Photo by Matthew Bradley
Good morning, Washington. Christopher Hitchens—critic, provocateur, libertine, contrarian, altogether what his longtime friend Christopher Buckley called “the greatest living essayist in the English language”—died yesterday at a hospital in Houston after an 18-month bout with esophageal cancer, Vanity Fair, one of his longtime literary homes, announced last night. Already the Internet is flooded with Hitch remembrances, but the most frustrating and brilliant might be on Twitter, which overnight removed the #GodIsNotGreat hashtag from its trending topics after offended religious users complained, perhaps justifying the thesis of Hitchens’ great 2007 book God Is Not Great. Still, there were plenty of local tweets of which the longtime Kalorama resident would hopefully approve—those marking his death, irreligiously, from inside a bar, my own included.
Maybe They Heard Us Gripe: Hey, all you “nonessential” personnel, looks like you’re staying employed. Congress hammered out an agreement last night to keep the federal government, and by extension the D.C. government, up and running through the 2012 fiscal year. No word if the amendment prohibiting the use of local funds to pay for abortions is still in the broader package, but DC Vote is planning a rally outside Congress later this morning.
Court Date: Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, the man accused of firing an assault rifle at the White House last month, has a hearing today in federal court to test his mental fitness to stand trial. An earlier hearing found Ortega competent, but “federal prosecutors are asking for more extensive tests to make certain that they can proceed with the case,” Fox 5 reported.
Oh, Email Archives, You Do Us Well: Following up on his column in this week’s dead-tree City Paper about the relationship between the Wilson Building and Post editorial scribe Jo-Ann Armao, Alan Suderman offers some of the emails he obtained in his reporting detailing Armao’s contact with the Adrian Fenty administration. “[Y]ou won’t find any smoking gun proving the widely-held belief that editorial writer Jo-Ann Armao was playing for the Green Team,” he writes. “Instead, it looks like she had a very good relationship with former Attorney General Peter Nickles, the de facto mayor under Adrian Fenty and probably the best source for a reporter to have in that administration.”
Briefly Noted: McDonnell pledges to shore up Virginia pension fund … A letter in the storefront of Michel Richard’s Meatballs is perfectly blurred here … Rooftop inflatable Santa is probably tougher to steal than other Christmas decorations … Elmo should not be this large … Alleged Wikileak-er Bradley Manning faces hearing at Fort Meade.
This Day in DCist: In 2010, the dawn of the bag search era, and annoying Bobby Flay challenges D.C.’s Gillian Clark to a fried chicken throwdown. In 2009, MPD Chief Cathy Lanier chimes in on Reggie Jones, and the beginning of the fallout—happy and otherwise—from the same-sex marriage vote.
