Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another Freedom Friday! How about this "heat wave," enh? ENH?

Michael Phelps, Olympiad and hero to long-necked people everywhere, crashed his Escalade in Baltimore last night. To give you an impression of how bad the accident was, here's WaPo's headline: "Phelps Uninjured in Two-Vehicle Crash." There wasn't enough room in the headline to mention that the person in the other car was left uninjured as well--only "shaken up."

It's an important story because Michael Phelps is A FAMOUS SWIMMER AND IMPORTANT YOUNG MAN, and when he was fresh out of high school, he was arrested for driving under the influence. Five years is nothing in journalism years--so maybe the the solid graf that addresses Phelp's sobriety was worth including. Then again, there's this [emphasis mine]:

Police found no reason to perform any tests on him, [Officer] Guglielmi said. Officers also examined both vehicles and found no evidence of drugs or alcohol, he said.

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: When It Comes to Phelps, Only Bad News Matters" »

Michael Jackson's memorial service monopolized every media outlet yesterday and seems to be the only national news event worth covering this morning.  It was poignant, it was tasteful, but what does it have to do with Washington?  Everything, according to Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), who spoke at the service yesterday and announced House Resolution 600. Oh yes, here comes the Michael Jackson tribute resolution, and it is lengthy.  They praise him for his humanitarian efforts and then proceed to list every kind thing he did.  For example, "in 1994, Michael donated $500,000 to Elizabeth Taylor's AIDS Foundation."  Good to know.

Apparently, watching the funeral online was an important part of yesterday's Congressional schedule.  Politico posts this message from the head of the House's tech operations.

"The Michael Jackson event is causing even more inbound Internet BW usage.
We are monitoring both Internet connections and they are maxed out at 155 Mbps inbound."

More District news, plus Obamas in Russia after the jump. Read More "Our Morning Roundup: Busted Edition" »

Jason La Canfora goes to work for Dan Snyder?

That's essentially what Pro Football Talk is saying. According to the site, La Canfora has been hired away from the Washington Post by the NFL Network, the future cable powerhouse owned by the NFL, which is run by the NFL owners, none brasher than Snyder.

On some levels, the departure was inevitable. La Canfora was good enough at his job, as the Post's Skins beat writer and the force behind Redskins Insider, the paper's most popular sports blog, to cause the Skins organization to launch a campaign against him. Snyder's message board, extremeskins.com, his media mouthpiece, Larry Michael, and his, well, everything else, Vinny Cerrato, all went crazy trying to attack La Canfora.

Michael had "The Sourcerer," a silly feature used on a Skins cable TV show to belittle everything La Canfora wrote. And then things got really ugly when Snyder gave Cerrato, who would "no comment" every question from La Canfora for his Post stories, a radio show on the sports station he owns, WTEM. Cerrato railed against the beat writer as soon as he got on the air.

The lowpoint of the feud came with Cerrato and Michael accusing La Canfora of tattling to the NFL in hopes of getting the league to launch a tampering investigation of the Redskins. (Tampering? Snyder?)

La Canfora fought ugliness with ugliness, calling Cerrato a liar and mocking the organization in emails to detractors. As predicted in this space many times, the beat wasn't big enough for both Cerrato and La Canfora to stay on another season.

Cerrato kept his football job, though the radio gig was such a disaster it can't come back. So it's La Canfora heading off, leaving writing for talking, as all typists aspire to do.

But, working for Snyder?

Read More "Cheap Seats Daily:Will Dan Snyder Sign La Canfora’s Paychecks? Is Joe Biden the Anti-Arnold?" »

*The President and Vice President supped at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington yesterday. According to the Post, they went dutch.

*THIS WEEK IN CAL THOMAS: The Washington Times commemorates the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's election as Prime Minister with a fawning piece whose best moment is its opening anecdote:

The newly elected Mrs. Thatcher takes her all-male Cabinet to dinner. The waiter asks her what she would like to order.

"I'll have the beef," says she.

"What about the vegetables?" asks the waiter.

"They'll have the same."

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: Potentates Like Their Beef" »

At 5:30 p.m., I spot a woman wearing a mask exiting a metro bus at Mount Pleasant and Irving. Do I have Vice President Biden to thank?

