Dear Washingtonians:
Three articles to read: Lucia Moses, “One Year In: 10 Ways the
Washington Post Has Changed Under Jeff Bezos,”
http://tinyurl.com/k22u4xg;
Megan McArdle, “A Streetcar Named Progress,”
http://tinyurl.com/mbarnrz; and
Dana Milbank, “Americans’ Optimism Is Dying,”
http://tinyurl.com/o2ecovv.
Moses makes ten brief points that don’t lend themselves to
summarization, so read the whole thing. McArdle gives her theory of why
building streetcar lines may be attractive to cities, and she’s worth
quoting at length: “One of my favorite former colleagues, Emily Bobrow
of the Economist, explains why streetcars are a bad idea. The
short version: They don’t move faster than buses, at least not in the
US, where they’re rarely given dedicated lanes. And because they require
a big fixed investment, they’re very expensive, and inflexible, compared
to buses. So why are cities suddenly going streetcar-mad? Oh, you can
cite the small advantages of streetcars — they’re less likely to give
people motion sickness, for example — but these advantages don’t really
seem to outweigh the huge costs. Yet American cities are laying
streetcar track as fast as they can get financing. My theory is that for
cities, the high investment, as well as the inflexibility of the routes,
may often be a feature rather than a bug. Building a streetcar is a way
to attract investment to an area where you would like to encourage rapid
development. And the reason that it’s attractive to investment is that
once they’ve been built, the streetcars can’t be moved.”
Milbank calls attention to a poll that shows a sharp drop in
Americans’ optimism: “It has been slipping for some time, really, but a
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this month put an exclamation
point on Americans’ lost optimism. When asked if ‘life for our
children’s generation will be better than it has been for us,’ fully 76
percent said they do not have such confidence. Only 21 percent did. That
was the worst ever recorded in the poll; in 2001, 49 percent were
confident and 43 percent not.” Milbank being Milbank, his preference is
for a partisan political theory of why Americans’ optimism is falling so
precipitously. I lean to a simpler economic theory. People fear that
their childrens’ lives will not be better than theirs for a simple
reason: it is very likely that they won’t be, and our political and
academic class seems to be satisfied, if not actually pleased, with that
prospect. Economically, for the past century, Americans aspired to own
their own homes, preferably with yards and with a bedroom for each
child. They aspired to own an automobile. Politicians encouraged them,
and worked through laws and tax policies to help people achieve their
aspirations. Now politicians and “thought leaders” tell people their
aspirations and hopes are impractical, unrealistic, and bad for the
earth, and that they should be satisfied with small apartments not large
enough to accommodate families and with bicycles and buses for
transportation. Who wouldn’t be discouraged?
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Undergrounding Electric Power Lines: Update
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
From July 21 through July 29, the District’s Public Service
Commission (PSC) held seven community meetings to receive comments from
the public on the first three-year phase (2015-2017) of Pepco’s and
DDOT’s plan to underground certain electrical power lines and fund the
one-billion-dollar project through a surcharge to be assessed against
Pepco customers. The goal of the project is to address the problem of
power outages in DC and to improve the reliability of electrical
service. During the first three years of the project, from 2015 through
2017, forty-give electric distribution feeder lines located on poles in
Wards 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8 will be buried underground in a massive public
works project that will require extensive excavation on many city
streets.
After a great deal of arm-twisting, the PSC and the DC Office of
Peoples Counsel (OPC) have finally made basic information about the
undergrounding project available to DC residents and have scheduled an
additional community meeting on September 9. This is information that
residents and businesses should have had prior to the community meetings
in order to make informed comments on the project. On the PSC web site,
information on the undergrounding project is at
http://tinyurl.com/pe44xfc and
http://www.dcpsc.org/esr/FC1116/index.asp. The DC Office of Peoples
Counsel’s web site has also been updated, and now has information on the
project at
http://tinyurl.com/k2jcgkh.
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Why Not Elect the Members of the Public
Service Commission?
Richard Layman,
rlaymandc@yahoo.com
Reading some of the recent postings by Dorothy Brizill, my immediate
reaction was that if we want to exhibit best practice democracy, why not
elect members of the Public Service Commission, and take the
machinations of the city council and the executive branch out of the
equation? According to the National Association of Utility Regulatory
Commissions, fourteen states elect their PSC representatives,
http://www.naruc.org.
###############
Washington Post
Rave on McMillan Plan
Daniel Wolkoff,
amglassart@yahoo.com
Roger K. Lewis, is an opinion columnist for the Real Estate Section
of the Washington Post. He wrote about McMillan Park on August 1,
http://tinyurl.com/lv43744. The
column should be honest and have a rendering of the monstrous blocks of
buildings that are planned for the Park, and not totally eliminate a
realistic view of the plan. The massive transportation problems, that DC
Zoning Commissions severely questioned, with twenty thousand more cars
added to the thirty thousand that are now crowding North Capitol Street
daily, should not be overlooked.
