Reagan was concerned about a fence, while the recent crop of would-be-Reagans spout nonsense about walls with moats topped by electrified fences.

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Believing that newspapers were still, as they always had been, protectable products with moats around their geographic markets, Tribune paid handsomely to buy several papers, including the Los Angeles Times.

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Tory MPs with their moats and country homes and porticoes (whatever the hell they are) have already got away from the working classes as fast as they possibly could and now use their expenses to shore up the defences.

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But, according to Mary Buffett, Warren Buffett has used some quantitative measures to find companies with those enduring moats.

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While acknowledging that a CDO's results can be difficult to quantify, Ms. Moats, who is Mexican-American, credits her predecessors with the recent increase in female leaders at the firm.

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Certain details of that time will always stay with me: the pool where we swam, the beach where we dug moats.

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