Word: argumentative
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Democrats are also planning to stick to the argument that a big tax cut means you can forget about using the burgeoning federal budget surplus to pay down the national debt. In an adroit bit of political gamesmanship, Bill Clinton played up the goal of debt elimination last week when he unveiled new White House budget calculations that show the total surplus over the next 10 years rising to nearly $5 trillion, an $800 billion increase over the last estimate issued just six months ago. ?We should be shooting for a debt-free America by the end of the decade...
...economic sense of this argument is, well, arguable. Interest-rate cuts take six months or longer to make a real impact on the economy, and Alan Greenspan implements those with a wave of his hand. Bush's tax cut faces a long road through Congress, and of course part of the argument he used during the campaign - back when everybody worried that it would overstimulate a red-hot economy - was that the cuts would be phased in so gradually that no one would notice...
...when a vigorous argument about dimples breaks down precisely along party lines, that is a coincidence that requires explanation. The most obvious explanation is that everybody's view on dimples depend on their view about the logically unrelated subject of who should be President. If fate had put Gore and Bush in the other's place on election night, the drama of the next five weeks would have had everybody playing the opposite role. Katherine Harris would have been flexibility personified. Laurence Tribe and David Boies would have been eloquent sticklers for the precise rule of law. Do you doubt...
This is the way Boies rehearses for a critical oral argument: he is in a conference room in San Francisco, spending his Sunday afternoon preparing his appeal in the attempt to vacate a crippling lower-court order in the Napster case. Fueled on junk food (in his hierarchy of tastes, food is not far from clothing), he's thinking at times about another case that he will be arguing the same morning by teleconference to a panel of judges in Los Angeles. And for much of the day, virtually up to the last moments before he enters the marbled...
...then Boies is on his feet, calmly elucidating--without notes, of course--the four essential points of his argument, his hands sometimes shaking the invisible box, his thumbs sometimes making a pair of goalposts. He cites page numbers and percentages and the specific copyright status of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and My Man Godfrey. Then the sun rises in the west: Boies asks the court's forbearance while he looks up a page number he cannot recall...