LL’s on the scene at the Kennedy Rec Center in Shaw, where Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans is holding his re-election kickoff party.

In the company of council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Evans announced minutes ago he’s throwing his support behind Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Evans had been a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter, co-chairing her campaign in the District. Earlier this month, he’d been elected by local Democrats to serve as an at-large delegate pledged to Clinton.

Asked to explain his move, Evans cited “just the momentum that was going behind it.” He says he left a message with the Clinton campaign about the decision but was not able to speak with the senator before making the announcement today.

“It’s important for the city that we have a good relationship with the next president,” Evans says.

Washingtonpost.com teaser headline from last night:

“Bush Remarks Seen as Swipe“*

So who’s the asSwipe?

*the adults have regained control over at dot.com: According to the updated headlines, Bush’s Hitler routine is now being seen “as Jab” at Obama. Much more mature…Tho, now that I think about it, there’s a good chance I also called somebody an “assjab” in junior high.                         

Colbert I. King, longtime Washington Post editorial board member and columnist, was given a well-deserved lifetime achievement award last night by the D.C. Appleseed policy nonproft, a distinction he shared with schools expert Mary Levy and former Ward 4 Councilmember and Southeastern University President Charlene Drew Jarvis.

In his remarks accepting the award, King shared heartfelt and stirring words about his work as a journalist, chronicling “people in this city who hurt in ways we can’t even imagine.” He also, of course, paid tribute to the organization that bestowed the award upon him, saying something to the effect that no one else around does more for the city than Appleseed.

Then things took an unexpected turn: “Dorothy Brizill is a close second,” he said, referring to the DCWatch doyenne, civic activist, and involuntary home-improver.

“No,” he then added, “you gotta catch up to Dorothy,” he said to the assembled Appleseed board and staff members and hundreds of others gathered at their annual gala at the National Press Club. Brizill herself was sitting at a corner table.

King concluded his personal tribute with the following: “Dorothy, don’t die!”

This week, we one-up Elmore James, with the most fearsome Fuego/Frio to date. Pay close attention as Wemple discusses apocalyptic prophesies in the Atlantic, superb investigative reporting from the Post, and a circulation scandal at the Express.

Don’t touch that remote!

This week’s Loose Lips column features a fascinating look at contemporary gay and lesbian politics in the District. The dropback for the piece was this week’s endorsement forum of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the “voice of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered citizens in the Democratic Party in Washington, DC.”

The forum is a great opportunity for activists to grill candidates on the wide range of extremely worthy issues on the Stein agenda, such as gay marriage. On that front, as WCPer Mike DeBonis reported, Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander took quite a beating, showing an ambivalence on the topic that the activists pounced upon. In the end, Alexander relented, saying, “I guess I’m in support of it; I’m in support of equal rights.”

Gay marriage, meet male strip clubs.

Longtime city gay activist Rick Rosendall proceeded to hammer Alexander on the lamest of all possible issues–Alexander’s support for stopping the relocation of male strip joints from the baseball district to Ward 5. As DeBonis explained, Alexander’s position on the matter is one of deference to the Ward 5 councilmember, Harry Thomas Jr. But Rosendall couldn’t possibly stomach a councilmember not getting behind the facilitation of strip-club mobility, screaming that Alexander had “betrayed us” on the relo thing.

Why? Because strip clubs suck. They’re ugly, they’re boring, their customers are boring and lugheaded. The places are blights on the urban landscape, in part because they have no windows or if they do have windows, they’re all covered up, and the people in front of those windows are generally stiffs–big self-important bouncers. The shit that goes down in the strip clubs is lame and not worth fighting for and certainly not something that should affect the assessment of a councilmember.

And it’s great to see that the Stein Club apparently feels this way: They voted 36-3 in favor of Alexander.

That would be Delegate and Republican senatorial candidate Bob Marshall of Prince William County. Today, on WTOP’s Politics Program With Mark Plotkin, Marshall was a guest, and Plotkin asked what he, as the junior senator from Virginia, could do to help Virginia’s notorious transportation problems.

Volunteered Marshall, I’d build I-95 through D.C.

