Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin, The Examiner
2006-12-20 08:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin cover people, power and politics in the beltway each weekday. Email them at yan@dcexaminer.com .

Subversive shrimp

Food & Water Watch members, from left to right, Sara Grusky, Susan Ellsworth, Lisa Rienhalter and Wenonah Hauter sing carols about the horrors of industrial farm shrimp produced from southeast Asia on Tuesday at the Gallery Place Metro stop. One such song examines how the shrimp are raised in heavily polluted ponds tainted with high levels of feces and chemicals.

Obama pals buy airtime in D.C.

Today, television ads in support of a presidential run by Barack Obama in 2008 hit the Washington airwaves. The volunteer organization Draft Obama (www.draftobama.org) has purchased what spokeswoman Kris Schultz calls “a modest rolling buy” on some cable “news channels and stuff like that.”

Oooo ... vagueness? She’ll fit in perfectly here in Washington.

The video, entitled “Believe Again,” was directed by Bud Jackson, who runs the Alexandria-based consulting firm The Jackson Group.

The ad features audio clips from a speech the Illinois senator gave this year while campaigning in Louisiana on behalf of congressional candidate John Yarmuth (who won). Obama makes the case for “the politics of hope,” “decent health care” and “a foreign policy that’s based not just on military might but also on the quality of our moral character.”

The Obama camp may want to hope that Jackson’s ad has better success than their last outing: Jackson also made the “Draft Wesley Clark” video in 2004 and, well, we know how that ended.

But that’s not the only video of sorts being shopped around town. The anti-Hillary Clinton group StopHerNow.com recently released their second animated episode of “The Hillary Show.” The organization was founded by Republican donor Dick Collins, and his latest installment features Barbra Streisand waving a donation check in front of Hillary while listing demands that include more taxes, liberal judges, illegal immigration, government spending and “self-righteous liberals.” Husband Bill stands in the background assessing Babs up and down.

As ball drops, bell tolls for cigar smokers

The days of the smoke-filled room in D.C. are numbered, and power players are frantically taking their final puffs in the city’s watering holes.

With D.C.’s smoking ban going into effect in bars on Jan. 1, patrons at downtown power spots can expect a “haze of cigar smoke” on New Year’s Eve, said lobbyists we spoke to.

The lounge at the Capital Grille, in all its leather-clad, scotch-sipping glory, could be particularly hazy. “We expect that a lot of our guests will be in to enjoy a final cigar or two,” a restaurant representative said.

So what’s a fat-cat lobbyist to do come 2007? Apart from a few private clubs, they’ll be going to Shelly’s Back Room on F Street to get their puffs in. The cigar bar is one of the only downtown establishments that currently meets the city’s standard for being smoke-friendly, because it earns 10 percent of its revenue from tobacco products.

But all isn’t rosy at Shelly’s. “It’s going to kill us because of cigarette smokers,” manager Donnee Thompson said. “They’re going to be taking up space from our box holders and cigar buyers.”

But Dave Wagner of Oliva Cigars thinks D.C. will adapt. “Based on my experience with the smoking bans on the rest of my territory (N.Y. included), premium cigar sales are still increasing since the bans,” he e-mailed us. “D.C. has a very strong cigar culture and sophisticated cigar smokers. These cigar smokers will seek out the cigar retailers with ... ‘membership lounges’ and take care of them.”

Washington blog readers: We have your winners

The 2006 Weblog Awards were announced on Monday. Some of the more notable ones for Washingtonians:

» Best Blog: DailyKos (www.dailykos.com)

» Best Liberal Blog: Think Progress (www.thinkprogress.org)

» Best Conservative Blog: Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com)

» Best Centrist Blog: The Moderate Voice (www.themoderatevoice.com)

» Best Media Blog: The Raw Story (www.rawstory.com)

» Best Military Blog: Blackfive (www.blackfive.net)

» Best Law Blog: The Volokh Conspiracy (www.volokh.com)

» Best Business Blog: Club for Growth (www.clubforgrowth.org)

» Best Technology Blog: Engadget (www.engadget.com)

Read the full list, including runners-up, at 2006.weblogawards.org

A Partridge in a scare tree

The only people who suggest the government had foreknowledge of 9/11 are “ridiculous conspiracy theory people.”

So says former Partridge Family member Danny Bonaduce in a video making the rounds on blogs.

In the homemade clip, John Conner, author of a book called the “Resistance Manifesto,” interrupts Bonaduce during a meal at an outdoor cafe on Hollywood Boulevard and begins questioning him about 9/11.

Bonaduce, a Bush supporter, politely begs the pardon of a fellow diner before lighting into Conner with an expletive-filled tirade.

“Who the [heck] are you to come up to me on the street and criticize my government?” asks the former child actor. “We’re losing hearts and minds around the world and you want to make us into the enemy? … You’re just trying to make yourself feel important by walking up and down the street with a microphone. You’re nobody, you’re never going to amount to anything.”

New ethics chair gets around

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, whom Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., just named chair of the ethics committee for the 110th Congress, has taken the third most privately paid trips of any member of Congress since 2000.

According to PoliticalMoneyLine.com, which tracks such things, Tubbs Jones has taken 75 trips paid for by corporations, associations and nonprofits.

Among them: six trips to Central America and the Caribbean sponsored by the CaribNews Foundation, and a Congressional Black Caucus visit to the New York Stock Exchange sponsored by an organization called the Humpty Dumpty Institute, whose mission is “putting the pieces together again.”