; he believes that his writings are entirely scientific (not trespassing into theology) because the motivation for the way things are (or might be) is never examined.

title: J. Richard Gott


text:
User talk:Wctaiwan

Tiger-head shoes
Hello, my friend. Long time! :) I hope all is well on your end. Sooooo, another typhoon season cometh. We've bungeed all the cows down here to prevent last years catastrophe known as "Rain of milk" and "Mooing thunder".

About the shoes, we need a pic. Me? You? Race ya! Seriously, I'll look, but I don't remember seeing any in the shops. All the best, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:39, 11 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hey there. Long time no see indeed! There was a typhoon earlier this week that passed us by, but I'm sure we'll get plenty of direct hits later on. Unfortunately I don't think I've ever seen the shoes in Taipei either--you can apparently buy them online (with same-day shipping, sheesh), but I've never seen them in person. Do you think we might have better luck asking someone on Flickr to release a photo under CC? This one looks quite nice (there are a good many others). (Speaking of that article, most of the references aren't very good and some are plain dead links... Ah well.) wctaiwan (talk) 08:27, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Can you help?
I started Feminism in Taiwan because I didn't think it right that such an article was missing. If you have a chance, it'd be great if you could help out. It's an area of considerable academic study so there are plenty of sources, but its far from my area of expertise. Cheers,  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 05:29, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid it's really not something I'm familiar with either (and I tend to be better at say, looking up sources for a claim, than writing articles from scratch). Great job starting the article, though; the topic definitely deserves coverage. Sorry I couldn't have been more helpful. wctaiwan (talk) 22:50, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
 * No problem at all! If I need to find sources I might come back to you. Cheers,  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:56, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Re: Martinsville Bulletin
Quoting your response to me:"Given that you're creating a new article (so there is no issue with attributing old revisions) and the existing article is just a redirect (and doesn't seem to have been deleted previously), you can simply go ahead and overwrite the redirect with your new article. However, please make sure the subject matter is sufficiently notable before creating the article. Thanks."

Wikipedia will not let me rename my sandbox page to Martinsville Bulletin because of the previous redirect, so i asked for other editors' help in the original request. Thanks. JeffConn (talk) 04:58, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Example
I discovered you redesigned User:Example's user page for no reason. The old one looked fine. The new one looked dull. 49.148.72.29 (talk) 06:11, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, I disagree, but feel free to bring it up for discussion (perhaps at WP:VPM?) and change it back if others agree with you. wctaiwan (talk) 02:43, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Regarding Extension:Thanks
I was modifying extension:Thanks for my private wiki, and had some questions to ask, so are you still active with MediaWiki? and can you plz guide me?103.118.50.4 (talk) 09:37, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not particularly active on Wikipedia or in MediaWiki development anymore. If you need help, Please see the options at Communication. wctaiwan (talk) 05:14, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

title: User talk:Wctaiwan


text:
User talk:AttishOculus

Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! - UtherSRG 13:24, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * How to edit a page
 * Editing, policy, conduct, and structure tutorial
 * Picture tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Naming conventions
 * Manual of Style
 * If you're ready for the complete list of Wikipedia documentation, there's also Topical index.

Metaclass talk
I hope it's good etiquette for me to contact you here... I just wanted to let you know I posted something in response to your March 2006 question in Talk:Metaclass. --Jorend 17:24, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

title: User talk:AttishOculus


text:
Danseparc

Danseparc was Martha and the Muffins' fourth album, recorded in 1982 at Grant Avenue Studios in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and released in 1983. The title single reached #31 in Canada.

This long out-of-print album was reissued on CD through the band's own Muffin Music imprint in North America with a release date of June 25, 2008. Three additional bonus tracks include the original extended dance version of “Danseparc”, “These Dangerous Machines” and a live version of “Sins Of Children” from M&M’s performance at Ontario Place in 1983 featuring avant-guitarist Michael Brook. On August 4, 2008, Cherry Records rereleased the album in the UK. Bass player Jocelyne Lanois is the sister of producer Daniel Lanois.

