Word: allene
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Virginia is a crucial race for both the Democrats and the Republicans. GOP candidate George Allen leads incumbent Sen. Chuck Robb in the polls, but the polls have vacillated between the two candidates in the last few days...
...invented comedy bits that others copied (Allen's Answer Man become Carson's Carnac the Magnificent). He discovered or introduced talents like Don Knotts, Bill Dana and Tom Poston, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. He gave Elvis Presley his first national TV exposure, even before Ed Sullivan. He was, as the obits reminded us, a renaissance man who played jazz piano, composed thousands of songs (but only one hit, "This Could Be the Start of Something Big"), wrote a couple of dozen books and even dabbled in politics. Though a lifelong liberal - a union man to the end, opponent...
...Tonight show (1954-57), a prime-time variety show on NBC (1956-60) and two late-night talk shows in the 1960s, Allen invented the style that TV hosts from David Letterman to Craig Kilborn are still developing. He looked for comedy in everyday trivia, taking a mike into the audience or turning on a camera outside the studio and simply commenting on people coming in and out of the Hollywood Ranch Market across the street. In one recurring bit, he would pick up a copy of the New York Daily News, don a cornball press hat and read angry...
...verbal comic, Allen was the fastest gun in the business, and a true heir to Groucho Marx for his inventiveness with language, constantly pirouetting around the tired cliché or the pretentious phrase. Yet he had an infallible internal censor that kept his wisecracks from ever being cheap, or risqué, or mean. He kept a police whistle at his desk, which he'd blow whenever a line or bit of business crossed the line. He remained old-fashioned that way, as well as in his stubborn refusal, unlike Carson and almost everyone that followed, to do "savers" when...
...rich and powerful. In California, for example, it takes at least $1 million to secure an initiative's spot on a ballot, which means special-interest groups like the teachers' unions (which fight tooth and nail to defeat voucher initiatives), as well as wealthy individuals like Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (who spent $8 million to garner support for public funding of a new Seattle football stadium), have become a significant force behind the seemingly endless array of propositions littering state ballots nationwide...