http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/ en Copyright 2008 Thu, 15 May 2008 07:31:26 -0400 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.36 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Six years ago, Northern Virginia voters weighed the pain of sitting in traffic against the bite that would result from a half-cent local sales tax increase to pay for transportation improvements. By a clear majority, they said, Thanks, but no thanks. Now, Gov. Tim Kaine has measured the reality of clogged roads against the message voters sent in 2002. And he's decided that what Northern Virginia needs this time is double the sales tax increase that voters rejected six years ago. Oh, and this time, we won't bother with the messy business of asking voters for their opinion. The easy part of the transportation funding battle that has dominated Virginia politics for more than a decade is sizing up the situation on the ground. Everyone agrees: The traffic stinks and the state has fallen down on the job of keeping up with surging development. I called leaders of two of http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_sales_tax_hike_that_rose_f.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_sales_tax_hike_that_rose_f.html Thu, 15 May 2008 07:31:26 -0400 Don't bet on it. The D.C. Council yesterday voted 10-3 to try yet again to end the decades-long debate over whether to repair a city street that happens to go through Rock Creek Park. The street, Klingle Road NW, is both an extremely convenient shortcut for east-west drivers who want to avoid the congestion around Connecticut Avenue, and a bucolic passageway through a surprisingly quiet and green oasis in the heart of the city. You can blame the rain--a big one--for the washout that rendered Klingle Road impassable back in 1990. Add the city's legendary incompetence, and the road stayed shut for years. Now toss in the intensive lobbying efforts by local neighbors who didn't want cars going past their houses anymore, and environmentalists who saw a chance to get some cars out of Rock Creek Park, and dogwalkers and naturalists who view the roadbed as a pedestrian paradise, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_last_klingle_road_post_eve.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_last_klingle_road_post_eve.html Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:10 -0400 Public radio station WAMU today fired political analyst Jonetta Rose Barras, co-host of the station's popular Friday "Politics Hour" with Kojo Nnamdi, in what appears to be a dispute over pay. Barras, a longtime fixture in local media, says she was sacked for seeking to be paid as a full-time employee for her work on the Friday program. "I refused to be an abused worker and not be paid for my worth," Barras says. "I feel I've been discriminated against both because I'm a woman and because I'm black." WAMU spokesman Kay Summers confirms that Barras is leaving the station (88.5 FM) and says a replacement analyst will be sought. Summers says the station's owner, American University, will not comment on the reasons for Barras's departure, but adds that the university "is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly deny the suggestion that American University has discriminated against Jonetta http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/wamu_fires_jonetta_rose_barras.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/wamu_fires_jonetta_rose_barras.html Tue, 13 May 2008 13:30:00 -0400 The announcement, made with great fanfare from the stage of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, was dramatic: This spring marks "the return of music to the D.C. public schools," said deputy schools chancellor Kaya Henderson. Applause swept the sold-out hall, and the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis stepped to the podium to offer his praise. By embracing music education and turning away from the test-driven narrowing of the curriculum that has so deadened too many classrooms in recent years, the District has found "the way for us to reclaim our soul in this country," Marsalis said. But has music really returned to the D.C. schools? What the Washington Performing Arts Society and D.C. schools officials were celebrating last week was a pilot program that began in February at three middle schools and may be expanded to more schools in coming years. The Capitol Jazz Project, a $200,000 effort by http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/schools_monday_music_returns_t.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/schools_monday_music_returns_t.html Tue, 13 May 2008 07:25:03 -0400 When the District tore down its old downtown convention center and opened a much larger one in the Shaw-Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood, then-mayor Tony Williams said that the new hole in the center of the city had to be filled with some powerful people magnet--a museum, library, arts center or performance space that would lure workers to stay downtown after business hours and attract suburbanites to come hang out downtown. But when the final plan for the site, now dubbed City Center DC, was announced this morning, Mayor Adrian Fenty scrapped that people magnet piece of the puzzle and instead handed over the city's land to a developer who promises to build yet another hotel and more retail on the land once designated for a major attraction. The Williams administration's notion that downtown Washington could only be resurrected as a bustling, pedestrian-oriented place has been replaced by the quest http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/dc_chooses_shopping_over_arts.