Tomorrow will be your last chance to do that, though; McKenna has opted to stop writing Cheap Seats and move on from City Paper. As McKenna announces his decision in his column for this week's paper, which will be his last:

This will be the last Cheap Seats column. In our 25 years and 51 weeks together, City Paper and I have gotten everything out of each other we’re going to get. I’m grateful for all the people who told me their stories, and anybody who ever read my attempts to retell those tales in this space, and, well, anybody who didn’t read but sued me anyway. Be well...

Editor Michael Schaffer sent staff an email about McKenna's departure today:

This is a really sad day for City Paper. I've worked with Dave in various iterations, separated by a dozen or so years, and I can say he's been one of the most consistently stellar journalists I've ever read, much less edited. In a way, it's a shame that the last year has been so defined by Dave's bravery in the face of legal threats from a billionaire celebrity, because so much of the real magic in his column was his ability to discover and champion the powerless and the forgotten. Yes, he's often seemed to be the only one questioning the most powerful sports juggernaut in town. But when you go through his collected works, also look for one-armed superstar catcher Gary Mays, Kentucky Derby winner turned $8-a-race Laurel Park pony boy Ronnie Franklin, and the schoolgirl athletes whose sorry treatment Dave chronicled.

Anyone who's had the fortune of editing Dave, or just shooting around ideas with him, also knows that Dave's also one of those guys who manages, in just about every interaction, to make colleagues smarter, funnier, more suspicious and more empathetic—exactly what journalists should be. I first experienced this back in the days when a long phone call with Dave was likely to be interrupted by a guitar solo (amplified through a tube amp). These days, said calls are more likely to feature ambient noise from his kids, but the same thing applies. You laugh, you argue, and you underestimate his ability to fact-check the all-Met or NFL-veteran claims of elected officials at your peril. Bottom line: Dave's someone I'm proud to work with. And, even though he's dropping the column as a staff writer, I still want to get Dave's voice in the paper as a contributor (and on the other end of my phone as a friend) as often as he wants.

Pick up tomorrow's paper to see who earns McKenna's final Unsportsman of the Year honors.

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Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder has just filed papers in D.C. Superior Court to dismiss his lawsuit against Washington City Paper and staff writer Dave McKenna over "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder," which we published last November.

Since Snyder first sued over the story, City Paper and McKenna fought the case aggressively, eventually asking a D.C. Superior Court judge to dismiss it under the District's new law against "strategic lawsuits against public participation." And of course, we've also continued to write about the Redskins—which, of course, we'll keep doing.

Here's our statement on Saturday's news:

We are pleased that Dan Snyder has finally ended his gratuitous litigation against Washington City Paper and staff writer Dave McKenna.

From the beginning, we have believed that Snyder's lawsuit was a baseless one, designed to intimidate a journalist and a publication that have been among his most persistent critics. We've also argued—in our pages, and in court—that our article never said any of the allegedly libelous things Snyder claimed it did. As we defended ourselves, we got unprecedented support from loyal readers who donated thousands of dollars of their own money to help us protect our rights. And we were fortunate to have an ownership group who understood the stakes and stood by us. We're confident that the court would have seen things our way, too, thanks to the strong laws the District of Columbia has in place to protect free speech. But we're also glad that it won't have to go that far.

City Paper is a small news organization with limited resources, and defending ourselves against this lawsuit has cost massive amounts of time and money, well beyond the $34,308.91 that readers have contributed to our legal defense fund. Despite those costs, we are proud that we never wavered or allowed ourselves to be bullied, ultimately leading Snyder to dismiss his case. Though the District’s anti-SLAPP law says courts “may” have awarded us some of our litigation costs had we pursued them, we concluded that it wasn’t worth spending substantially more money, energy, and attention for what would have only been a chance of recovering a portion of what we've spent.

Today, we got what we wanted all along: dismissal of a case expressly designed to pressure us, and filed by a man who now apparently says he never even read the story in the first place. Now we're eager to get back to our business of covering the city's politics and culture—including its sports culture—without this distraction. And we hope the end of this case means Snyder can get back to focusing his energy on making our shared home team as good as it can be.

