Word: czars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...even weirder at Warner. Harry Warner, the studio's money czar, said he knew nothing about his cartoon unit except that "we make Mickey Mouse." Leon Schlesinger, the stingy despot who ran the unit until 1944, would begin his viewing of dailies with a curt "Roll the garbage." Schlesinger did inspire his troops once: his lisp was the basis for Daffy Duck's voice. Schlesinger's successor, Eddie Selzer, hated the notion that his slaves might enjoy their work. He once sputtered, "What the hell has all this laughter to do with the making of animated cartoons...
...deals vividly with starvation, disease, tribal hatreds, sociopathic blood lust, religious mania, governmental terrorism and most other sources of human misery. But the author's predominant diagnosis of what went wrong, on all sides and without letup, is that stupidity ruled--quite literally in the case of the last Czar, Nicholas II (who comes across here as dull-minded and weak), and his wife Alexandra (dull-minded and forceful). At a time when Russia might have been transformed by shrewd and humane reforms into a parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch (a role that would have suited a Czar whose...
...industrialist to have coffee with the President, no alarms went off. No one made much of the fact that Dhanin Chearavanont, 57, chairman of the CP Group, is believed to be the largest single foreign investor in China and an economic adviser to Beijing. When an aide to campaign czar Harold Ickes asked "if it would be problematic if this individual met briefly W/ POTUS," the green light came quickly from the NSC: "O.K. by Asia Affairs." Among the 11 NSC officials informed of the meeting: Rand Beers...
...Washington expected the news. Bill Clinton's antidrug czar Barry McCaffrey heard it from the State Department, which had found out about it from reporters. The Drug Enforcement Administration was caught flat-footed, as was the CIA. At a press conference, a chagrined Attorney General Janet Reno said, "What I learned was at the point after the arrest was made...
...informant told the Mexican Defense Secretary, General Enrique Cervantes, that Gutierrez was living in a luxury apartment "whose rent cannot be paid with the salary of a public official," a statement from Cervantes' office later said. Summoned to a midnight meeting on the same day, Mexico's drug czar suffered a heart attack when questioned about the apartment, and was ordered into a military hospital...