By , ,
Published May 19, 2015
Those of us who watch Washington are generally serious folks dedicated to reporting the activities in your nation's capital so that you know what the elected folks are doing with your money. However, recently there have been a whole passel of things occurring here that have been immensely entertaining.
Two big stories on the Senate floor: one involved the diminutive senior senator from the nation's largest state. I'm speaking about Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (search). Senator Stevens on a good day is a bit intense, but he nearly had to be hog-tied after his Republican colleague, Senator Tom Coburn (search) of Oklahoma, made a move to take away funding for an Alaskan bridge that Stevens had championed. Stevens looked like one of those cartoon characters with steam coming out of his ears as he stamped about the Senate floor. He said he would rather leave the Senate floor on a stretcher than allow the bridge funding to be removed — later he even threatened to resign. No worries. The Senate voted overwhelmingly to leave the funding intact before Stevens' blood pressure caused him to have a stroke.
But if the money had been taken away, Stevens could have turned to Senator Judd Gregg (search) to provide private funding. Did you hear? Gregg won a piece of the Powerball lottery this week. He got five numbers right, but missed the Powerball number. His winning ticket was worth $853,492. The local reporters who showed up to take pictures of the lucky winner holding up his check at first did not recognize the low key Republican senator from New Hampshire and Gregg was having a bit of fun at their expense. Senators voted recently to cancel their next pay raise. No problem for Gregg, his winnings equal his senate salary for 5 years.
Then there was the flattering mug shot. FOX News and many other news organizations spent a fair amount of money trying to get a picture of Tom DeLay (search) showing up to be booked in Texas. But the problem was he had a piece of paper from the judge that allowed him to be booked in any county in the state of Texas and there are 254 of them.
As it turned out, DeLay went through the booking process in Houston (Harris County) and to my knowledge no one got a picture of him arriving. We did eventually get the mug shot — and what a mug shot it was. This photo was soooo flattering that some have suggested he use it on his Christmas card. Smiling ear to ear, DeLay denied the Democrats an unflattering image they wanted for future anti-GOP campaign ads.
I'm thinking about hiring the Harris County sheriff's deputy who took the picture to update my FOX photo.
See you Sunday for “Weekend Live.”
— Brian
Send your comments to: weekendlive@foxnews.com.
Brian Wilson is a congressional correspondent for FOX News and anchor of the Sunday edition of "Weekend Live."
https://www.foxnews.com/story/the-not-so-serious-side-of-politics