Harry Jaffe

Harry Jaffe: Should sniper John Allen Muhammad die on Tuesday?

One of the more memorable moments in my coverage of crime in the nation's capital took place in 1993, when relatives, friends and politicians came to the playground of Weatherless Elementary School to bemoan the death of Launice Smith. A four-year-old, Launice was running on the school playground a few days earlier when a teenager showed up with a gun in his hand and revenge on his mind. He shot and killed his rival, Kervin Brown. But in the hail of bullets from his 9 mm pistol, he shot Launice in the head. She died four days later. Delores Smith, one of Launice's aunts, spoke at the gathering. A former D.C. cop, she bemoaned the violence that had made the streets run with blood. She looked...

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Harry Jaffe: Unemployment stats paint a tale of two cities

In 1962, sociologist Michael Harrington published "The Other America," his landmark book about how the other half lived. He painted a portrait of Americans living in squalor and hunger. His book helped start the "war on poverty." The war is not going well in the nation's capital city. This week, the District's employment services department released unemployment rates that show the immense gap between the two Washingtons: one white and working; the other black and jobless. In Ward 8, east of the Anacostia River, nearly a third of the work force was without a job in September. Reaching a new high, the number of unemployed hit 28.3 percent. But in Ward 3, which I often refer to as...

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Harry Jaffe: My friend Phil Mendelson asks how Fenty's friends get DC contracts

Readers of my column might not get the sense that Councilman Phil Mendelson and I are buddies. Of all the pols and cops and businessmen whose chains I have yanked, I have tried to give Phil whiplash on more than a few occasions. "Comrade Phil" I called him, because he seemed to take the ultraliberal approach to law enforcement. He would dispute that, of course, but people who care passionately about public safety can disagree. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to hear that Mendelson referred to me as his "friend" from the dais during a city council meeting Tuesday. He may have used the term in that insipid way senators refer to one another as "my good...

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Harry Jaffe: Jack saves the Rooster

Here's a sweet story with a happy ending for your leaf-raking Sunday: Jack Evans was at home in Georgetown three Sundays ago when he read my column in The Examiner about the imminent closing of the Black Rooster pub on L Street, in downtown D.C. Too bad, he thought. Another great saloon bites the dust, like Nathan's in Georgetown and the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle. "Wish I could save it," he thought. The Rooster was about to be slaughtered on the real estate chopping block. Its lease with the General Services Administration had expired, and the landlord signed a deal to rent the space to the building's big tenant, the Peace Corps. The little brick storefront watering hole was...

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Harry Jaffe: Michelle in the Lion's Den

Watching the nastiness that took place during Thursday's city council hearing, parents of public school children in D.C. might despair. Don't. Chalk it up to growing pains. Pin it on the natural disruptions of change. Be thankful that school reform will survive the kind of recriminations that we watched in the Wilson Building. Starting after noon, School Chancellor Michelle Rhee appeared before the city council in what everyone understood would be a beat down of the school chief. Council members had been preparing to grill her for weeks, ever since she fired a couple hundred teachers. Other cities and states have been forced to let hundreds more teachers go, but in D.C., 200 was too...

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Harry Jaffe: Fenty puts park projects through spin cycle

We know that Mayor Adrian Fenty is a man of many talents and abilities. He can run, he can swim, he can bike. Every time Fenty's name pops up in a news article written by an out-of-town reporter, we read once again of his prowess as a triathlete. He's a protective parent, raising three young kids. He cuts a fine figure in black tie and tux. The dude can snip ribbons faster than Edward Scissorhands could sculpt a boxwood. Who knew he could run a laundry, too? Like any good laundry, Fenty's operation is based on speed and service. If you want a project done fast, Adrian is your man. We're not talking shirts and pants here. Fenty puts capital projects through a spin cycle so his...

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Harry Jaffe: Clock is ticking on D.C. voting rights bill

Starting today the District of Columbia has 67 days left for its best chance to get full voting rights in the House of Representatives. My arithmetic is simple: there are six more days this month, 30 in November and 31 in December until the end of the year. My reasoning comes from D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has devoted much of her time and political capital to gaining passage of the D.C. Voting Rights Bill. She tells me the odds of gaining a vote on the House floor drop precipitously in 2010. "There are legal technicalities involved," she says, "and the benefits to Utah might not be as great next year, once the census is complete." You might recall that...

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Harry Jaffe: Jeff Ruland has big dreams for UDC

It's 3:15 Thursday afternoon. A tall fellow, really tall -- as in 6-foot-11 -- is standing on the edge of the University of the District of Columbia's basketball court, whistle in his mouth and frustration in his voice. "Wake up!" he yells. "You need some smelling salts?" The guy with the whistle is Jeff Ruland, recently named coach of the UDC Firebirds. A minute later he blows his whistle to interrupt a two-on-two drill. "Violation!" he yells. "Can we get a guard who can handle the ball?" Better questions might be: How did Ruland, an NBA all-star with the 1983 Washington Bullets, become the UDC coach? In a city where kids live to play hoops, where great college teams come to...

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Harry Jaffe: Is Chief Lanier losing the trust of her troops?

When D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier took over the police force, she asked her cops to send her e-mails with comments or suggestions, good or bad. She vowed to protect them and their anonymity. Officer Mike Touart has paid for his candor. By any measure, Touart is a dedicated D.C. cop. His parents are D.C. natives. He joined the Metropolitan Police Department in 1990. "I'm a Washingtonian," he tells me. Touart has spent most of his 19 plus years on the force policing the other Capitol Hill in the 1st Police District. He ticks off the public housing projects: "Potomac Gardens, Kentucky Courts, Sursum Corda, Greenleaf Gardens." In these "gardens," people...

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Harry Jaffe: A Brit and a banker arrive to revive the Corcoran

Washingtonians have watched a number of people come to town to save the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Not that the grand exhibition hall in the 112-year-old Beaux Arts building near the White House is in imminent danger -- but it has been in need of an identity and a business plan for a few decades. Turns out the saviors might be a British artist and a banker from Ohio. But first, some art history. Robert Mapplethorpe left his imprint on the Corcoran. His 1989 exhibition might have catapulted the museum to the top of the photography world; unfortunately, some congressmen found one of his works distasteful, a scandal ensued, and the stain remained for years. Then came David Levy, a New...

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Harry Jaffe: Wealthy developer promises to fund Fenty foe

The city hall rumor mill was buzzing this week with word that a wealthy developer is so furious with Mayor Adrian Fenty that he's vowing to raise $1 million for anyone willing to run against the first-term chief executive. "Hey," one lobbyist who heard about the offer said, "I don't even live in D.C., but for a million bucks I would move to the city and run against Fenty." We are a year away from electing a mayor, and the silly season is upon us. The purported offer to raise funds comes from R. Donahue Peebles. Born in D.C., Peebles now lives and works out of Coral Gables, Fla. He's done well buying and selling property, developing hotels and writing books about his...

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Harry Jaffe: Watergate Hotel poised for second coming

On paper, a piece of the Watergate complex should be a hot property. And it's going for cheap. Who doesn't know the name of the building where a burglary in 1972 spooled out to bring down a president? Who wouldn't want to own a piece of Washington history? Steps to the Kennedy Center. Views of the Potomac River. A short walk to great shopping and eating in Georgetown; an easy jaunt to the monuments. Why, then, has part of the hot property gone cold and dark since owners shut down the hotel in 2007? The answer is complex, but it provides a perfect window into the distressed real estate markets here and across the country. The hotel and the garage beneath are in sore need of...

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Harry Jaffe: Closing Black Rooster Pub kills off part of D.C.

When news spread The Black Rooster pub would be forced to close, wails by way of e-mail came from Ireland, Australia, South Korea -- and Iraq. "Soldiers wrote that they had found a home here when they were in town," Jody Taylor tells me. He's owned the place since 1970. "They thanked me. I should be the one thanking them." Taylor has bellied up to the bar at his downtown saloon on Friday. The place is packed. Chris, the barmaid with the long tresses, is pulling pints of draft beer and setting out bowls of Brunswick stew, the special of the day, along with fish and chips. It is Friday, after all. People have been paying special thanks to Jody Taylor ever since word got out that...

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Harry Jaffe: Racism alive and well in D.C. Council

You have to give Marion Barry his due: The dude is consistent. He came to power in this town in the 1960s by pitting blacks against whites; while mayor for 16 years, he slapped down the race card every time he was threatened; in the twilight of his career, he is once again demonizing people by the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character. How else can we interpret the way he criticized parks chief nominee Ximena Hartsock, who happens to be a Latina? In the midst of an ugly confirmation hearing last week, Barry led his colleagues into the racial realm when he said Hartsock was not qualified because she didn't "understand our culture," as in black...

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Harry Jaffe: McKinley Tech firings arm Chancellor Rhee's enemies

In her letter alerting principals that the school system would have to fire 229 teachers, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee promised to handle the difficult situation without disrupting students or classes. Did she? For one school, the answer apparently is a resounding no. McKinley Technology High School lost 15 teachers Friday. Some were adored, some were tired, a few were helping students heading to college. Police had to walk some teachers from the classrooms. Students and parents were shocked at the scene after school the day before a sunny weekend. Some confronted police. Cops Maced one 17-year-old girl in the face, and cuffed another student and a parent. The teachers union blog...

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Harry Jaffe: Is UDC poised to soar?

Under crisp blue skies and a pleasant autumn breeze, I took a stroll through one of the city's most precious pieces of real estate the other day. National Mall? The Rock Creek golf course? Sen. Harry Reid's Senate hideaway? Nope. I was crossing what passes for a quad in the middle of the University of the District of Columbia. The concrete expanse still has the look and feel of a Soviet era housing project in the outskirts of Moscow. It looks cold and barren. The gray, concrete university buildings still have numbers rather than names, though new banners at least tell us which houses the law school and which the media classes. But the value of the property cannot be denied; UDC...

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Jaffe: Homeless folks at home in the Obamas' neighborhood

If first lady Michelle Obama wants to connect with the community and get a glimpse of the homeless problem in her new hometown she won't have to venture far from the East Wing. On any Wednesday evening, she can stroll across Lafayette Square, past the tourists snapping pictures of her house, around the statue of General Lafayette on his rearing steed, across H Street to the foot of 16th Street. To her left she can see the limos pulling in and out of the Hay Adams Hotel, as swank an inn as you can get in the capital. To her right she can admire St. John's Episcopal Church, with its canary yellow exterior set off by the six white columns. It is the church of presidents, who would walk...

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Harry Jaffe: Bad news poll for Fenty could be good news for D.C.

More than half of city residents polled by SurveyUSA for WJLA-TV "disapprove" of the way Adrian Fenty is running the city; even more said the young chief executive is out for himself. My polling mavens said it was a flawed poll. It was done by auto-dial, which cuts down the response rate. Who wants to answer a blind robo-poll? The people who responded might vote, might not. The poll wasn't sorted by ward or by party. It was not what some call a "scientific" poll. We can quibble with the methods and the timing of the poll; bottom line, it ain't good news for Team Fenty, as it plans to run for a second term a year from now. Asked about the results Friday, Fenty said: "I just tend not...

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Harry Jaffe: Loserville, U.S.A.

My friend Steve has been a Redskins fan for a few years -- 50 or so. His family has had season tickets since the team played in Griffith Stadium. The seats stayed with them as the team moved to what became RFK Stadium and now to FedEx Field. Steve attended the first home game of the season last Sunday. He was seated above the 50 yard line at the kickoff. He roared along with the Redskins faithful for the team's few first downs. The day was warm, but the stadium grew cold. By the second half, the fans were silent as the team failed to cross the goal line -- all day. Then they booed. "It was the first time I had heard Redskins fans boo," Steve said. "Kind of a surprise." Redskins...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. beating Md., Va. out of recession

Dr. Natwar Gandhi has never been one to overstate the District's financial well-being. To the contrary, the chief financial officer has been known to low-ball the city's revenues, in part to dissuade the mayor and city council members from spending cash they did not have. This is one reason Gandhi has earned the nickname "Dr. No." So when Gandhi wrote in a letter to city officials this week that the city's revenue stream has essentially remained even, everyone in the District building interpreted it as great news and breathed a sigh of relief. Gandhi's last few revenue reports have predicted drops in tax revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Translation: The bleeding has...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. Council passes a toothless ethics code

Up on the dais, there were huzzahs all around Tuesday when the D.C. Council passed its new "Code of Official Conduct." I use the term "new" very loosely; the code passed yesterday is an amalgamation of various rules and regulations and suggestions that have been around for some time. I would have at least added "don't talk on your cell phone during meetings." I have seen council members questioning a witness with a cell phone to their ear. Nevertheless, many of the 12 members praised Chairman Vincent Gray for his "leadership" in trying to assemble a "new" ethics code. Gray's code reads like the one you can find on the city council's Web...

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Harry Jaffe: Nationals are champs --off the field

Nationals pitcher John Lannan has had a so-so season on the mound. He's recorded seven wins and nine losses. The book on Lannan is that he starts strong but tends to break down in the middle innings. But off the field, Lannan has been an ace. Last month he started Lannan's Cannons, a ticket program for children getting treatment at the National Institutes of Health. When the Nationals play at home on Sundays, Lannan hosts 25 kids living at the Children's Inn, the temporary home for patients who need special treatment. Lannan has also gotten behind a campaign to raise $93 a night, the cost for a Children's Inn stay. How come? "It's the way I was raised," Lannan tells me. He grew up...

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Harry Jaffe: The best man gets aced out of U.S. attorney job

President Obama has yet to name the next United States attorney for the District of Columbia, but from what I know he will not be choosing the best man for the job. Channing Phillips, now the acting U.S. attorney, was not even on the list that went to the White House. Phillips is a dedicated public servant and proven prosecutor. He has the respect of the line prosecutors. And the police. He's served in the chief deputy's role for more than a decade. He has worked for Democrats and Republicans. He's a local lawyer, born and schooled in D.C. His father, Channing Sr., is a legendary civil rights champion. Why is Phillips not at least on the list of prospective top prosecutors sent the...

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Harry Jaffe: Police chief's shot at union boss off target

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier was none too pleased by my column last week about a defeat she took on a ruling about her "All Hands On Deck" tactic, or AHOD. As I reported, the D.C. police union had challenged the police department's procedures in ordering all officers to flood the streets on particular weekends over the summer. Last Wednesday, an arbitrator issued a ruling that supported the union. He said Lanier and Mayor Adrian Fenty had not followed the letter of the union contract or city law in ordering cops to the streets. He said the city had to pay overtime to the cops, at a potential cost of millions. Lanier's complaint begins with her saying that Fraternal Order of Police...

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Harry Jaffe: Perfect storm building over gay marriage bill

Ever been in the plains or on a plateau where the skies above are blue, but you can see black clouds piling up on the horizon? Our landscape is too hilly, our buildings too tall, and our air too thick to see storms coming from 50 miles away. But we are trained to sense a political tsunami on the horizon. My dog isn't howling yet, but I sense a political storm the likes of which we have not seen since D.C. tried to legalize abortions, and Sen. Jesse Helms emphatically put it down back in the 1980s. The D.C. Council is about to consider a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage. Coming from David Catania, perhaps the smartest and most deliberate council member, I expect it will be a...

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Harry Jaffe: Fight between police department and union gets ugly

The D.C. police department and the police union have been at war for many months; it now appears the Metropolitan Police Department is losing -- badly. On Thursday an independent arbitrator ruled that Police Chief Cathy Lanier's "All Hands on Deck" initiative violated the department's contract with the union. According to the arbitrator, cops were not given enough time to rearrange their schedules; Lanier and Mayor Adrian Fenty failed to declare there was a "crime emergency," as the law requires; and the department refused to honor the contract by simply discussing redeployment with the union. Not only does the decision slap down the chief and one of her main crime-fighting tools, it...

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Harry Jaffe: War within weakens Washington teachers union

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, is a mellow former gospel singer who turned to teaching after his turn at becoming an R&B star ran its course. Nathan Saunders, the union's general vice president, is an eager, ambitious young man who wants to be seen as the polished but hard-core representative of workers' rights. By title, Saunders is Parker's assistant, but for more than a year the underling has been throwing brickbats at the boss. This week their skirmishes started to draw blood. The battlefield is the no man's land between the union and the school system over a new contract. The old one expired two years ago. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and...

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Harry Jaffe: Foreign investors still buying chunks of downtown

Prepare yourself for the next round of doomsday predictions from economists forecasting the coming crash in real estate values. This time the sky is supposed to be falling on office buildings and other commercial developments. Loans coming due on big buildings will push developers into default and foreclosure. The economy will swoon; we will all suffer. Not if you live in Washington, D.C. While the commercial real estate markets in major cities across the country are teetering, downtown D.C. seems to be coming out of the credit crunch of the past year. Take last week's sale of a glass office building on the corner of 20th and K streets NW. Vornado Realty Trust announced that...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. politicians fiddle while gangs kill

The gangs of Washington, D.C., exist in a parallel universe; they live and die in their own place and time. We read about the tragic case of Deborah Ann Brown, a young woman who was killed Saturday night in a crossfire between gang members in Columbia Heights. You probably didn't read or hear about a shootout a few days earlier in Shaw. Two young men were walking up Fifth Street above R Street; two were walking the other way across the street. All four pulled out semiautomatic pistols and started firing. No one was hit. The shooters ran off. "That's the kind of stuff that scares people," Councilman Jack Evans tells me. Shaw is in Evans' Ward 2. "It's the randomness of it all -...

