Drug-dealing pandas, popes fighting the war on cars, aurora borealis in the culture wars: A farewell to the free tabloid and its zany covers.

So, a little while back, a DCist editor may or may not have—but totally did—compare this websites comment threads to a very unsanitary place. But comparatively, perhaps DCist commenters aren’t so bad.

I almost didn’t believe it this morning when TBD’s Ryan Kearney, rounding up the post-Super Bowl front pages of local newspapers, spotted this clunker of a subhead in the Examiner. An attempted slight toward Giants fans, or just lazy copyediting?

Look, Washington Examiner, we know you’re bummed out about not actually having crime-fighting superpowers. We would be too! But that’s no reason to start wildly promoting the idea that pedestrian accidents are on the rise exclusively because Michelle Obama is encouraging people to fight obesity by walking.

How we enjoy it when the New York Times takes some time out of its busy routine of pontificating on the state of the modern woman to cast a spotlight on the Washington area! Yesterday, the Times’ Media Decoder blog lent some attention to the Washington Examiner’s crime-fighting abilities. Oh, you didn’t know that the paper possessed such awesome powers?

No, these adorable critters don’t have anything to do with the last post of the day. We just finished watching many hours of Planet Earth and are now looking for ways to make blogging “green”. See, Al Gore, DCist loves Mother Nature and all her creatures. Well, most of them. >> We also love all sorts of maps. Now we’ve been informed that National Geographic’s awesome array of maps are online. Let the cartographic…

>> D.C.’s Rat Czar puts the city’s war on rodents in perspective. Gerard Brown, program manager of the DOH’s Rodent and Vector Control Division, tells the Examiner, “Rats are genius. They are going to be here after we leave.” Is Stephen Hawking available for a little vermin abatement brainstorming? [Washington Examiner] >> Check out these simple steps to making politics funny. We’ll see if President Bush can pull it off at tomorrow’s White House…

Today, the Washington Examiner returns to a theme we’ve noticed (and scratched our collective temple at) a number of times over the past year. It seems that Fannie Mae and the Urban Institute have conducted a survey showing that many District families are leaving the capital for the suburbs, due, according to the Examiner piece, to poor schools, excessive condo construction, and high housing costs. Says the article:Most housing booms are “primarily driven by the…

Written by DCists Ryan and Colin Every morning, we enjoy thumbing our copy of The Washington Examiner. With strong local coverage that Express sometimes lacks, we have been glad to make The Examiner part of our morning routine. Yesterday’s edition of the paper, however, featured an editorial that is as treasonous to Washington D.C.’s interests as it is uninformed and poorly argued. The piece offers 475 irresponsibly ideological words attempting to convince us that…

The Washington Examiner’s Steve Eldridge, who writes the paper’s daily Sprawl and Crawl feature, kicked off yesterday’s column with some pretty bold claims about the D.C. government’s motivations when it comes to Metro. In no uncertain terms, Mr. Eldridge accuses the District of attempting to systematically usurp control of our regional transit system. Could it be that D.C. is actually on such a Pinky-and-the-Brain-esque mission to take over WMATA? DCist takes a look at Eldridge’s…