In July, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals smacked down the city of Chica

go over instructional requirements similar to the District’s. The Second Amendment Foundation and Illinois State Rifle Association sued the Windy City for requiring training at shooting ranges that were banned by city ordinance.

As The Washington Times has exposed, Washington has created the same impossible situation, requiring residents to trek to Maryland or Virginia if they want to own a gun in the District. Feeling the heat, D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson introduced the Firearms Amendment Act last month to, among other things, allow the gun safety course to be completed within the city – in theory.

Washington, of course, has no shooting ranges for private citizens. For Mr. Mendelson’s proposal to be more than a public-relations stunt, the city should allow residents to use the police shooting range to complete the training demand.

While calling the "trek" to Maryland and Virginia an "impossible situation" is LOL-worthy, the board does have a point. If D.C. residents are allowed to own guns if they get trained in how to use those guns, they should be allowed to get that training in D.C. It's silly to throw up arbitrary barriers.

Photo by Bob B. Brown via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

The Bike Rent Is Too Damn High: Membership has its privileges, according to American Express. Capital Bikeshare apparently agrees. The service is raising fees for casual users by 33 percent, as well as hiking the cost of a 24-hour membership from $5 to $7. Longer-term members won't pay more—which is to say, finally, the tourists are subsidizing the rest of us. Now if only we could get them to stand to the right. +2

There Is No Sex In the Champagne Room Or The Reeves Center: Attention D.C. government employees thinking of having sex in your office or your city-issued car, then sending explicit emails to your partner from your DC.gov address on your city-issued BlackBerry—think again. The workers who did that at the Reeves Center last year, and also the husband of the woman involved (who allegedly broke into her office and email to find proof of the affair) have all been placed on administrative leave. +1

The Sky Is Falling: Finally some good news in the "nature" category, after earthquakes and hurricanes and what not. The Orionid meteor shower peaks tonight, and weather types say viewing conditions around the District will be good for seeing shooting stars. Of course, if you're actually in the District, your view of the night sky will be drowned out by light pollution. But if you hit the road now, you should be able to get somewhere dark and rural by after midnight tonight, when the peak will occur. +1

Good Luck, Mr. Vice President: Except when Dick Cheney is running the country from the Naval Observatory, the office of vice president is famously powerless (see former VP John Nance Garner's famous quote; also see Dan Quayle). Still, it's not actually as horrible as a Washington Times headline mistake today made it seem. The paper incorrectly, albeit briefly, blared "White House Backs Biden's Rape, Murder" from its website this morning, before adding "Remarks" a bit later. (Biden had suggested more Americans would be raped and killed if Republicans successfully blocked the administration's economic plan.) You'd think just replacing him on the ticket next year would be enough to do the trick. -1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 58 Today's score: +3 Friday bonus: +2 Today's Needle rating: 63

D.C. Votes! The election that Professional Washington devoted its last year to predicting may be taking place everywhere but the District. But polls are open here in Our Nation's Capital, too. Not much drama to report: Even without Democratic primary loser Adrian Fenty's tepid opposition to a write-in effort on his behalf, it's a good bet that Vince Gray will emerge triumphant. Still, election made makes up for its lack of excitement via a dose of low-comedy: This morning, a District Board of Elections and Ethics tweet announced that a voter had tried to use a hand-stamp to write a candidate's name. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except that the voter was voting on a touch-screen ballot. +2

Moonies Rising. A year after gutting its staff, killing its Redskins coverage, and generally giving up the pretension that it was a normal newspaper and not a right-wing 'zine, The Washington Times says it's reviving sports, metro, and entertainment coverage. You'd have to be brainwashed in order to double-down on a broadsheet in the current media environment, right? Don't answer that: The changes were announced as control over the paper shifted from one feuding branch of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's family (the one that saw the paper as a giant money pit) to another (the one that spent a quarter-century shoveling dollars into said pit). +3

