Party sources tell us the fallen food was a display of various Asian cuisine — dumplings, etc, that crashed to the floor. “Nobody laughed, it was more like a collective gasp because it was so loud and shattery-sounding in such genteel surroundings,” a party witness told us.

After the display fell, a small phalanx of capable young women with earpieces swarmed and had it taken care of immediately.

Brunch was saved!

Speaking of which, the food is always a highlight: sliders, different kinds of eggs benedict made to order, cones of tuna tartare, an assortment dumplings, lobster tails, crab legs — all kinds of seafood, and an open bar.

Guests spilled out onto the lawn.

According to our party sources, brunch at the Allbrittons was definitely more crowded this year.

All the big Politicos were there… continued…

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“Former White House communicators enjoy communicating; use newfangled social medias,” Greg Greene, a Democratic operative, tweeted sarcastically with a link to Byers’ piece and a “stop the presses” hashtag. On the other hand, Rick Wilson, a Republican media strategist, called the story “terrific.”

The thing with Byers’ piece — a look at the Twitter activity of former Obama administration officials and aides — is that it doesn’t contain any news. It doesn’t even draw any conclusions. The selling point seems to be that the headline labels the gang of Democrats as “trash-talkers.” And that this trash talking takes place in public via Twitter.

The story notes former Obama adviser David Plouffe who “frequently attacks Karl Rove” on Twitter. Attacking Rove isn’t exactly new. Even Fox News has done that.

And who doesn’t air out criticism on Twitter? And in what way is partisan trash-talking new? It’s not. President Obama‘s team has always talked this way, even before they left the White House or the campaign trail. And they didn’t need Twitter to do it. It’s otherwise known as “campaign politics,” which takes place on TV, radio and at rallies. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s surrogates did it as well (Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu is unforgettable).

The story seems to observe this supposedly new phenomenon where the campaign never ends. continued…

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Fair enough. But Munro, who was largely shunned and criticized by colleagues after his incident, had another take on the matter… continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

President Obama

So Bloomberg‘s Hans Nichols opted for the next best thing: A Daily Caller Neil Munro-style shouted question out of turn. As Nichols posed his question, you could see reporters like FNC’s Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry and others snickering in the row ahead. Nichols clearly had no regrets:  “I asked POTUS if he is open to short term extension on the SPENDING side of fiscal cliff, Jan 1 deadline. #deathstare,” he wrote on Twitter. NYT’s Michael Shear seemed impressed: “In the ongoing battle for more access to the president, Hans Nichols is my new hero. Way to go.” And NYT‘s Peter Baker added, “Hear Hear.”

(Funny, this wasn’t the White House media reaction to Munro back in June.) In response to that, some online referred to Nichols as a “friendlier” Munro.

Death stare may be a little strong… continued…

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NYT reporter Peter Baker was spotted late last week on his laptop at The Westmoor Club in Nantucket. It’s an upscale members-only tennis and pool club known as the “premier private club of Nantucket.” Special attractions include yachting, a state-of-the-art spa and croquet. The website says the club has “handsome dining rooms.”

Lucky dog!

“Yes, up in Nantucket, blissfully free of heat, humidity and political campaigns,” Baker wrote FBDC when we asked him about it. “A great place to get away before the conventions and the final sprint to election day.”

Psst… another journalist in Nantucket over the weekend was HuffPost-AOL Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington, who announced over Twitter on Saturday that she was lunching there. Her table is pictured above.

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Um, we’re not even going to try to figure this sultry scene out: Sassy stylist Paul Wharton writes, “With my sweet, naughty kitten @Lena_Chase. I could stare at her all day long.”

“You, my dear, should be a politician because that is the biggest load of $#!& I’ve ever heard.” — ABC Bachelorette Emily Maynard on “The Men Tell All” episode last night in which a contestant who called her daughter “baggage” attempts to apologize after taking to Twitter to say he’s not sorry.

Kiss Cam

“Not to be cynical, but press pool was in motorcade to leave then brought back for successful kiss-cam redo.” — NYT‘s Peter Baker.

Will Smith on Capitol Hill

“Actor Will Smith in Russell Rotunda this AM. Haven’t seen him erase any lawmakers’ memories…. yet.” — Peter Cook, Chief Washington Correspondent for Bloomberg Television.

Important Question to Ponder: “Is @DRUDGE_REPORT a satirical site, like a rw version of @TheOnion? Just asking. #amazingheadlines” — Author Amy Alexander, ex-wife to Politico‘s Joe Williams.

Convo Among Three Scribes

This morning’s conversation is among The Nation’s caustic Ben Adler, GQ’s Marin Cogan and Slate’s Matt Yglesias. Adler, your ambitions to be a Boybander have significantly diminished.

Adler: Someone invented it a black and white cookie that is all just the white half and made me very happy just now.

Cogan: That’s racist!

Yglesias: Racist.

A Journo and a Gentleman

“Reprimanded some buddies of mine who catcalled a random women on the street – they were not happy about it, but glad I did it.” — Inthesetimes.com labor journo Mike Elk.

