For more viral, malt-beverage-fueled hilarity, check out Alex Balk's "Bros Icing Bros And The Fate Of Humanity: A Look Back."

In more sober news, The Walk Disney Company will be closing most of its ESPN Zone restaurants, including the Washington and Baltimore locations. According to an NBC Washington poll, roughly 67 percent of local bros are sad about this.

Maureen Dowd takes on the bros at the Landon School who decided that setting up a hook-up fantasy league would be a good idea. Dowd concludes that it is "time for a curriculum overhaul" at the school, which is also the alma mater of George Huguely V, the University of Virginia lacrosse player accused of murdering his girlfriend Yeardley Love. "Young men everywhere must be taught, beyond platitudes, that young women are not prey."

Author Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies, in a Saturday Times article on the recession's racial divide: "What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care."

A sign spotted at the weekend "Tea Party" event, where protesters – carrying pictures of Obama defaced to look like Hitler or the devil – insist there are no racial undertones to their vitriol: "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THIS SIGN SAYS YOU'LL CALL IT RACISM ANYWAY!"

Washington Post readers, responding to columnist Michael Wilbon, who said yesterday's Serena Williams foot fault call was a really bad one (even if her reaction was too): "Youtube clearly shows Serena stepping on the baseline. Is that a foot fault? Or are rules determined by race. Is Serena allowed to break the rules of tennis because she is African American, a woman, a champion and American or whatever?"

And: "Wilbon, you lie or don't know the rules. Don't play the race card! Find another job!"

Keli Goff, weighing in on the same subject at the Huffington Post, saying one "can't simply blame race." Throw class in there too.

With the Williams sisters it has always been less about what color they are and more about who they are: from Compton, not from Connecticut; wearing wildly colored fashion combos, instead of pristine tennis whites; talking loud and proud of their roots, instead of quietly trying to blend in; rocking braids and cornrows in the early days, instead of joining the ranks of Beyonce and (some of the rest of us) by getting a more socially acceptable, "lady-like" weave....

Yes Serena was wrong.

But so was the lineswoman.

And so is every tennis fan who isn't willing to honestly admit that Saturday's call never would have happened, nor been deemed acceptable for any other player under those circumstances.

But other players are not named Williams.

Who wants to go there on Kanye West and Taylor Swift?

Image via brinux on Twitpic

In other other interesting news, the New York Times fired its second token conservative yesterday. Ben Stein, of the late John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, was relieved of his financial column for acting as "a commercial spokesman for FreeScore, a financial services company," according to Felix Salmon. Not too long ago the Times declined to renew William Kristol's contract because of the error-riddled dreck he scribbled in crayon on ripped paper bags and then forced into the NYT courier's chubby cheeks for transport. I completely agree with both decisions but find it sickening that the Times can't seem to part with Maureen Dowd,  a plagiarist, total luddite, and liberal sycophant; or Alessandra Stanley, who writes her column using a quill filled with unhappiness and checks her reporting against the ingredients list on a box of crack-cocaine. Simply put:  The Times needs to hold its writers to a higher standard.

Birthers after the jump.
Some really smart people, like the Examiner's Tim Carney and David Freddoso, are calling the heavy birther coverage the product of media bias. Here's their argument:

Twenty-eight percent of Republicans believe President Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and 30 percent are "not sure," according to this poll.

But before liberals begin to smirk, here's a poll from 2007, in which 35 percent of Democrats said that President Bush knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks, and 26 percent were not sure.

The next thing they say is that the media ignored the 9/11 conspiracy theories because they were covering for liberals but have latched on to the birther movement because it's led by conservatives. The only problem with this assessment is that in the wake of 9/11 NO ELECTED DEMOCRATS SPONSORED LEGISLATION ACCUSING PRESIDENT BUSH OF ALLOWING 9/11 TO HAPPEN. There were no U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauers out there. No former Clinton Administration officials making birth certificate jokes while campaigning for executive office in their home states. In short, the poll results reveal what citizens feel. But as we've seen with the birther movement, even elected officials are hoping/praying/wishing that this is true. And that, folks, is scary.

Perhaps of equal significance, TV wasn't taking its cues from the Internet in 2001. But it's sure as hell doing it now. Goddamn dinosaurs.

Bravo is spinning off yet another series from its Real Housewives franchise: The Real Housewives of D.C., which will be the fifth in the series....

The series will be produced by [D.C.'s] Half Yard Productions, which produced Discovery’s American Loggers. Different production companies produce the different spin-offs, perhaps to keep them fresh.

This is absolutely fantastic. Would it be too much of a stretch for Half Yard to recruit Maureen Dowd?