All the President's Rumormongers: Remember when the D.C. commentariat got all excited for about 24 hours about that rumor that Barack Obama would dump Joe Biden in favor of Hillary Clinton for the 2012 veep spot? "I kind of started the rumor," D.C. investigative-reporting super-duper-super-ace Bob Woodward told a Georgetown crowd, according to a Georgetown Dish report. (The audience laughed, according to the website's report.) We preferred it when Woodward was starting better rumors, like the one about how the President of the United States had conspired to cover up a break-in against the opposition party that was organized by his henchmen. But it would have been cool if he'd spent 1972 reporting on plans to drop Spiro Agnew, too. -3

So Devious it Just Might Work. So, here's the scheme. First, the Redskins get rid of Jason Campbell in favor of aging veteran Donovan McNabb. Then, they improbably bench McNabb at the climax of last week's game, and proceed to audition JaMarcus Russell—the very guy who Oakland cast off before they nabbed Campbell. A ludicrously bad trade-off...or a scheme so brilliant it could only have been hatched by the razor-sharp strategic mind of Daniel Snyder? You decide. -1.

Yesterday’s Needle rating: 46 Today’s score: +1 Today’s Needle rating: 47

Confused? Back in August, news broke that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon wanted to buy back the Times from his his son, Preston Moon. Per Keach Hagey:

The sale represents a return to the paper’s old guard, and has widely been interpreted as the paper’s founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon, reasserting control over the 28-year-old newspaper that has been one of the most public faces of his sprawling business empire.

More on this later ...

Silver Standoff: A gunman strolls into the Discovery Communications headquarters in downtown Silver Spring and takes hostages, apparently in an attempt to get the cable conglomerate to stop airing shows that encourage people to have babies. Why? Because the gunman is nuts. The alleged suspect, James Jay Lee, was arrested in the same place two years ago after another strange protest, though that one ended peacefully. TV coverage of the incident maybe played up how much it inconvenienced rush hour commuters a bit more than was really reasonable. But hopefully, Montgomery County police will be able to resolve the situation without more violence. UPDATE: Police shot Lee, freeing the hostages and taking him into custody. -10

Earl-y Warning: Driving to the beach on Labor Day weekend can be unpleasant enough. But if you're thinking of driving to the beach on Labor Day weekend while Hurricane Earl churns up the East Coast, Maryland authorities have a message for you: Don't do it! The storm is only expected to deliver a glancing blow to Ocean City and other Maryland and Delaware beaches, but significant erosion could be a problem. Virginia beaches, meanwhile, have a hurricane watch. Here in D.C., the weather should be nice all weekend. Just nice enough, in fact, to make you wish you'd ignored Maryland authorities and gone down to Ocean City. -4

Not So SmarTrip: Fare card machines suddenly refuse to allow Metro passengers to pick up employee-provided SmartBenefits during the morning rush hour, accepting only cash or credit cards to add value to SmarTrip cards. Metro officials say it's a "technical issue," but don't elaborate. Considering the new "peak of the peak" fares just took effect for morning rush hour a few days ago, riders show impressive restraint by not starting riots demanding better service. -3

Get Your Washington Times for $1: The hot new trend in the media business, apparently, is selling a newspaper or magazine for $1. Not a copy of the newspaper or magazine; the actual publication, including offices, computers, reporters, editors, and—chances are—massive debts. Newsweek kicked things off last month. The latest outfit joining the craze? The Washington Times, which is on the verge of a transfer from Preston Moon, a son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, to Doug Joo, a Moon ally. The transaction means the paper is likely to go back to the days of weird conservative dogma. But it also means the paper is likely to keep publishing. +2

Yesterday's Needle rating: 42 Today's score: -15 Today's Needle rating: 27

Which would probably bode well for the future of the paper—or what's left of the paper after Preston Moon's regime—and for the Times op/ed page remaining an entertaining home of right wing wisdom mainlined from the blogosphere. Stay tuned!

Dan Snyder's spokesman Tony Wyllie called to say that the boss "has no interest in buying the Washington Times."

Wyllie was responding to rabble roused by a Cheap Seats Daily post asking whether the unnamed Mr. Moneybags who is courting the Moon family to acquire the troubled newspaper was in fact the Redskins owner. Snyder had aroused suspicions in at least one cubicle inside the Beltway both by appearing as a guest of the sports-sectionless Washington Times at the most recent White House Correspondents Dinner and by planning to acquire every existing news outlet.

So ends the mystery.

