Photo by spiggycat

Every Sunday afternoon, I usually end up with a bunch of links that either didn’t have the juice or specifics to run on their own, or simply didn’t merit a ton of commentary outside of the facts presented. Often times, these stories melt together into a blur of little factoids that I barely remember come Monday morning. I find this annoying. Here’s an attempt to rectify the situation.

This weekend: let’s connect a Washington Post columnist’s response to The New Republic’s reportage to street crime in Georgetown in six easy, Kevin Bacon-less steps!

1. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank used his column inches on Sunday to respond to The New Republic’s takedown of the paper last week. Milbank, who covered the Clinton White House for TNR in the late 90s, refutes Gabriel Sherman’s assertion that the Post is in crisis by arguing that the Washington Post Company had a successful fourth quarter of 2009, and that the company will be raising its dividend. Okay, great. But the rest of Milbank’s argument consists of straw men (just because the New York Times, USA Today, Politico, and others have their own pressing financial issues hardly means that everything at the Washington Post is honky-dory, Mr. Milbank) and empty guarantees that the Post will, you know, pull through, buddy. Even Milbank admits that the Post’s “management has no sure-fire strategy for success” — and we’re supposed to believe that this isn’t an organization “in distress”?

2. Perhaps a reminder of better days at the Post, former WaPo food writer and organic freak Ed Bruske features an excellent investigative series from at his personal blog The Slow Cook, in which Bruske spent a week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke Elementary School, observing food preparation for students. His conclusions may not be surprising, but certainly are disappointing:

The food service provider for D.C. Public Schools, Chartwell-Thompson, had recently ditched the old method of feeding kids with pre-packaged meals from a food factory and replaced it with something they called “fresh cooked.”…As I soon discovered, there wasn’t anything “fresh” about the food being served at H.D. Cooke Elementary School. When I passed through the doors of the “Kid’s Stop Cafe,” I walked straight into the maws of the industrial food system…I was perplexed by the sheer banality of so much processed, canned and sugar-injected food being fed to our children on a daily basis…Are these really the lessons we want our kids to learn about food?

Read the whole series.