Colbert King recently wrote a column on the racial paranoia bubbling up on Cleveland Park's listserv. He followed up our own blog post on the subject. Whether residents there are racist or not we can not say. Those stories only prove that people still live in Cleveland Park. There are always the holdouts.

Video and more, below the jump!

With all the bad news surrounding Cleveland Park, we were a bit scared to visit its Connecticut Ave. strip. Had it succumbed to a sort of lawlessness? Were people freaking out over their 'hood losing its Slurpee machine? Would there even be anyone around to talk to? Had its residents started migrating to the hipper Van Ness, a neighborhood that can actually support a Starbucks?

One thing we did prove: You can still get a parking ticket in Cleveland Park.

Much has been made of the District's plan to step up enforcement of parking restrictions all around town. The push will affect nightclubbers who try to press their luck in all of those spaces just shy of intersections, not to mention street-sweeping violators: The machines that roar down the alternating sides of certain D.C. streets will be equipped with cameras to nail all scofflaw automobiles in their way.

On Saturday, I observed the new municipal attitude in force. I spied a late-model Infiniti parked pretty unobtrusively on 15th Street NW, just shy of O Street. The car was squarely out of the residential parking perimeter but was well short of the intersection and posed a limited hazard---it was a car, and not an SUV, so there weren't any issues with blocked visibility. But there was the purple rectangle of dread on the windshield. It had been issued at 11:30 pm on Friday, evidence that the no-tolerance policies of a decade ago making a comeback.

OK, so what's news? Well, the WaPo ombo, Andy Alexander, declared himself in favor of the Post's having gone with a Web-only treatment for Paul Duggan's two-part narrative on the killing of 32-year-old Robert Wone, the most fascinating murder the city has perhaps ever seen. Alexander thought that the paper's editors made a good choice here, which puts him at odds with me!

Federer!

Those of us who've been following the news at least cursorily over the past year know that off all the U.S. automakers, Ford has been dealing with the downturn best. But that doesn't mean that if you're writing an article about the company's performance, you have to borrow from their own advertising copy. Here's Katherine Timpf of the Washington Times:

Amid bankruptcies and forecasts of Detroit doom, one of the Big Three is hanging tough. Ford tough.

The New York Times Magazine asks: Can Shakira make early childhood education the No. 1 priority in Latin America? And I state: I would have to be unemployed, stranded somewhere, with no cell phone, no Internet, no one to talk to, no billboards or nature to observe, to even consider reading such a story.

Oh, the drama! Read on to see whether the writer of the Post's story on regional cabin accommodations manages to strike up a fire on her very last match!