Word: plainness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that Bush has watched as the cost of simply administering regulatory programs has skyrocketed from $9.6 billion to $11.3 billion in the last three and a half years. In other words, let's set aside that Bush is basically a moderate-conservative Keynesian who thinks supply siders are just plain silly. The economics themselves are dubious...
...immediate cause of the problem is beyond De Beers' control: political instability in some of the planet's richest diamond regions. Although the Angolan drought made alluvial-plain diamonds easier to find, Angola's rush was triggered mainly by the chaotic aftermath of civil war. Thousands of demobilized soldiers with no job prospects began scratching around for easy money. Legislation enacted in November permitting Angolans to trade in uncut diamonds was intended to soak up rough stones that people had illegally hoarded down through the years. Instead, because the move made it vastly easier to unload illegally dug diamonds...
Apart from the question of timing, many experts and just plain folk welcome Perot's plan as a credible blueprint for paring the deficit, which is now growing at a runaway rate of $310 billion a year. Such a program would scarcely pass Congress, however, because lawmakers embrace fiscal responsibility in theory but recoil from it in practice out of fear of angering voters. Yet the plan could take hold if the U.S. could somehow reach a consensus to divvy up the burden. "The only way you'll ever get political agreement is to promise that everyone will share...
...Most likely, they are looking to be seduced by entertainment, not by politics. They know, if Medved doesn't, that the basic stories and attitudes have changed little since the movies were young. Comedy always exalts the clever over the dull; romance promotes the beautiful over the plain; gangster movies and westerns resolve moral dilemmas with fistfights or gunfights. The hero is a fellow cocky toward authority. And drama has always been a charged debate between good and evil. The more vivid the evil -- whether the Nazis in Casablanca or Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs -- the more...
Besides being charged that they are just plain stupid, though, studies of popular culture have to deal with another often-leveled criticism--that students of the discipline don't learn anything they wouldn't in everyday life. It's a debate that's as old as Harvard itself. Cotton Mather accused the College of pandering to common interests when it delved even slightly into secular matters...