*Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher clocks in with a strong piece on the investigation that exonerated Prince George’s County police officers who stormed the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo. The cops overturned the place, killed Calvo’s dogs, and wreaked other forms of destruction. And for no good reason. In the end, it’s all about the “no-knock” raid.

*Here, the Washington Times engages in perhaps the most useless genre of journalism on earth: The pre-game analysis piece. It’s about how the Saints’ passing attack poses problems for the Redskins.

*Compelling: A mini slideshow on nytimes.com documenting Ike’s doings in Texas.

*Enterprising: DC Teacher Chic works weekends! In this edition, she hammers a librarian who insults children. The rot!

*Emotional: Reaction to the David Foster Wallace news

Having missed the Sarah Palin-Charlie Gibson interview of last night, I awoke this morning eager to gobble up analysis of this much-anticipated event. In my morning reading, I found two sources with distinct spin on the news here are some key excerpts from an account in the Washington Post.

*”Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks…The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.”

*”In the interview…she was confronted with questions about the U.S. relationship with Russia and her fitness for office, and she appeared to struggle when asked to define the “Bush doctrine” on foreign policy.”

And herewith some excerpts from an account in the Washington Times:

*Headline: “Palin touts readiness in 1st interview”

*”Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Thursday she is ready to be vice president and warned the U.S. needs to be vigilant in the face of Russian aggression, including being ready for war if it means defending NATO allies.”

*”Mr. Gibson at one point implied Mrs. Palin was stumbling over the question, telling her he was getting ‘lost in a blizzard of words there’ when she was fumbling over how far the U.S. could go to pre-empt an attack.”

*”[S]he did stress that during her recent trip she also met with wounded U.S. troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany - something Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama failed to do during his recent overseas travels. And at another point, she noted she has been in touch with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.”

Which story does a better job of capturing the utter truth of Palin’s coming-out interview? Is the Times too nice, the Post too critical?

Following an interesting debate on the screwups this week at the District’s Board of Elections and Ethics. As Washington City Paper’s own Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis has so capably reported, the vote-counting fiasco of Tuesday night involved the story of a troubled cartridge and an elections office that spent a day scrambling and hunkering down to figure things out.

In the comments section, one Elizabeth Elliott/Foggy Bottom compellingly recounted a tale of bureaucratic horror relating to the city elections operation, concluding with this line:

“If ever there was a case for not giving DC the vote, this fiasco is it.”

Seems that every time we screw something up in D.C., this same argument gets trotted out. Oh, we can’t govern ourselves, so we don’t deserve that voting rep or senator.

Has anyone ever considered that perhaps the caliber of our politicians and bureaucrats might improve a bit if we actually had voting representation. How many qualified public servants do you think have left D.C. in the past few decades just because they have essentially no future leapfrogging to national office from a post in D.C.? How many frustrated residents have left for the ‘burbs–yes because of bad schools and crime, but also because they get enfranchised when they cross the District line?

And one other thing: Doesn’t a poorly run city–which D.C. has pretty much ceased to be–deserve voting rights just as much as a perfectly managed city?

Last night, an up-and-comer upended the decades-long political career of Republican At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz. Thirty-three-year-old Patrick Mara used a whole boatload of cash from the biz community, plus a nice endorsement from the Washington Post, to drub Schwartz in yesterday’s Republican primary, by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent.

Now, winning a primary in the District of Columbia is usually a huge deal. It generally means you’ve won your office for all intents and purposes, with the general election a mere formality.

If you’re a Democrat, that is.

If you’re a Republican, the landscape is far different, especially in the wide-open at-large race. The problem is that Mara’s party represents about 7 percent of D.C. voters, many of whom are dyed-in-the-wool Carol supporters who are put off by the bitter attacks that Mara launched against the career incumbent.

To snare an at-large seat, Mara will have to be ride that fractured mandate to a strong showing in the November balloting. There are two seats up for grabs, to be claimed by the top two vote-getters. One of those top two is a foregone conclusion: Unopposed Democratic At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown will trounce the rest of the field.

That leaves a scramble for the No. 2 spot, which is worth a sweet part-time job that pays $120,000 per year. There’s a mad scramble for the runner-up position, too.

The party guys in this tilt are Brown, Mara, and Statehood-Green candidate David Schwartzman.

The indies, though, add a great element of drama. Failed mayoral and council candidate Michael A. Brown and longtime D.C. activist Dee Hunter are vying for the seats as independents.

Even though they’re not. Both Brown and Hunter are Dems, an affiliation that they surely will not hide over the next two months. They’re essentially trying to do what D.C. election law should allow them to do, which is to embrace open competition for the at-large seats.

