The New York Times reports that Henry Waxman’s congressional committee may ask the Justice Department to fire up a criminal inquiryinto Roger Clemens. For those without a TV, radio, or Internet connection, Clemens on Feb. 13 took the hot seat in front of Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in what turned into a hilarious circus of distortions, politicking, bullshit, and very possibly lies.

It’s that last part that Waxman’s interested in. Clemens used the hearing to do what he’s been doing ever since the Mitchell report on MLB steroid use came out last year–that is, deny he’s ever taken the substances. His denials contradict the testimony of his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who says he shot up the Rocket on numerous occasions.

Much won’t come of this. I hope the Justice Department has better things to do than investigate whether this blowhard once used drugs. Waxman has said he regrets holding the hearing, which perhaps indicates how interested he is in really pursuing this matter. Plus, Clemens has suffered plenty: It was revealed that an abscess on his butt once caused him to bleed through a pair of designer pants.

Of the 60 or so musical numbers from Enchanted performed on last night’s show, Kristin Chenoweth singing “That’s How You Know” was notable, not for its rote-ness (it is a rule, for instance, that anytime you see guys in hardhats in a production number, they’re gonna carry the singer around at the end) but for the tenacity shown by the conga player flanking Chenowith throughout the performance.

It’s as if he was sticking up for all conga players, forever forced by their ungainly instruments to the rear of the stage, back by the windchimes. I am a conga player of substance who has been given the opportunity to perform on national television, he seemed to be saying, And I will not step out of the frame now that you can no longer hear my instrument! You made all ambulatory conga players proud last night, sir. Drum circles around the world will thwack a paradiddle in your honor next weekend!

A four-alarm fire that started this morning in the historic Boone Hotel in downtown Boonsboro has spread to other buildings in the town square and is still smoldering. The hotel, built in the 1700s, was being renovated by romance novelist Nora Roberts and her husband, Bruce Wilder, who owns the bookshop across the street. They’ve lived in Washington County for some 30 years, according to the Haegerstown Herald-Mail.

An archived story in that paper describes the couple’s plans to renovate the six-room hotel for use as an inn, with each room to reflect a different literary theme and couple—including one reserved for Roberts’ In Death series (written under the pseudonym J.D. Robb) which features Eve Dallas, sexy police lieutenant of the future, and “her Irish billionaire, Roarke.”

The hotel went up in flames shortly before 8 a.m. and spread to at least four buildings, including apartments and a Subway sandwich shop. Nearly 40 fire companies were called in; various news reports this a.m. say no one was hurt. WUSA9 is reporting that witnesses source the fire to a kerosene heater that tipped over and started an explosion.

Roberts and Wilder also bought the U.S. Hotel in the same town square and their son, Dan Aufdem-Brinke, had planned to open a reastaurant there. Interestingly, he had a different restaurant on South Main Street, next door to the Boone Hotel, that was destroyed by fire roughly a year ago, on Jan. 19.

D.C.-born cartoonist Charles Burns–his family quickly moved to Seattle, but hey, a native’s a native–is having his brilliant horror-inspired graphic novel, Black Hole, made into a film by David Fincher. (The book, originally serialized in its own comic, recently came out in paperback.) Fincher’s a fine choice for the film–Burns’ obsession with blood-and-guts and social dysfunction is a nice match for the guy who made Zodiac and Fight Club. But having finally gotten around to Eastern Promises (note to self: my wife doesn’t like films in which a knives get shoved into somebody’s eyeballs), I think New York magazine’s blog makes a good point:

In related news, what the hell happened to David Cronenberg? Old Dave should have been all over this one, what with the queasy body experimentation and disfiguring pox, but he’s off making masterfully taut crime thrillers.

Kudos to the Washington Times, home to strong-willed Eagles fans, for flooding the zone on the Pope’s visit to D.C. in April–for about a month now the paper’s had a dedicated blog on the subject. Today it brings word that parishioners at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in New York City, where Benedict XVI will lead a prayer service, are getting the shaft as far as actually getting to attend. Worse, only 27 tickets are being made available to St. Joseph’s parishioners to attend the pope’s mass at Yankee Stadium.

Closer to home, the blog also brings word of the crucifix that will hang behind the Pope when he delivers mass at Nationals Park on April 17. The winner, pictured above, currently resides at St. Mark the Evangelist Church in Hyattsville.

