I had a dream that one day, Sen. Joe Lieberman will decide how to shake a man’s hand based not on the color of his skin, but on the content of his character. Maybe it had something to do with the photo accompanying the Washington Post’s latest story about D.C. voting rights:

Buried on B5, the Post reports that yet another anonymous senator has been placed a hold on the Fenty schools-takeover bill.

Last time, it was Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin. This time, David Nakamura’s sources say, it’s a Republican. And most likely the hold gets pulled today and the bill is approved. Or not—such is the glory of living in a federal fiefdom.

UPDATE, 5:05 P.M.: Turns out it was buried for a reason. Eleanor Holmes Norton says the story’s false.

“That must come with a ball tickler.” That’s what my older brother used to quip when confronted with an inordinately expensive commodity. In the case of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s $300-an-hour escorts, the answer to that question seems likely to have been, yes, if that’s what turned you on. On Thursday, a judge ruled the “D.C. Madam” could not pass on to reporters any more phone records that might identify the men who contracted the services of her workers.

But what’s more interesting than the names of the big spenders are the women who worked for Palfrey, the $300-an-hour club. I’ve never paid for sex (only because I didn’t know where to find it when I was 15), but in the marketplace, I assume $300 gets you the Ferrari, or at least the Corvette. But the questions remain: What does a $300-an-hour prostitute look like? What do you get for the money? Is there a charge by the minute?

President George W. Bush came to Petworth on Thursday for a meeting on immigration and assimilation at the Centro Evangelistico Asambleas de Iglesias Cristianas on the 4100 block of 9th Street NW. He did not leave some neighbors happy, reader John McLarty reports:

This morning I awoke to the sound of short siren bleeps and an unusual amount of activity outside my bedroom window on the 800 block of Taylor Street NW. After some observation and poking around out front, I learned that the throng of police and suited men outside my house were in preparation for a visit by George W. Bush to a church located across the street on the corner. A large white tent was set up at the side entrance. How exciting, I thought.

My neighbor informed me that she went outside just in just enough time to move her car as they were preparing to tow all of the cars, this in spite of the fact that no-parking signs has just gone up the evening before and in some cases the same morning. I watched briefly then hurried off to work. On my way down the street, I asked a few of the men the reason for the visit and they ignored me in a manner most surly. After I got to work, I called a news station to find out the reason for the visit was a meeting on immigration.

According to my roommate, by late morning Taylor Street was cleared, helicopters circled above, agents were stationed in front and behind each home to prevent occupants from stepping outside (a neighbor tried and was shooed back inside), Georgia Avenue was shut down. When the motorcade arrived, my roommate and I had a few more moments of conversation and then he decided to take a shower, he was to leave for work by noon. By the time he got out of the shower, it was over. The helicopters, SS swarm, commotion and MPD were gone and everything returned to normal. Well, not everything; we did note that the cars that had earlier been moved weren’t returned to their spaces (all legal) along our block.

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With the White House announcing this weekend that it opposes a bill that would give the District a real seat in the House of Representatives, we all should be turning our attentions to one man: WTOP political analyst Mark Plotkin.

Plotkin has fought for statehood and ranted on the issue more than anyone else including our previous mayor, Anthony A. Williams. It’s the perfect time to hear Plotkin do Plotkin.

“It is not surprising,” Plotkin says of the Bush administration’s turn against the District.

Plotkin then drops this anecdote as an explanation: “I had a conversation with Karl Rove at Parker’s Exxon on MacArthur Boulevard. His car was pulling up for gas and mine was as well. This was four or five months ago. I saw the ‘Taxation Without Representation’ motto was concealed [by the license plate cover on Rove's car]. I said, ‘Why are you concealing the thing?’ We had a conversation.”

Of course, Plotkin used the opportunity to hammer in on the statehood issue. “[Rove] said, ‘If you follow your logic, then Texas should be divided up into five different countries.’ I thought that was the end of the conversation. I just shook my head and got in the car….It was an insulting and demeaning remark.”

