A couple days ago we mentioned Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s tale of his harrowing visit with President Bush. He told a room full of journalists in New York that he had to think fast when Bush tried to insert a live power cord into a hybrid car’s hydrogen tank, saying he quickly pushed Bush out of the way to prevent disaster. The story exploded (much like sparked hydrogen) on the Internet after The Detroit Free…

I usually respond to the miserable summers in Washington by visiting friends and family in dryer, cooler climates. At the moment, I am writing from a cottage on Coldwater Lake in southern Michigan, but at several points along the road, people who have seen my D.C. license plate — some of them probably the first time they have seen one — have asked the same question. Why does the D.C. government put “Taxation without…

— If you haven’t had enough fun playing around with the Los Angeles Times’ wiki-enabled interactive editorial, take a look at John Daniszewski’s dispactch from Tehran about charges of official manipulation in the recent elections … and saying that “[n]ew doubts and divisions have come into view” regarding the Iraq war, Paul Richter tracks conservative North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones Jr. and his shifting stance on Iraq and how that’s playing back home ……

(Editor’s Note: In DCist’s pursuit of trying out new features, we’re going to introduce something we call Weekend Reading — essentially we’re going to point you to what papers are featuring in their Sunday editions, or in case of The Financial Times, their Saturday/Sunday edition. There isn’t necessarily anything local here, but considering reading the Sunday papers can be a recreational activity to some in this city, we think it could be of use. Editors…

With the rainy, cloudy weather — all dominated by the intense news coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II — it hasn’t been the most uplifting past couple of days. Since we can’t add much more to what’s been said or written about the late pope, we’ll do a survey of obituaries and headlines on the jump. But first, here’s what you may have missed on DCist. — If you’re late for…

Anyone who has passed through Dulles Airport recently knows it seems like half construction site and half airport these days. With construction of an airport rail system and other changes well under way, passengers have to pass around temporary walls in the terminal and the moon rovers skirt fenced construction sites scattered across the tarmac. The airport hasn’t exactly been wowing passengers recently: In January, Dulles rated near the bottom of a list of…

(Photo of pricey condos perched on the Virginia palisades above the Potomac River near the Chain Bridge taken by this DCist Monday at sundown.) Any faithful reader of DCist and in-tune local citizen knows that real estate is a hot topic in the area. Finding affordable property to buy is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Living in the suburbs can be just as or more expensive as living in the city….

We hate use of the term MSM, or for those not familiar with blogger speak, the “main-stream media.” It’s not that the acronym or the definition itself annoys us — it is accurate — but the use of MSM as of late suggests that there is some concrete line in the sand between journalism and blogging that will always be firmly in place. The use of MSM suggests that in the evolving media, there will…

Since others might do a better job explaining the style and substance of President Bush’s State of the Union address, we thought we’d do a sampling of newspaper and news agency ledes from around the nation and world (and we’ll add more through the morning as they become available): (Photo of the State of the Union Address from the White House)…

Since this DCist grew up in lake effect snow country, we always get a chuckle out of local reaction to an incoming snow storm. And this one, where snowfall predictions seemed to haved increased to panic levels, petered out at a modest four inches or so. (See Capital Weather for a detailed analysis of different forecasts, and check out what our friends are dealing with up in New York.) So to all those people…