Silly Season
Dear Sillificators:
It’s silly season in DC politics. Vincent Gray, running for city
council chair, sent out a press release on Monday announcing that he was
being endorsed by former councilmembers Sterling Tucker, Arrington
Dixon, Jerry Moore, Frank Smith, Nadine Winter, Willie Hardy, H.R.
Crawford, Sandy Allen, Eydie Whittington, and James Coates. Yikes. If
you were a candidate, is that the group of councilmembers you would want
voters to identify you with?
And Mayor Williams and Council Chairman Linda Cropp are both
campaigning against Adrian Fenty on the basis of his vote against their
phony “anti-crime” bill. They’re arguing that Fenty’s not
supporting a cynical, opportunistic, politically motivated, and
ineffective bill makes him unqualified to be mayor. As I said, silly
season. If in the next week or two Fenty makes reasonable, solid,
substantial anti-crime proposals of his own, proposals that address both
the liberal and conservative approaches to fighting crime, he’ll win
this round of the campaign in a walk. Of course, if he doesn’t, he’ll
earn a silly season mention of his own.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
###############
Is This Any Way to Treat the Public?
Henry Thomas, hbthomas@comcast.net
The DC Office of Tax and Revenue does not answer its mail. On June
13, I received a letter from them dated June 11 (a Sunday!) indicating
that the tax office had not received one of my quarterly estimated
income tax payments (I’m retired and so have no tax withheld). This
letter indicated that I therefore also owed interest on the missing
payment, and added penalties totaling 38.5 percent of the missing
payment. The letter provided an address to which I could write. My reply
dated June 14 enclosed photocopies of the carbon copies of my four
estimated tax payment checks, clearly indicating that I had not
intentionally failed to make a payment. Because the US Postal Service
had apparently failed to deliver the missing payment, I wrote that I was
quite prepared to make up the missing payment together with interest,
but suggested that the extremely heavy penalty was inappropriate as I
had not knowingly failed to make a payment.
As I had received no reply by June 30, and as the June 11 letter
indicated that, “If the total balance is not paid by July 3, 2006,
additional penalties and interest will accrue,” I wrote again. My June
30 letter enclosed copies of the June 11 and 13 letters together with
another photocopy of the four checks. It also enclosed my check paying
the total balance due while again protesting the penalties. I copied
this letter as well as all enclosures to Councilmember Jack Evans in his
capacity as chair of the council’s Committee on Finance and Revenue as
well as my Representative from Ward 2. My letter to the tax office was
certified; the return receipt indicated that it was received on July 3.
As I again had no reply, I wrote again on July 17, again copied to Jack
Evans. To this date neither the tax office nor Evans has had the
courtesy to reply to my letters. As an honest citizen with over thirty
years of faithfully paying my DC taxes on time and in full, I’m very
disappointed with this treatment, both from the government and from my
elected representative. After all, we taxpayers are paying their
salaries.
###############
Lawyers, Lawyers, Everywhere
Dorothy Brizill, dorothy@dcwatch.com
According to the DC Bar Association, the organization’s total
membership as of January 2006 consisted of 82,105 attorneys. Of that
number, 59,444 are “active” members and are admitted to practice in
the District. It is against the background of these startling numbers
that I must raise an issue that continues to puzzle and anger me: why
are attorneys and law firms never able to provide pro bono legal
services to grassroots civic organizations and community leaders in the
District? In the more than twenty years that I have been civically
active, working first in my neighborhood of Columbia Heights and then on
citywide issues, I have never been able to secure the assistance of a
District law firm on an issue. When in the 1980’s and 1990’s,
citizens in Columbia Heights came together and devised a multi-layered
plan to force the District government to address the community’s crime
and drug problems, we were never able to get the assistance of the DC
Bar or any law firm in the fight to make MPD, DCRA, DPW, and the
Redevelopment Land Agency more responsive to the community.
More recently, no District law firm would provide counsel in 2002,
when four citizens challenged Mayor Williams’s nominating petitions;
in 2004, when DCWatch and Citizens Against Slots challenged the 50,000
signatures on slots petitions submitted to the DC Board of Elections and
Ethics; and in 2006, when citizens of Anacostia challenged, both in
Superior Court and now in the Court of Appeals, the BOEE’s decision on
whether the slots initiative was a proper subject for an initiative.
Instead, citizens had to rely on law students, law librarians, and an
occasional individual solo practitioner who would be kind enough to
respond to inquiries.
In their defense, the District’s large law firms will point with
pride to their work with well established nonprofit groups working on a
host of issues, such as AIDS, homelessness, public education, housing,
statehood, and tenant issues. However, in all these cases the interests
of the nonprofit groups and the government actually coincide; they both
want bigger governmental programs and larger budgets for them. When it
comes to actually rolling up their sleeves to work on some of the most
difficult issues facing citizens and neighborhoods, issues in which the
neighborhood and community groups are fighting against city hall, it has
been my experience that most of the District’s 59,000 attorneys will
claim that they and their law firms have a conflict of interest or are
simply too busy to provide counsel.
