Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Though slightly more liberal in their leanings, Yeltsin and his regime are nowhere near the democracy we in America would like to think. Yeltsin's dissolution of parliament and subsequent use of force to quell protests exemplify his disdain for the democratic political process. Yeltsin is a shrewd politician and a master at manipulating the West into believing he represents Russia's only realistic possibility for change and economic transformation. Neil K. Malik Attleboro, Massachusetts
...defenses to stop them. This standard has met some resistance from the chief of the SDI program, Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson. In testimony before Congress two months ago, Abrahamson argued that SDI should be ''affordable,'' a more elastic definition. Nitze, a shrewd bureaucratic infighter, persuaded the President to sign a national security decision directive making his criterion official policy. Asked at the TIME conference whether he was trying to skirt Nitze's standard, Abrahamson demurred. He conceded that he might have ''erred'' by using the word ''affordable,'' but he seemed to fudge by insisting that the question...
...Joker may be insane, but he's a shrewd judge of character. He knows that Batman has two vulnerable spots: his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, assuming the role Katie Holmes had in the first film) and his hidden identity. So the Joker starts preying on Rachel, and he says he'll stop terrorizing Gotham if Batman will come out from under the mask. A modest request from the bin Laden of movie villains, yet Bruce is reluctant. Or rather, the film is, since the informing principle of any franchise is perpetuation of the series. No secret, no Batman - just...
...most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough. But Buffett, for all his affability, is shrewd about disengaging himself to avoid any unnecessary distractions that might impair his judgment. People often try to convince him to meet with them so they can pitch investments to him, he said, but he sees through their many ruses - not least their flattery - and is comfortable saying no far more often than he says...
...citizen lacks it. Obama's original mistake was not in declining to wear the flag pin but in saying he had stopped wearing it because he saw "people wearing a lapel pin but not acting very patriotic." And that's what makes his current adoption of the symbol so shrewd. By opposing the Iraq war in the fevered year after 9/11--when some Bush supporters branded doves unpatriotic--he has already expressed an understanding of patriotism particularly beloved by liberals: patriotism as lonely dissent. Now he is expressing an understanding particularly important to the conservatives he must court: patriotism as symbolic...