Corruption
Dear Watchers:
Apologists for the Williams administration are busy claiming that a
little government corruption isn’t such a bad thing. To review: City
Administrator Robert Bobb steered some single-source contracts to
Oakland, California, cronies of his. One of these contracts went to
Oakland city councilmember Jane Brunner, who fulfilled one of the
requirements of her contract by plagiarizing the unions’ position
paper on why the city should contract exclusively with the unions to
build the new ballpark and submitted it to the mayor as the city’s due
diligence study on why the city should sign a Project Labor Agreement
with the unions (see themail, June 29). DC Auditor Deborah Nichols wrote
a report exposing the illegal sole-source contracting (http://www.dcwatch.com/auditor/audit050603.htm).
In response, some DC reporters, like Jonetta Rose Barras on the DC
Politics Hour and James Jones in the Washington City Paper (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/lips/2005/lips0701.html),
are minimizing the problem, saying, “Nothing to see here; no problem;
look away.” Jones even buys into the administration’s transparently
false claim that Nichols is just a disgruntled job seeker, that this
controversy is nothing but a clash of egos, and that there is some kind
of moral equivalence between engaging in corrupt contracting practices
and exposing them. In an unusual role for her, even Councilmember Kathy
Patterson acted as an apologist for the administration’s illegal
contracting. At a hearing on the issue, Patterson asked Bobb softball
questions that excused the practices; the questions had been written for
her by administration aide Gregory McCarthy, who coordinated them in
advance with Bobb.
Mayor Williams’s and Bobb’s response to the exposure has been
arrogant defiance and promises of more of the same to come in the
future. So it’s time to go back to the basics, and explain why
government corruption is bad no matter which administration does it, and
no matter whether the mayor is named Barry or Williams. Corrupt
contracting wastes the taxpayers’ money and distorts spending
priorities. When politicians can reward their friends with contracts,
without an effective check on how the contracts are awarded, government
funds are spent on what profits the friends rather than benefits the
people as a whole, and the government gets shoddy, second-rate work in
return. This is corrupt government whether or not politicians are
monetarily rewarded for their favors; most often, elected officials will
not expect or receive personal payments in return for contracts. Mayor
Barry did not enrich himself when he enriched his administration’s
friends. What politicians get is support and loyalty, in addition to
money for their campaigns. I seriously doubt that anybody in the
administration pocketed any personal funds from the unions for
negotiating the Project Labor Agreement with them, but the politicians
expect and will receive the unions’ campaign support and
contributions, all paid for by the taxpayers’ money.
These first contracts exposed by the Auditor’s report are not for a
lot of money, in the scale of the government’s budget. But they are an
auger of things to come, of the way that our money will be spent by this
government on a ballpark project that will cost a billion dollars — if
the accounting were honestly done, and all the costs counted. And beyond
that, of the way that our money will be spent on the surrounding
Anacostia redevelopment projects whose costs will dwarf the cost of the
ballpark. They are a warning that we can either heed or disregard, but
if we disregard them now we shall pay dearly.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Independence Day Trash and Recycling
Collection Schedule
Mary Myers, mary.myers@dc.gov
In observance of Independence Day, most Department of Public Works
services will be suspended on Monday, July 4. There will be no city
trash or recycling collection, no street or alley cleaning, graffiti
removal or nuisance abatement. There will also be no parking
enforcement, including meters, residential and rush hour lane
restrictions, and no booting, towing or abandoned vehicle removal on
Monday. The Fort Totten Trash Transfer Station will be closed. All
services resume on Tuesday, July 5.
Once-weekly (Supercan) trash collection will "slide" one
day for the remainder of the week, beginning Tuesday, July 5. In the
twice-a-week trash collection area, Monday and Tuesday trash and
recycling collection will slide one day. Thursday and Friday trash and
recycling collections will be made on the regular day.
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Watch Those Fines
Ed T. Barron, edtb@aol.com
In a very unheralded manner, the fines for an obscured license plate
were recently increased from $25 for a violation to $500 per violation.
The reason for this is that many DC drivers have put plastic covers over
their plates that preclude red light or speeding cameras from reading
the license plates. The plate number can be read using these plastic
covers only from directly behind the rear plate (or in front of the
front plate). From any other angle on the side or above the plate number
cannot be read. I have seen a few of these on cars in DC. The plastic
covers are readily available on the Internet or by phone or mail using
the ads in the automobile magazines. The fine cost is now too high.
