Guest List: Today’s Newsmakers

–~~Deborah Galyan~~. The staff at the Freer Gallery. The Freer Gallery’s ~~public affairs chief~~ reputation got a lift when the Asian art museum was included included in the new Google Art Project, which makes galleries’ collections digitally available through the company’s Street View cameras. The Smithsonian museums have always made art and educational programming free to the public, but the Freer’s partnership with Google takes that mission a step further, opening up the museum to the world at large.

– The MARC happy hour organizers. If we’d known about this beforehand, we definitely would have included it in our list of 75 Great Bars, on newsstands now. The coolest place to have a drink? The secret BYOB happy hours that are apparently taking place on MARC trains during the evening commute home. Give us the password—or the timetable—and we’re so there.

– Ken Cuccinelli. The Virginia attorney general’s taking a political risk in asking the Supreme Court to immediately review his lawsuit seeking to have the Obama administration’s health care overturned on the grounds that requiring individuals to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. If he fails, he might get lumped in with all the other health care litigants. But if the Supreme Court decides to hear the case quickly and Cuccinelli wins? Well, there could be something to that nascent Cuccinelli for President movement.

– Eric Friedman. The director of the Montgomery County Office of Consumer Protection and other state and county officials are about to make life very unhappy for Pepco. After discovering that the utility company can jack rates to make up for money it loses when the electricity goes out, Maryland officials are going after Pepco, demanding that the company pay back consumers for surcharges that followed outages dating back to 2007—and they’re introducing a bill that would fine Pepco if it doesn’t start living up to performance standards.

– Josh Schwartz. Okay, he’s not really from Washington. But as the creator of The O.C. and Gossip Girl descends on our fair city to kick-start a new show called Georgetown, theoretically “a sexy soap centered around the young people behind the power brokers of Washington,” we’d like to give him a tour of our fair city—and a map, so he can figure out where else the cool kids hang out.

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