Then again... the Redskins once said they had no interest in acquiring Jason Taylor. And look how that turned out!

So, stay tuned to Cheap Seats Daily for all the breaking news in BuyingtheWashingtonTimesGate™!

The Times They Are a-Changin' Hands?

The great media gossip site DCRTV rumored yesterday that the Washington Times was on the verge of going out of business last week. The shuttering was postponed, say DCRTV's people, when a "revised" offer to buy the paper came in.

From the site:

A source tells us that Reverend Moon's son, Preston, was prepared to close the Times as recently as last Friday. A press release was reportedly ready for distribution when an apparent last minute and revised offer to buy the paper was submitted, we hear...According to a source with knowledge of the situation: "The paper has large debt load but there is a buyer."

My spidey sense is tingling: Could Dan Snyder be the guy who stepped in to save the Times? Is he ready to throw money at the Moons?

Don't rule it out, and not just because Snyder has a track record of making horrible business decisions.

I've been suspicious about Snyder and the Washington Times since the spring. He attended the White House Correspondents Dinner and brought Bruce Allen, Mike Shanahan and Donovan McNabb along with him. They all sat at the Washington Times' table.

Snyder's guest appearance came several months after the paper killed its sports section and laid off everybody who ever wrote about the Redskins. So they make for odd dining companions. Unless, of course, he was considering buying the place as part of his plan to own every media outlet and employ every journalist.

That is Snyder's plan, you know.

Plus, Snyder was supposed to attend a long-scheduled meeting with Washington Post editors this month, but recently canceled that gathering.

Call me crazy. But I think it's all adding up. And I'm not going to not believe it until I don't see it.

Update: Snyder says no.

Hi Ho: The original Kermit the Frog puppet will join the Smithsonian's Museum of American History, along with several other Muppet prototypes that used to star on Sam and Friends, on WRC-TV, the first showcase for the Sesame Street crew. Presumably, they'll take their place alongside other treasures of American pop culture in the nostalgia-inducing, albeit somewhat randomly assembled, collection that draws some of the museum's largest crowds. Might Willard Scott, who also debuted on WRC in the 1950s, be heading there soon, too? +3

See You in September August: For students in the District, Prince George's County, Frederick County and Anne Arundel County, Aug. 23, 2010, is a date that will live in infamy. (Any area students who don't get that reference: Google it.) Why? School started up again, nearly an unseemly two weeks before Labor Day. In Upper Marlboro, students walked into Barack Obama Elementary School for the first time. Good thing it's not in D.C., or Republicans in Congress would already have introduced legislation to name it for Ronald Reagan instead. +4

More Saving. More Doing. More Shooting: An off-duty Metropolitan Police Department officer working security at the Home Depot on Rhode Island Avenue NE is shot in the arm during a scuffle with a man in the store—with his own gun. Authorities haven't said what the struggle involved. If Home Depot were a nightclub, the outcry to close it down would already be deafening. Also, if Home Depot were a nightclub, they'd probably want to lock up the power tools. -4

Wake Up to the Times: Last year, the conservative-leaning, Rev. Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times laid off most of its staff and tried to reinvent the newspaper as... something else. (Exactly what was never clear.) Evidently, that didn't work; the paper may now be preparing its final edition and could close any moment. Before it does, though, the few remaining staffers will be joined together in holy matrimony to each other in a mass ceremony. -2

Weak Tea: A visitor's guide for the horde of Tea Party-ing masses heading to the District for a Glenn Beck march on Washington this weekend advises conservative activists that Metro's Green and Yellow lines are unsafe at any time. The guide also suggests Eric Ripert's West End Bistro as a dining option—in spite of Ripert's suspicious French origins—because notables like Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, and Clint Eastwood have all eaten there. (Overthrow tyranny! But first, try this 2005 Bourdeaux... Ooh, look! Someone famous!) The guide also serves, perhaps unintentionally, as a tip sheet for how locals can avoid the Tea Partiers: Just go wherever it says to avoid. Which, happily, is most of the city. +3

Friday's Needle rating: 44 Today's score: +4 Today's Needle rating: 48

The District is bracing for yet another gathering of Tea Party activists, seemingly furious about the very existence of the federal government and complaining about "taxation without representation." (Though, honestly, we in D.C. know from taxation without representation, and none of these grouches from states with two senators and voting House members really impress City Paper much for disenfranchisement.) On Saturday, Glenn Beck will do his best Martin Luther King, Jr., impression, addressing a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of King's 1963 March on Washington. Beck has a dream, too, you know. And it doesn't necessarily involve a Christmas sweater.

