The Washington Posts's first ever “chief digital officer” came aboard the newspaper, where he also oversees Newsweek's online efforts, after three years of working diligently to help elect liberals and Democrats to office -- including Barack Obama. A short profile of Vijay Ravindran, in the July issue of Washingtonian magazine, noted that “Democratic strategist and entrepreneur Harold Ickes,” a veteran of the Clinton administration and 1996 re-election campaign, enlisted “Ravindran to build Catalist, a national voter database for Democratic candidates and liberal organizations. From the fall of 2005 through the election of Barack Obama, Ravindran built systems for Catalist.” His title at Catalist: Chief Technology Officer.

Catalist, which dubs itself “The Future of Progressive Organizing,” lists a who's who of left-wing groups and causes on its client list, from ACORN and the AFL-CIO to Wellstone Action, with MoveOn.org, the National Resources Defense Council and Obama for America (the official Obama campaign) alphabetically in between.

In an interview last November with the “Sepia Mutiny” blog about South Asians, Ravindran recounted his political/career odyssey, including how “I feel somewhat embarrassed that I didn't appreciate the Clinton years.”

The Washington Post may have canceled its $25,000-a-plate dinners matching lobbyists with top officials, but Publisher Katharine Weymouth is still not seeing it the way journalists do: paying for private dinners at the publisher’s private home looks like deal-making rather than news-making. Howard Kurtz’s Friday story revealed the Weymouth worldview:

Weymouth, who had not seen the marketing copy, said that "we will never compromise our journalistic integrity." But she said other news organizations sponsor similar conferences and that she remains comfortable with the basic idea of lobbyists or corporations underwriting dinners with officials and journalists as long as those paying the fees have no control over the content.

But precisely what would be acceptable remains unclear. Asked whether the forums she envisions might still be viewed as buying access to Post journalists, Weymouth said, "I suppose you could spin it that way, but that is not the way it would have been done." She said the situation would be comparable to a company buying an ad in the newspaper while knowing that it "might hate the content" on that page.

But an ad in a newspaper is public and visible, unlike a private dinner. Kurtz brought in a former Miami Herald editor to offer the newsroom view:

In an update on Tim Graham's earlier post about The Washington Post’s flier that circulated to Beltway lobbyists, the Post abruptly canceled its "salon" program to offer "exclusive access" to "Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds" for between $25,000 and $250,000. (View an image of the flier.)

According to the Washington Examiner, Post company spokeswoman Kris Coratti issued a statement Thursday morning claiming that the flier was a "draft" that hadn't been "properly vetted" before being dispatched.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz reported Thursday on black females on the Michelle Obama beat, and whether their shared race and gender produces gauzier coverage. "Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women." Kurtz found:

"Without a doubt, I identify with her as a brown-skinned African American woman," [Newsweek’s Allison] Samuels says. "Now we have Michelle and see her as a mother, a lawyer, a wife, and she's doing it fabulously." Samuels got to interview Obama during the campaign and "we had a girlfriend-to-girlfriend moment. We did connect."

Post writer Robin Givhan, one of the most syrupy writers on the Michelle beat, tried to suggest "news" wins out:

"We all bring the full depth of our experiences to the facts we emphasize, the questions we ask, the stories that get us excited," says Givhan, who was a year behind Obama at Princeton, although their paths did not cross. "But in the end, news is news."

The Washington Post and The New York Times published similar Supreme Court "analysis" pieces on their front pages Wednesday offering the theme that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts is moving boldly to the right, and the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor will have no effect on this bold shift. It sounded like two newspapers trying to cool down the controversy over judicial liberalism as the Sotomayor hearings approach.

The Post headline was "Term Saw High Court Move to the Right: Roberts-Led March Likely to Continue." Reporter Robert Barnes argued:

The court's term avoided the blockbuster decisions that at one point seemed inevitable. But its path was clear: a patient and steady move to the right led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., one that is likely to continue even if President Obama is successful in adding Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the high court -- and perhaps two others like her.

While conservatives were unhappy with the incrementalism of some Roberts opinions, Barnes wrote:

The Washington Post put the first White House celebration of Gay Pride Month on the front page Tuesday, but reporter Michael Shear left out some of the president’s most liberal and most supportive lines from the transcript. Obama pledged to be "an ally and a champion" of the gay left’s agenda and hailed gay activists "who have refused to accept anything less than full and equal citizenship."

