New Jersey Governor Chris Christie lashed out at Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Eugene Robinson on Robinson’s home turf this morning, telling Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that people like Robinson “shouldn’t have a platform to speak, they’re so ignorant.”

Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, 85, has been relatively mum since his dismissal — by phone call — as head coach of the football team. But after undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer, and forced to a wheelchair because of a broken pelvis suffered in December, Paterno decided to open up to the Washington Post‘s Sally Jenkins in a story that ran on Saturday.

Last week, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler did a great job of disproving Mitt Romney’s claim that he created 100,000 jobs through Bain Capital, but made the bewildering judgment that the claim merited but a single “Pinocchio.”

After watching Romney at Saturday’s ABC News debate, Kessler came back with a new ruling: the claim now merits three “Pinocchios,” while the rationale doesn’t appear to have changed.

Quick! What’s one word you would use to describe Rick Santorum? …Devout? …Stylish? …Fertile? NO. The answer, according to George Will, is “fun.”

fter watching much of the opinion coverage Fox News has done on Occupy Wall Street, you could be forgiven for thinking that critiquing the rich is a sin against man. Seriously, I’m pretty sure the phrase “class warfare” has been said more times on that network in the past few months than “this just in.” But a recent report from the Washington Post and University of Michigan that shows that the median net worth of Congress members has skyrocketed in the past year has raised some FNC producer’s dander (as well it should.) The figures are astounding.

If Ron Paul were to run a third-party bid for the president, he would critically hemorrhage voters from the GOP nominee and bolster President Obama to reelection, The Washington Post‘s Scott Clement finds in a new poll.

In November, we let you know about a Washington Post report on Virginia’s Dover Air Force Base practice of dumping the incinerated remains of fallen soldiers at a nearby landfill. RELATED: Washington Post: Remains Of War Dead Sent To Virginia Landfill Now, the Washington Post is reporting that even more soldiers’ remains have been dumped [...]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned today after seventeen years in power. After announcing that he would step down earlier in the week, he came to the state house and handed in his resignation, exiting cheerfully while crowds alternatively jeered and made celebratory noises.

The Republican Party is going through a very bizarre primary period. After a year of turmoil that saw potential candidates rise and fall, and a spectacular season of semi-weekly debates that provided more awkward moments and embarrassing gaffes than a comedy writer could dream of, all signs point to the party convening around their safest bet: Mitt Romney. But with all other avenues exhausted*, Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne is asking whether it’s time for Republicans to draft someone new into the campaign.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Virginia’s Dover Air Force Base had, from 2003 until 2008, burnt soldier’s remains, sending the resulting refuse to a nearby King George County landfill. The base has since abandoned that practice — which had been typically been withheld from family members of the deceased — in favor of burials at sea.

On Wednesday, the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action PAC released a brutal, brutally effective ad against slow-and-steady GOP establishment pick Mitt Romney entitled “Mitt Romney’s America.”

In short order, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was all over the ad, awarding it a pile of Pinocchios based on assumptions and judgment calls that don’t add up to Jiminy Cricket.

The Washington Post is having an identity crisis. It isn’t their identity that is at play– it’s Sen. Marco Rubio‘s, one they challenged because the Senator misstated the exact date of his parents’ exodus from Cuba. Those few years, they contend, turn the exodus into an emigration, and their trauma into fraud. Sen. Rubio responded in kind, writing in a column in Politico that it was “an insult to the sacrifices my parents made.” He’s wrong– his parents aren’t the ones the Post has insulted, but the parents of all million or so Cuban-American exiles, and the intelligence of its readers.

There may be some argument over who was the winner of last night’s Bloomberg/The Washington Post Republican Presidential Debate, but from a media perspective, one victor is crystal-clear: Bloomberg TV. Hosting their first-ever televised debate, the finance-centric news network made the most of the opportunity, creating (and sticking to) a format that was right in its wheelhouse, and leveraging the new media effectively to compensate for its relative lack of broadcast reach.

Despite all of the media chatter about a Mitt Romney win at Tuesday night’s Bloomberg/Washington Post Republican presidential debate, the real stars of the show were Herman Cain and his “9-9-9 plan.” While Romney drove the fork deeper into fading rival Rick Perry, aided by Perry’s underwater tape-recorder delivery, it was Cain who gained the most from the debate, deftly deflecting criticisms of his economic plan, which was mentioned a Ron Popeil-esque 25 times during the debate.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich ratcheted up the temperature at last night’s Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP Debate when, in response to a question about the financial meltdown, Gingrich suggested the jailing of Rep. Barney Frank and former Sen. Chris Dodd.