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Harry Jaffe: Playing God in Rock Creek Park

Deer are adorable creatures. They touch so many warm spots in our hearts. You see a deer grazing in an open field -- even if it's your neighbor's back yard -- and you feel closer to nature. It represents the wilderness in suburbia -- or in the city, if you live near Rock Creek Park. The reality of Odocoileus virginianus in urban America is not so innocuous and cuddly. Bambi can be a varmint. The fields and forests of yore were perilous places. There were predators, such as mountain lions and coyotes and wolves and foxes -- and humans. In that natural setting, predators could control the deer population. Now they are threatened by what -- cats and dogs? The occasional hunter in a...

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Harry Jaffe: A trickle of D.C. students joins the college migration

This is the season of the great college migration. Parents are packing up cars with clothes and books and posters -- perhaps a blankie -- and driving their precious offspring to college campuses across the country and beyond. One of my daughter's friends is crossing the Canadian border to attend Magill University in Montreal. Most families are driving to nearby colleges in Virginia, Maryland or up the East Coast. In reverse migration, I am driving west to Madison to haul my daughter and her stuff home from the University of Wisconsin. Plenty of us will be on the road. Shamefully, few of the collegebound kids will come from D.C. public schools. According to the D.C. College Success...

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Harry Jaffe: Reading, writing, 'rithmatic and Fenty's boys

Let's begin today's lesson with addition. With much glee, Rhee haters and anti-reform whiners broadcast news that only 37,000 students were enrolled to start D.C. public school on Monday. Chancellor Michelle Rhee had convinced the city council to fund 44,000 students. Hah! Rhee is failing! Not so fast. Relying on that number would be like basing attendance for a baseball game by counting fans in the stands for the first pitch. The stands are always half-empty, but by the third inning, they have plumped up. Attendance is taken in the fifth inning, not the beginning. By early Tuesday, the system had received new enrollment figures that added 2,000 students, putting the number of...

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Harry Jaffe: A tale of tomatoes and a great hospital

It had to be the tomatoes. Our crop of heirlooms are coming in strong. We cooked dozens up with peppers and zucchini. I ate the rest. In salads, in sandwiches, fresh off the vine. So when my stomach started to ache Tuesday afternoon, I wrote it off to a momentary clash of heirlooms and my tummy. But when I woke up that night with knifing pains in my belly, followed by cramps, I wondered if the clash had turned into a full-scale war. Felt lousy the next morning but I sucked it up, suited up and drove downtown to interview an FBI agent. By noon I was on my back again. When my temperature hit 100 at 6 p.m., I drove over to Sibley Hospital. My first brush with the health insurance...

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Harry Jaffe: Wall Street gambling a billion on D.C.

The bond market on Wall Street is a poker game with many, many millions at stake. Look beyond the pinstripe suits who pore over ledgers at the foot of Manhattan and you will see them fret over the same questions I face when I throw chips on the poker table in my garage. We all weigh risk and reward. Should I bet a few bucks on my low straight, when Peter has the face of a guy holding a flush? Based on years of research -- watching him play -- I know he rarely bluffs. Steve looks like he's hiding a full house. Five bucks against a pot of $30? I fold. When bond traders and investors sit across the table from D.C. finance chief Nat Gandhi, Mayor Adrian Fenty, council Chairman Vince Gray,...

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Harry Jaffe: Living in D.C. is a coke walk

Chances are you are carrying cocaine around in your pocket. I'm not talking about a few of you. Look at the person next to you on the Metro, your wife, your kid, your co-worker. Nearly everyone in the nation's capital is carrying cocaine. Scientists have examined cash in Washington, D.C., and found that 95 percent of the bills in circulation have traces of cocaine. The study was conducted by chemists with the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. "To my surprise, we're finding more and more cocaine in banknotes," study leader Yuegag Zuo told scientists Monday at 238th meeting of the American Chemical Society in D.C. Are we surprised that Washington, D.C., is the cocaine...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. pools, parks, schools best the 'burbs

We denizens of the District have had pool envy for decades. And school envy. And athletic field envy. Everything in the surrounding the suburbs seemed better, brighter, newer. Take swimming pools. When my daughters wanted to take swimming lessons or get certification for lifeguard jobs, we had to traipse up to Bethesda to the Montgomery County Aquatic Center near the White Flint Mall. There we found an entire complex devoted to water sports. We were green with envy. The "nanatorium" at Wilson Senior High was an option, until the brick wall literally collapsed into the water. Two weeks ago the city unveiled the brand spanking new Wilson Aquatic Center. It has four pools in a...

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Harry Jaffe: Spring Valley weapons search moving to reservoir

Funny how the Army Corps of Engineers keeps unearthing more poisons in Spring Valley. Only it’s not so funny. It’s downright alarming and scary. Last week engineers hired to clean up a pit where the Army buried chemical weapons from World War I dug up a small flask encrusted with mustard gas. In the trench warfare during the 1914-1918 war, armies hurled mustard gas bombs across the killing fields to annihilate troops. The corps said the vial posed no risk to the public. The corps has been telling us for 16 years that the bombs and chemical residue are harmless. “Mustard gas in open containers is just as toxic now as it was 90 years ago,” says Kent Slewinski, a...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. voters aching for alternative to Fenty

The good news for Mayor Adrian Fenty in the first political poll of the season is that his core supporters are satisfied with his performance on key issues. The bad news is that a year away from the next mayoral campaign, close to half the people polled in three crucial wards would consider another candidate. Translation: Fenty does not have a lock on re-election. The executive job in the nation's capital is still up for grabs. The poll was taken last month by a political action committee financed by businesses. Though it sampled voters in only three wards, the results are telling -- and surprising. And not all of the news is bad for Fenty. The mayor's "favorables" are...

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Harry Jaffe: Pershing Park case resembles Watergate cover-up

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that will land you in the slammer -- or force you out of a high-profile job. Google Richard Nixon and Watergate. What sunk the 37th president was not his scheming and bad-mouthing minorities; not his role in breaking into Democratic offices at the Watergate hotel. It was the attempt to hide his role, cover his tracks, thwart the investigation. That's what led to Nixon's impending impeachment and his resignation. Google Scooter Libby. I. Lewis "ScooterÓ Libby was former Vice President Dick Cheney's trusted aide and fixer. He became ensnared in the Valerie Plame affair, in which political operatives connected to George W. Bush's White House...

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Harry Jaffe: Judge Sullivan is hometown avenging angel

You really don't want to tick off Emmet Sullivan. Thundering from the federal bench last week, he sure sounded ticked off. "I think that it's really unfortunate that the citizens of the District of Columbia have to pay for these types of shenanigans," Judge Sullivan said. "and that's putting it mildly." The "shenanigans" referred to how the city and the police department managed to lose so much evidence in the case involving the arrest of some protesters -- and hundreds of bystanders -- at Pershing Park during the 2002 meetings of the World Bank. Police reports of the day's actions, the "running resumes?" Gone. Radio tapes from the day in...

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Harry Jaffe: Fenty twins set to attend D.C. public schools

Chatter around town has it that Mayor Adrian Fenty and his wife Michelle have decided to send their twin sons to public school in the fall. This news will come as a relief to many public school advocates; merely deciding to entrust the twin boys, 8, to public schools might provide plenty of relief. Ah, but which of the five elementary schools in Upper Northwest have they chosen? Depends on whose chatter you believe. No matter, public school parents and advocates in D.C. are so starved for attention and approval, any school will suffice. We have been beaten to submission by politicians who "love-love-love" public education yet choose to send their precious progeny to private...

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More bull from Barry on earmarks

Call me a moth to Marion Barry's flame: The council member's constant display of his addictions, his brushes with the law, his mixing of public funds with his private pleasure -- they all draw me back to the well of Barry's ever-flowing fountain of news, most of it embarrassing for him and the city. Some of it, perhaps, illegal. What has set me off this time is not the facts dribbling out about his using public funds to lure in a potential lover. We shall let the federal and local authorities ferret out the details over the $60,000 contract the Ward 8 council member served up to Donna Watts-Brighthaupt, his love interest at the time. Let's stipulate to the facts that Donna fits the...

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Tourists clog D.C. streets and fill tax coffers

Flat is the new up, as the business folk are telling one another these days. Translation: If you're not making money but at least not losing it, you are doing better than those businesses that are sinking deeply into the red. In the midst of a recession, staying even looks good. But if you are in the food, beverage or tourism business in the District, you are looking better than if you are in Bethesda or Rosslyn. That is especially true of restaurants. "Our businesses in the District are in much better shape than our restaurants in the suburbs," says Paul Cohn of Capital Restaurant Concepts. It owns eateries such as Paolo's in Georgetown and Reston. "We're holding our own...

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Harry Jaffe: Park service bureaucrats killing D.C.'s Baseball Academy

Fort Dupont, a park atop a hill east of the Anacostia River, represents different things to Washingtonians. For Civil War buffs, it's one of the forts circling the city built to withstand Rebel assaults, similar to Fort Reno and Fort Stevens. For families seeking a respite from summer heat, the park is a 375-acre haven. But for thousands of kids across the region who had hoped to use a tiny corner of the park to play baseball and ice skate, Fort Dupont is an example of injustice brought to us by the U.S. National Park Service. The feds run the park, just as they control Rock Creek and our major downtown squares, from Franklin to McPherson. For some reason known only to bureaucrats,...

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Harry Jaffe: Raising D.C. taxes is a prescription for disaster

Last Friday, D.C.'s five keepers of the coin took a pilgrimage to Wall Street; their mission was to convince the bond rating agencies the District was still a worthy risk. When formerly gold-plated governments such as California are handing out IOUs, Wall Street lenders have a duty to be a tad wary. The pilgrims were Chief Financial Officer Nat Gandhi, Mayor Adrian Fenty, City Administrator Neil Albert, Council Chairman Vince Gray and finance committee Chairman Jack Evans. For starters, Gray and Fenty hardly spoke -- not the best way to present a united front. Thanks in large part to Gandhi's handling of the city's finances for more than a decade, D.C. has gotten its first top rating...

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Chancellor Rhee settles in for the siege

The shelf life of a D.C. school superintendent is just over two years. Gen. Julius Becton quit in 1998 after a couple of years, Arlene Ackerman fled after two in 2000. Paul Vance stuck it out for three and left us with this immortal line: "To be very candid with you, I just don't want to be bothered with it." Clifford Janey came and went before his third anniversary. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee celebrates her second anniversary this summer as public school boss. For those who wish she would pack up her box of reform tools and take them upstairs to the Obama administration -- or back to Denver -- fuggedaboudit. Rhee is here for the long haul. She's counting on Adrian...

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Cops take badge, gun from union boss

Police union chief Kristopher Baumann grabbed the phone first thing Monday morning when he showed up at the Fraternal Order of Police offices in the first row of brownstones just west of the Anacostia River.

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D.C. Council slush funds invite Congressional overlords

Let's follow the money to the sweet pots of dough that D.C. Council members refer to as their discretionary funds. The dollars begin their journey to council coffers in the pockets of taxpayers; some are residents like me who pay personal and property taxes; some are business folks who pay taxes or sell goods or services or property. Council members get $350,000 of those tax dollars every year to staff their offices. Each committee chairman receives another $350,000 to finance his or her oversight duties. Let's do the math: 13 members, each has a committee, so they can draw down $700,000. This tidy number puts serving in the city council in a whole new light. For what is still defined...

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Marion and Mark and Sarah - three pols in a pod

In pondering politicians who recently took to the microphone and regaled us with ravings about sex and family and politics, I first settled on the similarities between our Marion Barry and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Upon further consideration, I concluded Marion is better compared with Sarah Palin. Both Barry and Sanford fell for another woman other than their wife. Each kept appearing before the press and talking about their private lives. The airwaves would go sweetly silent for a day or so until Barry or Sanford would summon reporters and tell us more than we needed or wanted to know about their inner souls -- actually, their raging libidos. We come to find out that Barry,...

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Nathans — Georgetown’s best saloon — to close Sunday

And another Washington institution bites the dust. We lost Trover’s Books on Capitol Hill this week; on Sunday, Nathans, the trademark Georgetown saloon, will serve its last beers and burgers. Pity for a town with so few places that we can count on and call authentic and say: “Meet you at Nathans.” On Thursday, Nathans owner Carol Joynt hosted the last of her Q&A Cafe luncheons. Over the years, she has interviewed Bob Woodward and Tom Brokaw; Jack Valenti and John Riggins. Looking elegant and calm, she told the crowd: “How do I thank you for coming here all these years? I close.” Nathans has occupied the southeast corner of Georgetown’s main...

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Marion Barry set up again -- by a lady and Park Police

Marion Barry's fans might start wearing T-shirts that say: "The Bitch Set Him Up -- Again." And they might be justified, again. The first time Barry allowed himself to be set up by a female companion, it was Hazel Diane "Rasheeda" Moore. She lured him to the Vista Hotel, plied him with cognac and supplied him with crack cocaine. D.C. police and FBI agents raided the room and busted then-Mayor Barry in the infamous 1990 sting. Last weekend, Barry and his current love interest, Diane Watts-Brighthaupt, arranged a weekend trip to the beach. As the story goes, the two argued over lunch in Annapolis, canceled the trip and headed back to D.C. There the story becomes...

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Fenty plays Nixon in erasing city e-mails

Mayor Adrian Fenty idolizes John F. Kennedy; he often invokes the iconic president's name when talking about how he would like to be seen as a chief executive. But when it comes to maintaining the paper trail of communications within his government, Fenty is better compared to Richard Nixon. Love him or hate him, Nixon will be remembered by many for the missing 18 minutes in the tapes of his White House conversations that might have further incriminated him in the Watergate scandal. Nixon resigned in disgrace anyway to avoid impeachment proceedings, but the gap in the tapes leaves a hole in our understanding of what happened at a crucial moment in our history. Now we come to find out...

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D.C. kids celebrate summer with some new playgrounds

If Adrian Fenty rolls to an easy victory for a second mayoral term, he will have his No. 1 school system reformer to thank. That would not be Michelle Rhee. No disrespect meant to Fenty’s public schools chancellor. She has taken on the monumental crusade of dismantling and rebuilding the academic side, from classrooms to administration. Her successes will come at the cost of bruising some voters and Fenty supporters. Fenty was brave to take on the schools, and Rhee will succeed, but the political upside is paltry in the short term. The school reformer who will pay off well next election is Allen Lew, executive director of public education facilities modernization. Follow Fenty...

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Snyder should be thankful Skins aren’t a theme park

The amusement park business has been a real roller coaster ride for Redskins owner Dan Snyder. Back in 2005, Snyder waged a brutal proxy war to take over Six Flags, one of the largest amusement park chains in the world. We have one in Prince George’s County. The company leaders at the time didn’t trust him. Six Flags was bleeding cash. They were in the process of selling it. Snyder spent a year buying shares. He forked over about $50 million to amass more than 10 percent of the stock, according to Amusement Business, a publication that covers the sector. He said the parks were poorly run. He convinced a majority of board members that he had a better way to make the parks...

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D.C. Council plays race card

In a rare moment of levity during this week’s tense D.C. Council session on crime legislation, Chairman Vincent Gray peered down the dais and called on Muriel Bowser, an African-American council member. Bowser looked perplexed. Mary Cheh, the white council member from Ward 3, piped up. “Actually,” she said, “I asked to speak.” “Sorry,” Gray said. “I don’t want to be accused of racial profiling.” The 13 council members relaxed, but only for a second; accusations of “racial profiling” ruled the debate and triggered some nasty exchanges that were reminiscent of the days when Marion Barry played the race card to get...

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Fenty drops the ball on council crime bill

Mayor Adrian Fenty doesn’t care that much about crime in the nation’s capital. He can’t be bothered by the fact that gangs are making some Washingtonians afraid to walk from their door to the playground or supermarket or Metro. How else are we to interpret the mayor’s lack of attention to the crime bill he introduced last fall? Council members spent Tuesday afternoon debating ways to eviscerate his attempt at enacting an emergency bill for the bloody summer months; Fenty was not around. “Weak as tea” was how at-large member David Catania described the legislation after the council had worked over Fenty’s original bill. Fenty never testified...

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Politicians killed last chance for voting rights

After more than a year of political jostling and protest marches and rising expectations, legislation to give the District full voting rights on the House floor is dead: finished, over, kaput. It died this week with barely a whimper. Let’s deconstruct what might have been the last chance to get complete congressional representation for 500,000 disenfranchised Americans. Some politicians screwed up, got outmaneuvered, made poor decisions. Who’s to blame? Here’s what Rep. Steny Hoyer, majority leader and voting bill champion, had to say: “There is not a consensus among the leadership of the District of Columbia on this issue as I understand it. And as a result of...

