The Huffington Post has buses. Washington City Paper has these two.

Meet Keli Anaya and Molly McGinley. They'll be providing free walks from the Smithsonian Metro to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear tomorrow morning, from 10:45 a.m. until the rally starts at noon. We couldn't afford to bus people in for the shindig, and besides, if you're reading City Paper, chances are, you're already here. But we did want to help out somehow; after all, we're for sanity, at least most of the time.

Look for Anaya and McGinley at the Metro tomorrow morning. They'll have the sign they're holding above—and they will not be laughing. And look for coverage of the rally here on City Desk throughout the day.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

We at Washington City Paper can't rely on a fortune quite as large as Arianna's, so we can't afford quite such a generous gesture. And besides, most of our readers are already here in D.C., where Metro will be running frequent buses and subways toward the Mall for just a bit more than a buck (and, okay, the chance you might get run over). But inspired by the HuffPo's shuttle, we still wanted to pitch in somehow. So:

Washington City Paper hereby announces that we will offer free walking tours from the Smithsonian Metro stop to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive on Saturday morning, for anyone who may have trouble navigating the eight blocks along the Mall without the assistance of a media organization. Look for City Paper employees near the Metro between 10:45 a.m. and noon—they'll be wearing City Paper garb of some sort—and tell them you need a walk to the anti-protest protest.

Important legal disclaimers: City Paper will not assume any responsibility if you get distracted by the carousel on the Mall and wander away from the tour. City Paper employees may be willing to hold your hand to help guide you to the rally, but only if you're cute and ask nicely. Like the Huffington Post, City Paper is a free publication; unlike the Huffington Post, City Paper does not get much Web traffic from celebrity nipple slips. Offer of walking tour is only valid to the rally, so memorize the route. Do not taunt City Paper employees.

Remember, only you can keep fear alive. Restoring sanity is probably beyond all of us.

Come on, pervs: Get your name in before it's too late!

('Course, this also means time is running out on Cheap Seats Daily's ability to run everybody's fave photo.)

(AFTER THE JUMP: Does Dan Snyder's vacation choice mean he's met his Waterloo? Elba is nice this time of year? Somebody wrote something nice about Dan Snyder? Really? Was it accurate? Not really? Where'd David Donovan learn to fib? Dan Snyder's poster confiscating binge was all a prank? Will anybody get a "Goofus and Gallant" reference?)

I read in the Washington Times yesterday that Dan Snyder is in France. How Freudian a vacation choice, considering the sort of slurs thrown his way these days. (Writer David Covucci got me chuckling with a piece posted at the hit-or-miss site Bleacher Report, saying Snyder' failings have been so epic that "scholars now refer to Napoleon as having 'Snyder Complex.”')

If Snyder stops at Elba, would he be allowed to leave?

***

Nothing nice has been written about Dan Snyder for years. Three years, to be pretty exact. That's when "The Dan Snyder You Don't Know," Harry Jaffe's profile of Snyder, showed up in Washingtonian magazine. Jaffe's story has over the years been regularly posted on Snyder's message board, ExtremeSkins.com, when the Skins owner's getting the crap beat out of him. It was posted again there yesterday.

Snyder was talking only slightly less to the press then than he does now, so Jaffe must have worked incredibly hard to get a sit-down. But the story, which came out in the September 2006 edition was an Instant Classic — for all the wrong reasons. Reading it now, you wonder what date-rape drug Snyder snuck into Jaffe's tea before he started typing.

Jaffe's Dan Snyder was a Dan Snyder we didn't know, all right. His Dan Snyder is "not even close" to being a "spoiled, greedy, power-hungry rich" guy like other NFL owners.  He's "playful, and shockingly normal," a guy who goes to "Ben’s Chili Bowl in DC at 1 am with his buddies."

And, ethical? Read on!

No one has questioned Snyder’s corporate dealings. He likes to say he has never been in court.

“I am a goody two-shoes,” he says. “Business ethics are important to me.”

Jaffe had somehow missed or forgotten about the FCC's reports about Snyder's pre-Redskins business, Snyder Communications, and all the million-dollar shenanigans it pulled through "slamming," or switching consumers' phone companies without their consent. In one of the investigations into his company's shenanigans, investigators for the State of Florida found that Snyder "forged the signatures of hundreds of customers on letters of authorizations purporting to authorize a change of customer's resubscribed interxchange carrier." (The Washington Post's investigation into the Redskins relationship with scalpers, remember, included charges that Snyder's employees were forging folks signatures on season ticket contracts.)