He implied there was still work to do with all those fuddy-duddies who still followed the "worn arguments and old attitudes" from old sources like the Bible:

There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop. And though we've made progress, there are still fellow citizens -- perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones -- who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes, who fail to see your families like their families and who would deny you the rights that most Americans take for granted. And I know this is painful. And I know it can be heartbreaking.

The Washington Post’s free commuter tabloid "Express" earned its name on Tuesday. On page 8, its timeline of "Turning Points: Key Dates in the Iraq War" was so quickly assembled that it left out the capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein. It began by noting the invasion as a "bid to topple" Saddam, but never noted U.S. troops taking Baghdad on April 9, 2003. However, it did emphasize U.N. estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths, and abuse at Abu Ghraib. Here’s the complete actual verbiage:

March 2003: U.S.-led invasion begins with strikes on Baghdad in bid to topple Saddam Hussein.

April 2004: Photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison released.

Jan. 2005: Millions vote in first multiparty poll in 50 years.

Jan. 2007: President George W. Bush announces troop "surge." U.N. reports 34,000 civilians died in 2006.

July 2008: As violent deaths decrease, Iraqi P.M. Nouri al-Maliki raises prospect of U.S. troop withdrawal.

 "When they're runnin' down my country [music], man, they're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."

Merle Haggard's most famous lyric could well be adapted to express the reaction country music fans may have upon reading Joe Heim's latest review in the June 30 Washington Post.

Heim's lead paragraph begins with a drive-by attack on the genre as a whole:

Country music has always had something of an image problem, particularly among people who fancy themselves as progressives. Immigrant-trashing, gay-bashing, race-baiting, women-hating songs aren't hard to find in the country catalogue. Heck, sometimes you can find them all on a single album. 

Heim set forward this straw man in order to more effusively praise country artist Brad Paisley as a "forward-thinking" artist in the vein of say the Bush-bashing "Dixie Chicks" for his latest album, "American Saturday Night" which "celebrates cultural diversity, lionizes women, stirringly welcomes a black president and, for good measure, whoops it up about drinkin' and fishin.'"

The Sunday Outlook section of The Washington Post digged into the dregs of reality TV to plead the case for more national health care subsidies. Post Magazine reporter Liza Mundy authored a piece titled "Jon and Kate Plus Health Care: Would better insurance have saved this marriage?"

Mundy guessed that if the federal government subsidized in vitro fertilization (IVF), Kate might have had only one baby instead of sextuplets. "Possibly nothing could have saved this marriage, but one thing would have made it less fragile: a mandate for health insurance to cover in vitro fertilization."

It’s one thing for liberals to insist that it’s reasonable for taxpayers to shell out a few hundred dollars for broader immunizations and preventative health care measures. Now imagine being asked to pay for a $10,000 round of IVF. Mundy argued it would achieve the liberal goal of lowering inequality:

As NewsBusters' Tim Graham reported, the Obama administration planted Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney to ask a question at Tuesday's press conference.

The following day, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank also took the White House to task for this shameful episode. 

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," Milbank and Pitney had a rather heated debate about what transpired that included, according to Pitney, the WaPoer calling him a "d**k" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

The Washington Post is still on the lookout for the reemergence of fascism, long after its World War II heyday. Here was a weird place to find it: in fashion writer Robin Givhan’s Saturday review of the styles of the late pop star Michael Jackson:

As his career progressed, Jackson became more enamored with militaristic style. He took on the look of a toy soldier ruling over a Willy Wonka empire....There were times when the military jackets were discomforting. When they turned dark and threatening and vaguely fascist and Jackson didn't seem to understand how the images resonated in the real world. That, after all, wasn't where he was fully living.

What do you want to bet she’s thinking about how it was "vaguely fascist" for Jackson to wear the "militaristic" duds and stand next to the Reagans at the White House?

Washington Post movie reviewer John Anderson, meanwhile, found fascism in the new "Transformers" movie, from the very top of the review on Wednesday:

Like The New York Times, the Washington Post really hated the new movie The Stoning of Soraya M., which depicts sexist injustice under Islamic Sharia law in Iran. Post critic Jan Stuart complained Friday:

Iranian American director Cyrus Nowrasteh, co-writing with wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, has amplified the basic elements of Soraya's story into the worst kind of exploitive Hollywood melodrama, presented under the virtuous guise of moral outrage.

