During congressional recesses, members of Congress leave the Capitol campus and beleaguered staffers may get a day or two away, but HOH is always on duty! Here’s a roundup of the highlights from keeping a watchful eye on Capitol Hill, even during a slow week.
Bird Makes Hitchcock Proud
Capitol Police officers stationed at Second Street and Constitution Avenue Northeast got the Tippi Hedren treatment from an unfriendly crow who dive-bombed them, tourists and neighborhood folks.
An officer said the crow is likely just protecting the baby birds living in a large nest high atop the tree and joked that officers stationed at the post have alerted their commander about the “assault suspect,” which he described as a “10-inch black crow.”
Herrera Beutler Is Expecting
Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler knows what’s coming for her new kid: a lifetime of correcting people that “No, no, it’s pronounced ‘Butler.’”
That was how the Washington Republican announced on her Facebook page that she and her husband, Dan, are “expecting a baby.” This will be the couple’s first child.
Mark Sanford Gets Larry Flynt Treatment
Because things weren’t weird enough in the special election for South Carolina’s 1st District House seat, what with satirist Stephen Colbert’s sister taking on the world’s foremost Appalachian Trail hiker, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt entered the picture.
Calling former Gov. Mark Sanford the “sex pioneer of our time,” Flynt endorsed the former Republican House member who, in 2009, disappeared for several days for a tryst in Argentina with then-mistress, now-fiancee María Belén Chapur.
“Sanford’s open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support,” Flynt said.
Elie Wiesel’s Revelation
Elie Wiesel told the crowd at a 20th anniversary tribute to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that his public scolding of President Bill Clinton at the 1993 dedication of the museum was partially because of the rain.
“Our shoes were in water,” Wiesel said, as was the speech he had spent the night before writing. So he improvised and told Clinton on April 22, 1993, to “do something” about the bloodshed in Yugoslavia.
Clinton, speaking at the anniversary tribute on April 29, took it in stride, saying people like Wiesel compelled him to “get off my rear end and do something about Bosnia.”
