Ardith Hinton wrote:

>   Sometimes, as in "He thought it rather strange that
>   there was a car hanging from the underside of the
>   Granville Street Bridge."  The repetition of "was" in
>   such cases would sound unnecessary at best to many
>   native speakers of English.

I don't think it either an elision or an exception.  It is a
perfectly valid grammarical construction with verbs
"consider", "think", "deem", &c.  Trowest not thou so?

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 * Origin: - nntp://news.fidonet.fi - Lake Ylo - Finland - (2:221/6)