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A valentine for D.C. Public Schools

DCPS has been very good to me — and my family. The school system that is much maligned as “dysfunctional” or “worst in the nation” or “needs to be blown up” has helped me raise and educate three daughters. If it takes a village to nurture children, the public schools in the capital were the center of mine. Each school was the glue for our neighborhood. I write this with a bittersweet sense of relief and sadness on the day our youngest daughter graduates from Wilson Senior High. She sat in white gown and mortar board with 300 other graduates in the city’s biggest public high. Before the ceremony at Bender Arena, I spied Principal Pete...

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New presidential license plate: Free D.C. from taxes

In case you missed this bit of news, the District of Columbia Democratic State Committee passed a resolution last Thursday requesting that President Barack Obama place the “Taxation Without Representation” license plate on the presidential limousine. “Whereas,” it begins, “substantive and symbolic demonstrations of support for voting rights for the District of Columbia in our national legislature are critical to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of the residents of our nation’s capital:” The committee follows with a trio of “whereases.” » It says the committee and the D.C. Council have already asked the president to...

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New jail repeats old tale of letting thugs loose

Tasha Williams was not surprised when a teenage offender jumped the fence at D.C.’s new reform school in Laurel, Md. “We will face a major breach in security,” Williams, the chairwoman of the guards union at the facility, wrote in a memo last Thursday. “This was never intended to be a Secured Facility.” The brand-new youth jail opened Friday to the tune of $46 million. An inmate shimmied up a pole, leapt to a roof and jumped to freedom Saturday. Apparently, no one read Williams’ Thursday memo: “This is getting ready to be a disaster!” The District’s new reform school was a disaster from the beginning, starting with its name: New...

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A safer capital

I was midway through penning a column about how the D.C. Council was sitting on a crime bill that would have made D.C. safer for you and me this summer. Based on my reporting, I was writing that the local legislature would not take up Mayor Adrian Fenty’s Omnibus Crime Bill of 2009 on Tuesday, despite a pair of hearings and general agreement among cops and many community activists that tougher laws could make the city safer. Tuesday being one of the council’s last legislative session of the season, the crime bill could have languished. Thugs across town would have rejoiced. Then my phone rang a few times. Sources started to check in. The bill had life. I checked their tips....

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D.C. tax office hounds Marion Barry — and me

Finally, I have found common ground with Marion Barry. We both have tax problems. Better said, the District of Columbia has a tax problem with me and the former mayor. For tax year 2007, I forked over many thousands of dollars in federal and local taxes. I filed my tax returns on time. I figured I was done. Apparently not. I never got a call or a letter from the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue alerting me to a problem. The first I knew I was an alleged scofflaw was a letter from a collection agency. With no explanation, it simply said I had underpaid by $339 and therefore owed $2,058. I keep copies of my tax returns and canceled checks going back a few years. I found the tax return in...

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Coming soon: New top federal prosecutor for the District

On Tuesday a commission of 17 members will begin considering candidates for the next U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. With all due respect to Police Chief Cathy Lanier and FBI boss Joe Persechini and many of the lawmen in neighboring counties, the chief federal prosecutor in the capital city has the most clout. He or she can decide who and how to prosecute, from street drug dealers in D.C. to terrorists planning to bomb an embassy in Africa. The U.S. attorney here has more reach than any federal prosecutor in the nation; the D.C. office is also the country’s largest. So the deliberations that begin Tuesday with the Federal Law Enforcement Nominating Commission and...

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Turning a crime hearing into a circus

The shenanigans that led to one of the more juvenile moments in D.C. Council history began with Police Chief Cathy Lanier’s need to leave town late Monday morning. That led Attorney General Peter Nickles to request that he and Lanier be scheduled to speak first at Monday’s hearing on a pair of major crime bills working through the Council. Councilman Phil Mendelson had alerted Lanier to the hearing weeks ago and already had printed his schedule. He put Lanier last. Nickles watched the hearing on live video from his office — and fumed. He e-mailed Mendelson and asked if he could testify at 5 p.m. Mendelson’s nose was already so out of joint, it was visible from...

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Nats owners might need a few tips from fan favorite Leonsis

You gotta hand it to the Washington Nationals. They are making an effort to become part of our local community. Before noon Tuesday, a Nationals player is scheduled to read to students at Kimball Elementary School, on the city’s troubled east side not far from Nationals Park. As part of “Reading Is Fundamental” day in D.C., nine Kimball students will be honored before Tuesday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. For fans and kids, the pre-game show might be the highlight of the night; too often this season, what transpires on the diamond has been pure minor league. But it could be a fair fight; both the Nats and the Pirates currently dwell in the cellar...

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D.C. needs Bud Doggett now more than ever

Adrian Fenty and Vince Gray will be together again Friday morning, but they will be apart. They will smile at one another, but inside their hearts will be cold. The enmity they share has become a fixture of politics in the nation’s capital city. The mayor and the city council chairman are scheduled to speak back to back at the dedication of Bud Doggett Way along 10th and H streets NW, in Penn Quarter at 11:30 a.m. today. There is both irony and sadness in their coming together to honor Leonard “Bud” Doggett. He was perhaps the only man in town who could have brought the two into a room, slapped them around and forced them to make peace. Why could Doggett have pulled it...

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Wounded D.C. cop has to beg for care

At around 2:30 in the morning, on a cold November night in 1998, D.C. police Officer Howard Wade was working vice off South Capitol Street, in what was then the badlands of Capitol Hill. He was in plain clothes, in an unmarked police car, with three other cops. They noticed a guy walk up the sidewalk and reach down for what they initially thought was a stick. When he walked into the road, Wade saw the glint of the streetlight on the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. The cops unholstered their weapons and put them on their laps. The gunman approached the car. When he looked away, Wade jumped out and said: “Police. Freeze!” The man fired but hit a car parked nearby. Wade...

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Beyond City Hall, Fenty owns Washington

Brightwood is not a brand-name Washington neighborhood like Georgetown or Capitol Hill. Nor is it a notorious kill zone like Trinidad or Congress Heights. Brightwood is where Washington’s middle class resides. The leafy neighborhood arrayed along 14th Street and Georgia Avenue north of Military Road has broad avenues and small streets lined with old growth pin oak trees, neatly groomed row homes, and small apartment buildings. If you want to understand Mayor Adrian Fenty’s pervasive political appeal, check out this scene in Brightwood. One of those buildings — at 6425 14th St. NW — has been festering for two decades. It was known for rat infestations and code...

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Same-sex marriage debate showcases D.C.’s conservative base

When it comes to gay marriage, Marion Barry makes too much sense. “All hell is going to break lose,” Barry predicted to reporters at the Wilson Building the other day. One must weed through the underbrush of the council member’s verbiage, his backtracking and obfuscations. But when you take the time to examine why he was the only vote against the council’s measure this week to recognize same-sex marriages, you arrive at some basic realities of religion and politics in our town. “We may have a civil war,” he added. “The black community is just adamant against this.” Never fail to honor Barry’s take on politics in D.C. He may be old,...

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Harry Jaffe » D.C. loses two warriors for peace and prosperity

In spring, our time of renewal, we are forced to say farewell to Tom Blagburn and Jack Kemp, two men who devoted their lives to making the nation’s capital a better place to live. I wrote about Blagburn’s passing last week; his funeral was a moving moment and a call to action. Kemp died over the weekend. On Monday, integrated Washington, D.C., came out to bid farewell to Blagburn. Folks from many races and places and economic ranges and ages filled the pews at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church — as Tom would have wanted. Mayor Adrian Fenty stopped by for a bit of face time. Former Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly sat through the Mass. Cops came to honor the godfather of...

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D.C. now the hub of a region awash in ... happiness?

Happy days are here again, according to a new study by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, commonly known as COG. Really? Swine flu is bearing down on our Washington region. We are locked in an economic recession worse than any in recent memory. Construction has ground to a halt from Loudoun County to the Chesapeake Bay. Traffic is so bad we spend more time in our cars than at home with our kids. The Wizards are the worst team in pro basketball, the Nationals are the worst in the major leagues, and the Redskins are doing their off-season dance of death. Yet: “The region’s residents are connected and engaged,” the study finds. And “77 percent rated...

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D.C.’s political warfare bodes ill on Capitol Hill

Let’s take a break for a moment from the petty political food fight that passes for budget making in local D.C. governance. Pretend you are a congressman from Arkansas. You sit on a committee that will consider how Congress governs the nation’s capital. Will Congress keep a tight rein on District finances, as the Constitution allows? Will it extend more autonomy in budgeting and lawmaking? Will it give D.C. full voting rights? On a return trip to your district, a constituent buttonholes you at a fundraiser and asks: “Did I read that the D.C. mayor and the city council are fighting over baseball tickets?” Returning to the capital, the congressman finds that...

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Godfather of community policing dies

Tom Blagburn never gave up on the people of Washington, D.C. I’m not talking about the swells who reside east of Rock Creek Park in Upper Caucasia; and I’m not referring to the black and white middle-class folks who live along 16th Street in Shepherd’s Park or Crestwood; or even the yuppies and buppies who are jamming themselves into all the swank new downtown condos. Tom was for the Washingtonian parents who couldn’t read, whose kids went to school hungry, whose lives were stamped “loser” a generation or two ago. Tom would call me up and rage at how I was a lousy journalist because I wasn’t writing enough about the “real problems”...

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D.C. meter madness

Putting coins in a D.C. parking meter is akin to playing slots. You slip a quarter into the slot, and the gambling begins. Will the meter register the money and add time? Will it swallow your coins and keep flashing “Expired?” Will it simply jam? Take my attempt at parking Friday morning. At 9:30 I had to cover a hearing in a murder case at Superior Court. Knowing that parking is allowed at that moment, I pulled up Seventh Street Northwest just below D Street at 9:35. I found a spot. I was in luck; the meter already had 14 minutes. I walked across the street to the Chevy Chase Bank and got a roll of quarters. I started feeding. The meter gobbled each one but registered...

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Reverend on D.C.’s mean streets seeks a tougher crime law

Chuck Turner thought he knew what he was getting into when he moved from Southern California five years ago to start a branch of Victory Outreach Church in the nation’s capital. With his family in tow, the Rev. Turner moved to some of the city’s meanest streets, where Benning Road runs into East Capital Street. You’ll know it by the Shrimp Boat carryout on the corner and the sirens in your ear. His son, Devon, became fast friends with a neighbor, Arthur Daniels Jr. They were classmates at Elliot Junior High. Arthur idolized Devon: When Devon took up the drums, Arthur learned to play percussion; when Devon went out for the basketball team, Arthur signed up,...

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Ten reasons Fenty loves the media

By now it’s pretty clear to anyone paying attention to politics — or baseball — that D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is no longer the darling of the local media. Reporters have been dogging the young mayor for weeks. WTOP’s Mark Seagraves stuck a microphone in Fenty’s face in the half-light of one recent dawn as the mayor was about to board a plane for New York. Seagraves, one of the most serious and relentless reporters around, asked why Fenty was going to the Big Apple. Business? Pleasure? Schools? Visits with Mayor Bloomberg? Fenty told Seagraves to stuff it and walked away. The relationship between Fenty and the local pressies started to turn sour when...

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Marion Barry’s love, hate relationship with the law

Marion Barry has always had an intimate relationship with lawmen. Playing the black militant in his early days in D.C., he taunted cops and was arrested. But when Barry turned politician, he lobbied cops. Black police unions endorsed his first mayoral run. He appointed solid chiefs, like Maurice Turner and Ike Fulwood. When the crack epidemic hit D.C. in the early 1980s, then-Mayor Barry ignored pleas from police to combat the coming scourge. He gradually succumbed to cocaine addiction. He used his security detail as a shield and occasionally to deliver envelopes with cash for drug payments. The videotape of Barry drawing on a crack pipe just before police and the FBI busted him at the...

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The twilight years of Marion Barry

Doug Patton, a lawyer and lobbyist with deep roots in D.C. politics, recalls a conversation over lunch one recent afternoon in his firm’s conference room. It was mid-February. Marion Barry was in the news. “What’s with your former mayor?” one lawyer from out of town asked. “I read an article about his not paying taxes. Is he above the law?” A client chimed in: “Is he still addicted to cocaine?” Others piled on. How could D.C. residents have voted him onto the city council? Hasn’t his time passed? Patton listened and waited. He had known Barry for more than three decades. He had worked on his first mayoral campaign in 1978. He...

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Free trees! Tree rebates! Time to go out and plant!

Green is way hip, as we all know. We drink green tea and renovate our homes with green materials and build green skyscrapers. Pretty soon we’ll be pumping green gasoline. Few things are more authentically green than a tree; nothing nurtures our inner green spirit like planting one; and when in need of a shot of green, best thing to do is stand in a grove of trees. We in D.C. can’t agree on much; take the mayor and council squabbling over baseball tickets. But we can all agree that trees are green and good, and we need to protect the ones we have and plant many more. Which brings me to Casey Trees and its first annual “tree report card.” This Saturday, the...

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Let D.C. keep its taxes

If you pass by the John Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, keep your eyes peeled for the electronic billboard that keeps a running tally of the amount D.C. residents pay in federal taxes. Modeled after one on Dupont Circle that kept tabs on the number of rain forest acres turned to farmland, the digital display in front of the District’s city hall counts dollars. Two days ago, on tax day, the sign read: $1,013,552,816. Politicians noted in a lather of news releases that D.C. residents had topped $1 billion in federal taxes. “Denying nearly 600,000 Americans our fundamental right is unconscionable,” Council Chairman Vincent Gray said, “and Congress can end...

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Opening Day downer for Nats

The bad news is the Washington Nationals organization still has no clue how to handle a full stadium of 40,000 fans. Traffic was snarled, lines were long, parking was scarce. The good news is the Nationals will not have to worry about crowds; the team is so dreadful the franchise can expect 20,000 fans a game — on a good day, facing a hot team. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give the fan experience on Opening Day a solid 4, and my team won, so I left happy. Actually, it’s more accurate to say the Nationals lost. If you are the kind of fan who likes drama and lots of runs and the frequent changing of the lead, then Monday’s game was a thriller. But if you expect to...

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Come to Nationals Opening Day and bring along patience

Tomorrow is Opening Day for our baseball team. Skip out of work, grab the kids, hit the stands at Nationals Park. It will be a scene, a rite of spring, an annual ritual. Start now. Do it with your grandkids. Going to Opening Day could be the glue that makes memories. Why am I making this naked plug to attend the first Washington Nationals home game of the season? Has Nationals President Stan Kasten been whispering in my ear and begging me to attend the game, as he has done on the radio in Philadelphia, whose Phils will oppose the Nats? No, but I do believe we as a community need to get out and share the national pastime — even if our team looks as if it might be putting up lines...

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Give me a vote — with or without guns

Many D.C. Council sessions are workmanlike, worthwhile meetings. Questions get asked and answered, agreements are reached, some light might be shed on a corner of the city or the workings of a government agency. Then there are sessions that I see as show hearings. They are called by council members who have made their minds up on an issue, they call witnesses who will affirm that point of view, they then issue press releases that state the obvious and confirm their stance. Take Tuesday night’s hearing about the current D.C. voting rights bill. The legislation is designed to give the District’s congressional representative a vote on the House floor. It is in jeopardy, because...

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School builders get an A for effort, D for planning

By this time of year in D.C. we would have heard reports from across the school system about broken pipes and busted furnaces and kids wearing jackets to school just to keep warm. This year — silence. And parents across town, from the Chase Chase to Deanwood, would be shopping for toilet paper and supplies to bring to school for the bathrooms that were either undersupplied or out of order. This year — silence. April would bring showers that would run into the schools through leaky roofs. This year — all’s dry in the classrooms. The reason for the silence is that Allen Lew and his team at the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization have fixed the...

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By disarming cops, Secret Service makes D.C. less safe

Of course we Washingtonians are thrilled the current occupants of the White House are getting around our town. President Barack Obama has played hoops at a local gym, attended a pro basketball game at Verizon Center and read to our public school students. First lady Michelle Obama has made forays to schools and lunched with the mayor at Georgia Brown. The Obama daughters go to school in D.C. and invite their buddies to the big house for sleepovers. What a change from the previous residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue! The Bush girls partied a few times in Georgetown, but, for the most part, George and Laura Bush seemed to hold their noses every time they left the White House grounds and...

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Can Rhee reform schools and be fair?

I am totally in the tank for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. If you believe public education is the most potent equalizing force, Rhee could be the one person who can make Washington, D.C., a great city for all the residents: white, black and brown; rich, middle class and poor. Our chancellor says she has a military focus on kids and the classroom; she is not afraid of closing schools; she has not flinched from challenging the teachers unions over merit pay and tenure. And if she can fix our wretched public schools, President Barack Obama could use them to ram through reforms across the country. At which point we can build monuments to Rhee. But before that moment, while we are...

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Only one politician can beat Fenty

Adrian Fenty has passed the midway point in his first, four-year mayoral term, and he appears to be a lock for re-election in 2010. Most voters still see him as the young, energetic chief executive bent on cracking the whip on our notoriously lethargic bureaucracy. He has committed his political fortunes and the city’s revenues to fixing the wretched public schools, and most voters applaud his crusade. He has raised more than $2 million for his next campaign. And he’s a native Washingtonian. And he’s tight with President Barack Obama. And he has a lovely wife, twin sons and a new baby. So is Fenty a sure bet? I checked with my secret, political operative, who has...

