Two groups of lawmakers are Asia-bound over the House break Then it's off to South Korea to meet with President Lee Myung-bak and others, visit the DMZ - great photo ops - and talk about dealing with the lunatic North Koreans. Others tentatively going include GOP Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), Jean Schmidt (Ohio), Dan Burton (Ind.) and Jim Gerlach (Pa.) and Democratic Rep. Brad Miller (N.C.). Ros-Lehtinen runs a pretty tight ship. A much better bet is a 10-day jaunt, also leaving Friday, led by House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.), to China, South Korea and India. This is a "bipartisan, fact-finding mission," a committee spokesman e-mailed, "to learn global solutions that could increase America's competitiveness in the classroom and the workplace." The Taj, the Great Wall. . . We could not be told who was on board, because of "security" concerns. But we're hearing others who might be going include GOP Reps. Virginia Foxx (N.C.), Phil Roe (Tenn.), Erik Paulsen (Minn.) and Tim Walberg (Mich.) and Democratic Rep. Mike McIntyre (N.C.), plus spouses and staff. Sperling's dirty laundry A high-school-aged Gene Sperling should have known he was destined for a career in politics. In a new video for an initiative to encourage summer jobs and work opportunities for young people, the director of the National Economic Council fondly recalls his first job - as a ball boy and all-around janitor (paging Newt Gingrich!) for the University of Michigan's basketball team. "We got to sweep the court at halftime, and at the end of every game we got to go into the locker room and throw their dirty socks and uniforms into the laundry bin," he recalls. It's "did you hustle, did you do everything, did you have a great attitude?" he says. Joe, somewhat on the go Keeping an eye on the old Joe-mentum - the campaign phrase that outgoing Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) used when he ran for vice president as a Democrat in 2000. He and his wife, Hadassah, stopped in the Holy Land, and then he and two aides went on in a military plane to Tunisia and Libya. The commercial flights alone by Lieberman and aides Vance Serchuk and Margaret Goodlander, according to the Senate's quarterly foreign travel report released Thursday, cost about $28,700. Add another $5,000 in per-diem and "miscellaneous" costs noted in the report. Those planes, assuming they took a real small plane, are billed out by the Pentagon at $3,000 an hour. The blog: washingtonpost.com/ intheloop; Twitter: @InTheLoopWP