We aren’t sure what the hell Rove meant by that line of reasoning. But, like Plotkin, we agree that it must be some kind of putdown. Can anyone else out there parse Rove’s logic?

Four-and-a-half years ago, City Paper reporter Annys Shin filed a documents request with the federal government.

Thank you, Department of Justice, for the prompt reply. For the record, Annys no longer works here.

Whether you realize it or not, the District has the death penalty. There is a death penalty case going on right now in federal court, U.S. vs. Larry Gooch. Gooch is the fourth homegrown defendant to face the ultimate punishment since 2001, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office tried gang leader Tommy Edelin. If you’re shocked to federal government would thwart the District’s will, don’t worry—Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s got your back. If only she knew what she was talking about.

In January, Norton fired off a letter to then-interim U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor protesting his decision to seek the death penalty against Gooch, an alleged gang enforcer.

Norton wrote:

I write to bring to your attention my concern about the apparent emergence of a new and troubling pattern by your office of repeatedly seeking the death penalty in this strongly anti-death penalty jurisdiction despite consistent failure with juries and the federal courts. Only three death penalty cases here proceeded to trial, all during the current President’s administration, representing a sharp break with predecessor administrations of both parties for nearly 30 years.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs has responded to Norton’s missive with a thorough debunking.

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What’s the District’s chief exec really up to today?

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2007

Event: keynote speaker, U.S. Attorney General’s 5th annual black history program

Time: 12 p.m.

Location: Department of Justice, 10th Street and Constitution Avenue NW

The Lowdown: When it comes to black history, your honor, you’ve got a lot of work to do if you’re going to catch up with Obama.

On D.C. Cable Channel 16, the domain of boring mayoral speeches and public hearings galore, the city’s Office of Cable Television and Communications is running a PSA for Black History Month celebrating great black Americans through history.

The spot features some obvious choices scrolling by, such as Rep. Barbara Jordan and Muhammad Ali. There’s some less obvious choices, such as Barry White and Dominique Dawes. And then there’s the trendy choice, right at the front—Sen. Barack Obama.

The verdict is in: Barack Obama is the modern face of black history.

It’s Black History Month, and down at the D.C. Superior Court’s small-claims branch, photographs of nine notable African-Americans grace the records-room wall:

• Macon B. Allen, first licensed black lawyer (1845)
• Charlotte Ray, first black female lawyer, and first woman admitted to the D.C. Bar (1872)
• Bass Reeves, first black U.S. deputy marshal west of the Mississippi (1875)
• Samuel J. Battle, first black patrolman in New York (1911)
• Charles Hamilton Houston, first black editor on the Harvard Law Review (1922)
• Jane Matilda Bolin, first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School (1931) and receive a judicial appointment (1939)
• William Henry Hastie, first black federal magistrate (1937)
• Thurgood Marshall, first black Supreme Court justice (1967), and…
• Barack Obama, first black president of the Harvard Law Review (1990)

Seen at the Social Safeway, 7:45 p.m., Valentine’s Day: Scary-looking security dude standing guard at the in-store Starbucks. Black SUV idling by the shopping cart corral. John Negroponte waiting in line to buy his sweetie some grocery store roses.

Could he be cuter??

So I’m guessing Mrs. Former Intelligence Chief today is enjoying her two dozen: 12 red, 12 ivory. The other possibility is that Diana Negroponte (who, like all residents of giant houses in Woodley Park, hearts the City Paper) is reading this right now and thinking: “Hold the phone. I only got one dozen. Who did schmoopie bear give the other to? Condi?”

Hey, at least he didn’t send his lackey into the store to do his dirty work. He only does that when it comes to Iraq.

But these days—exactly two since he started work at the State Department—Johnny’s feeling the love. His first order as new boss: Go home. He got to be the lucky guy to announce a bunch of pansies shut down the federal government, sending everyone home early because of an inch of snow and a little bit of ice.

Big news of the past day in the trial of I. Lewis Libby is that the defendant and Vice President Dick Cheney won’t be taking the stand. It’s a development that contradicts everything that Libby’s defense team has been signaling for months, and it prompted an angry rebuke from Judge Reggie B. Walton.