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/dc_chooses_shopping_over_arts.html Mon, 12 May 2008 14:09:54 -0400 Martin Luther King was never an arms-folded kind of man. He was never one to tighten up against slings of opposition, never one to choose a cocky or grandiose pose. Leaf through hundreds of photos of the man, and you see him standing before oceans of Americans, one arm raised to the sky, his mouth open in a call to unity. He reaches forward, rallying, cajoling, explaining. Or he is leaning in, head to head with Lyndon Johnson, and you can almost hear King, the gentle voice, the rock-hard logic. Nowhere do I find King depicted the way a sculptor in China is interpreting him for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial that is supposed to be built at the Tidal Basin next year. Nowhere but in this proposed arms-crossed sculpture is King seen in the arrogant stance of a dictator, clad in a boxy suit, with an impassive, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/time_to_start_over_on_mlk_stat.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/time_to_start_over_on_mlk_stat.html Sun, 11 May 2008 08:19:51 -0400 Psst, pass it on: Check out the video from Tim Kaine. No, Virginia's governor isn't doing stupid human tricks. Rather, he's got his own YouTube channel where you can, for example, find Kaine expounding on the importance of saving energy. It's pretty stultifying, standard fare: Use efficient bulbs, the always-popular "set your thermostat a little higher in the summer," and, of course, use mass transit. This is about four rungs below public access cable fare. But wait, the Kaine Channel has better programming, if you hunt around a bit. Here's the governor hanging out with kids in the AP Government class at Martinsville High School. Note the handheld camera and the amateurish sound production. The kids seem eager to get the heck out of the room, but Kaine manages to tell a couple of decent stories and he comes off as genuine, honest and straightforward. "You can kind of http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/video_unlikely_to_go_viral_the.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/video_unlikely_to_go_viral_the.html Fri, 09 May 2008 07:42:13 -0400 The grainy video, shot at night from across Connecticut Avenue, reveals the menace -- caught on tape, posted on YouTube for all to see. The danger, the violation of public space, the unchecked liability, all now undeniable. Yes, it is true: For more than a year, James Alefantis, owner of the Comet Ping Pong pizza place at Connecticut and Nebraska avenues NW, kept a Ping-Pong table on the sidewalk in front of his eatery. And people played Ping-Pong on that table. In public. With their children. Laughing and smiling as if everything were just fine. And they did this without a permit. But have no fear. We live in a nation of laws. When bad things happen, we correct the ills, and everything returns to its proper place. And so today the Ping-Pong table is no more, and the sidewalks are once again empty, the street once more safe for http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/ping_pong_politics_on_connecti.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/ping_pong_politics_on_connecti.html Thu, 08 May 2008 07:28:42 -0400 It's the media's fault, of course. If it weren't for the worldwide media hysteria over Roy Pearson's $54 million pants suit against his neighborhood dry cleaners, why, he'd still have his job as an administrative law judge for the District of Columbia. So says Pearson in a federal lawsuit filed this week. Pearson, who has been keeping to himself since losing both his lawsuit against Custom Cleaners and his job last year, has emerged from his Northeast home to demand a cool million from the city that pushed him out of a job last fall. You may recall that in the pants case, Pearson styled himself as the "private attorney general" representing all of the people of the District of Columbia in the great battle to make certain that "Satisfaction Guaranteed" signs in retail stores be taken very, very literally. But even though the judge in that case did everything http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/pants_update_pants_man_sues_ci.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/pants_update_pants_man_sues_ci.html Tue, 06 May 2008 17:00:30 -0400 My vote for Frederick Douglass as the least offensive of the three weak finalists to be on the D.C. quarter may be in line with the plurality of Post readers' opinions, but there are strong voices in favor of another candidate, Duke Ellington, and Palisades resident Michael Dolan has penned a strong brief in favor of the Duke. Dolan, the author of "The American Porch," an eloquent tribute to a great and important American institution, makes his case like this: Marc -- All due respect to Messrs. Banneker and Douglass, you are WAAAAY wrong to pick either of them for the backside of the capital quarter. Each man in his way embodies the (you should excuse the deliberate transmogrification of meaning) carpet-bagging impulse that both excites and enervates city, as ambitious individuals like Banneker arrive here to make their reputations and renowned champions like Douglass descend from the empyrean http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_dc_quarter_a_brief_for_the.