Drivers beware.
And, while speaking about license plates, my front plate was
purloined (bracket and all) from my car when the car was
uncharacteristically parked on the street in front of my house. The car
is normally in the garage at night, but last Thursday evening it was
parked in the street for a few hours because house guests were using the
driveway. After getting a police report number I went to the dreaded
Department of Motor Vehicles office on C Street, NW. Found myself on a
line of about thirty folks but was out and on my way with new plates,
registration, and sticker for the windshield in less than twenty
minutes. The DMV seems to be using a very fast system for routing
customers to, and through, the right windows. Well done.
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International Legislators Vote Overwhelmingly
in Support of DC Voting Rights
Kevin Kiger, kkiger@dcvote.org
On Saturday, July 2, the General Committee on Democracy, Human Rights
and Humanitarian Questions of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) overwhelmingly approved the amendment
brought forward by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) urging the
United States to provide equal voting rights for the District of
Columbia. The passage of the amendment comes one day after nearly three
hundred supporters of DC voting rights took part in the “Equal Voting
Rights for DC Rally” on Freedom Plaza. Rally participants encouraged
members of the OSCE to support and pass the Norton amendment.
The language of the amendment “calls on the Congress of the United
States to adopt such legislation as may be necessary to grant the
residents of Washington, DC, equal voting rights in their national
legislature in accordance with its human dimension commitments.” With
approximately fifty OSCE parliamentarians voting, only three voted
against the measure, including Senator George Voinovich (R-OH). No calls
were returned from Senator Voinovich’s office at the time of this
release. The Norton amendment is now part of a draft resolution. A vote
on the draft resolution will take place on the morning of Tuesday, July
5. Sponsored by Rep. Norton, the amendment was cosponsored by U.S. Reps.
Mike McIntyre (D-NC), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD),
Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and by Senator Jerry Grafstein of Canada and by
Barbara Haering of Switzerland.
For more information: read the approved amendment to the OSCE
resolution supporting full congressional voting rights for DC, passed
July 2 (http://www.dcvote.org/advocacy/material.cfm?leg=ID36);
the Washington Post article “Think Locally, Ask Globally,” by
Mary Beth Sherdian (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/01/AR2005070101959.html);
the Equal Voting Rights for DC Event press release, dated July 1 (http://www.dcvote.org/media/release.cfm?releaseID=190);
and the DC city council’s Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe Emergency Resolution of 2005, passed unanimously on June 7 (http://www.dccouncil.washington.dc.us/images/00001/20050615145122.pdf).
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As I have noted in past issues of themail, in recent weeks Mayor
Williams’s travel schedule has been busier than ever. Writing in the Washington
Post last Thursday, Lori Montgomery noted that, “the mayor will
have spent all of part of 57 days out of the city so far this year —
nearly one in three. That means Williams’s 2005 travel schedule has
been busier than any since his 2002 reelection. In 2003, the mayor spent
all or part of 107 days out of the city, or about 29 percent. Last year,
his trips ate up 97 days, or about one in four” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/29/AR2005062902742.html).
In the past three weeks, Mayor Williams has visited Beijing, Chicago,
London, Puerto Rico, and Ocean City. Last Thursday, he made a two-day
trip to Los Angeles in order to represent the National League of Cities
at the swearing-in ceremony for that city’s new mayor, Antonio
Villaraigosa. Upon returning to DC, Williams turned around briefly and
on Saturday morning again left for a four-day “private trip” to an
undisclosed location. The press office for the executive office of the
mayor has been so sensitive to the issue of the mayor’s frequent
absences that it now refuses to announce his trips more than a day in
advance. If he were a student in DC schools, the truant officer would be
hunting him down as an incorrigible absentee.
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Representative Ray Browne Responsible for Most
Proclamations
Patrick Pellerin, pellerin@verizon.net
Per Steve Leraris’ comments about the proclamations from around the
country in support of voting representation for DC residents in the
Congress [themail, June 29], the person responsible for almost all of
those proclamations was US Representative Ray Browne (D-Shadow). Through
hard work and determination he received proclamations from city councils
or mayors in large cities, such as Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
New Orleans, and many others, and from small town America including
Baker, Louisiana, Lansing, Kansas, Clanton, Alabama, and many others as
well.