Of these two “independent democrats,” Brown appears to have the edge. He has some name recognition from his mayoral run in 2006 and his subsequent attempt to snare the Ward 4 council seat vacated by now-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. Brown withdrew from the mayoral race in its late stages and was trounced in his Ward 4 race.

Now comes his third shot in as many years. Brown will no doubt be simplifying things for the electorate, instructing people to vote “Brown and Brown” and will doubtless steal from Schwartz’s playbook a bit, hammering Mara as a puppet of special interests. If Schwartz had sneaked through her primary, she would have soaked up all the love from the Dems and independents who’ve put her in that coveted No. 2 spot on previous at-large ballots.

With her on the sidelines, that spot is essentially Brown’s to lose.

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery, Washington City Paper stalwart

Longtime Republican At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz moments ago gave a concession speech after a tightly contested primary battle with upstart Patrick Mara. With less than 20 percent of the precincts in, Mara held a commanding 62-38 percent advantage. According to Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis, that early tally doesn’t include most Ward 3 precincts, where quite a few Republican voters reside–which raises some questions as to why Schwartz bagged out so early.

The 68-32 margin looks a lot more impressive as a percentage than do the raw numbers behind it. Mara has garnered 424 to Schwartz’s 258. That’s what happens when about three-quarters of your city’s voters are Democratic.

The real story here is the insularity of the Republican primary. Schwartz is one of the city’s most popular politicians, as evidence by her historically strong showings in general elections, where she has pulled down enormous chunks of the voting population. But this is a closed Republican primary, and her opponent essentially out-Republicanned her.

Buoyed by big dollars from pro-biz groups, Mara hammered Schwartz with campaign literature that described her as, well, a Democrat in Republican clothing. Much of Mara’s support came from a D.C. business community peeved over Schwartz’s championing a sick-leave bill that imposed new costs on D.C. firms.

In a brief interview with Loose Lips this evening, Schwartz said that she’d “never wage a write-in campaign” to leverage her popularity with the city’s Democratic supermajority. Nor will she ever endorse Mara, on account of the “guttural nature of the campaign.”

Years ago, a debate sprung from the editorial offices of the Washington City Paper. Here’s the backdrop: We were writing about a 40-something musician or artist who died when his car got T-boned in a terrible accident. A draft of the story called this event a “tragedy.” A since-departed editor said no, that’s not a tragedy. Do you know what a tragedy actually is?, he inveighed. He said that his English professor preached that a tragedy is when a great, great man dies an early death.

In addition to being a song by the Bee Gees, “Tragedy” is defined as a “calamity: an event resulting in great loss and misfortune….”

So perhaps news outlets should exercise a bit of caution in using the word. Particularly sports writers, who are always trying to amp up the drama in their copy, even stories that don’t involve the Olympics.

This past weekend, I was reading Mark Maske’s piece in the Washington Post about Green Bay Packers executive Mark Murphy. A former Redskin, Murphy was the guy who negotiated the team’s traumatic separation from Brett Favre. Here’s Maske’s bar for tragedy:

For Murphy, the Favre saga played out at a time of personal tragedy. His father Hugh died in mid-July in Clearwater, Fla., at 83, only about 3 1/2 months after having brain cancer diagnosed. Hugh Murphy had a long career in labor relations and had continued to work as a mediator in Florida until about a year before his death.

Is that really a tragedy, or is that just life?

Here’s a note from Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth on the changes going on in the lobby of the Post building.

As everyone noticed this morning as they entered the 15th Street building, we’re in the process of making changes to the outer lobby and elevator lobby. I am sorry that we did not communicate earlier about this. It has been in the works for some time and was kicked off by the big guy upstairs in Corporate. The goal is simple: update our look while preserving our history.

Briefly, here’s what’s happening: several weeks ago we removed the photo kiosks in the outer lobby to create more space. The guard desk will move to the far end of the outer lobby. To the right as you enter the building, we will install three large high-resolution monitors to display washingtonpost.com, Newsweek.com and Slate. The websites will be visible from the street.

In the elevator lobby, we will install a large monitor that will display washingtonpost.com’s daily Photo Gallery. The surrounding wall will be “papered” in significant historic front pages.

Joe Elbert is creating a video of the historic photos that were in the elevator lobby; that video, which will include many more photos, will play in the Multi-Purpose Room on a new monitor.

Finally, Eugene Meyer’s Seven Principles will be displayed prominently on a column in the outer lobby.

We expect this project to be completed over several weeks, and hope you will enjoy the results.

Today is a big day at the Washington Post, with Marcus Brauchli taking over from longtime Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. But that’s not all, folks!

