News-Record.com

For those who remember the dispatches from Washington earlier this month, the newsprint package will run this Sunday.

Those stories include:

• "The Hill: Your politicians at work", the main story.
  
• "Congress looks for answers on Iraq dilemma"
  
• "On their list", a run down of our local honorables priorities.
  
• "Working for a living," which was written for newsprint but didn't make it in the paper.

And you can click here to check out this fine example of why I should stick to writing rather than reading the news. If you turn down the sound, you still get Jerry Wolford's excellent photos.

I recorded scads of audio on the trip, some of which has already been posted. Some more can be found at these links:

• Mel Watt talks about his time as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a host of other things during and extended interview.
• Richard Burr talks about the minimum wage.
• Howard Coble talks about his views on Iraq.
• Elizabeth Dole talks about life in the Senate.

For those who missed them, here are links to the blog posts I did while in Washington. You can see reader questions that we answered, hear more audio and check out some snippets of life on the Hill:

• Tuesday.
• Wednesday.
• Thursday.
• Friday.

Also prepared for the print package was what we call a quote rail, basically little outtakes from interviews we don't have anything to do with. We ran out of room in the paper, so you get them here:

• "There are two sports seasons that I follow: college basketball and college basketball recruiting," says Rep. Brad Miller, looking at a framed picture on his office wall in which he can pick out where he was sitting during the 2005 NCAA championship game won by the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.

• Rep. Howard Coble, 75, is a famously confirmed bachelor. Why?
  "A girl I used to date asked me the same question," he says, "and I said to her, 'This is going to sound like a bachelor copout, but I've never had time.' And she thought for a minute, and she said, 'It sounds like a bachelor copout, but knowing you, it's believable.'...I guess maybe the best way to say this is, I've dated a lot of women, liked all of them, sometimes I liked them more than they liked me, sometimes they liked me more than I liked them. And I just never did seem to find a fit. And as I told a constituent, I'm not an unhappy bachelor."

• The Volkswagen Thing, a Mexican variant of a European jeep from the late 1960s and early 1970s, is about as ugly a mod of transportation as one might find. Sen. Richard Burr has two.
  "As most would tell you up here, rarely if ever does the top go up," he says. "I leave the top down because the weather is pretty good most of the time and I can ride from here to the White House and kind of forget that I'm in Washington. It's as much therapy as anything else."

• Sen. Elizabeth Dole recently underwent hip surgery.
  "I'm doing very well, really am," she says. "This is something I could have postponed for several years but I'm one of these folks who OK, if you feel you're going to need to do it sooner or later, just get it done. It's behind me, it takes a little while of course going through rehabilitation."

• "Interestingly enough, we’re now into the second week and I've yet to speak on any of the legislation," said Rep. Mel Watt.
  Is that unusual?
  "In some years it would have been unusual. Nobody has asked me 'Where you've been?' yet."

Credits for all this goes to Jerry Wolford, who did the photos and some of the sound recording; Michael Grossman who helped with sound editing and compiled parts of our online package; Eddie Wooten, Betsi Robinson and Ann Morris, who let me go play for a week and edited the stories; and designer Jennifer Burton, who made it look pretty in newsprint.