From there, Stuart then condemned how the filmmakers had a reputation for "inflating" historical events like 9/11 and the crucifixion of Jesus:

Clearly, the most important takeaway from ABC's low-rated White House forum on health care was President Barack Obama's admission that he would go outside the constraints of a nationalized system to get the "very best care" if necessary for his own family.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey noted that Obama's response should properly be seen as "a Michael Dukakis moment that exposed him as a hypocrite."

A video of the exchange is at YouTube. To the extent possible, see if you think Diane Sawyer, standing next to the inquiring doctor, looks a bit peeved as the nature of his question becomes clear.

ABC's Jake Tapper and Karen Travers understood the newsworthiness of what Obama said, and led with it in their post-forum coverage:

In the run-up to the Inauguration, Newsweek held a competition (apparently canceled) to dress mean, robotic-looking paper dolls of Bush and Cheney and declare what they would do after high office in "Give These Men a Job." Now, its corporate cousin The Washington Post is declaring on Friday a new contest urging readers to imagine the first paragraph of Dick Cheney’s memoirs, as he’s just been signed by Mary Matalin’s Threshold brand at Simon & Schuster. The headline announcing the contest on the back page of the Style section was "It Was a Dark and Stormy Eight Years." The Post’s sample first paragraph is jokey, but really cheesy:

Take three liberal policy advocates, stir into a 12-paragraph story, and strain out any dissenting voices.

That's the recipe for pushing Washington Post writer Martin Ricard's June 24 story on illegal immigrants who rallied yesterday in Washington, D.C., for a bill before Congress to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get access to financial aid for college.

In "Students Stage Mock Graduation To Advocate for Undocumented," Ricard noted "[a]lmost 400 students and their supporters" yesterday who "were drawn this year" to a mock graduation ceremony in Washington, D.C., "organized by United We Dream." Nowhere in his article did Ricard describe any of the students as "illegal immigrants," preferring instead to label them "undocumented."

Wil Haygood of The Washington Post had some fun at Republican Gov. Mark Sanford’s expense in Wednesday’s Style section, insisting that Sanford was a laughingstock, a man who went missing because he was strange and unpopular for resisting the appeal of the Obama "stimulus." Haygood began:

After all those weird stares, after he fought against stimulus money meant to help his fellow South Carolinians who've lost jobs at an astounding rate, after the blitzkrieg of complaints from Democrats, no one had to tell Gov. Mark Sanford to take a hike.

He did it on his own.

Haygood even compared the South Carolina governor’s press aide to a Soviet stooge:

He'd dropped his security detail like a bag of stale potato chips over at reelection headquarters. He'd told his press spokesman to keep it all on the hush-hush, and the spokesman clammed up like a Kremlin operative.

"It's not unusual for him to take a few days off to recharge his batteries," Joel Sawyer, the Republican governor's spokesman, finally explained yesterday.

The recent protests in Iran, as well as Hezbollah's political defeat in Lebanon days earlier, are the result of Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4.

Such nonsense was actually reported by the Washington Post Tuesday.

At this time, it appears the real Obama Derangement Syndrome is creating a nexis between anything good that happens anywhere on the planet to some presidential deed (h/t Hot Air):

In the same vein as Warner’s San Francisco Chronicle example, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy hailed Barack Obama’s fatherhood in the Monday Metro section. He spoke about being a father at a White House "national conversation on responsible fatherhood" on Friday with a hundred "mostly young black men" and their celebrity mentors. As Obama talked about his daughters being born and his swagger at parent-teacher conferences, Milloy reported:

The young adults in the audience were spellbound. At 47, Obama was younger than many of their dads, as eloquent as any rapper and revered even by the athletes that they hold in highest esteem.

Surprise, surprise.  Despite the overwhelming negative reaction to the President’s statements regarding the Iranian election demonstrations, Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler could not find more than one foreign policy expert that was vaguely critical.  In fact, the sole expert they did find to criticize the President added a caveat – a caveat of praise.

In the section titled ‘Approach generally praised’, Kessler writes:

The president's approach has generally been praised by foreign-policy experts, with one exception.