I couldn’t help but notice the photo in the Post of the photographer at City Paper. It’s meta Darrow! Can you spot him??

Also noticeable: It’s harder than a rubber dildo to cover the Sex Workers Art Show and still abide by the vanilla rules of a mainstream newspaper. To wit:

“At the same time, it is very much about, well . . . that word.” (Translation: fucking)

“One performer, dancing to ‘God Bless the U.S.A.,’ pulls a chain of dollar bills from a place money should never be saved.” (Translation: her asshole)

Stay-tuned for the full-on, noneuphemized version from CP’s Show & Tell columnist, Amanda Hess, who has done her post-show homework about the artistes.

There has been a fascinating and ugly debate taking place in the City Desk comments section lately between Lance Armstrong’s defenders and his detractors.

It started in a thread about the steroid circus now going on in the halls of Congress, when Betsy Andreu, wife of one of Lance’s former cycling partners, alleged that Armstrong has tried to ruin her life for saying that she heard him admit to doctors that he had used performance enhancing drugs.

Andreu’s comments brought a strong rebuttal from Tim Herman, a lawyer for Armstrong in a 2004 fraud case surrounding Andreu’s allegations about Armstrong’s drug use. (Both Andreu and Herman confirmed in interviews that the posts on the City Paper board are indeed theirs.)

Herman’s rebuttal has since been dissected and rerebutted piece by piece by Andreu and a horde of mostly anonymous anti-Lance posters. Somebody posting as MSM inserted a link into the thread for a really, really fascinating and really, really ugly Mp3 of a phone conversation between America’s first golden-boy cyclist, Greg LeMond, and Stephanie McIlvain, who testified in that case that she didn’t hear Armstrong admit to using performance enhancers.

In the conversation, which was taped surreptitiously — McIlvain at one point asks if it’s being recorded, and LeMond assures her it’s not — McIlvain confesses that she was in fact in the room with Andreu when Armstrong admitted using the drugs.

The fear and contempt LeMond and McIlvain have for Armstrong and his lobby makes the conversation gripping, despite the low-fi quality of the recording. LeMond alleges that Armstrong is out to ruin him, and says that before “I have 17 years of my life destroyed by Lance, I will go down fighting!”

There’s likely nothing new contained in the allegations posted here. All the events alleged to have taken place in the thread took place a long time ago, if at all — the confession of drug use that Andreu says she heard from Armstrong was in the mid-1990s. The LeMond/McIlvain tape has been making the rounds in the cycling underbelly since at least last fall.

But, the passion in this thread makes it clear that the suspicions about Armstrong’s cleanliness as an athlete aren’t going to go away soon. And with what’s taking place across town right now — with federal lawmakers ready and eager to go back in time to investigate cheating and drug use charges in baseball and football —
by the end of the LeMond/McIlvain conversation, listeners are left with one big question:

Hey, Congress: When’s Lance Armstrong Coming?

Older Woman Wearing Gold Flats, Carrying Cane: Do you think Britney is going to be all right?

Younger Woman in Nikes, Tattoo on Bicep: Would you be if you had all those people following you all the time?

Older Woman, Gold Flats, Cane: I think it’s a tragedy how they treat her.

Younger Woman, Nikes, Tattoo: Me, too. And she’s gotten so fat.

The noose is hot. It’s passed the Swastika as the go-to hate symbol for high-school kids and bozos from the Deep South to South Capitol Street. Don’t even try to use it to sell magazines, or to defend those who try to use it to sell magazines.

So, let’s take time to give credit for this phenomenon to the man who put the noose back in play in American pop culture: Former Virginia Senator George Allen.

When he was a lawyer and state lawmaker, Allen felt cozy hanging a noose in his office. During campaigns for the U.S. Senate in 2000, the rope wasn’t a major issue, and Allen was able to pass it off as, depending on the interview, a token of his law-and-order leanings or of his fondness for the ways of the Old West.

Then came the great “macaca” episode while Allen was running for re-election to the Senate in 2006, and Allen’s history on matters racial became the focus of the campaign and, because of his presidential ambitions and status as a frontrunner for the 2008 Republican nomination, part of the national conversation.

Turns out Allen had the sort of resume Spike Lee would fabricate were he to create a “Politician Who Hangs Noose in Office” character.

