Word: washingtonization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are no easy answers to the mounting U.S. current account imbalance. The normal strategy would be for Washington to raise interest rates, but that would create a vicious circle: depress the stock market, diminish consumer spending and drive foreign money away. Lipp hopes the threat of a recession would provoke quick agreement among the G-7 countries to cut interest rates and taxes. But Hormats cautioned that in the U.S. there's no prospect of easy accord between Clinton and the Republican Congress on cutting taxes or, even harder, deficit spending. Expect a lot of Washington jawboning this year...
...politics of personal destruction that engulfed Washington wasn't an accident. Even before they won control of Congress, the Republicans dreamed up a government by investigation designed to cripple the Clinton Administration and sweep their party back into the White House. In October 1994, Newt Gingrich envisioned a Republican Congress that would have at least 20 task forces and subcommittees investigating the White House. (Hey, give him credit for keeping his word--the G.O.P. Congress eventually featured 31 separate inquiries into the Clinton White House...
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who would like to be President, held a funny kind of film screening last week. At the invitation of his campaign organization, 50 or so journalists, political operatives and Senators joined him at the Washington headquarters of the National Cable Television Association. The occasion was a private screening of a documentary about McCain produced for the A&E network series Biography. McCain is one of those baroque pearls of American politics, lustrous but irregular, so nobody was surprised that the film made the most of his days as a Navy flyer and a Vietnam...
Under the Inspector General Act, anonymous denunciations thrive in Washington as they have rarely done since the Council of Ten in the Venice of the doges. Like road-company Kenneth Starrs, inspectors general and their flatfoots roam through the private lives of public officials. The idiotic pursuit of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, our proposed ambassador to the United Nations, a man who has spent most of the past 40 years working for the government only to have his whole life investigated anew, is the latest dismal consequence of uninhibited and unaccountable prosecutorial authority...
...very nasty very quickly. Conservative advocates of confidentiality warn that pregnant women faced with the prospect of having their records eventually opened will be more likely to choose abortion over adoption. While most adoption groups support some kind of compromise plan, the National Council for Adoption, a buttoned-up Washington coalition of agencies that arrange confidential adoptions, would require that extraordinary measures be taken by the state to find, counsel and get consent from birth parents before adoptees could even learn their names--to say nothing of meeting them. At the other extreme is the Internet-based Bastard Nation, which...