This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: DC Government

  • Congressional voting for DC

    Congress is debating Congressional voting for the DC delegate this week. From Washington Time’s Gary Emerling;

    Legal analysts yesterday debated before a House committee the constitutionality of a bill that would give the District congressional voting rights, wrangling over the right of Congress to enact the change and sparking concern among lawmakers that the measure might violate the Constitution.
        “Is it possible … that we are about to step into a huge constitutional problem?” Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked the panel. “Can we all have good will and not be able to do anything on this [because] the Constitution has us tied in knots?”

    Yeah, Conyers – that pesky Constitution thing is always getting in your way, ain’t it?

    Honestly? I don’t think the District’s residents deserve a vote in Congress. Pretty harsh, huh? Well, look at their record of choosing politicians. There’s Marion Barry who after serving a sentence for crack possesion and whore-mongering while mayor of DC returned to run again and win. And now he’s a council member and a tax evader who hasn’t paid his taxes on time since 1998.

    When the District thought that a Democrat Congress and a Democrat president would give them representation in Congress, they elected straw-candidates in anticipation of their new status – they elected Jesse Jackson, resident of Chicago, IL, as a Senator.

    When Mayor Anthony Williams’ campaign was fraudulently submitting petitions for his nomination for reelection in 2004 (with thousands of forged signatures including Donald Rumsfeld and Oprah), his own Democrat Party removed him from the ballot. He ran as an independent and won. As his corrupt political appointees were fired, investigated and jailed, he was still beloved by the voters.

    I was a resident of DC for more than seven years and never once did I feel left out because my neighbors didn’t have a voice in Congress. In fact, I was glad they didn’t. I was willing to sacrifice my voice, because my neighbors were morons.

    DC went 90% for Kerry in 2004, in the straw primary they held that year, Howard Dean won with Al Sharpton second – the straw primary was held before the Dean Scream. Now, after the Dean Scream, in the real primary, DC went to Kerry. So, they allowed themselves to be swayed by the media and the talking heads. And these are the people we want to have an uninformed voice in Congress? Nope, not me.

    They (dumbass DC voters) vote time-and-again to keep the status quo – poverty, filth, corruption – with no thought of changing things for the better – for very stupid, shallow and racist reasons. Then after they’ve voted and nothing changes, they (dumbass DC voters) blame the Federal government for not giving them enough money.

    I’ve lived in enough third-world countries to recognize a third world country when I see it – and DC is a third world country. Massive power outages, government officials on the take, exploding manholes, mentally deranged people roaming the streets, rampant and generally-tolerated crime on every corner.

    I’d be more inclined to give the vote to El Salvador than the District of Columbia.

    Update; Well it passed out committee according to the Washington Post;

    The House Judiciary Committee today passed a bill giving the District a vote in the House of Representatives and the measure is expected to go to the House floor late next week.

    The committee approved the bill by a vote of 21-13 with no amendments, a victory for D.C. voting rights advocates. The Democratic leadership is hopeful that the bill will pass the full House. It would then go to the Senate.

    Well, it might make through the House, but the Senate will be a different story – I hope.

  • Barry escapes jail time once more

    From the Washington Post; Marion Barry, the District of Columbia’s perennial repeat offender, escaped jail time again;

    Barry, 71, was sentenced by Robinson in March 2006 to three years’ probation after he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges. He could have been jailed for up to 18 months after admitting that he failed to file returns covering six years, 1999 to 2004. In giving him probation last year, Robinson ordered that he obey the law and file any outstanding tax returns.

    Prosecutors first alerted Robinson in February that Barry had failed to file his 2005 tax returns on time. Barry (D-8th Ward) did not dispute the basic allegations the prosecutors made. It was only after they went to court that he filed the federal and local returns.

    That’s just his most recent dust-up. He’s been arrested in Federal parks in the area numerous times after closing hours, at times with a “powdery substance” in his possession. After the initial reports in the local media, the story just dies without the public being informed of the outcome. Until now.

    The prosecutors have him cold on tax evasion, but apparently he has a judge on his side. This one is Deborah A. Robinson, a local magistrate since 1988. Wonder what Barry has on her. How long do you figure it’d take for Magistrate Robinson to lock you or me for seven years of tax delinquency?

