Word: token
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...Majilis (the lower house of the Kazakhstan parliament), held by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev yesterday, they should have known better. The Nazarbayev-led Nur-Otan (Light of the Fatherland) party carried 88.05% of the vote - and all the seats in that legislative body. All expectations for at least a token opposition presence in the much touted "new parliament of reform" flopped. Neither the All-National Social-Democratic party (ANSD), nor the Ak Jol (The White Way) party emerged with a seat. And this was after Nazarbayev's presidential staff appeared to encourage some opposition participation, if only to help with...
They should have known better themselves. Nazarbayev's staff indeed had been preparing for a token opposition presence in the new Majilis, according to Victor Kiyanitsa, until recently a senior government official and now an independent political analyst. But, he explains, "It's not even they who decide the returns, it's the regional authorities." Nazarbayev's staff targeted 77% for Nur-Otan, Kiyanitsa says, but regional governors zealously competed to show loyalty to the President and over-fulfilled their quotas. Sometimes, authoritarianism can't help itself...
...penis is puzzled in Portnoy's Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy's shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover Dam." (Congrats to Manohla, by the way, for getting shrink and penis into the same sentence.) The token male critic I consulted, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, was just as enthusiastic: this "bawdy, big-hearted" comedy is a "canny evocation of male friendship in all its richness and complexity." It's as if all these worthy scribes have the rapture, and I'm left behind...
Millionaire hedgies playing high-stakes poker in an over-the-top Las Vegas hotel to improve a Third World country. The contradictions abound, but these are people who don't mind being unconventional. By the same token, they don't consider themselves gamblers. That's the greater irony. Las Vegas was built on wild, exposed, highly leveraged directional bets. I'm not sure many of the hedgies would have been comfortable with such risky trades...
...piled into the hatchback of whichever friend had most recently learned to drive. Once we got there, we were a lot more concerned with the contents of our illicit “water” bottles than we were with the musical styling of Blink-182. By this token, I regularly made the trek to see some of the worst college-rock bills on the summer-touring circuit...