Word: congressmen
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...turned her dining room (and perhaps her bedroom) into a venue for sources for a Confederate spy ring. A well-liked widow known for entertaining both sides in the tense years before the Civil War, Greenhow understood the ways of Washington. She advised a friend seeking a favor that Congressmen were "honorable men who could not be bribed, but they discern much more clearly the justice of a case, when they have dined and supped well in pleasant company." When the war started, the Union politicians who continued to sup with Greenhow let slip intelligence that she passed along...
...hear a colleague is like spotting an elderly mammoth alive in the natural-history museum. As long as he's not extinct, he's formidable. Dingell comes from a time when Congress did big things, like Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, as a matter of course. Key Congressmen were known as "bulls," and they didn't look to the White House for permission slips or marching orders. Dingell's first oath of office, in 1956, was administered by Sam Rayburn, whose power is memorialized in the congressional office building bearing his name...
...civic myth, like the devils and tempters in a medieval morality play. In 1798 John Adams signed the Alien Act, which gave the President the power to expel "dangerous" foreigners. Harrison Gray Otis, an Adams supporter in Congress, singled out "hordes of wild Irishmen" as particularly unwelcome. Other Congressmen mocked the French accent of Representative Albert Gallatin, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland. Adams was rewarded for his harshness on this issue and others by losing the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, who understood Gallatin well enough to make him Treasury Secretary...
...almost too easy to make fun of the President; he's a lame duck who needs medical attention, and fortunately he can afford it. (And if he couldn't, his bills would be paid for by the people, as is the health care of all Senators and Congressmen.) Besides, Michael Moore had his instructive Bush-bashing in Fahrenheit 9/11, the highest-grossing documentary of all time, earning $119 million at the domestic box office and lots more overseas...
...Moore has a genius for confrontational stunts - demanding a meeting with General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, chatting up an addled Charlton Heston on gun control, buttonholing Congressmen to see if any of them had actually read the Patriot Act - but the Cuba jaunt tops them all. It begins when he hears Congressional testimony indicating that detainees at Guantanamo were getting free colonscopies and nutrition counseling. (One female soldier cited in the film says, "They get way better health care than I do.") So he rounded up several volunteer rescue workers from the World Trade Center site who had suffered respiratory...