The biggest story over the weekend concerned a videotape that allegedly showed Ashley Biden, the 27-year-old daughter of VP Joe Biden, snorting cocaine and cussing.

The New York Post reported that lawyer Thomas Dunlap had come to the paper while trying to sell the tape to media outlets for as much as $2 million. Dunlap was representing the guy who claimed to have shot the video.

When I read the story, posted on Drudge, the anonymous rat's lawyer's name sounded familiar.

And then it hit me: HE'S THE KICKBALL GUY!

Dunlap, of the firm Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver, with offices in Leesburg and DC, was the plaintiff's lawyer in what has to be the first federal lawsuit ever filed about kickball, and one of the bizarrest cases I've ever come across.

Read More "DC Lawyer Selling Biden Cocaine Tape Has Represented Scoundrels Before" »

I wore my $14 suit to an inaugural ball tonight.

When Joe Biden came by, he gave a shout-out from the stage to the governor of Pennsylvania, and the guy standing beside me started waving his arms and yelling nice things at the new Vice President.

I was next to Ed Rendell!

Rendell's my favorite governor, even though the only things I know about him are that he's a huge Philly sports fan and that he's appeared on the Eagles post-game shows for years.

So I took the opportunity to tell him sorry about what happened in Arizona. I figured the Eagles' NFC Championship loss would still be on his mind no matter how great a day this was for Rendell's political party.

I figured right.

"That last play was pass interference," Rendell said in that dog-bark of a voice he uses when he's excited.

Then, as any good Philly sports fan would, after starting out blaming the refs for the loss, Rendell recounted the Eagles miscues that he also felt cost them a trip to the Super Bowl.

"We shoulda had their guy at the 50 on that 4th down," he huffed. "But...."

Rendell told me he's going to the Super Bowl anyway, to root for his state's other team.

Now I wanna move to Pennsylvania just so I can have a governor like that.

But there's a ton of security; the entire front entrance is blocked off. Correspondent Ruth Samuelson is in a downstairs ballroom, looking for the veep-to-be. One awkward moment: Delaware State Society honcho Nancy Aiken was supposed to present a check to a Delaware firefighters' charity, but she spaced on bringing the check itself. When she realized that she'd forgotten the loot, she ducked off to the side. Remember: Aiken is the enterprising woman who resurrected the Delaware State Society after it had lapsed. The requirement for membership in this selective group is that you have to have eaten dinner at one point in the state of Delaware. Which means that every meathead who's ever spent a weekend at Dewey Beach is eligible to hang with the big boys at the Willard Hotel, theoretically at least.

Reporting by Ruth Samuelson, writing by Erik Wemple

At the close of her interview with Joe Biden on Wednesday, Diane Sawyer re-aired a clip from the SNL veep debate. The footage, in which Jason Sudeikis plays Biden, left the candidate in stitches. Viz.:

This, to me, is an awkward exchange. First, politicians need to stop making jokes about hair-plugs, even if they've got a few. Second, give me a good belly-laugh any day over the halting, drawn-out, don't-know-whether-he's-laughing-or-crying chuckle that consumes Biden for nearly a minute.

Don't get me wrong: I would take a bullet for Joe Biden. But it sure would be nice to see a politician laugh with the joyful abandon of Bill Clinton back in (say) 1995:

According to Dep. Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Yeltsin was visibly impaired by a serious cognac buzz at the time of the press conference. Clinton, of course, took the situation in stride, later mollifying a vexed Talbott with, er, a stiff highball of truth:

We can't ever forget that Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.

Now that's what I call straight talk!

In related non-news, a hard-hitting trend-piece published yesterday in the New York Times heralds the umpteenth resurgence of political humor.

Valleywag points to a Time magazine widget listing the results of a poll asking folks who will win tonight's watch-it-through-your-fingers-like-it's-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vice Presidential debate. The rest of the world gives it to Joe Biden, 83 percent to Sarah Palin's 17 percent. Even Alaska is on the same train as everybody else (78 to 22). Delaware goes to Biden, unsurprisingly---but at a full 100 percent. When's the last time an election poll went 100 percent in one candidate's direction? Even Alan Keyes got a few points against Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race.