Word: whiffs
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...office as New York Attorney General in 1954, Javits bid for the Senate seat of the retiring Herbert Lehman and carried the state against New York City Mayor Robert Wagner by 460,000 votes in 1956. His welcome in the Senate, whose clubby atmosphere then included more than a whiff of anti-Semitism, was less than warm. "When I rose to speak in those early days, the whole chamber was still," he later recalled. "Still and cold...
There is, and has long been, a strong whiff of scam about the influence- peddling business. Its practitioners like to imply that they have more clout than they truly do. In the post-Watergate era, power has been fractionated on Capitol Hill. Where a few powerful committee chairmen once held sway, Congress has become a loose federation of 535 little fiefdoms. This has made a lobbyist's job more difficult, but it hardly means that Congress has been ! liberated from the thrall of special interests. Well- intentioned congressional reform has been subverted over the years by the proliferation of lobbyists...
There is also a whiff of scandal involving some of Moscow's better-known bathhouses, traditional Russian meeting places for relaxation and banter. In a country where the private lives of important people are almost never discussed, there are rumors that several bathhouses were used by officials for after-hours orgies...
...four or five lung- cancer deaths in Casmalia. The young woman who used to teach here with me was ! in perfect health when she came, and she died of leukemia two years later." Not until last month, after well-to-do neighborhoods in Santa Maria got a strong chemical whiff one day, did the county government finally admit the dump was a problem. People in Casmalia are sure they have the official reluctance figured: revenues from the dump this year will be $40 million, with the county taking 10% off the top. "Money talks," says Phyllis Vaniter...
Tipper Gore can do something you can't. She can quote the loopy lyrics of a rather recherche song by W.A.S.P.: "I got pictures of naked ladies lying on my bed/ I whiff the smell of a sweet convulsion/ Thoughts are sweating inside my head/ . . . I start to howl in heat/ I . . ." and this next word presents a problem. How to handle propriety and make her point at the same time? Spelling is the answer. She pronounces each of the four letters, then finishes, ". . . like a beast...