On page A1 of today’s editions, the New York Times muses on the motivations of Team Libby: “The decision could be viewed as a sign that Mr. Libby’s lawyers are confident that the prosecution failed to make its case.”

Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald & Co. have really fallen on their faces. Let’s see—how many witnesses have they gotten to tell the jury that Libby’s telling of events doesn’t add up? Well, there’s a really credible FBI agent, two reporters who may not have aced the Plame–Iraq story but certainly weren’t caught lying, either, and some Bush administration characters as well. Throw in hours of Libby grand jury testimony in which the defendant sounds shaky at key moments, and you have, well, a slam dunk!

To use the Times‘ phrasing, the decision to keep Cheney and Libby off the stand could also be viewed as a sign of the following:

• The defense team has decided that the sooner their client gets convicted, the sooner his sentence’ll start;
• The defense team has decided that they don’t need another guy from the veep’s office testifying that Scooter had a bad memory and was really busy in the summer of ‘03;
• The defense team figures its client will have a better shot at a pardon if they don’t put the veep on the stand;
• The defense team wants to get home before the winds kick up and the streets freeze over.

Just some possibilities.

These days, when an inmate violates his parole, he is taken to the D.C. Jail until a hearing examiner makes the trip from the Chevy Chase offices of the U.S. Parole Commission (USPC) to decide whether the charges are enough to hold the parolee and, if so, for how long. But the USPC now proposes to do away with the trip into the District and conduct the hearings by camera—and the city gets no say in the matter.

According to a USPC memo, the move is expected to allow examiners to move cases quicker, free up support staff, and save time and money by lessening downtime for employees. “It makes for a more efficient operation,” says Tom Hutchison, chief of staff for the federal agency, which has handled D.C. parole matters since the District-run Lorton Prison closed in 1999. He emphasizes that these hearings are “not a finding of whether someone is guilty or innocent.”

But prisoner advocates say that the decisions can be momentous all the same and that inmates deserve a face-to-face meeting. “The commission is making the final decision of whether so-and-so from Southeast D.C. is going to spend another 18 months in prison,” says Philip Fornaci, head of the D.C. Prisoners’ Project at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

“When you’re trying someone,” he says, “you generally want to watch their demeanor, hear what they say, watch their body language, see if they’re telling the truth. And digital feed is not exactly lifelike.”

Fornaci disputes the USPC’s assertion that cameras are a time- and money-saving tool. The agency isn’t exactly swamped with federal criminals, he argues; D.C. parolees comprise the bulk of its cases, so the USPC should be obliged to provide live hearings. But Fornaci realizes there’s not much that anyone outside of Congress can do about it. “They’re an independent federal agency,” he says of the USPC. “They’re answerable to almost no one. So they’re doing this because they can.”

I understand why Metro might need its own police force, and I can see why the Capitol and the CIA need their own uniformed police, too—but, really, why does the Government Printing Office need its own police force? And why are they carrying guns? Come on!

In 1860, Congress established the Government Printing Office (GPO), and for nearly 90 years the D.C. police officers patrolled the GPO’s main building, warehouse, alleys, and parking lots in Swampoodle—the neighborhood north of Union Station now rehabilitated as the more marketing-friendly NoMa.

But by 1970, as Swampoodle fell prey to a near-constant barrage of vandalism and violent attacks, Congress determined that “The Metropolitan Police Department has done the best it could over the years, but, unfortunately, it is not in a position to provide effectively for the safety of the property and people in the area, especially during the night hour,” according to the legislative record.

As a result, Congress authorized the GPO to create a special police force, stating that “the Public Printer or his delegate may designate employees of the Government Printing Office to serve as special policemen to protect persons and property in premises and adjacent areas occupied by or under the control of the Government Printing Office.”

The GPO’s 39-member, two-cruiser police force provides protection in areas where the bureau produces secure or classified documents, entrances, alleys, and parking lots around the clock.

And although GPO cops are armed and able to make arrests for violations of federal and District law, they have never fired a gun while interacting with a suspect, according to bureau spokesperson Veronica Meter.

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?