We understood why people were clamoring to buy last Wednesday's Washington Post, the one that declared that President-Elect Obama had made history. And sure, it made a certain amount of sense that D.C. residents started lining up at CVS that evening to snag a copy of the special $1.50 commemorative edition that came out later in the day, after the regular paper completely sold out. This was a huge moment in the history of......

It's been virtually impossible to pick up a paper copy of the Washington Post today (or any other major paper, for that matter), but Editor & Publisher reports that a special edition should hit the stands around 3 p.m. The special election edition, of which there will be at least 150,000 copies, will cost $1.50, $1 more than the regular newsstand price. Lots of other papers around the country are printing extra copies, too.......

Everyone knows the perils and regrets of drunk dialing. There's that awful feeling of waking up the next morning remembering the nastygram you left on someone's answering machine. Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema must be feeling that way today after the paper retracted his review of Commissary, citing that he and one of the owners has a previous "personal relationship" and should have recused himself. This morning the owners of Commissary also sent out an......

The second installment of a two-part post previewing D.C.'s race for the newly reconfigured Board of Education. Read the first part here. There are several competent and articulate candidates running in tomorrow's D.C. State Board of Education race. But what to make of this discouraging run-on sentence of gibberish and doubletalk taken from the District of Columbia Voter’s Guide? The statement of candidate that declares my information deemed necessary to protect the qualified experiences of/and......

We might not have Joe the Plumber or $150,000 in stylish threads, but the final days before a number of local races are decided have gotten plenty exciting. There's internal fighting, a second-time-around endorsement and a drunk-driving charge. Council Divides Over Brown and Schwartz: Not wanting to sit out the increasingly close battle for non-Democratic At-Large seat that's up for grabs, this week members of the D.C. Council started throwing their weight behind either Independent-Democrat......

DCist has been requiring comment registration as a spam-prevention measure for quite some time now, so hopefully our readers won't be too surprised to learn that washingtonpost.com will begin requiring it on every one of their blogs sometime next week. Steven Goff first mentioned it on his Soccer Insider blog today, and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive spokesperson Molly Gannon tells us that while registration has already been required in order to comment on news stories on the......

Dish of the Week: Mascarpone-stuffed dates with sea salt Where: Komi Congratulations to Komi, which received a fourth star in the 2008 Washington Post Dining Guide. A definite splurge for most diners, most visitors to Komi find themselves wowed by the clean, simple flavors of the dishes and great technique. More than just fine dining, it is a place to take pleasure in really good, simple things. One of Komi's signature dishes is the mascarpone-stuffed......

Via Notions Capital, a weeks-old Politico story we missed contains a tidbit about a funny exchange said to have taken place between perennial fringe presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader and the Washington Post editorial board.Nader recounted a recent meeting with editors at The Washington Post, who he said told him the paper wasn’t covering his campaign because he had no chance of winning. According to Nader, he replied: “Then why are you covering......

D.C.'s primary elections are less than a week away, this coming Tuesday, Sept. 9. By now you should have received your sample primary ballot, and, if you're a registered Democrat, are likely still trying to determine exactly what all those Democratic Party slates are -- stay tuned to DCist for plenty more primary election countdown posts to help you sift through it all in the coming days. The big news on the local primaries front......

We understand that there's Washington, and there's D.C. There are plenty of people who live and work in Washington, but not all of them know much about the District. So we've all been enjoying reading today's article from the Post's David Nakamura, in which he exposed that point through some hilarious interviews with some of D.C.'s Democratic superdelegates. There are 75 at-large superdelegates appointed by DNC Chair Howard Dean; 15 of them live in Washington,......

Remember the Unabomber and that itty-bitty shack he holed himself up in? Well, they're in the news again. In a handwritten letter dated July 15 to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the Unabomber -- a.k.a. Theodore Kaczynski -- complained about a museum exhibit featuring the shack in question. The museum in Kaczynski's letter is none other than D.C.'s own Newseum. The cabin, measuring 12 × 10 ft., is part of......

Move over, Don Rockwell. There's a new epicurean discussion board in town. If you can't get enough of Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema between his dining column, travel column, or weekly "Ask Tom" online chats, then you might want to take a seat at Sietsema's Table. Sietsema's Table is the newest addition to the Post's series of online discussion groups. Anyone with a washingtonpost.com account can sign in and join the group. Each week,......

You may have read Eric Weiss's story in Sunday's Washington Post, which described the District's attempts to improve pedestrian safety and encourage walking and mass transit use as a "war against workers who drive into the city." There's not much more to say about it that David Alpert and Ryan Avent haven't already said. This sums it up nicely (from Avent):Essentially, Eric Weiss went around the suburbs asking folks to bitch about the District’s efforts......

The Politico's Michael Calderone says that Leonard Downie, Jr. announced today that he is stepping down as executive editor of the Washington Post. The move had largely been expected, as reports that a search for his replacement was already underway had been circulating through town for several weeks. City Desk rightfully calls the announcement hardly news, but points out that the quick timeframe for his departure is something of a bit of a surprise: Downie......

From today's corrections section in the Washington Post.......

First: Good news from Duke, where Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) underwent what his doctors are calling "successful" surgery today on a malignant brain tumor. While the initial announcement of Kennedy's condition and potential treatment a couple of weeks ago did not include surgery as a likely option for the 76-year-old senator, Kennedy went forward with the aggressive procedure this morning. It has yet to be revealed exactly how much of the tumor surgeons were able......

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......

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......

City Desk apparently has a fantastic set of sources inside the newsrooms of the District's two main competing newspapers, and today they bring us updates on the layoffs that have been hitting the industry at almost every level. First, the Washington Times. According to a memo from new Editor in Chief John Solomon, the Times is finally looking to be a profitable operation, possibly in hopes of actually giving money back to primary owner Rev.......

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......

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......

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......

As we mentioned at the end of the day yesterday, Acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has fired Alan Morrison, the lawyer who had been preparing to defend the District's handgun ban before the Supreme Court in March. The timing of this move leads to all manner of questions about how seriously the Fenty administration actually takes this Supreme Court case, and whether the Mayor and the Acting AG are capable of putting important legal......

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......

With the books finally closed on 2007, we can take an official look at the crime statistics for the year. The Washington Post did so yesterday and found that, as expected, violent crime in the District was up last year as compared to the previous year. You can view some of the District's 2007 crime data at the MPD's site over here. It shows that 2007 saw 181 murders, up 7.7 percent from 2006, which......

Over at Huffington Post, Andrea Batista Schlesinger of the Drum Major Institute has a nice roundup of what she thinks are the best public policy initiatives of 2007. Number six on her list is the D.C. Voting Rights Act, and she has a solid grasp on why congressional representation for the District is so important:Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C's indomitable delegate, can debate with the best of them, but without the D.C. Voting Rights Act, neither......

The Washington Post says that taxicab drivers are handing out surveys to riders about the impending change from zones to meters. Drivers have until Jan. 8 to hand in public comments to the D.C. Taxicab Commission and the mayor's office, which means that if you get in a D.C. cab between now and then, odds are pretty good you'll be asked to complete a survey. We haven't spotted one of the surveys ourselves yet, but......

Finally legal and ready to party This week the Washington Post published an article featuring three local pastry chefs creating recipes around exotic fruits. The article was a nod to the recent change that allows the legal importation from Thailand of rambutan, litchis, longans, new varieties of mangoes, and the "queen of fruits", the mangosteen. Many of these fruits were available fresh in Asian markets, but were often smuggled from Canada. The fruits will begin......

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......