Word: flattops
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tester, a sweet, back-slappy guy with an $11 flattop, was 100th in seniority when he was elected two years ago. He landed the worst office in the U.S. Senate, which isn't bad--it being an office in the U.S. Senate. There are high ceilings, marble everywhere and a view of a courtyard. But half of his space is on the second floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, and the other half is divided between two unconnected offices on the third floor, so his 19-member staff is always running up and down. Also, there...
...Distributing that firepower across 120 warships instead of concentrating it on America's 11 carriers makes sense. Then there's the huge built-in cost of carriers. Much of a carrier group's firepower--accompanying ships and subs and the airplanes on its deck--is dedicated to protecting the flattop itself. "We need to move from a Navy of a few large carriers to a Navy of many smaller ships," says John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Navy's postgraduate school in Monterey, Calif. "The carriers ought to have their numbers painted over with bull's-eyes...
...long-term political benefit, however: Tester, who is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Montana, has the most distinctive hand wave in American politics, a thumb-and-pinkie hook-'em-horns waggle. Indeed, Tester's physical presence-he's a big old farm boy with a flattop crew cut-is a political statement that stands close to the heart of the national Democratic congressional campaign of 2006. It says, I'm not a slick Washington guy. I'm a Montana farmer. After six years of a Bush Administration cozy with business, many Democrats are taking a flyer this...
...points in 2004. But he knows he's in a very difficult race, and the g.o.p.'s first campaign ad of the general election went straight to the heart of Tester's candidacy: his haircut. It features a barber who says, "Fella comes in for a trim on his flattop because he's running for U.S. Senate. Guess he didn't want anybody to know he opposes a gay-marriage ban. Thinks flag burning is a right. And supports higher taxes. So I told him, 'You're gonna need a lot more than a haircut to cover up all that...
Aircraft carriers have been controversial ever since the U.S. Navy commissioned its first flattop, jury-rigging a converted collier by sticking a long black strip of tarmac over its deck in 1922. Battleship captains back then mocked the ungainly craft as a "covered wagon." More than half a century later, long after the carrier became the capital ship of the U.S. Navy, the doubters and true believers are still trading salvos in an engagement that has only heated up since ships of the Sixth Fleet sailed into harm's way in the Gulf of Sidra...