There was Allen’s opposition to the MLK Holiday in Virginia while he was in the state legislature, his proclamation for “Confederate Heritage Month” as governor to answer Black History Month, and his support for Trent Lott during the Strom Thurmond episode. And old acquaintances were running to microphones to recall Allen as a guy who would drop “the N-Word” into casual conversation.

By the end of his losing and most likely last campaign, the days when a hanging rope could be dismissed as “more of a lasso,” as Allen had tried doing not so long ago, were over.

U2 3D (aka U2 3D: The First Live-Action 3D Concert Movie, Featuring U2 …): It’s like seeing U2 live, in three dazzling dimensions, except it’s on film. U2 3D opens today at the National Museum of Natural History’s Johnson IMAX Theatre, 10th St. & Constitution Ave. NW.

Also, that dude still seriously calls himself “The Edge.” I wonder if that’s what is on his driver’s license?

Six Flags stock opened the day at $1.75 per share,
matching its lowest opening price in at least 10 years. This after the stock set record closing lows in each of the previous two days of trading.

The stock continued its slide despite last week’s fourth quarter financial report, which claimed a 7 percent revenue increase over the same period in 2006.

The company’s goodwill seems to be flagging, also. Michael Palazzi, a business owner in Agawam, Mass., home of Six Flags New England, has asked the city to repay him $54,000, the amount of money he estimates he lost when the town council passed a parking ban pushed by the local theme park.

Last year, the town council passed a parking ordinance which prohibited Six Flags visitors from parking anywhere but at the lots owned by Six Flags, which cost $15-$30 per car. The measure was pushed by Six Flags in the name of public safety, though there was no record of any pedestrian safety incident involving the unsanctioned satellite lots in the past 20 years.

Palazzi, who has a storage facility down the street from the Six Flags entrance, was among the locals who offered a cheaper alternative, at $10 per car, before the ordinance knocked him out of the car parking business.

The ordinance was tossed out shortly after Agawam citizens and lawmakers learned that Dan Snyder, who became chairman of the Six Flags board in late 2005, had used the exact same safety rationale in 2000 in Prince George’s County to prohibit pedestrian traffic to his FedExField on Redskins game days.

The PG measure was tossed in 2004 after a lawsuit was filed claiming that the safety argument was bogus, and that the measure was actually intended just to force fans to pay Snyder’s inflated parking fees.

Mayor Cohen, a four-term incumbent, was bounced out of office in November by Susan Dawson, a substitute teacher and political neophyte, in a campaign that centered on the parking situation.

Dawson’s campaign was managed by Palazzi. He jumped into politics for the first time to fight Six Flags’ influence on his hometown.

Last week, Palazzi threatened to sue the city if he is not paid the money he lost as a result of the ban.

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

A Jimmy Carter expert says he doubts Carter ever made the anti-Semitic remarks that Marvin Mandel attributes to the former president in “All About Abe,” a new and occasionally brutal documentary about Abe Pollin.

Allegations against Carter provide the film’s biggest bombshells. Mandel, the now-87-year-old former governor of Maryland and longtime friend of Pollin, says Carter “tried to keep me from being chairman of the National Governors’ Conference. He actually said on the telephone…‘We can’t elect a Jew the head of the National Governors’ Conference.’”

Mandel and Pollin go on to spew a lot of anti-Carter gibberish in the movie. Pollin asserts, for example, that Carter rigged the Justice Department to make sure Mandel was indicted and convicted, and downplays the extent of Mandel’s corruptness, saying he only took “[s]hirts, couple of suits, very small stuff” from political pals.

Pollin’s charges are quite disprovable: Mandel was indicted on mail fraud and racketeering charges in November 1975; Carter took office in January 1977. And the trial record indicates that Mandel took hundreds of thousands of dollars in goods, services and cash from cronies before doing their bidding.

The slime from the quote attributed to Carter by Mandel in Pollin’s doc, however, isn’t as easy to wipe off.

But Albert Nason, an archivist at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, a branch of the National Archives, says he’s suspicious of the accuracy of Mandel’s memories.

