While lobbying for Continental Airlines on the pension bill, Cox wore her Member’s spouse pin, which, of course, gave her access to restricted areas of the Capitol where conferees were meeting until the wee hours of the morning Friday.

Aides saw Cox at 1:15 a.m. standing outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), where conferees were scheduled to be meeting (though, in reality, they had moved down the hall to another Senator’s hideaway). Cox, they said, was wearing her spouse pin conspicuously on a necklace.

“She had it prominently displayed on her necklace,” a senior Republican aide to one of the Senate conferees told HOH. “No other lobbyist could have gotten into that area.”

The aide said he found Cox’s move “shocking” in this era of ethics and lobbying reform, though he had to acknowledge, grudgingly, that Cox did one heckuva job for Continental by snagging such great access.

“Good lobbying? Maybe,” he said. “Inappropriate? Definitely. The fact that the wife of a former Member — he isn’t even a current Member — is using the privileges given to her as such for personal gain, her business definitely crosses the line.”

On its face, the pin Cox wore was still valid, since her husband was a Member of the current Congress, leaving late last year for the SEC.

Congressional rules do not appear to address the issue of whether the spouses of former Members may use their special pins during the practice of lobbying, said veteran ethics watchdog Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21.

Wertheimer was unaware of the late-night lobbying incident involving Cox, but he said that “from a common-sense standpoint, it shouldn’t have happened. From a rules standpoint, the House and Senate should have clear rules” for registered lobbyists who are married to both current and former Members of Congress.

“As a general proposition, lobbyists ought to all be operating under the same set of rules,” Wertheimer said. “And former Members’ spouses, or anyone else connected to Members who are professional lobbyists, should not have any special privileges that go beyond what lobbyists normally do.”

A spokesman for the House Administration Committee, Jon Brandt, said Members and spouses are allowed to keep their respective pins after the Members’ retirement.

Cox did not return phone calls to her office seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Continental Airlines, Julie King, said she tried to reach Cox “all afternoon” to no avail. She finally sent an e-mail stating, “While I haven’t been able to connect with Rebecca, I have been able to speak with [Vice President of Congressional Affairs] Nancy Van Duyne, who said that ‘this must not have been a restricted area, because there were several other lobbyists in the same area where Rebecca was at the same time.’”

Whatever the case, they certainly didn’t have as nice a necklace as Cox.

Aide to Connecticut: Bombs Away! Wow, a senior aide to House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) really has it out for the state of Connecticut. So much so that he wrote in an e-mail to colleagues that he’d like the state to be wiped off the map and its residents shipped off to Gitmo.

A copy of his e-mail, which arrived in HOH’s inbox this week via good old-fashioned snail mail, was startling, if funny in a morbid, twisted way.

The aide — Daniel Kish, a senior adviser to Pombo — was responding to an innocent question from the committee’s deputy communications director, who wanted guidance from her colleagues on how to respond to a June 13 editorial in the Hartford Courant that opposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She sent an e-mail to five colleagues, including Kish, on the same day the editorial was published.

The spokeswoman, Melissa DeLaney, attached the Courant editorial, which took issue with Pombo’s policy of wanting to open up ANWR for drilling, and asked a simple one-word question: “Response?”

Kish had a response, all right. Seven minutes after DeLaney sent the e-mail, Kish replied:

“Connecticut should have its statehood taken away from it. The foolishness of its pampered residents should be demonstrated to others by a government program to bulldoze the entire state, salt the land and construct a windfarm to supply NYC with electricity. And its residents should be relocated to Guantanamo Bay where they can take a number behind the 3 who hung themselves this weekend, since they seem so intent on suicide.”

Well then, that pretty much answered her question, didn’t it?

We wondered, was Kish serious? Should the Connecticut delegation be overly concerned? He says not so much.

“You caught me in my ongoing ribbing of Andrew Whelan, who was born and raised in Connecticut and works in our press shop,” Kish wrote in an e-mail to HOH. “He’s a great, smart and talented guy who understands the link between economic progress and access to energy supplies, and gives back as good as he takes it. I always tell him the country doesn’t run on nutmeg.”

That Sneaky Stork. Happy birthday to Ava Landrum Simmons! Ava turns one week old today, according to her proud father, Kyle Simmons, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who says, “Carrie and I are obviously thrilled.”

Baby Ava weighed in at a whopping 8 pounds, 13 ounces and all of 20 inches long. Daddy Simmons says she’s “healthy and beautiful.”

Please send your hot tips, juicy gossip or comments to hoh@rollcall.com.