Word: rico
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...Pieta with a hammer in his pocket isn't alone in wanting to go down in history. Presidents can feel the urge with equally disastrous results. Richard Nixon's need to keep the tapes was his downfall, and Gerald Ford's last grand gesture, proposing statehood for Puerto Rico, was his last blunder. Ford had an enthusiasm for drives and campaigns with the flair of Chamber of Commerce resolutions. And, whether impeaching Earl Warren, Whipping Inflation Now, or inoculating every American for swine flu, they tended to fizzle out quickly. Still, when he announced during a skiing trip at Vail...
...please his friends? He possibly felt that it is in the interest of the United States to assure control over the secret petroleum deposits off the north shore of the island, or perhaps he made an empty offer as a gambit in the forthcoming debates over Puerto Rico in the United Nations Decolonization Committee. He gave good reason to suspect the latter when he used his arrival at the economic summit as an occasion for warning Cuba that the United States would never relinquish Puerto Rico. If we take him at his word, he acted out of sympathy with Puerto...
Right after Ford's announcement came a second surprise, the publication of a poll conducted by Gallup in the United States, in which 59 per cent of the Americans interviewed said they favored statehood for Puerto Rico. Now the question was phrased as follows: "Puerto Ricans recently elected a pro-statehood governor. Do you favor statehood for Puerto Rico?" Only an enemy of democracy could have said no. And in other polls, about a fifth have said they favored independence, with an equal number who had never heard of the island. Many Americans do not understand, for example, that Puerto...
...leaders were notified a few minutes before the announcement, but House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. was not. "The whole thing is crazy," said an aide to the Senate Interior Committee, which monitors Puerto Rican affairs. Added a House Territorial Subcommittee staffer: "The key is for Puerto Rico to show some interest in becoming a state, and it hasn...
...gasoline price proposals into legislative form by Jan. 20, they will be dealt with by a new President and a new Congress, with their own ideas about the nation's needs. As for Ford's well-intentioned championing of statehood for Puerto Rico, it left some Puerto Ricans muttering that the White House was trying to force them into a "shotgun wedding." Newly installed Governor Romero, a longtime statehood advocate, offered his opinion in his inaugural address: he pointedly chose not even to mention the Ford proposal...