There could only have been one cause that this reporter's favorite half-price pizza night was deserted on Monday, and that half the Capitol Hill offices yesterday were closed by 4:30 -- it's recess, that wonderful time of year when Washington gets so hot and muggy that people move the location of their jobs just to get away.

Not that we mind; the half-price pizza was delivered faster, and we actually found a seat, while the tired Hill aides (at least three of whom returned calls for comment while "running errands" -- read, sitting at the beach) deserve a few days off after a wild weekend in which the House didn't adjourn until after 1:00am Sunday morning.

But with everyone out of Washington, the story lines that sustained reporters through the first seven months of Congress are fading fast as well. Now is not the winter of our discontent, but the summer of our casting about for silly political stories.

Now is when the LA Times' Andrew Malcolm takes a look at candidates heading to New York to appear on Jon Stewart's Daily Show. It's become a fairly routine stop for candidates, most notably Senator John McCain, who makes his tenth appearance on the show later this month. If memory serves, it will not be the first visit for Delaware Senator Joe Biden, either, when he sits next to Stewart tomorrow night.

Why do so many candidates join Stewart? As Malcolm rightly points out, it's not because they have a gift for comedy. In fact, the best way to play an appearance on a late-night show is to play the straight man and just laugh at the host's jokes. The host pays comedy writers; campaigns do not. As Albert Brooks says in his not-very-funny "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," comics don't want to talk about other comics; they only want to talk about themselves. It's a good lesson: Don't compete with the host.

Now is also when journalists turn to old favorites and stir up intra-party rivalries. According to Patrick Healy at NYT, Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, "political rivals within the Democratic Party," are teaming up to fight back against a Pentagon official who called Clinton's request for Iraq contingency plans boosting enemy propaganda.

The most interesting nuggets: Some of Kerry's top donors decided to help Illinois Senator Barack Obama after Clinton criticized Kerry's botched joke in October about students who didn't work hard being stuck in Iraq. Also, that Clinton's friends "say she was no fan of the Kerry campaign, seeing it as feckless and undisciplined at times."

Finally, now is the time to finish going through those FEC reports, as the Washington Times' Stephen Dinan found out that either John Edwards has a carbon footprint twice the size of Clinton's, or that Clinton is "less diligent" in tracking her campaign's emissions.

Okay, one more: Check out the new power player in Vegas, State Rep. Ruben Kihuen. It has been said (by this author) that the two ways to know you've made it in life is if your name is the answer to a New York Times crossword puzzle clue or if the Wall Street Journal makes you a dot matrix. Kihuen, 27 and a U.S. citizen for just three years, has made it, as presidential candidates are throwing themselves at his feet.