Word: idea
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While assured of her status as a great American singer, Lucinda Williams has never been most people's idea of an easy one--someone whose music you'd trot out at a wedding, say, or any other event where keening is frowned on. Williams isn't po-faced; she's so tough that misery, mostly in the form of doomed men and rotten luck, never stands a chance. It's just that in the Williams songbook, misery never seems to stop coming around, which is why the first track on her ninth album, Little Honey, is such a shock...
Bair, a former aide to Bob Dole, had little idea what was in store when she took over the FDIC back in sleepy 2006. "They said this was going to be 9 to 5 and just an easy portfolio of issues," she said. But she quickly learned how far underwriting standards had fallen. A year ago, she rang the alarm with mortgage lenders and said they were not doing enough to help borrowers meet their house payments. "I thought," she recalled, "they were going to throw tomatoes...
...investigated and found that the machines worked just fine but that rural consumers were using them to wash potatoes. What would an American company do to solve this problem? Call in a p.r. firm to tell consumers that washing vegetables voids their warranty? The Chinese company had a better idea: it added a vegetable-wash cycle to its machines. We call this innovating with ingenuity--and no government program can teach this...
Today the debate about the legitimacy of government's role is largely ended. What argument remains focuses on the efficacy and fairness of various policy choices, not on the idea of intervention itself. Public opinion is far from unanimous about what should be done, but it is virtually unanimous that something must be done. That represents a seismic shift in popular attitudes...
...Amendment had it wrong. Before we adopted the 12th Amendment, the President was the candidate who got the most votes, and the Vice President was the candidate who got the second most votes. And because of the advent of political parties, that turned out to be a very bad idea. But in the current environment, I thought this may be one of the few times in American history where the original framework actually was right. Maybe we would benefit from having both of these guys in the White House at the same time...