Snyder's suit was filed late Wednesday—curiously, in New York, rather than in any of the Washington-area jurisdictions where City Paper circulates.

Earlier in the day, City Paper publisher Amy Austin published a letter to readers defending columnist Dave McKenna's reporting. The Snyder suit specifies four alleged misstatements in the story, and also claims that a cover illustration depicting Snyder with horns and a goatee was anti-Semitic. We expect the claims to be defended vigorously. We've also made clear that we think the allegation of bigotry is sensationalistic and absurd.

The bottom line is: It's sad that Snyder, who has such a public relations apparatus at his disposal, has chosen to turn to litigation instead—especially in a court deep in Giants country.

Read Snyder's full complaint after the jump.

Tune in to hear McKenna, whose column last week took note of Redskins GM Bruce Allen's newest role—season ticket pitchman. (Update: This post originally said you could see McKenna, but as he's advised in the comments, MASN has opted—perhaps wisely?—to take an audio feed only from him. You'll have to keep waiting for McKenna video.)

Even the announcers and sideline reporters were in on the act. Everyone was decked out in Redskins-logo shirts (shame on Channel 4 sports anchor Lindsay Czarniak and Comcast Sportsnet reporter Kelli Johnson, who apparently are now employed part-time by the Redskins as sideline reporters; isn't that a conflict of interest?).

That was the scene, anyway, at last Saturday's 'Skins-Steelers tilt. McKenna cited the same infractions at the previous preseason 'Skins outing:

Lindsay Czarniak showed up during the game broadcast and the post-game show wearing a licensed Redskins shirt, logo and all. That makes sense, since she was working for the Redskins Broadcasting Network, owned by Dan Snyder.

But Czarniak was carrying a WRC microphone. She took off the Redskins costume and put on a blue fluffy top for her 11 o’clock news segment from Baltimore, so clearly her superiors have some inkling about the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Why is this dual role allowed? Czarniak works for the news department of an NBC affiliate. But she works for Dan Snyder, too. For the ethics police, other than the import of the subject matter, what’s the difference between Czarniak’s Redskins deal and Armstrong Williams taking money from the Bush White House?

There's something about TV, I guess. People's expectations of local TV news broadcast have been so abused, so debased, for so long, that the notion of holding these folks to any standard of conduct is just too much for the public to pull off.

With the better weather come turf battles. This past week, Washington City Paper's sports & games columnist/resident genius Dave McKenna wrote about soccer pitches around the city, and their dwindling numbers. The piece dwelled on the situation at Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park, that gorgeous spread of fountains, steps, and grass on the 15th Street threshold of Columbia Heights. McKenna laments that the entire field isn't available to soccer players and picnickers:

The temporary red fences, augmented by strips of police tape, have been up for nearly three years on the upper level of Meridian Hill Park off 16th Street NW. Fencing was removed earlier this month on the south half of the beautiful park’s upper level. The northern knoll remains blocked off.

So soccer’s out there, too.

There are no turf repair signs on the Meridian Hill Park fences—or anything to tell patrons why the grounds are off limits.

The out-of-commission soccer spots have some things in common besides the red fences.

The National Park Service, for one, runs them all, even Meridian Hill, as part of Rock Creek Park.

This is a bona fide city issue, and I'd talked previously with superstar parks activist Steve Coleman about the situation. So after McKenna scorched the park service, I decided to take a jaunt through the park, just to see if our legendary columnist is right on this one.

He's not. Though I concede that "nearly" three years is a really long time to shut off a field, something has worked right with respect to that field's upgrade. The part that's not blocked off right now, that southern expanse, is as nice a patch of grass as I've seen on any spot this side of the turf at Nats stadium. And the blocked-off part looks as if it's going to reach that same level of beauty sometime soon. As many of the dustbowls around town—most maintained by the city's parks department—make clear, it's not easy to maintain good grass in the city. It tends to get trampled.

So I'm hereby officially endorsing the grass-management approach at Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park.

