Below The Beltway

New details emerged today about the massacre at Virginia Tech:
BLACKSBURG, Va. — The massacre inside a chained-shut Norris Hall went on for nine minutes as Seung-Hui Cho fired off 170 rounds, killing 30 people before shooting himself in the head, police revealed Wednesday. But they said investigators still don’t know why Cho launched the bloody [...]

Not only did the Dow Jones Average pass 13,000, it positively shattered it:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The Dow industrials jumped 136 points Wednesday afternoon to close above 13,000 for the first time as investors hailed upbeat earnings from Amazon.com, possible asset sales by Alcoa and a strong reading on the economy.
The gain in the Dow [...]

Just in case you didn’t know it, the conductor of the strange-talk express makes it clear:
PORTSMOUTH, N.H., April 25 — Arizona Sen. John McCain started over again Wednesday, telling a crowd in New Hampshire why he wants to be president and hoping that five days of old-fashioned rallies in five states will erase the memories [...]

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is far from the best indicator of what’s happening on Wall Street. For that you’d do better to look at the S&P 500 or Wilshire 5000. Nonetheless, it is the one everyone pays attention to, so today’s news that it passed 13,000 for the first time is getting alot of [...]

The Washington Post reports this morning that sales of new homes rose slightly in March:
WASHINGTON — Sales of new homes rebounded slightly in March, helped by better weather, but the gain was not enough to offset big declines in the previous two months.
The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that new home sales rose 2.6 percent in [...]

For the Yankees that is:
?ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 24 ? Mike Myers stood on the pitcher?s rubber, aimlessly kicking the dirt with his right foot, over and over. His eyes darted away from the fielders converging on him, away from the manager coming to take the ball. Myers was a portrait of isolation.
He is on [...]

Oh, I’d say they’re pretty much done by now:
I spoke with a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives this past week, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, and I heard the same devastating critique: This White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to [...]

Scientists have discovered what is apparently the first potentially habitable planet outside the Solar System:
WASHINGTON — For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for “life in the universe.”
The planet is [...]

My post last week about the D.C. Vote initiative brought this comment from one blogger:
Below the Beltway exhibits what I?ll call business casual partisanship as opposed to naked partisanship: ?Davis, the Democrats, and the District are all ignoring the Constitution and trying to use this legislation as a means to circumvent the Amendment process, where [...]

The Washington Post reports today that while Americans seem to support the idea of giving the residents of the District of Columbia voting representation in Congress, they don’t support the bill currently before Congress:
A sizable majority of Americans think the District should have a full voting member in the House, but reaction is mixed to [...]