Hatch, meanwhile, kept his same handicap of 20, but fell down in the rankings from 152nd to 159th. Maybe the 74-year-old senator needs more time on the links.
Give me your money!
Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, reported this week that Hatch has been traipsing around lately with his hand out. Hatch is charged with raising funds for the President's Dinner, the National Republican Senatorial Committee's biggest annual money event, the paper reported.
Hatch has already raked in about $3 million, about $1.5 million more than any other rank-and-file lawmaker, Roll Call said. And Hatch supposedly has personally called more than 300 donors capable of giving more than $25,000 apiece.
"I've called hundreds of people," Hatch told the paper. "A lot of people aren't there, but if they don't call me back, I'm going to call them again."
Name calling
Hawaii Rep. Neil Abercrombie called out Utah's own Rob Bishop recently on the House floor after Bishop talked in support of a bill that would protect certain endangered species while also ensuring the water would continue flowing in the southwest United States.
"Madam Speaker," Abercrombie jokingly complained, "I observed that Mr. Bishop was looking directly at me when he recited, with a look that I can only determine as 'gleeful,' [when] he cited the razorback sucker and the bonytail chub. I am not sure whether I was being categorized by him in the sucker category or the chub category, or he was gazing at me metaphorically."
Bishop replied to the Democrat, "I have certainly never thought of the gentleman as either a razorback or a bonytail."
But as a sucker or chub, well, that's another story.
Tulip time
In a serious hearing with very serious people debating the serious economic problems facing this nation, Sen. Bob Bennett unearthed one of his favorite metaphors - the great Holland tulip crisis - and unwittingly added a little levity to the meeting.
Just like the mortgage mess of today, Holland had a tulip debacle hundreds of years ago.
"And at the end, people were mortgaging their farms for the sole purpose of buying a single tulip bulb," Bennett explained to the Joint Economic Committee and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke this week, just as he did with the banking committee a year ago. "The devastation that occurred in the Dutch economy destroyed it for 100 years."
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer responded: "I'll refrain from commenting. Although you guys are always back in the 17th century."
When the laughter subsided, Bennett corrected him, saying it was probably the 14th or 15th century, but he conceded that he wasn't sure.
"Whatever," the Utah senator said, "I'll go look it up."
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* BURR and CANHAM report for The Tribune from Washington. They can be reached at tburr@sltrib.com or mcanham@sltrib.com. For more political
tidbits, check out http://blogs.sltrib. com/utahpolitics.
