Word: shrewd
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...well the Democrats' "turtle" strategy against the amendment will work is in doubt. Only shrewd parliamentary maneuvering by Senate Democratic leaders last week prevented passage of a Republican-sponsored amendment as part of the bill increasing the national debt limit to $830 billion from $798 billion. In place of the G.O.P. measure, the Democrats substituted a diluted rider that requires congressional budget committees to draw up a balanced budget for fiscal 1981 and 1982. But the amendment does not bind Congress to adopt the committees' recommendations. Complained Kansas Republican Senator Robert Dole: "This is a hoax...
...such manner did Roosevelt, with the shrewd instinct of a rampant heterosexual, kick James again and again in his 'obscure hurt,' until the novelist was moved to weary protest. 'The national consciousness for Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is ... at the best a very fierce affair.' James was too courteous to say more in print, but he privately characterized Roosevelt as 'a dangerous and ominous jingo,' and 'the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise...
...also shrewd. "I don't advise anyone to take it up as a business proposition," she wrote of her chosen métier, "unless they really have talent, and are crippled so as to deprive them of physical labor. Then with help they might make a living. But with taxes and income tax, there is little money in that kind of art for the ordinary artist." Since then, thousands of painters have ignored Grandma Moses' advice, but not one has achieved her pitch of personal celebrity...
...make a routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins −and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture...
...than a prescription. Last Gang in Town, a fleet, bleak vision of the immediate future with London deeply riven by intramural combat between "rockabilly rebels," "skinhead gangs," "soul rebels" and "zydeco kids," is in part a smart parable about musical rivalries. Even more to the point, it is a shrewd reflection on class and generational warfare, as Strummer sings, "The sport of today is exciting/ The In crowd are into infighting/ . . . It's brawn against brain or knife against chain/ But it's all young blood flowing down the drain...