Politics & Sold: Yes, Borders may be on its way to the brand graveyard. But if the health of the publishing industry can be measured by the fate of bookstores, the news isn't all bad; a buyer was announced today for Politics & Prose, the upper Northwest institution with its own C-SPAN camera. Former Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham and longtime Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) adviser Lissa Muscatine will purchase the store. They beat out, among others, a group headed by former New Republic editor Franklin Foer and Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg. +2

Sugar Lobby: Mysterious enough that Georgetown Cupcake can draw endless lines of fans to its M Street corner, no matter the weather. Now the calorie bombs are being used to influence public policy. Sunday's New York Times wrote up AT&T's lobbying blitz last year on Federal Communications Commission regulations, capped by the delivery of 1,500 cupcakes to the FCC's offices at The Portals in Southwest. (The company later also sent some cupcakes to the non-profit that first disclosed the tactic.) The bad news: Really, more publicity for cupcakes? The good news: Maybe this means Darrell Issa will finally investigate the true scourge of D.C.—trendy sugary snacks! -1

Gas Guzzling: Taxi rates just went up $1—and no, this time, you can't blame the meters. With gas prices soaring, Mayor Vince Gray issued an executive order allowing a $1 fuel surcharge on trips within the District. It's set to expire July 25, but since a gallon of gas may well cost five bucks by then, it's likely to be extended. Our advice: Learn the bus routes. -1

Ostrich Jam: Traffic on the Beltway? Not surprising. Traffic on the Beltway due to an escaped flightless fowl? That's a different story. An ostrich got loose from a truck taking it to a petting zoo and ran around on I-495 near the Connecticut Avenue exit on the outer loop, until handlers coaxed it back in. (Which, to be honest, is usually what we feel like doing when driving on the Beltway.) +1

Friday's Needle rating: 65 Today's score: +1 Today's Needle rating: 66

D.C. Busted: For months, budget experts and politicians have been warning of how bad the District's fiscal situation is, and how much would have to be cut from expenditures (or raised in new taxes) to fill a $450 million gap in this year's balance sheet. Now it turns out the real shortfall is $600 million instead. The solution is obvious—start charging a tax on commuters from Maryland and Virginia who spend most of their weeks here and take all their income home with them—but unfortunately, that's not an option. (Thanks, Congress!) Look for a municipal bake sale soon, featuring $40,000 cupcakes; if it's sponsored by those folks with the TLC show, people are sure to buy 'em. -4

Run, Rudy, Run: And now, time for today's installment of completely arbitrary national rankings ginned up to get Web traffic by magazine editors. The latest news: D.C. lands at fifth on a list of the rudest cities in America compiled by Travel + Leisure. Their evidence of our obnoxious nature? Harry S Truman said to get a dog if you want a friend in Washington. The list is clearly wrong, regardless; Philadelphia came in third. Having lived there for more than six years, we can't really trust any rudeness ranking Philly doesn't top. -1

All Your Tax Are Belong To Us: A little-known side effect of being a U.S. colony is that technically, every dollar the D.C. government spends is appropriated to the city by Congress; local tax revenues are turned over to the U.S. Treasury, then given back to the District, in an accounting gimmick that makes about as much sense as, well, denying meaningful representation in the national legislature to residents of the nation's capital does. And so it is that the new Republican House has decided to try to ban District authorities from spending any money—even money that comes from local income or sales taxes—to pay for abortions. Passing laws that only affect a city where none of your constituents live is, clearly, the American dream. -3

Millions and Millions: George Washington University typically finds itself near the top of the "America's most expensive colleges" lists. But now it's clear that all that tuition money is good for something, after all: It can buy you luck! A GW alumnus, Gilbert Cisneros, and his wife Jacki won $266 million in a California lottery drawing last May, and they've given GW $1.1 million out of their haul. Presumably, soon you'll be able to buy lottery tickets with your GWorld card. +1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 55 Today's score: -7 Friday bonus: +2 Today's Needle rating: 50

Manly Deeds, Womanly Words, Pepco Oversight: The Maryland Public Service Commission announced it wants Pepco to appear at a hearing Tuesday morning to explain why the utility can't quite manage to actually provide electrical service to its customers. 60,000 people lost power in yesterday's storms, and nearly 40,000 of them were still in the dark by this morning. (Not Howard Kurtz, though!) Don't be surprised if the PSC headquarters suddenly loses power early Tuesday. +4

Vincent Gray Wins Free Subscription to Peaceoholics Publication: Peaceoholics founder Ron Moten wears many hats—community activist, go-go promoter, Adrian Fenty evangelist, and more recently, magazine publisher. Now Gray, Fenty's chief rival in the Sept. 14 mayoral primary, tells The Examiner someone stuck four copies of Moten's pro-Fenty, anti-Gray magazine to his front door Thursday night in the shape of an X. (Hey, at least they didn't tape them to his fence.) As threatening gestures go, it's a little weak; Gray's response—that if he wins, Peaceoholics will rapidly find D.C. government doors shut to them—should probably scare the organization more than the magazines scared him. But it ain't exactly a great sign for the prospect of a civil end to the campaign season. -5

Cupcake Counterrevolution Commences: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them to some cloyingly cute frosted calorie bombs, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. And in Georgetown, it seems, people have started doing just that, rising up with signs and angry rhetoric against the preposterous crowds that local bakery-turned-TV studio Georgetown Cupcake draws. It's high time D.C. started realizing the dirty little secret of cupcakes: They're just miniature cakes! And they cost too much money! +5

