glamorousky's Time----提升作文修炼

glamorouskyUID：2459211

Barney’s Great Adventure
The most outspoken man in the House gets some real power.

Of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives(众议院), Barney Frank is the only one whose public remarks have been collected in a book of quotations (“Frank Talk: The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank,” published in 2006). He is also the only congressman whose fight against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton has been the subject of a documentary, which was shown to acclaim at film festivals around the country (“Let’s Get Frank,” directed by Bart Everly). Frank is not the only member of Congress to have been the subject of a full-scale（全面的 ） biography, but the account of his life, written by a former aide named Stuart E. Weisberg, to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press later this year, will likely rank among the more exhaustive(详尽的 注意搭配 且与exhaustible) and admiring books ever printed about a sitting member of the House, who is described as “arguably(雄辩地) the most unique and fascinating, certainly the most entertaining political figure in Washington.”

The title of the book suggests the basis for the widespread interest: “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.” Now sixty-eight years old, Frank has represented Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District since 1981, and he remains best known for his decision, in 1987, to reveal that he is gay, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. At the time, the disclosure provoked（比cause好的多） more curiosity than controversy, but, two years later, Stephen Gobie, a prostitute whom Frank had patronized（赞助） and then befriended, made a series of lurid allegations about him—claiming that they had had sex in the House gym and that Frank had permitted Gobie to run a prostitution ring out of his home. An investigation by the House Ethics Committee failed to substantiate those charges, though it determined that Frank had written a misleading letter of recommendation for Gobie and had Gobie’s parking tickets waived. Nevertheless, Frank was reëlected with ease, and he became a pointed critic of the Republicans who took control of the House in 1994 and a passionate opponent of Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. A witty and effective presence on the House floor and in committee rooms, Frank in recent years has settled into the roles of wise（扮演好。。的角色 ） guy and wise man of the Democratic Party. (Conservatives “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth,” he once remarked. More recently, he noted that Barack Obama’s continued insistence that we have one President at a time “overstates the number of Presidents we have.”) In a 2006 poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian, published shortly before the elections that gave Democrats control of the House for the first time in twelve years, Frank was voted the brainiest, funniest, and most eloquent congressman—a notable achievement, since he often speaks in a barely(hardly 的替代品)comprehensible mumble（n.咕哝）.

During the financial crisis this fall, Frank’s status as a gay trailblazer（开拓者）suddenly seemed remote and irrelevant. After the Democrats’ victory, he became chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, designated（后面直接是designate sb sth） him the Democrats’ chief negotiator with the Bush Administration on legislation to address the crises in the banking and auto industries. “Through this all, the quarterback(四分卫) for us is Barney,” Pelosi told me. “He’s solution-oriented（解题的）, respectful of different perspectives, and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”

For the first time in more than forty years of public life, Frank has real power, and he is wielding it in a characteristically idiosyncratic manner（富有特点的做法）. He remains a national symbol of outré sexuality as well as a rare wit in generally humor-deficient（n.+adj的形式 幽默不足的） Washington. But in Congress he is thought of no longer simply as a liberal of the old school (which he is) but also as a grind. His expertise is in one of the least glamorous subjects on the national agenda—housing, particularly rental housing for poor people—and he is using that knowledge to confront the nation’s economic crisis. “For Barney, the question has always been: What works? What can government do to see that people have the decent necessities of life?” his sister Ann Lewis, the longtime Democratic activist, says. “Now he’s right there. Barney’s been preparing for this moment for his entire life.”

The contours of Frank’s Massachusetts district have shifted over the years, but his political base has long been the liberal, heavily Jewish suburbs of Newton and Brookline. (Brookline was once part of the district represented by Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, but he surrendered it to Frank’s predecessor, Father Robert Drinan, saying, according to Frank, “I can’t take all the phone calls. Those nice Jewish ladies even call when they agree with you!”) Much of the campus of Boston College, a Jesuit institution, also lies within Frank’s district, and two days after the recent election he paid a visit to the B.C. Real Estate Council, an alumni group.

Boston College has become a major national university in recent years, but the hundred or so older graduates at the luncheon（正式的午餐） reflected the school’s Irish-Catholic roots. Frank ambled to the podium in his standard uniform: a monochromatic suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie（绫格布的领带）. The look is an improvement on the dishevelled attire（衣着凌乱） that was once his trademark. When Frank was running for state representative in Boston, in the early nineteen-seventies, a campaign poster featured his photograph and the words “Neatness Isn’t Everything.” In conversation, and even in his speeches, Frank often refers to his lifelong struggle to lose weight, but he is well into his seventh decade, and that battle seems to have been lost, a plight（境况） accentuated by his apparent tendency to（明显的倾向于） buy shirts in his aspirational, rather than his actual, size.

连载一

abdmenUID：2536727

ZNM哪里是ibt作文哦？
有人这样写IBT作文么？

glamorouskyUID：2459211

呵呵~~只是从其中提炼出地道的句式及短语 有一些词语的搭配是我们想不到的

glamorouskyUID：2459211

Frank never speaks from a prepared text, and he talks so quickly that transcription is nearly impossible. His staff in Washington sometimes posts videos of his remarks on the Web instead. Frank has lived in Massachusetts since he was a freshman at Harvard, in the late nineteen-fifties, but his accent is still marked by a virulent strain(充满敌意的紧张情绪) of his native New Jersey—he is from Bayonne. (Early in Frank’s congressional career, Toby Moffett, a representative from Connecticut, jokingly asked for U.N.-style simultaneous translations of Frank’s remarks during committee hearings.)

