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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

Changes in Chief of Staffs

Good afternoon sweet readers! LL’s Bean has become a crawling machine. Granted, not as impressive as foals who can run within an hour of being born, but LL is still proud. News time:

Emergency, This Constituent Has No Wizards Tickets: Where does much of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans‘ constituent service funding go? Towards season tickets for local sporting teams, the Post reports. “Evans has paid $135,897 for professional sports tickets over the past decade using money from his constituent services fund, renewing calls for tighter restrictions on the accounts, which are meant to help city residents.” Nothing to see here, says Evans, who says he gives most of the tickets away to “Ward 2 residents and local schools and charities.” But Evans would have done himself a big favor if he’d provided the Post a full list of who has gotten tickets instead of providing only a “representative list” of recipients. Representative lists may as well be called shady lists, because when you withhold information it looks like you have something to hide. Meanwhile, Ward 6 Councilmartyr Tommy Wells shows why he’s so well liked by his colleagues by jumping into the fray. “I think it’s inappropriate,” Wells says of Evans’ ticket purchase. Also: if the Post story seemed familiar, here’s why.

AFTER THE JUMP: Subpoena Time; School Starts, Rhee is Silent; More Fun in Ward 7…

Subpoena Time: Mayor Vince Gray has been subpoenaed to talk about his role in awarding the District’s lottery contract, the Examiner reports. The subpoena stems from a lawsuit against the city filed by former CFO employee Eric Payne, who claims that CFO Nat Gandhi illegally asked him “to alter a controversial contract by adding a friend of then-council Chairman Gray to the deal.” Speaking of the lottery contract, Post columnist Colby King says he hopes the city’s inspector general is investigating the lottery deal. “The DC Lottery is perhaps the last get-rich-quick scheme in the District,” says King, and he doesn’t mean playing Keno.

School Starts: Summer fun is over for 75,000 District kids (with probably a few tossed in from Maryland and Virginia) who are starting school today. Since we’re talking about schools, do you guys remember former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee? Well, she takes quite a bruising from the New York Times, which points out that the media darling won’t talk to USA Today. It was USA Today, you’ll remember, that did excellent work probing some of the District school test score results, which may or may not be too good to be true. More interesting than Rhee’s weakass media strategy: the District’s weakass investigation into alleged test cheating. “In Washington, two investigators spent five days at eight schools. In Atlanta, the state deployed 60 investigators who worked for 10 months at 56 schools. They produced a report that named all 178 people found cheating, including 82 who confessed. There was not a single case of ‘redacted and redacted doctoring redacted grade answer sheets at redacted.'”

Ward 7 Candidates: It’s official, Kevin B. Chavous is going to try and follow in his father’s footsteps and challenge Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander. Tom Brown is also running.

In Other News:

• MLK memorial is open.
• Ethics talk is “cheap,” says Jonetta.

Gray sked: Back to school events in the morning, cabinet meeting at 4 p.m.

Council sked: Recess