Stupid pothole or stupid scribe?

“I crashed my bike on @DDOTDC‘s stupid pothole in January. Went to ER. Just getting bill now. $2,100. Jeez.” — DCist‘s Ben Freed. Read about his January accident here. We hear he hasn’t been quite the same since.

Peter Ogburn contributed to this report.

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Uh oh.

“If you receive an Edible Arrangement & 4 mylar Happy Birthday balloons in DC today, your bike messenger just got in a fight w my cabdriver.” — The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball.

More ragging on Washington

“There is too much wrong with Washington to say ‘So and so represents everything that’s wrong with Washington.’ But it’s Lanny Davis.” — Former Obama speechwriter and The Atlantic‘s Jon Lovett. Davis is former special counsel to President Clinton. He’s a lawyer and TV commentator.

Bumpy ride followed by brisket

“AF1 was wheels up in Denver at 5:09 p.m. local time (7:09 p.m. DC time). The first 15 minutes or so were unusually bumpy, throwing folks around before settling down in time for the beef brisket on Texas toast.” — NYT‘s Peter Baker in a late-night White House Pool Report.

Headline that should make you squirm: “Woman charged with putting menstrual blood in boss’s coffee.” If you must read the story see here. The lede is wonderfully appropriate: “This is not the best part of waking up.” In a strange twist, the story reports that in certain cultures this is a ritual that promotes sexual connection. Yikes.

TV reporter gets cheeks question

“Working in TV gets you questions. stranger asked if I had cheek implants. said no moved on. now wonder… which cheeks we talking about?” — ABC7′s always dramatic reporter Stephen Tschida.

Alec Baldwin wonders about Breitbart’s death

“I asked what killed Breitbart. And all your RW zombies say I ‘mock his death.’ I’m glad these people are a fringe few. Sad.” — Alec Baldwin. To one detractor he replied, “Will, you fool. No one is mocking anyone’s death. What killed Breitbart is the question.”

Peter Ogburn contributed to this report.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Also on the RSVP list are media bigwigs (some bigger than others and some not so big at all, you decide): John Roberts, FOX, Ed Henry, FNC, Peter Baker, NYT, David Jackson, USA Today, Ron Brownstein, NJ, Aaron Lobel, American Abroad Media, Charlie Cook, NJ, Emily Pierce, Roll Call and former CNNer Kathleen Koch.  The BPC recently attracted former MPAA head Dan Glickman, now a BPC Fellow and head of a nutrition & physical activity initiative and former first lady Michelle Obama‘s, Robin Schepper, former executive director of Let’s Move! to join the nutrition project.

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U.S. News & World Report

Consider this a warning as opposed to a self-pimp alert. Bedard’s piece includes a response from yours truly. He advises that this item would only get over the top if I superimposed my face onto the Palins. I won’t.

Read the story here.

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Ben Feller, AP
Savannah Guthrie, NBC
Mike Emanuel, Fox News
Chip Reid, CBS News
Peter Baker, NYT
Jake Tapper, ABC
Laura Meckler, WSJ
Ed Henry, CNN
Han Nichols, Bloomberg (asked if Obama would invite Speaker presumptive John Boehner (R-Ohio) over for a Slurpee, referencing a line Obama used on the campaign trail over and over again this cycle)
Matt Spetalnick, Reuters

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

An amusing anecdote from NYT‘s Peter Baker from a morning pool report:

Baker wrote, “On a separate matter, it should be noted that [personal aide] Reggie Love reportedly was spotted boarding AF1 with a baseball bat (your pool missed this). [Deputy Press Sec. Bill] Burton said he brought it to keep your pool in line.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” WaPo’s Howard Kurtz asked NYT Peter Baker about his use of sourcing in a recent magazine cover story on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Kurtz: I want to ask Peter this last question, you write that “Emanuel declined to talk to me on the record.” What should we read into that?
Baker: “Exactly what it says,” he said, with a laugh of surprise at the question.

Baker wrote in his story: “Emanuel (who declined to talk to me on the record for this article) generally shrugs off most of the commentary, scorning the armchair critics who haven’t spent time in the White House or Congress actually trying to accomplish something.”

As with most reporters, it’s a given, a cardinal rule of the trade that Baker will never fess up to how much they spoke or what they spoke about. Atypical, however, are Baker’s in-depth remarks in his profile regarding his relationship to Emanuel over the years.

Julie Moos, director of Poynteronline, said there are a variety of things to infer by the way Baker reported this story. “Maybe that was part of the deal and that, in fact, what Rahm Emanuel wanted to communicate was that he didn’t officially cooperate but that unofficially, he did,” she told FishbowlDC. “You don’t know motives and you don’t know specific nature of the relationship and what you have here is an implication.”

She suggested that journalism is shifting in the areas of transparency and objectivity. “The way the sourcing was handled [in Baker's story] was maybe in that new gray area because in the traditional journalistic idea of objectivity is there is no conflict of interest, no relationship between the source and the reporter other than information,” she said. “That’s something we value. Well, obviously as journalism is evolving there are people who disagree, [who believe] that it’s preferable for journalists to be transparent about any prejudices and not have any prejudices in their reporting. In some cases, does transparency give you all the credibility you need? For some audiences, that increases your credibility, for some audiences it decreases your credibility.”

