Easter weekend, aka illegal parking weekend, went off pretty much hitchless here in D.C. Lots of people driving around in nice clothes---that's what it looked like to me. Anyone ever take Metro to church? I mean really, have you ever heard someone utter the sentence, "Yeah, so I was late for church because of a delay on Metro. Red line was all screwed up." That's when we know we live in a green world, when WMATA starts announcing special Sunday service for services.
Read More "Weekend in Review" »

Just some recap to get you feeling centered on this Monday morning: Washington City Paper's "Best Of" issue came out last week---it was a whopper, with a readers poll that pulled in 29,000 ballots and a huge editorial hole filled with picks on everything from Best Restaurant to Best Place to Buy a TV Stand.

Weekend weather was a mixed bag, with a wet Saturday and a schizophrenic Sunday. Yeah, I know---you know that. But I am trying to break the mold here, giving weather "retrocasts" instead of forecasts.

And what a snoozer this NCAA tourney is. No parity in that league, whatsoever. Too many blowouts to make for good watching, Villanova v. Pitt notwithstanding. Can't wait for the NBA playoffs, when teams that are well matched hit the hardwood.

Read More "Weekend in Review" »

From NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof's Twitter feed:

Just interviewed Michelle Rhee, head of schools in D.C. She's ground zero for school reform nationwide. I'll write for Sunday.

So much for that supposed national media blackout.

Well, perhaps not exactly. From the New York Times:

Speaking with reporters, Mr. Holder provided few specifics but said the Justice Department’s enforcement policy would now be restricted to traffickers who falsely masqueraded as medical dispensaries and “use medical marijuana laws as a shield."

Read More "A.G. Eric Holder Saves Medical Marijuana Industry, Considers Extending the Same Courtesy to Newspapers" »

Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another installment of Freedom Friday. Before we get started, I'd like to throw something out there: GeoPet. Can y'all feel that contraction bustle off your palate, like so many Metro riders leaving the Georgia Avenue-Petworth station? I can. Petworth needs this, folks. Why should AdMo, CoHi, and BloMi have all the fun? It would be so much easier to give directions, too: "The Looking Glass Lounge? Oh, it's one block south of GeoPet"; "I'm going to grab some groceries at the GeoPet Safeway"; "Hey, let's meet for lunch at Sweet Mango--it's across the street from GeoPet." Gah, so cool! Hey, Prince of Petworth, what do you say? Gonna throw your blog behind this one?

The American Enterprise Institute's financial woes, Campus Progress' smear campaign, and creationists at the Smithsonian below the jump.

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: The GeoPet Proposal" »

What a great weekend for all involved. Just a fine couple of break-out days, days to indulge in the early spring that this region belches up every year. They say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but the transition from king of the jungle to perennial doormat happens more quickly in D.C. Nothing like a few lines of throwaway weather talk to kick off the WIR!

From the New York Times comes this killer little bit of commentary on the free-agency moves of the Washington Redskins, which snatched up Albert Haynesworth of the Titans and DeAngelo Hall as well---both for bi bucks. Anyhow, let the New York paper take it away:

Guaranteed money: Granted, the Washington Redskins’ defense got a lot better, but giving Albert Haynesworth $41 million guaranteed — hours after guaranteeing DeAngelo Hall $22.5 million — left almost everyone else in the N.F.L. agog.

OK, but I think there's going to be a little reverse mojo going on here. For years, the Skins would acquire free agents, and the moves never got them anywhere, going all the way back to Deion Sanders and Dan "Big Daddy" Wilkinson and Laveranues Coles and the like. Back then, people thought, wow, this team is gonna be something special. As we know, they specialized in mediocrity. But now that everyone is slamming them for these pay-scale busting acquisitions, I guarantee that Dan Snyder is going to look like a genius come this time next year.

Folks: I am sure I missed something here, but why on earth is Adrienne Washington writing about national stuff now (in this case, a tepid analysis of Obama's health care plans)? Wasn't she supposed to be a local kid?

