Word: toothless
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...Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association and no mean practitioner of the craft, "is the biggest growth industry around." The number of registered domestic lobbyists has more than doubled since 1976, from 3,420 to 8,800. That figure is understated, however, since reporting requirements under a toothless 1946 law are notoriously lax. Most experts put the influence-peddling population at about 20,000, or more than 30 for every member of Congress. Registered lobbyists reported expenditures of $50 million last year, twice as much as a decade ago, but the true figure is estimated at upwards...
...There is no going back in pleasure. "Bother!" said Toad. He picked up a No. 1 Eberhard Faber pencil. He eyed it with the despair of a suddenly toothless gourmand confronting a life of strained carrots and peas. He found a schoolboy's lined notebook and started to write...
Marcos has always paid careful lip service, and sometimes more than that, to democratic forms. Some of his more controversial authoritarian powers were ratified in a carefully orchestrated 1981 referendum, which he carried with 80%. The same year, he won a presidential election against a toothless opponent and also got approval for a constitutional amendment that stretched his four-year term to six years. In 1984 Marcos held elections for the Batasang Pambansa, or National Assembly. Opposition politicians won roughly one-third of the seats. Despite widespread accusations of cheating, the elections were judged acceptable by the Philippine community...
...newest cable sitcoms are even less adventurous. Washingtoon, which stars Tom Callaway as the dippy legislator, promises a biting look at the ways of Washington, but its political satire is toothless and its performers charmless. In 1st & Ten, the curvaceous team owner (Delta Burke) talks football as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically, and the gridiron goons who surround her (a womanizing quarterback, a dumb lineman named Bubba, an oily general manager in cahoots with the Mob) are well past sitcom retirement age. The bottom drawer in comedy's bargain basement, however, belongs to the new sitcoms showing...
...major surprise of L'Affaire Greenpeace has been how aggressively the French press has pursued the story. As watchdogs of government, French newspapers and magazines historically have been rather toothless. Though a few publications, notably the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, occasionally have sniffed out scandal in high office, serious French journalism, by and large, favors analysis and ideological commentary over investigative digging. This time, however, periodicals ranging from the left-of-center daily Le Monde to the conservative newsweekly L'Express joined Le Canard Enchaine in unraveling, bit by bit, what has been dubbed Underwatergate...