On other topics far from D.C. parks, Andy Alexander, the WaPo ambo, writes this week about a favorite of ombudspeople everywhere, and that's the comics page. He explains the whole hullaballoo behind the cancellation and restoration of "Judge Parker" and ends up applauding Post management for its flexibility on the matter. Alexander points out how a few people got upset about the paper's eliminating stock tables and messing with crosswords and the like. Yet people went berserk about "Judge Parker."

Now, take that data alongside this complaint, which appeared in the paper's Free for All page on Saturday:

I had wondered why my team seemed to be playing station-to-station baseball: the first four games, no stolen bases or anyone caught stealing. Then I noticed other teams, too, were missing such stats in their box scores. Also missing were double plays, grounded-into-double-plays, sacrifices, sacrifice flies and who knows what else that doesn't come right to mind but does play an important part in the game.

I realize that you're trying to put content into less space, but the gain from omitting these items must be tiny and the loss larger than you realize. I can reconstruct almost every play with a complete box score and have made that a ritual for most of 40 years. It is the first thing I do with the paper in the morning, and I often return to it later to confirm my read of teams' strengths and weaknesses.

If the information is incomplete, I have much less reason to continue my rather expensive subscription. After all, I can get the information on various Web sites. However, I'd prefer to keep things as they have been.

By the way, who decided what to omit — a football fan? You left the time of play and the attendance, surely the least interesting data.

That's from reader Jim Calhoun of Waynesboro. And it leads me to the conclusion that cutting back a big, full-service, kick-ass newspaper has got to be the most frustrating and impossible tasks on earth. No matter what you do, no matter how much one cutback makes sense, no matter how few people seem to care about something, well, they do. All those complaints on the paper's quite excellent Free for All page speak to the old saw about newspapers—that they are essentially like supermarkets, in that customers come for one or two things and then head out. Sure, there are some that buy something from every aisle, but you can't build a business around them. The point here is that there is no smart or good way to downsize a newspaper.

But even the shorter Post has a lot of good stuff, including this laugher from Dana Milbank on the results of his reading all his reader comments for a week–1,800 of them.

WashTimes has a piece on Obama defending his outreach to Cuba, Venezuela. Bit of a snoozer there. But can I just remark here that the rotating story box on the WashTimes site annoys me? If only because if you want to scroll back on the thing, there's that strange "Feedback" tab in the way.