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Mr. Ladduwahetty [themail, June 29] can rest assured that plenty of
progressives find the recent Kelo v. New London decision to be
troubling. Here’s something I wrote in another forum: "Even
though this case is attributed to the liberal grouping of Supreme Court
Justices, I think it needs to be looked at more in terms of the Court’s
general treatment of citizens vis-a-vis the government. In the civil
liberties area in particular, more and more cases have upheld the
government versus citizens (reduced scope of Miranda, citizens have to
produce identification if requested by police officers, etc.).
This case is not really about capitalism at all, unless you are a
proponent of what Immanuel Wallerstein called “state capitalism,”
which was the term he used to define the then Soviet Union and its
approach to economic development. I consider myself progressive-left
leaning (although my college friends would probably think of me as
conservative now -- particularly my stands with regard to
“disorder”), concerned with “equal protection under the law”
(14th Amendment), as well as a balancing of community concerns with
individual rights, which is at the heart of historic preservation law
and philosophy and the foundation of my work as a community advocate
working to repopulate and revitalize the center city.
To really understand land use politics, I highly recommend reading
either or both “The City as a Growth Machine” by Harvey Molotch (American
Journal of Sociology, 1976) and Urban Fortunes: A Political
Economy of Place by John Logan and Molotch. (For more on how land
use issues work in DC, one of the best things to read is chapter 4 of
the book Dream City by Henry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood.) If you are
intimately involved with such issues in your communities, these writings
will transform how you think about these issues. They did for me, and I
was already pretty knowledgeable (and cynical) about the back room
aspects of how all this works. The entries below from my weblog, http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com,
are specifically about these issues and DC. “Why I don’t always
favor ‘community’ development corporations,” “Even more on
eminent domain — DC style,” “More on eminent domain,” and the
entry from Sunday, April 10, 2005 (in the archive), “City Business as
usual — land giveaways, diminishing urban design.”
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[In response to Lea Adams, themail, June 29] I believe the issue in
the complaints against WPFW (I’m filing one) is not about programing
diversity as much as diversity in hiring. The station has no obligation
to hire me (or Rhyme Kakthouda). It is obligated to open its hiring
process for paid staff positions to other persons of color who may wish
to apply. We charge it has failed to do so.
The charges of sexism concern primarily the west coast station KPFA,
not WPFW. In April 2004, while serving on the local board, I called for
those allegations to be investigated before they led to litigation.
Sadly the reaction was, as usual, that I was "an ungrateful
upstart." Today litigation has been filed at KPFA and we now know
that some $200,000 in public money was paid out to settle other
complaints against the same programmer. What the basis for those
complaints were we will never know, his personnel file was destroyed.
You can’t make some of this stuff up if you tried, and, yeah, things
were different I’m sure four decades ago.
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[In response to Bryce A. Suderow’s submission, “Cops Fight Crime,
Mostly Jaywalking.” themail, June 29] I am not only a distant neighbor
of his: I also live behind the alley where the body was found. Mr.
Suderow has often surprised me with the negative tone of so many of his
postings, and this one finally drove me to respond. I am new to this
area of town, having moved here recently from Georgetown. It is
exciting, vibrant, and there are many things going on here, both bad and
good. One of those things is that, unlike my own personal experience in
Georgetown, there are neighbors here who greet one another, and work
with one another to deal with issues. I have tried to sit back and
simply listen to those issues, and to who says what, before jumping in
with suggestions that might not be helpful. But one that impressed me
the other day was several residents noticing a case of public urination:
cops were called, simply asked to show their presence. And they did
arrive.
I confess that the civil libertarian in me has issues with the notion
of zero tolerance made so popular by Rudy Giuliani, but there is no
doubt that it changed the public perceived face of New York that I grew
up knowing. There are various messages that we want to send out: that we
will not tolerate crime -- prostitution, drug dealing, public urination,
etc. — and that the police are in the area to watch and see as well as
to enforce.