Let’s set aside for a moment that Marshall is proposing building a potentially six-or-more lane freeway through a jurisdiction he would not have been elected to represent. And let’s ignore the billions of dollars it would cost. Maybe even we can forget that such a road would, if not destroy their homes and parkland, disrupt the lives of hundreds of District and Maryland residents for years. And we’ll even forget this would have unproven effects of Virginia traffic. How ’bout the fact the people stopped this more than three decades ago and no credible proposal for an inner-city highway has been proposed in D.C.—or virtually anywhere else in America—since.

The way portrayed it, Marshall said it would simply be a matter of dusting off plans prepared in the early 1970s, and in fact proposed doing so to former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and former Mayor Marion Barry some years ago. The excellent Web site Roads to the Future describes what those plans entailed:

If I-95 had been completed according to the original plans, it would have continued from the Center Leg to north of New York Avenue, and it would have junctioned the North Leg of the Inner Loop, turned east, and followed the North Leg, which would have paralleled the New York Avenue corridor, about a block to the north of it. At the B&O Railroad corridor (today’s CSX Transportation), I-95 would have turned northward as the North Central Freeway, following the railroad corridor to beyond the Brookland area, being tunneled (cut and cover) for 3/4 mile from south of Rhode Island Avenue to north of Michigan Avenue, then leaving the railroad corridor at Fort Totten Park, heading northeast into Maryland as the Northeast Freeway, passing west of Hyattsville and College Park before junctioning I-495 at the I-95/I-495 interchange that was completed in 1971. I-95 would have had 10 lanes on the North Leg and North Central Freeway, and 8 lanes on the Northeast Freeway.

Plotkin seemed as taken aback at the idea as LL, and he asked Marshall to confirm that he was in fact proposing pushing a freeway through the middle of residential Washington.

Marshall confirmed he was, “along with a corridor for light rail, correct,” he said.

Oh, light rail (along a corridor already served by Metro’s Red and Green lines)—it’s all good, then, Bob.

Jonetta Goes Down the Memory Hole: A minute in to the Politics Hour on WAMU-FM, host Kojo Nnamdi makes no mention whatsoever of the firing of his former co-host, Jonetta Rose Barras. Filling in for her is NewsChannel 8 host Bruce DePuyt, who is currently talking about…team tennis. —Mike DeBonis

Palace of Wonders update: Last night’s “Weirdo Show” benefit for local side-show jack-of-all-trades Johnny Anderson raised $1,700. Proceeds will go toward Anderson’s surgical bills. -Amanda Hess

Steve Novick launched his campaign to run for Republican Gordon Smith’s Senate seat in April 2007. He’s one of those prototypical Oregon progressives, with staunchly lefty views on war, taxes and health care. He also has an amazing story. He stands under five feet tall and was born with a missing left hand. Raised in a working-class family, he went on to Harvard Law School, at age 18, and ended up serving as the government’s lead attorney in the Love Canal case.

Half a year after Novick started his grass-roots campaign, the Democratic establishment put a more generic horse in the race: state House speaker Jeff Merkley, who’s voted against giving in-state tuition to immigrants’ children and in favor of denying driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Now, the two candidates are neck and neck in next week’s primary.

Novick’s underdog battle is getting an extra push from a bunch of notable musicians, from Death Cab for Cutie to REM to Rufus Wainwright. The campaign is giving tickets to Pearl Jam’s D.C. show this June to local supporters who donate $250. Even MTV is paying attention now.

(Conflict of interest alert: I went to grade school, high school and college with Novick’s campaign manager.)

People still don’t get it: Man with H.I.V. sent to prison for trying to contaminate a police officer with … his saliva.

California high court approves Satan’s plan.

Did two people need to die here? A former diplomat shot and killed his sickly wife after finding her collapsed on the sidewalk. Then he shot himself.

The Smithsonian pimps itself out.

Woe to Gossip Girl fans world-wide, the CW is in trouble, and it’s all your fault.

Fun document from Princess Sparkle Pony: An appeals case from Texas in which the deadly weapon is none other than Baby Jesus!

Dan Snyder’s nauseous theme park chain, Six Flags, got lots of recognition this week.

Foremostly, in our continuing quest to become the clearinghouse of poop on Snyder’s non-Redskins doings, here comes another cataloguing of things that have gone wrong at Six Flags of late.