And a note to the WashTimes Webmaster: When you put announcements up on the site, like this one about the hiring of an editorial page editor, make sure you get the dates right. This story, available on the site Sunday evening, said, "The Washington Times on Monday named Richard Miniter as editor of the editorial pages and vice president of opinion, the latest of a series of dramatic moves to boost the newspaper's global impact."

But it wasn't Monday yet. I know times flies, especially when you're boosting your global impact, but this is crazy.

A little self-promotion here.

Not sure whether the Newseum has an exhibit titled "Beat Sweeteners: A Quadrennial Tradition." But if there is, I nominate Anne Kornblut's Saturday piece in the Washington Post for a central place behind the glass. I am speaking of this piece of puffery, a profile of White House "fixer" and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina. Now, if Messina has ever done anything untoward, anything tawdry or dumb, well, we're not going to know that from Kornblut. Because here's what she's got to say about this man:

Starting with the lede:

Holed up in a windowless West Wing office, Jim Messina is working on his usual assignment: fixing President Obama's problems.

Read More "Weekend in Review" »

Good afternoon, Washington. Below the links, City Paper is pleased to announce winners in its 2009 Inauguration Reader's Choice Contest.

*Ben Smith touches on the New York Times-Politico spat; Greg Sargent, meanwhile, mediates between the rhetoric of NYT Exec. Editor Bill Keller and that of Politico's John Harris.

*Farm Fresh Meat, hoping to cure his blogger's block, escapes to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

Read More "Our Lunchtime Roundup: Bloggers, Booze, and Our Winners in the Readers’ Choice Photo Contest" »

Here's how lame our news culture is getting these days. So Fox launches this stupid-as-shit TV show called "Lie to Me" starring Tim Roth, and right away the nation's top newspapers print little reality checks on the show's conceit.

First, the show. Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, name partner in the Lightman Group, and goes about getting really squinty-eyed and all kinds of probing when he talks to witnesses about crimes. Then, later, at the Lightman Group's offices, he throws video of the witness interviews onto a giant screen and schools his colleagues in the fine points of detecting lies through stray and mendacious facial expressions and body language. The show comes off as a workshop in biometrics, though I'll confess that I failed to sit through an entire episode.

Read More "Lie, Schmie" »

OK, before getting into this huge news docket for the weekend, let me include a gratuitous slam on President's Day Weekend. It's a waste of taxpayer money, a disgrace in these lean times, a stupid holiday right in the middle of an ugly season, and it wreaks havoc on the Washington City Paper editorial deadlines. Enjoy Monday off, Rest of the World.

Big news coming out of Daytona. I mean, Kenseth is a monster.

Good feature on the front of Washington Post Metro today about an ages-old killing in Virginia, a confession, and the aftermath. I've been hearing some grumblings of late that the Metro people are having a tough time making it to A1. If so, this'd be Exhibit A in my case to the page-placement jury.

NYT has a great piece on an inquiry into corruption on part of U.S. officials in Iraq just after "Mission Accomplished." Something about big wads of money in pizza boxes and the like. Also, this guy Burris--perhaps the best approach was indeed to send him out into the rain.

WashTimes, with the unscoop that Obama administration says stimulus key to economic recovery.

Examiner's Nei-man needles Fenty for nominating two jogging buddies to posts.

That's Rick Rodriguez, for all you morons who don't recognize the leading lights in the world of journalism. Rick Rodriguez is a journalism professor at Arizona State University and former executive editor of the Sacramento Bee.

Such credentials have landed Rodriguez a spot on the roster of experts discussing the future--or lack thereof--for newspapers on the New York Times Web site.

Rodriguez predicts a time of turmoil in the world of local news coverage, with dailies cutting coverage or folding and new competitors trying to fill the void. "For a while it’ll be the Wild West in terms of journalistic standards, the rise and fall of old and new enterprises and an endless pursuit of new business models."

But he's got good news for papers like this one: "Among the best bets for adhering to traditional journalistic standards will be smaller, already-established newspapers that can expand their local influence. Alternative weeklies and ethnic media mostly will survive, and possibly even thrive by specializing in coverage of fields like entertainment or local politics."