Frank shot back last night, noting that “It’s interesting, the charge is failure to stop Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay from deregulating,” and called the charge odd “even by Gingrich’s standards.”

In perhaps the most interesting segment of tonight’s Bloomberg/Washington Post Republican presidential debate, moderator Charlie Rose stepped out of the debate and let the candidates shoot questions at each other. Not surprisingly, most of the question went to frontrunner Mitt Romney, and of those the most informative exchange occurred between Romney and Texas governor Rick Perry, who challenged Romney on the most contentious part of his resume: the passing of “Romneycare” in Massachusetts.

Tonight’s Bloomberg/Washington Post Republican Debate on the economy comes at a critical time in the GOP presidential race, as the last few weeks have seen some stunning shifts in momentum. While several candidates stand to lose big from tonight’s debate, up-and-comer Herman Cain is the only one who really stands to gain, and is in a nearly can’t-lose position. I predict that Cain will join Bloomberg TV as the big winners of tonight’s debate, and Mitt Romney will need Jedi skills to avoid a big loss.

This past Sunday the Washington Post published a lengthy report on a family camping site rented by Texas Governor Rick Perry that went by the name N*ggerhead Rock. Last night CNN’s Don Lemon very carefully reported on the story then asked fellow panelists if the Perry campaign can recover from even being associated from this story.

A new Washington Post report about a hunting camp that once (and colloquially, still does) bore the offensive name “N*ggerhead” is raising new questions, fairly or unfairly, about embattled GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX). The article exhaustively details the questions surrounding the camp, and while it contains a denunciation by Perry, it also carries with it the strong suggestion that Perry at least tolerated the name, once painted on a large rock at the camp’s entrance, for a time.

Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh railed against the Washington Post. The cause was an article entitled “Obama 2012 campaign’s Operation Vote focuses on ethnic minorities, core liberals”. Limbaugh seemed to feel that the Post was going easy on President Obama for not accusing him of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy? That he had promised to be “post-partisan” and “post-racial” in 2008 and this move, in Limbaugh’s mind, proves that he is “the most partisan” and…uh…”the most racial.”

Ralph Nader, Cornel West and 45 other “distinguished leaders” have joined forces in search of a “recognizable, articulate” candidate who could pose a challenge to President Barack Obama as he campaigns for reelection. Never a content Democrat, Nader says it’s “very unlikely” that he will run himself, and that this challenge is not meant to hinder Obama’s chances of reelection. “I just want all these liberal, progressive agendas to be robustly debated. Otherwise, there will be a de facto blackout of their discussion,” he told the Washington Post yesterday.

America is starting to forget September 11th, 2001. It is a natural process– much of today’s population was either not born at the time or too young to remember, and those cursed with being merely alive but not participating in the true grief of the event are growing exhausted of the burden. Many in the media will implore us to forget the day, to move on with dignity, but the temptation to trivialize the pain lest “the terrorists win” comes at a significant detriment to those who can’t forget what they don’t remember.

Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein‘s economics and policy blog as we know it is closed for business. Yesterday evening, Klein announced that he would be writing for a new blog called Wonkblog starting on Monday, a collective– located at the same URL– written by himself and the collaborators regularly featured on his current site.

Wednesday’s edition of Washington Post Media‘s free Express daily featured a headline that’s garnering viral guffaws and questions about their editorial judgment. Aggregating an AP story about former Libyan rebels rooting out Gaddafi loyalists, the paper, in an obvious attempt to appeal to the political center, headlined the item “Libya Ferrets Out Gadhafi’s Taint.”

Was the headline a prank, an error in judgment, or…something in between?

Jon Lovett, award winning comedian and Obama speech writer (“I don’t know if I am a major speech writer for the president,” he jokes in said award winning routine), is escaping the White House for the glitz and glam of the Inland Empire, where he hopes to make a name for himself as a Hollywood screenwriter. “It’s always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative,” said the 29-year-old, who is set to move west in mid-September. According to the Washington Post, Lovett has already fielded “interest from studios in a Washington-based political comedy and an updated version of “M.A.S.H.” Did Hollywood just get a little smarter? Or Washington a little less funny?