Whew!!!

Hello my fine people. I have had an eventful day so I thought I’d share it. I see lots of famous politicians and really smart people, so I thought I should start keeping track. The opportunities here to go to committee hearings and lectures are endless, and I try to soak in as much as I can. Ok, let the name-dropping begin! Starting off this week, I went to a lecture by Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer. It was interesting to see him but considering he didn’t have many hot topics to cover (the best he could do was tomato salmonella), it got boring pretty fast. Today was quite a good day for events, though. I started off the morning with a tour of the Capitol with some Casper folks (and yes, I did have a connection to them-they work with my aunt Sherri). We got to see Cheney presiding over the Senate, Harry Reid (Democratic Senate Majority Leader) and a Missouri senator sniping at one other, along with some heated debates about energy in the House. Then, we saw Cheney, Leahy, and Gates (Homeland Security head) all leaving the Capitol at once.
Then at noon, all of us went to have our picture taken with the big man himself, VP Dick Cheney. They brought all of the interns from our office and the HELP committee. It was kind of a bizarre experience. They lined us up outside his office, and one by one we filed in the room, shook his hand, a photographer snapped a pic and we were ushered right back out. It was probably less than 30 seconds. To his credit though, he asked each of us our names and where we were from.
Later that day, I attended a committee hearing about the “Iran problem.” The Foreign Relations Committee (which John Kerry heads, but wasn’t there even though I saw him later that day) talked to the ambassador to Iran and asked him a lot of questions. It was pretty fascinating. To be honest, everyone sounds pretty eager to do something about getting rid of the Iran regime. The ambassador, along with Sen. Biden seemed to be pushing some hard-line diplomacy coupled with sanctions. However, they made clear if that doesn’t work, they want to push (multi-lateral!) ‘engagement.’ Whew, there is some political-speak for you, but I thought it was pretty interesting to have a front row seat to all of that.
I finished off the day with a BBQ in which Senator Brownback (R-Kansas) dropped by. I shook his hand and said hi. Not really my type of politics, but I always like to meet people. ;-)