Word: contemptible
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Your Dashboard graphic showing the racial breakdown of inmates reminded me why our prison system has deservedly earned us the contempt of the world [March 17]. We incarcerate a larger percentage of the population than any other nation, and the government puts away harmless souls under the guise of fighting its two "wars" on terror and drugs. It's a tragic irony that freedom is now a mere buzzword in a land once regarded by many as a beacon to the world. Gordon Wilson, LAGUNA NIGUEL, CALIF...
That said, it's worth recalling the contempt with which the Bush Administration viewed Bill Clinton's failed efforts to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To Bush's team, Clinton's desperate pursuit of a deal--his first-term Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, visited Israel 35 times--was a waste of presidential prestige. It smacked of utopian arrogance, as if Americans thought we could make a messy world behave the way we wanted...
...left government not only did nothing to slow the rising prices of basic commodities but also worsened the situation by increasing taxes. Everybody is struggling with meager salaries or pensions, while members of the ruling class enjoy enormous incomes and a lot of benefits. Everywhere one can feel the contempt that ordinary people nourish toward politicians in this mock democracy. The sight of the uncollected trash around Naples is a painful metaphor of the Italian mess. Alessandro Berrini, SAN DONATO MILANESE, ITALY...
...left government not only did nothing to slow the rising prices of basic commodities but also worsened the situation by increasing taxes. Everybody is struggling with meager salaries or pensions, while members of the ruling class enjoy enormous incomes and a lot of benefits. Everywhere one can feel the contempt that ordinary people nourish toward politicians in this mock democracy. The sight of the uncollected trash around Naples is a painful metaphor of the Italian mess. Alessandro Berrini San Donato Milanese, Italy...
...serious dramas from Oscar-winning directors. Anyone who worked in other kinds of movies ran into the wall of the Academy's genre snobbery. Crime movies (later known as film noir) had a dark glory, a stinging postwar fatalism, but flew under the Academy's radar and beneath its contempt. Of the hundreds of westerns in the '50s, some were superb, like Ford's The Searchers and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, but even those A-list directors could not interest Oscar in their oaters--zero nominations for those two great films-- or in John Wayne's towering performances in them...