Hoyer and Pelosi Need Your Input: Mike Panetta, D.C. Shadow Representative, informed us that voting rights activists are pushing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to bring the voting rights legislation that was derailed last week back to the floor of the House this week. They’re afraid that if it gets pushed off until next week, it may well get lost in the usual congressional shuffle. Panetta has…

According to word we have just received, the flat tax that Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is hoping to force upon the District is receiving a second round of debate and consideration today. The District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which he chairs, has scheduled a hearing today to dicuss his flat tax proposal, and it will be receiving testimony from District CFO Natwar Gandhi, Brookings Institution scholar Alice Rivlin, and Terence Golden…

As they say: nothing is sure in life but death and taxes. And in the District, those taxes are high. That may change, though. According to an article published in the New York Sun today, Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate’s Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, is mulling introducing a flat tax in the District. His intentions are not so much noble as they are inquisitive, though. Brownback referred to the…

(Editor’s Note: DCist intern Maureen Miller wrote this report.) The vast right-wing conspiracy is back in vogue among the young’uns, DCist oref=login”>just learned from today’s New York Times. Jason DeParle describes the many rewards — in the literal sense — of the intern program at the Heritage Foundation. Here’s how one current member of the summer class of 2005 got to this elite round of 64: Like all Heritage applicants, she [Daren Stanaway, of Harvard]…

Damn D.C., we’re all smart. Today, the Post features our city’s burgeoning intellectual institutional base, which attracts the smartest folks from every corner of the globe to our “sausage factory for the opinions and ideas of the city’s internationalists” where “there can be nearly 200 … events on a given day …” Even The New York Times has acknowledged this “egghead quotient,” in a piece by Anne E. Kornblut, written around the time the Atlantic…