Word: vacuums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Soaring into the vacuum left by the imploding Conservatives, two new regional parties gained substantial power -- dragging with them the perennial issue of Canada's political survival. For the first time, the official opposition party, the Bloc Quebecois, with 54 seats, is an organization dedicated to the country's dismemberment. The Bloc, led by Lucien Bouchard, 54, aims to take Canada's predominantly French-speaking province out of Confederation. In the west the conservative populist Reform Party won 52 seats. Its leader, Preston Manning, 51, has often declared himself unwilling to make further constitutional concessions as the price for Quebec...
...been crossed. A taboo broken. A Brave New World of cookie-cutter humans, baked and bred to order, seemed, if not just around the corner, then just over the horizon. Ethicists called up nightmare visions of baby farming, of clones cannibalized for spare parts. Policymakers pointed to the vacuum in U.S. bioethical leadership. Critics decried the commercialization of fertility technology, and protesters took to the streets, calling for an immediate ban on human-embryo cloning. Scientists steeled themselves against a backlash they feared would obstruct a promising field of research -- and close off options to the infertile couples the original...
...racist lampoons. It's he, not Limbaugh, who uses outrageous put- downs and salty language, right? Such as calling a former U.S. Senator "Alan ('the Cadaver') Cranston" and Perot "a hand grenade with a bad haircut." It's Stern, surely, who used to do an on-air stunt with vacuum- cleaner sound effects dubbed "caller abortions," who chatted with a female caller about giving him "a throat massage" with her tongue, whose current newsletter article on health-care reform is headlined BEND OVER, AMERICA, and who just last week on the radio delivered a parody ad for mail- order bricks...
...staff of 20 year-round groundskeepers who maintain 70 percent of University property rake the leaves, blow them into piles and feed them through a vacuum and shredder...
...Into the vacuum left by the retreating clout of the owner has flowed the pretensions of the journalistic class. This is a relatively new thing in American journalism, because only in the past half-century have journalists had anything to be pretentious about. Some of the great names of American writing cut their teeth in the press -- Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. But until well into this century, most reporters fit the Duke of Wellington's description of the English soldier -- "the scum of the earth." They were lively but ignorant, and often venal. The spread of college education...