After bulldozing Democrats and President Barack Obama into accepting a package that includes $38bn £23bnn) in cuts in the remainder of this fiscal year, Republicans last night were re-arming for the next big battles: debates on setting the 2012 budget and, more crucially for now, on raising the national-debt ceiling.
In Mr. Creten's work, four monumental owls with half-human features face one another in stony wisdom — like Egyptian gods, a panel of hanging judges or a corporate board in a takeover battle — debating whether to eat or be eaten.
Captains had total authority during battle, when debate and disagreement were likely to be both inefficient and dangerous.
"Budget battles and debates, those are as old as the republic," Mr. Obama said before a friendly audience assembled in a White House annex.
In 1996 Forman returned to form with The People vs. Larry Flynt, a biopic of the pornographic magazine publisher whose legal battles provoked debates about freedom of speech.
Many of these "crypto" battles were debated on a handful of mailing lists, where Julian Assange was both an avid reader and an occasional contributor.
In the United States, where the Senate passed an unemployment insurance extension last month only after a long battle, the debate over how to treat persistent joblessness has mounted as well.
The halls of Congress — as big a stage as any — lost a pride of lions, their battles and debates mostly long settled, but not always; a cause or two remained among their survivors.
Carey Goldberg (NYT) THE SOUTH DIAGNOSIS: A FLAG FIXATION -- Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina, a Democrat, used his State of the State speech last night to add a sense of urgency to the Confederate battle flag debate, imploring lawmakers to reach a compromise that would move the flag off the Capitol dome to a spot elsewhere on the Statehouse grounds.
The proposal that the ultimate meaning of the human genome will be fought out in the arenas of art and culture ignores the growing political battle and debate over the application of biotechnology to the food supply ("In Wake of Genetic Revolution, Questions About Its Meaning," Sept. 12).