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Rock Creek Park to get an EXTREME cleanup Saturday

I went looking for trash along Rock Creek on Friday afternoon. My walk with dog and daughter began at the U.S. Park Police ranger station on Beach Drive at Broad Branch. We took the path by the bridge over the creek south toward Pierce Mill. We embarked on our hunt to check out the stream banks in preparation for Saturday’s EXTREME Cleanup, organized by Friends of Rock Creek’s Environment. The group focuses on the creek’s health and water quality, as opposed to the entire park. Every April, FORCE organizes a cleanup, but this one’s “extreme” because the organization expects more than 500 people to come to 50 sites along the creek. “We’re...

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Did Dubai buy Fenty to lure tourists?

So, my inbox occasionally flashes an e-mail from an outfit called eAristotle with notices from the TravelMole newswire. Since the extent of my travel writing involves regular excursions into Rock Creek Park, I quickly delete the mole’s messages. But the title of last week’s note caught my eye: “Dubai Gets Serious With Its Social Restrictions.” Coming in the midst of the fracas over Mayor Adrian Fenty’s all-expenses-paid trip to that small Arab nation, the e-mail might give us clues into why our local leader decided to travel halfway around the world for a family vacation. Why Dubai? Why not the Bahamas, or Jamaica or London? Finger-wagging reporters and...

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In D.C. corruption cases, the audacity of dopes

What is it about the District of Columbia’s government than makes it so attractive to thieves — so vulnerable to rip-off artists? More questions — When Mayor Adrian Fenty delivered his budget to the city council Friday, why didn’t he include a line item for replenishing funds stolen by corrupt public officials? This might sound a bit cynical, but the mayor could take a cold-eyed look at the $50 million ripped off by D.C. tax collectors, figure that some tax officials might still be siphoning funds, and add some to offset the drain. Corruption is on my mind because of last week’s developments in our two most celebrated cases. The feds made another arrest in...

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Chief judge backs system in killing of 14-year-old

Great thinkers and ponderous pontificators like to say of the United States: We are a nation of laws, not of men. To which I say, not really. I prefer: We are a nation of wiggle room, not hard rules. My line lacks the gravitas of the “laws versus men” line, but mine is more accurate, especially when it comes to our criminal justice system. The way our system functions, men and women have discretion over how our laws are applied. Which brings me to the case that keeps me up at night — the killing of Arthur Daniels. For background, Arthur, 14, was killed on the last Saturday night in February. He was walking home from a church group meeting. He and his friends were...

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Rhee and Weingarten face off in battle of D.C. teachers unions

Who would have thought that the nation’s epic battles over education reform would be fought in the trenches of Washington, D.C.’s wretched public schools? Right here, right now, factions led by worthy opponents are battling over these fundamental questions: Do teachers deserve to keep their jobs forever, regardless of whether their students learn? Should good teachers get paid more than mediocre ones? Would students benefit from national standards, and should teachers be judged on whether their students meet those standards in regular testing? Consider what took place in the nation’s capital last Tuesday. In his first speech on education, President Barack Obama waded...

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D.C.’s criminal justice system failed, killed Arthur Daniels

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Arthur Daniels. I never met him. I don’t know his family. From what I have gathered, he was a sweet kid — kind of small, 14, liked to play the bongo drums at church. Arthur and some friends were walking from a youth group meeting at Victory Outreach Church the last Saturday night in February. Their route took them along a rough stretch of Minnesota Avenue Southeast, toward the Metro stop. Two men approached; one asked Arthur and his buddies which neighborhood they were from. The boys tried to walk away. “They’re ignoring you,” one of the men said, according to a witness. “Just bust them.” The boys...

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Mr. Smith goes out of Washington

Sam Smith and his wife, Kathy, were driving north to Maine in 1970 when they first considered pulling up stakes in D.C. and moving to the farm. Smith’s father, Lawrence, had bought Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport in 1957 and started raising organic beef. The capital city would have been a different place if they had not come back. Returning to D.C., Sam Smith helped found the Statehood Party; wrote “Captive Capital,” a book on D.C. politics; and continued publishing Progressive Review, his news and essays that lean far to the left. Kathy Smith, a Wisconsin native, had come to the capital to work for Sen. Gaylord Nelson. She was shocked at the paucity of information...

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On schools and guns, D.C.’s Democrats lose out in Congress

Meet Virginia Walden Ford. Like many folks who call Washington home, she came here from the South and settled in a few decades ago. Like the majority of African Americans, she was a tried and true Democrat. Then she got a taste of the Democratic dogma on school choice. Now she’s a member of the D.C. Republican Committee. You could have seen Ford in action yesterday when she appeared with three Republican senators at a news conference to lobby for D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. The tiny school voucher program now helps send 1,700 inner-city kids to private schools. It provides grants of up to $7,500; schools such as Sidwell Friends kick in the rest. Thanks to a...

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Why a Republican is safe as D.C.’s top lawman

The authorities summoned the media Tuesday afternoon to announce they had gathered enough evidence to charge Ingmar Guandique with killing Chandra Levy in May 2001. Reporters packed the room to take in the latest chapter in a sexed-up crime thriller that had occasionally consumed the airwaves for nearly a decade. First, Mayor Adrian Fenty stepped to the microphone and broke the news. Then Police Chief Cathy Lanier talked about how important it was to resolve the case for the Levy family. Then U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor got to the meat of the matter and unveiled the new evidence. Taylor sits atop the law enforcement pyramid in the nation’s capital. He decides which cases to...

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District finance chief’s ‘economic tsunami’ could end up a ripple

Quick — grab an oar, hop into the ark you’ve been building in your garage and prepare for the waters to rise. “What we have here is basically an economic tsunami out there,” Dr. Natwar Gandhi told reporters this week. Real estate tax revenues are falling, rich people will not be forking over huge sums in taxes from capital gains, and unemployment is rising. “Things are really bad.” Gandhi’s been the District’s chief financial officer for the past decade, so he should know when red ink is seeping into the government’s balance sheets. But knowing and appreciating Dr. Gandhi as I do, I have to wonder: Is the capital city’s chief...

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D.C. needs a voice in the White House

When D.C. needs the White House, who you gonna call? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that President Barack Obama, on his way to deliver his speech to Congress last night, punched up Mayor Adrian Fenty’s number on his cell phone. “Fenty,” the president might have said, “can’t you do something about this traffic? I have a date with the American people.” Fenty got the joke, of course. Obama’s course was plotted and cleared for his motorcade, lead by D.C. cops astride Harley-Davidsons. “When are you showing up in my neighborhood gym for some hoops?” Fenty could ask. “Me and Caron Butler against you and...

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It’s time to bag it D.C.!

Bob Dylan famously wrote “the answer is blowin’ in the wind;” look up these days and you are more likely to see plastic bags blowing by. Or floating by if you are on the Anacostia River or the Chesapeake Bay. Or washing in on a wave at Rehoboth. Or mucking up your drawers and closets. We are awash in plastic packaging. My desk is adorned at this moment by a balled-up white plastic bag. I have nearly severed fingers cutting through plastic packaging on toys and gadgets. Don’t even start me on Styrofoam. But the answer to our plastic bag glut, according to D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells, would be charging 5 cents for each bag used at a grocery or drugstore. Much as...

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UDC students deserve a decent education for more cash

Corey Francis, lugging his portfolio to class Thursday, spread his arms in what passes for a quad at the University of the District of Columbia. “We are UDC. The students are UDC,” he says. “What this administration is doing is endangering UDC.” No doubt UDC President Allen Sessoms and board Chairman James Dyke would disagree. They figure they are saving the only public university in the nation’s capital. Pushed by Sessoms, who is new to the job, the UDC board this week approved a resolution to double tuition. D.C. students at the four-year school would have to fork over $7,000 a year, rather than the current $3,500; out-of-city students would pay...

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Fenty, council at war over nominees

Imagine you have cancer in your left pinkie. You are right-handed, it’s a slow-growing disease, you have more pressing physical problems. You ignore it. The cancer advances to your other fingers. You pretend it doesn’t exist. After a year, the pain becomes unbearable, and you decide to treat the problem. You call in a team of accountants. The accountants count your fingers; the cancer grows. And grows. Fixing it might require a year and millions of dollars. Gruesome as it might sound, the fictional cancer debacle matches up well with the way Mayor Adrian Fenty has dealt with the Public Employee Relations Board. As it became sick and withered, he ignored it; when the pain it...

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Zenith Gallery’s closing leaves a hole In city’s soul

Margery Goldberg had an idea shortly after Barack Obama won the election last November. Why not mount an inaugural exhibition at Zenith Gallery, her storefront on Seventh Street, a block north of Pennsylvania Avenue? Goldberg has had plenty of ideas in her more than 30 years as a art dealer, wood sculptor and agitator for creativity in a capital city known for squelching the creative impulse. She had an idea to start a gallery at 14th and Rhode Island Avenue in 1968 just after riots torched the neighborhood. And she did. She had an idea to establish the Zenith Community Arts Foundation in 2000; now its programs and calendars have raised more than $100,000 for the Capital Area Food Bank....

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Health care resurrection east of the Anacostia

A little more than a year ago, Dr. Marilyn Corder got a call from the head of pediatrics at the Greater Southeast Medical Center. “Can you please come in today?” he asked. “Everyone else has walked out.” The capital’s only hospital east of the Anacostia River was a wreck. It was facing bankruptcy for the second time, despite millions in District dollars. Wind and rain blew through the windows. Someone had set a fire in one of the radiology labs; it had been closed and charred for a year. Lights blinked on and off in the operating rooms. Doctors refused to work there; nurses fled — without being paid. Thursday, Corder stood in the gusting winds in front...

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Death and taxes for all — except Marion Barry

Marion Barry will not go to jail for failing to file his tax returns. He knows it. The judge knows it. You know it. “Get over it,” as Barry told his political opponents when he was elected to a fourth mayoral term. This was after he served time in jail on a cocaine rap. The prosecutor knows it. That’s why U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor tacked on “The Alternative Request” at the end of his seven-page motion to revoke Barry’s probation and send him to the slammer. If the judge declines to accept Taylor’s argument that Barry’s “failure to file tax returns for the eighth time in nine years cannot be countenanced,” and that...

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Harry Jaffe: Fenty turns good will to bad blood

By Harry Jaffe The last time we witnessed Adrian Fenty's raw political wizardry on the campaign trail, he left our heads spinning and competitors in his wake. Who can forget the young council member knocking on every door as if it were a marathon? We remember that commercial with Fenty showing off the holes worn in his shoes from walking the city. We remember images of Fenty and his lovely wife, Michelle. Fenty with his cute twin boys. With his parents, the shopkeepers. He was the native son we wanted to succeed. What has happened to that masterful politician? Fenty is still in perpetual motion, but the fluidity and ease of the man in motion to curry favor and votes has morphed into...

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Fenty’s tough new crime laws could make city safe

The first six weeks of 2009 have been bloody for the folks who live in the other Washington, the one east of the Anacostia River. Very bloody. According to city stats, there have been 10 homicides already in the badlands covered by the 7th Police District. In the 2nd District, which covers Georgetown north to Friendship Heights and Chevy Chase, there have been no murders. That district racks up perhaps one a year. Why the disparity? Is it race, or economics, or education or health care? Liberals and academics would say “all of the above” and outline dozens of ways to coddle criminals. But for the hardheaded lawmen who lock up bad guys and prosecute criminals, the answer to the...

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Hosting success at Hospitality High School

In climate lore, groundhogs arose from their winter quarters for the first time Monday and determined whether we would have a long or short winter. For students at D.C.’s Hospitality High School, Groundhog Day can be as fresh and portentous. Every year they take the day to leave the classroom and tour the hotels where they might one day work. For a few, it’s more. “This is my first time in a hotel,” says Christopher Feaster. He’s 14. He’s a ninth-grader at Hospitality High. He takes a Metro and two buses to get to Roosevelt High on 13th Street NW, where the public charter school occupies the third floor. His mother works as a receptionist in a downtown...

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Learning to play by Grant Stockdale’s rules

Grant Stockdale was a dreamer, but he did things, many things. He was a Renaissance man, but not a dilettante. He did a few things very well. Before the days of caller ID, my land line would ring, I would answer it and hear: “Stockdale. Come see me.” And I would take a left from my door in Chevy Chase, and walk a block down to Stockdale’s bungalow. Or I would hear: “Stockdale. I’m coming over.” And I would see a tall, broad man with a round face, big smile and head of snow-white hair ambling up my walk. But he won’t anymore. Cancer got Grant Stockdale, after a long battle. His passing is more than a sad day for us in the neighborhood around...

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Why murderers run loose

Jeremy Bank stood in roll call in D.C.’s Seventh District station the afternoon of Oct. 3, 2008, with the same anticipation he brings each day to the job of policing. “Being a police officer is something I enjoy doing,” he tells me. “It gives me a chance to help people.” Born in New Brunswick, N.J., he graduated from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania; he was working as an inventory clerk in a warehouse when he applied to become a D.C. cop in 2005. “Sitting at a desk eight hours a day wasn’t for me.” He was assigned to patrol in 7D, the city’s most violent sector. “It’s violent, but it needs the most help,” says...

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Extra! Extra! D.C. schools ombudsman quits! But does anyone really care?

A few weeks ago, Tonya Kinlow left her job as D.C.’s “first-ever” ombudsman for public education. The “first-ever” characterization comes from the press release of Oct. 25, 2007, which announced Mayor Adrian Fenty’s appointment of Kinlow. Fenty hailed her as “the city’s face of customer service for education.” So in the midst of a contentious school year -- when the school board has been disbanded, thousands of students are still getting accustomed to new schools after the closing of 23, half the schools have new principals, some schools are plagued with violence, the chancellor has recommended new discipline standards, and the...

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Integration: Can it happen here?

So, we have a black president and a black mayor of the nation’s capital, and to the north in Montgomery County an African-American county executive in Ike Leggett. Can we check off “integration” as a goal achieved in this allegedly post-racial moment? Short answer: No way. “It’s hard to find anyone who will say they are against integration,” says Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights stalwart who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and headed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Mother and apple pie and integration. “But,” says Guyot, “it is a dream sought but not realized. In Washington, D.C., we can have vibrant dialogue on...

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Fenty, D.C. Council are primed to battle over money, schools

The last council session disharmony between the brash new mayor and the relatively disorganized council came down to this: Mayor Adrian Fenty got pretty much everything he wanted. He got control of the public schools, freedom to develop massive stretches of waterfront, and the votes to keep his closest legal adviser, Peter Nickles, as attorney general, despite concerns about his authoritative ways. We witnessed moments of petty bickering over parking spaces and tickets to athletic events. At the start of this session, will the “Adrianettes” begin to curb the mayor’s enthusiasm for spending millions on schools with little review? For making over the bureaucracy in his...

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Sounds of harmony at Sousa Middle echo MLK’s dream

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today he would just have turned 81. Perhaps he would have been as lucid and funny and deep and powerful as his friend, Joseph Lowery, was in delivering the benediction after President Obama was sworn in Tuesday. King would have been bursting with pride, of course, that four decades after he laid his life on the line to free blacks from second-class citizenship, the citizens of the United States had elected a black man to lead the nation. But I suspect King would have been just as pleased at what took place at D.C.’s John Philip Sousa Middle School on Monday, the day we celebrated his birthday. I had gone to the middle school in Anacostia to...

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Officials build themselves an inaugural palace

On Friday, with temperatures in single digits and winds whipping them below zero, I took the inaugural parade route. No way I will get near Pennsylvania Avenue on Tuesday. Will anyone? My trip answered two pressing questions: Will there be enough porta potties? Why are Mayor Adrian Fenty and our elected officials allowing the U.S. Secret Service to turn our city into a DHZ, as in de-humanized zone? To get a sense of how “dehumanized,” check out the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies Web site: inaugural.senate.gov. There you will find maps that show you how the powers that be have made it virtually impossible to get anywhere close to the U.S. Capitol or...

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Girls gone crazy in crime scene

Cotina Lane, a researcher with the Institute for Public Safety and Justice with the University of the District of Columbia, has just completed a study of juvenile crime in the nation’s capital. You might be surprised by what she discovered. “I certainly was surprised,” she tells me. Working with criminal justice professors Angelyn Flowers and Sylvia Hills, Lane examined arrest records for children and teens charged with crimes during the summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008. First surprise: arrests actually went down, from 1,545 in 2006 to 1,363 in 2008. In what we consider the city’s roughest, poorest precinct, 7D across the Anacostia River, crime by kids 17 and...

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Shut up and bike

Last Wednesday’s column — Obamajam Capital — about getting jammed up by the incoming president’s motorcade in downtown D.C., provoked a few interesting responses. Ellen Gold, a certified master guide from Bethesda, writes: “You should have seen the mess around GW Hospital the last time Cheney had to visit the cardiac unit there!” Now, it seems, the entire region is going into cardiac arrest over the U.S. Secret Service’s plans to encase parts of the nation’s capital under a glass case to make it safe for Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Ellen Gold joins the chorus who wonder why all the security mania. “My biggest...

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Time to stiffen penalties for gun crime in D.C.