Washington City Paper's twitter account (@WCP) is leading the hunt on this one. Twitter your guesses as to which neighborhoods are most likely to produce Half Yard's "real housewives" and tag your tweets #realhousewivesdc. Guess correctly and there may be some swag in it for you.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell and a teensy bit more about Maureen Dowd, after the jump.

• The MSM would rather praise Barack Obama for what he says than hold him accountable for what he doesn't do, hence the flowery recaps of yesterday's speech with little mention of the broken promises. Great example: On Wednesday, Rachel Maddow reported that Robert Gibbs, in response to a question about what Barack Obama was doing to overturn/abolish Don't Ask Don't Tell, said that the president "is working with the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs on making that happen." Yet according to Maddow, "a Pentagon spokesman said just yesterday that that‘s not actually happening, that there is no planning underway. There‘s no work underway inside the Pentagon toward changing the policy, despite the fact that the White House keeps saying that there is." As Greg Pollowitz at the NRO's Media blog points out, Maddow failed to mention that Gibbs lied. (Lefties, like righties, need that kind of shit spelled out for them.) In summary, the Obama Administration said its working to change Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and yet it's not actually doing that. At least his speeches are uplifting! My thoughts on DADT.

• In case you missed it, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd plagiarized. The NYT didn't care, Josh Marshall (the victim) didn't care, and Maureen Dowd didn't care enough to formally punctuate her apology letter to HuffPo or address the fuck-up in her most recent column. Then one of my heroes, Jack Shafer, went and threw her a fucking bone, NSA. Every time I see that woman's wizened yet beautiful visage, my blood boils. How the fuck does she get away with it? Would William Kristol have gotten away with plagiarism? Newser's Michael Wolff thinks we should all just let it go: "Dowd is like some much-vaunted high school type whose success and popularity drive everybody else mad with either envy and spite or inspire a perverse (evidence of great-self-loathing) desire to be her way-too-loyal friend and supporter....Indeed, she is famously surrounded by an inside circle of friends and supporters—other famous-type columnists and New York Times reporters—who famously help her write her column. She regularly lifts their thoughts and sentences, which, since they are unpublished (supposedly), is not plagiarism—though it certainly is insiderism....Such insiderism is why so many people, especially the outsider-type bloggers, despise her. Her evident self-satisfaction and the obvious echo chamber in which she resides, not to mention her apparent ability to get by without doing too much work, rankles." I am TOTALLY BLUSHING RIGHT NOW!

OK, I'm going to watch this video of Maureen Dowd laughing at her own jokes! See y'all later!

Putting it bluntly, Riggs says: "Dowd stole some shit and admitted it." Fair enough.

In Slate, Jack Shafer has an uncharacteristically mellow view of the proceedings. After chiding, "Bad, Dowd, bad—deserving of hard time in a pillory!," Shafer proceeds to exonerate the columnist—Dowd "almost sets things right," he says, a conclusion the media critic arrives at through six-point reasoning:

1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)
2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).
3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.
4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."
5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.
6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.

Taking these points one by one:

1. Two of the most highly trafficked politics and commentary sites rub your nose in your own literary pilfering. What do you do: Retire to your Georgetown manse and burnish your Pulitzer, or acknowledge the obvious?

2. Could Times spokesperson Diane McNulty possibly have been squishier in her apologia? McNulty writes: "There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error." Does the Times really need Marshall to come knocking before they force Dowd to grovel?

3. OK.

4. This smacks of a Chris Rock sketch. Regardless, Dowd deserves no props on this count.

5. Ditto, but OK.

6. Still got a job, check. Still got a column, check. Plenty of heavyweights coming to her defense, check. Them's some pretty meager lumps.

A major point that Shafer misses is the question of medium. When a book plagiarizes another book, or a print publication plagiarizes a book, reaction is likely to come slowly and by narrow avenues. When one of the most-read columnists in the country cribs from one of the most-read bloggers in the country, well, that's a different story: backlash is likely to come quickly and from all sides. Leaving the cribber on the defensive, and with little equivocal recourse.

All of which sidesteps one of the most troubling points: How often has Dowd done this exact thing before?

A final point: Shafer apparently misunderstands the purpose of a pillory. Pillorying a writer isn't the equivalent of slapping him or her on the wrist—it's a full-on public humiliation (see above), after which the writer's reputation is tarnished forever. Seditious pamphleteering, Papism, sexual deviancy—these were the crimes that merited a good pillorying back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Far be it from me to recommend such for Dowd. But let's at least be consistent in our hyperbole.

Illustration above: "Defoe in the Pillory," engraving by J.C. Armytage, 1868.

Maureen had us correct the column online as soon as the error was brought to her attention, adding in the sourcing to Marshall's blog. We ran a correction in today's paper,  referring readers to the correct version online.

