Remember that time my roommate was on the front page of the NYT???

Yeah, so in this blog post I HAD to give a shout-out to my roommate, the wonderful and accomplished Miss Meredith McDermott whose picture is on the front page of that paper from New York this morning!!! Well, technically, it's a picture of the very unfortunate Tony Heyward, CEO of BP, but she's taking his picture in the picture! That pretty much trumps anything I could possibly say in this blog post.

Well, another work week has passed (almost!). Sunday, Meredith, Alan, and I decided to go to the Newseum, which is one of the most underrated museums in DC. Scratch that: one of the most underrated sights of DC. It was incredible! It's right across from the National Archives and has this amazing terrace that looks out on the Capitol, the Mall, etc. Even better: I got to see and touch part of the Berlin Wall! They actually have the largest whole piece of the Berlin Wall in the US (and maybe the world? I'm not quite sure...). They had a small piece you could touch, and they even told you which was the West German side and which was the East German side. Easily one of the coolest things I've seen. It was really chilling seeing pictures of East Germany and hearing such horror stories about people dying in pursuit of freedom...which unfortunately is something I take for granted far too often. Not anymore, after seeing the Berlin Wall!!

They also had all of the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs on display, complete with the stories behind them. It was extremely cool...there were so many pictures there that I recognized that I didn't know were Pulitzer Prize winners! One picture, the photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, was especially interesting because of the story behind it. Apparently, the guy who took the photo was changing the film in his camera when JFK was shot, so he completely missed that opportunity. Then, when Oswald was being transported and Jack Ruby shot him, he just so happened to have the perfect angle and shot at the exact same time that Ruby did. Which won him the Pulitzer! Crazy.

Yesterday, we had an intern meeting where the director of the Voter Protection department came to talk to us! After asking where everyone was from, he smiled and laughed when I told him I was from Atlanta, so of course I figured he had either lived there or had some great stories from there. Sure enough, he had taught at Emory Law School for a while. Even better: he had an entire slide on his Voter Protection presentation about Georgia and how horrible the election law is here! I had assumed until fairly recently that most states had similar photo id laws...but they don't! And apparently it's pretty shocking to most people. Apparently there's a citizenship verification law on the books in Georgia as well (I wasn't aware that we lived in Arizona?) that Georgia's Attorney General, Thurbert Baker, is fighting. And a lot of people didn't know that Georgia is still a "covered jurisdiction" under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and still has to have its election law precleared by the US DOJ. Let's just say that after hearing about how many times and in how many ways Georgia has tried to disenfranchise voters even in the 21st century (including appointing a "Special Attorney General"), I felt the need to preface my question with "Georgia's better than it sounds!"

In other news, the more I'm around the "Hill-terns," the more I love them. And by love them I mean love making fun of them and their "red badges of courage." Don't know what I mean? Look up the "Spotted: DC Interns" blog. It's amazing.

In other non-internship-related news, the NBA final are finally over, and unfortunately the Lakers won. But that's ok, because USA is about to play again, and let's face it, the East and West coasts can finally agree on one team to support!

More updates about the weekend to come!

ps...GO BRAVES!!