| Ernest Partridge: Great American Election Charade
That effort just might bankrupt the super-affluent Chamber of Commerce, for the fact of the matter is the American public is now as mad as hell and not going to take it any more. More significant, perhaps, than the candidates' totals in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary are the numbers of citizens participating in these contests: approximately twice as many Democrats as Republicans, and an extraordinarily large proportion of them are young people. At long last, more and more ordinary Americans are getting the message that they have been lied to, that they can no longer trust the mainstream media, that their public treasury has been looted, that their children's and grandchildren's future has been mortgaged, and that they are living under the darkening shadow of despotism.
Coming of age
Precisely where his tomb will lie, Nguyen does not know. He has no burial plot in hand. "No money," Nguyen says in distinct English. But he wants it to be in a place that's as comfortable as a Buddhist flower garden, so that the presiding monk can feel totally at ease when he comes to Nguyen's grave and, abiding by tradition, sets his spirit free with powerful chants. With remains now dispersed among different graveyards, from the city to the suburbs, an informal group representing more than 300 Vietnamese elders like Nguyen is hoping to establish its own central burial ground in Boston, one with a price its members can squeeze into their strained budgets. For now, they have found no place to rest. Distress over future digs can weigh heavier on Vietnamese seniors, who are part of a culture that honors its forebears with religious or communal rites at the burial site.
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So has one of the most popular antidotes to cyclical downturns: fiscal stimulus in the form of tax cuts or higher government spending. Today, public figures as diverse as Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential contender, and Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, are proposing just that remedy for the current problem: stimulus packages of $50 billion to more than $100 billion. But such proposals are designed for normal downturns in which the fundamental problem is that the economy has stalled because consumers have run out of steam or because policy-makers have made a mistake -- stomping too hard on the economic brakes. Under such circumstances, pumping money into the economy gets it moving again. In the current downturn, something more unsettling than a traditional swing in business cycle appears to be at work: The United States has become increasingly prone to financial bubbles -- huge, seemingly irreversible rises in the value of one sort of asset or another, followed by sudden and largely unforeseen plunges.
Venturing into the Dallas jungle in search of the elusive $30,000 ...
Rhoad worked as a legal secretary in Las Vegas to support herself and her 13-year-old daughter Heather. When times were lean, though, like they were now, Rhoad resorted to waiting tables or dancing as "Sedona" at a strip club. Soon after they met in a casino restaurant, Rhoad and Haberman were chatting like best friends. Haberman, born and raised in Dallas, said he rarely talked to his family "because they didn't believe anything he said." His new home was Key West. Haberman said he'd joined the Marines in 1989 but had been forced to leave in 1998 after a diving accident almost cost him his life. After his recovery, Haberman said, he'd joined Army Special Forces and was now a sniper and a crypto-linguist, trained in technology to decipher foreign languages. Listening to his military exploits, Rhoad felt drawn to Haberman, then 31.
The eras of the NHL
It was not the beginning of elite professional hockey in North America, but it was the beginning of the rapid consolidation of talent into one premier league. It was a period of intense development. Expansion grew the league to 10 teams by 1927. Two competing, Western-based leagues failed and the talent came East. There was rapid development of rules and strategy throughout the 1920s. The principal evidence of frenetic change is that scoring plummeted from an average of nearly 10 to less than 3 goals per game over this era. Rule-making efforts to maintain offence could not keep pace with the development of the skills and strategy of goal prevention. The 1920s were, in a sense, much like today. The league was struggling with the rise of goal prevention.
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