He then cites the lone dissenting voice (emphasis mine):

“She fell for his worldly sophistication” while he “admired her work helping ordinary people,” gushed a front page Friday New York Times story on Gwendolyn and Kendall Myers, both charged with spying for communist Cuba for nearly 30 years. Deciding “to give the second half of their lives new meaning,” the couple found themselves “disillusioned with the pace of change in Washington” so they once moved to South Dakota, Times reporter Ginger Thompson charmingly related, where “they marched for legalized abortion, promoted solar energy, and repaired relations with six children from previous marriages.” How loveable. (Screen shot is from MSNBC on Friday highlighting the article.)

The Times story arrived 12 days after a front page Washington Post piece, “A Slow Burn Becomes a Raging Fire: Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba,” in which reporters Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber managed, though the couple's betrayal of their country (and the people of Cuba) started during the Carter administration, to include a shot at former President George W. Bush as the cap to a lead paragraph of, in the Weekly Standard's assessment, “Updikean brushstrokes.” To wit:

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

The New York Times and the Washington Post had a pretty profound disagreement this morning on whether or not Obama has a chance to get a health care "reform" proposal through Congress this year, with the Times, predictably, being far more optimistic about prospects for the president's big-government health plan.

Times health care reporter Kevin Sack portrayed Obama-style health care "reform" as having serious momentum in the lead two paragraphs of his Friday article, "Health Care Reform's Moment Arrives (Again)."

In their heart of hearts, few in the Obama administration would have predicted late last year that they would be this well positioned by June to achieve a major victory on health care. As the economy faltered, and attention focused on Wall Street and Detroit, it seemed unthinkable that Congress would be ready to devote the summer of 2009 to the costly proposition of providing health coverage for all, a goal that has eluded presidents since Theodore Roosevelt.

But five months after the inauguration, health care dominates the domestic agenda on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Any package that emerges will preserve the country's private insurance system, at least for now. It could nonetheless bring sweeping changes, requiring that everyone be insured, creating a government health plan to compete with commercial carriers and perhaps taxing employer-provided health benefits.

By contrast, the top two paragraphs of Ceci Connolly's lead story in Friday's Washington Post seem to have come from an alternate universe:

CBS Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez wondered on Friday: "Lots of politicians get caught having affairs, as you know. The trick, though, is making a comeback. It’s happened before, but the question is does John Edwards have a political future?"

Rodriguez later introduced the segment by citing Edwards’ recent comments about his political future in a Washington Post interview: "Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, just two of the high profile politicians who’ve survived the scandal of having an extramarital affair. Now John Edwards is speaking out for the first time, since his affair, about testing the waters for a possible political comeback. But is it too late? Is the damage done?"

In the report that followed, correspondent Nancy Cordes quoted Kenneth Vogel of Politico on the topic: "His cancer-stricken wife knew about the affair, asked him not to run for president. He did anyway. He kept it from his staffers. His political committees may have paid hush money. All of these things put together just make it that much more difficult for him to find a way to rehabilitate himself in the public eye." Cordes responded to that seeming political obituary by declaring: "Not so fast. Lots of politicians, after all, have had affairs and gone on to successful careers. Crisis management experts say Edwards may be testing the waters and could still have a political future."

The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan goes all gooey for Michelle Obama again at the top of the Style section on Friday, comparing the First Lady to Clair Huxtable, or as explained by the caption under their pictures: "As portrayed by Phylicia Rashad, Clair Huxtable was an accomplished yet down-to-earth figure. In Michelle Obama, the nation now has another symbol of success and style." Givhan writes with an admiration so dazzled that you worry she’s going to faint:

She serves as a symbol of middle-class progress, feminist achievement, affirmative-action success and individual style. And she has done all this on the world stage...while being black.

Time and again, observers grasp for adjectives to describe Obama's combination of professional accomplishment and soccer-mom maternalism. It's no wonder so many eye her with awe and disbelief. Or why a minority still view her with suspicion. There have been few broad cultural precedents for what she represents.

The Washington Post printed a front-page story headlined "President Obama Wades Into Gay Issues" on Thursday, but Scott Wilson’s story displayed the usual double standard, calling the religious right "conservative" and describing the gay left with no ideological label at all. Is this really a cultural clash between the conservatives and the supposedly non-ideological sexual revolutionaries? Worse yet, Wilson suggested Barack Obama’s been displaying "centrist instincts" on the social issues:

The gay political agenda has proved to be a challenge for Obama, who since taking office has tried to drain the ideological fervor from the most divisive foreign and domestic policy debates. That agenda comprises a set of social and economic issues that at times pit Obama's religious beliefs and centrist instincts against the demands of a well-organized constituency important to his future electoral prospects.

