There’s a quaint little area of popular, resoundingly trashy bars on M street between Connecticut and 23rd, lovingly referred to as Herpes Triangle.  Here the alcohol runs freely, interns are viable bait, and the likelihood of getting alcohol poisoning, vomited upon or groped by strangers is almost guaranteed.  Welcome to DC’s Mecca for drinking and debauchery. MORE »

Every time a restaurant in DC opens up, your Wonkette prays that it’s not another lounge-y room with house music, small plates and overpriced drinks. Policy, on U Street, opened last Saturday — and it’s got all this and more. MORE »

Fans of Jets to Brazil, Jawbreaker and Thorns of Life, get ready to soil yourself. The bands’ own Blake Schwarzenbach is coming to DC and sitting down with folks for an intimate chat and a night of music at Bourbon. MORE »

If you want to dance to indie music and drink cheap beer all night, DC9 is the place to go. They’ve always got fantastic specials (some nights feature FREE Olde English or Red Bull & vodka), you don’t have to dress like a douchebag, and there is absolutely no chance that you will run into your boss — it’s certainly not one of those hip, modern lounges that DCites in their late thirties would hang out at. MORE »

• Local street hobos are very pessimistic about the Inauguration. Hope! [DC Examiner]
• Good news about your Maryland bars!: those in DC will stay open until 5 AM, and those in Annapolis will stay open until 3 AM. [WTOP]
• Obama might not be in favor of giving DC a seat in the House, despite selfishly going out to DC restaurants with his wife. [Washington Post]
• Parts of NW DC have been marked a “prostitution free zone”, where presumably all whores can be rented (& no late fees!) free of charge. [DCist]
• Obama stopped by to hang out with his friends at the Washington Post, a visit that was sarcastically and undermine-ingly covered by the hilariously sad New York Times. [Fishbowl DC]

Well, this is a terrible disappointment. The City of St. Paul decided to charge bars $2500 for a license to stay open till 4 a.m. during the anxious, angry slog known as the Republican National Convention — an event to make a drinker out of anyone — not a single establishment has applied. A POX ON ALL THEIR HOUSES. MORE »

Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg is worth tens of millions of dollars, but because he is drunk most of the time — including a 2004 trip to Kazakhstan where he “had several shots of vodka before he fell off a horse, got trampled on by another and broke at least one rib” — he usually sleeps in his Capitol Hill office. He has absolutely no idea where he is or what he is doing at all times. So what is this $300 in campaign money he dropped for “lodging” at Capitol Hill’s delightful Tune Inn bar, where they don’t have “lodging” in the traditional sense? MORE »

If hard-living state legislators have their way, bars in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area may stay open until 4 a.m. during the Republican National Convention in early September. One aggrieved tipster writes to Wonkette: “Sure, us regular alcoholics have to stop at 1:00AM and the Republicans get to drink till 4:00AM. What next, hooker discount coupons?” [KARE11.com]

We write to you from the bar upstairs at the Stephen F. Austin hotel, which is HOPPING. Very serious young people in navy blazers gather in one corner watching a wide-screen TV with local returns. OK, the blazers only number 1 or 2, and the wearers look young in the sense of “under 40, maybe”, but we are going for ATMOSPHERE here. We are nursing a $9 Maker’s and ginger ale and listening to people discuss the race in the 10th Congressional District, in which a savvy handsome young International Expert named Dan Grant locked horns with a silly old teevee judge from Houston. MORE »

* If a Metro bus hits you, you probably deserved it. So forget about the lawsuit, okay? [why.i.hate.dc]
* An entire blog dedicated to Happy Hours! Bookmark it. Use it. [Tremonkey's DC Bar Tour]
* DC on its way to having a non-black majority of the population, and it didn’t even take a hurricane. [DCist]
* “Perfect blend of professionalism and restrained sensuality. i melt when you look at me. let’s spend all summer dancing around the elephant in the room.” [Craigslist]

Just because your friends won’t host a SOTU drinking-game festival doesn’t mean you have to sit at home alone with Dubya. Go on out there and have as good a time as anyone can have these days. There are parties at: MORE »