    It’s bad enough that residents of DC’s Southeast see some value in having Barry represent them on the city council, but when the judiciary protects repeat and constant offenders – something is really rotten in the nation’s capitol. Besides Marion Barry

  • DC’s Mayor Fenty speaks out against citizen’s rights

    Everyone knows by now that, in a rare act of confidence in DC residents, the DC Circuit Court struck down the District’s draconian 1976 gun law that forbade citizen-owned handguns and only allowed owners to have rifles in their home (not shotguns, rifles) if the rifle was disassembled and separated from it’s ammunition.

    According to Washington Time’s Tarron Lively and Daniel Taylor, newly-elected Mayor Adrian Fenty (that’s him on the left in the picture above) was “outraged”;

    D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said he was “outraged” by the court’s decision, which overturns a law that “has been unquestioned for more than 30 years.”
        “Today’s decision flies in the face of laws that have helped decrease gun violence in the District of Columbia,” he said. “The ruling also turns aside longstanding precedents and marks the first time in the history of the United States that a federal appeals court has struck down a gun law on Second Amendment grounds.”

    Scott McCabe of the DC Examiner quoted the new mayor;

    “I am strongly opposed to the court’s decision,” Fenty said. “District residents deserve every protection afforded to them under District law.”

    The District has banned handgun ownership since 1976. In 2004, a lower-court judge told six D.C. residents that they did not have a constitutional right to own handguns.

    I’d remind Mayor Fenty that the longevity of a law doesn’t neccessarily protect it from challenge. Otherwise slavery and Jim Crow Laws would be common practice since they were unchallenged for decades. As for helping keep DC gun violence down, according to the Metro DC police’s own count, they’ve confiscated 9046 guns since 2002. I’m guessing that they’re only scratching the surface of illegal guns in the hands of criminals in the District. There have been 30 murders in DC already this year – that’s over 3 per week.

    According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention,  209 kids (between the ages of 0-19) were murdered by gun violence 1999-2004 in our nation’s capitol. Doesn’t sound like this law has been doing much good. Nor does it sound like the District can protect it’s half-million citizens with the eight thousand law enforcement officials on patrol from various local and Federal agencies in this city.

    Crime has been on the rise over the past two years in DC and it’s largely because the law-abiding population isn’t armed and the criminals are armed. Car-jackings and home invasions are becoming more prevailant – two crimes that would virtually end if criminals weren’t quite so sure that their intended victims are unarmed.

    We moved from Northeast DC last year because crime was becoming a daily event in our neighborhood – gun crime. Two people were shot on different occasions in our upscale apartment complex. Two carjackings at gunpoint and a home invasion at knifepoint finally drove us to the suburbs. Having my Ruger Mini-14 in the closet was some comfort, But not being able to brandish it in an emergency was becoming a concern. I can only imagine the nightmare of a trial I would be forced to endure if I’d actually shot an intruder.

    And just because another court has never struck down a gun law on Second Amedment grounds, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be struck down. That’s what the Bill of Rights is supposed to do, Junior. It’s supposed to protect the minority from the ill-considered over-reactive policies of the majority.

    The Washington Post does it’s level best to paint the plaintiffs in this case as right-wing gun nuts;

    Gura declined to say how he assembled the plaintiffs, who came to the case with different backgrounds and motivations.

    Some of the plaintiffs grew up with guns in and around their homes and belong to the National Rifle Association. A few are involved with libertarian organizations, including the Cato Institute, which provided legal assistance in the lawsuit.

    To us on the Right it sounds innocuous enough, but to the Leftists in DC (who voted 90% for Kerry in the 2004 election) invoking the boogey-creatures the NRA and Cato Institute (which a DC resident recently explained to me was a front organization for the KKK) is fear-mongering. This case (to which I’ve contributed money since 2003) didn’t garner much attention outside the Cato Institute’s membership and the Washington Times until this court decision. I suppose it’ll take front-and-center in the gun-grabbing Washington Post’s columns from now on, though.