Two 22-year-old college buddies had a bright idea last June: Let’s break into a Virginia gun shop, steal pistols and sell them on the streets of the nation’s capital. With that in mind, Leon Waddy and Michael Henderson set out for Green Top Sporting Goods in Glen Allen, Va., just north of Richmond. They took a bat to the front door, a hammer to the display cases and made off with 34 guns. All of this was recorded on a security camera and documented in court records. Waddy and Henderson were efficient at grabbing guns but novices at selling them. They sold a 40-caliber pistol for $550 and a 50-caliber one for $1,000 — both to an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol,...

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Obamajam capital

My eldest daughter has been losing stuff. She may be able to discuss Socratic political theory she just learned halfway through her senior year of college; but she cannot seem to hang on to her credit cards or driver’s license. So one of my chores Monday morning was to deliver her to the downtown Department of Motor Vehicles so she could replace her license. As we drove toward the intersection of Sixth and Indiana Avenue NW, I could see cop cars with lights flashing. “Maybe a suspect bolted from the courthouse,” I said. “Or an inmate escaped the central lockup.” I pulled closer to the light, in time to see a cop car hook a U-turn in the intersection to block...

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Fixing D.C.’s dangerous ambulance service

A frigid wind blew hard across the RFK Auxiliary Field on Saturday, Nov. 22, when girls’ soccer teams from Wilson High and School Without Walls met in the city championship game. Running and stretching, 22 girls peeled down to their soccer shorts and did battle. The score was tied at 1 at the end of the first half. About 12 minutes into the second half, Wilson’s Aleesha Woodson and SWW’s defender Kony Serrano both jumped high in the air to head a ball. They collided, heads knocking with the sound of two coconuts, and fell to the hard ground. Woodson got up; Serrano did not. Parents and coaches covered Serrano with blankets. We could see her legs twitching. I called 911...

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Hope for the nation’s capital

Looking back over the District of Columbia’s 200-plus years as the federal enclave, we can chart the ups and downs of a relatively young national capital. In the early 1800s, slaves were sold along with bales of cotton on the Georgetown wharves, to the disgust of visiting diplomats. In the brief Reconstruction after the Civil War, the city became a haven for black men and women who created a muscular middle class in neighborhoods like Shaw — and Georgetown. We had race riots in 1919 and worse ones after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. There were two bright and hopeful moments for those who look for positive steps toward peace and prosperity in the District....

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‘Dan and Jerry’s Excellent Adventure’

The following is a proposed screenplay for a fantasy flick that might open locally on Halloween. It would open with Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and a friend kicking back on his yacht, cruising in the gentle winds of the Mediterranean Sea. “What could I have done to avoid such a mediocre season?” Dan wondered aloud. He stuck his Cuban cigar in his mouth, took a puff, blew a smoke ring. “Hiring Jim Zorn as coach was a risk, but we started off so well. We were 6-2 and heading for the Super Bowl.” Then the harsh reality of life in the NFL intruded. Snyder’s hapless Redskins dropped games to crummy teams. Touchdowns were as scarce as sober fans in FedEx Field....

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Person of the Year for ’08 ... Allen Lew

D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee gets all the fawning features in the national press because of her willingness to blast the foundations of education dogma, but the person who has actually blasted the foundations of school buildings and done the most for students and teachers in the nation’s capital in 2008 is Allen Lew. When Mayor Adrian Fenty begged Lew to take over his Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization two years ago, Lew already had managed construction of the city’s new convention center and the National’s baseball stadium. He took a quick tour. “The schools looked like prisons,” he tells me. “There were gates and cages and...

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Final feel-good moment for ’08

Christmas is so yesterday, and there are only six more tomorrows left in 2008. Six more days to reach into your pockets and donate funds to worthy charities. Lord knows there are a zillion deserving, big league causes, from CARE international to March of Dimes. But for those of us who want to donate closer to home and give money to small organizations where a few dollars will count, here are a few of my favorites. I have investigated each to make sure they have small talented staffs and have direct impact for good: First on my list is FORCE — Friends of Rock Creek Park Environment. Rock Creek is a small waterway with few friends and too much cruddy water running off roofs and...

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Stocking stuffers for the power elite

In making my list and checking it twice, I might not have the time or the cash to get everything that our leaders need and deserve. If you lack ideas for what to give that special luminary, here are a few thoughts: Mayor Adrian Fenty: It would be easy to start and end with diapers and blankies for Aerin Alexandra Fenty, the new addition to the Fenty family. And it’s too easy to buy a new pair of biking gloves. He gets plenty of running shoes and socks from his family store, Fleet Feet, now run by his brother, Sean. For this ruthlessly focused, workaholic executive, I would suggest a $100 gift certificate for coffee at Starbucks, with the condition that he drink the beverage in the...

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Has D.C.’s gravy train finally hit the skids?

It had to happen. For years, the District government expected surpluses each time Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi reported the city’s actual balance sheet. Revenues would exceed estimates, and Gandhi would bestow gifts of around $100 million to the happy council members — which they would promptly spend. But when Gandhi announced his revised revenue estimates last week for fiscal 2009, the news was bad, though hardly dire. He and his bean counters gazed into their crystal balls, crunched their numbers and estimated that D.C. would come up $127 million short of what they had projected in September. What that means is that the mayor and the city council have to trim $127...

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D.C. charter school boss deserves a full hearing

Why has D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton called for Tom Nida’s head? The chairman of the Public Charter School Board must be deposed, Norton said, because of “astonishing, acknowledged and systemic conflicts of interest and financial self-dealing.” I fear Ms. Norton may be acting on impulse. Worse, she was moved to call for Nida’s ouster based only on an article in the other daily newspaper. In great detail, The Washington Post reported last Sunday how Nida, a banker, has helped charter schools get loans for buildings and programs. From the outside, this relationship seems ripe for conflicts of interest. “For a long time, the charter board has taken the...

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Rhee gets Cabinet seat – by proxy

A few weeks ago there was all this useless speculation that President-elect Barack Obama might pick D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee as his education secretary. Our local school czar was the flavor of the month for the national media. Cover of Time magazine. Articles in the Atlantic and the New York Times. Clips on CBS. Wishful thinking on the part of her few detractors had her moving up and out. Never happened, of course. She squelched the rumors. Who would elevate someone to education secretary who had run a small, urban school system for less than a year? Instead, Obama settled on Michelle Rhee’s mirror image: Chicago school chief executive Arne Duncan. It was almost as if...

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Who’s gonna pay millions to host inaugural bash?

Let’s do some inauguration arithmetic, starting with the basics: portajohns, or portable bathrooms. The District of Columbia is expected to host some 4 million visitors during the four-day celebration of Barack Obama’s presidency late next month. They will need toilets. Lots of toilets. Some estimates have come in at the need for 40,000 portapotties. Seems low to me. At $50 a day for each, which seems reasonable for carting them in and out and setting them up and cleaning then out and all, the tab will be $8 million. Who’s going to pay? Right now D.C. City Administrator Dan Tangherlini and his staff are crunching numbers. How much overtime for 4,000 cops, who will be...

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Greed tramples reason

The four-day Obama inaugural celebration will be historic for the federal enclave known as the District of Columbia. The whole world will be watching — very closely. We should look smashing as a backdrop to the swearing-in, and the parade, and the balls. With New York City losing power as the financial capital, with federal regulators and Congress taking more control of corporate America, and with a star taking residence in the White House, Washington, D.C., is indeed poised to become a global destination for business and pleasure. Unless one tourist gets whacked during the inaugural festivities. If a woozy couple from Kansas wanders out of a bar in Adams Morgan and gets mugged at...

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Fenty rakes in big bucks at birthday bash

The 2010 mayoral campaign season began Saturday night when Mayor Adrian Fenty celebrated his 38th birthday with a thousand of his closest friends; it may have ended, as well. What the general public saw was a huge white tent on a tiny street in Forest Hills, a few streets east of Connecticut Avenue. Music blared, wine flowed, the mayor spoke (and spoke), and a good time was had by most. Even the protesters chanting “Mayor Fenty is for sale!” seemed to be enjoying themselves, despite the freezing rain that stung their faces. Traffic became a problem, but most folks were in good spirits. What the teeming masses missed was the exclusive cocktail reception held in Fenty’s...

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Rhee’s Time

This week’s Time brings us yet another glowing magazine article about Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Who makes the cover of Time? Barack Obama, Vladmir Putin, Lance Armstrong — and Michelle Rhee. If you missed the Rhee profile in Time, and you want to know how the out-of-town press sees her, no worries. You can grab the current issue of The Atlantic or back issues of: Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company. Google Rhee and your computer might explode with references and links. You can rest assured the attention and praise for Ms. Rhee rankles her detractors here at ground zero, where Rhee is locked in a battle to the death with the Washington...

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As Capital One steps in, the last big local banker takes the fall

Rumblings that Chevy Chase Bank was in danger reached me more than a month ago, but I was rocked by the news that B.F. “Frank” Saul II was forced to sell the bank he started and loved. “I guarantee you having to sell Chevy Chase was as painful to Frank Saul as it was for Joe Allbritton to sell Riggs,” says Bill Regardie, publisher of magazines that covered D.C. business when local moguls controlled the city’s the real estate and finance. More painful, I respond. “Probably right,” Regardie says. “Frank built Chevy Chase with his own hands.” Frank Saul can trace the story of Chevy Chase Bank back to 1851, when John Saul, his...

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Does D.C. need a new AG?

As soon as Barack Obama has the power to hire and fire, one of his first acts will be to replace Jeffrey Taylor as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Taylor, the highest ranking and most powerful law enforcement official in town, has two strikes against him. He was appointed by President Bush, and his pedigree includes serving as a top adviser for Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales from 2002 to 2006. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton has criticized him and essentially stood in the way of his Senate confirmation. Bush nominated him in September 2006; he’s kept his job by appointment of D.C.’s federal judges. But I’m not so sure Obama and his...

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Holiday is time for D.C. leaders to mend fences

Journalists thrive on conflict. So it is with a certain degree of self-sacrifice that I offer a holiday proposition: District leaders who have been gnawing at one another for the past year should meet and work out their differences. It would be bad for the news business, especially for this columnist; but it would be beneficial for the city and its residents – especially now that Washington, D.C., long thought to be immune to recession, is beginning to show signs of diminishing cash flows and tax revenues. Here are four pairs of pols who need to lay down arms, call a truce, rise above their petty jealousies and start working together. • Let’s begin on the money side,...

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Vince Gray is no turkey — is Fenty?

It's an easy thing for columnists to waste some paper around Thanksgiving listing the season's “turkeys” — that is, public figures who have done something truly dumb, cowardly or hypocritical. Instead, I want to give thanks to someone who has served bravely and well. This year's public official, who made a hard choice for the pubic good that was counter to his immediate personal and political interests, is D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray. Readers of my column, Gray in particular, might view this as an odd pick, seeing as I have occasionally used my column to jab the chairman. Gray deserves the city's thanks for his vote on the confirmation of Attorney General Peter...

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Capital’s crime fighters let a robber loose

During my two decades and counting of covering crime in our town, I have heard cops and residents repeat this complaint time after time: Bad guys rarely stay arrested. It goes like this: A thug commits crimes, cops arrest him, lawyers and judges set him free. Drug dealer busted Friday night is back in business Saturday afternoon; cops pick up a kid shooting up the corner after school Tuesday, and he’s playing hooky again on Wednesday. But never in my years chronicling crime have I come across anything like the frustrating case of Michael Richardson. Richardson likes to rob people. His method is simple: He jumps them, grabs money or a cell phone or an iPod. Police say he was...

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Shaquita Bell’s killer deals himself a light sentence

The murder of Shaquita Bell has a number of tragic story lines. There is her disappearance 12 years ago. A mother of three working as a bakery clerk at a Giant supermarket, Bell vanished in 1996. There was no body and no witnesses, yet every June near the date of Shaquita’s disappearance, her mother, Jackie Winborne, came to police headquarters and pleaded to heat up the cold case. When Cathy Lanier became police chief, she took the Bell case to heart. “If we recover Shaquita,” she said on cable TV last month, “it’ll be the best day in 18 years of law enforcement for me.” But for me, the back story is how Bell’s killer gamed the system. Fingered...

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D.C.’s godfather in Congress bids goodbye after 14 years

The year 1995 ranks as one of the worst in D.C.’s relatively brief history of self-government. The nation’s capital was broke. During Sharon Pratt Kelly’s term at mayor, she had run up the deficit to $700 million. Marion Barry had just been elected mayor for his fourth term, after his six-month sojourn in jail on cocaine possession charges. “Get over it,” Barry told voters unhappy with his victory. To which Congress said: We’re over D.C.’s mismanagement, and we’re taking control. The task of working out the details of what would become the D.C. Financial Control Board Act of 1995 fell to Tom Davis, a freshman congressman from Fairfax. It...

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First family should go public

Barack Obama was elected on the promise that he would change the way we do things in Washington. What are the first two things he does? First, he hires usual suspects like Democratic gunslinger Rahm Emanuel to run his staff. No change there. And when he and his wife, Michelle, investigate schools for their two daughters, they take the path of least resistance down the same old road toward private schools. Like the Clintons. No change there. Why not consider sending Malia and Sasha to public schools? The thousands of parents who send their kids to D.C. public or charter schools are wondering — what are we, chopped liver? Committing child abuse? Not good enough? Despite all the dire...

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When the president calls ...

The local chattering classes are buzzing with speculation about which D.C. politicians might wind up working in the Barack Obama administration. The hot name this week is Michelle Rhee. The chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools has been hitting the national media like Britney Spears announcing another rehab visit. She has been profiled by The Atlantic, Newsweek and CBS news. Rhee speaks all over town and wows her audiences with her valiant struggle to reform D.C.’s woeful schools. She has cornered the teachers union with a proposal to accept a form of merit pay or face loss of seniority — or both. Rhee has made education reform kind of sexy. So people ask me: Is it true...

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Fenty’s honeymoon over?

On Monday, in its very first sign of political will, the city council took a knife to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s 2009 budget, cuting enough to balance the budget and whacking off an additional $46 million just in case city revenues go the way of the stock market. This was a prudent thing to do, in light of the spending sprees that previous councils engaged in, like ones that sent the city toward bankruptcy a dozen years ago. “I am particularly proud of the institution,” At-large council member David Catania told me. “This body is not eager to repeat the mistakes of the past.” But in bucking the mayor for the first time in two years, is the city council asserting...

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Dear president-elect: Welcome to Dodge City

It was Marion Barry, back when D.C. truly was the country’s murder capital, who uttered the immortal defense of the District, when he told reporters: “This is not Dodge City.” The year was 1989. The nation’s capital recorded 434 homicides. Barry’s defense fell on streets drenched in blood. The murder rate is much lower now. Last year we hit 181, according to police. At last count we were at 164, on pace to reach the still unacceptable number of 181. The nation’s capital still ranks as Dodge City, especially if you live east of Rock Creek Park or across the Anacostia River. A week ago three men were gunned down in our fair city; that would be the day...

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Rock Creek best-dressed for autumn

The picnic table sits a few hundred yards into the path along Rock Creek from the entrance by the bridge near the Park Police station on Beach Drive. It was placed between stout oak and ash trees, between the path and the creek. The ends of two of the slats that make the table top are knocked off, leaving jagged edges. Still, the table is ready for a fall feast or simple picnic. I’m certain this table was fished from Rock Creek by some Good Samaritan, positioned on a flat spot and readied for guests. I sat down, brushed leaves off with a sweep of my arm, and ate my lunch by Rock Creek amid Friday’s falling leaves. I would venture to say this short walk along Rock Creek, from...

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D.C. wish list for the next resident of 1600 Penn Ave.

First things first — when it comes to hyper local power and politics, the big winner in Tuesday’s election of Barack Obama was not D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Obama’s body double; nor was it one of the city council members who paraded around early and often for the candidate. The biggest winner is Eleanor Holmes Norton, our still non-voting delegate to the House. Mrs. Norton came out early and unambiguously for Obama. Their relationship goes back years. The first time I met Sen. Obama was more than two years ago at a fundraiser for Norton’s last reelection bid. He helped her and she helped him. He enlisted her to carry the Obama message in campaign stops around the...

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Federal judge faces tough call on top detective

Federal Judge Paul Friedman has a tough call to make tomorrow morning. At 10 a.m. he’s scheduled to sit in judgment of Michael Irving; I don’t envy him. Irving is one of the best homicide detectives ever to solve a murder in the nation’s capital. I am not stretching facts to say the streets of D.C. are safer because Irving solved so many violent crimes and put perps in jail for a long, long time. Cases Irving helped solve are the stuff of legend. Take the triple murder at Colonel Brooks’ Tavern in Michigan Park near Catholic University. Intending to rob the popular restaurant, thugs broke in one Sunday morning in 2003 and shot three employees. Detectives brought in...

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Neither McCain nor Obama can change D.C.

We cynics are used to hearing politicians promise the moon during the campaign and promptly forget their vows after they are elected. My favorite promise this presidential season is the common vow to change Washington, D.C. Barack Obama has based his entire campaign on the promise to make change; John McCain has adopted the mantra. The rude awakening that will overtake the presidential candidate who emerges victorious on Tuesday is this immutable fact: You might promise to change Washington, but Washington will change you. Take George W. Bush. He was the image of energy and fresh ideas when he took office eight years ago. He, too, promised to “change” the way we do business...

