Word: oed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dick Cheney's more memorable lines. "Deficits don't matter," he told Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in 2002. Later, after O'Neill made the conversation public, Cheney elaborated that he meant this "in a political context," not an economic one. But for most of Cheney's time as Vice President, the claim held up pretty well in both contexts. Over O'Neill's objections - he'd be gone soon anyway - the Bush Administration and Congress abandoned a bipartisan commitment to fiscal prudence that had held sway since the early 1990s and went back to running chronic deficits. The result...
...crowded out private investment and investors demanded higher interest rates on Treasuries to compensate for our country's shakier finances. But during the Reagan presidency, deficits stayed above 4% of GDP for five straight years - and interest rates fell, and the economy boomed. (Hence Cheney's full statement to O'Neill: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter...
Shaquille O'Neal can do anything, as long as that thing is telling people he can do anything. On ABC's Shaq Vs., he challenges Super Bowl champ Ben Roethlisberger to a football game; baseball's home-run leader, Albert Pujols, to a batting contest; and gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh to beach volleyball. He insists he's the greatest athlete in the world, even though the only thing he beats them at is trash-talking. O'Neal plays sports the way George W. Bush fights wars...
...writer, O'Neal is actually beating us pros. He is the 10th most popular writer on Twitter, while I am way behind, at 195th. This would be less upsetting if it weren't for the fact that before O'Neal signed up for Twitter, his writing career consisted of spelling his name with a Sharpie. He's crushing my Dorothy Parker-level quips, like "Beer summit koan: If you dispel low-income racial tension by removing alcohol, you dispel upper-income racial tension by adding alcohol," with Shaqisms like "Happy birthday, harry potter main charachter dude." I am being beaten...
...challenged O'Neal to a writing contest. We each had four days to craft 400 words about Twitter, and we'd let TIME.com readers, who I'm sure are not at all biased toward celebrities, vote for the superior writer. I called O'Neal to do some pregame trash-talking, which I thought would be a better idea than doing it to his face, partly because I'm a coward and partly because his face would be so far away...