Last night (July 30) at the JW Marriott Hotel, just blocks from the White House, Fred Thompson's fledgling presidential campaign hosted a $1,000 per person reception as he tries to build the war chest necessary to run. The long list of names on the invitation include many former Thompson aides and players in Tennessee politics, but more than that it also includes many notable Washington figures.

Here's the list:

In my Post Watch column in the August issue of The Washingtonian, I wrote that the Washington Post had blown its opportunity to make a success of its radio station, WTWP -- 1500AM. The station's temporary morning radio jock -- David Burd -- did not take kindly to my assertion that ratings for his time slot dropped when he replaced Washington Post star Tony Kornheiser.

Sporting an unkempt beard along with his signature T-shirt, jeans, and square glasses,  pop-critic Chuck Klosterman   was treated like a rock star by an audience of 20-to-45-year-olds crowded last Monday night into the Penn Quarter Olsson’s bookstore.

“I feel a close connection to [Klosterman],” gushed a star-struck employee to the audience as she introduced him, tapping into the cultural status Klosterman has acquired—among certain crowds, he’s as notorious as some of the celebrities he has interviewed. In addition to writing about Britney Spears, Bono, and Morrissey for Esquire and Spin magazines, Klosterman has gained attention as a savvy cultural critic and staunch pop-culture defender.

He was in town to promote the paperback release of his latest book, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, which consists of three parts: celebrity profiles; opinion pieces and theories on life and popular culture; and a short fictional story.

Klosterman answered questions from the audience, chatting about politics, his disdain for the latest crop of reality-television shows, and his failed past relationships.

The Washington Post is struggling to unveil a political section on its Web site that it hopes will draw political pros and junkies.

But developing the new section has created conflict between the downtown DC newspaper staff and the Post’s Internet operation across the Potomac River in Virginia.

It’s also focused the ire of reporters on the management style of Susan Glasser, assistant managing editor for national news.

No one was talking on the record, and it’s hard to determine whether displeasure over Glasser amounts to typical personality differences or serious divisions within the national staff. But there is no question that national desk morale is suffering.

“We’re working very closely with the Web site,” Glasser said.

Sources at Washingtonpost.com said the relationship with Glasser “is improving.”

But reporters and editors working on the new political Web section report that Glasser and Bill Hamilton, who together run the newspaper’s national coverage, are tangling with Web site personnel over who will control the content of the new feature, which might be called “The Trail”—or another name yet to be determined.

Glasser won’t call it a blog. She asks that reporters call it a journal. Reporters say Glasser and Hamilton expect them to feed the new “site within a site” often; in the process, Glasser and Hamilton have insinuated that Post reporters are getting beaten too often on political stories.

Conflict over the new Web feature has exacerbated longstanding frustrations with Glasser, which began with the unceremonious reassignment of veteran reporter Chuck Babington from the senior political staff. He was welcomed by the Business section.

“They treated him like crap,” one reporter told The Washingtonian.

Glasser came to the Post from Roll Call in 1998 and has distinguished herself as a reporter and editor. She helped edit the Clinton impeachment coverage, during which she worked closely with White House reporter Peter Baker. They married and left to cover Moscow for the Post. Her star rose when she improved the Outlook section; she then won the coveted top national editing job earlier this year.

This just in from the Washington Post internal message board:

"Hello Everyone,” it begins invitingly.

It then explains that the phone numbers of the clients of "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey have been posted on the Internet. It then says:

"If your phone number is among them, please contact Sue Anne Pressley Montes for an interview as soon as possible."

The message didn’t say whether anyone owning up to being one of Palfrey’s clients would be exposed or become a source.

Or whether the message was a joke.

—By Ruth Samuelson

For years, journalist Connie Schultz was a single mother working at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Then her life underwent some dramatic changes: In 2004, she married Democratic Congressman Sherrod Brown of Ohio. The following year, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper column. By the end of 2005, her husband had announced he was running for the Senate. Several months later, this self-described “ardent feminist” took a leave of absence from her job to join him on the campaign trail. Last year, her first book came out—Life Happens, a collection of her columns. For the rest of that year, Schultz helped her husband in his Senate race, which he won.

Schultz writes about these experiences in her new book, . . . And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir From the Woman Beside the Man. (Read a review here.) She’ll be at DC’s Politics and Prose bookstore (5015 Connecticut Ave., NW; 202-202-364-1919) Monday, July 9, at 7 pm. Read below for a conversation with Schultz about her book and her new life in Washington.