###############
Wither the Visiting Profs?
Ed T. Barron, edtb1@macdotcom
Well over a year ago, American University bought the home next door
to me for a megabuck and then proceeded to completely renovate, add on,
and re-equip the house with all new baths, appliances, etc. My estimate
is that between $400K and $500K were expended in this makeover. The
property was bought, ostensibly, for visiting professors and their
families. Beginning in January of this year, the house was used as a
conference/meeting center for outsiders and students. After a bevy of
complaints from local residents that decried the use of that property
outside of the zoning laws, the conferences have stopped. No sign of any
visiting profs or their families.
###############
In the midst of so many E-mails from people holding up their
“Somebody for Mayor” signs, I feel it is necessary to connect a few
critical points that were made in the last edition of themail. The point
was made that our children are not educated to do anything. At what
point is the US education system going to start teaching our children
how to do something? Balance income versus expenditures, manage a stock
portfolio, understand a business contract, create an inventory
spreadsheet, for example. All the vocational classes are gone. Teachers
are spending more time teaching to the test, while trying to maintain
order in the classroom. In some schools they have copy quotas,
preventing the teachers from creating instructional documents. The three
R’s are not enough anymore. With all the developers courting our local
government, why can’t there be a provision requiring some of these
companies to provide some on-the-job training to high school students?
These could be unpaid internships and would not cost the city anything,
but it would create significant gains for the students and their
community by giving the students hope.
The other point that was made was about the disconnect between the
police and the community. Is anyone else tired of seeing police rolling
around talking on their cell phones? Is it that the MPD officer don’t
come from DC? I don’t know. The disconnect is obvious and unaddressed.
Crime bill? How about a youth employment bill? The money could be given
to our young people for real jobs, training, and a future. Instead of
setting up a cameras, set up a job placement center. Instead of more
police on the street, how about getting more young people off of the
street and into a career? An emergency bill would not have been
necessary if somebody was paying attention to the needs of the
communities. Stick that in your ballot and vote on it!
###############
Fighting Crime
Norman L. Blumenfeld, NLBlum@aol.com
Many citizens have commented on the council’s emergency crime
legislation. What is so troubling is that it has been attacked as the
only solution that the mayor and the city council could set forth. I
suggest that it was only a start, a determination that forward steps
needed to be taken. As revealed during the next few days following the
council vote, more took place. A Violent Crime Task Force to combat the
surge of robberies and violent offenses was created. The force is led by
the DC Police Department and includes FBI, Bureau of ATF and Drug
Enforcement authorities, as well as police from the US Park Service,
Metro Transit, Capitol Hill and the US Marshall Service. Air
surveillance and cell phone tracking will be used. Prosecutors are
gearing up to keep up with arrests and deal with repeat offenders. Gun
dealers are targeted. Outstanding fugitives will be rounded up. DC
police will develop campaigns to reach out to parents and businesses
with guidance and educational assistance. The council was right in
starting the ball rolling. (And by the way, there are numerous experts
who feel that at this moment in time, curfews, more police officers, and
cameras can help.)
Of course politics, being an election year, has reared its head. I
applaud the council for not sitting on its hands. If this were the only
action that the legislative body was taking, it might be seriously
question as too less than a perfect solution. But it was but a temporary
measure to confront a real problem. And since it is election time, I
will express a worry: the lone dissenter did not seem to understand what
this particular piece of legislation was about. That lack of
understanding, and a failure to articulate any reasonable alternative or
present any amendments, show a lack of leadership, knowledge, and
experience, that shows that he should not be mayor of our city. It
appears time to decide if the dissenting council member is ready to be
in charge of an eight billion dollar budget, represent the citizens
before Congress, and work with the governors of Virginia and Maryland on
multi-jurisdictional issues. Maybe at another time; but not now. His
failure to work with his colleagues on the crime bill is very troubling.
###############
It’s Just a Theory
Ed T. Barron, edtb1@macdotcom
Shortly after we moved into DC some nineteen years ago, there was a
crack cocaine epidemic (just ask Marion Barry, the mayor at that time).
Part of that epidemic resulted in hundreds of "crack babies"
being born here in DC. It’s just a theory, but perhaps this crime
wave, involving teenagers in the city, is the price those kids and their
victims are now paying for that crack epidemic fifteen years ago.
###############
Judiciary Drives Forward the DC Voting Rights
Act
Kevin Kiger, kkiger@dcvote.org
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
announced on July 25 that the Subcommittee on the Constitution will mark
up the DC Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act (DC Voting Rights Act,
H.R. 5388) on September 14, 2006. In an historic vote in May, the House
Committee on Government Reform passed the DC Voting Rights Act with
overwhelming bipartisan support and a vote of 29-4. Now the bill moves
to the Judiciary Committee by way of the Subcommittee on the
Constitution.