The hits just keep coming from Jaffe. Snyder, we learn, was actually patient with Norv Turner after buying the team in the summer of 1999.

"Snyder stuck with Norv Turner through the 1999 season, which was lackluster," Jaffe wrote.

"Lackluster"?

Well, actually, 1999 was the best season that the Skins have had under Snyder. That team won the NFC East and hosted the only playoff game ever played at FedExField. Yet Snyder somehow stuck by Turner throughout the year! Bravo!

Snyder, were also told in Jaffe's piece, began charging admission to training camp "in 2003."

Well, actually Snyder charged $10 admission and $10 parking fees in 2000 — the very first training camp he hosted. The date change is important, because it shows that as soon as Snyder could gouge the fan base, he did gouge the fan base.

To be fair, there are some enlightening parts of Jaffe's tale. As Jaffe relates an anecdote that's meant to show how much fun Snyder is, we learn where David Donovan, now the Redskins Chief Operating Officer and Fibber-in-Chief learned that honesty ain't a policy with Skins management.

Take the time Redskins general counsel Dave Donovan went to his first away game at the St. Louis Rams’ domed stadium. Snyder and [minority Skins owner Dwight] Schar saw him calling his wife and family on his cell phone to say how cool it was to be in the stadium before the game. They called the head of security and asked him to send two cops and “arrest” Donovan, saying it was illegal to use a cell phone in the stadium.

Donovan was escorted across the field. It wasn’t until he got to the other sideline that they told him it was a joke.

“We were laughing so hard we almost peed in our pants,” says Snyder.

Well, we can only hope Snyder was wearing Depends when Donovan went on WJFK earlier this week to say that there weren't many Philly fans at FedEx for the Eagles game, that the Redskins don't sue their fans, that only a few posters were confiscated by security at FedEx on Monday, etc. Though, come to think of it, Donovan says he's in charge of game-day operations now, so maybe when the Redskins had their security guards escort all those people out for wearing anti-Snyder t-shirts or anti-Snyder bags or carrying anti-Snyder posters, it was all a practical joke! Donovan was just funnin' with everybody! You got Punk'd, Skins fans!

And, Jaffe quotes Snyder associate named Mark Jennings describing Snyder as somebody who won't do anything "to get the next great article written about himself.”

Ain't that the truth.

I wonder if Jaffe would write anything differently if he could.

***

By now, all that's left is for Highlights to crush Snyder, and then every magazine on the rack, and every magazine off the rack, will have crushed him. Everybody who never wrote about the Skins owner has pounded him these last couple weeks.

After the New Yorker, you'd figure most publications would figure: Why bother?

But this morning, the Huffington Post still bothered. The online pub gives Bob Franken digital column inches to come at Snyder like he took Franken's money — which, in a disclosure contained in the piece, Franken says Snyder did (as a ticketholder).

Franken goes mega macro, comparing Snyder and the Redskins to Wall Street and the U.S. economy. At least that's what I think Franken did.

You be the judge:

So consider Dan Snyder and his Redskins a metaphor...a metaphor for heartlessness and incompetence that has brought things to ruin with little hope that next season will be much better since the same people will still be running things. No wonder so many are angry. A few have played the game terribly, but it's everyone else who has lost.

So I'm not the only one screaming that this is bigger than football to the point of foolishness? Cool!

Actually, I'd like to hear Highlights take on Snyder. He's providing teachable moments for all the children. And if Art Rooney was put forth as Gallant, you-know-who would make a great Goofus.

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

An announcement posted on The Washington Teacher's blog:

Rank and file educators will gather outside of the DCPS central office on Thursday, September 24, starting at 4:00 p.m. to protest teacher layoffs. We request that other laid off and terminated government employees, parents, students, city workers, residents, community activists, local leaders and the media join us in taking a stand for our teachers, students, and schools. We are baffled that Chancellor Rhee hired over nine hundred new teachers this summer, and that only one month into the school year announced that — due to a budget shortfall — she will make imminent teacher layoffs prior to the start of the fiscal year. Please join the rank and file this Thursday as we protest Rhee: The Teacher Terminator.

The site reports that "most of the lay offs will impact DC teachers and other school based staff including instructional coaches, custodians and even some principals and vice principals, etc."

In a Huffington Post piece on Friday called "Mass Teacher Layoffs One Hell of a Power Play by Michelle Rhee," teacher Dan Brown offers thoughts on how Rhee's "latest gambit might be her wildest. How can someone hire nearly 25% of their work force over the summer and then less than a month into the school year throw up her hands and move to lay so many off? Here's how."

