Word: plainspoken
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...George W. Bush the Candidate. This is a different guy from George W. Bush the President, whose rotating personae--resolute defender of freedom, deer in the headlights, jaunty flyboy--haven't been nearly as engaging as the low-key fellow who campaigned in 2000. Bush the Candidate is charming, plainspoken and humble. He rarely raises his voice; he never orates; he always drops his gs. It is hard to imagine a politician more different from John Kerry, who has dominated the past few months with equine dignity but without really ingratiating himself...
...S.S.A. possesses between 500 and 2,000 troops?no one knows for sure. Ask a rebel spokesman how many, and he tersely replies, "Enough." Many of the S.S.A.'s fighters were previously loyal to former opium warlord Khun Sa, who surrendered to Rangoon in 1996. Today they answer to plainspoken commander colonel Yawdserk, himself a former Khun Sa man, who vehemently denies any current S.S.A. involvement in the drugs trade. On these remote hills, poppies are still grown and opium is still traded, along with millions of methamphetamine pills called yaba, or crazy medicine...
Grunwald writes with an obvious tenderness toward his heroine--in an introductory note, he discusses his decades-long obsession with her--but that doesn't stop him from treating her roughly, and her tale is in the end bittersweet at best. He delivers it in a bluff, plainspoken style; one flaw in the telling is that the dialogue has a touch of that musty quality that often inhabits historical fiction. Yet Grunwald has a strong sense of his historical period--he genuinely intuits the mirror logic of the Renaissance religious mind--and his story has an emotional power that transcends...
...state that has lost more than 37,000 textile jobs since the U.S. lifted quotas on Chinese imports two years ago. Unless Rowland's North Carolina workers suddenly become competitive with Chinese counterparts who earn just a few dollars a day, he fears his employees will be next. The plainspoken Southerner ticks off what he regards as China's unfair advantages: excessive government protection, an underpriced currency, cowed and underpaid workers, exports dumped below cost. If Washington won't help, Rowland says, he will have to move some jobs overseas. The new quotas slapped on some Chinese textiles last month...
...creative policy thinking. Think about it: Apart from his early stand against the war in Iraq, what has distinguished Dean's candidacy from that of the other Democrats? The propellant for the Dean surge has been almost all style and process--the Internet successes; the monthly Meetups; his stirring, plainspoken pugnacity; the joyful abandon of his campaign--and the sense of community he has aroused in his supporters...