Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here in the U.S., meanwhile, the project of moving the government a few hundred miles to the southwest proceeds apace, under the supervision of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In 1989 Byrd gave up the Senate majority leadership to become chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He made no bones about why: his intention was to direct federal spending toward West Virginia. A billion dollars in five years was his goal, and he made it in half that time...
Apart from the usual highways and parks, Byrd has taken a special interest in transplanting pieces of federal agencies from metropolitan Washington to his home state. Among the departments of government that have offered up various limbs and organs for sacrifice are the FBI division of fingerprinting, the CIA and the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt, Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even the Coast Guard has moved its national computer operation to Byrd's landlocked state...
Strangely, Byrd's little experiment in de-Washingtonization has become the focus of outrage among the very people who are otherwise most critical of Washington and its ways. To these critics, it is the very symbol of congressional arrogance of power, isolation from reality, contempt for the voters, and so on, and demonstrates the need for term limits if not lynching. Bob Byrd, formerly thought to be at worst a courtly, fiddle-playing gasbag, is portrayed as a voracious monster of the pork barrel...
...standards of time and place, was a lonely figure. Jay Shropshire, then a legislative aide and now Wilder's chief of staff, recalls, "He was frozen out for the most part, ignored, bypassed." So Wilder became a leader of the "palace revolt," in which remnants of segregationist Harry Byrd's machine were ousted...
...promise not to reprint this quote 20 years from now in a cover story on Adam Hann-Byrd, world-famed entomologist. But chances are good that Adam, who doesn't plan a lifelong career as a little-boy actor, will evade the ravages of celebrity. Whether he wants to or not. Most people go through graceful, productive phases, and they pass with the same inexorability as the awkward ones. Not many people shine in or on every stage. Not many people are Jodie Foster...