Get a Car

Does "transportation" include things like sidewalks and crosswalks, bike lanes, and mass transit?  Or is "real" surface transportation pretty much limited to cars and highways?

That was the question Congress was struggling with as the House and Senate proposed new multi-year transportation bills for the nation.  Only the proposals weren't transportation bills — they were highway bills, with a bit of railroad thrown in.  And they would have marked a departure from previous laws passed under both Democrats and Republicans, laws that included Safe Routes to Schools and funding to make sure pedestrians, cyclists and others can use the country's roads and bridges too.

The gaps in those proposals led to this video, a look at what the new laws would ignore and why alternatives are important.  It initially appeared on two blogs in DC, GreaterGreaterWashington and TBDOnFoot, and was quickly picked up by blogs and websites around the country, both national ones like Streetsblog ("Congress to America: Get a Car") and many local sites, from Marin County to Salt Lake City to New Jersey.

Not that we can claim credit, but by the end of the week the House bill was a shambles which the House leadership was scrambling to replace, while the Senate bill had accepted a bipartisan amendment to restore funding for such projects.  That amendment was thanks in part to Maryland's own Sen. Ben Cardin — whom we happened to be photographing at the end of the week as he spent time "helping out" workers at Prince George's Hospital, below.

Far ahead of the news cycle

House Speaker John Boehner (whom I photographed here that day with Majority Leader Mickey Cantor) denounced President Obama's State of the Union speech as "pathetic." Maybe that's not unusual for a House speaker commenting on a speech by a president from the other party, especially in an election year.

On the other hand, Boehner passed this judgement two days before the president's actual speech. And people on Capitol Hill wonder why they're perceived as partisan and grid-locked.....

The Barf Option

When former senator Jon Corzine appeared before the House Ag committee last week to talk about how his company, MF Global, had "disappeared" perhaps $1.2 billion of its customers' money, he had little to offer about what happened. But one congressman asked what exactly Corzine had done on the night of Oct. 30 when he discovered the money was missing. "Did you call the police, or run into the bathroom and throw up?" the congressman suggested.

Corzine offered a reasoned, careful answer about trying to account for the cash. After he finished, his questioner commented: "I'd have gone into the bathroom and thrown up."

Me too.

Dinosaur man

Back in the day (the day of the Contract With America) I got to go into the office of the Speaker of the House and do an interview with Newt Gingrich, for a story on a photographer who had documented the new speaker's "First Hundred Days." Sitting right there in the office, in a glass case, was the huge skull of a T Rex. It was behind me, but at one point in the interview - mid-sentence - Newt leaned around me to look at the skull admiringly.

"Man I love that thing," he said.

Now Newt's out of that office and running for another. On an assignment to photograph him recently I found his new office on K Street had no dinosaur skulls, but lots of other dino memorabilia. It seems a risky symbol for a Republican presidential candidate, but then Newt never went out of the way to be politically correct.

Revolution, again

So far at least this doesn't have the revolutionary feel of Newt's seizing power in '94 or Pelosi taking the gavel in 2006. But it still makes for an exciting time on the Hill when we have a change of power. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out — how the demands, energy and probable hubris brought by new Tea Party members are balanced with the reality that Republicans control only one house of Congress, and not the executive. Will undeliverable promises to repeal healthcare and other legislation result in two years of trench warfare and gridlock until the 2012 election? Or will the nation's leaders get to work and forge compromises on at least some of the the country's critical issues?

According to my former colleague Major Garrett, writing in the National Journal just before the election, the Republican leadership will build its strategies with a belief that "the era of long-lasting House majorities is over, undone by the fluidity of party loyalties" and other factors. In any case, it's going to be an interesting time working on the Hill and having a front-row seat to see how it all plays out.

But tell us what you really think, Mr. Feinberg

Kenneth Feinberg has had an amazing career as a "special master" -- an expert entrusted to make decisions on financial and other matters in a legal dispute. He's served as the Obama administration's "pay czar," helped resolve the value of the famed Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and of Holocaust slave labor, and administered the 9/11 victims fund.

And now he's in charge of divying up the $20 billion BP has surrendered to recompense victims of the oil spill. (I photographed him here testifying on this before the House Small Business Committee.) What's it worth if your seafood business is destroyed by the spill, or your beachfront rental property becomes a depository for tar balls? Or suppose the property is just fine, the beach pristine, but nobody's renting because it's on the gulf coast? It's going to be the job of Mr. Feinberg, this disaster's King-Solomon-in-Residence, to figure it all out.

Leaving town

That's Sen. Max Baucus, who played a key role in the battle for health-care reform, headed out barely an hour after the Senate's passage of the legislation. That vote came at 7 a.m. on Christmas eve, after Republicans and Democrats had pretty much worn each other out in round-the-clock maneuvering.

Unless you're trapped in a house fire, you'll probably never see a group of people so happy to get out of a building as they were leaving the Capitol that morning. Still, the senator, who'd spent two years in what often appeared to be a losing battle for this legislation, had time to stop and wish me a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!

How many photos?

"How many photos do you take?" people ask me when I'm working.

"A lot," I usually say. "It's the secret of professional photography: Take a lot of pictures, and something is bound to turn out."

Well, maybe not. But I do shoot a lot of photos, perhaps a couple hundred at an assignment that only lasts an hour or two. And judging by the sounds of their cameras, some of my colleagues shoot even more.

Usually all the unused images languish in my archive, with me occasionally finding the need to go back and pull one. But, with the magic of laptop movie-making, they can also now be made into a movie. And it can be a darn good movie -- at least when the subject is our highly expressive Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner (see "Yes, he can"), appearing before the House Financial Services Committee.

Geithner, the Movie from Jay Mallin on Vimeo.

That's a lot of Congressmen

Well, how would you react if you were called to testify before the combined membership of the House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees - more than 100 members of Congress in all, or about one-quarter of the full House of Representatives.

Yes, he can

Back in January I noted how well-suited former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was to a time of economic crisis — at least in terms of his facial expressions (See "Farewell to the Bald Guy"). And, since I regularly put in time photographing Treasury secretaries, I wondered how well his successor, Tim Geithner, would do on that front. What if we got a secretary incapable of anything but bland expressions and limited gestures?

Following a pair of hearings with Mr. Geithner, I can report my situation was like that of many comics at the end of the Bush administration. They were concerned that the last president's departure would leave them without material. And they, like me, need not have worried.