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_dc_quarter_a_brief_for_the.html Tue, 06 May 2008 12:26:22 -0400 Last fall, when Virginia's Republican Party proposed to require voters in its presidential primary to sign a pledge promising that they would support the party's nominee, Democrats called the maneuver a "slap in the face to voters." Bruised by criticism from Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, the GOP backed off--there would be no loyalty oath. So imagine the surprise of some Democrats in Arlington last weekend when they arrived at a party caucus to select school board candidates and found themselves confronted with... a loyalty pledge. "For the first time in my 42 years as a voter I have failed to vote in an election," says Margaret Shannon, a research historian who lives in Arlington, "not because I forgot, but because I walked out rather than violate my conscience." Shannon was appalled that her party would ask her to sign this statement: "I certify that I am a resident http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/arlington_dems_told_to_sign_lo.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/arlington_dems_told_to_sign_lo.html Tue, 06 May 2008 07:21:03 -0400 First, the U.S. Mint nixed "Taxation Without Representation" as the slogan for the D.C. quarter. Now, the Mint has narrowed the choices for the design of the coin's reverse to three figures from the city's history: Benjamin Banneker, Duke Ellington, and Frederick Douglass. Each has his merits, of course, but this is a weak field. The problem is not any lack of achievement on the part of the candidates; no, it's the tenuousness of their connections to the District, which are important but way too brief (Banneker), an accident of birth that had little meaning in his ultimate accomplishments (Ellington) and almost irrelevant to his greatness (Douglass). Just as almost every state in the union decided that no one person captured the essence of that place's history and identity, the District should have chosen inanimate symbols to put on the coin that so many people fought so hard to http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/weak_choices_but_douglass_for.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/weak_choices_but_douglass_for.html Mon, 05 May 2008 07:46:56 -0400 Twenty-eight houses sold in 51 minutes, each auction the final spin in a harrowing death spiral for 28 families that believed just a year or so ago that they had found security and comfort. On a blustery spring afternoon at the edge of a parking garage in Upper Marlboro, eight people stood in a semicircle in front of the auctioneers whose job it was to sell off the houses those 28 families couldn't pay for anymore. Each person in the audience -- all professional house buyers who travel the circuit of courthouse auctions -- spent the hour glued to a cellphone, awaiting instructions from anonymous investors. At the end of the hour, all eight buyers, even the ones who had blank bank checks in their hands, stood up and silently walked away. The house on Canberra Drive in Clinton, listed for sale for $450,000, went back to the bank for http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/28_houses_in_51_minutes_no_buy.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/28_houses_in_51_minutes_no_buy.html Sun, 04 May 2008 08:57:18 -0400 The flat voice of a police officer reading off the blotter contrasts starkly with the smooth introduction from the professional announcer who precedes him on the air: "8:09 p.m., report of juveniles setting fire to a pile of papers behind an apartment complex; 3:14 p.m., Annapolis police respond to report of an argument. The man violently resisted efforts to place him in the police car." It's the morning police report coming to you "from Radio Park" on Annapolis's hometown station, WNAV (1430 AM), one of a dwindling number of intensely local voices of the sort that used to dominate the AM dial. The digital revolution threatens to render irrelevant or unprofitable many of the most prominent old media, whether they be newspapers, books, magazines or television and radio stations. As each of those industries struggles to hold on to audiences or attract young consumers, the medium that has fallen farthest http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_webs_spiritual_grandfather.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/the_webs_spiritual_grandfather.html Sat, 03 May 2008 08:36:05 -0400 Given that it's taking decades to extend Metro rail to Dulles Airport or to connect the two limbs of the Red Line, it hardly seems prudent to predict that the region's transit system might expand even more ambitiously in the coming years. But Daniel Malouff, an urban planner for the city of Fairfax who runs an inventive blog looking at the future of the Washington region, has come up with a sprawling vision for Metro's future that includes a tight web of new light rail and streetcar lines that would finally relieve many suburbanites of the exasperated plaint, "But Metro doesn't go where I'm going." Malouff's map of the future assumes that the cost--in dollars and political strife--of building a lot more heavy rail is probably prohibitive. Certainly the battle over rail to Dulles has proven that. So he gets more nimble, adding a few infill Metro stations, but http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/metro_of_the_future_beyond_sil.html?nav=rss_blog http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/05/metro_of_the_future_beyond_sil.html Fri, 02 May 2008 08:23:19 -0400