Comments? Ideas? I'm at eniedowski@washingtoncitypaper.com, and on Twitter.

While we're on the topic of elevating abusive cops above world leaders, I've got two more candidates for future beer summits–and one of 'em's local!

In Mobile, Alabama, cops tazed and pepper-sprayed a deaf man with a mental age of 10 because he spent too much time in a dollar store bathroom:

Love...says he was not feeling well and was in the bathroom for about a half-hour before the police "throw poison under the door." Soon they broke into the bathroom, he recalled in an account he wrote for his family, and "the police get the tazz three strings in my stomach, chest and hand and hit my head." Later, he says, "I saw police laugh at me."

According to Jacob Sullum at Reason, the cops arrested Love even after they learned he wasn't the average vagrant.

And according to HuffPo's Arthur Delaney, D.C. cops recently pulled a Gates-like stunt on U Street:

[Tuma] told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, "I hate the police, I hate the police."

One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

Tuma was arrested for disorderly conduct.

In fact, all three men–Gates, Love, Tuma–we’re charged with disorderly conduct. How many of them are going to sip beers in the garden behind the White House? The mentally disabled deaf man? He wouldn't have much to say. The loud-mouth gay guy? He had it coming. And Gates? Well duh! He’s already famous!

And a little side note to Warren Goldstein at HuffPo, who frames white privilege by talking about how he almost house-sat the wrong house but wasn't arrested when a patrol car showed up because he is white: You were spared arrest, Mr. Goldstein, not just because of your skin color, but also because you were polite. Authority demands respect, and when you give it, authority rewards you by not arresting your ass on bullshit charges.

More beer summits!

Never thought I'd be scolded by a Huffington Post official for linking. But I was!

Here's a chronology that explains how this HuffPo reprimand came about:

April 1, 2009: Washington City Paper decides to give its readers a different look on its homepage. Instead of the usual lineup of images and blog links, we go with an April Fool's edition titled "Huffington City Paper." The whole thing is a rip-off of the classic HuffPo homepage, complete with navigation tabs, the ginormous news link at the top, and running feeds from our blogs. People love it. Our own staff wonders if we shouldn't try to move permanently to something modeled after this platform, which is better suited to highlight the various newsie posts we produce each day. One reader comes to the conclusion that the Huffington Post has acquired Washington City Paper.

April 2, 2009: The parody recedes into our archive, just as much a relic as any other April Fool's joke. It's history. Our tech guy says that in order to find the page, you'd have to know what you're looking for; it has gotten a barely measurable number of pageviews (around 300) since the April Fool's activity.

June 9, 2009: Washington City Paper columnist Amanda Hess writes a post blasting the Huffington Post entertainment page for using sexism to drive pageviews. An excerpt: "People—even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people—will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that’s a big part of the Huffington Post’s model." Hess's column gets some nice rotation on the Web, aided by a link on the Romenesko site.

June 10, 2009: Washington City Paper receives a request from a Huffington Postie asking us to remove the parody page from our archive. The HuffPo person expresses a couple of concerns. One is that the blog feed to this well-hidden page is still flowing. Correct: Deep within our archive, the page is sitting there, with virtually no one ever clicking on it, and inside of this dark Internet cave, it continues to update via the Washington City Paper blog feed. Again, the parody disappeared from our homepage on April 2, never to reappear. So what's the gripe here?

The second HuffPo objection is the headliner: The official was perturbed that the parody page that virtually no one has clicked on since April Fool's contains a link to the Huffington Post site. That bears repeating: The Huffington Post scolded us for linking to them.

Photo courtesy of eyeliam, Creative Commons Attribution License

Yesterday, the Huffington Post tried to make a big deal out of stars Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman "making out" while filming a scene. The article's alleged point was CDC's suggestion that we all avoid sucking face during the swine flu outbreak.

Check out the scandalous photos if you've got nothing better to do, what with the kissing kibosh and all.

"Getting high affects your brain in ways that may directly influence your gaming ability," warns the Drug Czar's Web site, citing the impairment of "many of the skills required for winning a background, defeating an opponent, [and] beating games."

To dramatize how bad a stoner can be at video games, the site interviews a computer-generated character who laments the demise of a gamer friend of hers. "I used to have a good time with Lyle. We made a good team. He had skill. He had swiftness," she says. "Well, he used to, anyway. Then our last fight, Lyle decided to get high. And it was simply: sayonara skill, sayonara swiftness."