    Yesterday, their editorial board called it a “Dangerous Ruling“;

    IN OVERTURNING the District of Columbia’s long-standing ban on handguns yesterday, a federal appeals court turned its back on nearly 70 years of Supreme Court precedent to give a new and dangerous meaning to the Second Amendment. If allowed to stand, this radical ruling will inevitably mean more people killed and wounded as keeping guns out of the city becomes harder. Moreover, if the legal principles used in the decision are applied nationally, every gun control law on the books would be imperiled.

    The 2 to 1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down sections of a 1976 law that bans city residents from having handguns in their homes. The court also overturned the law’s requirement that shotguns and rifles be stored disassembled or with trigger locks. The court grounded its unprecedented ruling in the finding that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends beyond militias to individuals. The activities the Second Amendment protects, the judges wrote, “are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or continued intermittent enrollment in the militia.”

    Never before has a law been struck down on that basis. The Supreme Court, in its landmark 1939 decision United States v. Miller, stated that the Second Amendment was adopted “with obvious purpose” of protecting the ability of states to organize militias and “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Nearly every other federal court of appeals has concurred in that finding. The dissenting judge in yesterday’s opinion, Karen LeCraft Henderson, a Republican appointee like the other two judges on the panel, rightly lambasted the majority for its willful disregard of Supreme Court precedent.

    Yep, never before has the court ruled that a basic God-given right of an individual is to protect his property and his family. Way to misinterpret the Constitution, goofballs. I wonder if any of the members of WaPo’s editorial board or Mayor Fenty own guns, or if any of the people who protect them have guns. Don’t the rest of us deserve the same level of security?

  • OK, maybe it is Hell–

    My bride and I arrived back from the beach yesterday to witness the biggest bunch of crybabies on the planet trying to run a city. First, let me tell ya’all that it took us longer to get from our suburban Maryland home to Reagan National Airport on the subway than it did to get from Reagan to our hotel in South Beach Miami (that’s including the taxi ride and picking our luggage up from the airline) because a whopping 1/2″ of snow had fallen by the time we left home.

    That was on Tuesday – the snow stopped late Tuesday. This morning, four days later, schools are still closed because the people who get paid to shovel municipal sidewalks, clear shool driveways of snow, keep the school buses maintained are all on their collective ass.

    So instead of someone taking charge, schools are just closed. Is it any wonder that large numbers of schoolchildren don’t take their education seriously when the bloated bureaucracy that’s responsible for teaching those schoolchildren don’t take their jobs seriously?

    How many times have we seen those videos over the past week of kids in Redwood, NY and Oswego, NY plowing through 100″ of snow to get to school? I grew up a little south of there and I remember very few “snow days”.  

    Instead of attending school, the under-educated drones of the DC and bordering MD school districts were all riding the rails to-and-from the malls yesterday when we got back from Miami. They can zip back-and-forth to the malls, but because area bureaucrats can’t drag their ample buttocks out of bed on a schoolday and do the jobs their paid to do, they can’t get educated beyond a grade-school level.

    how is this your problem? Well, DC schools are Federally-funded to the tune of $811 million. How much of that do you figure comes from 1/2 million residents here?

  • More gun control – that’s what we need

    A recent Metro DC Police Department report announces that 901 of 1126 homocides in the District were committed with firearms. The District has banned firearms outside of residences since 1974. In the same story, the Washington Times cites that Atlanta has 10% fewer gun-related homocides with a less-restrictive gun ownership policy. Ain’t that funny?

    As a recent resident of DC, I owned two rifles which stayed inside my home, in compliance with local laws. The law also requires that those firearms must be disassembled – I may or may not have been quite so compliant in that regard.

    When we first moved there, one of the most violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods in the country, I announced to all of my neighbors and anyone else in my neighborhood that I owned rifles with large capacity magazines. Although many of those neighbors became the victims of various crimes, I remained untouched by the criminal element for seven years. Coincidence? The only time I was ever assaulted was at the subway station where I couldn’t (and didn’t) have a gun.

    Of course, that idiot police chief Ramsey, who never seems to be at fault for anything, blames Virginia and Maryland gun laws for the crimes that plague DC. Everyone knows that criminals will only buy guns legally from gun stores and file the neccessary paperwork and wait the mandatory time period.

    Idiots run the District and I don’t see it changing much with Adrian Fenty as Mayor.