Frank rarely smiles, even when he’s being funny. “There are three lies politicians tell,” he told the real-estate group. “The first is ‘We ran against each other but are still good friends.’ That’s never true. The second is ‘I like campaigning.’ Anyone who tells you they like campaigning is either a liar or a sociopath（反社交者）. Then, there’s ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ ” He went on, “Everybody likes to say ‘I told you so.’ I have found personally that it is one of the few pleasures that improves with age. I can say ‘I told you so’ without taking a pill before, during, or after I do it.” A priest and several older men at my table realized that Frank was talking about sex, and, embarrassed, they stared at their hands. But the moment passed quickly. In Frank’s district, at least, his homosexuality provokes little controversy, even at a Catholic school. (Elsewhere, Frank no longer censors his ribald（下流的） sense of humor. Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser（募捐者） for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out（大声呼唤）, “Sometimes it is!”)

Frank told the group at Boston College that he predicted, and might have prevented, the real-estate crisis that has engulfed（吞噬） the economy. By this time, many aspects of the crisis were well known. The end of the housing bubble had caused home values to plummet（急速下降 也可用于股票） and mortgage defaults to rise, particularly among subprime次优级抵押贷款 borrowers. Many financial-services firms had assembled mortgages and bought and sold them as securities, and the value of those assets had also declined sharply—a development that devastated the firms. The investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had closed their doors, and the financial-services industry was on the brink of collapse（破产边缘）, even after Congress authorized an emergency seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout, in October.

According to Frank, at the root of（。。。的根源） the real-estate crisis was a misguided notion that homeownership should be available to all people—what President Bush has called “the ownership society.” “The ‘I told you so’ here is that homeownership is a nice thing but it is not suitable for everybody,” Frank said at Boston College. “There are people in this society who don’t have enough money to be homeowners, and there are people whose lives are not sufficiently integrated for them to take on the responsibility to be a homeowner. And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership.” He said that many people would always be renters, and that there was nothing wrong with this. “We need to get back in the business of building rental housing and preserving the housing we have,” he said.

In one respect, Frank went on, the current crisis has had a salutary effect（有益的结果）: home prices have fallen, making homes more affordable for those who still have the money to buy them. “But we need to be bringing down the cost of housing in an orderly way, like by building new housing to increase the supply,” he said. “We’ve brought the cost down a little bit in a less orderly way. I tend to eat when I’m under stress. I want to lose twenty-five pounds—but not by Sunday. And that’s how home prices have come down.” (Frank speaks incessantly about food. In “Let’s Get Frank,” he complains about the low-fat provisions given to Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment debate. Referring to Dick Gephardt, who was the Minority Leader at the time, Frank says, “They got all this jelly-doughnut shit in there, and I gotta eat this stuff. . . . Gephardt’s a sheygets—whaddaya expect from Gephardt?” Sheygets is Yiddish for a male Gentile, and thus one who cannot be trusted to provide acceptable snacks.)

Frank arrived in Congress when the Reagan Administration was withdrawing the federal government from the business of building housing for the poor. At the time, it was clear that the private sector had little incentive to(几乎没有刺激) build low-income housing without government assistance in the form of tax breaks or subsidies. The Reagan Administration assisted low-income renters by offering them vouchers to help them pay rent and by providing tax credits to local developers who built low-income housing. In subsequent years, Frank has fought with intermittent success to preserve such programs from major budget cuts.

In 2001, Frank embraced a new approach（采取了新的举措 embrace很好用 可以是抓住机会 可以是包括包含 还有信奉之意）. That year, Bernie Sanders, then a representative from Vermont, sponsored a bill to create a government trust fund that would be used for building and renovating low-income housing. Sanders’s legislation didn’t pass, but the idea was later reintroduced, and Frank backed a proposal for funding the trust with a portion of（一部分） the annual revenue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, the two giant, government-backed mortgage companies. The funding for the trust would be automatic—not subject to（屈从于） annual congressional approval. “I realized, because housing has been a backwater, getting appropriations for housing is going to be tough,” Frank told me. “First of all, if you want to build housing, it can’t be year by year. You know, it’s construction. But, two, I’m finding money outside the appropriations process, money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So I can do a lot of units without directly competing for the appropriations.”

小狗小骨头UID：2254659

楼主辛苦了 加油！

lbvslzvsmomUID：2533971

3Q

cjluUID：2448066

gla版总结的真好^^支持一下~

lbvslzvsmomUID：2533971

3Q

四月百合UID：2529490

cool

qinx04UID：2673115

非常支持lz~~~感谢lz的辛勤劳动~~:handshake

lois_xiaoxiaoUID：2910902

谢谢！~:handshake

兔子加油UID：2908816

第一篇文章的结尾很牛~~特别是那个排比句式~~我看到里面有个模板可以拿来写托福作文~~嘿嘿，这个
we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that

daliuyaoUID：2960207

不错

daliuyaoUID：2960207

谢谢

imyeyesloveUID：2986621

作文不好 留爪