But Washingtonians aren't the only ones preparing for the invasion: The Tea Partiers are girding their loins for their imminent arrival in the District. A visitor's guide posted on a Maine Tea Party group's website has gotten some attention for advising the anti-government activists avoid Metro's Green and Yellow lines—a warning that's "even more important at night"—and stick to certain areas of the city for safety reasons if on foot, in a cab or a bus:

Bethesda, Arlington (preferably north Arlington), Crystal City, Falls Church, Annandale, or Alexandria, or in DC only in northwest DC west (i.e. larger street numbers) of 14th or 16th streets, or if on Capitol Hill only in SE Capitol Hill (zip 20003) between 1st and 8th Streets, not farther out than 8th (e.g. 9th, 10th etc). (Or stay on the Mall and at the various monuments.)

It seems unlikely many Tea Party activists will take this advice completely literally; a lot of them have been showing up here pretty often since President Obama took office, anyway, to scream about how unfair it is that the government will soon be helping people without health insurance get coverage, among other perfidies, so they may have learned their way around town by now.

Which is a good thing—because this visitor's guide would put quite a few sights off-limits. Among them:

• The National Archives, where—thanks, no doubt, to a socialist plot—the beloved Constitution now resides, best reachable by public transit via the Green or Yellow line;
• Ur-Republican Abraham Lincoln's cottage on the grounds of the Old Soldier's Home, located dangerously northeast of downtown, in Petworth along North Capitol Street;
• The Washington Times (if it's still publishing by the weekend), whose op/ed page unflaggingly supports Tea Party goals from its home off New York Avenue in Northeast;
• Baseball at Nationals Park, on the Green line—fortunately, both "mom" and "apple pie" stick to safer transit options;
• Target, in Columbia Heights, which faces a MoveOn.org-organized boycott over its political contributions to a business group that's given money to opponents of gay marriage in Minnesota;
• The street named after Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin's turf, Alaska Avenue NW, which runs northeast from 16th Street NW to Georgia Avenue NW.

Where else might Tea Party types want to go, or not go, this weekend? Leave your suggestions in the comments. And if you spot a Beck acolyte on any Metro line this weekend, remember—their farecard only covers 66 percent of the cost of their ride. The rest? Paid for by the government!

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr/Creative Commons attribution license

Turns out, Slevin hadn't been getting along with new editor Sam Dealey. In his goodbye email, Slevin accuses Dealey of leaking to other reporters, and laments that he never got the opportunity to groom him.

Slevin doesn't like the paper's two-member board, either–he writes that they've visited the paper's office on New York Avenue a combined total of one time.

What to do if you're a Slevinite newbie without a patron? Slevin has some ideas:

1) Work collaboratively throughout the company; 2) Respond to the marketplace by putting digital first, radio second, and print products third, flowing onto newsprint as the outcome of first meeting the 24/7 customer digital demand; 3) Disperse authority in the newsroom throughout, structuring foremost to serve a digital audience. Recognize that the era of the newsroom as separate and supreme empire and editor as emperor is over.

Aw, new media bromides that even Lee Abrams wouldn't touch? How is that going to help people avoid becoming casualties in the Moon family's fratricidal war? You'd be better off attending peace festivals.

It was a good discussion, the lede turned out well, and the 12,000-word story ended up winning us a nice prize.

We don't do that stuff anymore—summoning groups of people to obsess over the fine points of storytelling. If we're lucky enough to get a long-form story from one of our freelancers, we edit it in a vacuum, in between blog posts and tweets. Hopefully it'll make sense once it hits the paper and the Web.

Oh well.

There's not much to lament here. Moving from a weekly frequency to one that refreshes washingtoncitypaper.com many, many times per day has been a blast. Perhaps the greatest input-output machine civilization has ever seen, the Web rewards news, original thought, and finely articulated outrage. When we manage to pull off any of those things, the feedback is immediate and engaging. Compare that to the grind of yore, in which we'd drop a big stack of words on the public every Thursday. Those stories would routinely "bounce like a box of rocks," in the words of a former colleague.

