Given TPM’s editorial line, you may find it surprising that when I go out to a cafe in the morning to read papers and sip coffee I will often pick up a copy of The Washington Times along with the Post and The New York Times. I don’t think 
a lot of their political coverage but when it comes to reporting on the Pentagon and defense issues they have stuff you just won’t find in the other papers.
But every so often you get a glimpse of just what an odd operation the Times is. On Friday I was sitting in my usual cafe reading my papers when I came across a whole separate section in the day’s Times, a “Special Report”, with the headline: “Adjara, Georgia: Region is Model for Good Government, Vigorous Economy.”
On the front was a man of destiny-looking type figure with the caption: “The dynamic President of the Autonomous Region of Adjara, Aslan Abashidze, is a Georgian patriot and widely respected at home and in Europe.” Below that there’s an article “Adjara â beautiful, successful & secure: A unique region of the globe.” And then on the page’s right side an interview: “President Aslan Abashidze, visionary leader of Adjara.”
(I later found this all on the web too, and thus the supplied links.)
After a bit I figured there was something a bit funny here and I discovered the small line of text scrawled at the top corner of the front page: “A Special International Report Prepared by The Washington Times advertising Department.”
But by now I was hooked and, before I knew it, on to the second page, which has “500 Years of Family Leadership” about the Abashidze family’s exploits in Georgian history back to 1463; “President Abashidze: a biography”; and “The Political Testament of Aslan Abashidze.”
The next page has President Abashidze’s open letter to President Bush expressing condolences about 9/11, a note from the First Lady of Adjara, and then from there articles about various economic development projects in Adjara, President Abashidze’s commitment to democracy and stuff about Adjarian culture. On the religious front, surprisingly enough, it turns out that St. Matthew, the guy who wrote the ‘Gospel of’ is buried in the capital of Adjara, Batumi.
The only article about anyone else beside President Abashidze is an article on the back page, page 12, about the newly-elected Mayor of Batumi, the President’s twenty-six year old son George Abashidze. George “has long expressed his political credo as ‘STRONG CITY, STRONG REGION, STRONG GEORGIA!'”
