Barack Obama’s nearest neighbor lives in a plastic hut directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Her name is Conchita Picciotto, and she has been living on the same patch of sidewalk and protesting against nuclear weapons night and day, winter and summer for more than 30 years.

Since her partner at the vigil William Thomas died in 2009, Conchita has carried on more or less alone, handing out flyers and patiently explaining the consequences of a nuclear holocaust to anyone who stops to listen.

Conchita Picciotto has been beaten up and arrested and almost frozen in sub-zero temperatures again and again since her vigil began August 1, 1981. It was 99° in the shade when I talked to her last week, and there wasn’t any shade on Pennsylvania Avenue.

She’s there right now.

US Representative Sandy Adams (R-Florida)

“It’s him again!”

“You can’t take pictures here!”

“Says who?”

“Says the Chief of Staff of the Judiciary Committee! He just told you that you can’t take pictures here! He told you the same thing yesterday.”

“You mean that cue-ball with the bad tie? Is he really the Chief of Staff? Did you see some ID? Does he own the Capitol? Who elected him? What gives him the right to abrogate my First Amendment freedom? Is he the boss of you? The committee isn’t even in session yet! There’s nobody here but you, me, C-Span and that human cue-ball! They sell out the public and I can’t even photograph the furniture?”

And so on.

Bipartisan Redesign of the US Capitol

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington DC, July 2011

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington DC, July, 2011

Hart Senate Office Building, Washington DC, July 19, 2011

This sympathetic little gnome in the Longworth House Office Building was absolutely the only person I saw anywhere around the Capitol who looked the least bit worried, while Republicans were flushing the last remains of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal down the toilet of greed and bullshit economics.

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington DC, July 14, 2011

Almost all of us are losing the game that Congress and Obama are playing in the White House, but thousands of winners are swarming through offices and committee rooms all over Capitol Hill.