To everything there is a season, dear readers. Turn, turn, etc. Yeah, continuing the great purge, we are sad to announce that our Anonymous Hill Staffer is a Hill Staffer no more. The whole tragic tale appears below. In the meantime, because he insisted that none of his coworkers was funny, we are on the market for a new one. If you work on the Hill and are good at answering questions, shoot us an email. Or if you have new and exciting ideas (Ask a Lobbyist? Ask Mitchell Wade?) for a regular column, let us know.

After the jump, a tearful, 99% true farewell, with implicit Green Day soundtrack and cherished memories montage.

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Seriously, is it just us? The one one the right is a like a John Turturro/John Waters-lookin’ guy. MORE »

Holy shit, really?!? MORE »

Scott’s last briefing? A lot like the rest of them, but everyone was being a little bit nicer. His first answer was an almost poetic blend of nearly every talking point he’s been given over the last two years and cherry-picked economic statistics. Anyone have a rush transcript? We can’t even remember the question, but his lengthy response made us fall in love all over again. Then: BREAKING NEWS: PERSONNEL CHANGE! …to be announced later. MORE »

* You have to respect hookers. Who else could take a regular oldho hum corruption case and make it really get interesting? This one could get very good, so keep watching — it’ll all be here.
* It’s just wait on see on our old buddy Karl too. All the orange jumpsuit pics will be here once we get ‘um.
* In the category of news that’s not news, but everyone wants to hear anyway, George Clooney spoke at the National Press Club. Swoon, swoon, loving sigh, swoon. Seems also that the light from George’s star burns so bright, it extinguishes other lesser, previously scheduled, stellar formations.
* Scott McCllelan has only been gone for a week and already Bush has a new lamb to lead to slaughter. They say Tony can take it though, that he’s a cool customer and part time rock god, but we’re reserving judgment til an .mp3 comes through. We did get a chance to go see for ourselves that everyone else was more than happy to line up for the gravy train.
* The kickball kids must have been too drunk to talk to reporters, and the non-profiter’s Ultimate league has already gone underground, so the Wall Street Journal (the paper to read if you really want to know what’s going on) put a little piece about Hill softball up on the front page and now all the staffers are a twitter. They’re not really fooling anyone (we already know what’s in the red cups) but the hitting and catching is a nice garnish.
* Don’t think we forgot there’s a huge party tonight. Wonkette’s gonna be there, and we’ll tell you all about it so it’ll be just like you were too.

…mostly because the response was so unthrilling. Here’s the passage, from yet another SHAKE-UP-A-THON ‘06 story:

“It’s really weird right now,” says another senior White House official who likewise asked for anonymity. “People are worried about their jobs.”

Three of you responded. Two of you with “George W. Bush.” Here’s the more substantial guess:

The key to this is the phrase “senior White House official”. Some reporters will use this to describe the cleaning staff if they think it makes their story sound good, however, it usually applies to the President, VP, or an official who is titled as an “Assistant to the President”. Deputy Assistants and Special Assistants are usually “White House officials” or “Administration officials”.

Who is an “Assistant to the President”? … [It] can vary as the President wishes but the following is a pretty good first cut: Chief of Staff, VP’s Chief of Staff, Deputy Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor and his deputy, communication director, press secretary, staff secretary, head speechwriter, White House Counsel, director of personnel, and advisers for domestic policy and homeland security.

I am fairly certain Bush and Cheney are not going to fire themselves. Let’s also assume that Josh Bolten is not going to fire himself, that Joel Kaplan is not complaining about a promotion, and that no one can fire Karl Rove. The press secretary can’t be worried about getting fired since he already got the boot. Given all that, as Wonkette first postulated, Miers is a good guess. However, I’ll go with Frances Townsend, the homeland security adviser. This is in keeping with my desire to see the hot chicks in the administration get more blog exposure, not due to any actual knowledge.

And hey, we’ll drink to that. If you have another, better guess, go ahead and send it our way, though no guarantee we’ll still care tomorrow. The other two responses, cheeky though they are, after the jump.

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Bush: “Tony already knows most of you, and he’s agreed to take the job anyway.” Hey! Someone finally got around to reading that 50 Tricks to Great Public Speaking book he’s had sitting around for 6 years. MORE »

This week’s Newsweek Official Shake-Up-A-Thon ‘06 article’s pretty good — the first one that almost inspired that things-are-gonna-be-different-now feeling that everyone else seems desperate to convince us of — and it’s just filled with nice, juicy, paranoid, rats-in-sinking-ship anonymous quotes. Here’s the one we’re focusing on today: MORE »

Oh look, they brought in a gray-beard. James Baker, the offical Bush Family Gray Beard, is here to placate Congress and encourage more stories about how shake-ups are really shaking things up and oh how much more up could this White House be shaken? Not much more up, that’s for sure! The Times has already compared it to LBJ and Acheson! “The analogy is far from perfect,” they acknowledge, mostly because it’s a stupid and inapplicable analogy, but it was fun to make anyway. The piece is short on details of what Baker will actually be doing, and long on anonymous people claiming that this’ll really shake things up. MORE »

* The tasteful classic rock hits finally stopped playing, and when they did, Scotty was the one without the chair. We heard later that maybe he never even had a chance. MORE »

So who’s going to replace Scott McClellan? Truth be told, there’s not much new on that front. Executive summary: Any Republican who has ever been on TV is under consideration. MORE »