Word: spasms
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...situation was distressingly familiar. The 98th Congress had dithered for months over its most basic responsibility: funding the vast operations of the Federal Government. Now it was in a frantic haste to adjourn. In a sudden spasm of activity, it fell all too short of meeting its self-imposed spending and revenue limits. Illinois Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, pronounced a scathing verdict on the legislators' performance. "As we leave Washington," he predicted, "word of our impotence will precede us. We have put special interests on notice that we can be pushed around...
...really set your mind to it, you will at least be able to focus in on the novel's "meaning." But this rule of thumb does not apply to Gilbert Sorrentini's latest work, Blue Pastoral--thinking is of no use. And only in the grip of a spasm of frustration, as you are preparing to heave this book across the room, will you possibly get an inkling of what has been going on or why the actions took place...
...spasm of reforming zeal, the Federal Highway Administration in 1976 announced that it was thinking of changing all signs on the nation's interstates from miles to kilometers. After receiving nearly 5,000 letters of protest, the FHA quickly abandoned the scheme...
...places for moral improvement, but that it took so long for the U.S. to recognize and confess the folly. The outlook always should have been grim. Riots have beset American prisons from the beginning. But those manifest failures along the way were only specifically disappointing, not generally disillusioning. A spasm of violence at a particular prison, epidemic madness at another, each was explained away as a technical error: the cellblock configuration was wrong, the recreation policy too lenient. One who saw through to the inherent failure was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous 1831 tour of the U.S. was, first...
...Egypt has a sharply different role: now it is assumed not to be a reliable Soviet client state but, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, a force that extinguishes Libyan extremism, helps to impose moderation on the Israelis and thus stabilizes the Middle East. Otherwise, our next spasm of global bloodshed remains much as imagined four years ago in The Third World War: August 1985 by retired British General Sir John Hackett, 71, and his military associates. So does the authors' message: civilian blathering about disarmament is infantile, and the West's only hope is to trust its stalwart...