But the lack of conflict created a regulatory backwater, an agency grown soft because it never had to make decisions without consensus support from the industry.
Artist and academic Edward Chell has translated this Romantic impulse to a landscape unique to the modern age: the tufty, brambled bits of wilderness that flank motorways, what the Highways Agency terms "soft estate".
Enamels are termed hard when the temperature required to fuse them is very high; the harder the enamel is, the better it will withstand atmospheric agencies, which in soft enamels first produce a decomposition of the surface and ultimately cause the breakup of the whole enamel.
But the agency has a soft spot for barnstorming, vintage aircraft and other attractions of country air shows.
Pushed as to what should be excluded from our diets, the agency stresses that soft drinks should go, especially for children.
The shift in S.E.C. policy to seek admission of wrongdoing comes after longstanding criticism that the agency was too soft on large organizations at the heart of the financial crisis.
Mr Wilson was thus a ready-made target for Mr Cheney: an Iraq war sceptic who had been sent to Niger by a notoriously soft agency and who tried to ventilate his views in the newspapers.All this still leaves the biggest question unanswered.
THE SCRIPT -- Rather than being read by an urgent-voiced professional announcer, the script is delivered by a copywriter at the Devito/Verdi agency, with a soft tone to his voice: "First she became a lawyer, named one of the top hundred in America.
Many of the reforms, however, are now on hold because critics are accusing the agency of being soft on criminals.
Yet despite the agency's arguably soft touch in the past, the first whistleblower payout may spark concern for corporations, Bernstein said.
