Word: pretenders
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...sure, Washington lawmakers, including members of both parties, like to pretend all this is a matter of free will, that people make their choices and then must accept the consequences. But the right choices--going to school, working hard, saving for a down payment--used to offer a reasonable assurance of achieving the American dream. While most of us still have a decent shot at the good life, risk has been introduced into American life--the risk of never getting on track to prosperity, or falling suddenly from it--in ways few Washington policymakers would care to admit...
...actor I couldn't play myself--in a voice-over. So they hired Jon Cryer (Two and a Half Men) to play me, which, oddly, we both found insulting. Next they concluded that booking celebrities for interviews was too difficult, so they wrote fake interviews and had actors pretend to be the guests, thereby removing the entire premise of the show. Then they set the show at VH1 instead of a magazine--and made Joel an incredibly unlikable jerk. It had morphed from my idea to an idea that kids who used to beat me up would have liked. After...
...campaign conforms to crude stereotypes. The biggest campaign corps belongs to Howard Dean, whose volunteers are overwhelmingly white and mostly female. They wear old clothes, exude a crunchy vibe and spend a lot of time on the dating website Friendster.com They're basically the rich kids on campus who pretend they have no money (the Dean campaign parking lot is full of SUVs and Saabs). It's their insularity--plus the Saabs--that make them universally hated among the other volunteers...
...Leno, whose rival show airs on NBC. Letterman, also tapped for an award this year, beseeched his audience, "I'm Dave Letterman! I work here at CBS!" On air, he demanded a call from a "big-deal person" at the network: "Apologize, beg for my forgiveness and pretend that you fired the person responsible." Minutes later, CBS prez Les Moonves complied, quipping that the network's website had been demolished completely. Oprah won again anyway...
...customers. Over the past five years, L'Oreal bought two of them, SoftSheen and Carson, and integrated them into a single entity that the company sees as a worldbeater. Researchers at the Chicago institute will help develop products that SoftSheen/Carson can take well beyond the U.S. "You can't pretend to be No. 1 in the world," says Alain Evrard, L'Oreal's managing director for Africa, "and forget about 1 billion consumers of African origin...