Governor should lower ante on NFL bet
Somewhere in the elected-official handbook apparently is a rule that says you must make a wager with an elected official of another venue when one of your teams is playing one of his teams in a high-profile game.
That would explain why Gov. Chris Gregoire made a “friendly wager” with her Illinois counterpart, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, over today’s NFL playoff game between the Seahawks and the Chicago Bears.
Gregoire is betting smoked salmon and Washington apples on the ‘Hawks against some barbecue and “Cozy Dogs”– a hot dog on a stick locally famous in the Land o’ Lincoln – on da Bearz.
Members of Congress got involved in similar bets last year over the ‘Hawks as they made their way to the Super Bowl, with varying success.
Depending on the type of salmon, this is likely a relatively equal bet. But Spin Control will reiterate the observation from last year, that Northwesterners come off sounding a bit snooty by betting salmon against barbecue on football, which is just a half step below betting a case of oak-casked chardonnay against a rack of non-micro brewskis.
Don’t we have anything else that far-off elected types want?
Three’s company
U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris and her husband, Brian Rodgers, are expecting a baby boy in late May, her congressional office announced last week.
Spin Control suspected as much, based on that certain glow McMorris had at appearances in the district last month and the fact that she did seem to linger with the 3-month-old son of a Purple Heart recipient during a presentation ceremony. But one doesn’t ask a sitting member of Congress something like, “So is there a baby on the way, or are you just really enjoying the holidays?” so we just waited for the official announcement.
The announcement does raise the question of what kind of maternity leave a member of Congress gets. McMorris’ staff, which did some checking, said there’s no set policy.
That could be because a member of Congress giving birth is a relatively rare event. (This is not too surprising, considering members overwhelmingly tend to be guys.) The staff could only find three previous instances when it even came up, aide Jill Strait said.
“My goal is to minimize my time off the floor,” McMorris said in an interview last week. The baby is due around the Memorial Day recess, and she plans to be back for votes as soon as possible.
House rules allow members to bring family members under age 12 onto the floor, so if there’s a late vote, day care is closing and she hangs on to him for a while until her husband can collect him, at least she won’t get a nasty gram like then-state Rep. Lisa Brown of Spokane got for holding her infant son in her lap while waiting for a vote back in 1993 in Olympia.
“I do remember that. I was there,” said McMorris, who was a legislative aide in Olympia back then.
Name change
Sometime soon, probably later this month, Rep. McMorris will officially become Rep. McMorris Rodgers. This has been a little confusing since her wedding in early August. (Stop counting backwards on your fingers regarding the previous item. It all checks out.)
The House of Representatives’ protocol was to change her name on congressional lists as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage license, but for campaign purposes she was sticking with her maiden name, which was on all the campaign signs and literature.
Now the changeover awaits the printing of new office stationery, which was waiting for the final word on committee assignments. Last week McMorris discovered she was keeping all three of her previous committees – Armed Services, Natural Resources and Labor/Education – so printers will soon be getting the green light.
She’ll use both names, no hyphen. But that means she may be found under “R” on some alphabetized lists of Congressional votes, offices or Web sites.
Getting testy
Most college students probably know what Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was about, a recent survey shows. Of some 14,000 who took the American Civic Literacy test over the past two years, four out of five correctly picked “expressing his hopes for racial justice and brotherhood” when given five possible options describing the famous oration.
That’s good, with MLK Day coming up tomorrow. On the negative side, however, more than half of those who got that question wrong chose an answer that said King was “arguing for the abolition of slavery” in the speech, which means they either thought King was alive in the 1860s, or slavery still was legal in the 1960s.
The question was among 60 civics questions on a test given by the University of Connecticut to college freshman and seniors at 50 schools over the past two years. The goal was to see if seniors did better than freshmen, from which researchers can infer whether students actually learn something about history and civics during their stay in college.
The only Northwest school in the mix was University of Washington, which placed 26th out of 50, with seniors doing a miserly 1.8 percent better than freshmen. Don’t feel bad, Huskies; Harvard was 25th, and their seniors did just 1.9 percent better than their freshmen.
Even worse, at 15 of the schools – including some big names like Michigan, Yale, Duke and Brown – the seniors actually did worse than the freshmen, which does tend to make one wonder what they are getting for all those tuition dollars.
Think you could do better? Take a quick sample quiz at www.americancivicliteracy.org.