Not EVERYTHING that’s gone wrong, of course. There’s not enough time or trees to get all that in print.

But we weren’t the only ones pounding on Snyder’s parks. The stock touting website Motley Fool has just named Six Flags a recipient of its Olbermannesque honor, “The Worst Stocks in the World.”

And if Snyder’s losing the Motley Fool, well, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. A regular contributor there named Rick Munarriz has been pumping up SIX since Snyder took over in late 2005.

To a business doofus such as myself, Munarriz’s continued shilling seemed bizarre and even immoral, since the share price keeps falling and can’t get up.

I once contacted Munarriz, who did not write the Worst Stocks in the World piece, and asked him why his pieces on SIX were so full of, well, bullishness.

He responded that he didn’t like me calling him a “stock tout,” and declined to explain the cheerleading.

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

Early next week is one of the great annual events in District politcking: the trip to the yearly convention of the International Council of Shopping Centers in Las Vegas. There, from Sunday to Tuesday, local politicos, bureaucrats, and developers do their damnedest to land commitments from big-time national retailers.

In past years, Mayor Anthony A. Williams was a frequent attendee, as well as then-council economic development committee chair Vincent Orange and occasionally a couple of other councilmembers. This year, the delegation has grown: eight councilmembers—Chairman Vincent C. Gray, Ward 2’s Jack Evans, Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr., Ward 6’s Tommy Wells, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, Ward 8’s Marion Barry, and At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown—and seven council staffers are slated to attend, in addition to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Neil Albert, and three of his staffers.

And, as with so many instances of intergovernmental relations these days, there are apparently some issues. The council has had a hard time getting a complete schedule of meetings from the executive branch. That’s important, LL’s sources say, because it gives the impression that the mayor is calling the shots as far as who can attend which meeting with which potential retailer.

“We want to be on the same page, so were disappointed the executive is making the sole decisions,” says Alexander. “We don’t want to look like we’re disorganized.”

Gray, a source says, requested a full schedule from a mayoral staffer at a meeting yesterday but has yet to receive one. LL is also told that Brown, current chair of the economic development committee, was none too happy with the snub. Reached by LL, though, Brown declined to feud with Hizzoner. “There’s no problem,” he says.

UPDATE, FRIDAY 1:16 P.M.: Gray’s chief of staff, Dawn Slonneger, calls to say a full schedule was provided by Albert’s office last night. Everyone’s happy again!

Sad news: Marshall Thompson is closing the District Line, his British-ish clothing store in Georgetown, (also a Best of DC winner). Perhaps there will be a sale.

I just stopped by Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest, hoping to talk to kids about the breaking news that at least one of their own is suspected in connection with a mostly-suburban drug ring with “plans” to sell marijuana to high school students. After finding more than $6,000 in cash and more than three pounds of marijuana in one student’s home (which leads me to believe the “plans” had already been realized), Montgomery County police arrested two students, from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and two adults. More arrests were promised–potentially at Wilson. Police said they were proud they caught the little buggers before they had a chance to sell any drugs. Um, right.

Anyway, I figured this news would be the talk of the town at Wilson. Even though the campus was relatively busy this afternoon, I found only one student who’d heard anything. The gossip, she said, was something about “a white, 17-year-old girl” involved with selling drugs with kids from Maryland. The rest of the students I talked to were more concerned about another police action on campus today: the closure of Fort Reno park due to high arsenic levels in the soil. According to a group of students sitting on some steps at a business across from the school, at about 1:30 p.m., the park was their favorite place to ditch class. Now where will they go???

I understand their frustration. When I was in high school, we would sneak away to a place called Hamburger Mary’s in Portland. We would order home fries, douse them with Tabasco, nurse coffees and smoke Marlboro Reds. I was really not that much of a rebel, so we only skipped during assemblies or when we’d done something to make showing up in class riskier than getting caught skipping. When Hamburger Mary’s closed, we were distraught. We tried going to the fancier brew pub down the street, but the waiters quickly caught onto our game and gave us a time limit. The next year, our school started locking the doors during assemblies. That meant we actually had to go. And they were really, really bad. Wilson students, I feel your pain.