Of course, we still do put out a weekly paper—it's just that it rarely has that gaping cover hole and often has content republished from our Web site. Though the double-platform world often feels tyrannical, it's more often exhilarating. Anything that demands more writing, more editing, more riffing on headlines, more collaboration with the staff—that's more fun for me.

The Boilerplate Editor Farewell Letter requires at least several expressions of gratitude, and who am I to break this particular mold? So here goes.

Thanks to our readers. Without you, we wouldn't have this shaky business model that we've been trying to fix for several years now. I've closely observed you in cafes, restaurants, and Chipotle, grabbing Washington City Paper and flipping straight to the ads and the syndicated content with which my editorial staff and I have nothing to do. Yet I still love you. You are motivated, smart, clever, and hip people, though I'd appreciate it if you showed more of those attributes in the comments section.

Thanks to my sources. Yesterday marked the end of the coverage of local media under this byline. Over eight years, I've written about many local outlets, including the Washington Times, the Examiner, the Washingtonian, the InTowner, the Northwest Current and so on. The preoccupation of the coverage, though, has been the Washington Post, an outfit that's one of the easiest conversation starters in the region. In recent months, I've had numerous discussions with friends in the industry, and the feedback I get about the paper is pretty uniform: The Post has dropped to a new low, it's missing key stories, it's boring, it's [insert other pejorative comment here]. There's no question that the newsroom has lost some bandwidth via four buyouts and general attrition. Yet it remains the greatest bargain in the household budget of my family—and we are aggressive Costco shoppers. How do I reach this clinical determination? Easily: There's a stack of old Post sections sitting on my bedstand; they represent all the stuff that I didn't get a chance to read in the morning before rushing out, plus all the stuff I didn't read on the Web during work. I try to plow through them before I fall asleep at night, and I never make it through the pile. The point here is that the Post is giving me more interesting stories—coverage I really want to read—than I can possibly digest. So there.

Before I started covering the Post, I wondered how I'd get sources. A friend told me, "They'll help you," referring to staffers at the paper. He was right—Post journalists, for the most part, welcome scrutiny of their work. Despite my rantings about the Brauchli Doctrine, named for current Executive Editor Marcus, the paper remains a transparent and accountable place. To all the people at the paper who have trusted me with their accounts of internal deliberations and a fistfight, un abrazo.

Thanks to my colleagues. This is the part I really can't write without breaking down, so I gotta call it a day. Plus, it's a Friday afternoon and the audience for this thing is dying. I'm just going to post it—no updates or followups this time.

It essentially dropped metro and sports coverage in the reductions.

It is caught in the middle of a massive power struggle within the Unification Church, the entity whose business interests finance and run it.

Yet the Washington Times is soldiering on, and will be announcing a new editor on Monday, according to U.S. News & World Report's Paul Bedard. It's 36-year-old Sam Dealey.

Bedard on Dealey's bio:

Dealey, a U.S. News contributor, is based in Washington, writing on national and foreign affairs. Besides contributing to Reader's Digest, he writes frequently for publications such as GQ, Details, and The New York Times. Dealey has also reported from Africa for CNN and PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. He is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Dallas native was a reporter for The Hill newspaper, an editorial board member at The Washington Times, and assistant managing editor of The American Spectator.

Dealey would be taking over a newsroom that's been in flux ever since the November drama that saw the departure of editor John Solomon as well as top officials on the publishing side.

City Desk will be working to snare some updates on this story. Stay tuned.

Update 9:01 pm: Washington Times released an announcement this afternoon confirming the appointment. Dealey is quoted saying that "this is a tremendous opportunity to help shape the future of a great newspaper that is transitioning to meet the challenges of the 21st century media market." Meaning, the paper has laid off 50 to 60 percent of its newsroom staff.

Today Gilbert Arenas could prance through Chinatown wearing nothing but a bandolier and smile, and there would be no one to cover it. For today, every member of the District Sports Media Elite will be at the National Cathedral for the memorial service of George Michael, not the singer.