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Adrian Fenty’s perpetual campaign

Two weeks ago Mayor Adrian Fenty filed the official paperwork for his re-election to a second term. You might have figured this was a mere formality, and he would get to the actual business of campaigning by and by. Guess again. On Dec. 6, Fenty is kicking off his re-election campaign with a fundraising party at the home of a supporter in Forest Hills. Consider this an invitation: price of admission is raising $25,000. This answers two questions: First, Fenty has no intention of being a one-term mayor. Second, he has no intention of taking a job with the prospective Obama Administration, should the Democrat win the presidency next week. In Fenty’s first run for mayor in 2006, he...

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Channeling Fenty’s endorsement of Mara

My moles down at the Fourth Street city offices reported long lines of voters casting early ballots, which raises a few questions. Are they working the old “vote early and often” routine of electing local political bosses in Chicago and Philly? The integrity of D.C.’s voting system is so questionable they just might get away with it. Check the rolls for dead voters and double-dippers. Are they so besotted with the idea that Barack Obama might win that they can’t wait to cast a ballot, even though their vote will join the assured D.C. landslide for the Democrat? They will get the satisfaction of a tiny share of the three electoral college votes that could just put...

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Chinatown disappears in developing East End

t rush hour Friday evening I went looking for Chinatown. I knew it once had a vibrant crossroads at Seventh and H Streets, N.W. The streets going in all directions used to be lined with tasty, funky Chinese restaurants with Peking ducks hanging in the steamed up front windows. Chinese residents of the Wah Luck House at Sixth and H would shop at the food stores and get well at Dr. Lee’s offices up on I Street. You could buy ginseng from a Chinese herbalist. We even had a touch of organized Asian crime. But as I approached what once was Chinatown from Fifth and H Streets, heading toward the Friendship Archway at Seventh, I saw not one Chinese person. I passed a few down-at-the-heels...

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Jewel on the Hill site for political brawl

You had to be there to appreciate the political theater that unfolded at St. Elizabeths East Campus Wednesday. Mayor Adrian Fenty called a press conference for 10 a.m. at the chapel on the eastern half of what used to be a federal compound high on the hill up Martin Luther King Avenue SE. He wanted to “unveil” plans to redevelop the 173 acres across from what is still the city’s mental hospital. One problem. Actually two. First, our Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton — who was largely responsible for getting the new Homeland Security Department to locate there — had announced weeks ago a community meeting later that evening to talk about her plans. Second, St....

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Michael Brown’s candidacy corrupts Home Rule Charter

Electing Michael Brown to the at-large city council seat on Nov. 4 would be a corruption of the country’s core democratic principles and a flagrant violation of the Home Rule Charter. Here’s why. Politics in the United States is based on a multiparty system. Many voices, many choices, many parties. At this moment, politics is dominated by the two major parties, the Democrats and the GOP. Looking back, we had Whigs and Federalists and Progressives. Now we have the Greens and the Libertarians. In D.C. we have the Statehood Party, driven to change the Constitution and give residents a pair of senators and a congressman. True, many third parties are quixotic, like our Statehood...

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Fenty-backers back mayoral enemy No. 1: Michael Brown

Politics makes strange bedfellows, the saying goes. The adage came to mind when I read the invitation to a party aimed at raising money and support for Michael Brown’s run for an at-large seat on the city council. The at-large race has come down to a two person contest, between Brown and longtime Republican Carol Schwartz. Having lost the primary, Schwartz is asking voters to write her name in on November 4. We’ll get to Brown later, but first the party of bedfellows. It was held at the home of Bill and Cynthiana Lightfoot, way up 16th Street in the heart of D.C.’s Gold Coast. Lightfoot, a former city council member who flirted with a mayoral run in the 1990s, is a...

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D.C. needs Nickles more than Nickles needs D.C.

No doubt D.C. Council members, corralled and cowed by Mayor Adrian Fenty, would like to break out by holding up the confirmation of Peter Nickles as attorney general. Bad idea. It would be tantamount to puffing their chests at the expense of the city’s well-being. It would be at once petulant and destructive, juvenile and shortsighted. Nickles, 70, is scheduled to go before the Judiciary Committee today. Its chairman, Phil Mendelson, has criticized Nickles for being too close to Fenty and for acting as the mayor’s lawyer, as opposed to being head of an independent agency. Before Mendelson questions Nickles, I have a question for him: Has he read the law creating...

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With pols away – Washingtonians can play

Bashing Washington and Washingtonians is a favorite fall sport for politicians. We are the whipping post for senators and congressmen and now, of course, the two presidential candidates. Let’s put aside the fundamental hypocrisy of such rhetoric. Nah. Let’s pound it home: How can John McCain and Barack Obama make sport of running down Washington when both are creatures of Washington and its culture? If Washington is corrupt, as they say, then both are captains of corruption by association. Both deplore the cronyism of the capital city. Both need to look no further than their top staff to find members in good standing of lobbying firms and think tanks who supply us with our best...

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Has Fenty turned council into his own Adrianettes?

Back in the days when Marion Barry was mayor, we used to call the 13-member legislative branch the ”Marionettes.” With his swagger, his goodies and his charisma — and occasionally the back of his hand — Barry had complete control of the city council. Now, barely halfway through his first term, I think it’s fair to ask whether Mayor Adrian Fenty has turned the D.C. Council into his very own “Adrianettes.” The question came to mind after I reviewed the shenanigans at Tuesday morning’s breakfast, which preceded what was supposed to be a crucial day of making laws. The table was set by Barry, now the council member for Ward 8. Though his...

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Gunshots day and night cry out for council action

Two men get into an argument at a restaurant in Adams Morgan a few Sundays ago. One pulls out a pistol and shoots the other, then turns it on himself. Earlier that day, a few blocks away, gunfire erupted in an alley. Two men fell, both shot and wounded. In the first week of October, D.C. police reported three homicides by gunfire. On the last day of September, cops found three men shot in the stairwell of an apartment in Anacostia; one was dead. So far this year police say there were 2,200 cases of assault with a deadly weapon. They reported this in a positive light, as a 12 percent drop from last year’s numbers, when there were 2,499. But if one assumes most of those assaults...

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Rhee spanks teachers’ union

Money managers around the globe are focused today on Congress, as it weighs the $700 billion bailout of their descent into greed; meanwhile, educators across the U.S. are equally mesmerized by the battle unfolding between Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the Washington Teachers’ Union. For Washingtonians, the Rhee v. WTU skirmish might have more lasting effect. The financial markets will recover; the teachers’ union might not. Would that be good or bad for students? Yesterday morning Rhee dropped the bomb on the teachers. In her parlance, it was “Plan B,” short for her proposal if negotiations with the union failed. Sources tell me the two sides were close to...

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. GOP still dissing democracy

Patrick Mara stopped by the D.C. Republican Committee offices at 13th and K streets last Wednesday to see whether anyone had signed his petitions for an at-large seat on the City Council. A campaign volunteer had dropped them off a week before. On a counter, Mara saw forms for Christina Culver, running as a GOP candidate against Jack Evans in Ward 2. He saw Adrian Salsgiver’s petitions to challenge Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. But no Mara petitions. “I realized I couldn’t rely on the D.C. GOP to get signatures for me,” Mara tells me. “I went to an event for a local GOP candidate in Georgetown last week. They were passing around petitions for everyone but...

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Funny money in D.C.

Yippee! Wall Street is weeping, banks are failing — good times are here again for Washingtonians. Keep reading and let me try to convince you how the current pre-depression money crisis could be a bonanza for the nation’s capital. But first, let’s review last week’s Sunday column, in which I quoted a D.C. financial official about the central city’s fiscal health. Senior policy analyst Marcy Edwards told me: “We’re not projecting a deficit.” Four days later, the District projects a $130 million shortfall in its estimated 2009 revenue. Was I hoodwinked? Not in the least, Edwards says. Her boss, Natwar Gandhi, calls to say “We never...

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Rush to judgment forcing out D.C.’s best homicide cop

Great street cops are hard to come by in any city, but they are especially precious in the nation’s capital. I’m talking about native Washingtonians who rise in rank from patrolling in cars to solving murders as top detectives, local boys with roots so deep in the community that grandmothers call them to finger their grandsons. Cops like Michael Irving. Why, then, is the Metropolitan Police Department in such a hurry to end his career? Follow this tangled web: Remember the thugs who broke into Colonel Brooks’ Tavern one Sunday morning in 2003 and murdered three employees? Two confessed to Irving; the third committed suicide before Irving got to him. Or the drive-by...

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Capitalist-style competition comes to D.C. schools

Looks as if the number of students in D.C. Public Schools will drop a few percentage points this school year. And it seems as if some of those students will switch over to the city’s public charter schools. This alleged “news” comes from reports in other papers that bear the fingerprints of two unnamed sources: Critics of Mayor Fenty’s school reform efforts and activists who hate charter schools. First, the numbers are premature and concocted. Secondly, their relevance is extremely low, unless you belong to the whiners who will search out any factoid that can be used to nip at D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The fight between public schools and charter...

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D.C. finances seem strong as suburbs suffer

When Wall Street gets the blues, state and local governments can suffer major depressions – from falling tax revenue income to increased bond payments caused by higher interest rates. Budgets can sink, programs can get cut, workers can be laid off. From pieces of the puzzle I have pieced together, the District faces the current financial debacle in better shape than its neighbors. Virginia and Maryland and our neighboring counties have been whining about declining revenue for months, and they have cut their budgets accordingly. D.C., standing alone, has been financially strong, and it could remain in solid shape. Revenue estimates are due out later this week, but I pestered senior...

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Godfather of D.C. tax scam still at large

Now we know so much about the biggest corruption scandal in the city’s history — but we also know so little. I am sifting through the 114-page “Statement of the Offenses” that describes in great detail how Harriette Monica Walters stole $48 million from the D.C. government. It took dozens of federal investigators and accountants and prosecutors nine months to build their case and narrate the scam. It makes good reading, if you can stomach it. We find out how Walters started in 1984 skimming small sums. The documents tell us how she learned to embezzle cash and then embellished the scheme over time until she was able to rip off $8.6 million in 2004, her high point — or low point,...

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‘Boy banker’ brings A-games to D.C.

Let’s play a sports trivia game: Which Washington businessman has done the most to bring a variety of sporting events to the city?  A. Abe Pollin, owner of our pro basketball and hockey teams. B. Redskins owner Dan Snyder. C. Ted Lerner, who bought the Nationals from major league baseball. D. Robert Pincus, known in local business circles as “Boy Banker.” Before last week, I would have chosen Pollin, but seven days ago, when the suits and the politicians smiled into the cameras at the Navy Memorial for the unveiling of D.C.’s first college bowl game, I spied Bob Pincus. And I thought to myself, there he goes again. First tennis, then baseball, then basketball, now football....

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Carol Schwartz's primary defeat could kill D.C. GOP

If you drove past the corner of Foxhall and Reservoir roads Wednesday afternoon, and saw a fresh-faced white guy waving and blowing kisses, you would have been witnessing the high point of Republican politics in the nation’s capital. And also the nadir of the local GOP — perhaps its extinction. The waving politician was Patrick Mara, who knocked off Carol Schwartz in Tuesday’s D.C. Council primary election. Mara came here 11 years ago to work as a Capitol Hill aide, recently got involved in D.C. politics and decided to challenge the pol known around town as Carol. Let’s be clear: Carol Schwartz may be the only Republican who could get elected to anything in D.C....

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NRA extremists would open D.C. to military weaponry

The National Rifle Association might be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Or it might be shooting itself in the foot. Choose your cliche. Having won a major Supreme Court decision that finally proclaims the Second Amendment does indeed convey an individual’s right to bear arms, the NRA is pushing a bill in Congress that is so radical it could turn moderate, sensible, reasonable gun owners against it. Such as me, a proud member of the NRA. At the same time, the NRA has allowed the nuttiest congressmen to parade their intellectual inadequacies before the American public, as I witnessed in yesterday’s hearing on H.R. 6691. For background, consider that gun rights...

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Ballou High School Marching Band needs a helping hand

Maybe you were in church this Sunday, and the preacher asked you to do something for the less fortunate. Maybe you are bummed the Redskins took a pounding from the Giants, and you want to change their luck. Perhaps you simply want to play the Good Samaritan. Here’s a quick solution: Donate a few bucks to the Ballou High School Marching Band, so one of the best bands in the Washington region can march in the Rose Bowl parade and step its way down Fifth Avenue in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. I rarely see a way for a few dollars to make a direct change in the lives of high school kids and also resonate throughout their community. This is the one. Ballou sits on a rise in...

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For Ward 2, Evans is a keeper

D.C. needs Jack Evans more than Jack needs D.C. Washington’s Ward 2 might be the city’s most diverse political district; it’s certainly the capital’s heart of gold. It stretches across the city’s midsection, from the Potomac River east to North Capitol Street. It encompasses Georgetown, home of the well-heeled elite; Shaw and U Street, once known as D.C.’s Black Broadway; the Golden Triangle and all of the central business district; and last, but not least, the White House. It’s not a stretch to say Ward 2 provides the lion’s share of tax revenues that drive the District’s $5.7 billion budget. Facts are that commercial real estate...

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Gibbs legacy leaves Skins losers

This week the nation’s capital begins another autumn of discontent, or should I say weekly whining. The Washington Redskins take the field Thursday night for the first real game of the NFL season. The local team, which pulled off a 9-7 record last season, meets the New York Giants, which won the Super Bowl. In New York. Before a national audience. With a new coach. Oddsmakers say the Giants should prevail. If the Giants win, I say this town will be awash with weepers and Friday-morning quarterbacks and one frustrated owner, Dan Snyder. A loss Thursday night could portend four months of depression for Redskins fans, which means almost everyone in the Washington region. Local lore...

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National Mall marked as midpoint of national bike trail

Shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday, just as rush hour traffic began to jam Constitution Avenue, Edward Miller and Harold Thomas knocked off for the day. The two-man crew with D.C.’s transportation department had been installing new signs along the National Mall since 9 a.m. Now there were about 150 elegantly simple signs showing the route of the East Coast Greenway from Union Station to 17th Street by the Washington Monument; Miller and Thomas would be back in the morning to strap more green, white and blue vertical signs to traffic posts, so bike riders and hikers could see a clear path along the Mall to Memorial Bridge. Erecting Greenway signs along the Mall is a milestone for the...

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Tax Scam Tally Leaves D.C. $35 million in the Hole

The feds are about to complete their investigation of the D.C. tax scandal, according to my sources. Here are some of the essential numbers: -- $15 million is what my sources say the feds have recovered from the $50 million siphoned from tax revenues. -- 20 years is the time it took the tiny group of corrupt tax officials to embezzle the dough; 10 months is what the feds needed to close their investigation, if they bring final charges next month, as expected. -- Nine is the number of people who have pleaded guilty in the tax scheme so far; if ring leader Harriette Walters pleads guilty in September, as expected, the number will grow to 10. -- One is the number of tax office employees...

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Money Talks But Will DC Students Walk -- Or Read?

First, a rant about people with no stake in D.C. schools braying about Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s radical crusade for change. Monday morning my wife goes to the dentist in Bethesda, and while she’s unable to talk back because of metal devices in her mouth, the hygienist says Rhee “must be fired” because she’s proposed paying middle school students to toe the line. Hygienist lives in Maryland, has no kids in school. As Lewis Black might yell: “Shaddapp!” Professional complainers like Gary Imhoff at DC Wire serve up predictably sour reviews of every move Rhee makes. Not one word about pleased parents and happy students in spiffed up schools,...

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Bloods In Trinidad turning the streets red

The Bloods have arrived in the nation’s capital. Now what? Just as guns and drugs flow back and forth across the District’s borders with Virginia and Maryland, perhaps it was inevitable that organized gangs from beyond the city limits would invade our streets. For months I have been fielding tips about the Bloods, the Los Angeles gang in storied conflict with the Crips. Still, reports of Bloods in D.C. seemed bogus; then I got my hands on Commander George Kucik’s memo. “The Intelligence Division has verified that there are bona fide members of the ‘Bloods’ gang living and operating in the District of Columbia,” wrote Kucik, commander of the...

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Capital Hill King Is Dead -- Long Live the Queen

Walking into the Community Action Group’s office in the historic Carriage House by the Old Naval Hospital on Capital Hill is a shock to the senses. The scent of Marlboros would hit you immediately. Now you get a puff of air freshener. The gravely voice of the rough crusader who co-founded CAG 20 years ago would growl into the phone. The new voice is softer but no less powerful. His round face with its mustachioed lip and stout body no longer occupies the CEO chair. Now the sweet woman he loved is seated there. Harold “Hal” Gordon, the face and force behind CAG, died August 5 in a boating accident. His wife, Janice, who co-founded CAG, has taken his seat, his title,...

