Word: barrelism
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While political maneuvering is an insufferable feature of our system, pork barrel projects are one thing and this is another. People are being denied the right most basic to democracy, which this administration threatens to lose out to groveling conservatives, denying liberties in the name of federalism...
...shoulder-held antitank weapon, called the Viper, to replace a Norwegian model costing $135. The U.S. version would be cheaper, a mere $78, and have a longer range. But the first models proved too noisy, so the firing tube was lengthened. When these were tested, part of the barrel blew off. Subjected to the prescribed two-hour water-immersion test, the weapon failed after five minutes underwater. The Norwegian model now costs $250. The Viper, if Congress does not shoot it down, is expected to cost $1,000 each. Says an Administration defense expert: "It is painfully apparent that...
...politicians' commitment to nukes seems to spring from three sources. One is simple pork-barrel politics. Clinch River's two main backers are Tennessee's powerful Republican, senator. Howard Baker, and Congressman Lloyd Bouquard (D-Tenn.), whose district stands to lose jobs if the project shuts down. Another motive seems to be the romanticization of high technology, an irrational love of complexity for its own sake, that ignores nuclear power's evident flaws. This attitude is reflected both in Reagan's vision of remaking America into an "industrial giant" and in many representatives' fears that we might "fall behind...
...morality stories (each with a twist), browbeat them with "verbatim" scenes from Hamlet and Othello and frequently harangue them about politics. With a freewheeling didacticism few audiences today would gravitate to for entertainment, he lengthily described the benefits he had gained in youth by regularly "fertilizing" himself in a barrel of horse manure, and he generously passed on his father's Irish fables in a luxuriantly funny brogue...
...must scrape the bottom of the barrel of credulity to believe that in one short summer or about two hours running time--a verit-able slew of the nasty little problems that life coughs up at us resolve themselves so quaintly. Among the difficulties that late (actually, kismet might be a better word for it dispenses with like some powerful spot remover are an old man's anxiety about aging and death, the long-time antipathy he and his daughter share, the uneasiness of the wife mother who is caught between them, and the generally screwed-up nature...