William Jefferson, who was found with $90,000 of cash in his freezer, is now on trial for 16 counts including racketeering, obstruction of justice, and money laundering.

The Washington Post's Allison Klein did a story on his trial today, but for some reason Klein failed to mention Jefferson's party identification.

Could it be, perhaps, because Jefferson was a Democrat while he was in office, before being defeated in the previous election cycle?  (UPDATED AGAIN)

Washington, DC is considered more hip whenever the power balance shifts to the left.  I didn't say that - Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts of the Washington Post's Reliable Source column said it.  Wow!  WaPo writers acknowledge that the snoberati equate hipness and style with leftist politics. 

"Our examination of the evidence suggests that his [Obama's] influence on the city's cool/host metrics may be overstated," the duo report.  They then give as evidence a little snapshot of city hotspots, star presence, fashion, and reality TV. 

Count me impressed that WaPo writers question the whole "left is hip" zeitgeist.  My only quibble here is that the Reliable Source suggests that people in DC no longer wear running shoes with pantyhose to work.  Clearly, they are not on my bus or train route.

It’s small wonder the fawning media continue to note how “confident” and “cool” the new president is in office. The Sun King has assumed the throne and found it to his liking. Barack “L’État c’est Moi” Obama is a company man in a company town – a statist in a place where he needs only to stretch a hand to stretch the state. The federal apparatus in Washington, D.C. is vast, and designed to do one thing: grow and assume power. Obama is large. He contains multitudes.

Small wonder too that the GOP lost its identity after 12 years controlling Congress. No matter how strong your small-government credentials, or how “in-touch” you are with the folks back home, living and working at the heart of a sprawling, powerful government apparatus “dulls the edge of husbandry,” as Shakespeare might have put it. Conservatives can end up captive to Beltway norms and mores, and end up conservative no more. It’s Stockholm Syndrome for conservatives.

This is particularly so because the inherently liberal news media doesn’t question whether government should expand. So when the party of small government strays, who’s going to call them on it? Not the party of big government, and not the press. So government grows.

CBS correspondent Thalia Assuras touted the celebrity status of the Obamas on Wednesday: "The paparazzi and the press corps treat them like movie stars. They're on magazine covers and in fashion spreads. Even the presidential pooch is a celebrity. The Obamas are helping turn staid old Washington into Hollywood on the Potomac." [audio available here]

During the Early Show, Assuras reported on numerous upcoming reality TV shows being set in Washington D.C. and credited the first family for turning the nation’s capital into a celebrity hot spot. She cited Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn, who declared: "All of the power is concentrated here and power is a great aphrodisiac. And so, Washington has become the place to be." Assuras added: "And be seen. Even film stars are flocking here for a chance at the spotlight. Now the latest proof that the nation's capital is indeed the new hot spot, the arrival of reality TV."

Have you ever read a newspaper article and walked away stunned that the writer seemed to be totally oblivious to the real story or left some significant questions unasked?

Conservative readers of the June 9 Washington Post could understandably answer yes to the aforementioned question after reading the front page story "Early Lesson in Eco-Activism Comes From Economics Book."

Writer Daniel de Vise begins:

Casting about for a cause, the Young Activist Club at Piney Branch Elementary settled on something close at hand: the hundreds of polystyrene trays and plastic utensils discarded daily in the school cafeteria.

President Obama is making his big health insurance push and The Washington Post is right there beside him, helping make his “ambitious” case. The June 9 Post detailed the “inequities, shortcomings, waste and even dangers in the hodgepodge of uncoordinated medical services that consume nearly one-fifth of the nation’s economy.”

The Ceci Connolly article argued everyone agrees the health-care system must be changed. “On that point there is rare unanimity among Washington decision makers: The U.S. health system needs a major overhaul,” she wrote. 

Connolly certainly made it seem that way, including only two conservative voices who also argued for sweeping changes to our health insurance system. One of those two, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), was originally nominated Obama’s Commerce Secretary.

There were other problems with Connolly’s story, including some of the other facts she used in her article, such as the number of Americans in need of health insurance.  “Today, about 46 million Americans have no health insurance, so they go without or wait in emergency rooms for expensive, belated care,” she wrote, mischaracterizing the actual total by 10 million people or more.