Word: base
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Populists have been doing it for years--telling the common man that politicians are against them or that the political process is a farce. The difference today is that politicians no longer need to broaden their appeal beyond a committed, activist base. And they know more precisely than ever what the base wants. The soapbox, which became the sound bite, thanks to radio and television, has gone interactive. If you say it today, the audience will come to you. "There is an interactive element to this. I spend enough time online to figure out what people are thinking," explains Grayson...
...policy areas, the President and his team try so hard to satisfy their critics that they appear unwilling to make critical choices, doing just enough to raise hopes but not enough to realize them. The Administration, for example, announced in mid-September that it was unilaterally dropping plans to base advanced missile-defense interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic. Critics said Obama had given away the East European store to Russia in the vague hope of getting assistance on Iran. But a month later, literally on the same day that the U.S., Russia and others were negotiating with Iran...
...Army appointed its first Muslim chaplain in 1993, and five years later the Navy opened the U.S. military's first mosque at Norfolk Navy Base in Virginia. The Pentagon is eager for the language skills of Muslims, and has been awarding signing bonuses and expedited citizenship (for the two-thirds of enlistees who are legal aliens) since 2003 to recruits fluent in Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Kurdish and Pashto. (The Army's website, in its typically patriotic but omnisciently weird way, declares these 450 new soldiers - all sent to Afghanistan, Iraq or the Horn of Africa - "100% support the Global...
...girl, and a U.S. helicopter crash in 2004 at a Ginowan university campus. Sunday's protest followed another on Saturday, when 2,000 demonstrated in the town of Kadena, near Ginowan, to oppose the proposal made by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada to merge Futenma with the Kadena air base...
...Tokyo, trying to hold fast to its campaign promises to resolve the base issue in step with the needs of Okinawans, has felt diplomatic pressure from the U.S. State Department over the past few weeks to make a firm decision to enable the terms of the 2006 agreement on Futenma. In late October, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pushed Hatoyama to uphold Japan's end of the 2006 agreement. "Secretary Gates played the bad cop so that President Obama won't have to," says Michael Green, senior adviser and Japan chair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies...