Short and sweet today, mostly because I started late, but also because it's sunny outside and I am going to run grab breakfast. So happy Wednesday.

Yes, I know there has been a stretch of negative things that have happened in the last few days - although frankly, I thought the Michael Steele thing was hilarious - but today I have to lead off with a local incident from last night.

Noticed it on Twitter not long before I walked out the door that DC EMS were responding to a shooting on the 4000 block of South Capitol SE, along with two words at the end, "mass casualty."

The headline in today's Washington Post is "LIKE A WAR ZONE". A gunman, in an apparent drive-by shooting, sprayed bullets into a crowd outside of an apartment building, killing four and leaving five more wounded. In an ensuing police chase that led to three arrests and the recovery of a weapon, four more police officers were slightly injured.

Two quotes from witnesses are chilling:

A man who said he was in the area at the time recounted the sounds he heard as "pat, pat, pat, pat, pat," followed by a loud boom.

Then, "all I saw was bodies dropping," he said. "It was like Vietnam."

Another witness said that as bodies fell, "it was like a pileup at a football game."