• Dave McKenna incited a quiet riot on Monday by asking, "Did Anybody Go to the Phish Reunion?" Phish fans, many endowed with a LSD-inspired sixth sense, flocked to the comments board. The exchange was nowhere near as trippy as the culture war going on over at the Sexist, or as revolting as the average Twilight attack, still, I was mucho impressed to see the school of stone-washed stoners band together in defense of Trey "Is this thing on?" Anastasio.
• Speaking of getting stoned: "Police said Monday they confiscated about $1.2 million in illegal drugs and more than $68,000 in cash...Authorities also arrested 194 Phish fans during the three-night celebration of the band's return to the stage after a nearly five-year absence." That's the gut of an AP article about the Phish reunion concert. Let me sum it up in a different way: Laid back folk got together to listen to some laid back tunes, and the cops ROBBED THE SHIT OUT OF THEM. For those of you who are thinking (or typing) "serves those scofflaws right," I want you to look around your home or office for a consumable that some other person might perceive as unhealthy–a bottle of Jager, maybe, or the April 2004 issue of Genesis magazine, or a package of Ramen noodles. Now, I want you to imagine some sweaty prick with a Taser taking that thing away from you, bending your arms behind your back, snapping a picture of you after you've been crying (this picture will end up online), demanding thousands of dollars in exchange for your freedom, and then releasing you in your dirty laundry with that taboo attached to your personal record. Ugh.
• The National Review Online's Media Blog tips its hat to the Washington Times for totally nailing the Chas Freeman story. Kevin D. Williamson writes: "The other Times — the Washington Times — was very much on the case, with Eli Lake providing the most substantive reporting on Freeman, his history, and his connections to the Chinese and Saudi regimes. National Review, The New Republic, and other opinion journals covered the story, but the newspapers were largely absent. The Washington Post covered the story sparingly, and the Wall Street Journal touched on it, too, but considering the issues at play, it was remarkable that so much of the daily press took a back seat." It would seem that this is one of those stories only Washington folk give a shit about: Jamie "Am I bigger than Jesus, yet?" Kirchick dug his heels into the Freeman story over at The New Republic and the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel suggested that the now office-less Freeman will one day form an unholy alliance with Michael Steele.
• Michael Perkins did some WMATA math and found "Metrorail fares have stayed flat relative to inflation for trips of equal length." He goes on to suggest that WMATA could stand to raise them: "Would it be better if fares kept up with inflation, and there was less pressure for service cuts?  Maybe with fare increases, there would be money for increased service after the recession is over." Perkins' post is deep, folks. I suggest those of you who can handle more than a graf or two of uninterrupted transportation talk dive the hell in. Though for my money, I think WMATA would invest in a chain of children's haircutteries before it raised fares as much as they need raising–an amount that would further marginalize the people who need WMATA the most. (Also a good transportation read: "Nobody Rides for Free," by Sarah Godfrey.)
• Last but not least, there's a party: My some-time bosses at Reason magazine and reason.com are hosting a Reason.tv (so many domains!) viewing party this Friday in celebration of John Stossel's 20/20 special, "Bailouts, Big Spending, and Bull." I have reason to believe that "[s]oft and hard drinks and light fare will be served," and I'm certain that admission is free, and that most of the attendees will be the sweetest, most disarmingly-sincere capitalist pigz most of you have never met. Just make sure and RSVP. (Ruth Samuelson wrote a great piece about think tank food awhile back, now's as good a time as any to read it.)

OK, folks, let's seize this thing.

Flickr photo courtesy of David Drexler. Thanks David!

Good morning, City Desk readers. It's Libertarian Friday, are you ready to rage against the system? Great! Here's some news:

• Culture11, the conservative/libertarian Web magazine started by Conor Friedersdorf, Peter Suderman, Joe Carter, David Kuo, and James Poulos and based in Arlington, laid off its entire staff on Wednesday. According to Kuo: "We raised a certain amount of money last year predicated on the assumption we would raise more money...Then the fall’s fall occurred and we stretched money as long and far as we could without incurring any debts. With no new money in the door the board decided the most prudent thing to do was suspend business operations." Andrew Sullivan's eulogy for the magazine is especially touching.

• Pete Eyre, founder of the anti-statist social networking site Bureaucrash, has been trying to schedule a meeting with someone from the Arlington Police Department after he was intimidated by an Arlington police officer. (Background: Eyre called the APD after he found an officer had parked his cruiser in a no-parking zone while he went to the gym. The officer who responded to Eyre's call politely refused to write a ticket and left the scene. The officer who had been working out, however, decided to exercise his authority by following Eyre around the neighborhood in his gym clothes, sometimes right up close, sometimes from a distance. Eyre walked nearly a mile away from his home and found the officer was still following him. Always ready to fight the system, Eyre recorded the incident on video.)
• But a little hassle is nothing compared to death by police shooting, the subject of Dave McKenna's Cheap Seats story "Death by Wager." McKenna's lead says it all: "Sal Culosi was shot and killed by a Fairfax County cop three years ago last Saturday. He was about to be arrested for taking football bets, the quarry of a dubious sting operation that seemed timed to make a news splash ahead of the upcoming Super Bowl. (Why dubious? Well, the only major bettor was an undercover police officer, and the alleged bookie, Culosi, covered all the bets himself.)"
• WMATA is trying to cut $103 million from its 2009 budget. Michael Perkins at InfoSnack Headquarters breaks down the numbers. According to Perkins, "the largest increases in costs ($44 million) come from wage increases for unionized employees, which WMATA budgeting treats as sacrosanct." And while union employees will get a pay raise, hundreds of non-union employees will lose their jobs. UPDATE: WMATA will trim the ranks of union employees as welll.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user fdecomite.