Hail to the Redskins: Seems like just yesterday the Skins were in hot pursuit of their 5th win of the 2009 season (a pursuit that, alas, was never consummated). Tonight, they start the 2010 preseason with a game in scenic Raljon, Md., against the Buffalo Bills. Reasons to be optimistic this year: Donovan McNabb; Mike Shanahan; the team's apparent decision not to sue too many fans, at least not until the regular season starts. Reasons to be pessimistic: Albert Haynesworth; Dan Snyder; the gnawing sense that this year's roster was built to win your 2005 fantasy football league, not Super Bowl XLV. Still, meaningless, unsellable preseason game or not—the NFL is back! We want Dallas! +3

Adios, Jaime: Speaking of teams that may have left their glory days somewhere on East Capitol Street, things have not gone so well for D.C. United this year. The club fired its coach earlier this year, and though it could still win the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, chances are the highlight of the season will be a 3-2 win over a vacationing AC Milan squad just before the World Cup. And now, forward (and all-time leading MLS scorer) Jaime Moreno says this is his last year wearing the black and red. Yes, he's looked slow, and old, lately, and hasn't played much. Even so, RFK Stadium won't be the same without him. -3

Yesterday's Needle rating: 41 Today's score: +4 Friday bonus: +2 Today's Needle rating: 47

The answer is two! I think. Karen Hart, About.com's guide to Washington, D.C., travel, Twitters under the name washingtondcist. This was a surprise to Sommer Mathis, editor of popular local blog DCist.

There is some overlap in mission: DCist aggregates mercilessly, excellently, and amusingly, mixes in original reporting about D.C., and has a commenting community that used to make people in this building weep with jealousy.

Hart takes a softer focus approach, since her audience is presumably not too interested in the niceties of curbside collection or a stellar collection of Chien Ming-Wang jokes. Her About.com page tends to work the bejeezus out of details of the upcoming Cherry Blossom Festival, 10 great reasons to visit here, that sort of thing.

But on Twitter, look out! If you write about a D.C. hotel offering curling, Hart is all over that! Georgetown Cupcake's secret flavor of the day? RETWEETED. I didn't notice any DCist RTs in Hart's feed, but I'm sure she wouldn't be stingy with them. (I have not been able to find this Karen Hart, though I have high hopes for the "Send E-mail" link on her forum. (I will, of course, update if I find her.) "We have over 11,000 Twitter followers to her 350, so if she's trying to confuse people, she's not been very successful," says Mathis. "Still, I'm sure our publishers would prefer she come up with an original name."

After visiting 16 bakeries, consuming 35 pounds of sweets, and ingesting more than 11,000 calories per taster, the Washington Post finally declared a winner in its Cupcake Wars contest. Georgetown Cupcake took the top prize after sweeping the first seven spots in the Food section's list of the highest-rated cupcakes.

Food Editor Joe Yonan and his team deluged readers with stats and tips (otherwise known as "commandments"), but they still didn't satisfy all of my questions about the paper's hard-to-resist eight-week series. Yonan was good enough to take my questions. His responses have been edited, paraphrased, and otherwise mangled, though hopefully not in a Deborah Solomon way.

What was your methodology? With two exceptions, the tasting team visited each bakery anonymously on Tuesday in the early afternoon. They'd buy one of every kind of cupcake available that day and bring them back to the office, where the sweets would be brought to room temperature (if necessary) and eaten within "a couple of hours" of purchase. This was not a blind tasting; logistics prevented such a tasting. The four tasters would each silently eat one quarter of a cupcake and make his or her evaluations on a number of criteria. Only then would the tasters compare notes and calculate a score. No bakery was ever visited twice. "The time involved would have made it just impossible," Yonan says.

Did you have any favorites or preconceived notions going into the contest? "We had tasted Georgetown's cupcakes when they first opened...We really liked them. We had good feelings about them. We also had pretty good feelings about Hello [Cupcake]." Yonan also confesses that he had "some preconceived notions about CakeLove based on previous experiences."

That CakeLove sucks, right? "Yeah, it sucks."

Was your seventh commandment ("Beware the refrigerator") a dig at CakeLove? "It was partly CakeLove, but there were some others that had this problem" of putting their cupcakes into a fridge, where they would inevitably dry out. One of the other offenders was Chatman's D'Vine Bakery & Cafe on 9th Street NW.

Did you ever consider just saying all cupcakes suck so you could end this madness? Yonan laughs. "They were low points, yeah. Thankfully just when we thought we were going to shoot ourselves, we would taste some good cupcakes. That would keep us going." Still, there were moments when tasters couldn't stand it anymore. They offered up comment like, "Make it stop!" "What's the point?" and "I can't go on like this!"

Are you sick of cupcakes? No. The tasting team finished its final judging on a Friday. Over the weekend, Yonan tested the winning recipe and brought another batch of cupcakes into the office on Monday. "People dove right back in," he says.

What's the worst cupcake you had? It was a four-way tie. "There were four cupcakes that had unanimous scores of zero," Yonan says. Two were from Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe [a, ahem, City Paper Best Of winner]: carrot and chocolate truffle cupcakes. The spice cupcake from Just Cakes was another loser, as was the coconut cupcake from Lavender Moon (116 S. Royal St., Alexandria).

Did you gain any weight? "I'm sure that I did. I have a trainer and try to keep on top of things. But I haven't weighed myself." Yonan says he "feels like" he's gained a "few pounds."

Do you think it's a ripoff to charge $3 or more for a few ounces of cake and some icing? "Not if it's great. It's a ripoff if it's bad. If it's bad, it makes me angry."

Which do you like more: cookies or cupcakes? "Just generally? Cupcakes, yeah. (He laughs.) I don't think I would have said that before."

Do you think people who love cupcakes are suffering from stunted adolescence? "Sure. If not stunted childhood."

Image courtesy of the Washington Post.