If you are from D.C. that appositive will not be necessary. But a lot of people move here from other places!

Tony Kornheiser: He will be there. I heard him say it on his radio show. (No radio show from TK today; you'll have to make your own obsessive jokes about Arenas' birthday party.) Joe Gibbs: He will be there too. Maybe he will refrain from any Brit Hume moments, at least this time! Maybe he will try to freeze the pallbearers. These are hard things to know in advance.

Which is why I will go to this service. Maybe while there I will see Dan Steinberg. True story: Last week my son came bounding out of school thrilled because he'd seen a picture of me in the newspaper. He drew from his pocket a carefully folded piece of the Washington Post with Steinberg's woodcut portrait. Baldism: It's never too early to start.

fig. a

fig. b

This has been a great couple of months for D.C. sports news. Shanahan. Agent Zero. The Washington Times massacre. The invention of HDTV. Wise vs. Kornheiser! Campbell vs. Portis! Riggo vs. Snyder! McKenna vs. Cal Ripken's publicist! Washington may have only one team that can win anything, but storylines we got.

Victims of the recent purge at the Washington Times have walked away with a shell-shocked sensation. As in, What the hell just happened here?

Consider: After riding out some really bad times, the paper all of a sudden ousts its visionary top management and then announces layoffs as deep as 40 percent. And when it comes time to hand out the pink slips, the cuts end up slashing the newsroom more deeply, by about 60 percent.

Thanks to the tremendous reporting of TPM LiveWire, we know that the cuts at the Washington Times followed a fascinating struggle within the reigning family of the Unification Church. According to TPM, Hyun-jin Moon—aka Preston Moon, the polished, MBA-holding son of church leader the Rev. Sun Myung Moon—"acted without his father's blessing" in gutting the newspaper. Preston Moon had reportedly lost out to his brother, the similarly named Hyung-jin Moon, in the quest to succeed Sun Myung Moon as the church's top leader; he took "unilateral action" with regard to the Washington Times, reports TPM.

Richard A. Steinbronn is adding a bit more detail to that narrative. A lawyer who resides in Herndon, Steinbronn would appear an unlikely route to enlightenment on the inner workings of the Unification Church and its business holdings. Yet he served as secretary and in-house legal counsel for Unification Church International (UCI) from the mid-1990s until September 2008.

At which point, he claims, he was wrongfully terminated. That's according to a suit he filed last month in D.C. Superior Court—a nearly 50-page complaint that spans 343 enumerated paragraphs and features more specifics on the activities of Moon family-related entities than you could ever want, let alone understand.

It's long been known that the Washington Times has lived off of subsidies provided by various business entities connected to the Unification Church. Several years back, media accounts placed the amount of the subsidy at $1 billion; recently, the estimates have risen as high as $2 billion.

Whatever the amounts, we've always known the core reality of Washington Times budgeting: As soon as someone decided to turn off the spigot, the paper would wither.

As Steinbronn's filing outlines, the Washington Times' evisceration essentially began in the summer of 2009. That's when, in the words of the complaint, "UCI's founder suggested that two more directors be considered for positions on the UCI board." And when "UCI's founder" offered such "suggestions," the document notes, they were viewed as "having paramount significance." In other words, no one messes with Sun Myung Moon.

The complaint continues: Two UCI directors, Douglas Joo and Peter H. Kim, then called for a special meeting on July 12, 2009, to elect the directors suggested by the founder. Joo and Kim got their meeting all right, but they were the only ones there. Preston Moon and two others didn't show, and the session adjourned for a lack of a quorum.

Weeks later, on Aug. 2, the board held a meeting and ousted Joo and Kim. Straight from the filing: "On August 3, 2009, the day after Mr. Joo and Mr. Kim were removed from the UCI board, News World Communications LLC notified its subsidiary, The Washington Times LLC (TWT), of new restrictions on TWT's ability to seek financing and funding, and new restrictions prohibiting TWT from engaging legal counsel without prior written OK from NWC LLC's legal counsel....In the following weeks, various other actions were taken at TWT, including amending TWT's operating agreement in ways that increased the control NWC LLC had over day to day operations at TWT."

More stuff on the Washington Times, as alleged by Steinbronn:

• In mid-August 2009, Washington Times Publisher Thomas McDevitt, the guy who had ushered in an era of optimism at the paper coinciding with the hiring of editor John Solomon, was removed from the paper's board.
• Sometime in the fall of 2009, Jonathan Slevin, the current publisher of the Washington Times, became the "sole director" of News World Communications.
• The changes at Washington Times came at the direction of Preston Moon and others.

And, finally, Steinbronn's takeaway: "On information and belief, these actions taken at TWT at the direction of Mr. Slevin and UCI management are damaging the business reputation and value of TWT as a historic, strategic asset of the UCI group."

Now there's a matter for moot court. Given the (unchallenged) estimates about how much cash the paper has gobbled up in its nearly 30-year history, calling it an "asset" of any sort is a stretch. And calling it a "historic" asset presupposes that the good old days of Wes Pruden's Washington Times, the days when the choice of news stories screamed of ideological bias, the days of scare quotes around "gay marriage," and the days of a petulant refusal to print the word "gay" in constant favor of "homosexual"—carried social and financial value.

Steinbronn can be excused for overvaluing a property for which he worked more than a decade. As to whether the pro se plaintiff, a Unification Church member, has accurately described the internal moves that led up to the debasement of the Washington Times, well, that's a tricky question.

Steinbronn did not respond to two calls for comment on his complaint. A lawyer for one of the defendants did not immediately return a call for comment.

Regardless of whether the Unification Church establishment refutes Steinbronn's narrative, it sure does appear concerned that his allegations will leak into the public realm. In a Dec. 22 filing, two weeks after Steinbronn's complaint, defendant Times Aerospace USA LLC (TA USA), one of the church-related entities housed in the Washington Times building on New York Avenue NE, appealed to the court to seal Steinbronn's complaint. The motion reads, "Plaintiff's Complaint contains numerous allegations derived in whole or part from his having acted as the in-house counsel for TA USA and UCI and reveals the confidences and secrets of his former clients." Steinbronn, according to the motion, has raised no objection to sealing his complaint.

Hell, the Unification people even detailed the parts of the Steinbronn complaint that they are most worried about becoming public. Just so the public can have a reasonable discussion of whether the court should seal these portions, let's provide a capsule summary of them:

• "Secrets and confidences related to defendant Huyn Jin Moon's election as UCI Director and President."

OK, in this part of the complaint that so scares the church, Steinbronn alleges that in April 2006, Preston Moon was elected as UCI chairman, president, and CEO. It also says that he was the first UCI president to receive a salary "as UCI president." The complaint later notes that a section of the District's nonprofit law "prohibits the payment of dividends and distributions of income to directors and officers."

• "Secrets and confidences related to changes of the UCI board in 2009."

OK, in this part of the complaint that so scares the church, Steinbronn runs through the narrative that precedes the dismantling of the Washington Times, as abridged above.

• "Secrets and confidences related to business strategy of UCI subsidiaries."

OK, in this part of the complaint that so scares the church, Steinbronn discusses personnel changes at the Washington Times board and at that of its parent company, News World Communications, not to mention key happenings at an entity called Times Aerospace International LLC, not to be confused with Times Aerospace USA LLC (note the absence of "International" in that one!), or with Washington Times Aviation LLC, or with Washington Times Aviation USA LLC, or with Times Aviation USA LLC. Not that anyone ever would!

• "Secrets and confidences related to UCI board governance and sales of UCI assets."

OK, in this part of the complaint that so scares the church, Steinbronn talks about a whole bunch of UCI biz, including the possibility that UCI upper management "may be planning to sell certain rural property held by New Hope Farm in West Virginia and Virginia, and other properties held in the UCI group." Wouldn't want the public to know about the possible sale of cow pastures!

Through all of his exacting allegations about Unificationia, Steinbronn sounds pissed. The complaint alleges that on Aug. 18, 2009, he was called to a meeting in New York state. He went. When he got back, he found that the locks of his Falls Church office had been changed. A struggle for files—both personal and professional—ensued.

The suit asks for all kinds of damages, monetary and otherwise, including "an accounting of UCI and all subsidiaries, to determine the extent of any improper use or expenditure of funds or property."

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery