The Senate is rife with sweet stories of romance.

There was the 69-year love affair between Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and his wife Erma, who passed away last year. Erma used to handle the family finances. She called their little dog “Baby,” while Byrd called her “Trouble.”

There was the exciting-though-brief union of Washington and Hollywood in the long-ago marriage of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who used to make pancakes for breakfast policy talks at their home.
And then there is former Sen. Conrad Burns.

The Montana Republican was on Capitol Hill Tuesday, dining with his former colleagues at the Senate GOP policy lunch. Asked what brought him back to his old haunt, Burns declared it was the free lunch. Which begged another question: Why does the lawmaker-turned-lobbyist need lunch?

“My wife’s in the hospital — I ain’t got no cook at home!” he said.

Indeed, Phyllis Burns had her appendix removed, and thus is probably not attending to the care and feeding of the former senator as diligently as usual.

We wish her a speedy recovery.

Michael Mukasey’s questionnaire answers, prepared for his upcoming confirmation hearing for his attorney general appointment, are about what you’d expect from a prospective top administration official.

Educated by the Ivies, gave some speeches, won some awards … we almost fell asleep before we got to the good part, buried in the list of organizations with which he has been affiliated: the Senior Society of Sachems, an exclusive club at his alma mater, Columbia University.

The Sachems may remind some curious Democrats of Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) both famously pledged during their college years. But the reality of the Sachems is less Hollywood thriller and more Woody Allen comedy. The Sachems were formed around 1915, as campus legend tells it, by students who were turned off by the exclusionary attitude of the Nacoms, Columbia’s other secret society.

The bloggers at the university’s student magazine offer one taste of the Sachems’ quirky and hush-hush initiation process: “A few years ago, a junior found a costumed FedEx employee on her doorstep; the package contained a cell phone which immediately began ringing,” they wrote. “After following the directions of the mysterious voice, she was officially welcomed into the society with a paper plate of whipped cream to the face.”

Given that Mukasey reports giving at least two speeches to the Sachems and being a possible member, questions about pies in the face seem fair game for a confirmation hearing.

The Idaho Mountain Express was quick to declare Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) career over, calling for his resignation in an editorial just four days after news broke that he had been arrested in connection with a sex sting in an airport bathroom.

That editorial argued that the senator should step aside because “Craig will lose his influence and thus his value to Idaho in Washington.”

But you know Idahoans — they only care about one thing.

The Mountain Express’s true motives were revealed on Wednesday when the paper published an editorial entitled “Craig down, fish up?” which noted that Craig’s possible ouster could have implications for the state’s salmon population.
The article suggests that Craig has been “callous in his disregard for the plight of salmon” in continuing to support the licensing of dams.

 “Sen. Craig’s fishy behavior in the Minneapolis airport restroom may yet have a happy ending if the senator’s downfall gives a boost up to the mighty salmon,” the editorial said.

Salmon beware, though — Craig has yet to make a decision on his political future.

Congressional debate has done little to change the course of the war in Iraq so far, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took the fight to a new opponent on Tuesday: Elisabeth Hasselbeck of ABC’s roundtable show “The View.”

Hasselbeck, the resident conservative on the show who earned her chops battling liberal Rosie O’Donnell, suggested to Pelosi that “the surge is working,” but Pelosi easily kept the audience on her side.

When Hasselbeck noted that civilian deaths in Iraq have declined, Pelosi got cheers for her response:

“There are still a lot of people dying,” she said. 

Condoleezza Rice’s recent rash of speeches has taught us a lot about the very private secretary of state’s formative years.

Last week, we learned that Rice was quite the indecisive college student, unwilling to choose a major until forced to do so by her adviser. This week, at a speech at New York City’s Harriet Tubman School, she gave us a hint as to why choosing a path was so difficult.

Rice explained that she was a couple years younger than her classmates; the young smartypants actually skipped both the first and seventh grades.

Now, when we think back on the kids in school who skipped grades, they weren’t necessarily the most popular boys and girls in town, but Rice said she toughed it out.

“I think it was all right. It was kind of hard at the beginning because when I was in eighth grade I was 11 years old and that’s a big gap between 11 years old and 13,” Rice admitted. “But I kind of got caught up someplace along the way, and maybe I have two years coming to me sometime.”

Elana Schor contributed to this page.