DCist was pleased to learn today that we've been selected as the official blog to represent the District of Columbia at this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. DCist will be part of the State Blogger Corps, which is a new cadre of bloggers who cover state and local politics that the Democratic National Committee has invited to sit with their own delegations on the convention floor. You can find a full list of......

A lengthy stream of names, many of them seriously big time folks, keeps rolling out of the Washington Post newsroom today as senior reporters, editors and columnists are coming to final decisions about their buyout offers. The face of the Post is about get a lot younger and a lot less familiar to its readers. The two biggest names to come out of today's round of buyout acceptances are longtime sports columnist Tony Kornheiser and......

Fishbowl DC reports that Jonetta Rose Barras, longtime political analyst for WAMU's Friday program, The Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta, is leaving the show. City Desk has more, citing differences between Barras and WAMU Program Director Mark McDonald and calling the move a firing. Barras told the Washington City Paper that she felt there was a large disparity in her salary, especially since the program expanded its coverage in January to include Maryland and......

Not very many media outlets have really mastered the art of producing web video, but Slate's team of online video producers tend to stand out from the pack (see their Larry Craig arrest report reenactment for further evidence). Via Matthew Yglesias, we get this truly funny report on the stupidest bike lines in America (and elsewhere in the world). Slate ended up giving the top honors to a 20-ft. stretch of bike lane they......

Color us honored! When we thumbed through the massive, two-lb. "Best Of D.C." edition of this week's Washington City Paper, we were surprised and delighted to find that publication's readers had awarded us "Best D.C. Web Site." Best locally-focused blog, OK, but best web site? Washingtonpost.com was a runner up? Allow all of us here at DCist HQ to deliver a collective "gee golly." That was just awfully nice of you, City Paper readers. Make......

Michael Calderone over at the Politico broke the news today that D.C.'s original foul-mouthed political blog, Wonkette, is leaving the Gawker media empire. Managing editor Ken Layne will personally take the helm of the newly independent Wonkette, as he confirmed in a post on the site today. There's some pretty thinly veiled subtext in both the letter from Gawker publisher Nick Denton that Calderone posted, and in Layne's announcement, that Layne and Denton disagree about......

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and the Washington Post racked up an extraordinarily impressive six of them. It's no surprise that the Public Service category went to Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille for their investigative series into the poor conditions at Walter Reed Hospital. The Breaking News award for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was also a good bet. Some of the other awards were slightly more......

No, we're not talking about the popular HBO show that white people seem to love. The Post has brought back to life D.C. Wire, their blog on local politics that suffered a lonely death in late 2006, when the newspaper's beat reporters couldn't figure out what the heck the thing was for. After taking all of 2007 off, the blog was quietly reintroduced last week; so far, it's got eight posts on everything from Michelle......

You've no doubt already read this impossibly horrible column penned by conservative freelance journalist Charlotte Allen that ran in the Washington Post on Sunday, but just in case you haven't gotten the outrage out of your system, consider this comment thread the place to do just that. We hardly know how to begin to wrap our brains around this series of events: Allen, the same woman who wrote the Weekly Standard story dismissing the Jena......

There's been a lot more attention placed on the goings on at D.C.'s Child and Family Services Agency since the gruesome discovery of the murdered daughters of Banita Jacks, and rightly so. But two different stories in today's edition of the Examiner paint nearly opposite portraits of what might be going wrong inside the agency. First is Bill Myers' story, about how the principal of Latin American Montessori Bilingual School called the city’s abuse hot......

Thanks to the 276 different people who took the time to email us this New York Times blog post from Jennifer "I probably shouldn't make pathetic attempts at insults with a middle name like" 8. Lee. Apparently our reputation for obsessing over a) transit issues and b) people who try to compare D.C. to New York City are well known at this point. So apparently Ms. Lee was recently a visitor in our fair city,......

Major shakeups are afoot at the Washington Post. First, Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of late Washington Post Co. chairman Katharine Graham, has been named chief executive of a new division to be called Washington Post Media, which will place both The Washington Post print edition and washingtonpost.com under the same direction. City Desk asks the key question here: Will this mean the end of the 3.4-mile trek between the two operations? For the uninitiated: The......

Forbes has put out a list of what it's calling America's "Most Lustful Cities", but what is in fact just a list of cities that sell a high percentage of contraceptives compared to their populations. D.C. comes in 6th on the list, which doesn't include any of the typically thought of as sexy U.S. cities, like Miami, New York or San Francisco. 1. Denver, Colorado 2. San Antonio, Texas and Portland, Oregon 3. Seattle, Washington......

While the Washington Post is our hometown newspaper, it's also part of a larger corporate behemoth. And like many a corporate behemoth, this one is seeing some turmoil in the ranks. In recent days, large ads have been appearing in Metro stations decrying an ongoing labor dispute between Post production workers -- the folks who actually put the paper together for delivery -- and Post management. The production workers, part of the Communications Workers of......

The AP via Baltimore's WJZ-TV reports the issue of same-sex marriage rights in Maryland will pop up again next week. This time around, it's the state legislature and not the courts who get to rule on the matter. Back in September, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that laws banning same-sex marriages did not violate the state constitution. This contradicted a January 2007 ruling in the Baltimore Circuit Court that the laws were discriminatory and......