Is Rodriguez keeping up on our bankruptcy?

Big story this weekend was the weather (and not the Pro Bowl)---it felt like wintertime in D.C. for the first time in weeks. January, according to reports, was colder than usual, and February started out likewise. Yet somehow and for some reason, as the temps tilted toward 60 degrees on Sunday, people didn't get the memo and could be found in large, bulky coats. What's up with that. I am going to suggest that there's a certain demographic out there that doesn't watch the news, pick up a newspaper, or check out the Internet--these folks just assume that since it's winter, it's cold. No other possible explanation for it.

On news fronts, it's basically the economic crisis, and many things that don't matter nearly as much. Let's stick to the latter here.

Comments from the heroic pilot of that Hudson River-landing plane.

Can't believe that in the year 2009, they're still playing the Pro Bowl.

Well, there's a multiagency investigation of the cancellation of the Veterans Presidential Inaugural Ball, so how did Dionne Warwick's bash skate free?

What happened to a 36-year-old with paranoid delusions in a city with a patchwork system of care for the mentally ill?

WashTimes has the skinny on the unpresidentialness of "doom" rhetoric.

WaPo on the rise of homelessness among schools population.

As noted in today's LL Daily, David Brooks, in his New York Times column this morning, painted Ward 3 with the typically broad brush you might know and love from such armchair sociological works Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive.

A sample: "On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies)."

So LL called Ward 3's councilmember, Mary Cheh, to get her reaction. She minced no words:

"I do have something of a reaction. He's made his living lobbing uninformed insults at various communities. He lives by these broad generalizations, which is somewhat ironic, since the man himself lives at Bethesda, Maryland...a community which suffers even worse stereotypes...He should be ashamed of himself!"

Cheh went on to postulate a cynical motive: "It might be a market strategy, since many of the New York Times readers are in Ward 3."

The stereotypes, Cheh continued, are "extraordinarily offensive. That's his stock in trade, to be offensive to communities....They're not based on fact. They're not based on first-hand knowledge." She seemed most concerned about how Brooks' comments reinforce the old tropes about white vs. black Washington: "It plays into these divisive stereotypes that people throw out about the District. It doesn't help any community in this city."

Cheh's husband, Neil A. Lewis, is a longtime reporter in the Times' Washington bureau. LL asked Cheh if she might ask him to crack some heads down at the office.

"No," she said, "I'm leaving him out of it."

UPDATE, 5:45 P.M.: For the record, Cheh says, she does not have a NordicTrack in her Forest Hills home. "And I haven't had my kitchen remodeled!"

In fact, Brooks' no-upper-body-toning rule sure doesn't apply to Cheh. The councilmember tells LL she does 200 pushups daily.

Though I haven't wavered from my original opinion of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- and heard ripples of shared astonishment over the film's 13 Oscar nominations -- it's sometimes reassuring to get backup on one's unpopular opinion.

Ran across this conversation between New York Times critic A.O. Scott and New Yorker's David Denby thanks to a terrific article in the L.A. Times on film criticism and, peripherally, the Academy Awards.

Columnist Patrick Goldstein more thoroughly summarizes the critics' debate on The Charlie Rose Show last Friday, as well as includes the full segment of Scott and Denby's appearance.

Here's an abbreviated clip, which includes Denby's spot-on observation about Daisy's infatuation with Benjamin: "I don't know what she's in love with except that beautiful shell."

A note on Kim Severson's New York Times article about D.C. dining, which DeBonis mentioned earlier:

Marvin has a "cool, P. M. Dawn feeling during the week"?

Listen, I understand that there are a lot of people who'd like to pretend that the past eight years never happened. Drawing a line between P.M. Dawn, the Bush I/Clinton-era jazz-hoppers who last surfaced on Hit Me Baby One More Time, and "cool" is an entirely different matter.

Don't believe me? Watch the following video. If you still think your weeknights would be enhanced by partying like guys who sampled Spandau Ballet, well, actually, maybe you will enjoy living here.

Severson, I'd appreciate an explanation if you get a sec.