When my brother and his significant other were here for Thanksgiving, my darling girlfriend and I took them to Amsterdam Falafel, which we love to death. I don’t know how the subject came up, but we were talking about DC’s lack of representation in Congress and giving my brother a crash course in the facts and our opinions on the matter. I noticed out of the corner of my eye a woman who clearly was interested in our conversation but politely not interjecting herself into it. Kudos to you, ma’am – minding your own business in a dining area as small as Amsterdam Falafel’s is an exercise in restraint that many people aren’t up to, particularly on such a heated issue.
On her way out she stopped and commented that getting a vote doesn’t require a lot of constitutional machinations (one of the areas we touched on) – you just need to make DC a state. While I think that glosses over the extent of the exercise, at this point I doubled the number of invisible Don respect points (save them and redeem them for not so valuable prizes!) since she was not only interested as a DC resident, but was even wearing a cap with the web address for one of the advocacy organizations. We chatted for a few seconds and she was on her way.
This isn’t really that interesting, except that I found myself wondering this morning which organization it was. So I googled “DC statehood” to see which ones make mention. I suspect it was dcvote.org since I recall it being a brief name, but I kept scrolling down the list. Where I did find another not-quite-as-short name but one that seems to advocate for DC becoming a state. For elaboration, here’s the short descriptive paragraph Google shows next to the link.
Camping Tents. COMPANY NAME REDACTED offering a products for inside and outside the home including patio heaters, turkey fryers and camping tents.
Yep, some organization has registered a domain name that references voting rights for the over half a million people living in our nation’s capital… and they’re camping on it to sell camping gear. The douchenozzles in question are a Tennessee company named EleetDealzebub (satirized and not linked because I don’t want to give them even an iota of a Google rank bump) and they don’t have a single mention of ‘statehood’ on their site – they’re just parasites hanging out near our misfortune attempting to profit from it.
Jerks.
This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
Well I used to say something in my profile about not quite being a “tinker, tailor, soldier, or spy” but Tom stole that for our about us page, so I guess I’ll have to find another way to express that I am a man of many interests.
Hmm, guess I just did.
My tastes run the gamut from sophomoric to Shakespeare and in my “professional” life I’ve sold things, served beer, written software, and carried heavy objects… sometimes at the same place. It’s that range of loves and activities that makes it so easy for me to love DC – we’ve got it all.