Whether this is an opinion piece, editorial, or news item, Lewis
excludes all kinds of negatives about the plan, and the question of
using public land for public needs just goes unanswered, as do questions
of gross malfeasance in office, theft of services, unequal distribution
of resources, and what any gracious healthy city needs in open and green
space. Residents can’t find park space in overbuilt NOMA even with the
fifty million dollars called for in the plan, so what kind of corruption
of sound planning practice covers McMillan with dense concrete
buildings, violating all environmental common sense?
###############
About Gun Rights and Democratic Rights
Jack McKay,
jack.mckay@verizon.net
It seems to me that the crucial “right” in this matter is the right
of us residents of the District to decide for ourselves, through our
elected representatives, what our local laws and regulations will be.
That’s what home rule is supposed to be about, and that’s what the
American Revolution was fought for.
Democratic self-government is not something to be tossed aside
frivolously, in favor of a “right” created just a few years ago. The
legal right to keep and bear arms became an individual’s right only in
2010, when the Supreme Court “incorporated” the Second Amendment in
McDonald v. Chicago. For more than two hundred years before that
decision, the Second Amendment was the right only of states, not of
individuals.
McDonald v. Chicago, and District of Columbia v. Heller
before it, explicitly stated that the individual’s right to weapons was
not unlimited, and that localities may impose reasonable restrictions on
keeping and carrying guns. The principal right at issue here is that of
democratic government: we, the people, should be able to decide what gun
regulations best suit the District of Columbia. That’s far more
important than anyone’s supposed right to carry guns on the streets of
DC.
###############
Second Amendment Interpretation
Andrea Rosen, Ward 4, Chevy Chase,
aerie@rcn.com
[Re: Gary Imhoff, “The Dangers of the Bill of Rights,” themail, July
27] Wow, I didn’t see that coming — that you’re a defender of the
armed-to-the-teeth interpretation of the 2nd Amendment!
Does my memory fail me, or did the residents of the District of
Columbia vote overwhelmingly to impose the strongest gun controls in the
nation on themselves? That is self-regulation, not government
regulation. When a group of old Catholic men decides to reverse
precedents established by earlier Supreme Court decisions by
reinterpreting the 2nd Amendment in favor of the gun lobby, and to
reverse laws enacted through direct democracy, that upends the
Constitution. But then we are not protected by the Constitution, because
we are a democracy-free zone without voting representation in Congress.
At every turn, the popular will is negated.
#####
[Opponents of Second Amendment rights are reviving the theory of
States Rights, that individual states or the District of Columbia should
be able to nullify rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the
federal Constitution in the name of making their own separate democratic
decisions. The theory of States Rights simply doesn’t work any more; it
was discredited and finally decided by the victory of the United States
over the rebellious southern states in the Civil War. Neither an
individual state nor the District of Columbia can reject, modify, or
restrict a right guaranteed to the people by the Constitution.
[The right to keep and bear arms was universally recognized as an
individual right, rather than as a right of states, from the time that
the Second Amendment was written until the twentieth century. A few
scattered state court decisions in the first decades of the twentieth
century treated it as a right that was limited to formally organized
state militias, and opponents of individual rights seized upon that
argument to limit the applicability of the right, but the Supreme Court
never denied that the Second Amendment recognized an individual right.
In the two decades leading up to DC v. Heller and in the Supreme
Court’s decision in the case, the evidence for both sides of the
argument was exhaustively examined. In the Heller case, all nine
justices, both liberal and conservative, recognized that the right to
keep and bear arms pertained to individual citizens, not just to formal
state militias, although the Court divided five to four on other issues.
[The judge in the case gave the DC government time to bring its gun
laws into conformity with the Constitution, and delayed the
implementation of his order so that the DC government could comply. My
guess is that, just as it did in the Heller case, the city
council and mayor will delay, grumble, and grudgingly and reluctantly
obey the Constitution, but most likely make the minimum concessions that
they feel they can get away. — Gary Imhoff]
###############
InTowner
August Issue Content
P.L. Wolff,
intowner@intowner.com
The August issue content can be viewed at
http://www.intowner.com,
including the issue PDF in which will be found the primary news stories
and museum exhibition reviews — plus all photos and other images. Not
included in the PDF but linked directly from the home page is Stephen A.
Hansen’s “What Once Was” feature — this month about a slave owner whose
fine house and businesses were located in what today is Kalorama Park.
This month’s lead stories include “Corcoran’s Move to Dissolve Legally
and Transfer Art & Building by Cy Près Proceeding Challenged in Court;
Decision Very Soon” as well as previews of plan for early September’s
Adams Morgan Day and the 17th Street festival.
The reviews of exhibitions at American University’s Katzen Center
(only through Sunday, August 17) and at the Phillips Collection are
found at PDF pages 6 and 7. In addition to these, a review of a stunning
show at the Museum of African art (also (only through Sunday, August 17)
is posted in our web site’s Art & Museums section at
http://tinyurl.com/m745gyj. The
title of our editorial, “Homeless and Affordable Housing Require Urgent
Attention Immediately, Not Later” speaks for itself. Your thoughts will
be most welcome and can be sent by clicking the comment link at the
bottom of the web page or by E-mail to newsroom[at]intowner.com.
The next issue PDF will publish early in the morning of September 12
(the second Friday of the month, as usual). For more information, either
send an E-mail to newsroom[at]intowner.com or call 234-1717.
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