Word: drain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more mirage than reality. "Poland has serious structural economic problems," observes a senior Administration official. "The money it has previously borrowed from the West has been used very poorly." Unless the Poles revamp their economic system, says the official, "it's going to be money down the drain...
...same time he was curtailing exorbitant demands on his country's exchequer, Gorbachev was trying to establish peaceful conditions around the country's borders. Simply enforcing totalitarianism on restive East bloc neighbors was no longer a satisfactory solution; their own vast economic and political troubles were becoming an insupportable drain on Soviet resources and attention. Perhaps most important, Gorbachev recognized that it was essential to enlist economic, technological and managerial assistance from the West. The price of that was a curtailment of cold war aggression and regional agitation...
...tried reasoning with them. I've tried bribes. I've even threatened to take the glop off the shower drain and throw it in their beds. One night I was so frustrated that I thought back to what my father would do when my siblings and I made too much noise late at night...
Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the majority opinion in the original Roe decision, predicts that Roe will likely "go down the drain this term." Even if it doesn't, Blackmun and his liberal brethren, Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, are teetering on the brink of retirement. Another Republican-appointed justice would seal Roe's fate...
...office space most efficiently. Six years later he was holding up SALT II for a Carter Administration commitment to increase conventional-forces spending. "They told me they couldn't think of how to spend more money," says Nunn, still incredulous. "That was what really started SALT II down the drain." But Nunn wasn't implacably hostile. His support of the Panama Canal treaty gave Carter one of his greatest victories. "I think it would have lost if I hadn't gone along," says Nunn. "There were at least two Senators who were waiting to see which...