Word: speciousness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many ways, the $22 billion crime bill moving through Congress this week is as flimsy as a tin badge. Around its core of solid proposals -- money to build more high-security prisons and help local governments hire more cops -- are the kind of specious gestures that are made whenever Washington tries to tap into voter sentiment on what is largely a state-and-local issue. If adopted in its present form, the bill will extend the death penalty to 47 mostly uncommon crimes and create 60 new federal crimes for acts that are already punished by state law. Among...
...mostly argues his cases lucidly, particularly by radio standards. Nor, in this post- Reagan age, can he be called an extremist.He harps on liberal straw men in a way that seems more properly circa-1973 ("long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking peace pansies"), and his logic can be unforgivably specious (against the pro-choice argument for abortion:"Can a woman choose to steal, using her own body?"). But in fact his views on abortion are relatively nuanced. Nor is it kooky or even wrong to assert, as Limbaugh has, that the risk of heterosexual AIDS and estimates of the homeless...
...without having undergone New York City's Uniform Land Use Review Process. It also says the store will devote 40,000 sq. ft. of space to building materials -- far more than the 10,000-sq.-ft. maximum required by law. Jesse Masyr, counsel for Home Depot, called the charges "specious...
...children. Equally shocked will be the countless heterosexuals who have no plans to "breed." Unfortunately, Mansfield has confused the charge to reproduce the species (a charge, by the way, which an over populated planet might well wish to apply with caution) with his own obvious talent for reproducing the specious. This homosexual is more than happy (she is even "gay") to leave the latter "reproduction" to the likes of Harvey Mansfield. Ann Pellegrini...
This quandary speaks to the oversimplification of political discourse. The problem is that it is just too easy to thrash an opponent with specious voting record arguments. "Senator X voted for the second largest tax increase in American history," is a devastating, if unsubtle, sound bite for a 30-second commercial...