Word: ragtag
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...called the Greens "a lively, irreverent, topsy-turvy coalition of assorted left-wingers who decided they are both a party and a movement." At last year's national Green party convention, dogs raced around the podium and paper airplanes flew during the proceedings. But what was once considered a ragtag, disorganized group of hippies has taken practical steps towards gaining power and turning rhetoric into public policy--enough so that the older politicians have become increasingly worried about the March 6 national elections...
...predictably the target of potshots from the right. The local political left, of course, was generally pleased with the antigun crusade of the moderate mayor. But not all factions on the left: more determinedly upset than any of the conservative gun groups was the White Panther Party, a ragtag tribe of about a dozen communards encamped in an electric-blue town house in-yes-the Haight-Ashbury district. The Panthers were formed in the 1960s, and they still adhere to a position popular with the far left in that frenzied time: revolutionaries need weapons...
...Soviet paratroopers landed at Kabul airport and began a prolonged, costly and so far unsuccessful campaign to control Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal, 53, the Kremlin's hand-picked leader, remains in power, but the Soviet Union's 105,000 troops have failed in rooting out the mujahedin, the ragtag but stubborn guerrillas who control most of the countryside. Neither side has gained or lost much ground over the past three years, and all signs point to a continuing stalemate. Although diplomats began to speculate last November that new Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov would try to find a face-saving...
...them wide of the mark is a penchant for insipid shock value (a make-out scene in a morgue) and a sentimental streak as wide as an emergency ward. When James Coco and Doris Roberts appeared last week as two street derelicts, they seemed to bring everything in their ragtag baggage but a violin and a cup. Roberts, facing the amputation of both feet because her frozen toes had become gangrenous, was forced into a literally incredible choice between dismemberment, Coco and death that not even Ben Casey could have treated successfully...
...soldiers for themselves. The gathering sometimes seemed conventional: patriotic eulogies, American Legion caps, martial music and maudlin, affectionate reunions of old platoon chums. But the convocation had an edge, a sense of catharsis, mainly because it was large and public. In the end, with a splendidly ragtag march down Constitution Avenue and the dedication of the Veterans Memorial, the spectacle seemed like the national homecoming the country had never offered...