Personnel

 * Martha Johnson - guitar, keyboards, vocals
 * Mark Gane - guitar, keyboards, vocals
 * Jocelyne Lanois - bass
 * Nick Kent - drums, percussion

with:

 * Daniel Lanois - treatments
 * Nick Gane - synthesizer, piano
 * Glenn Schellenberg - synthesizer
 * Dick Smith - percussion
 * Ron Allen - saxophone
 * John Oswald - saxophone
 * Debbie Griffiths - background vocals

title: Danseparc


text:
Upper Arley

Upper Arley is a village and civil parish near Kidderminster in the Wyre Forest District of Worcestershire, England. Historically part of Staffordshire, the village had a population of 741 at the 2011 census.

Amenities
The Arley railway station on the Severn Valley Railway, one of Britain's preserved steam railways, has been used in many films and television programmes (including the BBC's Oh, Doctor Beeching!). The station was opened in 1862 and closed by British Railways in 1963. It was reopened by the SVR in 1974. The village also has one pub, a tearoom and a post office with shop.

History
Upper Arley used to be in Staffordshire, but was transferred to Worcestershire in 1895. The parish is unusual in being divided into two unequal parts by the river Severn. Woodeaves (west of the river) was only linked to the rest of the parish by a foot ferry, which was replaced in 1972 by a footbridge.

The manor of Upper Arley had various owners before 1276, when it was bought by Roger de Mortimer in 1276. It passed down his family, who held the title Earl of March until 1448 when Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York sold it. It was bought by William Burley, whose daughter Joan married Thomas Lyttleton, whose descendants (spelling their name Lyttelton) also owned Hagley Hall and became Barons Lyttelton until the death of Thomas Lyttelton, 2nd Baron Lyttelton in 1779, when it passed to his sister Lucy and her husband, Arthur Annesley, 8th Viscount Valentia, later Earl of Mountnorris. The manor was held by the Woodward family from 1853 to 1959. Captain Robert Woodward was killed in World War I in 1915. On the death of Sir Chad Woodward, on 2 February 1957, most of the estate was sold off for death duties. His widow continued to retain the rights and duties of the Lord of the Manor.

The village of Upper Arley was an estate village owned in the early 19th century by the Earls of Mountnorris and the heirs, the Viscounts Valentia, from whom the village's second (and now defunct) pub took its name. In the late 20th century, it was owned by the philanthropist and iron & steel tycoon Roger Turner, who bought the estate after selling his family's Staffordshire tubemaking businesses, called the Wellington Steel Tube Co. Ltd. There are a number of subtle references or in-jokes to this legacy on the estate — a large redwood tree of the Wellingtonia variety stands very much out-of-place at the entrance to the manor house of Arley House, as does one by the footbridge across the River Severn in the village; and the estate buildings, be they commercial or residential, are coloured green and cream, the corporate colours of the Wellington companies. By 2000 and the death of Roger Turner, part of his private park was opened to the public as Arley Arboretum. Symbolically, Turner lies buried in the churchyard and next to the gate leading to the Arboretum and Arley House.

Arley Tower, a Grade II listed castellated folly is on Arley Lane close to the river Severn.

title: Upper Arley


text:
Talk:UFD

Fixed by block copy edit to here of disambiguation wiki code from PDT of SCSI

---

Ouch, I wanted the UFD article to say that UFD can mean either of:

Unique Factorization Domain

USB Flash Drive

Now I'm told wiki misunderstood my edit, deciding instead that now UFD means only USB Flash Drive, and no longer Unique Factorization Domain. That's not what I meant to say.

title: Talk:UFD


text:
E. Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier (September 24, 1894 – May 17, 1962), was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States (1939); it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on Black people researched and written by a black person.

In 1948 Frazier was elected as the first black president of the American Sociological Association. He published numerous other books and articles on African-American culture and race relations. In 1950 Frazier helped draft the UNESCO statement The Race Question.

Frazier wrote a dozen books in his lifetime, including The Black Bourgeoisie, a critique of the black middle class in which he questioned the effectiveness of African-American businesses to produce racial equality.

Biography
Frazier was born in Baltimore in 1894 as one of five children of James H. Frazier, a bank messenger, and Mary (Clark) Frazier, a homemaker. He attended the Baltimore public schools, which were legally segregated in those decades. Upon his graduation in 1912 from the Colored High and Training School in Baltimore (renamed in 1923 as Frederick Douglass High School), Frazier was awarded the school's annual scholarship to Howard University, a prominent historically black college.

