Word: multibillion
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...person is the founder, it's Rick Santelli. A year ago, the CNBC commentator blew a gasket on the air over a plan by the Obama Administration to tackle the foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli's rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party," Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama's digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents...
...Gates really demonstrated his seriousness earlier this month when he cashiered a Marine two-star general who had been running the Pentagon's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the most expensive weapons system in history, for failing to meet cost and performance goals. Senior officers fumble multibillion programs fairly often, but rarely are they publicly rebuked - never mind fired - for such snafus. "Fundamentally reforming acquisitions, above all, calls on us to foster a culture and practice of accountability - accountability with regard to industry and within the walls of this building as well," Gates said at the Pentagon. (See pictures...
...disaster in Vancouver felt uniquely awful, for two reasons. First, its occurrence just hours before the opening ceremony created a somber and painful situation: A man had just lost his life preparing for a multibillion-dollar sporting spectacle, yet participants were obliged to sing, dance and play their fiddles in celebration of it. Let the games begin! Second, while the Beijing murder was a terrible tragedy, it was a random act of violence. On Friday, an athlete was killed pursuing what Olympic officials sell as the epitome of purity: Go faster, go higher...
...part of their plans, many governments lined up multibillion-dollar advance-purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies to buy vaccines during a pandemic. When the WHO declared H1N1 as such, governments were locked into these contracts, if not legally then politically - amid news reports of a new and potentially lethal virus spreading around the globe, governments could not responsibly pass on the option for vaccine. In this context, governments may have felt the only prudent course was to err on the side of caution. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...President Obama's fault that our multibillion-dollar homeland-security apparatus is more Keystone Kops than 24 ... The Federal Government is (alas) a vast, ungovernable enterprise. And the bigger it gets, the less effective it will become ... [Still,] the President is in thrall to the illusion of a skilled, paternalistic government ... Could the new New Deal just get airplane safety right first...