An excerpt:
“Like a lot of reporters, I met Emanuel in the 1990s when he was at the Clinton White House. He was then, as now, aggressive, relentless and driven. He always had a pithy attack line on Republicans to share or a scooplet on some modest forthcoming presidential initiative to peddle. He liked reporters and understood what made a good story. he also understood that the relationships he was building were good for him.”

After leaving the White House, Baker said Emanuel kept up their relationship. “Along the way, he stayed in touch, calling me unsolicited to trade gossip or point something out about George W. Bush’s White House that he thought deserved more scrutiny from the news media,” he wrote. “He managed to get around so much that an editor at a major newspaper at the time recalled finding Emanuel’s name on the expense account of virtually every reporter covering Washington for that paper.”

In the next graph, Baker writes, “Just a few weeks before the election, we met for one of those expense-account dinners, and he flatly rejected any suggestion that he might become chief of staff.” (So was Baker referring to his own paper when reporting about the bureau’s bevy of expense account dinners with Emanuel?)

Moos said readers prefer transparency. “Sometimes it has to do with not just sourcing but funding,” she said. “So in a story about a story between vaccines and autism, you want to know if research was funded by a pharmaceutical company so you can assess the information yourself. Sourcing has the same value. It helps readers judge the information, whether there was any ulterior motive. Especially in political stories there are often reasons to share information that have little to do with public enlightenment.”

Like Emanuel to Baker, the NYT writer declined to talk to me on the record for this story about his sourcing, except to say, “I will let the story speak for itself.”

For anyone who missed it, read Baker’s story here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• NBC’s Meet the Press: David Axelrod,Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), NYT’s David Brooks, CNBC’s David Faber, WaPo’s Eugene Robinson, U.S. News’ Mort Zuckerman.

• CBS’ Face the Nation:

• ABC’s This Week: Barbara Walters in the anchor chair with guest Sen.-elect Scott Brown (R-MA).

• CNN’s State of the Union: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CNN’s Mary Matalin and James Carville.

• Fox News’ Fox News Sunday: Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). Round table: Bill Kristol, NPR’s Mara Liasson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and NPR’s Juan Williams

• CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz: Lauren Ashburn, managing editor and executive producer, USA Today Live; Lola Ogunnaike, pop culture commentator; Robin Liss, president and CEO, Reviewed.com; Steven Levy, author, “The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.”

• CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria: Director of National Economic Council Larry Summers and Iran Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

• NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show: PANEL: CNBC’s Jim Cramer, The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell and Newsweek’s Katie Connolly.

• Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal: WaPo’s Dan Balz, NYT’s Peter Baker, CNN’s Gloria Borger and Politico’s John Harris.

• Bloomberg’s Political Capital with Al Hunt: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), Sec. Ray Lahood, Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker , Hans Nichols , Margaret Carlson and Kate O’Beirne .

• Washington Watch with Roland Martin: Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education Arne Duncan.

• CNN’s Amanpour: Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive; Michelle Montas, Haitian journalist and acting chief of the UN mission to Haiti; Amy Wilentz, author of ‘The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalie’ and Leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron.

• C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers”: Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Roll Call’s David Drucker and Politico’s Eamon Javers.

We’ll update as we get ‘em.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• NBC’s Meet the Press: Gov. Tim Kaine (D-VA), RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell & Chuck Todd

• CBS’ Face the Nation: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and a roundtable with NYT’s Peter Baker and CBS News’ Jan Crawford.

• ABC’s This Week: Christina Romer, Chair of Council of Economic Advisers and roundtable with ABC’s George Will, Liz Cheney, Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt, PBS New Hour’s Judy Woodruff and Robert Reich of The American Prospect.

• CNN’s State of the Union: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Christina Romer of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Dem. Strategist Donna Brazile, Liz Cheney

• CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz: WaPo’s Anne Kornblut, Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News and TWT’s Amanda Carpenter followed by WaPo’s Mike Wise and Buzz Bissinger of Vanity Fair

• CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria: Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, “The Edge of Disaster” author Stephen Flynn, Exec. Dir. 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow and NYC Deputy Commissioner of Counter-Terrorism Richard A. Falkenrath.

• NBC’s The Chris Matthews Show: Time’s Joe Klein, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, NYT’s Elisabeth Bumiller, David Ignatius of the Washington Post

• Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal: NYT’s Peter Baker, Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio, Nat Journal’s Jim Barnes and Ceci Connolly of WaPo.

• Bloomberg’s Political Capital with Al Hunt:

• Washington Watch with Roland Martin: Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) with panelists Robin Givhan of WaPo, Air America’s Ana Marie Cox, XM’s Joe Madison, Black America’s Deborah Mathis, Roll Call TV host & Philadelphia Tribune columnist Robert Traynham and News One’s Smokey Fontaine

• CNN’s Amanpour: General David Petraeus

We’ll update as we get ‘em.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.