You know how, every few months, when reporters are bored, someone writes a story about how Members of Congress are unable to afford DC housing and end up sleeping on a couch or an air mattress or a pile of garbage?

Today was Bloomberg's turn.

It's unfortunate, really. Congressional pages get their own dorm; it seems like it would be an awfully good idea to have a similar option for Members (security concerns aside). A Hill-ton, so to speak. (Yes, I know there's a Capitol Hilton.) For $30 million or so, a budgetary pittance, the AOC could build a 500-room hotel that would be made available to Members at some extremely reasonable price (say, $500 a month). Siting the building close to the Capitol would be expensive, but worthwhile, and would allow Members to focus more on the issues they ought to be focusing on and less on paying the gas bill or calling the exterminator.

God knows it'd be tough to pull off, politically. It's hard to justify spending $30 million on yourself when there are people who can't afford any housing whatsoever. But if someone figured out a way to do it, the next several generations of Congressmen would thank them.

On a somewhat related note, tonight marked the premiere of The Hill, the Sundance Channel's 6-part "verite documentary series" about Robert Wexler's staff. [After that whole cocaine-and-hookers incident, I guess Wexler can use all the good press he can get.] I enjoyed it enough to set the TiVo for next time, and I'd happily recommend that you consider doing the same.

Krugman on chutzpah:

But in his non-concession speech, Mr. Lieberman described Mr. Lamont as representative of a political tendency in which “every disagreement is considered disloyal” — a statement of remarkable chutzpah from someone who famously warned Democrats that “we undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

And that's why you suck, Joe.

Two articles worth reading:

• On Sunday, the NYT profiled the pastor of a "megachurch" in Minnesota who's been making a laudable effort to separate church and state.
• On Monday, the NYT profiled a "conservative boot camp" run by the Young America's Foundation.

The two have little to do with each other (aside from the fact that both are about places that scare liberals), but I read them within hours of one another, and it occurred to me that - with a relatively small amount of thought - I ought to be able to come up with some pithy connection between the two of them.

That was three days ago, and I haven't really had time to come up with anything, so in the spirit of better-now-than-never, I'll just post the links instead. But I want you all to know that I meant to write something coherent.

(Incidentally, the hiatus continues. I'll return full-time at the end of August.)

It's hot.









Update: I was wrong. Now it's hot.

Hiatus!

Sorry, loyal readers. I'll see you in August. -Ish.

Do you think they don't get the irony, or do they just not care?

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization's policies and internal administration.

The best American fiction of the last 25 years, courtesy of the New York Times and a veritable who's-who of contemporary novelists.

How Dan Brown didn't win is beyond me.

In honor of Mother's Day, The Hill asked a dozen Representatives to describe the best advice their mothers ever gave them. To summarize: Al Wynn's mom is crazy; John Boehner's mom is boring; Darrell Issa's mom is strict; Steve Chabot's mom is prescient; Jim Moran's mom is nurturing; and Thaddeus McCotter's mom is sad.

Why Mike Hayden's right for the CIA: because he can smell a rat.

A few years ago, when Steven Vardy began receiving cryptic e-mails from the descendants of exiled African leaders who wanted to transfer millions of dollars into an American bank account and offered a big cut of the proceeds, he turned to a former student for counsel.

"I asked him 'what do you think of this?'" said Mr. Vardy, a distinguished professor of history at Duquesne University. "At first I thought they were terrorists, trying to transfer money."

Mr. Vardy's former student, who happened to head the largest electronic spying agency in the world, not only smelled a rat, but knew the breed.

Don't worry, Gen. Michael Hayden told his old professor. "He told me he knew about it and they weren't dangerous. They were just people trying to make a little money out of me," Mr. Vardy said.

You don't say.

To anyone looking for something to read, I'd very highly recommend Maid for a Month, a five-part series by the [Toronto] Globe and Mail's Jan Wong. Ms. Wong and her two teenage sons spent a month undercover as members of the working poor, so to speak, and put together an admirable read-in-one-sitting version of Nickel and Dimed. If nothing else, it'll make you feel guilty about how dirty your bathroom is.

The fine folks at Agence France-Presse are owed a great debt for this, the best headline I've seen in days:

Mike Huckabee was on the Colbert Report this past Tuesday, but I didn't get around to watching it until about half an hour ago, so I'd like to quickly mention it now: every time I see the man, he makes me laugh, and then he makes me cry.

Laugh, of course, because he's such a witty, likable guy; and then almost immediately cry, because his likability makes it altogether too easy to forget how far to the political right he really is (gay marriage, abortion, evolution... these are all things that Mike Huckabee doesn't believe in¹).

As I mentioned to my distinguished former co-editor this evening, I honestly think that Huckabee's rather unique² combination of tremendous likability and tremendous conservatism has the potential to make him as dangerous to the left as the early-90s Bill Clinton was to the right. And that makes me nervous.

1 - That last one is actually not even an exaggeration.
2 - Name another likable conservative, I dare you. (No offense, distinguished former co-editor.)