Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...benefits and the employers deduct the insurance premiums from their taxable profits, an arrangement that is thought to cost the government $75 billion a year. But Clinton determined early that nothing labeled as a large tax increase would fly politically. So his planners were driven to a Rube Goldberg scheme of mechanisms designed to hold down costs of extending care to the uninsured; one lobbyist describes it as "an elaborate way of getting around having to tax people...
While Harvard's own Al Gore '69 claims to be re-inventing government, Harvard itself seems to have enlisted the service of an equally renowned thinker to design its bureaucratic structure: Rube Goldberg...
...elders gathered to pick their presidential candidates. That role having long since been forfeited to the primaries, the parties have turned the convention into a made-for-TV show. Perot understands that this new contraption -- parties manipulating media to send out the parties' message under cover of "news" -- is Rube Goldberg inefficiency. Why not let one man go on Larry King and send the message out himself, directly...
Even without Brooks, the country sound has upset the cosmopolitan assumptions of Los Angeles and New York City, which said drawl-and-twang music would never acquire a mass audience. Country music was, after all, the sort of rube industry that made a vamp out of the cowboy by putting him in rhinestones and that churned out corn pone-ography like TV's Hee Haw, the show where banjo pickers and celebrity fiddlers would pop out of a field to joke about henpecked husbands and lazy cousins. Worse, the last time country flashed across the national consciousness, it was propelled...
...DELICATESSEN, but the setting has the look of Gallic movies from the grungy- romantic '30s. Everything else is, well, different. Meat is scarce here, so the piggy butcher serves chopped humans to his customers -- who may soon be his victims. A housewife bent on suicide rigs up a dozen Rube Goldberg devices of destruction. Underground, an army of inept "Troglodists" (sort of Middle- Age Mutant Dingy Frogmen) plots revolution. And a nice guy in clown shoes hopes the butcher's myopic daughter will see the goodness in his heart. Part circus, part zoo, the film's milieu is a nice...