Holly Pitt Young, a fundraiser in town, took issue with Matt Laslo, a D.C. freelance print and radio journalist, for announcing a Twitter accomplishment of sorts.

Thanks all – hit 5k. Now I’m going back to Instagram…

— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) May 5, 2013

don’t be a whiney bitch begging 4 followers then RT @mattlaslo: Thanks all – hit 5k. Now I’m going back to Instagram…

— hollypittyoung (@hollypittyoung) May 5, 2013

Then things got a little ugly.

Read more

No doubt PBS’ “Washington Week” host Gwen Ifill didn’t anticipate the sleeping beast she’d wake by complimenting NBC Political Director and MSNBC “Daily Rundown” host Chuck Todd.

loving @chucktodd even more than usual right now

— gwen ifill (@pbsgwen) March 20, 2013

But that’s exactly what happened last week when Todd, who is Jewish, traveled to Israel with President Obama and asked one too many questions, three to be exact. “Passover starts in a couple days, I get four questions,” Todd joked. Obama poked at him, saying, “Chuck, how many ya got?” and “Chuck, you’re just incorrigible!” Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also made fun of the reporter, saying, “This is not a kosher question but don’t hog it.”

In a day and age when journalists get verbally slaughtered online for just about anything, including breathing, some of Ifill’s followers were furious about her praise for Todd. There was nothing mild about it. Unlike some journalists, Ifill left it alone and didn’t respond.

Have a look. Read more

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith is a thief, a “jerk” and a “shill for right-wing smear merchants.” That’s according to the photographer whose picture Smith has used as his Twitter avatar for more than a year.

Yesterday Daniel Sieradski, a self-employed photographer in New York, went after Smith on Twitter. “I would really like Smith to clarify his relationship to the Washington Free Beacon, Emergency Committee for Israel and Josh Block,” Sieradski said. “He obviously works for them.” The common link is a pro-Israel cause. The Emergency Committee for Israel is a pro-Israel political group, led by The Weekly Standard‘s William Kristol. Block is president of The Israel Project, also a pro-Israel political group. And The Free Beacon was founded in part by Michael Goldfarb, a well-known pro-Israel political activist.

Smith has reported on or published reports on these groups in the past and has paid loose compliment to Goldbarb in the NYT. For those six-degrees-of-separation connections, Sieradski believes Smith is “a shill for right-wing smear merchants.”

And for that, Sieradski, a self-described “left-wing supporter of a progressive Israel,” wants Smith to stop using the photograph he took. He tweeted at Smith: “I would still also really like [him] to cease and desist from using my copyrighted photograph as his avatar without my consent.” Sieradski also linked to his personal Flickr account that contained the original photo, taken at the American Jewish Press Association 2008 Annual Conference.

“About time to change the avatar anyway,” Smith replied. Read more

Current TV “Full Court Press”  Producer and FBDC Contributor Peter Ogburn received this note this morning from a concerned viewer after revealing a recent bout of food poisoning, which, incidentally, involved raw oysters.

“Food Poisoning was the lord’s way. Too bad you survived. The lesson you should have learned is when you break the lord’s laws, you will pay the price. Next time you baby killers *will* die!!!!!”

A recent piece from WaPo’s Gene Weingarten did not go over very well with a reader. Dave Starling, from Ashburn, took time to write into WaPo about this piece, which mocked the way Southerners speak. They ran this Letter to the Editor.

“I am deeply offended by Gene Weingarten’s Magazine column mocking Southern speech [“The trial,” Oct. 21]. The only purpose of this column was to make fun of Southerners such as myself.

The Post may consider it politically correct to mock Southerners, but I do not. Weingarten owes all Southerners an apology, and The Post owes its readers an apology for publishing such offensive tripe. As an online commenter noted of the column, you wouldn’t publish anything similar mocking the speech of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican immigrants or any number of other groups. Why do you publish this garbage mocking Southern Americans?”

You might not believe this, but we actually have Gene’s back on this one. Read more

This should make things nice and cozy in the White House Briefing room.

Today The Daily Caller‘s Questioner-in-Chief Neil Munro sets his sights on the press corps, critiquing them for not asking the right questions. Or better said, asking lame questions instead of questioning President Obama about “the meltdown” of his Muslim outreach policy.

Instead, writes Munro, the press squandered its time on “low impact” questions about whether “officials timed today’s announcement of a new lawsuit against Chinese auto part makers to aid the president’s two campaign stops in Ohio.” Other “softballs” according to Munro included: 1. A question about the beautiful weekend weather and President Obama not being out on the golf course and about 2. How the President is monitoring the situation in Afghanistan.

Questions Munro thinks the media should have been addressed… Read more

Washington City Paper removed a slew of Jewish slurs from its Loose Lips section last night. The blog, written by the Jewish-sounding Alan Suderman, received a number of insulting comments about his supposed religion that had nothing to do with his stories.

Editor Mike Madden explained that most of the deleted slurs went something like this: “The gist: ‘SUDERMAN THE BLOOD-SUCKING JEW.’”

Well, it turns out Suderman isn’t even Jewish, which Madden, who is, noted in an early evening tweet: “To the commenter who keeps calling @AlanSuderman anti-Semitic names on @wcp site: Suderman is not Jewish. I am the blood-sucking Jew here.”

Madden explained to FBDC that “the comments, aside from being offensive, had nothing to do with the posts they were left on and added nothing to the discussion, so we treated them like spam. …I don’t know who left them or whether they’re on Twitter, but figured some of our readers might have seen the comments before we got to them, so I’d note them.”

As many Washington journos and pundits know too well, appearing on TV means opening themselves up to an infinite cast of critics who assess their looks. CNN Democratic Political Contributor Paul Begala took exception to a recent insult.

I prefer “fugly.” MT”@drtesla33: @alexiabutcherBegala is on tv all the time, people who have seen him in person say he’s ugly”

— Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) September 8, 2012

It can’t be a coincidence that the woman who insulted Begala has the last name “Butcher.” But all ends well that begins horribly as Washington can have that absurdly small town feel. A web developer then questioned Begala on where he gets his hair cut, wondering if it’s Louis’ Barber Shop. “Was in there a couple years back for a haircut and could have sworn you were sitting their waiting as I was leaving,” said web developer Joel Housman. Sure enough, Begala said he has gone to the barber shop for the past 20 years.

We get a lot of poisonous mail here in the Fishbowl. Sometimes the hate comes in waves and other times one sharp jab stands out in the mix.

This week we wrote about The Daily Caller‘s Executive Editor David Martosko, who, at the moment, is more obsessed with his cigars and biweekly cigar columns than anything else. During the first night of GOP Convention speeches Tuesday night, he ignored NJ Gov. Chris Christie and mentioned some of the others in his Twitter remarks. One thing he didn’t ignore that evening was an offer for readers to get cigar alerts. So we wrote about his impeccable timing.

A reader wrote in, “You people are idiots. Martosko has his pigmotional tweets automated, like everyone with a big audience. Morons.”

For starters, we’re the “idiots” and “morons?” Maybe so. But when the Executive Editor of a daily online pub feels the need to promote his cigars bullshit on an important evening of speeches, it should be noted. On a brighter note, we adore the word “pigmotional” and hope you won’t mind if we borrow that. And a “big audience?” Hilarious! We love self-promoters and braggarts! As my cohort Peter Ogburn remarked to me, “He could at least TRY to hide that it’s him.”

Thanks for writing in Martosko!