Word: pork
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fans annually, exist purely for profit. They maintain extensive farm and scouting systems and are run by people with years of experience in the pro game. Japan's teams, concentrated mainly in the Tokyo and Osaka areas, exist primarily to advertise the products of their corporate owners - like the pork sold by the sponsors of the Nippon Ham Fighters. They invest sparingly in player development: only one farm team per franchise is the norm, and teams are often operated by officials from the parent company who know little about the game...
...teams are reduced in number to tighten up competition and increase overall per-game attendance. Another idea is expansion, as in a plan proposed by baseball columnist Jim Allen, which would take advantage of a number of new ballparks built around the country, courtesy of Liberal Democratic Party pork, to set up a broad system of professional minor league teams in small markets. Still another plan is a World Baseball Cup, like that of soccer, held once every four years. But all require conviction and/or money, commodities in short supply in recession-ridden Japan. Hiroshi Gondo, ex-manager...
...Kertes and the people around him profited immensely from his position. In his home town of Backa Palanka on the Croatian border, he made sure his friends got jobs and even doled out gifts to kindergarten children from vast warehouses built in town to house confiscated goods. The pork barrel paid off. In last September's elections, Backa Palanka was one of the only districts in the country to vote Milosevic...
...Business lobby there (place your bets on that one). He wants to leave room for his $1.6 trillion tax cut - Republicans are bragging they'll have most of that $400 billion back in the plan by May - but he'll be up against not only locality-driven pork, which will be foremost on lawmakers' minds this week, but also government programs that many people believe actually do some good. And in trying to restrain "recent explosive growth in discretionary spending" by cutting "unjustified programs, excessive programs, duplicative programs and programs that have completed their mission," he'll find that every...
...weeks spent away from the Washington office, surrounded by lobbyists and local constituents for whom "pork" is food on the table, is only going to increase lawmakers' impulse to protect themselves by continuing to bring home the bacon...