He graduated with honors from Howard in 1916. Frazier was a top scholar, pursuing Latin, Greek, German and mathematics. He also participated in extracurricular activities including drama, political science, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He was elected as class president in both 1915 and 1916.

Following graduation from Howard, Frazier attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he earned a master's degree in 1920. The topic of his thesis was New Currents of Thought Among the Colored People of America. During his time at Clark, Frazier first began to study sociology, combining his approach with his deep interest in African-American history and culture. Frazier spent 1920–1921 as a Russell Sage Foundation fellow at the New York School of Social Work (later part of Columbia University).

Frazier taught sociology at Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, where he established what is known in the 21st century as the Atlanta University School of Social Work. In 1927 Frazier published his article titled "The Pathology of Race Prejudice" in Forum. Using Freudian terms, he wrote that prejudice was "abnormal behavior," characteristic of "insanity," including dissociation, delusional thinking, rationalization, projection, and paranoia. White people in the South, he argued, were literally driven mad by the "Negro-complex," to the point that "men and women who are otherwise kind and law-abiding will indulge in the most revolting forms of cruelty towards black people."

An Atlanta paper carried an editorial against Frazier's work, which indirectly publicized his article. Already planning to move to Chicago, Frazier and his family left Atlanta early because of severe threats made against them due to the controversy and hostility among whites generated by his article. He had a fellowship from the University of Chicago's sociology department. His studies at Chicago culminated in his earning a Ph.D. in 1931.

Frazier was also teaching at Fisk University during this period, from 1929 to 1934. That year he returned to Howard University, where he taught from 1934 until his death in 1962. After founding and leading the D.C. chapter of the American Sociological Association, Frazier was elected as its first black president in 1948. At Howard, Frazier was a prominent member of the Howard School of International Relations, where his scholarship and research augmented Race and Empire in International Affairs.

In his research and writing, Frazier adopted an approach that examined economic, political and attitudinal factors that shape the systems of social relationships. He continually pressed to find the "social reality" in any context he investigated. His stature was recognized by his election in 1948 as the first black president of the American Sociological Association. "He was established as the leading American scholar on the black family and was also recognized as a leading theorist on the dynamics of social change and race relations."

Frazier's position emphasized African-American cultural developments as a process of accommodation to new conditions in the Americas. Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie, the 1957 English translation of a work first published in French in 1955, was a critical examination of the adoption by middle-class African Americans of a subservient conservatism. His book received "mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe."

Frazier's Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World, published in 1957, explored the relations between the European and non-European races along four categories: ecological, economic, political, and social. The study argued that the economic expansion of Europe remained the most important factor underlying race relations. Likewise, it argued that the new regional power structure birthed out of the Cold War gave non-white peoples an increasingly important role in international affairs with the UN also acting as an arena for the struggles emergent in race relations.

Frazier published eight books, 89 articles and 18 chapters in books edited by others.

Frazier died on May 17, 1962, age 67, in Washington, D.C. He has been ranked among the most important African Americans for his influence on institutions and practices to accept the demands by African Americans for economic, political and social equality in American life.

Some of Frazier's writings generated controversy in the black community for their focus on the effects of slavery and how it divided the black family. During the McCarthy era, when there was conservative political pressure against liberals, Frazier supported civil rights for African Americans; he was also a member of the Council on African Affairs.

Legacy and honors

 * Howard University named its E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research after him.
 * Clark University created a chair and professorship in his name: The E. Franklin Frazier Chair and Professor of English.

Published works

 * The Free Negro Family: a Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War (Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1932)
 * The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932)
 * The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939)
 * Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1940)
 * The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil (1942)
 * The Negro in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1949)
 * The Integration of the Negro into American Society (editor) (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1951.
 * Bourgeoisie noire (Paris: Plon, 1955)
 * Black Bourgeoisie (translation of Bourgeoisie noire)(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957)
 * Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 1957)
 * The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963)
 * On Race Relations: Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by G. Franklin Edwards, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)

title: E. Franklin Frazier