Word: argumentative
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...first six months, the nation argued the fate of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old miracle child rescued off the Florida coast after a shipwreck had killed his mother and 10 others as they fled Cuba. The argument boiled down to family vs. freedom--was the boy better off in Cuba with his father or in Miami with relatives?--and vented long-dormant cold war-era passions. The boy and his father finally returned to Cuba in June, but the argument lives...
...Democrats are also planning to stick to the argument that a big tax cut means you can forget about using the burgeoning federal budget surplus to pay down the national debt. In an adroit bit of political gamesmanship, Bill Clinton played up the goal of debt elimination last week when he unveiled new White House budget calculations that show the total surplus over the next 10 years rising to nearly $5 trillion, an $800 billion increase over the last estimate issued just six months ago. ?We should be shooting for a debt-free America by the end of the decade...
...economic sense of this argument is, well, arguable. Interest-rate cuts take six months or longer to make a real impact on the economy, and Alan Greenspan implements those with a wave of his hand. Bush's tax cut faces a long road through Congress, and of course part of the argument he used during the campaign - back when everybody worried that it would overstimulate a red-hot economy - was that the cuts would be phased in so gradually that no one would notice...
This is the way Boies rehearses for a critical oral argument: he is in a conference room in San Francisco, spending his Sunday afternoon preparing his appeal in the attempt to vacate a crippling lower-court order in the Napster case. Fueled on junk food (in his hierarchy of tastes, food is not far from clothing), he's thinking at times about another case that he will be arguing the same morning by teleconference to a panel of judges in Los Angeles. And for much of the day, virtually up to the last moments before he enters the marbled...
...then Boies is on his feet, calmly elucidating--without notes, of course--the four essential points of his argument, his hands sometimes shaking the invisible box, his thumbs sometimes making a pair of goalposts. He cites page numbers and percentages and the specific copyright status of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and My Man Godfrey. Then the sun rises in the west: Boies asks the court's forbearance while he looks up a page number he cannot recall...