Word: toxicants
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Tone is all in a social fable, and first-time writer-director Derrick Borte shows an impressive command of mood and pace. He doesn't push your face into the message of conspicuous consumerism; he lets the characters and actors breathe, allows viewers to detect the toxic undertaste in their own good time. In its amiable, ambling way, The Joneses is a zeitgeist film: it says as much as a Michael Moore screed about the American way of debt. It's also a feature-long joke about Hollywood's mania for product placement...
...summer of political combat is turning toward an autumn of showdowns over some of the biggest public-policy initiatives in decades. The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation - poured abundantly over Obama's presidential campaign a year ago - have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness. Trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books. Good faith is trading at pennies on the dollar. The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" - the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy...
...erupted after a stray bomb fired during a Navy training exercise killed a local security guard in 1999; a few years later, the Navy closed Camp Garcia and left for good in 2003. By then it was already conceding things it had long denied - such as its use of toxic materials like Agent Orange and depleted uranium. It also admitted that on at least one occasion, during a chemical-warfare drill in 1969 for a project called SHAD - for Shipboard Hazard & Defense, which was part of Project 112 - it had sprayed trioctyl phosphate, a chemical compound known to cause cancer...
...Still, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) said in 2003 it found no negative effect on health from the Navy's decades on Vieques. Much of the scientific community howled at that verdict, given that independent studies of hair, vegetation and other local specimens indicate island residents have been exposed to excessive levels of lead, mercury, cadmium and aluminum. "The [ATSDR] conclusion seemed borderline criminal," says former Vieques mayor Radames Tirado, a plaintiff in the Sanchez suit who says at least 13 of his relatives there today have cancer. Says Arturo Massol, a biologist at the University...
...pride. "At 75 years old this is probably the last major thing he'll participate in," says one senior GOP Senate staffer. Democrats in the Administration and on Capitol Hill say they believe Shelby is negotiating in good faith. (Read "Geithner Faces Questions as He Prepares to Roll Out Toxic-Asset Plan...