There are cataclysmic changes going on in the building’s lobby, and they’ve caught the attention of Postie Paul Duggan, who sent this note to his colleagues:

fyi, I’m told the lobby collage of Post front pages from the long-ago previous century and the iconic photo of Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee circa-Pentagon Papers is to be replaced with a flat-screen-TV slide show of photos from each day’s paper and the rest of the wall be simply paint. … Only one coat up there now, so it’s not all gone yet, just faded behind a cloud of beige. … Nice metaphor.

The Washington Post is ready with the latest in Bob Woodward’s probe of of the full eight years of the Bush administration. Haven’t read the book, just the first excerpt in the Post. Verdict: Not a lot of red meat for a Sunday excerpt. Best little tidbit was a top White House aide telling the prez about Iraq:

“It’s hell, Mr. President,” said deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan.

This took place around 2006, pre-surge, when things in Iraq were looking, well, like hell.

But outside of that rare glimpse into Bush administration truth-telling, Woodward’s working with a lot of bureaucratic goop in this bad boy. Sure, he clues us into a spat between Condi and a top military official, but the key revelation in this first installment is that Bush was seeking a strategic re-evaluation of the situation in Iraq during this 2006 time frame. Good spade work, Bob, but hardly memorable stuff.

*Who woulda thunk that Roger Federer would’ve made it to the U.S. Open final, given his struggles this summer? And who would’ve thunk that his opponent wouldn’t be Rafael Nadal?

*WashTimes on Palin’s post-convention coming-out.

*This is the guy you want to listen to when it comes to analysis of the Fannie-Freddie takeover.

*And let me just say this about Favre’s debut with the Jets. Indeed, green machine fans, you are 1 and Oh after barely squeaking out a vick over the Dolphins. It happened in part on account of the heroics of your new QB, who threw a vintage heave for a TD in the first half of this tilt. Don’t, however, get giddy. This is a guy who, I’ll predict right now, will toss at least five more INTs than TDs before the year is over or he’s benched, whichever comes first, in car-maintenance parlance. Just wait till he starts to feel a bit comfortable with the system, because that’s when he starts improvising, starts calling his own little plays in the huddle, sandlotting it. And that’s precisely when the defense swoops in, grabbing duck after duck after Favrean duck. I suppose you could look upon this year as Favre’s best chance to pad that NFL-record pick total.

Newark Star-Ledger reporter Mike Garafolo has a strong theory on why the Skins-Giants game was so awful last night:

I was thinking along the same lines as many people after last night’s game: what a sloppy second half that needs to be cleaned up.

But when I got home and really cooled down for the first time after running around pretty much all day, I had another thought: It was way too freakin’ hot yesterday. And I can only imagine how those guys felt, playing their first full game at regular-season speed in that kind of weather. So if I seemed to have been a bit critical of what was a division win at home to start the season (never a bad thing), I take some of that back after looking at that second half with a slightly different perspective. As I see it now, both sides were simply gassed and just trying to survive.

The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) is looking into whether lifeguards manning Dupont Circle’s Francis Pool improperly collected parking fees from patrons. Over the last couple of weekends of DPR’s pool season, staffers at the facility, at 25th and N Streets NW, opened a dusty stretch of land on the western edge of the complex. When incoming pool users parked there, the lifeguards extracted a $5 parking fee.

I was one of their victims. Two weekends ago, I spotted an opening in this parking area. There was no sign indicating a fee, but a lifeguard hit me up for payment just after I’d parked. He dropped my fiver into a big wad of bills.

I later asked for a receipt. No go. I asked to see a sign. The lifeguard said they’d had a sign up the weekend before, but that someone must have taken it down. I then questioned him about the system: If there are no receipts, how does DPR know how much cash was collected? He replied that DPR has precise notions of how many people patronize the pool on a given day, and how much cash should be handed over by the lifeguards. (The pool charges $7 for non-D.C. residents).

The fishiness in this setup was also apparent to Brian O’Connor. He and his family showed up last weekend, parked in the “pay” space, and faced an immediate request for payment. He blew it off and proceeded to enjoy the pool. Then a lifeguard threatened to call the police on him. At first, he said he’d welcome the intervention of the cops, but ultimately just moved his vehicle.

O’Connor was suspicious of the scheme in part because a friend had previously handed over $5 for parking, only to watch the attendant/lifeguard slide the bill right into her wallet. O’Connor said he’d likely report the activity to DPR, “though we doubt it will do any good at this point.” (The pool closed for the year on Sept. 1).

