Word: barrelers
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...little like one of Thomas Pynchon's wonderland allegories. A motley but not unlikable crew of misfits chases around rural California in quest of a greenback grail: $312,000 in cash embezzled from a talent agency years earlier. James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser barrel over the back roads towing an Airstream Land Yacht, pursued by two absurdly sinister motor homes painted deadly black and piloted by unseen, relentless drivers...
MADAME VICTOR STEINLE, the widow of an Alsatian wine-barrel maker, has changed nationalities five times in her long life. She was born French, but became German in 1870 when Bismarck's army marched across the Rhine and took possession of Alsace and Lorraine. She remained German until 1918, when the French returned to Strasbourg. In 1940 Hitler made her German again, and in 1944 she was back where she began, a citizen of the French Republic. "My only wish," she says, at the age of 108, "is not to change again. I want to die French...
...National Rural Electric Cooperative Association gathered to denounce a prospective increase in interest for REA loans. They were joined by another veteran lobby, the National Farmers Union, which is aghast at the President's abolition of the Rural Environmental Assistance Program, a durable piece of pork barrel that distributes $225 million a year among all 50 states. So successful were the lobbyists' initial efforts that the House Agriculture Committee quickly reported out a bill that would require the President to spend the money appropriated for REAP...
Over the decades, farmers' income has grown to record highs, and REAP has degenerated into a pork barrel. Many farmers were paid year after year for continuing conservation practices that they were originally encouraged to start as a demonstration for their neighbors. Some REAP drainage projects destroyed wetlands needed by wildlife and subsidized the growing of potatoes in Idaho to the detriment of potato farmers in Maine. Former Agriculture Under Secretary John Schnittker voices the most telling criticism of the program: "REAP subsidizes farmers to do what they would do anyway. Most conservation practices are themselves profitable...
...bitterness left over from his Navy experience continued to fester. Friends reported that he became a different person. The walls of his apartment in New Orleans were decorated with revolutionary slogans such as MY DEATH LIES IN THE BLOODY DEATH OF RACIST PIGS and POLITICAL POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL...