The first, and more serious, story was penned by Jeffrey Anderson in this morning's Washington Times. It detailed various small jobs done on Gray's home by William C. Smith & Co., the politically powerful local development company. The second, a Washington Post story by Tim Craig, involved his use of council stationery to ask Comcast for a $20,000 donation to the local delegation to the Democratic State Committee. Gray addressed the controversies in an afternoon appearance on NewsChannel 8's NewsTalk With Bruce DePuyt.

Regarding the DNC allegations, Gray made the case that the fundraising effort was focused on voting-rights awareness, and thus kosher. Given that the check benefited local Democrats attending a political convention, it's awfully questionable distinction to make. But he gets points for this realization: "'If I had to do it over again, I certainly wouldn't have used the stationery."

As for the work on his Hillcrest home, Gray insisted "there was no impropriety that was involved."

Gray went on describe his relationship with Chris Smith, the president and CEO of WCS&Co., which, he says, stretches back some 15 years to his time as executive director of Covenant House, when Smith;s company built youth housing and other projects. "There's a longstanding relationship here," Gray said. "Chris Smith is a guy of impeccable integrity. I like to phrase it that he's the best blend of economic development and social justice that hes ever seen."

The renovation project, he says, came about this way: "When I wanted to do a renovation on my house, I turned to him, and he said that he though that his company could help me."

Gray repeated that he paid in full for the work that was done, that no favors were extended. He went out to emphasize that this was intended to be no small job, that WCS&Co. helped identify an architect that he paid for. The small jobs mentioned in the Times story---painting a room, changing a door, washing a driveway---were incidental. "Had this larger project not been on the table, they never would have done the work," Gray insisted.

Then there's the issue of the payment. The WaTimes story implied that Gray only paid for the work done once the paper started asking questions. Gray says he got an invoice on Oct. 30, and paid it within two weeks, adding that he was not aware of reportorial inquiries until Monday, after the bill was paid. "My payment was not in response to anticipation of a story from the Washington Times."

DePuyt asked a smart followup about whether he had put any money down, as home-improvement contractors often require. "That may well have been the case if we had started the renovation," Gray said, adding, "There was no project that had been authorized to go forward. We were in the architectural development stage at that point."

Then there's the permit issue; the Times story found no evidence that nay permits had been issued. Said Gray, "There were no permits that were required. I cannot imagine that a permit would have been required for this work."

For more explanations on the renovation issue, do see Jonathan O'Connell's reporting today for Washington Business Journal. A William C. Smith & Co. exec explained to him that a company subsidiary called WCS Construction LLC did the work, describing it as "a Ward 8 business....they hire local contractors and that's really important in this city."

The exec, Carol Chatham, responded to the idea that her company did the work hoping to receive contracts thusly:

"The council does not award development projects. That comes through the mayor's office of economic development," she said. Given the lousy mayor-council relations, she said, "if we were trying to curry favor with the mayor we certainly wouldn't be doing favors for the chairman of the council."

She's got a point there.

In all, not a bad first-day reaction from Gray---defensive at times, sure, and his accusations of political motivations were unnecessarily ugly, but he exhibited some awareness that there are legitimate questions that need to be answered. Whether this turns into a two-day story or something more depends on some questions yet to be answered: Has this WCS Construction done other similar home improvement work---for politicians or anyone else? Will the firm continue handling Gray's home renovation project? Was the work priced appropriately? Will Gray release the invoices for public examination?

With regard to the fundraising questions, DePuyt asked Gray if he'd be willing to have lawyer Bob Bennett, currently examining other D.C. Council ethics issues, examine the matter. Said the chairman, "I'd be happy for him to take a look at it."

Then DePuyt asked the money question: He asked Gray if he thought that the appearance of the stories represents a "brushback pitch" from the Fenty camp. Said Gray: "Absolutely. I think it's clearly political."

Gray insisted the stories would have no bearing on his decision whether to run against Fenty or not: "You called it a brushback pitch, I used to play baseball...When you get in the batters' box you better be ready for what comes."

The Washington Times has historically placed a real low value on transparency. For years, the place ran corrections only at gunpoint. It was nearly impossible to get newsroom leaders on the line to defend their journalism, a task that often required going through a flak and then getting a "no comment."

Editor John Solomon changed a lot of that. Having taken over the newsroom in early 2008, he was not only easy to get on the phone, but he'd talk your ear off, evangelizing about this great new initiative or that one.

Yet he's not helping too much on the great unanswered question of this new round of weirdness at the Times.

Where is he? Why hasn't he shown up after the Sunday/Monday firings of the paper's top execs?

And current management isn't helping too much with the info flow. At a staff-wide meeting on Monday, new top dog Jonathan Slevin reportedly asked staffers to refer media calls to the PR ace that the Times had hired. Way to act on industry principles, Slevin: Reporters and editors should never be asked to refer calls to anyone; that's the very behavior that they rightly declaim every single day.

Anyhow, the freedom-of-expression-chilling request of Slevin has meant business for Don Meyer of Rubin Meyer Communications. Meyer has been in the PR biz for about 20 years and has worked for the Times going back about five.

Here's a Q&A with one smooth newspaper mouthpiece:

Question for Don Meyer: What's up with Solomon?

Don Meyer response: I don’t have any updates on his status at this time. When additional information becomes available, I will be happy to pass it along to you.

Question for Don Meyer: So is he resigning or something?

Don Meyer response: I am sorry to do this to you, but I don’t have any information on his stautus right now.

Question for Don Meyer: Does anybody have that information?

Don Meyer response: Somebody does.

Question for Don Meyer: How many inquiries have you gotten about the Washington Times?

Don Meyer response: Quite a few...I've received a dozen calls.

Question for Don Meyer: Were you aware that management advised reporters and editors in yesterday's meeting not to answer media calls and to route inquiries to you?

Don Meyer response: Oh yeah, I wasn’t aware that he said it in the meeting, but my guidance to him was that media calls be directed to me.

Question for Don Meyer: Why should all media calls be directed to you?

Don Meyer response: Because they have decided to utilize me as appointed spokesperson for this particular announcement and so they have asked me to handle it. It ensures that everyone gets the information from a reliable source.

Statement to Don Meyer: That seems to run contrary to the spirit of a newsroom.

Don Meyer repartee: Listen, this is actually how a lot of organizations handle sensitive announcements, which is they want one spokesperson speaking to the media, and it tends to be an accepted practice in corporate and organizational settings.

Statement to Don Meyer: Right, and again, it runs contrary to the spirit of a newsroom.

Don Meyer repartee: The newsroom might not have the latest information involving the executive situation and may not be the best source of information anyway.

Pause in interview to ponder that last Don Meyer comment: Way to keep the newsroom in the loop, Washington Times!

Question for Don Meyer: What do you think of John Solomon?

Don Meyer response: I think he’s a very capable journalist. He's done great things for the Washington Times.

Question for Don Meyer: Will he continue doing those great things?

Don Meyer response: When I have more information on the status of John Solomon vis-a-vis the Washington Times, I will be happy to pass it along.

Question for Don Meyer: So is the financial state of the paper the cause of the uncertain status of John Solomon?

Don Meyer response: I gotta give you credit for trying, but honestly I don’t have any additional information.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

And then there's the whole John Solomon angle. The outgoing, popular newsroom leader hasn't been seen since the putsch. The staff-wide meeting yesterday featured no mention of the guy who happens to top the masthead. Solomon isn't commenting and even people who consider him a close friend are reporting no contact with him.

One possible reason for Solomon's scarcity: He has lost his parking spot. According to Washington Times sources, the signs that reserved spaces for top company officials have been stripped away, including the one for Solomon.

So even if he did have plans to come back, where the hell is he going to park? At the Arboretum?

The gripping part comes when the Rocha, a dog handler, describes in extensive detail just what his superiors did to torment him:

Once, the abuse was an all-day event; a training scenario turned into an excuse to humiliate me. Normally we ran the dogs through practice situations -- an earthquake, a bomb or a fight -- that we might encounter in our work. That day, in a classroom at an American school in Bahrain, with posters of the Founding Fathers lining the walls, the scenario happened to be me. I was the decoy, and I had to do just what Chief Petty Officer Michael Toussaint ordered.

In one corner of the classroom was a long sofa, turned away from the door. When you walked into the room, it appeared that one man was sitting on it, alone. But I was there too -- the chief had decided that I would be down on my hands and knees, simulating oral sex. A kennel support staff member and I were supposed to pretend that we were in our bedroom and that the dogs were catching us having sex. Over and over, with each of the 32 dogs, I was forced to enact this scenario.

Unreal. As if you needed any more evidence that don't ask, don't tell is a fiasco. And though Rocha's misery may be the most common way in which the policy's scourge manifested itself, there are others as well, as Rocha points out. He recounts how commanders who received allegations of man-on-woman sexual abuse used don't ask, don't tell to get their men out of trouble. It went this way: "'You weren't sexually assaulted by a male in my unit. I hear you're a lesbian.' After all, homosexuals have no rights in our military. You can't sexually assault someone who doesn't exist."

Humane, huh?

On other fronts, if you're going to read the Food Issue of this weekend's New York Time Magazine, try the piece on British chef and good-food evangelist Jamie Oliver, but skip about 1,000 words in, and get to the good part about his trying to bring healthier eating habits to Huntington, W. Va. Pretty good stuff. There's an eatery in town that makes a 15-pound burger.

What else? Oh yes, the retrocast, which called for glorious temperatures and just about perfect early-autumn weather here in the mid-Atlantic.

Where do you go for the latest on taxi-scandal news? Well, you're already there. Check out Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis's latest on the story behind the story. He's got an interview with East Coast taxi mogul Solomon Bekele, and it says quite a lot about where D.C. fits in with national cab trends. As of this writing, there are three comments on this post. Rockin'!

Apparently the Washington Times has decided that seven years marks the appropriate anniversary to do a monster look-back at the sniper shootings in the area. This undertaking runs through seven page clicks on the Times Web site, which is about seven too many for my interest in rehashing the most hashed episode in the history of Washington-region crime. Plus there's the typo that allegedly---at least according to the comments---first appeared at the top of the story: "7 Lears Later"

LL and other news outlets have explored a lot of angles in the arrest's aftermath, but there's a media angle that's been neglected: Graham's press guy was just getting settled in.

"Thursday was my second day," says Brian DeBose. "I came in, and I was starting to just get myself acclimated to the computer and the system. And, you know, by 12:30 the FBI came in to Ted's office," he says, "which vastly changed the job."

DeBose is no stranger to the city hall media; he was a longtime Washington Times reporter. He spent eight years at the paper, including a stint on the editorial board in his last months there. (He's also married to Washington Post police reporter Theola Labbé-DeBose.) He's taking over for David Lipscomb, another former WaTimes reporter who is now returning to that paper.

"This is the first political advocacy job I had, DeBose says. "I like excitement and it is exciting."

And how.

DeBose says his reportorial expertise came in handy last week. "I've learned lessons a long time ago about how to handle these sorts of things. There's only so much you can do in this sort of situation."

Another thing came in handy, too: "My friend sent me her crisis memo. She's the former communication director for William Jefferson," says DeBose, referring to the Louisiana congressman found by federal agents to be stashing $90,000 in his freezer. "That's there where I learned my lessons."

Postie Brigid Schulte writes in Outlook on a problem that I've read about nine million times: Lack of afterschool opportunities for latchkey kids. Of course, that doesn't make the problem any less pressing. The author nails a problem that, as she points out, just doesn't seem to ever get resolved:

Lynne Casper, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California who studies the phenomenon of latchkey kids, remembers attending a congressional briefing on workplace issues.

"We were talking about the need for society to start addressing workplace flexibility and work and family balance, and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton said: 'We've been talking about this for 20 years. Why doesn't it ever get any better?' " Casper recalled. "Most of the structure of our workplace in this country has been in place since the Fair Labor Standards Act of the 1930s. But we've shifted from single-earner to dual-earner families. We've shifted from a manufacturing to a 24/7 service economy. As we've shifted, the things that were set up no longer work."

The Great Lanny Davis on health-care reform in the Washington Times. Here's the critical part of this piece: "This week, as promised, I will explain briefly how this bill works to achieve these goals. And next week I will explain how this act will be paid for..." Don't you just want to dig in?

Darrow Montgomery, going really big-time photographically on Fiesta DC!

On the reading front, looks as if the Post's Style section is making a move to up their local feature count. Today, Dan Zak goes long on a D.C. mural, following on the heels of other feature-box stuff on D.C., including Michael Rosenwald's experiment in listening to sports-talk radio.

Post columnist Colbert I. King goes long and hard about acceptance of violence in the city. Murders, shooting sprees, deaths---no one seems to care, screams King, citing the emergence of a "new normal." And it's not a good normal, either: "That 'new normal' view embraces bike paths and a bicycle center at Union Station, townhouses and parks along the Potomac, couples eating al fresco at neighborhood coffee shops, doggy parks, schools befitting the middle class, and poor people who behave themselves and patiently wait their turn.

The city's chosen means for coping with a crisis shaped by self-destructive forces and a shifting civic landscape? The medical procedure, triage.

Officials won't say it this way, but this is what it means: dividing our social order into three groups -- those who aren't going to make it, those who might and those who will."

District rocks!

A perennial: D.C. cops out to get the prostitutes and johns at 5th and K. And another perennial: D.C. voting rights lobbyists are taking their act on the road, where people---surprise!---don't know that we don't have meaningful congressional representation: "DC Vote is reaching out to people like 62-year-old Henry Perry of Tennessee.

Not until the advocacy group visited Mr. Perry in Mississippi earlier this month did he learn that D.C. residents pay taxes and serve in the military but don't have a vote in Congress.

'I think it's really a disgrace that they're denied that right,' said Mr. Perry, president of the Teamsters Local Union No. 667 in Memphis, which also has members in Mississippi. 'I was kind of shocked.'"

Howie Kurtz discusses how powerless the media is when it's face to face with disinformation (i.e., death panels).

Solid tale by Post's Del Wilber on $3 million, sexual molestation, a duped judge, and a defamation case. Not to mention a stolen barbecue grill!.

The catchy lede, on why Rhee appeared on the cover of Time mag holding a broom---a cliched pose for a reformer of any institution. Here's the Post's Bill Turque, reporting Rhee's account to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray of why she allowed this photo to go get shot:

Rhee explained that most of the shoot for the Dec. 8 issue involved images of her with children. The idea for the broom, which she gripped while standing stern-faced in front of a blackboard, came up near the end, she said, according to Gray's version of their meeting. She told Gray that it wasn't her first choice for the cover but that the decision wasn't hers. Gray wasn't satisfied.

"Why did you let the picture be taken in the first place?"

Then comes the nut graph!

Other key points:

*There are pockets of success in a context of continued failure;

*She has confidence in about a third of her principals;

*She has some perspective on herself: "We weren't doing a good job of communicating," she said regarding her too-fast push for change;

*She must kiss the asses of D.C. councilmembers to get the funding she needs;

*Good observation skills by Turque: "Rhee now sits at hearings for hours at a time waiting to speak, per the council tradition that has members of the public appear first. She can be seen fiddling with her BlackBerry, conferring with aides and idly cracking her knuckles, one hand at a time."

The skinny on this Rhee front-pager is that it's a great way for people to catch up on all things Rhee. It's comprehensive and there's fun stuff about the politics of Rheeism. But for dweebs who've been following the twists and turns of the chancellor's reform efforts, not a lot of smashing-new content here.

And now for the official Weekend in Review retrocast: Amazing weekend on the weather front, in all respects. Low humidity, dry after a long wet spell---perfect for just about any kind of outdoor activity. Sun a bit intense during those peak afternoon hours, but hey, this is D.C.

Check out the analysis of ubiquitous sports analyst Dave McKenna on the latest woes of Six Flags. And to think that just after Snyder took that company over, I was seriously considering buying stock. After the way he was so successfully fleecing Redskins fans, I figured, Hey, how can I lose? Good thing I never pulled the trigger on that one.

And speaking of more financial woes, LaVar's restaurant didn't work out so well.

Wouldn't be a weekend roundup without visiting the Washington Times, and this weekend, the editorial staff is really on a hot new topic: tasteless video games!

Rant of the weekend: Yes, the Francis has long been something of a scene, a cruising spot, and so on. But if you're going to take it to the next level and make out and roll around on the concrete and really kinda get into it, you should bring some more padding than just a towel. It can't be that comfortable to mash around like that on that hard concrete surface. Try multiple towels, an inflatable raft, or the grass on the field just outside. Those are more comfy options.

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!

The piece itself is pretty harrowing, describing monstrosities straight out of the biography of Rasputin:

The latest victim in Chicago's long year of student killings is 15-year-old Alex Arellano. On May 1, he was chased, beaten with baseball bats, run over by a car, shot and burned. His body was found days after he disappeared from his family's home on the city's South Side.

All of which is unspeakably depressing. But what the hell does it have to do with the President's daughters?

With the better weather come turf battles. This past week, Washington City Paper's sports & games columnist/resident genius Dave McKenna wrote about soccer pitches around the city, and their dwindling numbers. The piece dwelled on the situation at Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park, that gorgeous spread of fountains, steps, and grass on the 15th Street threshold of Columbia Heights. McKenna laments that the entire field isn't available to soccer players and picnickers:

The temporary red fences, augmented by strips of police tape, have been up for nearly three years on the upper level of Meridian Hill Park off 16th Street NW. Fencing was removed earlier this month on the south half of the beautiful park’s upper level. The northern knoll remains blocked off.

So soccer’s out there, too.

There are no turf repair signs on the Meridian Hill Park fences—or anything to tell patrons why the grounds are off limits.

The out-of-commission soccer spots have some things in common besides the red fences.

The National Park Service, for one, runs them all, even Meridian Hill, as part of Rock Creek Park.

This is a bona fide city issue, and I'd talked previously with superstar parks activist Steve Coleman about the situation. So after McKenna scorched the park service, I decided to take a jaunt through the park, just to see if our legendary columnist is right on this one.

He's not. Though I concede that "nearly" three years is a really long time to shut off a field, something has worked right with respect to that field's upgrade. The part that's not blocked off right now, that southern expanse, is as nice a patch of grass as I've seen on any spot this side of the turf at Nats stadium. And the blocked-off part looks as if it's going to reach that same level of beauty sometime soon. As many of the dustbowls around town---most maintained by the city's parks department---make clear, it's not easy to maintain good grass in the city. It tends to get trampled.

So I'm hereby officially endorsing the grass-management approach at Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park.

On other topics far from D.C. parks, Andy Alexander, the WaPo ambo, writes this week about a favorite of ombudspeople everywhere, and that's the comics page. He explains the whole hullaballoo behind the cancellation and restoration of "Judge Parker" and ends up applauding Post management for its flexibility on the matter. Alexander points out how a few people got upset about the paper's eliminating stock tables and messing with crosswords and the like. Yet people went berserk about "Judge Parker."

Now, take that data alongside this complaint, which appeared in the paper's Free for All page on Saturday:

I had wondered why my team seemed to be playing station-to-station baseball: the first four games, no stolen bases or anyone caught stealing. Then I noticed other teams, too, were missing such stats in their box scores. Also missing were double plays, grounded-into-double-plays, sacrifices, sacrifice flies and who knows what else that doesn't come right to mind but does play an important part in the game.

I realize that you're trying to put content into less space, but the gain from omitting these items must be tiny and the loss larger than you realize. I can reconstruct almost every play with a complete box score and have made that a ritual for most of 40 years. It is the first thing I do with the paper in the morning, and I often return to it later to confirm my read of teams' strengths and weaknesses.

If the information is incomplete, I have much less reason to continue my rather expensive subscription. After all, I can get the information on various Web sites. However, I'd prefer to keep things as they have been.

By the way, who decided what to omit -- a football fan? You left the time of play and the attendance, surely the least interesting data.

That's from reader Jim Calhoun of Waynesboro. And it leads me to the conclusion that cutting back a big, full-service, kick-ass newspaper has got to be the most frustrating and impossible tasks on earth. No matter what you do, no matter how much one cutback makes sense, no matter how few people seem to care about something, well, they do. All those complaints on the paper's quite excellent Free for All page speak to the old saw about newspapers---that they are essentially like supermarkets, in that customers come for one or two things and then head out. Sure, there are some that buy something from every aisle, but you can't build a business around them. The point here is that there is no smart or good way to downsize a newspaper.

But even the shorter Post has a lot of good stuff, including this laugher from Dana Milbank on the results of his reading all his reader comments for a week--1,800 of them.

WashTimes has a piece on Obama defending his outreach to Cuba, Venezuela. Bit of a snoozer there. But can I just remark here that the rotating story box on the WashTimes site annoys me? If only because if you want to scroll back on the thing, there's that strange "Feedback" tab in the way.

Anyhow, there was some pretty good journalism getting tossed about on this holiday weekend. The Washington Post's Eli Saslow went to Texas to monitor the GWB post-presidency and came back with all kinds of details, including an account of a dinner with the Bushes and neighbors, the efforts of some Boy Scouts to penetrate the former prez's cocoon, and the usual template about how Bush gets up early, goes to the office, keeps in touch with former administration officials, etc. I'm guessing the piece weighed in at about 3,000 words.

So how did the New York Times manage to fit more into a piece one fraction of that size? Because it had one key detail: Dick Cheney isn't coming to an anticipated administration reunion. Gotta say that the Cheney bit was worth a lot more than the fact that George and Laura don't like to cook too much.

Post's Tim Craig on how D.C. is going all liberal all of a sudden.

AP goes into some detail on the Chandra Levy--Ingmar Guandique case, talking about how the thing is riddled with holes. This is one of those stories that rests on, like, "former prosecutors" and various experts.

Missed the blossom? BYT has got you covered.

The Washington Times' evolving credibility, the Motorhome Diaries, the Veterans Administration, and more after the jump.

• Last month I applauded the Washington Times for covering the Chas Freeman story, and argued that thanks to Eli Lake (formerly of the New York Sun), the paper is developing a formidable archive of enterprising foreign policy reporting. Fishbowl DC announced on Wednesday that the Times had snatched up Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chuck Neubauer, formerly of the Los Angeles Times--no small feat for a paper that runs scripture in its op-ed pages on Christmas day. Perhaps with a little more time, people will learn to ignore the Washington Times' strange founder (just as so many Beltway liberals are capable of cheering The New Republic while bashing Marty Peretz, the magazine's "racist" owner and editor in chief; and just as sophisticates across the country barely looked up from their Kellogg's Cinnamon Toast Crunch when the the New York Times announced it had accepted a cash injection of $250 million from a corrupt Mexican oligarch) and judge the paper by its merits alone.
• Speaking of the shit human beings will tolerate, someone needs to raise a fuss about this: "David Schultz, a reporter for the NPR affiliate WAMU in D.C., had his microphone, headphones, and a digital recorder seized by police and PR reps from the Veterans Administration when he interviewed veteran Tommy [Canady] at a public town hall meeting in D.C. yesterday....[Canady] was attempting to tell Schultz about the poor treatment he says he's been getting from the VA hospital. VA officials claim Schultz didn't identify himself as a reporter, failed to obtain a VA-approved waiver before speaking with [Canady], was both exploiting [Canady] and violating [Canady]'s right to medical privacy." That's from Radley Balko at Reason, who also writes that "the VA still hasn't returned Schultz's equipment." One Reason reader wasn't very sympathetic towards Schultz:

"Back in my college days a friend of mine who was a reporter for the college rag refused to leave an (improperly) closed session of some policy-making body, and then when they demanded he leave, he taunted them to have the cops drag him out of the room, as he wasn't leaving any other way.

If he knows where to take a stand, what the fuck is wrong with "adult" reporters and their news outfits that they capitulate so easily?"

Great question!

• Speaking of Radley Balko: If you give two shits about police raiding the home of a watchdog blogger, a police chief who retaliated against officers for participating in internal affairs investigations, and "police officers facing civil rights lawsuits" who plead ignorance of the law as their defense, then I suggest you add the Agitator to your RSS reader.
• And please, check out the Motorhome Diaries: Searching for Freedom in America.

That's it for me folks, I'm off to find a new front rim.

*PRETTY SOON THEY MIGHT START REPRODUCING: After victories in Iowa and Vermont, "[gay] momentum...could spill into other states," the New York Times speculates.  Closer to home, the D.C. Council voted resoundingly to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.  Jason Cherkis has some comments on that, as well as some intriguing internal polling, here.

*Marc Fisher wants U.D.C. to "raise its game" by adopting University President Allen Sessoms' proposal to bifurcating the university into a two-year community college alongside a reinvigorated, competitive four-year college:

For too long, UDC has been a high school--even a middle school--in disguise, with college professors scrambling to teach basic algebra and even some arithmetic, as well as reading comprehension and other foundational lessons to students who were simply passed through the D.C. public schools.

Would such a reorg mean even more hikes for the four-years set? No word yet.

* D.C. Police report that James Duncan of the 2200 block of Sherman Ave. NW is missing:

Mr. Duncan was last seen at approximately 4:00 pm, on Thursday, March 26, 2009 in the 2200 block of Sherman Avenue, NW. Mr. Duncan is described as a dark complexioned black male, 5’6” tall, weighing approximately 180 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair.

*The Washinton Times blushes to report that "hundreds of students" gathered for a screening of Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge in UMD College Park's Susquehanna Hall on Monday, defying squeamish Maryland lawmakers who'd threatened to withdraw $424 million in state funding.  Students defended the screening, citing the film's "educational" content and the fact that Stagnetti really got a bum deal the first time around.

*Prince of Petworth just really liked this sky.

Photograph above: "Tehran Sky" by Hamed Saber

In other not-really-news, visitors overwhelmed the District this weekend, in every possible way, crowding and closing off the streets, jamming the Mall for just-past-peak cherry blossoms, checking out and participating in parades, and so on. It was enough to make me feel anxious for a sweltering, humid weekend deep in August when the Mall looks and feels like the Sahara.

One of my weekend obsessions these days is what Andy Alexander, the Washington Post's ombudsman, is saying about things at the city's long-dominant daily. This week he's writing about how the paper doesn't do a good job of disclosing its ethical and reportorial standards, as other prominent papers do.

OK, so disclosing them to the public is one thing--good point, ombo.

But then he takes it one step further: "A separate question is whether The Post adheres to the policies in place. In my first two months as ombudsman, I've found a disturbing lack of attention to the standards and ethics rules."

Alexander then goes on to talk about how "a surprising number of staffers told me it's been years since they reviewed them." So the lack of attention to the standards doesn't mean that Alexander has found actual violations of the standards, just that people aren't, like, having in-house seminars about them.

That seems like a non-issue. If you want to talk about the standards and rules, can't we come up with some sort of wrongdoing first?

Unreal: The Washington Times sent someone overseas to cover President Obama. We are talking original WashTimes content here!

WaPo has the scoop on tourism season here in D.C.: It's up! Actually, it's down. Well, maybe in-between, or something like that. You try to figure it out.

An amazing bit of insight from a WaPo subhed on the fate of the national economy: First quarter ended on an upswing, but it is not certain that the worst of the crisis has passed. Now that's taking a stance!