Word: blunting
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...fifth term with 79% of the vote. His annual budgets are routinely passed with only token opposition. He controls public housing, public schools and the city council. He is cozy with Big Business, is a master at the ward politics of fixing streetlights, and he speaks with a blunt, blue-collar brio that Chicagoans find endearing. "There's never been a [U.S.] mayor, including his dad, who had this much power," says Paul Green, professor of policy studies at Chicago's Roosevelt University. And he's used it to steer the Windy City into a period of impressive stability, with...
Tremendous pressure was also building on Paulding. Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death-penalty crusader and author of Dead Man Walking, called the devout Catholic attorney on the phone. Prejean says the conversation was blunt: "'T.R.,' I told him, 'you are the one movable part of this machinery of death.'" Eventually, a judge made an extraordinary threat to take away Paulding's law license if any new evidence about Ross's competence emerged after he had been executed. An hour from death, Ross backed down--in order to save his lawyer's neck, he says. The aborted execution cost...
Folsom's attempts to isolate gang leaders have failed, so when violence flares, authorities have been forced increasingly to use the single blunt tool at their disposal: confinement of all prisoners to their cells. During such "lock-downs," inmates are released only for a ten-minute shower every other day, spending the rest of the time seething in their cells. After each of Folsom's recent lock-downs, inmates have emerged ornery as ever. "All the lock-downs do is buy time," says Prison Chaplain James McGee...
...inaugural address delivered last week by Alan García Pérez, Peru's new President, was more than an impassioned speech to his people. It was a blunt message to the foreign banks and governments that have loaned Peru money. Determined and defiant, García vowed to renegotiate Peru's $13.7 billion debt during the next twelve months, and said that while doing so he would devote no more than 10% of his country's export earnings to making interest payments...
MSNBC found Coulter "blunt, rude and just completely over the top," says Stephen Lewis, a former MSNBC producer involved in Coulter's hiring--and firing. The network dismissed her at least twice: first in February 1997, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, even as the network was covering her somber memorial service. Coulter said Harriman was one of those women who "used men to work their way up" and suggested "Sharon Stone or Madonna" as her replacement. Even so, the network missed Coulter's jousting and quickly rehired...