All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

CBS News' Kaylee Hartung and Arden Farhi profile Washington lawyer Matt Sanderson, who's brining together members of Congress to change the Bowl Championship Series rankings.

The first round of official college football rankings were released this week, and the old controversy surrounding how those rankings are determined was ignited once again. But this time, Washington is getting involved.

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rankings determine who plays for the national title in January. Some say the way these rankings are determined is unfair - including members of Congress. So this week’s "Unplugged Under 40" caught up with a young Washington lawyer who's trying to rally members of Congress to change the system.

Matt Sanderson and five fellow football fans launched PlayoffPAC this week. This political action committee wants to do away with the BCS and institute a playoff system. Division I-A college football is the only NCAA sport without one.

Their slogan is "beat the BCS save college football." And Sanderson said reform is necessary “for the good of the entire sport – all schools, fans, corporate sponsors, all people involved. Playoff PAC feels “that the BCS is anti-competitive and arbitrary.”

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Three months after the end of her reign as Miss Virginia, Tara Wheeler is missing more than a crown atop her head. Monday night she shaved her hair off to raise awareness and money to cure kids' cancer.

Amidst a media frenzy and a room full of supporters, Wheeler and four others shed their locks on Monday night at event sponsored by the St. Baldrick's Foundation.

St. Baldrick's raises money for pediatric cancer research as volunteers solicit donations by offering to shave their heads. Wheeler says the cause is one that's been close to her heart for years, but it was experiences during her time as Miss Virginia that brought her to this moment.

She first met four-year-old Jessie while serving as an ambassador for the Children's Miracle Network.

"When I saw how upset Jessie was about losing her hair, and I knew how she would feel when her hero, the former Miss Virginia was bald too, it really showed me that this was a way I could be worthy of all these children looking up to me. And hopefully I've made a step toward doing that," she said.

Since making the pledge to shave her head in March, Wheeler has raised close to $50,000 for the St. Baldrick's Foundation.

Watch Wednesday's "Washington Unplugged" above to see an interview with Wheeler, which follows a discussion of the Obama administration's use of "czars."

"Washington Unplugged" appears live on CBSNews.com each weekday at 12:30 p.m. ET. Click here to check out previous episodes .

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In a 24-hour trip to Washington this week Nick McDonell had a full agenda. The freelance journalist spent the day in meetings on Capitol Hill with staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – He's working on a story on the International Criminal Court he says he hopes to sell. And he spent the evening signing copies of his third novel at Politics and Prose.

Nick describes "An Expensive Education" as "a combination of campus novel and spy novel, so at its best it is sort of like Graham Greene goes to the frat house, but he also has to go to Somalia and Kenya and deal with all of the real trouble that happens there. But it's a conspiracy theory book."

But what does a 25-year-old know about the real trouble in Somalia and Kenya? Shortly after college graduation, Nick ventured to Sudan with a book idea in mind. He had heard wildly intriguing stories of the region from his Harvard Prof. Alex de Waal. He asked de Waal to connect him with a few sources, and he was off. But once he arrived in Sudan he realized de Waal was a story himself. He wrote 9,000 words on de Waal's work as a mediator between the Sudanese government and the West and sold it to Harper's Magazine. Along the way, in hotel rooms and on the road, he wrote "An Expensive Education."

"I'm an inexperienced reporter and I'm still learning. So I would arrive in a place and I would have to meet somebody, say there was a Rwandan MP, and he didn't show up for a month and the lieutenants wouldn't talk to me. So I was sort of just nosing around but a lot of the day there would be nothing to do, one or two interviews a day. So for the rest of the day I would sit there and I would try to write the sort of book that I would like to read."

Nick made headlines at 18 with his debut novel, "Twelve." The story of the over-privileged and under-supervised teens of New York's Upper East Side became an international best-seller. The movie is expected in theaters next year. Nick wrote a second book, "The Third Brother," in between his college classes, though it garnered less praise than the first.

Nick writes about what he knows, whether it's growing up on New York's Upper East Side or his reporting adventures abroad, then he pushes the limits. All three books are told from the perspective of young men coming to a new understanding about the world they live in.

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CBS News' Kaylee Hartung profiles Washington Post's economic and domestic policy blogger Ezra Klein, who has recently launched his new column, "Gut Check."

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