Yesterday, I spoke with DPR spokesperson John Stokes about these parking “policies” at the Francis pool. He responded unequivocally: “We do not charge for parking at our facilities,” he said, positing that perhaps the folks who were collecting the fees weren’t DPR employees.

When I told him that they were dressed in white tanktops, red shorts, carried lifeguard equipment, and supervised the pool, he said, “We will be seriously looking into the situation.”

“That was a scam,” said Stokes.

“The only thing I can say is that calls are being made right now,” continued Stokes. “We really appreciate it when constituents note any type of illegal behavior at any DPR facility or location.”

Chevron’s got some cleaning-up to do in the city’s Lamond-Riggs neighborhood, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency released an order yesterday requiring the oil giant to take several steps to remediate a contaminated gas plume that leaked over time from a Chevron station in Chillium, Md., across the District line this quiet neighborhood in Northeast.

What can a gas plume do to a nice neighborhood like this? Well, in the words of the EPA, the threat is something called “subsurface vapor intrusion,” a term that figures big in a big EPA document on the mess.

Upon checking for subsurface vapor intrusion in Lamond-Riggs homes, the agency concluded that “there is elevation in benzene and MTBE vapor concentrations” in homes above the plume. In other words, Chevron’s plume has made it to the living room.

The EPA is requiring Chevron to take five steps that include expanding the “existing remediation system” and installing “individual vapor mitigations sytems” but that amount to a larger fiat: Clean this shit up!

There are plenty of people in the Washington area who’ve cursed out the Examiner for its penchant to throw papers willy-nilly on lawns and stoops.

Yet Shepherd Park resident Don Squires came up with perhaps the most original protest. At an advisory neighborhood commission meeting earlier this year that addressed the unwanted deliveries, Squires showed up with a bag of Examiners that’d landed on his front lawn. He proceeded to dump them in the meeting room, provoking a commissioner to declare him out of order.

Squires responded that he was just making a point: No one wants a pile of trash in their space. Watching all of this was Examiner Publisher Michael Phelps.

Phelps also absorbed some blows on the very candid Shepherd Park listserv, which boiled over with nastiness about the free newspaper. Wrote one neighbor:

Recently, we were out of town for 10 days and our home was broken into. In our absence, The Examiner had been delivered and was littering the sidewalk to our house (I stopped the Post). For 2 years, I have begged and pleaded for delivery to stop, repeatedly voicing my concern about this being a home security issue. I have contacted Mr. Phelps and the head of circulation numerous times; I have called the 800 number; and, I have filled out the “Stop Delivery” function at The Examiner (all suggested by Mr. Phelps himself during his ludicrous ANC appearance).

The Examiner also got some pressure from the office of Councilmember Muriel Bowser, which acted as an intermediary between Phelps and the angry residents. Phelps was unavailable for comment.

These days, less newsprint is getting thrown around in this stately D.C. neighborhood. Squires reports that for the first time since mid-July, he’s not getting the deliveries. One big help is that the Examiner around that time bagged its nearly daily deliveries and went with a twice-weekly schedule. “I think it was done with an eye toward not bothering people as much,” says Squires.

Every year, I look forward to this day. Not because it’s the start of a three-day weekend (at a weekly newspaper that goes to press on Tuesday night, three day weekends mean torture). Not because football season is starting, though that’s always a bonus. Not because the temperatures are falling, because September in D.C. can be grueling.

It’s because I get to laugh at the AAA annual Labor Day travel forecast, or the biggest fraud this side of I-95.

This year’s projections don’t disappoint. Here’s a Bloomberg report on the AAA conclusions:

The number of people taking trips of at least 50 miles from home today through Sept. 1 will fall 0.9 percent from a year earlier to 34.4 million, according to AAA, the largest U.S. motorist group. That would make Labor Day the third straight U.S. holiday with a decline.

Zero-point-nine percent? How’re they coming up with that number? Do you think they like the decimals just to give the impression of exactitude here?

Never doubt AAA. As this paper reported in 2005, the travel survey is “based in part on a telephone survey of 1,300 U.S. adults and in part on a “proprietary forecasting model developed by [the Travel Industry Association],” according to an AAA official. The TIA thing is called the Holiday Travel Forecast Model.

And if the Holiday Travel Forecast Model says that 0.9 percent fewer people will hit the road this Labor Day, then by golly, enjoy those wide-open roads and security checkpoints!

From Washington City Paper Publisher Amy Austin comes word that a driver who delivers copies of Washington City Paper to streetboxes around the city was held up today at North Capitol Street and Florida Avenue. The driver lost his vehicle, cell phone, and wallet in the incident. We will be aggressively updating this story.