Guest List: Today’s Newsmakers

Washington is full of newsmakers. But from today’s headlines, here’s who we really want to sit down with over drinks or dinner to get the story behind the stories.

• The newly announced cast of Potomac Fever, Rob Lowe’s E! reality show. This includes entertainment reporter Angie Goff, radio host Tommy McFly, flack Charles Moran, and what the Washington Post refers to as “some other young Hill types.” We’ll raise a glass to Lowe for nabbing a cast that’s way closer to the center of Washington life than Bravo did for the Real Housewives of DC. And we’re vastly curious to know which lawmakers are going to find themselves unexpected reality-show sidekicks—if only the gods of reality television would be good enough to give us the quip-tastic Representative Barney Frank.

• Frederick County Sheriff Charles Jenkins. Inmate suicide attempts in the Frederick jails are up from 50 in 2007 to 136 in 2010. Jenkins is making changes to cell design to make it harder for inmates to try to hang themselves with bedsheets, but he also told the Gazette that he’s “not sure the public has a whole lot of sympathy for these individuals.” Would devoting more resources to suicide prevention help make sure crime victims and prisoners’ families see justice? We’re curious.

• Virginia's Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte, if he isn’t too hoarse after sponsoring a bipartisan House reading of the U.S. Constitution today. Given the increasing importance of the Constitution as a symbol in, if not a literal guide to, American politics, driven by the Tea Party movement, we’d like to know what the constitution means to Goodlatte and what he got out of hearing it read aloud—other than a sudden interest from throat lozenge donors. 

• National Archives Presidential Librarian Sharon Fawcett. Gippermania will kick off in February with the 100th anniversary of late President Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the Archives are taking advantage with year-long rotating exhibitions on the 40th president. Given that in some quarters, Reagan is as powerful a totem as the constitution, what did Fawcett learn from Reagan’s marginalia in his “Evil Empire” speech or his handwritten letters?

• Washington Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo. Federal Baseball suggests that the Nats are done trading for the winter, and if that’s true, is Rizzo happy with the results? The Nationals have shown that they’ll spend and they’ll beg, but also that the city isn’t a destination baseball town yet—famously shy pitcher Zack Greinke blocked a trade to Washington this off-season and ended up in Milwaukee instead.

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Alyssa Rosenberg