Word: importance
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Only two kinds of businesses seem to be thriving: those that sell to the government and those that sell for it. Some merchants who have hoarded such basic items as meat, sugar, flour and even matches have made huge profits. Says a businessman in the import-export trade: "The only money to be made these days is in trading staples, house appliances and the like. People pay whatever they have to to get them...
...decide things for themselves. That is an empty proposition, one which knows no ideology and does more to obscure than illuminate. For if Markey were to have won, what would have been signified? Very little. Questions of local autonomy are irrelevant in issues which are essentially national in import. Decisions about zoning are one thing. Those about racism or nuclear energy are of a different order. The states rights defense cheapens public debate by reducing issues of the utmost conscience to arguments of jurisdiction and power which by nature ignore what is right or moral...
They weren't. Most of the shots on Firing Line were blanks. The Somber Seven were all painfully earnest, briefing-book glib and unfailingly polite. But the few issue differences that emerged (primarily on trade and oil-import fees) were introduced almost apologetically with phrases like "with all due respect." Jesse Jackson and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, the orators of the group, seemed to believe that flights of rhetoric would be unseemly at such a high-tone forum. Two of the technocratic moderates in the race, Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt and Tennessee Senator Albert Gore Jr., were largely content...
...returned to its original emphasis on hard rock and heavy-metal bands, with softer ballads largely relegated to its sister service, VH-1 (available in 20.8 million homes). The channel's format has been diversified with more live programming, sitcoms (reruns of The Monkees and a British import called The Young Ones) and nonmusic inserts, like a series of reports on rock groupies. "We have changed directions," says MTV Entertainment President Tom Freston, successor to MTV Founder Robert Pittman, who left last fall to start his own media company, "from focusing on music alone to including life-style...
This objection fails on four counts. First of all, it is "their oil" in only a technical sense. It is true that the Europeans and Japanese import more gulf oil than the U.S. does. But oil is fungible, and the U.S. imports almost half its oil. Were the gulf shut down, our allies would have to get it + elsewhere, thus bidding up the price. If this resulted in a panic, as happened in the oil shock of 1979, all oil importers, including the U.S., would be badly damaged...