Word: ribboners
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...full-frontal Clinton--winking, mugging at the most mundane remarks, pointing excitedly into the crowd as if he had just spotted a long-lost friend or a donor. Except for Senator Chuck Schumer, stage center, trying to boogie with the homeboys, it was picture perfect, a routine ribbon cutting turned into exuberant street carnival. Cable dropped its split-screen coverage of Clinton alongside the current President giving a speech, and went with full-screen coverage of an ex-President opening an office. The New York Times's headline the next day: A HERO'S WELCOME...
...full-frontal Clinton--winking, mugging at the most mundane remarks, pointing excitedly into the crowd as if he had just spotted a long-lost friend or a donor. Except for Senator Chuck Schumer, stage center, trying to boogie with the homeboys, it was picture perfect, a routine ribbon cutting turned into exuberant street carnival. Cable dropped its split-screen coverage of Clinton alongside the current President giving a speech, and went with full-screen coverage of an ex-President opening an office. The New York Times's headline the next day: A HERO'S WELCOME...
...Blue-ribbon presidential commissions fall into two very different personality groups. Type A commissions are made up of reasonable people who disagree about some complicated problem and then struggle to reach consensus. These folks spend months in tortuous public hearings, draft carefully hedged reports, and often wind up utterly deadlocked. Type B panels avoid that outcome by being rigged from the start--stacked with people who already agree on What Is to Be Done yet still go through the motions of assessing the problem. Their final reports are clear and sweeping but usually dead on arrival, because all the opponents...
...shown little grasp of finance. An ex-minister recalls spending a night crunching a lengthy technical report to two pages for her. "She couldn't even get through the first few paragraphs," he lamented. "Then she asked if there were any new projects where she could cut the ribbon." Foreign investors are concerned that Megawati may appoint her husband's business cronies rather than solid professionals to the government's key economic jobs. Indonesia owes $140 billion in foreign debt, inflation is nearing double digits, and the rupiah is one of the weakest currencies in the region. Corruption remains rife...
...battle is stoked by divisions of class, real and perceived. Jack Welch, head of the 600,000-member Blue Ribbon Coalition of motorized recreationists, calls the greens "elitist." Many of his fellow drivers see their enemies either as rich ski folk defending their million-dollar chalets along the Volvo/Chardonnay line or as REI-outfitted granola eaters who want the backcountry to themselves. The greens in turn view the ATV crowd as an emission-spewing, beer-guzzling NASCAR subset that stops to smell the flowers only after running over them...