The following is a reaction to the scheduled hearing from DC Vote
Executive Director Ilir Zherka: “A hearing for the DC Voting Rights
Act is another great stride forward in the movement, and we are thrilled
Congress is getting the message that Americans want to see progress on
this bill. Leaders of organizations, elected officials, and -- perhaps
most importantly — everyday people have conveyed to Congress the
tremendous need to give DC a vote. We commend Congress for listening to
the uproar of strong national support for DC voting rights. We welcome
the opportunity to amplify our voices at the hearing in September. Tom
Davis, Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC Vote and others, have worked hard to
shepherd this bill through Congress. DC Vote will continue to build
momentum for the DC Voting Rights Act and end taxation without
representation in the nation’s capital.”
###############
I was absolutely mortified to see that the headline I wrote on a
recent submission, “a humongous water bill,” had been changed,
without my knowledge or consent, to the above [themail, July 23]. Augh!
The use of “an” before words beginning with the aspirated “h”
is, in my firm opinion, pretentious claptrap. Yes, there are words with
a silent “h,” and those take “an”: an hour, an honor. But if the
“h” is sounded, then one correctly uses “a”: a house, a hornet,
a hero, a hypothesis.
Gary retorts that, according to his “personal stylebook,” “a
word beginning with an unstressed syllable beginning with ‘h’ takes
‘an.’” According to this inflexible rule, one would write “an
hypothesis, an heroic deed, an hysterical woman, an hallucination.”
Nonsense to that, I say, and my Chicago Manual of Style agrees.
More generally, the name appearing attached to my submissions to
themail is my own, and readers will quite surely blame me for any
supposed stumbles of grammar and usage. I don’t think it’s
appropriate for Gary to “improve” the style of our submissions,
right or wrong, not when the results will be blamed on us, the
contributors.
[There is one nicely petty point to debate here, my inflexible rule
versus Jack’s inflexible rule on the use of “a” and “an.” In
our private correspondence, we cited dueling stylebooks on this usage.
Jack is right that the Chicago Manual of Style is absolutist on
the use of “a,” but others (including Fowler’s, my
favorite), say that both usages are correct, although “a” is more
modern and “an” old-fashioned. Well, to my old-fashioned ears, as I
wrote Jack, a habitual, a heroic, a historical, a Homeric, a hypothesis
— and a humongous — all sound awkward rather than modern; to his
ears, “an” sounds pretentious in all these cases.
The bigger question is whether messages in themail should be edited
or not. In one of my private messages to Jack, I wrote that, “themail
is not an unedited listserv in which messages are posted unaltered; I
have written that several times, and made it clear to contributors and
readers. Rather, it’s like the letters column in the newspaper, where
the editor standardizes grammar and usage, but doesn’t do any major
editing that could change the writers’ thoughts. The purpose is
twofold. First, it makes themail easier to read if usage is
standardized, and if, for example, 10am, 10:00 AM, and ten A.M. are all
printed as 10:00 a.m. Second, it provides a level playing field, where
opinions and ideas can compete on their own value, not on the
grammatical skill of their writers. If I catch a typo, I’ll correct
it. I’ll use my spellchecker to correct misspellings, when it isn’t
introducing errors on its own. Unless a grammatical error is clearly
intentional and used for emphasis (something like ‘there ain’t no
such thing’), I’ll correct it. It a message doesn’t have a title,
I’ll title it; if the title is too long, I’ll shorten it. I do
rewrite many event notices substantially because they’re sent in
poster or bullet-list format rather than paragraph format.”
So weigh in on “a” versus “an,” if you must, but I’d really
like to hear themail’s readers’ opinions about whether I should
print submissions exactly as they are submitted or should continue to
edit them. In the interest of full disclosure, by the way, I am sure
that I have further irritated Jack by putting the commas and periods in
his above message inside of quotation marks, to conform with standard
American usage, rather than leaving them outside of the quotation marks,
as he did, which is standard British usage. — Gary Imhoff]
###############
CLASSIFIEDS — FREE
Tenley Town: free large chest; wood, six drawers (two small, four
large). 32"W x 19"D x 39"H. You pick up.
###############
themail@dcwatch is an E-mail discussion forum that is published every
Wednesday and Sunday. To subscribe, to change E-mail addresses, or to
switch between HTML and plain text versions of themail, use the
subscription form at http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/subscribe.htm.
To unsubscribe, send an E-mail message to themail@dcwatch.com
with “unsubscribe” in the subject line. Archives of past messages
are available at http://www.dcwatch.com/themail.
All postings should also be submitted to themail@dcwatch.com,
and should be about life, government, or politics in the District of
Columbia in one way or another. All postings must be signed in order to
be printed, and messages should be reasonably short — one or two brief
paragraphs would be ideal — so that as many messages as possible can
be put into each mailing.