“I don’t know if Carter had anything at all to say about who would head up the Governors’ Conference,” says Nason, who has been with the library for 21 years. “But look back to that time: Here’s Carter coming in in 1976, he’s setting up the administration — the first thing he’s going to do is appoint a governor who is under indictment? This is after Watergate. He wanted to pursue a transparent image. If he were to push Mandel while Mandel was under indictment, that would be against everything he was running for.”

“I just can’t see Carter coming out with something so blatantly anti-Semitic as ['We can't elect a Jew...],” Nason adds. “Nothing else in his life would indicate that.”

Jimmy Carter Has Always Hated Jews!

Michael Jordan Called Abe Pollin a Lying Redneck Bastard!

Those are the money shots from All About Abe, the straight-to-party-favors-bags documentary about Abe Pollin that was recently produced.

The only release the film has had so far came when DVDs were given away at a party celebrating Pollin’s 84th birthday and the 10th anniversary of the Verizon Center.

I didn’t rate an invite to the party, but got a copy from a guy who knows a guy, and was stunned that the movie hasn’t gotten any attention whatsoever, even with its very limited distribution.

What’s more, wide release or no, I felt the scenes containing the aforementioned Jew/Redneck slurs made the film’s director, Ivy Meeropol, a lock for the 2007 Unsportsman of the Year award.

I didn’t speak with Meeropol until after deadline for my current column, which bestows the annual dishonor on her.

Turns out she’s a real good sport. Rather than get defensive or snippy, Meeropol said she was “happy to hear” any feedback, even if I thought parts of the doc make Abe seem like a creep.

“I’m probably not going to hear many perspectives on this, so, I welcome anything,” she said. “I have to say, I didn’t think anybody would feel that way.”

Meeropol said that the Pollin family, who funded and produced All About Abe, wanted a feature-film documentary made, and paid the going rate to have that done. But there were indications that the Pollins never intended to release the movie to theaters or television.

“They didn’t buy insurance, which you’d have to do if you’re going to put this out,” she said. “What if Jimmy Carter comes after me and says, ‘Hey, you’re calling me an anti-Semite!’ You’d have to protect yourself. I don’t see how this could ever be released. The family just wanted to make [several thousand copies] and give them to friends and family. They wanted a legacy thing.”

In other words, Abe Pollin wanted his friends and family to see him and his pals smear Jimmy Carter.

The ex-president is portrayed in the movie, albeit with total disregard to historical accuracy, as a guy who back in the 1970s used all his powers to ruin the political career and life of FOA (Friend of Abe) and former Maryland governor Marvin Mandel.

Why? Well, according to the documentary, because Mandel is Jewish. (The Mandel/Carter scenes feel like they should be in another movie, but are creepy enough to make the DVD worth seeking out all by themselves.)

Meeropol said if she wasn’t working on a vanity project for the Pollins, she would have made some attempt to counter-balance those portions of the film that brutalize Michael Jordan, also. The most sensational of these scenes has Pollin accusing Jordan of calling him a liar and “redneck bastard.”

“I think this told Abe’s side of the story. We did not give [Jordan's] side at all,” she said with a laugh, “I felt that was a little unfair. But….”

We know: We’ll have to wait till Jordan funds his own documentary to get the rest of the story.

Nick Hornby, from today’s Post Syle section, and Wallace Shawn. It’s hard to be twins. Just ask Cherkis.

Former City Paper reporter Dave Jamieson and I pulled up a chair last week at Levi’s Port Cafe and practically ordered the left side of the menu, everything from a slab of ribs to Carolina-style barbecue pork to fried catfish to mac and cheese. It was our first visit, and we wanted to sample widely. The meal was part of my ongoing quest to find decent Carolina ‘cue in the area. More on that later.

But as I was paying the bill at the counter, another apparent first-timer walked in and introduced himself to the cashier. “Hi, I’m Marion Barry,” he told her and held out his hand. He said he had heard about the soul food and barbecue outlet. By the time I paid up and started to walk out, Barry had settled in at a table by the window, and plates were starting to pile up around him.

Barry’s glad-handing struck me less as politicking than as a ploy for a free meal. But not so, says Johnny Kersey, owner and chef at Levi’s. “Everybody pays that comes in,” he says, otherwise he’d go out of business fast. “If the president comes in, he has to pay.”

But Kersey did say that he’s known Barry for awhile, though he couldn’t remember if the councilmember had ever visited his place before last week’s meal.