Jamison Foser over at Finding Gravity brings the receipts in a great takedown of the aforelinked Washington Post’s all-but-useless capsule approvals of Trump’s nominees, highlighting their five worst endorsements. I only wish he'd done all of them.

The Washington Post Editorial Board weighed in over the weekend on Donald Trump’s cabinet picks:

We would not have picked any of his choices for our hypothetical Cabinet. But, as we have argued for decades, that is not the standard we — or U.S. senators — should apply when evaluating potential executive nominees for Senate confirmation. The president-elect won the election. He deserves deference in building his team, and the Americans who elected him deserve an operational government, absent disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.

By that standard, all but two of Trump’s planned Cabinet nominees seem confirmable — as well as all but two of his picks for Cabinet-rank jobs that require confirmation.

These are little more than thumbs-up or thumbs-down for each, with a sentence or two capsule review (at best; some have no commentary at all).

For example, for Doug Burgum, nominee for Secretary of the Interior:

The outgoing North Dakota governor and Stanford MBA built a successful software company that he sold to Microsoft.

I’m unclear how this is relevant experience for running the Department of the Interior—unless, perhaps, there’s a plan to sell federal land to Microsoft.

Or for Sean P. Duffy, nominee for Transportation:

The former reality TV star is also a former congressman from Wisconsin. He’ll still need to study.

That’s it. Remember, the Post Editorial Board’s criteria for approval is they’re “absent disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.” I guess “reality TV star” is the new mark of competence in the coming Trump regime.

This is especially deep brown-nosing following the Post’s cowardly refusal to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle. The editorial board should be ashamed of itself.

Marissa J. Lang, with a beautiful story for The Washington Post:

The table was set. The pastries arranged. A white tablecloth dangled placidly in the early morning mist, surrounded by 12 golden-hued high-backed chairs.

Five decades ago, a dozen friends gathered here, on the National Mall, for breakfast. They wore morning coats and floor-length dresses, dined on oysters, drank champagne and danced together as a string quartet played in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial.

The extravagant scene on July 19, 1974, drew in a Washington Post photographer, who captured the moment in an image that would ricochet around the country in newspaper reprints.

While I’d seen this photo in passing, I never gave it much thought. It was not a story I expected to move me, but by the end I was wiping away some dust from my eye.

(Via Steve Herman by way of Michael B. Johnson.)