Pot reduces hand-eye coordination for activities like driving, ladling baked-potato soup, and self-loving, and a quick search didn't turn up any science that would prove or even suggest that the opposite is true for video games. But the hacks at Above the Influence left out one key data element in their analysis: Many gamers who smoke were smokers before they started playing video games. I once watched a level-60 (the highest level achievable at the time) World of Warcraft player take a hit from a 6-foot bong without coughing. He held that hit for a good 30 seconds then let it out very slowly through his nose. The guy was rather unexceptional in almost every other activity, save for those 6-footer hits and his WoW record.

So while taking up smoking after you've been playing video games for years might throw you off, taking up video games after smoking for years just means that you'll learn to play the game differently. In neither scenario are you guaranteed to suck at video gaming in general, especially since different genres require different skill sets.

I hope the Drug Czar's silly bit of agitprop inspires some dude in a labcoat to test the above assertions; perhaps s/he will discover a novel and counterintuitive trend, kinda like the one about how gamers are fitter than the average American.

Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another addition of Freedom Friday. In case y'all missed it, please check out Average Day D.C., and, if you have time, my review of Arthur Delaney's Nanonman: The Post-Human Prometheus. And now, some news:

• Tucker Carlson, talking head and–apparently–columnist, joined the Cato Institute this week as a senior fellow. This is not nearly as exciting a purchase as Nat Hentoff, who joined a few weeks back. I mention it mostly because I love liberty (and so does Cato), and because Carlson, at least according to his press release, went to a college where "Cato..publications [were] passed around like samizdat.” True or false, this is simply too fantastic a claim not to reprint all across the Internet.
• In the wake of the banking disaster (and Obama's disaster of a response), Harvard's Project on Law and Mind Sciences is hosting The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences. The organizers pose this question: "If the current state of the U.S. economy makes clear that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's faith in free markets was misplaced, the question remains: what was it about free markets that proved–and still continues to prove–so alluring to economists, scholars, and policy-makers alike?" It's all so sad, isn't it? WE FREE MARKETEERS HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO ADDICTS! FML! (Sorry, Wonkette moment.)
• Lastly, there's a very special event going on in D.C. today that didn't make our listings. That even is called the Tea Party, and it's being hosted and attended by people who don't like the idea of their government spending their money on bailing out bad companies and stupid homeowners. Bob Cesca at the Huffington Post calls it a "Wingnut Revolution," and he's sort of right, insofar as there will be wingnuts in attendance (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and, well, you don't really need anyone else to prove Cesca's point). Might make for an interesting time, you know, if you're not too busy sewing sickle patches on your winter wear.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Riot Jane.

Elliot Spitzer chats up a reporter about his new gig at Slate, and the above is what Huffington Post's front page editor comes up with for a visual? Because if it weren't for that picture of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, Huff Po's enlightened readers would have had no idea who the fuck Elliot Spitzer was? (The defense that HuffPo is jabbing Spitzer and/or Slate for the former's decision to work at a magazine that heralded his downfall doesn't hold water, seeing as no one at HuffPo actually wrote about the dynamics of that relationship–then again, no one at HuffPo writes about anything.)

Stunts like the Spitzer picture should give dead-tree journos everywhere pause. If this is what it takes to be a dominant leader in page views–posting tacky Photoshop pictures and "breaking" news before it happens–maybe a million eyes just aren't worth it.

Then again, plenty of places manage to sustain high levels of traffic without stooping to HuffPo's level, so maybe the question is: How bad do we want to be on top of the web-garbage pile?

Editor's note: An ill-advised paragraph has been deleted from the original post.

For instance, organizations like The American Cancer Society, AARP, and The National Federation of Independent Business (to mention a few) all have robust lobbying outfits in Washington.

In a column today at HuffPo, Lanny Davis tried to redirect lobbyist discourse, hitting the issue on its head.

"What is negative about lobbying is the absence of transparency — when the powerful and the wealthy have secret influence on members of Congress or the executive branch."

Davis continues:

"With total transparency, lobbyists and the officials they try to influence will have to ask themselves the question "would I mind if this lobbying meeting is fully reported in all respects in tomorrow's newspaper?"

The Jack Abramoffs of lobbying will continue to sprinkle their corruption and egregious fraud in big DC firms, but if Obama puts a few former lobbyists in his administration, don't be so fast to make the jump to corporate corruption.