There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error. It was corrected. Journalists often use feeds from other staff journalists, free-lancers, stringers, a whole range of people. And from friends. Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Maureen's work knows that she is happy and eager to give people credit.

This is complete bullshit: Dowd. Fucking. Plagiarized. But she's a Pulitzer winner, a media elite, and a total babe, so the NYT is looking the other way. (I bet Jayson Blair is seething right now! Rick Bragg–not so much.)

Calderone closes his piece with this bit of insight:

If I was e-mailed a 40-plus-word block of text for this blog, and I used it, I'd include some sort of attribution — whether "a reader writes in," "media insider points out" or whatever the case may be.

But from The Times' response, it seems the paper finds it acceptable for columnists to take entire paragraphs from friends (or sources?), over the phone or e-mail, and reproduce them verbatim in the paper under the columnist's byline.

Awesome, Calderone, you'd do differently. So would I. So would my colleagues and our freelancers and every other journalist who actually had to pay the consequences of handing in illegitimate copy. Now, can somebody suggest a good punishment for Dowd, a well-paid, respected columnist at a world-famous institution, who has demonstrated that she's too lazy to rework a friend's idea into her own words?

Perhaps a 500-word definition essay on integrity? Or maybe the same thing should happen to her that would happen to a first-year NYT reporter who stole from another journalist...

Eric Zorn says what I can't.

On Saturday, Colbert King stepped away from the juvenile crime beat to write about Fenty's ego. King thinks the mayor isn't so invincible. Why? The mayor's hubris may trip him up. King writes:

"The mayor out and about in the District of Columbia is not the candidate who captured all 142 precincts in the 2006 Democratic mayoral primary. There's a different man in office today. People seem to know it....

He's still quick with the smile and handshake, still good with names, still works the crowds, and makes all the photo ops. No D.C. government good deed gets announced without his presence.

But nowadays, something else comes with him when he shows up on the scene. There is a certain haughtiness in Fenty's bearing, a trace of scorn in his demeanor, a sense of self-importance that was not present (or at least was not noticeable) in him before."

Meanwhile, there were lesser crimes uncovered. I went to my first Nationals game of the season. When friends tried to buy the $10 tickets, they were told that they were all sold out. When we got inside the stadium—with the $20 tix—we couldn't help but notice plenty of empty seats in the 10-buck section. Conspiracy!

And then Maureen Dowd offered a very laughable excuse for plagiarizing TPM's Josh Marshall in her column.

*Maureen Dowd visits Twitter HQ to find out "if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)" (The real question: Is Maureen Dowd as annoying as this column?)  In her umpteenth use of the screenplay gimmick (at least she wrote it herself this time!), Dowd confesses her own Twitterific ambition: "When newsprint blows away, I want a second career as a Twitter ghostwriter."  Someone sign this woman up!

*The Examiner reports a surge in D.C.-area gun sales. Are people stocking up in anticipation of tightened gun regulations and economically fueled civil unrest? "Experts" say yes.  But there may be something else at work:

“Business is great,” said Bill Kelley, own of The Gun Center of Frederick. “The gun industry, like everything else, was going into a recession. All of the sudden, after November, the entire country decided they had to have [guns] and have them now.”

Gun enthusiasts here and around the country say they don’t trust the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress. There was a similar sales rush after President Bill Clinton won election in 1992, but Philip Van Cleave of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League says he’s “never seen anything like this.”

“People are pulling their hair out,” Van Cleave said.

God knows I am.  When the Prez starts palling around with Chavez, and a whole host of tyrannies loom...it's Glock time!

*Over at the Washington Times, Cal Thomas has penned the definitive meditation on the Susan Boyle mini-phenomenon. The take-home?  Surface is shallow, prettiness passing, but true inner beauty—now that's the stuff! "For two days I contemplated the phenomenon that is Susan Boyle," Thomas confesses, before leading us through the viewing experience:

We quickly size her up: a nearly 48-year-old woman with graying hair, a dress that looks as if it might have been purchased at the British equivalent of Wal-Mart hugging a body that even she described as "like a garage." Frumpy is the word that first comes to mind.

Crikey.  With looks like that, how could Boyle possibly (as the show's title goes) "got talent"?  But lo:

All those hypocrites who thought nothing good could come from this dowdy woman because our narcissistic culture has taught us that the only thing that matters is beauty, not depth of character, suddenly want to embrace what seconds ago they had instinctively rejected.

The question remains: Does the Boyle sensation represent an actual cultural inversion, or what a better columnist would call a "flash in the pan"?

*Prince of Petworth approves of a Young Playwrights' Theater production based on his blog commentariat. "I didn’t get made fun of too badly," marvels the Prince. Coming soon: a CBS special inspired by whoever comments on this very post!*

*Or, at the very least, a Lifetime miniseries.