Just a few days from now, the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire will kick off its fifth and final season. Considered one of the best and most realistic portrayals of crime and corruption in a struggling city (Baltimore, in this case), the show traces the thin line that divides the good guys from the bad. Whether cops stealing stacks of cash during drug busts or thieving dockworkers pooling together money for a stained-glass window......

Metro fares aren't the only thing going up in price in D.C. If you're in the habit of purchasing a copy of the Washington Post from a vending machine or a sidewalk hawker on your way to work in the morning, take note: the cost of the daily paper is about to go up by 15 cents. The Post's newsstand price will become 50 cents beginning on Dec. 31. The company cited a decline in......

The thinly veiled sexism oozing out of today's Examiner column by veteran local politics observer Harry Jaffe is hard enough to take, but to whomever thought up this gem of a headline, be they copy editor or author, DCist salutes your willingness to go boldly where no human beings in the 21st century were thought to be capable of going anymore. Yes, if the recent Office of Tax and Revenue scandal has taught us......

Last week's comment section was full of goodness (and a technical glitch, sorry). From schools to traffic to illegal second timeouts, there was plenty to go around. The comment of the week comes from G Lover Park (who also narrowly missed the coveted best username of the week award). G Lover had a brilliant theory: Yet more evidence of vast Supermarket Industrial Complex, more casually referred to as the Perishable Triangle. The major brands get......

Good morning, Washington. Are ya ready for some embezzlement scandal news? Of course you are! This morning's update comes not from the embattled Office of Tax and Revenue, but rather from the D.C. Public Schools front office, as the Examiner reports that Eugene Smith, the former director of internal audits for DCPS, entered a guilty plea yesterday to charges of stealing nearly $50,000 from a charter school account. Smith was fired by the school system......

While the name might promise simple sweetness and pleasantries, the exhibit You Catch More Flies with Honey…, now on display at Carroll Square Gallery, is not simple or superficial. Curated by Hemphill Fine Arts, the exhibit features five artists in the first annual OPTIMA exhibition, which showcases artists whose works have natural connections and form dynamic relationships when viewed together. Bright color infuses the gallery as each artist uses a cheerful color palette to hide......

"It pissed me off." That is how R.E.M.'s Mike Mills described his reaction to seeing firsthand the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the stagnated recovery effort since. Though his band has a history of political involvement, Mills himself has shied away from activism until now. Having seen the suffering of New Orleanians in the aftermath of Katrina, he declared, "No one can appreciate the destruction without seeing it and I was very aware that......

‘Tis the season for D.C.’s galleries to hold their annual group shows, hoping to entice holiday shoppers with a variety of artwork at affordable prices. Until December 30, U Street’s Nevin Kelly Gallery is hosting its third annual Attainable Art exhibit, with all work priced under $1500, and many pieces in the $200-600 range. Even if you don’t have many art lovers in your shopping queue this year, group exhibits like this one give visitors......

If you've taken a D.C. taxicab since the stroke of midnight last night, you may have been surprised by a cab driver insisting that you pay an extra $1 gas surcharge. Didn't the gas surcharge expire in September? It did, but last week the D.C. Taxicab Commission quietly passed an emergency measure to bring back the $1 fee, beginning at 12:01 a.m. this morning and lasting until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. “Prices......

The Onion's regular American Voices segment takes on the D.C. HIV/AIDS epidemic today, proving once again that there is no holy mad cow disease too sacred for America's Finest News Source.......

>> D.C. police will spend $3 million in the 3rd Police District on an anti-gang initiative. [WaPo] >> Montgomery County Del. Jane Lawton, 63, died of an apparent heart attack this morning, collapsing after giving a speech in downtown Washington. Lawton also served as a four-term mayor of Chevy Chase. [Md. Moment] >> If you have an elderly relative living at either Carolyn Boone Lewis Health Care Center in D.C. or Ruxton Health of......

Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving, D.C. Normally we like to get you your headlines in the a.m., so we hope you'll forgive us for rounding up the news later in the day today -- we needed to spend the morning rolling our much fatter selves out of bed and calling our doctors for a new Lipitor prescription. What do you mean, it isn't necessarily a good idea to put gravy on pumpkin pie? Breaking News: People are Shopping!:......

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, our picks here at DCist look a little slim this week. Fear not, the authors will return to our city next week with more books they think you should buy as holiday gifts. In the meantime, enjoy and be thankful for your pie. MONDAY: Mr. The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw, is back to give us another "epic portrait" of a defining era in U.S. history, this time the 1960s in......

The enraged D.C. Council on Thursday circulated the first photo released to the media of former Office of Tax and Revenue employee Harriette Walters, who stands accused of masterminding the theft of at least $31 million from the District's property tax coffers. Walters is pictured wearing one of the many dresses she is said to have purchased from Neiman Marcus with her ill-gotten money. You can also see her tax office employee badge. No other......

Dynamic, lively, stunning, soaring. These are the words used by Smithsonian officials and architect Spencer de Grey to describe the new Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, home to both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. With a blend of modern aesthetics and historic sensibilities, the new courtyard is a gorgeous space that the Smithsonian plans to use to hold public......