Word: populists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California - an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy. Beholden to a tax-averse electorate, the state's liberals and moderates have attempted to live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect - freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts...
...flummoxed by a candidate who seemed to have been trained by some Iranian equivalent of Karl Rove. They appeared paralyzed by what they considered his coarse impertinence; in American terms, these might have been debates between George Bush the Elder and Newt Gingrich, a gentlemanly establishmentarian against a rude populist brawler. Ahmadinejad was a slick combination of facts and accusations. He spoke directly into the camera. He deployed little charts, as Ross Perot did in the 1990s, to show that things weren't as bad as people thought. His statistics were heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents...
...years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist becomes President, it is a step down. But there...
...there are signs that a populist, anti-copyright movement may be gaining strength. Earlier this month, Sweden voted a member of the Pirate Party, which campaigned on an anti-copyright platform, to the European Parliament. The party, which won 7.13% of the vote, is named after Swedish file sharing website Pirate Bay. Earlier this year, a Swedish court sentenced four of the Bay founders to a year in prison each and a fine of approximately $3.6 million for "assisting in making copyright content available." There is no formal connection between Bay and the Pirate Party but there is little hiding...
...Adopting the style of a populist demagogue, Ahmadinejad hasn't allowed facts to spoil a good argument. In public appearances, for example, he has repeatedly claimed that Iran's inflation rate is 15%, whereas the country's Central Bank puts it at 25%. He insists, against the evidence, that unemployment and the country's disparity in wealth are both on the decline, and he casts himself as an Iranian Robin Hood, depicted on banners as bowing to poor old farmers and deprived children. And in a neat trick for an incumbent, he styles himself as an insurgent outsider: "For four...