And therein lies the main issue of Mr. Suderow’s complaint as I see
it. What exactly does he want the police to do? If he was at the meeting
held last week in response to this horrific crime, he would have seen
that the police are out there, that they can’t talk a lot about an
ongoing investigation, that the neighbors -- those who are in the
immediate area he discusses, not several blocks away — are concerned
and taking action and working with the police. If he was not at the
meeting, he should have been. On the one hand, he appears to make fun of
the police for being in the area with their lights on, implying that
that is not enough. On the other hand, he then scoffs at them for the
one example he provides where not only did the "jump-out team"
appear, but did so on one of the worst corners in the area. Rather than
simply making sarcastic comments, I suggest that Mr. Suderow consider
offering concrete action.
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Bottom line, smoking kills. It’s not a hypothesis, it’s a fact. I
smoked all through high school and college and quit just before
graduation. And the whole myth that reformed smokers are worse, is just
that, a myth. I recently moved to NYC and while going out to bars and
restaurants is now an absolute pleasure, it’s pretty tough, when it’s
90 degrees with 100 percent humidity, to walk down the street with all
of the smokers congregating outside of buildings . . . to breathe!
You wanna smoke, you have every right to do it; I don’t want to and
therefore shouldn’t be forced to by having to sit in a nonsmoking
section that is merely divided by an imaginary wall. It’s amazing how
Ireland and Scotland have finally caught on that smoking kills and
England isn’t too far behind, and California has been nonsmoking for
about ten years, but our good old boy’s network of a Capitol can’t
seem to agree to decades worth of credible research and statistics. And
when it boils down to it, it’s not a matter of if it will pass in DC,
it’s a matter of when, and it’s coming pretty quickly. Hoorah!
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On Tobacco, Gary Imhoff Loses Touch with
Reality
David Sobelsohn, dsobelso -at- capaccess -dot- org
In the June 29 issue of themail, Gary Imhoff wrote “The results of
the scientific studies on secondhand smoke have been politicized and
exaggerated for political purposes, to aid in a movement to prohibit
smoking entirely, in gradual steps.” Gary, get a grip! I expected
better from you than this canard. California has banned smoking in
restaurants and simultaneously legalized (or tried to legalize) smoking
marijuana, in private, for medical purposes. Most of those who support
smoke-free restaurants also support liberalization of the marijuana
laws. Are we all schizophrenic? Or do we just prefer marijuana to
tobacco? No, we just think there’s a time and a place for everything,
and there are good ways to regulate harmful behavior, and bad ways to
regulate harmful behavior. Lots of activities are acceptable in private
but not in public. Lots of harmful behavior is and should be tolerated
when it harms only the person behaving badly and no one else. None of
the leaders I know in the movement for smoke-free indoor air thinks a
total prohibition of smoking makes sense. I hope we learned from
Prohibition that the criminal law is a rough tool. When it addresses
conduct usually taking place in private, enforcement costs are extremely
high. It’s not worth it when the people regulated are mostly harming
only themselves, as are most smokers who smoke in private. If anyone
tried “to prohibit smoking entirely,” I’d be at the battle-lines
denouncing it as stupid and unenforceable, as it would be, and as I have
argued for decades against our current stupid method of regulating
illegal drugs. But smoking in public, in restaurants? Enforcement costs
are pretty low, as the California and New York examples indicate. Yes,
sure, all of us agitating for clean indoor air — especially the
medical professionals who see the damage of smoking up close — will be
pleased when no one uses tobacco any more. I got sick when my mother
used to light up her cigarettes, and my father his cigars. But would I
have put them in jail? Not on your life. Would it help the kids of
smoking parents to send their parents to jail for smoking? Maybe I’ve
heard more idiotic suggestions than that, but I can’t remember when.
Gary, you would do Chicken Little proud.
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Government Regulation Is Not a Dirty Word
Angela Bradbery, angela@smokefreedc.org
After reading all the submissions over the past few weeks, I feel
compelled to write in. Kudos to those who understand the dangers of
secondhand smoke and the need for smokefree workplace legislation. I am
baffled at those who must belong to the Flat Earth Society and who
question the well-established science showing secondhand smoke causes
disease in nonsmokers. Since when did government regulation become a
dirty word? Does it occur to folks that when they turn on their tap,
they get clean water (or in DC, relatively clean water) because of
government safety standards? Or that all vehicles come equipped with
seat belts because of government rules? Do you really want the
marketplace to handle oversight of prescription drug safety and cut the
government out of it? What about toys? Do you want manufacturers to make
whatever they want with no government guidelines at all to ensure toys
are basically safe for kids? The government’s role is to maintain
basic health and safety standards by setting rules that people must
abide by for the good of society.
