Word: portentousness
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...intends to raise taxes or hold the line. "New numbers come in almost every day," said Ackley, and Johnson juggles them with the skill of a center-ring virtuoso. Last week, for example, aides in Austin hinted that the fiscal 1968 budget might total $140 billion-an almost certain portent of higher taxes. Almost immediately, however, they began "massaging" the fat out of that figure. Come January, and-presto!-Johnson will look like a genius if he unveils a budget in the neighborhood of $130 billion instead...
...some very sinister stuff: a glaze-eyed Aryan appears, bearing down on her. But up jumps a nervous little Dragnet theme to turn it ludicrous. When Hamlet asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Am I easier to fret than a pipe?" the scene is played in heavy silence that exaggerates its portent. But presumbaly that's the director's doing, as, unfortunately, is a lot else...
...portent of that was Bull Connor's own statement, when he first became commissioner back in the '30's, that he favored Negro police on the force. The idea, no doubt, was to relieve whites of the task of looking after Negroes. The cops themselves were adamantly opposed. As late as October, 1963, five months after Birmingham's voters ousted the three-man city commission and replaced it with a racially moderate mayor and city council, and one month to the day after the Birmingham church bombing, the Fraternal Order of Police issued a statement asserting that hiring Negro policemen...
...most heartening and significant portent of Alabama's 1966 primary is that Negroes voted-massively, enthusiastically and sensibly. They demonstrated a remarkable ability to vote with racial sympathy in instances where this was the issue and ignore color where it was not important. Said the N.A.A.C.P...
...reluctant to invoke it. For most Americans, Manifest Destiny died when the 20th cen- tury was born, and two world wars have only thrust it deeper in its grave. Nonetheless, the junior Senator from Arkansas last week professed to see the U.S. commitment to Viet Nam as a portent of the overweening conviction of righteousness that has typified most major powers in decline...