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Doggett Dies And a D.C. Pillar Crumbles

Bushy-browed Bud Doggett went out like a light. Last Thursday he had lunch downtown with a buddy, stopped by his house in Northwest, D.C., checked the refrigerator, his heart quit, and he collapsed and died, right there on the kitchen floor. In that instant, Washington, D.C., lost a truly local tycoon who -- through grit and love, hard living and generosity -- made the nation’s capital a better place to live. I don’t pretend to have been one of Bud Doggett’s many close friends or even a casual acquaintance, but I know that we lost one of our few pillars last week. If you happened by Saint Patrick’s Church downtown on 10th Street yesterday morning, you might have...

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Dog Days Best Time To Frolic In D.C.

Hordes of transient residents flee the nation’s capital in August to avoid the sullen heat that sometimes settles over our town. Pols in Abe Lincoln’s day left the swampy city for higher ground; now the movers and shakers reach for beaches from Nantucket to Duck, or the mountains of New England. The really rich head to southern France. To which I and many local say: good riddance! Seethe in your traffic-clogged causeways to the barrier islands. Stew in your security lines for jets to hubs where your connecting flights will have been canceled. We will stay and play. August can be the best of times in Washington, D.C. Our historic sleepy, southern charm begins to fill the vacant...

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Accounting 101 from DMV

A letter arrived at my home a few weeks ago with ominous origins. Return address was the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles -- Adjudication Services. Never good. My mind rifled through the ways in which I had screwed up. Was it an unpaid parking ticket? Was my truck past inspection? Was I driving on an expired license? Resigned to my fate, I opened the letter. It began: “Our records show ...” I considered closing the envelope and tucking it under the stack of unpaid bills, but I read on -- “... that the ticket or tickets listed below issued to your vehicle ...” I knew it. I had forgotten to pay that ticket from K Street. Or was it the one on Capitol Hill? I...

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Harry Jaffe: A campaign season of losers — and some winners — in D.C.

Michael Brown is the biggest loser this election season. The Federal City Council comes close to topping the loss column. Linda Cropp comes out a winner, either way.As we cast ballots today in the most meaningful election since the dawn of D.C. Home Rule in 1974, here’s my roster of good and bad moves, regardless of the vote count.» Lobbyist Michael Brown never stood much of a chance to become the city’s next mayor.He had to overcome the notion that he was riding on his legendary father’s name.He had to......

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Harry Jaffe: Fenty confronts the demons of power and public love

Shortly after 10 p.m. Tuesday, Adrian Fenty emerged from his ramshackle campaign office on a semi-seedy strip of Florida Avenue. Word that D.C. voters loved him 2-to-1 over Linda Cropp had reached him. Cops stopped traffic.Fenty waded across the street to the victory tent erected on the vacant lot — encased in a gaggle of security guys and aides. A burly African-American, serious and unsmiling, led the wedge. Watching from a few yards away, I appreciated Fenty’s moment of innocent joy in his overwhelming victory. And I wondered whether this......

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Harry Jaffe: It might take a Wolf to force feds to police D.C.

Turns out D.C. has another champion in Congress, besides Fairfax Congressman Tom Davis. His name is Frank Wolf, the Republican who represents the congressional district astride the Blue Ridge mountains, from McLean to Winchester.Davis, a powerhouse in the Republican Party, has devoted his clout to a law giving D.C. full voting rights in the House. Wolf has had other interests, in particular crime and education. He has pursued them quietly, which explains in part why I was too quick to criticize him in an earlier column. He petitioned the White......

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Harry Jaffe: Maryland’s Gift to Rock Creek: Dirty Water

Twilight along Rock Creek Wednesday reminded me once again why I appreciate the national park that runs through this area. Last week’s oppressive heat was a fading memory. The evening breeze felt almost cool. A fox darted across the trail between the park ranger station and Broad Branch. Two women rode by on horseback, one on a gray, one on a bay.The banks of the creek were a mess. Massive trees uprooted by July’s torrential rains were cantilevered over the water. Still, the creek sounded sweet and melodic as it......

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Harry Jaffe: District allows lead to poison children and create criminals

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could present a fix for two of our worst problems? Surveys of voters this campaign season have shown that D.C. residents are most concerned about two issues: crime and education. Cutting crime and improving education have been perennial concernsin every city — small and large — for decades. The problems and debates have migrated to the suburbs. Crime and education are seen as the two most intractable problems of modern America. But could it be that the way to have a significant impact on......

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Harry Jaffe: Janey’s call for charter school moratorium a cry of desperation

D.C. Public Schools Superintendent Clifford Janey descended Tuesday from the fortified walls of his downtown offices to deliver this pronouncement, which I shall annotate:Janey: "We have not delivered on quality education here in D.C. ... "Dude, are you just discovering this?Janey: "both with respect to the charter schools and to DCPS."Dude, are you sure you want to compare the two?Janey: "That’s why I want to advocate a moratorium [on charter schools]."Dude, can’t you find a less ham-handed way of killing the competition?Janey wants the city to quit authorizing charters to......

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Harry Jaffe: Henri Rousseau: Jungle in D.C. at the National Gallery

Sunday — the last lazy summer Sunday before school begins and political campaigns get serious and the Redskins start to lose real games — the family and I went to the National Gallery to see the most entertaining art show of the season: "Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris."Rousseau’s paintings have always captured my imagination, with their wide-eyed lions and tigers and apes peering from the depths of a forest or jungle that Rousseau has depicted with precision, each leaf etched in oil, every blade of grass luminous with light from......

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Harry Jaffe: Marie Johns for — city administrator?

Rumor has it that Marie Johns is going to throw in the towel and accept an offer to become city administrator under the next mayor. Adrian Fenty has asked her. Or was it Linda Cropp?"I have heard those rumors," Johns tells me.Any truth?"NO!" she says. "I’m not even thinking about that."Against most odds, Marie Johns is still thinking she can win the Democratic nomination for mayor on Sept. 12, — though polls say she’s in single digits against front-runners Fenty and Cropp — even though most voters still can’t tell......

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Harry Jaffe: Money, power and political winds shift in Georgetown

Georgetown represents a tiny hamlet of Washington money and power, but what happens in Georgetown resonates across the city. Which is why it was so unusual and noteworthy that the two top mayoral contenders had dueling fundraisers Wednesday night at the homes of the rich and famous.I went to see the candidates — and the houses.Adrian Fenty had his get together at the manse of Jim D’Orta on N Street. It just happens to have been the home of Pamela Harriman, hostess and diplomat of a bygone era.Linda Cropp......

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Harry Jaffe: Foggy Bottom loses ground to GW

Remember the old George Washington University Hospital, the one made famous when Ronald Reagan showed up in the emergency room in 1981 with a bullet just a whisker from his heart, thanks to John Hinkley’s assassination attempt?Picture it scraped off. Now picture a massive commercial development there on the southern curve of Washington Circle, with office buildings and condos and enough Starbucks’ shops to stoke students late into Saturday night after a binge at the Beta house.This is the vision dancing in the financial heart of GW, a university in......

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Harry Jaffe: Mayoral candidate’s quandary:Public or private schooling?

When Adrian Fenty’s 6-year-old twin sons start class this fall, they will walk through the doors of Tots, a private school in Petworth, rather than West, the local elementary school.Is it fair to expect a mayoral candidate who has made improving public education the centerpiece of his campaign to send his children to public school? As a parent, I am of two minds. Where one schools one’s children is among the most important decisions a parent must make. It is sensitive and private and must be tailored to each child’s needs.......

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Harry Jaffe: Marion Barry’s kiss is the kiss of death in the mayoral race

Am I the only person in this entire city who misses Marion Barry during the homestretch of a mayoral race?The District has had races for mayor only eight times, beginning with Walter Washington’s win in 1974. Marion Barry has run and won four times. I am addicted to his mesmerizing, if somewhat garbled, oratory. I had become accustomed to following him on the campaign trail and hearing supporters yell his name on street corners across town.Barry may have run the government into the ground, but he was great copy. How......

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Harry Jaffe: Locals would make great District leaders

On Sunday night, in the back yard of her home on Broad Branch Road in Northwest Washington, Suzannah Creedon told a group of neighbors why she had decided more than a year ago to devote herself to Adrian Fenty’s run for mayor."Like Adrian," she said, "I was born in Washington. When I heard he was running for mayor, we talked and I realized that here was someone who understood the city’s problems and would actually do something about solving them."Creedon, who is white, lives with her husband, J.D., and their......

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Harry Jaffe: Aides and colleagues say Mayor Williams has all but quit

Mayor Anthony Williams showed up for work at the John A. Wilson Building yesterday. This is news, if one defines news as something a public official does that’s out of the ordinary. Our mayor has spent about a third of his time the past year traveling abroad or around the U.S. He’s just back from a long weekend in Belfast, Northern Ireland.Word around city hall is that Tony Williams has quit performing his job as mayor. People who work closely with Williams — in his executive branch and in the......

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Harry Jaffe: From junkyard dogs to lap dogs, council members warm to Fenty

At city hall, the book on Adrian Fenty was that he had no friends on the D.C. Council. Elect him, they said, and watch the council eat him for breakfast (in a secret session, of course). The kid won’t be able to govern.Funny how a landslide victory can turn enemies into allies. Wasn’t that Jack Evans standing with Fenty a few days after Fenty trounced his candidate, Linda Cropp?And Carol Schwartz, whose last-minute Cropp endorsement puzzled many, says it was "not true" she trashed Fenty for months.Political realities drive this......

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Harry Jaffe: Back-to-grime night for D.C. school parents

Clifford Janey is shocked. Shocked!The showers and bathrooms at Dunbar High School don’t work! This OUTRAGES him, D.C.’s school superintendent told a small meeting of Dunbar teachers and athletes. He promised "emergency repairs."Where has this alleged superintendent been all summer and fall? Apparently, he was nowhere near schools across the city as they festered with fouled-up facilities, from stinking bathrooms to floors speckled with paint chips, to rooms without radiators. When was the last time Janey set foot in a D.C. school building?Parents across the city stepped through the doors......

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Harry Jaffe: Natwar Gandhi takes action in health care worker training

Natwar Gandhi, with his fingers firmly around the throat of any politician or businessmen who would bust the city budget and tarnish D.C.’s gold-plated bond rating, has extended his reach into education. Gandhi has come up with a well-conceived remedy for a long-standing problem, and it comes with a tight budget, as one would expect of D.C.’s chief financial officer.Gandhi and everyone else paying any attention knows the Washington region creates thousands of jobs every year; on the other hand, D.C. has one of the highest unemployment rates in the......

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. School Board wins one for the kids

As a parent, it takes a Herculean effort to tamp down the rage over the D.C. School Board. It’s been so useless and damaging to our children for so many years. But I am reaching for patience.Today parents go to schools to talk to teachers about our children. Superintendent Clifford Janey and his bureaucrats wanted to reduce the parent-teacher conference time by two hours, so they could finagle a change in the school calendar that would satisfy a deal with the unions for teacher preparation time but also give the......

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Harry Jaffe: Take to the streets on Columbus Day

Columbus Day is a relatively young federal holiday. Our kids have a day off school, banks and courts are closed, and we are expected to shop. Why not use the day to protest our historic and unjust denial of voting rights in Congress? Let’s adopt Columbus Day as our day, once every year, to use all the tools of protest — from sit-ins to civil disobedience to Internet campaigns — to educate our fellow Americans about the little-known fact that we are the only Americans who have no say in......

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Harry Jaffe: Barefoot kid comes from salt mines to fix District schools

In the predawn darkness of the fall morning when Robert Bobb’s father drove him through the sugar cane fields of rural Louisiana to the bus that would take him to Grambling State University, his father said: "If you don’t like it, come home."That was a sweet notion from a father who drove a tractor in the sugar cane fields all summer and worked in the sugar factories all winter, a man whose education ended in third grade. His eldest son was the first in the family to graduate from high......

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Harry Jaffe: D.C.’s new top lawman is a stranger to our streets

Meet Jeffrey Taylor, who is suddenly and without much fanfare the most powerful law enforcement official in D.C. Taylor is a 41-year-old lawyer. He was born and raised in small towns in Northern California. He played high school football and got A’s. He went to Stanford University and got a law degree from Harvard. He served as a prosecutor in San Diego, worked for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah — where he helped write the U.S. Patriot Act — and did a stint with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Most recently, he......

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Harry Jaffe: In D.C. Schools, the‘N’ is for nepotism

Why are the D.C. schools so hard to fix? Why has it been so difficult to accomplish the simple things, such as counting students or delivering textbooks or stocking bathrooms with toilet paper?True, we have run through superintendents faster than Dan Snyder sacks coaches. The school board has been inept. Governance is Byzantine.But those of us who drill down into the system know one deep-set problem is nepotism, in the bureaucracy and in the union. Everyone is related by family or by cronyism.Case in point is Barbara Bullock, defrocked president......

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Harry Jaffe: D.C. Council to cop killers: Welcome!

Thanks to the D.C. Council, the District has always been the friendliest city in the U.S. for criminals. Want to shoot up the corner? Sell drugs? Rape, rob and pillage? Come to D.C.The D.C. Council has been rolling out the red carpet for criminals since the 1970s by lowering sentences, raising the bar for cops to make arrests and making it harder for prosecutors to keep suspects behind bars. But the current crime legislation that just passed the council puts a bull’s-eye on the cops and almost begs bad guys......

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Harry Jaffe: Murderers go down in Rosenbaum case, questions remain

Michael Hamlin sat in the witness chair last week for more than three hours and ratted out his cousin. In a calm, often meek voice, he told a Superior Court judge and jurors and family members how he and Percy Jordan sneaked up behind New York Times journalist David Rosenbaum last January, how Jordan clubbed him with a plastic pipe, how he himself snatched Rosenbaum’s wallet as he fell, how they drove off in their dark Cadillac and used Rosenbaum’s credit cards to buy gas and tires — after they......

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Harry Jaffe: Why I’m voting for Robert Bobb

Robert Bobb seems to be a lousy candidate for D.C. school board president. He often comes off as gruff and overly serious. I’ve never seen him slap a back or offer a glad hand. Smiles don’t come easily. His trademark veneer of crisp, white shirts, dark suits and cowboy boots can make him hard to approach.But for me, Bobb is the perfect man at the perfect time to help run our public schools. This is not an endorsement, but here are my five reasons Bobb will get my vote next......

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Harry Jaffe: From coke kings to French language stars in Trinidad

If you were a D.C. cop hunting drug dealers a decade ago, Trinidad was a target rich environment. Rayful Edmond III, our one and only crack king, called it home.The neighborhood on the city’s east side is sandwiched between Florida Avenue and H Street, which burned in the 1968 riots. Trinidad suffered. Rayful Edmond was the local hero in the 1980s. He was the law, the employer, the judge and the jury. On Thanksgiving he delivered free turkeys from his Porsche.For kicks on Wednesday, I drove the two narrow, one-way......

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Harry Jaffe: Washingtonians got no game this Election Day

Washingtonians are powerless today.We sit in the eye of the political storm raging around us. The storm could rumble through and change our lives. Democrats could sweep Republicans from power. Law firms where we work could win or lose clients; lobbying firms that were up could be down. All we can do is wait and watch and root for our team. What we cannot do is vote for anyone or anything that matters in this midterm election.We have no senators. We have our one, nonvoting member of Congress. Not having......

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Harry Jaffe: Power shift on Capitol Hill sweetens deal for D.C.

District residents should be dancing through the empty halls of Congress today, while Republicans are off licking their wounds and Democrats are celebrating in their home territory. If you consider the District to be run like a plantation, with the two houses of Congress up on the Hill as our overseers, this week’s change in masters was a cause for celebration. Rarely in the city’s history of subjugation have we come out of an election in such good shape.Ask Eleanor Holmes Norton."It’s a new day for the city, a new......

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Harry Jaffe: E. Louise White vows to make the New School a model

E. Louise White understands the students she has brought under her wing as principal of the New School for Enterprise and Development."They have always fallen into situations of having the least response in their education," she tells me. "The least-prepared teachers, the most overly neglected physical facilities. They became a forgotten part of the school population — through no fault of their own."Mrs. White taught her first class in 1957 at Draper Elementary School, in one of the city’s poor Southeast neighborhoods. She took over the New School in January.......

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Harry Jaffe: Enterprise closure would be a ‘huge loss,’ grad says

The New School for Enterprise and Development was a refuge for Ka’Trina Andrews.When she entered the charter high school in 2001, she needed a break from the fighting and violence in and around Wayne Place, the public housing project where no kid should have to grow up. Her mother and uncle refused to send her to Ballou, the public high school up the hill in Anacostia. Too violent."My mom was real excited about Enterprise," Andrews tells me.Her mother was even more excited four years later when Ka’Trina graduated first in......

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Harry Jaffe: Can one man keep a tough school safe? Sometimes

When a 10th-grade student at the New School For Enterprise and Development missed two weeks of classes last fall, it was Tom Blagburn’s job to investigate.He called the boy’s house a half-dozen times. Finally, he knocked on his door in Atlantic Terrace, in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of Anacostia. The boy’s father cracked the door. Blagburn identified himself as the New School’s head of security."Where’s your son?" Blagburn asked. "We miss him at school."The father, a house painter, said he had fallen off a ladder a month ago and broken......

