The Washington Times this morning carries the story that DC’s Southeast residents are more than a little miffed at the rise in homicides in that quarter of the District – and they’re blaming the serial criminal they elected to the City Council;
A recent surge in homicides in Southeast has embattled residents pointing the finger at D.C. Council member Marion Barry, who is seeking re-election in November.
(This Ain’t Hell file photo)
How do you write a story about Marion Barry, convicted whore monger, crack head and tax evader without mentioning his past? Ask Marc Fisher of the Washington Post.
Even now, in the waning years of the Barry era, the man who once dubbed himself The Situationist is playing his pragmatic brand of politics with consummate craft. The same politician who railed against the evils of gentrification when Williams was replacing old housing projects with hundreds of new homes embraces those developments as the heart of “the new Ward 8.”
Barry is an evangelist for a plan to transform national parkland at Poplar Point into a high-end retail and residential community, a project not unlike those he used to deride during the Williams years as the vanguard of a yuppie takeover of working-class black neighborhoods.
Yes, he’s a tireless champion of the ever-poor in the Ward 8 neighborhood he now represents on the City Council of Washington, DC, but he also embodies the corruption and empty promises that have kept the poor in that state for the last three decades. Hardly a year passes that we don’t read another article about his difficulties with obeying the law.
In 2002, before he began his poltical comeback, he was arrested in a Virginia national park with a powdery substance. A few years later the IRS had him in court for tax evasion (to my knowledge, he hasn’t paid a penny in federal taxes since 1999). When the IRS tried to toss him in jail when he failed to make any effort to repay the tens of thousands of dollars he owes, a judge blocked his imprisonment.
When he was robbed by several teens last year, the inventory of the property stolen included jewelry worth $14,000. And he still hasn’t bothered to repay the taxes he owes because there’s no punishment for his behavior.
But for the Marc Fishers and Washington Posts of the world, he’s a saint among men;
Still, the poverty in Ward 8 is palpable. We stop at a red light, and a 60-ish woman sidles up to Barry’s window. “It’s the mayor,” she says. “I need $4.”
“Y’all breaking me over here,” Barry grumbles, with a smile.
He reaches into his pocket and counts out four singles, hands them through the window. “These people wearing me out,” he says.
From the corner a few yards away, a middle-age man calls out, “What’s up, Barry? Got some for me?”
Marion, you’re wearing me out.
Hot Air wrote yesterday about the first day of the lifting of the gun ban in Washington, DC, our nation’s capitol – where our rights are defended by our government.
The 32-year ban ends this morning — or does it? Even crueler than being first in line for the iPhone only to find they’re out of stock…
Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit.
But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.
I left the District of Columbia right after the DC government voted to build the new ballpark for the Washington Nationals. Then-Mayor Tony Williams promised to finance it all with municipal bonds. He said taxpayers wouldn’t get saddled with the expense. I left the District because I knew eventually, taxpayers would indeed get hit for the expenses. Well, they haven’t yet, but it’s getting close.
According to the Washington Post, the Nationals have stopped paying their rent to the District, so the District is going to raise the sales tax in the stadium to recoup some of their losses;
Fed up with the Nationals’ failure to pay $3.5 million in rent, eight D.C. Council members proposed legislation this week to capture more revenue another way: increasing the sales tax by 5 percent for most items sold at the new ballpark in Southeast Washington.
The city charges a 10 percent sales tax. Council members said the money raised from the tax increase would help make up for tax revenue lost because of lower-than-projected ballpark attendance.
And they said it would bring money into the city’s coffers while the Nationals continue to hold off on paying rent on the ballpark. The team contends that the ballpark, up and running since March, is not complete.
Besides withholding rent, the team is demanding $100,000 a day in damages dating to March 1, a move that is galling to some D.C. officials, who are quick to point out that the District put up more than $611 million in public money to build the stadium complex along the Anacostia River.
So when people buy less at the stadium, and attendance falls off even more, who is going to end up paying off those bonds? Anthony Williams? Nope. The city government? Yep, but with taxpayer dollars.
Do the Nationals or the city government think they can force people to attend the baseball games? Do they think they force people to pay higher prices for stupid hats and hot dogs? When the Nationals get fed up with the corrupt and inept District government and walk away from the stadium, it’ll end up being just another eyesore on the Anacostia River that DC residents will have to clean up.
Governments don’t know how to run profitable businesses – except in China where they use prison and slave workforces and the army runs the businesses. I could see this coming from miles away, but everyone wanted so much to believe that Tony Williams wouldn’t screw them – he was just another grifter wearing a bowtie.
By now, you’ve heard that the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s draconian gun laws last month. This caused DC’s government to go into closed-door sessions to rewrite the law. Yesterday, they outlined the new law which is not much different from the old law and the DC government thumbs it’s nose at the Supreme Court and the rights of it’s citizens (Washington Post link);
The legislation does not lift restrictions on semiautomatic handguns, a move that will probably land the District back in court, according to the lawyer who successfully challenged the gun ban.
Announcing the regulations yesterday, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was clear about what might be ahead.
“We think we have struck the delicate legal balance,” he said during a news conference. “While we will have lawsuits, we think we stand on solid legal ground.”
Associated Press steps out of their usual Obama-loving selves to recount an interview Obama did in February;
The Democrat’s campaign said a spokesman made an “inartful” statement when he said in November that Obama believed the D.C. law was constitutional. But Obama himself did not correct a debate moderator who repeated the position in February.
“You said in Idaho recently, I’m quoting here, ‘I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.’ But you support the D.C. handgun ban and you’ve said that it’s constitutional,” said the moderator, Leon Harris of Washington television station WJLA. Obama nodded as Harris spoke, nodding and saying, “Right, right.”
“How can you reconcile those two different positions?” Harris asked.
Obama answered that the United States has conflicting traditions of gun ownership and street violence that results from illegal handgun use. “So, there is nothing wrong, I think, with a community saying we are going to take those illegal handguns off the streets,” Obama said.
The Obama campaign argued that Obama was simply acknowledging the question by saying “right.”
The DC ban MADE handguns illegal – guns that weren’t illegal before the law were the guns that were taken off the streets. Did the gun ban take guns off of the streets of DC? Nope. According to the DC cops statistics, about 2,000 guns are “recovered” every year – that’s six guns every day.
All the DC ban did was disarm law-abiding citizens.
Of course, AP could be just trying to reassure Obama’s base that he’s still on their side.
Me? I’m waiting for our resident law school grad, TSO, to tell us what the USSC really said in his promised long post on Monday when he’s done knocking his dimpled balls around in New England this weekend.