Those who protest “nanny government” in regards to smokefree
workplace legislation are missing several key points: 1) no one has the
right to harm the health of those around them. 2) The proposal is not a
ban. It is not telling people they cannot smoke; it merely asks them to
step outside to protect the health of people around them. 3) A public
place and a workplace should have clean air. Why should people who want
to tend bar or wait tables jeopardize their health for a job? Why should
the four in five DC residents who don’t smoke be unable to go out if
they want to get a drink at a bar, shoot pool, or listen to live music
without breathing toxins? (Contrary to information you may have heard, a
small fraction of DC restaurants are smokefree. Just one bar is
smokefree. There is just one smokefree venue for live music — Blues
Alley — and none for billiards.) Just because you own business doesn’t
mean you can do whatever you please. If you have workers and customers
coming into your establishment, you must abide by certain health and
safety regulations. You can’t leave food unrefrigerated. You can’t
crowd the tables and create a fire hazard, and so on. Smokefree
workplace legislation is just another basic health and safety rule that
cities, states and countries throughout the world are adopting.
Carol Schwartz’s analogy was way off the mark. If Gary is sitting
next to Dorothy and he drinks a six-pack of beer, it won’t hurt
Dorothy in the least. But if Gary sits next to Dorothy and smokes six
packs of cigarettes, he is harming her health. Yes, drinking can harm
others if one drives drunk, and that is precisely why there are laws
against doing so. Please don’t say that smoking sections and
nonsmoking sections are sufficient; that’s like having the peeing and
non-peeing sections of a swimming pool. The smoke travels and everybody
breathes it. Secondhand smoke has been classified by the EPA as a class
A carcinogen. There is no safe level of exposure to it. If I were to run
around a restaurant spritzing arsenic and benzene into the air, I would
be arrested for endangering the public health. Yet those are just two of
more than 4,000 chemicals in secondhand smoke, which is being spritzed
through the air daily across the city.
Smokefree workplace laws are not a new concept, folks. Nine states,
many cities and several countries (including Ireland) have enacted
smokefree workplace laws. Smokers don’t stop going out; they simply
step outside to smoke. Smokefree states and cities are thriving. Smokers
survive without a cigarette for several hours when they go to the movies
and for many more hours when they fly on an airplane. Under the DC
proposal, smokers can still smoke whenever they want. We just ask that
they step outside to do so, which is eminently reasonable. DC prides
itself on being progressive, but in this arena, it is falling way short.
Let’s make sure we’re not the last city in the country to recognize
that everyone has a right to breathe clean air on the job.
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Secondhand Smoke Is a Serious Health Hazard
Eric Marshall, eric.marshall@cancer.org
I would like to address some inaccurate statements made about the
American Cancer Society and smoke-free workplaces in last week’s issue
of themail [June 29]. As an organization, we set a challenge goal of a
50 percent reduction in the cancer death rate by the year 2015. Cancer
prevention is the key element in attaining this goal, and comprehensive
smoke-free workplaces laws play a vital role. Secondhand smoke is a
serious health hazard that causes cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and
other serious diseases in nonsmokers. Every major public health agency
in the country has made similar statements about the health of
secondhand smoke. It was interesting that the credibility of the
American Cancer Society and the Environmental Protection Agency called
into question in one sentence, and then the statements of Penn and
Teller and Michael Crichton espoused in the next. Even if I didn’t
work at the American Cancer Society, I would still find it hard to
believe that a comedic duo and an author would be a more credible source
about secondhand smoke than these two major health organizations.
Second, a statement by the American Cancer Society was taken out of
context. Smoke-free workplaces protect workers, the public, people with
certain health conditions, the elderly, and children from the hazardous
effects of secondhand smoke. True, prohibiting smoking in bars will not
protect many children from the affects of secondhand smoke. However, it
will protect workers and the thousands of Washingtonians who patronize
DC’s bars every year. The American Cancer Society actively supports
smoke-free workplaces legislation across the country. The line, “…it
is important that any such policies be as strong as possible, and that
they do not prevent action at other levels of government,” refers to
loopholes and preemptive actions by state governments over local
smoke-free workplaces ordinances, not homes or automobiles.
