This is in response to more than a few e-mails I received over the last 15 hours or so.

Yes, we tend to do these bar events in D.C. The reason, of course, is most of us are in or can easily, during the course of normal work activity, be in D.C. That’s unfair for the rest of the country, yes. And I apologize. The problem, of course, is to get to other places requires money and time and yes, money again. And so the event has to wind up a) paying for itself and b) being a paid one, to cover the expenses. And then, since we’re shipping so many out somewhere, to make a modest profit (i.e. it’s a fundraiser).

I do promise you that those paid fundraiser events we’ve done over the years have been wholly different than the bar nights. If you were at the Dubliner last night, it was a tight space, no guarantee you’d run into any of us if you were looking for any one of us. At the paid events there is much more room, opportunity for conversation, you can actually see who is there, and we often have a panel or something — in other words, it is more of an event than a happy hour. In other words: You who have paid are not being played for fools by northeasterners!

I wish we could just have a bar night in Wichita tonight (would beat running into Sanjaya at the White House Correspondents Dinner), but I’m not sure of the plausibility of that. That said, Jonah and Ramesh have been best at holding sidebar bar events in towns where they travel too and that’s something we’ll try to consider doing a bit more.