Politicians behaving badly? Report them to The Loop!
AID needs some a-i-d if it wants to see this unsightly spot in its lobby spruced up with the giant plaque that honored Hillary Clinton back in the '90s.
(Al Kamen/the Washington Post)
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In the spirit of the holiday travel season -- and in honor of Sen. Chuck Schumer's churlish treatment of a flight attendant this week on the US Airways shuttle from New York (not to mention earlier Schumer highhandedness during his travels) -- we're inaugurating the LoopOnTheGo mailbox. This is where you can drop tips whenever you see a member of Congress or a senior administration official pulling rank, grabbing an extra seat, cutting in line or otherwise behaving badly at an airport, train station, restaurant or other public place.
Send your sightings to looponthego@washpost.com. (Please include an e-mail address or phone number in case we have some questions. Communications will be treated confidentially.)
The perfect gift
The Obama folks are looking to get a chunk of the top nominees stuck on the Senate floor confirmed before the Upper Body slithers out of town. One of those awaiting confirmation, Rajiv Shah, up for administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, has a lengthy checklist of tasks, including filling all the top slots in his troubled, drifting agency, from deputy director to the nine top assistant administrators -- all of whom have to be confirmed -- and other key players.
It's bad enough that the agency, rudderless for a year and a pastiche of career folks, contractors, Bush-era vets and such, is still grappling to find its place in the new world order. Once Shah rights the ship and hires for all those spots -- or maybe even before -- he can turn to the biggest challenge of all: raising the money to fill the huge, unsightly gouge in the USAID lobby wall.
When last we wrote, the agency had, at the last minute, scuttled a plan to restore a large bronze plaque dedicated to then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton that had been installed during her husband's administration. But the stop order, apparently from Clinton, did not occur before officials had prepared to bring the 800-pound plaque back from a warehouse and ripped out the marble walls to affix it.
A Clinton spokesman said then that "if AID wants to restore the wall, it should pursue private funding." It will probably cost thousands.
Happy fundraising, Mr. Shah.
Worth a look
No particular plans for the holidays? If you find yourself in Kentucky, stop by the University of Louisville and check out the newly opened archives housing the papers of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his wife, former labor secretary Elaine L. Chao.
The archives are in the Ekstrom Library. Loop Fans may recall a $14.2 million McConnell earmark that paid for a new library wing three years ago and included an auditorium named for Chao. This new exhibit, as described by Chao's e-mailed holiday greeting card, is a "7,000 square foot facility." She adds: "The gallery is over 2,000 square feet, and features memorabilia, photos, and videos from Mitch's and my childhoods through our careers. In particular, the exhibits chronicle the immigration of our family from Asia to America, our initial years in America, the challenges of assimilating to a different land."
No, thanks
A codel finds House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a two-plane jaunt -- 21 members (15 D, six R) with six spouses and assorted staff -- to catch the end of the Copenhagen climate conference. This is not a Loop-recommended trip. The turnaround is too quick -- they left Wednesday and come back Saturday -- and Northern Europe in December is not our idea of fun. Too many briefings and meetings. And the carbon footprint . . .