Third, the Philip Morris web site was falsely quoted. Nowhere on the
site that Bruce Jones provided did it say “…and it makes us say
that, too, to escape further costly litigation.” In fact I found this
on the web site, “Philip Morris USA believes that the public should be
guided by the conclusions of public health officials regarding the
health effects of secondhand smoke in deciding whether to be in places
where secondhand smoke is present.”
Seventy-four percent of DC voters, nine councilmembers, the mayor,
and over eighty local organizations, including the American Cancer
Society Cancer Action Network, support a comprehensive smoke-free
workplaces law for one simple reason: secondhand smoke is a serious
health hazard. Everybody has the right to breathe smoke-free air, and
nobody should have to choose between a good job and good health.
###############
Let me repeat: the scientific evidence on any health risks posed by
secondhand smoke is heavily politicized by advocacy groups like the
Smokefree DC and the American Cancer Society. Advocates claim that any
exposure to tobacco smoke is dangerous, but the science doesn’t
support them. Advocates of smoking bans assert their great authority and
heap scorn on skeptics, but do not support their claims with reliable,
scientific proof of high levels of health risks from secondhand smoke.
The scientific studies show that secondhand smoke poses a minimal risk
to health, but it would not be a great enough risk to justify government
intervention if the subject were anything other than smoking tobacco.
Government’s proper role is protecting people from proven health risks
that they may be exposed to involuntarily. Unless our government aspires
to becoming a nanny state, it should not ban most health risks that
people take voluntarily, like smoking, skateboarding, or playing
football. Neither should government ban people from doing things that
merely irritate other people, like smoking, skateboarding, or talking
incessantly about football.
The question, as I wrote, is one of dosage. All sorts of things are
poisonous, but many poisonous things are harmless and safe in low doses,
and all poisonous things are harmless in low enough doses. There are
dangerous chemicals in tobacco. Smoking tobacco over the course of many
years can cause illness and death in susceptible people. But how
dangerous are these chemicals in the much, much lower doses contained in
secondhand smoke? The advocates confuse the issue by concentrating on
the proven dangers of smoking. They also confuse the irritation caused
by any smoke with potential health dangers. The smoke from a pipe of
tobacco, a barbecue pit, or a pile of burning leaves smells good, but
breathing in too much of any smoke will make people cough and wheeze. It’s
better to breath clean air than smoky air, but the irritation doesn’t
prove anything about disease.
Finally, either I am a very poor humorist or Eric Marshall has a tin
ear for humor, or both. I parodied Philip Morris’ obedient recital on
its web site of what the government requires it to say in order to
escape further litigation. Marshall claims that I was dishonestly trying
to pass off my line as a direct quotation. Was I that unclear? And when
I cited Penn and Teller and Michael Crichton on this subject, I referred
to them as “eminent authorities.” Isn’t that a good enough clue to
show the tongue in my cheek? But Marshall’s disparagement of Penn,
Teller, and Crichton does bring up a point. They’re all smart people
who know how to read and evaluate scientific reports, and Crichton is
also a physician. None of them questions the real, proven dangers of
smoking. They’re just saying that secondhand smoke doesn’t pose
nearly the same risk as smoking.
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
July 5-25, Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, 901 G Street,
NW, 2nd Floor East Exhibit Hall. Exhibit: Writing for the Community. An
exhibit of articles, poetry and essays with art and photographs by young
journalists, activists and poets participating in DC SCORES, an after
school program in DC Public Schools. Public contact: 727-1183.
July 5-28, Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, 901 G Street,
NW. American Sign Language classes are provided by the Librarian for the
Deaf Community, Adaptive Services Division of the DC Public Library.
Please check outer lobby bulletin board for class locations. Beginning
level: Tuesday and Thursday, 5:30 p.m. (7/5-7/28). Intermediate level:
Wednesday, noon (7/6-7/27). Conversational level: Saturday, 10:30 a.m.
(7/2-7/16). Young adults and adults. Public contact: 727-2145 (TTY and
voice).
