(The power plant was a separate, independently owned entity, called ACR Energy Partners — an arrangement that has proved poisonous).
And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country's prospects.Start with the government, whose ministers are still oscillating between prophesying economic Armageddon and gamely predicting the best of all possible recoveries.
The setup, with its protagonist seen through the eyes of an implicated observer, owes something to Henry James; the ironic conflicts of work and love are bitter; as ever in Sirk, the blend of high ideals and tawdry pursuits proves poisonous; and the literary origins of the story emerge in the surprising role played in the movie by a book, Willa Cather's "My Ántonia".
Keep chocolate away from animals, especially birds, dogs, and hamsters, as chocolate has been proven poisonous to them.
To judge by the record of the past 13 years, it will prove a poisonous combination, and not just for France.
Still, the fact remains: going into a tough reëlection bid, President Obama has hired three men associated with a bailout that, while economically successful, has so far proved politically poisonous.
The affair has proved particularly poisonous because Mr. Schroder -- habitually a follower of the all-politics-is-local school with little taste or instinct for international affairs -- chose to make a personal crusade of the German quest to head the fund in Washington.
Now, however, two newer sources of argument are likely to prove altogether more poisonous.
Extreme resistance in this climate could prove more politically poisonous, particularly to some Republicans, than upsetting the N.R.A.
Some say it began on a day in 1820 when Robert Gibbon Johnson gathered a crowd as he ate a tomato on the steps of the Salem County Courthouse to prove it wasn't poisonous.
