Word: token
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Penal institutions, true enough, have improved in some ways over the years. The chain gangs of yore are gone. In some systems, bare-bones medical services have been expanded to include at least token psychological care. Reform movements still trudge along, and some of their programs are promising, at least in intent. The intent is, or ought to be, to remedy overcrowding in prisons not by building more cells but by sending nondangerous offenders into community-based programs...
...Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement pillbox...
...relatively little. For example, Carter wants to trim only a token $2 billion from expenditures in the remaining six months of the current fiscal year, even though the deficit is estimated to be as high as $47 billion. But now that he has produced his program, the President at least has an incentive to stick to it. Cutting spending in an election year will surely lose some votes, but making a start toward lowering inflation is nothing less than a national necessity...
...because the CPI rose 13% in 1979. That creates a vicious circle: inflation increases federal spending, which increases deficits, which increases inflation. Several experts have proposed limiting the tie between prices and benefits to 85% of any rise in the CPI, but Carter apparently will not ask even for token cuts in the entitlement programs...
...local opposition to construction of the nearby Seabrook nuclear power plant. And worse prospects lie ahead. After this week's primary in his home state of Massachusetts, Kennedy faces three contests on March 11 in Carter's Southern stronghold: Alabama, Florida and Georgia. Kennedy plans only token appearances in those states, so that he can concentrate on Illinois, which on March 18 will have the first primary in an industrial state outside the two candidates' native regions...