July 5-28, Washington Highlands Neighborhood Library, 115 Atlantic
Street, SW. Literacy tutoring for reading, writing and math provided by
the Urban League Reading Information Center. Tuesday and Thursday, 1-6
p.m., Wednesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Young adults and adults. Public contact:
645-5880.
Thursday, July 7, 12:00 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial
Library, 901 G Street, NW, Room A-5. Brown Bag Recital Series. Cellist
Vassily Popov and Pianist Ralitza Patcheva perform music by J. Brahms,
C. Szymanowski and S. Prokofiev. Public contact: 727-1285.
Thursday, July 7, 2:30 p.m., Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial
Library, 901 G Street, NW, Room 221. Let’s Talk About Books. A group
discussion of “The Lottery,” a short story by Shirley Jackson.
Public contact: 727-1281.
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Reel Architecture Film Series, July 9-August
24
Brie Hensold, bhenhold@nbm.org
As part of its twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, the National
Building Museum will present a film series dedicated to the relationship
between architecture and cinema. This series will kick off on Saturday,
July 9, and Sunday, July 10, with two full days of movies addressing the
shape of Hollywood’s home town -- Los Angeles. The Reel Architecture
Film Series will then continue with 8:15 p.m. programs on seven
consecutive Wednesdays, July 13 through August 24. These screenings will
showcase American films that reflect themes related to the National
Building Museum’s 25 years of exhibitions, such as sustainability,
transportation and transit, and office design in America. On some
evenings, short-form documentaries will precede the feature film.
The Wednesday night programs will take place in the Museum’s Great
Hall. Doors will open at 7:15 p.m. Live music by local bands before the
screenings will add to the festivities. Select exhibitions will also be
open for viewing. Seating is first-come first-served, with only a small
number of chairs available; so bring your blankets and pillows and
spread out on the carpeted floor of the Great Hall! Outside food and
nonalcoholic beverages are permitted. Concessions will be available for
purchase. No registration required. Free admission. All movies at the
National Building Museum, 401 F Street, NW, Judiciary Square stop, Metro
Red Line. For a complete schedule of films, see http://www.nbm.org.
###############
Unknown Confederate Soldiers Memorial Service,
July 16
Jerry A. McCoy, sshistory@yahoo.com
Please join us for a memorial service for the unknown Confederate
soldiers buried at Grace Episcopal Church Cemetery on Saturday, July 16,
at 10:00 a.m. The soldiers were killed at the Battle of Ft. Stevens in
the District of Columbia on July 11-12, 1864.
Featured will be a Color Guard, bagpiper, bugler, balladeer, floral
wreath presentation, and Civil War re-enactors in period and
refreshments. Grace Episcopal Church is located at 1607 Grace Church
Road, at the corner of Georgia Avenue, in Silver Spring, MD.
###############
CLASSIFIEDS — HELP WANTED
Executive Director, H Street Main Street
Brednan Danaher, bjdanager@yahoo.com
H Street Main Street is seeking an executive director. This person
will lead the organization’s economic development programs on the H
Street, NE, corridor. For a full description, please see: http://www.idealist.com/en/ip/idealist/SiteIndex/AssetViewer/view?SID=02d091d20bbe99000d4ae35f239d1c3c&asset-id=130331%3A62&asset=Org
###############
CLASSIFIEDS — VOLUNTEERS
Volunteers are needed for this year’s Adams Morgan Day, sponsored
by Adams Morgan MainStreet, to take place on Sunday, September 11. We
will need at least a hundred volunteers for the day of the event, as
well as volunteers as soon as possible to help us work on aspects of the
festival, such as the kid’s fair, vendors, permits, music and dance
stages, Arts on Belmont, etc. If interested, please go to http://www.ammainstreet.org/adamsmorganday.htm
to download the Volunteer Application and send it to amday@ammainstreet.org.
Applications for arts, crafts, retail, and food vendors are also
available at this web address.
###############
Restoration of the Big Chair Project
Sharon Wise, thehouseofsharon@msn.com
We are seeking volunteers, professional carpenters, funds, and
organizations to participate in the parade that will lead to the
unveiling of the Big Chair once it is complete. The restoration will
begin October 3-7, and the unveiling celebration will be October 8, down
Martin Luther King, Jr., Avenue, SE. If you and your organization would
like to participate, please call International Executive Assistant,
Armetria Knight, 531-1187.
###############
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