Dear Washingtonians:
Reid Wilson, in the Post, uses various sources to try to
quantify “The Most Corrupt State[s] in America,”
http://tinyurl.com/kff8txl. In
the chart that shows the number of convicted public officials between
1998 and 2007, DC comes in only ninth of the top ten localities, but
when the chart is reordered to show the number of convicted public
officials per million residents per year, DC tops the list, and has a
hefty lead, 66.9 compared to 46.9 for the next highest region, the
Virgin Islands. That 66.9 figure is almost 5.65 times larger than the
8.3 figure for the most corrupt actual state — North Dakota.
The American Interest engages in a bit of futuristic speculation
when it theorizes that “Robo-Chauffeurs Could Kill Public Transit as We
Know It,”
http://tinyurl.com/pba6978. The key sentence: “A recent study by IHS
Automotive predicted that nearly every car on the road in 2050 will be
self-driving; in that kind of world, in which our nation’s highways are
populated by hordes of self-driving vehicles packed tightly together at
higher speeds and with greater fuel efficiency, massive investments in
rail infrastructure or new bus networks won’t make much sense.” In
thirty-six years, then, “public transportation” in major cities will be
obsolete or a minor, secondary choice compared to self-driving private
or shared cars. But then, if we believed futurists’ predications in
1950, we would all have private flying cars in our garages by now.
Matt Cohen, in DCist.com, asks, “Why Do DC Residents Pay the Highest
Internet Costs in the County?”
http://tiny.url/k6m9ear. Cohen doesn’t come to a firm conclusion,
but he suggests our high cost may partially be due to our high
connection speeds and partially due to a lack of competition, with RCN
and Fios covering only limited areas of the city and not giving Comcast
any serious rivalry.
Randall O’Toole and Damien Schiff wrote an article that I missed when
it was published in the Washington Times, but it has now been
reprinted on the Cato Institute web site,
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/do-single-family-homes-threaten-planet.
“A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into
multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies
nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to
transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate
change. Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area
live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by
2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area,
recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the
region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.” Reducing the number of
single-family homes in the city sounds like a plan the DC Office of
Planning will advocate in the future, as contemptuous as it is of the
actual preferences of DC residents.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Gray’s Future Written in Plea Agreements
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
Early voting in the April primary election begins in the District on
March 17. Given his late entry into the mayoral race and his
second-place showing the ward 8 Democrats straw vote on January 18,
Mayor Gray needs to act quickly in the coming weeks to raise campaign
funds, organize a campaign staff, establish a field organization and a
get-out-the-vote strategy, and open a campaign headquarters (at least to
serve as a workplace and gathering point for his campaign workers). At
the same time, Gray and his supporters will be closely following
developments in the US Attorney’s investigation of Gray’s 2010 campaign.
Two individuals who pled guilty to playing an integral role in
organizing Gray’s 2010 “shadow” campaign, Eugenia “Jean” Harris and
Vernon Hawkins, are both in their seventies and in poor health, and are
seeking to avoid lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the
fraudulent campaign scheme.
Harris, for example, is facing a sentence of thirty to thirty-seven
months of incarceration and a fine of up to six thousand dollars. She
signed a plea agreement on July 9, 2012, that requires her to “cooperate
completely, candidly, an truthfully in any criminal investigation or
prosecution conducted” by the US Attorney’s Office. The plea agreement
stipulates that at the time of her sentencing the US Attorney’s Office
“will advise the sentencing judge and the United States Probation Office
in the District of Columbia of the full nature, extent, and value of the
cooperation” she provides to the government. Hawkins’ plea agreement,
signed August 13, 2013, contains a similar provision, requiring him to
“cooperate with the Office of the United States Attorney,” and notes
that the government “will bring to the Court’s attention at the time of
sentencing the nature and extent” of his cooperation or lack of
cooperation. Hawkins is currently scheduled to appear in US District
Court before Judge Kollar-Kotelly for a status conference on February
14, and Harris will appear before her on March 19. At those hearings, it
may be possible to get some indication of the extent to which Harris and
Hawkins have assisted the US Attorney’s Office in completing its
investigation of businessman Jeffrey Thompson, who funded Gray’s 2010
shadow campaign.
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Comment on WAMU
MetroConnection McMillan Report
Daniel Wolkoff,
amglassart@yahoo.com
How much history should be preserved at McMillan? Is our history
measured in amounts, by the yard, pound, square foot, percent, like
Vision McMillan Partners (VMP) tells us? We have a case here at McMillan
of successive DC administrations who placed no value on our history, no
value on the residents of an entire section of their city. Since 1986,
the DC government has fenced this land off, blocking peoples’ access to
their needed outdoor recreation, with absolutely no concern for
community health. WAMU, would this park have been fenced off had it been
located in Friendship Heights or Georgetown?
