Word: effective
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...friends were a bigger problem than his enemies, and Clinton is finding it to be true. Time and again the President provided big contributors with the sort of encouragement that when presented in business circles in the Far East, might be mistaken for official credentials. This created, in effect, a shadow diplomatic corps. For businessmen abroad, a picture with the President is worth a lot more than a thousand words--or dollars, for that matter. One supporter, Johnny Chung, whose $366,000 in donations qualified him as a "managing trustee" of the Democratic National Committee, made 49 visits...
...this cost cutting has accompanied one other remarkable change in the way airlines do business. The mid-1990s have seen the major carriers, in effect, stop picking one another's pockets. Where once they seemed to have a policy of infinite expansion into competitors' territories, now they view wholesale expansion as too dangerous. The last carrier to seriously invade another's main hub was a Continental operation called Continental Lite, which attempted to win market share in major Eastern markets. Continental Lite sank in 1995, losing $300 million. Since then the hub-and-spoke carriers have retreated to their fortresses...
...American's pilots and other groups--who gave up wages and benefits in the past--can only put upward pressure on prices. And with companies such as USAir and TWA struggling mightily to maintain altitude, a big merger is possible, which would invariably reduce price competition. The net effect, everywhere you turn, is that fares are up and service is way down--and the prospects aren't good for much improvement in the future...
Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective...
...community of people who are convinced that Alec Guinness, who is presently alive and well and living in a London suburb, actually bit it back in the late '80s. Obi-Wan Kenobi's dialogue with Luke in that memorable scene from Star Wars, as a result, had its unlikely effect on me: "Oh, he's not dead; not yet." Well, apparently...