Word: states
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...voter poll was released a couple of weeks ago that showed Florida Governor Charlie Crist dropping into a tie with former state House speaker Marco Rubio - an underdog Crist had led by more than 20 points last summer - in next year's Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate. But the next day, Crist was still being Crist. Seemingly ignoring the GOP conservatives who've been lambasting him for reversing much of the red-meat legacy of his predecessor, Jeb Bush, Crist enthusiastically signed a bill expanding passenger rail in Florida - including a high-speed train system Bush made...
...moderate, bipartisan style. Seizing on his embrace of President Obama's $787 billion economic-stimulus plan, they've treated him as a whipping boy for everything that's wrong with the battered GOP as well as Florida's recession-ravaged economy, whose unemployment rate of 11.5% is the state's worst since 1975. Along the way they've anointed Rubio, a 38-year-old Cuban American, as the right wing's new boy wonder, a genuinely conservative David who can slay Crist's Goliath RINO (Republican in Name Only) in the primary next August. (See pictures of GOP memorabilia...
...alienating the less impassioned Republicans who don't come out for straw polls - especially in a state with Florida's centrist and independent streak - is also risky. Crist knows they vote in primaries. They helped give him a landslide victory in the 2006 gubernatorial primary against a more conservative candidate. They also lifted John McCain, the more moderate Republican Crist backed for the presidential nomination last year, to a key Florida primary victory. (They also know, according to polls, that Crist has a better chance of defeating a Democratic candidate next fall than Rubio does.) As a result, Crist insists...
...dozen or more murders a day amid fighting between drug gangs and government forces--and, just as often, among rival cartels. Meanwhile, corruption in the ranks of police, army and government officials is so endemic that some analysts have declared the nation of 110 million a failed state. The U.S. has pledged $1.4 billion over three years to combat drug-fueled crime in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America--an overture dwarfed by the demand for illegal narcotics north of the border...
...think the State Department is coming to realize, belatedly, that [baseball] can be a very effective tool in public diplomacy," Callahan told TIME. In the case of the U.S. and Nicaragua, he said, "of all the things that unite us, I think the great sport of baseball is the most important...