In 1989, Washington Post Managing Editor Leonard Downie Jr. asked staff to refrain from lending their names to nonprofit organizations, saying: “They’re not inviting you, they’re inviting the Washington Post.” But Daniel Brandt of Public Information Research notes in his May 7 Internet posting that “apparently this ethics thing does not get in the way when the ruling class comes calling.” Brandt cross-referenced the online edition of Who’s Who in America for Post staffers and executives with the 1992 membership of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (CFR is that well-known cabal of the “best and the brightest,” the wellspring of global conspiracy theories that gave us the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and an unwavering belief that it was necessary to defend South Vietnam at all costs.) Brandt found 13 Posties who were CFR members: Granny Graham; board member James E. Burke; Downie and his evil twin Managing Editor Robert G. Kaiser; Editorial Page Editor Meg Greenfield; columnists Charles Krauthammer, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Stephen S. Rosenfeld; Washington Post Magazine Publisher Anne Karalekas; and editors/writers Jim Hoagland, David Ignatius, Lee Lescaze, and Walter H. Pincus. Brandt says the list “suggests that if you’re suspicious of the ruling class, here is one newspaper you should stop reading.”