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Harry Jaffe: Two sides of New Anacostia are clashing in the New School

What we are seeing in the apparent demise of the New School for Enterprise and Development are the growing pains of the New Anacostia.Washington’s worst neighborhood, known as home to our permanent underclass, is being reborn. Across Anacostia, new developments are replacing decrepit public housing; it has a spiffy new community center; charter schools are scheduled to open up more educational opportunities.In these seeds of growth, the New Anacostia is rising on the city’s East End, across the Anacostia River. But the underclass of wrecked families and drug-infested housing projects......

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Harry Jaffe: Cropp’s campaign powered by Barry’s brain trust

Council Chairman Linda Cropp is pinning her mayoral campaign on her 30 years of public service and the experience she’s gained on the School Board and D.C. Council.Many of the people behind Cropp got their political experience working for Marion Barry sometime during his four terms as mayor or countless years on the D.C. Council. Indeed, Cropp’s campaign organization contains a veritable "who’s who" of the Barry years.Cropp’s campaign chair is Elijah Rogers, who served as Barry’s first city administrator before moving on to a successful career in accounting and......

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Harry Jaffe: Fenty dives for corporate dollars

Read his lips: "No new taxes."This bold assertion was music to the ears of the businessmen who sponsored Monday’s mayoral forum, where D.C. Council Member Adrian Fenty made his pledge.Now read Fenty’s lips in January 2002: "I’d like to have that revenue to use for programs." That’s what Fenty said as he vehemently opposed the Tax Parity Act, which rolled back personal income taxes.The business community took that as an indication that the young council member was a liberal and a populist, a mantle that he earned during his first......

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Harry Jaffe: Ted Lerner’s local roots: Dining at Duke’s

Ted Lerner did not lunch at the Palm yesterday, the day after he and his family became owners of the Washington Nationals."Wouldn’t know Lerner if I tripped over him," Tommy Jacomo told me as I was leaving the restaurant.Unlike James Carville, Paul Begala and other usual suspects who need to see and be seen every day at the Palm, Lerner probably has rarely been to the downtown steak and fish joint.Lerner, on the other hand, was a regular at Duke’s, as in Duke Ziebert’s. On most days, Duke would greet......

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Harry Jaffe: Mary Cheney sells a book; the District pays for it

If you needed an officer in downtown D.C. Friday evening between the hours of 6 and 8 p.m. — say you got mugged or hit by a car or wanted to report an imminent terrorist attack — you were probably out of luck.But if you happened to be walking down 19th Street, between Dupont Circle and M Street, you would have seen a sea of blue. A detachment of the Metropolitan Police Department‘s finest had been detailed to protect Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynn.Was it a crucial......

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Harry Jaffe: At Deal Junior High, ‘It’s The Teacher, Stupid’

Having written a book about the District and reported on our fair city for two decades, I thought I knew most details about the capital city’s history.Apparently not.Last week I chaperoned a field trip for my daughter’s Algebra class at Alice Deal Junior High. The annual foray into the city, "Math on the Mall — and Beyond," is the creation of math teacher, Guy Brandenburg.He took us way beyond math — to history and warfare and public policy and art and architecture.I had always pondered the purpose of the majestic,......

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Harry Jaffe: Brown’s message is worth the run

The political classes are inclined to discount mayoral candidate Michael Brown.They say he’s not his father, Ron Brown, who was a force in national Democratic circles.They say he’s a lobbyist with zero experience running a government or a business.They say he comes off glib and a bit too smooth, as if he was getting off on doing the "Oprah thing" during mayoral forums.And while there may be a hint of truth to each of these judgments, it is way too soon to discount his candidacy. A flawed candidate? Yes. But......

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Harry Jaffe: Politics of baseball: II

The rap on Ted Lerner was that he had never met with any D.C. politicians as he angled to become owner of the Washington Nationals.Not exactly.Turns out Lerner had paid a visit two weeks ago to Council Chairwoman Linda Cropp. They chatted — very privately — and exchanged ideas about how baseball could put down roots in the capital city.Might that be one of the reasons Cropp was separated from the Lerners only by Mayor Tony Williams when the assembled pols and owners threw ceremonial shovels of sand at last......

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Harry Jaffe: Dear Virginia: Where did the cop killer get his game?

As a community, we will never recover from the killing of Fairfax Detective Vicky Armel.Nor should we.We see cops mowed down by the dozens in films and TV shows. Rarely does it happen in real life, in our towns. Never to a mom with two children.This is a first. Perhaps there’s a way we can try to make it the last.In mourning, we are left with two questions. We know the answer to one; we must find out about the other.Though the gunman, Michael Kennedy, was killed Monday when police......

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Harry Jaffe: Walter Reed takes us back to plantation

If Washingtonians needed any more motivation to push for full representation in Congress, consider these two words: Walter Reed.In August, the Army said it didn’t need the historic medical center on Georgia Avenue. Sad, I wrote at the time, but a potential boon for the District, which could develop the 113 choice acres.Last week, the feds blithely announced they would keep the land for some future, unexplained use.I would like to say the feds swiped Walter Reed, but that would be wrong; it’s more accurate to say they excluded us......

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Harry Jaffe: Tony won’t take it any more!

He looked like Mayor Anthony Williams.He sounded like our lame duck leader.But the words and their intent came from someone much tougher and more passionate than the intellectual wonk who has been running D.C. for seven years.Indeed, it was Tony who threatened to throw Bishop Alfred Owens Jr. off of his Interfaith Council, in response to the minister’s vicious attacks on homosexuals. And it was the mayor who lost his cool when political commentator Mark Plotkin hectored him about voting rights.I am tempted to pin these outbursts on jet lag......

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Harry Jaffe: No political signs in my front yard, please

Arriving back in D.C. a week ago from a weekend away, I was surprised to see a green "FENTY" for mayor sign in my yard.It matched the overgrown meadow that is my unmowed front lawn. It even looked good against the brick house. But it didn’t match my political persuasions.Despite a few cynics who believe I am in Adrian Fenty’s back pocket, I am an agnostic when it comes to the five mayoral candidates. I will vote on Sept. 12. Call me undecided.I took the Fenty sign down. It’s somewhere......

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Harry Jaffe: Money, power give Rice edge in Ward 3

Last spring, one of Marie Drissel’s friends called with a messy problem.It seems an extended family of 300 birds had taken roost in the tree in front of her house in Georgetown.Needless to say, they covered everything with poop.Drissel, a veteran activist and longtime city resident, agreed to help. They called the Humane Society. They searched the Internet for solutions. The woman’s car was so covered it could not be driven; it had to be towed.Which gave Drissel her "aha" moment: This was a street problem. "I called Bill Rice,"......

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Harry Jaffe: School Board gets a D for dysfunctional

Graduation exercises at Alice Deal Junior High were scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, but two specials guests — who happened to be the only two elected officials on the program — were absent.Parents and teachers and students waited. And waited. At 10, "Pomp and Circumstance" played and the graduates filed in and took their seats.A half hour later, Ward 3 Council Member Kathy Patterson took her seat. She apologized, but at least she showed.One seat on the stage remained empty for the entire two-hour ceremony. School Board Member......

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Harry Jaffe: From New School’s ashes, a better school might rise

The New School for Enterprise and Development graduated its final class Thursday — 72 students gathered at Howard University to celebrate their achievements.There was Matthew Bolden, who’s headed to the University of Kansas.And Khari Edwards, on her way to LaSalle University in Philadelphia.And Erica Watkins, who will go to college at Temple University.It was a bittersweet day for the graduates and all the people who have put their hearts and souls into this charter school on the wrong side of town. On June 30, the New School will close its......

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Harry Jaffe: Learning to paint by numbers

Using the "paint by the numbers" technique, the picture of Tony Williams’ administration looks like something Edvard Munch might create. As in, makes me wanna scream.First number = 1,225. Let’s start with the incessant squabble over parking at the proposed baseball stadium. Keep in mind that we’re talking about 1,225 spots for bigwigs, those who will sit in the luxury suites; you and I will never see those spaces, unless they hire us as valet parking attendants.Now let’s tally the cost of each spot. The mayor wants to dig an......

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Harry Jaffe: Help! RFK is crawling with Yankees fans

In the seventh inning of the first of the three-game series against the Yankees this past weekend, the anti-Bronx cheer filled RFK Stadium, for the first time in the modern era."Yankees suck! Yankees suck!"The Washington Nationals had just taken a 5-3 lead against the boys in pinstripes. The Nats fans sounded off — prematurely.In the top of the eighth, the Yanks rang up two runs to tie the game at five, after a Nats pitcher walked in the tying run."Who sucks now? Who sucks now?" rang out from the Yankees......

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Harry Jaffe: A raw deal: Georgetown’s monster on the waterfront

There’s something very fishy going on along the Georgetown waterfront, and it’s starting to smell really foul.For at least a decade, Georgetown University has been trying to build a boathouse for its rowing program on the Potomac River just up stream from Key Bridge. The region needs a betterfacility for its burgeoning crew programs, both high school and college teams. Georgetown University wants to build a monster.There are dozens of good reasons why every environmental group in the region has lined up to oppose the huge building. Hikers, bikers, boaters,......

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Harry Jaffe: On Division Avenue, new life replaces bullets and heroin

Division Avenue on the city’s far eastern edge was my late-night stomping ground for years — but I would go there only with cops.Here, where the right-hand corner of D.C. juts into Prince George’s County, cops counted bullet holes in dead bodies and closed drug markets one night to see them open up like Middle Eastern bazaars the next morning. One cop told me: "You were at Division Avenue? We don’t control that."But that was then — in the 1980s and 1990s — when crack killed communities and Marion Barry’s......

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Harry Jaffe: A glimmer of hope for District schools

For those of us who despair that no one can improve the District’s dysfunctional schools, I serve up a sliver of good news.I heard that City Administrator Robert Bobb might become a candidate for school board president. Doubting that he would be interested in a thankless job for puny pay, I tracked him down."It’s right at the top of my thinking," he told me. "I am giving it serious consideration."Why would I get so jazzed simply because the city’s top bureaucrat is eyeing a run for the school board presidency?......

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Harry Jaffe: On Independence Day, the District remains in chains

It’s 4:38 Friday afternoon leading into the Fourth of July weekend, Washingtonians are fleeing for higher ground or sea level spots on the sand — and Kevin Kiger is glued to the phone in his downtown office, plotting ways to make the District of Columbia the setting for the new Democratic caucus that would take place before the New Hampshire primary."We have a good shot," Kiger tells me. The Democratic National Committee has asked for formal applications from states. "We’re up against 10 others."Let’s be honest: It’s a long shot.......

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Harry Jaffe: Could I be wrong? GU’s ‘monster’ boathouse could be user friendly

There’s an old adage among reporters: Never let facts get in the way of a good story.To this I would add a codicil for columnists: Never let the other side of a controversy get in the way of a good rant.Critics might complain that I adhere to both self-deprecating laws of journalism, but I actually attempt to base my reporting on facts, and I try to see both sides before I write. Which leads me to admit that sometimes I can be blinded by one side.Take, for instance, my column......

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Harry Jaffe: To keep city streets safe, make them unsafe for thugs

Is it safe to go out at night in the once peaceful streets of Northwest Washington?First, David Rosenbaum gets clubbed in January with an iron pipe while walking his dog in Cleveland Park and dies from head injuries. Sunday night thugs attacked Alan Senitt, a 27-year-old Brit walking his date home in Georgetown, slitting his throat and leaving him to die in a pool of blood.I know that stretch of Q Street a few blocks east of Wisconsin Avenue. I’ve been to Herb Miller’s house, where Senitt and his......

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Harry Jaffe: Report cards absent for D.C. school students

In the fall, at the start of the school year, students in some D.C. schools often begin classes with no textbooks.Now, many students have completed their school year but have no report cards."There is a delay," a DCPS spokesman told me."It’s a postal issue," said school board member JoAnne Ginsberg. "It is across the system."Or it might be a funds transfer issue. Or a computer issue. No one knows where to ascribe blame for the fact that a month after class ended for many students, they still have no grades."It’s......

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Harry Jaffe: Washington Republicans operate behind the Iron Curtain

When election season rolls around, Washington turns into the Soviet Union. We live under a one-party system.Democrats outnumber Republicans in our town about 11-1. D.C. has about 30,000 registered Republicans. Whoever wins the Democratic primary in September is virtually assured of winning the November general election.And we call it democracy.Carol Schwartz, an at-large council member, is the top Republican-elected official in D.C. Actually, she’s the only Republican holding office. By law, two members of the council cannot be members of the majority party. David Catania used to be a Republican,......

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Harry Jaffe: Playing the race card in D.C.’s Republican party

As if the D.C. Republican Party isn’t marginal enough, the top of the ticket is blowing up as we head into the prime campaign season.After I filed my Tuesday column, in which lamented the fact that D.C. is a one-party town and introduced GOP mayoral hopeful Dennis Moore, David Kranich called."I just challenged the petitions of my two competitors," said Kranich, who’s running for mayor. "I will be the only Republican on the ballot."Kranich, sounding as if he had squashed a couple of ants, said Moore had collected only 154......

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Harry Jaffe: Zen and the art of calling crime emergencies in D.C.

Question: If the young man whose throat was slit in Georgetown had been a D.C. taxi driver rather than a white Brit, and if the people who have been mugged in the mall had been D.C. residents rather than tourists, would Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf have asked President Bush to call a summit on safety in D.C.?Perhaps. But I doubt it.Another question: When was the last time Frank Wolf bothered to drive into neighborhoods within view of his Capitol Hill office that have been in need of a "crime summit"......

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Harry Jaffe: Comrades in arms: Insurgent union backs Fenty for mayor

You can understand the battle for mayor by deconstructing the groups that have endorsed the candidates.Linda Cropp, the council chair favored by the establishment, has attracted the most endorsements from the most entrenched organizations from the business, labor and political elite.Adrian Fenty, the young renegade from Ward 4, got the cold shoulder from most business and labor groups, but he’s about to get the stamp of approval from the blunt-force instrument in today’s labor movement.Last week, Fenty went to New York for an audience with the bosses at 1199 Service......

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Harry Jaffe: Against all odds, Norton says ban the bomb

Seems that everyone is developing a nuke these days.North Korea is threatening to make a nuclear bomb. Iran is a few years away from having a nuclear weapon of mass destruction. Pakistan wants one. Israel probably has one already.How quaint, and a bit odd, that our Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton has once again introduced H.R. 1348, the Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act. And that she’s crowing because the House has passed a resolution commending Kazakhstan for closing down its weapons testing site, years ago."Nuclear disarmament has become a dated......

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Harry Jaffe: District’s environment needs some help from its next mayor

On this moist and musty Monday — in an autumn season that has seen almost every leafy tree in D.C. flame out with a burst of crimson or yellow or orange — the Pinehurst Branch of Rock Creek surfaces in a deep, dark pool just inside the D.C. line.Beth Mullin opens a black trash bag. I reach down to pick up an empty beer bottle and stuff it in the sack. We continue our walk to the confluence of the Pinehurst with another creek.Mullin, an attorney who used to work......

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The curious case of Wilson Senior High's Art Siebens

Your average spectator trying to make sense of the breakneck pace of change in the D.C. Public School System might be justified in suffering whiplash. Here’s the roster of major developments: » The city devoted $2.3 billion to fix schools and build new ones. » Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the public schools and hired Michelle Rhee to become superintendent. A Newsweek columnist called her “brilliant,” and the magazine is preparing a cover story about her reform efforts. » Rhee has closed 23 schools, fired nearly 100 central office staff, sacked a bunch of principals. » In her latest move, Rhee has jolted the Washington Teachers’...

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Rhee’s union pitch long on carrot, maybe short on respect

Money can’t buy you love, the saying goes. But can money buy you a great teacher? We are about to find out — if D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee pushes through her version of a teacher’s contract. I was able to get my hands on the “information packet” put out by the Washington Teachers’ Union describing Rhee’s proposals. It spells out compensation and benefits and layoff procedures for the next five years for members of the public school system’s 4,200 teachers and staff. If a teacher can measure up to Rhee’s standards and remain in the school system for five years — and get the maximum $20,000 bonus — he or she...

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Revolution in teacher pay on the table in D.C.

Another torpid summer seems to be upon us in the nation’s capital. Congress is trying to leave town and get down to the serious business of getting re-elected. Your friends and colleagues are fleeing for the beach or higher ground. The presidential race is taking the action to the hinterlands. But while no one’s looking, a two-front war and a series of skirmishes are roiling the Washington Teachers’ Union. The outcome of the battles could spell success or failure for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s crusade to reform D.C.’s schools. It could also revolutionize the way teachers are paid — from coast to coast. That’s right — revolutionize. I’m...

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Smokey Bear failing national parks in downtown Washington

Let’s say you are a tourist from Paris or London visiting Washington, D.C., for the firsttime. Perhaps you simply drove in from Bethesda or Herndon to have lunch in the nation’s capital and take in a matinee at the Shakespeare Theatre.You find yourself at the corner of 14th and K streets, you see an expansive city park,......

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Fenty, Rhee bring healthy fear factor to D.C. schools

You have to love the clumsy two-step all our politicians and educators are doing over reports that D.C. students made big academic gains this past year. What’s the line — Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan?Do we credit dearly departed Superintendent Clifford Janey? Before Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the schools last year and gave him the gate, Janey did change some tests and reform some curricula.Should we bestow......

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