The air is turning blue over the Capitol Dome. And the government is more shut than ever.

Washington woke Thursday to a whiff of rare hope that behind-the-scenes efforts were accelerating in the Senate to end a federal shutdown now imposing severe pain on millions of Americans.

But the day ended with senators skipping town for the weekend — to join members of the House not seen inside the Beltway for so long it’s hard to remember what they look like.

What’s so galling is that both Republicans and Democrats insist they are keeping faith with their duties — taking care of the American people — but that the other side is willing to drive ordinary citizens to the brink of hunger or sickness.

Senate Democrats triggered the shutdown, refusing to extend federal funding until Republicans agree to extend expiring enhanced Obamacare subsidies, without which millions of citizens will see the cost of health care rocket.

Republicans are willing to talk — but only when the government is opened again. Their assurances aren’t being taken at face value since their president routinely ignores the terms of deals and Congress’ constitutionally sound decisions on how to spend taxpayer money.

The result: Vital SNAP benefits that help feed more than 40 million people are within hours of running out. Federal workers deemed essential have slogged through demoralizing weeks without pay. And it’s no vacation for their furloughed colleagues either: Financial obligations aren’t shut down just because the government is.

Little is evident on the horizon that could prevent the monthlong shutdown from becoming the longest on record next week.

In the absence of meaningful progress, dismayed lawmakers spent the day venting and trading insults.

Democrats accused Republicans of starving kids. Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of putting extreme pressure on air traffic controllers, implying they were risking the nation’s “extra safe” skies. And President Donald Trump — perhaps the sole agent with the capacity to change the political wind and end the shutdown — didn’t really say anything until a late-night post calling on GOP senators to abolish the filibuster to end the funding stalemate.

West Virginia Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said staying in town over the weekend “is gonna be a waste of time.” Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, told CNN’s Dana Bash he was shocked “at the level of cruelty” shown by his GOP colleagues.

And renegade Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has had it up to here with everyone. “It’s an absolute failure what occurred here for the last month,” Fetterman told CNN. He also complained about his own party’s tactics. “We can’t even get our sh*t together and just open up our government,” he said.

Democrats might have some justification in arguing that Republicans and their health care policies and endless attempts to kill Obamacare set the stage for this crisis. But Republicans can also point to the great contradiction of the Democratic strategy: The shutdown has now become a test of which bloc of unfortunate Americans are hurting the most — those who risk losing health care or those who don’t have enough to eat.

Shutdowns typically end when one party can’t bear the political price of the government staying closed. In many ways, these showdowns are Washington games that can define the course of presidencies and Congresses.

But the fact that it’s now been a month and neither side is willing to blink is also a symptom of a broken political system and a Congress that can no longer do its basic constitutional task of funding the government. And any victory for either party at this point will be hollow, since it will be built on the suffering of citizens.

One federal judge in Boston is doing what the judiciary often seems to do these days: stepping in where Congress has failed. US District Judge Indira Talwani signaled she will intervene in the dispute over the Trump administration’s refusal to use billions of dollars in emergency funds to fund food stamps under SNAP.

“Right now, Congress has put money in an emergency fund for an emergency, and it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency when there’s no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits,” Talwani said in the kind of plain English that lawmakers seem to shed when they get to Washington.

“The idea that we’re going to do the absolutely most drastic thing, which is that there’s not just less money but no money, seems the farthest thing from” what Congress intended, Talwani said. “We’re not going to make everyone drop dead” from hunger.

Sometimes in Washington, the darkest hour is the one before dawn. So maybe there’s a chance the vicious rhetoric is a smokescreen allowing everyone to vent before they compromise.

But there’s another characteristic of modern Washington that may be more apt right now — the way that disaster always has to nearly strike before two parties mired in their ideological extremes find a sliver of common ground.

But at some point, this shutdown will end. It has to.

If the denouement does not come from a president who discovers a moral or political imperative to live up to his 2016 convention vow, “I alone can fix it,” it may emerge from a creative fudge in the Senate in which Republicans give a handful of Democratic senators political cover to vote to break the filibuster and reopen the government.

Majority Leader John Thune — who ditched his suave self-control on Wednesday to rage at Democrats in a Senate rant — struck one hopeful note when he said there was an uptick in bipartisan conversations this week. “We got members on both sides who are continuing to dialogue,” he told reporters.

But Thune doesn’t yet have the political space to offer Democrats the kind of tangible deliverables they would need. “When they’re willing to produce the votes to open up the government, we’re going to talk,” he said, restating the sticking point.

One possible endgame scenario is that the Senate could blur the sequencing of when the government reopens and talks get serious on Obamacare subsidies. But knowing how something might eventually end is easier than getting there.

Therefore, in the absence of progress, everyone had to fill the space.

“We are now beginning Day 30 of the Democrat shutdown,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana. “There are millions of Americans … that are bracing themselves for further pain and hardship.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York accused the administration of enacting “policy violence” by refusing to extend Obamacare subsidies while offering a $20 billion bailout to Trump’s MAGA pal President Javier Milei in Argentina.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said he wasn’t worried about his own air travel as air traffic control snarls, but did “worry about the flights of thousands and thousands of people.” Mixing transportation metaphors, he accused Democrats of being “way off the rails.”

And Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York followed his warning on Wednesday that Trump “is a vindictive politician and a heartless politician and a heartless man” by accusing Republicans of bringing down “the specter of financial disaster” on Americans — including in red states — over health care.

It’s not exactly promising.

But Thune told reporters, “I’m always optimistic. Aren’t you?”

That’s a tough one, senator.

WASHINGTON – Rain continues to fall across the D.C. region Thursday morning, arriving in waves and making for a soggy start to the day.

Rain slows commute

More than an inch of rain fell overnight, said FOX 5’s Tucker Barnes. Thursday’s rain is the heaviest the area has seen in some time. Some pockets of heavy rain and isolated thunderstorms are still possible through mid-morning, with gusty winds not out of the question. The rain and storms disrupted the early morning commute creating a mess on the roadways. 

Sun returns midday

Conditions are expected to improve by late morning as a low-pressure system pushes everything out to the north. Sunshine should break through by early afternoon, bringing mild temperatures in the upper 60s to finish the day. The evening commute looks dry.

Looking ahead, Halloween looks dry with highs near 60 degrees – ideal for trick-or-treaters Friday evening!  The weekend also looks clear and dry. And don’t forget – clocks fall back early Sunday morning as daylight saving time ends.

In October, Tom Sietsema (SFS’83) stepped down as The Washington Post’s food critic after 26 years.

During his tenure, Sietsema wrote 1,200 restaurant reviews and 50 dining guides. He used pseudonyms and disguises while eating out 10 or so times a week.

Along the way, he covered America’s top food cities and the eating habits of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders; went undercover in the CIA’s dining room and in a kitchen as a dishwasher, and this fall, penned his final list of DC’s 40 best restaurants.

Sietsema’s journalism career dates back to his undergraduate years in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

The Minnesota native set out to be a diplomat, but after internships at Good Morning America and the Chicago Sun-Times, he fell in love with reporting.

Decades later though, Sietsema still practices diplomacy — just not in the way he thought.

“I’ve been able to use diplomatic skills at the table for 26 years, so in a way, thank you Georgetown School of Foreign Service,” he said.

Find out how Sietsema carved his own path in food writing and how he practices diplomacy at the dinner table.

Culture Shock at Georgetown

Sietsema fell in love with Washington, DC, while spending a semester studying and interning there as an undergraduate. He was a student at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the time, and by the end of his exchange program, he didn’t want to leave DC.  

Sietsema decided to apply to Georgetown and arrived on the Hilltop in 1981 — a “huge culture shock,” he said.

“I felt as if I were a representative of a class of people who were from the Midwest. I went to public schools. I was a Protestant. What amused me was how similar students were from around the world in their regard for Georgetown and Catholicism and making the world a better place.”

Sietsema lived in Village A, a few floors away from Patrick Ewing (C’85). He took German classes and a course taught by Jan Karski, a Polish WWII spy and diplomat and SFS professor. He ate mainly from the salad bar on campus, and in his off-hours, worked as a waiter at a pizzeria to save up money to eat out. 

“What I loved about Georgetown was it seemed to be a magical place at the time,” he said. “I remember it being a really optimistic time in my life.”

Finding His Footing in Journalism

His senior year, Sietsema took the university’s first journalism class, taught by Ted Gup, then an investigative reporter at The Washington Post who worked under reporter Bob Woodward.

His classmates were Kara Swisher (SFS’84) — a “whirling dervish then and remains one now” — and Mary Jordan (C’83), a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and editor for the Post, with whom he’d compare notes and help edit one another’s papers. The class taught the nuts and bolts of breaking into the news business, he said. 

“I loved the Georgetown way of thinking and teaching, and I think I’m a better reporter because of the professors I had there,” he said.

Gup connected Sietsema with the Post, and after starting as a copy aide, he worked for Phyllis Richman, the newspaper’s restaurant critic. Sietsema tested recipes for readers, learning how to clean squid, prepare African peanut stew and bake colonial cakes — among the more than a thousand dishes he finessed for readers.

“It was the greatest cooking class,” he said. “I think my grocery bill was double my rent.”

After cutting his teeth in food writing, Sietsema headed west, working as a food editor, reporter and/or critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, before a role covering restaurants for Microsoft’s Sidewalk brought him back to DC.

In 2000, Sietsema took on the mantle of the Post’s chief food critic.

Food as Diplomacy

In covering restaurants for 26 years, Sietsema has been able to put his diplomacy skills to good use. 

He says he tries to make his dining companions feel comfortable, encourages them to try a new food or shows them how to eat a certain dish. In the process, Sietsema has found that people often open up.

“I would take a starving artist or a young family to a big deal restaurant just to see it through their eyes,” he said. “I like to take hoity-toity people to dives. I realized people would open up over a meal in a way they never would in a different setting. I’ve had people tell amazing stories over the years. I feel it’s been a masterclass in life and living.

“Food is a diplomatic tool. It can be symbolic. It’s nourishment. It’s been the most important thing in my life really.”

After logging thousands of reviews, Sietsema is looking forward to becoming a regular in restaurants. He also plans to cook more. He’s hosting a monthly lamb burger night for DC movers and shakers. He recently invited his Uber driver, an Afghan contract worker, to join, he said.

“He’s going to be the most important guest there,” he said. “You can effect change one meal at a time, and that’s what I want to do. I’m very optimistic about the future.”

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