To understand the historic importance please read the excellent
nomination to the National Register of Historic Places by our Office of
Historic Preservation’s Kim William,
http://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/13000022.htm. You will quickly
understand that McMillan is an amazing resource of national significance
that is in surprisingly good condition, and that its preservation,
ironically, is by law a charge of the DC government. McMillan is a
Registered DC and National Park Service Registered Historic Place, not
an office park or condo row. We have an unacceptable disparity in this
city based on institutional racism and economic class discrimination,
with five times the park land provided to the priviledged upper NW
sections of DC than to this densely urbanized section around McMillan
Park. Would the DC government have waited thirty years to mitigate the
flooding in Bloomingdale, had raw sewage been flooding into the
basements of Kalorama? In upper northwest, parks are geologic, cultural,
historic civil war fortifications, stream valleys, glens.
So what percent of McMillan should be preserved as a park? All of it,
and we have to get the reservoir and all one hundred thirteen acres of
this Historic District included. Just like NY’s Central Park, we need
places to walk, hike, jog around the Reservoir, watch the sunset and the
July 4th Fireworks. Obesity is epidemic, so stop fencing our nicest area
to jog, our area to grow urban gardens, healing gardens for Children’s
National Medical Center, our Glen Echo of
art/performance/music/festivals, and millions of recreational use. VMP
has concocted the most ridiculous warnings of why we can’t use the
McMillan Park, our park, for our needs. And it is offensive that the
media trumpets the “ridiculous” instead of real investigation of this
issue. We have been blocked out as if we don’t have any value to our own
government. In recent years even Advisory Neighborhood Commission tours
of the twenty acres of mystical underground vaulted galleries were
blocked by Jeff Miller of the Deputy Mayor’s office, as hundreds of
people began to see the value of real preservation and potential
creative adaptive-re-use.
The twenty acres of under-surface galleries are perfect for “indoor
urban agriculture” that can produce five times the fresh vegetables of
regular farms, and provide for our food needs without trucking
vegetables from California and Mexico. Should we let this opportunity
disappear for VMP’s big profits, for Mayor Gray, and for his deputy
mayor? Every benefit this community needs can be accomplished while
saving all of McMillan as the whole it was designed to be, and creating
a sustainable eco-campus. It is VMP and Gray that cuts off the potential
and builds over the site for fifteen years. This link below is for a
Youtube video of a TED talk from the Netherlands that shows the critical
urban agriculture opportunity the DC government is now destroying in its
determination to build a suburban office/condo mall, on our land, our
park. Using our licensed vertical indoor growing technology we could
convert the McMillan/Olmsted Park caverns to a fully functional, local
food production facility and only utilize a relatively small part of the
space, making it a totally sustainable site. Please look at this:
http://youtu.be/ILzWmw53Wwo.
The district government’s failure of stewardship of McMillan has been
continuous malfeasance, racist discrimination, and a massive waste of
the peoples’ money and resources. Three city council members who dealt
with the VMP plan are convicted felons who took bribes, committed fraud
and embezzlement. Where is the investigation of the whole
under-the-table development process and Gray’s fraudulent election? Now
Mayor Gray, who funnels DC resources to contractors and developers, in
this case in complete disregard for common sense and community health,
is giving away this 25 acres of precious land to VMP. The “surplus” of
McMillan must be stopped and, as WAMU Patrick Madden made clear, the
“symbiotic relationship” between the DC officials and the big developers
(ten in VMP) is corrupting the very L’Enfant/McMillan plan for a
gracious, open, airy, tree-covered DC. McMillan is part of the plan for
the Mall. It should never have been ceded to a DC government that is so
destructive , irresponsible, wasteful, and misguided, rushing like mad
now, to overbuild the city and block sustainable creative re-purposing
that saves our heritage and our open space, “great places” and our
McMillan/Olmsted Park. We must block the “surplussing” of McMillan, our
land given away to corporate profit, with $319 million in taxpayer
subsidies that no developer should need. This is atrocious. So come on,
WAMU, how about reporting on all of this, and serving the community with
some real journalism?
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What has happened to the simple present tense? Why has it been driven
out by the unnecessary use of the present participle? On a local
listserv today, I noticed this construction in a post about frozen
pipes: “I am wondering about the age of the homes in which the pipes are
getting frozen . . . I am also wondering about the age of the pipes. . .
.“ How about, “I wonder about. . .?”
This unnecessary use of the present participle has been
proliferating. I encounter it on radio and in print daily. Watch for it.
Is it a rhetorical tic, like starting sentences with “so?” When did it
begin? Why is it proliferating? Is bad usage, like base currency,
driving out good?
Does anyone have any thoughts?
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