Word: hidebound
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...federal agencies that regulate business have regularly been denounced from every part of the ideological spectrum-but none has vexed more people more consistently than the Federal Power Commission. One oil executive calls the agency "hidebound and bureaucratic"; another terms it "a miserable failure." Consumer advocates are just as vehement. "The FPC acts as judge and jury," says one. Congress is the most critical of all. Just before the November elections, the watchdog House Oversight Subcommittee accused the FPC of everything from "preconceived ideological" commitments to "a conscious disregard of its statutory duties." It bluntly concluded that...
Once a year Washington's Gridiron Club justifies its existence by roasting the pretensions and perquisites of politicians at a lampoon dinner. For the other 364 days, the group of columnists, bureau chiefs and other journalistic elders acts like any other hidebound institution. Among the most staunchly defended traditions: a membership limit of 50; women need not apply...
...member of the "Class of 70," a small group of freshmen legislators bent on reforming the Senate, Chiles, a lawyer, decries the chamber's inefficiencies and has sponsored a "sunshine" bill that would open most congressional committee meetings and federal agency hearings to the public. "We're hidebound and hobbled," he says. "We're so far behind the state legislature of Florida in our decision-making capacity that it's kind of pitiful...
...greatest game of them all." ' Or is it? Surely football is closer to the Zeitgeist, with its chatter of "long bombs" and marches downfield. Surely basketball with its constant scoring, or hockey with its eruptions of violence, is America's ideal spectator sport. The conservative, hidebound sport of baseball can offer no such qualities; scoring is rare, violence a matter of tempers, not policy. The game is an echo of a vanished pre-TV, prewar America, a bygone place of leisure and tranquillity...
...which professional and amateur athletes would compete, much as they do in tennis and golf. Certainly some basic regulations must be updated and simplified. As it stands, the Olympic rulebook reads like a French constitution, and is just about as workable. Whatever man-made foul-ups were involved, hidebound laws and simple legislative misunderstanding contributed to such contretemps as the disqualification of U.S. Swimmer Rick DeMont and his loss of a gold medal and the ludicrous 51-50 Russian victory over the Americans in the basketball finale...