Barack Obama missed out on the much-ballyhooed Gridiron Dinner this weekend, an event in which journalists and politicians sit around very expensive tables with long white linen tablecloths and quietly give each other handjobs. Instead the president stayed at Camp David with his family, blah. Fortunately, Joe Biden attended the dinner and brought home the larfs. MORE »

How are the Washington journalists responding to the selection of new NYT op-ed columnist Ross Douthat? The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, for one, has mixed feelings: “Ross is a late-twenties-year-old public intellectual with the sensibility of a 60-year eminence grise, the range of a Hitchens, the pitch of a conservative AJP Taylor, the conscience of a Neibuhr and the intellectual honesty of his frequent sparring partner, Andrew Sullivan… Bill Kristol was just a mistake, but boy, talk about the rebound: I think Ross is the sharpest, most innovative heterodox thinker of his generation, left or right… As the chairman of the Atlantic would say, Ross is in his vertical hour. And now, one of the greatest minds in the country has one of the world’s best megaphones.” He concludes that Ross Douthat is best read while in the nude. [Marc Ambinder]

Guess what, Democratic National Committee kids working through the hot summer months while everybody else is pretty much not thinking at all about the election?

The DNC says you can sorta dress down for summer — but not like a complete whore or a bum! Read the new Dress Code and feel the wind beneath your … uh, skirt. MORE »