Today’s Yeas & Nays has a great piece about White House press secretary Dana Perino.  Headline:  “Subtler than Snow, funnier than McClellan.”

An excerpt:

American Urban Radio’s April Ryan says Perino is “straightforward, but can inject personality.”

“She has a comfort in front of the camera that McClellan never had,” Ryan said.

Mason’s favorite example of Perino’s style of humor occurs once a year. “Every year on the anniversary of ‘Mission Accomplished,’ reporters come into the briefing room with guns blazing, demanding a mea culpa from the White House. When it was his turn, Tony let the briefing devolve into a massive argument about the meaning of the banner and who did what when. Dana this year just scoffed at the whole thing, saying it’s the news media’s most favorite day of the year and turning it back on the room. End of discussion.”

What did that encounter look like?  Let’s go to the tape … and Helen Thomas.

Happy news over at Fishbowl:

Indeed. Super antibiotics for a super hero.

This just in exclusively to the glass-enclosed nerve center of Extreme Mortman … the yummy menu for the April 26 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.  Enjoy!

Fishbowl recognizes departing member of the White House press corps Trude Feldman.

We’ll leave the full tribute to Fishbowl.  Instead, we’ll crib from them one of the greatest Bill Clinton quotes of all time, one that we had forgotten but even today reminds us of the beautiful seasonal sounds of the Shofar — and Bill Clinton:

She did occasionally score an interview, like this one with Bill Clinton (taken from the September 29, 1998 Jerusalem Post):

“What has really been helpful to me in the last several months, and particularly in the last few weeks, is religious guidance that I have been given about atonement from the Yom Kippur liturgy, to remind me that while it is unusual for the president to be in a public situation like this, the fundamental truth is that the human condition - with its frailties and propensity to sin - is something I do share with others,” Clinton said in an interview last week with Trudy Feldman, a White House-based journalist, that was published in The Washington Post.

That may be the most outstanding product placement of Yom Kippur we’ve ever seen.  And trust us, we’ve been trying to work Yom Kippur into the routine for, like, forever.  We’ll say it again and again until the Messiah comes for the first time and returns Greater Israel to sole Jewish control: Bill Clinton is the greatest politician of all time.

Sure we’ve taken our shots at the White House press corps over the past year.  Hasn’t everyone?  After all, the White House posts transcripts of White House press briefings online, for all to see the sausage being made.  Yes, it’s an unforgiving enviroment.

But today we get wind of something good coming out the WH press corps — greater transparency.  Greater openness.  And embrace of the Web 2.0 media world.

It’s the White House Correspondents’ Association’s spiffy new interactive website, officially launching Monday.

It has great pics, fun history, and — this my favorite — links to some of the Association’s members who write insider blogs.  Plus archives of the White House Correspondents Association Dinners.  Thanks to C-SPAN, visitors can even buy a DVD of  performances like Stephen Colbert.

Of course, you probably won’t agree with all the content on the site (Colbert, perhaps?).  Just like you might not agree with everything coming out of the White House.  But cheers to the Association for assembling all this information in one place for the public.  Let’s hope it grows in content and attention.

Great snark and snide by Dana Perino today:

Q What does the President think of Karl Rove being a columnist?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think that he misses his friend Karl and wishes him the best.

Q A journalist, I mean.

MS. PERINO: What do you think of that? That would be a more interesting –

Q I think it’s terrible. (Laughter.)

Q Don’t hold back. (Laughter.)

MS. PERINO: Right. It would be shocking to know a journalist that had an opinion that they would express.

Bulls-eye!  We like that response.  Plenty of facts to back up the zinger — particularly given the following exchange earlier in the gaggle (we’ve bolded the exculpatory evidence).

MS. PERINO: I think that Americans have seen what our troops have been able to do this year, in trying — is starting to turn things around in Iraq. We’ve got a long way to go, but they have started to make some significant gains, and to pull the rug out from under them now seems to be — seems irresponsible.

Q To keep killing you mean.

MS. PERINO: Helen, every — the security situation in Baghdad is vastly improved, because of what our troops have been able to do, working alongside of the Iraqis. I can’t imagine that they would not want to fund these troops before they go home for Christmas.

(Fishbowl has the Rove exchange, too.)

We kinda like this question from today’s White House press briefing with Dana Perino:

Q Dana, in the past two months, 13 million toys have been recalled. For those of us whose children are playing with those Thomas the Tank Engines that were painted in lead, that system failed us.

Ah, but won’t the Thomas the Tank bedding still do in a pinch?

White House spokesperson Dana Perino is steadily developing a following in the conservative blogosphere.  Most immediately she’s become an overnight sensation sparked by this statement yesterday:

And unfortunately, it seems that increasingly Congress is being run by Code Pink.

Some of the reviews include:

• Michelle Malkin: “The White House smacks the Dems over Code Pink.  About time.”
• Wake Up America: “Perino is right, the Democrats and congress, are, indeed, being run by Code Pink these days.”
• Commenter at Hot Air:  “Dana Perino for Wonder Woman.”

Meantime, the Examiner’s Yeas & Nays column notes others who have started paying attention:

On Tuesday, reporter Connie Lawn asked her how it feels “when you’re parodied the way you are today and this week in Doonesbury, or the way you are on the ‘Daily Show’? How do you really feel? Does it get under your skin?”

But Perino wouldn’t bite. “I hardly have time to check it out,” she said, before moving on to the next question.

Great hit by Dana Perino on Sy Hersh today at the White House:

Q: This weekend the New Yorker magazine came out with an article claiming that this summer the President, or at least the White House in general, asked the Joint Chiefs to redraw plans to attack Iran. Is that true?
MS. PERINO: Look, you know, I’m glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it.

Meantime, looks like the freedom memo hasn’t yet hit the White House press corps:

Q Dana, a couple on Burma/Myanmar.
MS. PERINO: Burma. (Laughter.)

What, no follow-up on the Falklands/Malvinas?

It’s not often the White House press corps gets called offensive, but it happened today.

From the press briefing with White House spokesperson Dana Perino.

MS. PERINO: On the speech — your question about the speech, the drafts are circulated, and there was an error made in trying to make sure that interpreters had what they needed. I don’t know how the draft of the speech — it was not final — was posted, but it was, and it was taken down. There’s really nothing more to say about it.
Q And they were phonetic spellings of various countries — as well, we understand.
MS. PERINO: That’s not unusual. We do that for many speeches.
Q Does the President have a hard time pronouncing some of these countries’s name?
MS. PERINO: I think that’s a offensive question. I’m going to just decline to comment on it.