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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Linking Education and Crime
Roger Scott, roger.scott@earthlink.net

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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An Humongous Water Bill
Jack McKay, jack.mckay@verizon.net

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]

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CLASSIFIEDS — FREE

Wood Chest
Lyla Winter, mrscalabash@att.net

Tenley Town: free large chest; wood, six drawers (two small, four large). 32"W x 19"D x 39"H. You pick up.

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