We only gave Harry Thomas Jr the #3 slot in 2011’s Worst of Scandals list, but it appears he will be the number one figure in DC politics for the next few weeks. WUSA9’s Bruce Johnson is reporting that Councilmember Thomas will resign as part of a plea deal that will send Thomas to prison for 2-3 years. In addition, according to comments obtained by the Washington Post, Thomas failed to make his second scheduled $50,000 payment this week.

Thomas’ resignation would leave Ward 5 without a seat on the council (excepting At-Large Councilmember Vincent Orange, who also lives in Ward 5) until a special election could be called. The District, according to law, must hold the election on the Tuesday after 114 days from the certified vacancy. Should Thomas’ vacancy be certified by Friday of this week, that election would take place on April 30th, but a May election date is more likely. Thomas faced three challengers in the 2010 primary, with none gathering more than 19%. No word yet on if any of his 2010 challengers would make a run for his seat.

Should Thomas resign, it would be nice to see the Council take efforts to, give the financial situation, amend the charter to add more flexibility to the special election options, including alignment to nearby primary and special elections, as well as provisions to allow for the Board of Elections to avoid days that could limit voters for religious reasons.

If your company participates in Metro’s SmartBenefits program, Congress has likely given you an unexpected pay cut. Those who participate in the program get pre-tax dollars put on their SmarTrip card each month, up to a maximum allowable limit that has been up to this point $230/month. Because Congress did not extend the ceiling, the new pre-tax ceiling is a little more than half that, at $125/mo.

So, when the changes come in a week, remember that it’s not WMATA’s fault, for once, and that the Congress that DC has no vote in snipped your transit benefit in half.

Anacostia’s Uniontown Bar and Grill has been the subject of a lot of favorable coverage and attention for bringing new life to the Martin Luther King Jr. Ave strip in Historic Anacostia. Unfortunately this morning the coverage will be different, as its owner Natasha Dasher is the subject of federal drug trafficking charges, as she and two co-conspirators apparently had 65 kilograms (140lbs) of cocaine delivered to a Fort Washington office.

There are a lot of unanswered questions right now, especially given the future of the restaurant. The Post’s coverage revealed that Dasher is behind on the rent for the restaurant, which is not a good sign.

The Nationals’ catcher, Wilson Ramos, is feared to have been kidnapped while playing winter baseball in Venezuela. This evening, numerous reports, including one from his winter ball club, indicated that the Nationals’ young catcher has been abducted from his home in Valencia, Venezuela by parties unknown.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Ramos and his family, and we hope for a quick resolution.

Update, 8:20pm Spanish language newspaper El Nacional has an article on the reported kidnapping. Google Translate gives us these paragraphs:

According to respondent, 4 gunmen approached the grandeliga Washington Nationals near his home in the Santa Ines, capital of Carabobo, and took him away.

“They are still waiting for the kidnappers contact the family,” continued the insider. “At the moment the only thing they have done is to inform the police.”

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We’d known this was coming. We’d heard that since Sulaimon Brown’s allegations of impropriety surrounding the Gray campaign, and Brown’s subsequent flame-out, were being investigated that this could turn criminal at some point. The Post dropped the bombshell in a Sunday A1 story that there was a grand jury impaneled to hear testimony concerning actions within the Gray campaign. The testimony to date, according to the Post, centers around Howard Brooks, Lorraine Green and Brooks’ son Peyton Brooks, and some shady dealings with cash and money order contributions, as well as the concerning matter of Sulaimon Brown.

The Examiner has some additional analysis concerning the immunity deals, which are certainly not what the Gray administration wanted to see right about now. They can just hope at this point that it’s just a few rogue individuals working without knowledge of the top of the campaign. If that’s not the case, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Who’s got the saw? And how many feet in a cubit anyway?

Well it looks like the internal domain name the We Love DC team uses to communicate amongst themselves should have been sandbagged – it floated away in the night and our ability to coordinate anything along with it. So instead of our usual Weekends feature here’s a picture of a hippo.

We miss you Happy. For reals. Peace.

Anyway, we’re re-assembling our excretion into a coherent gathering and hopefully will be back on track soon. We haven’t forgotten you!

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When you consider that the winning campaign in the 2008 Presidential Election spent about $800M or so to achieve victory, Zillow’s prediction concerning 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at $262M of value seems a bit off. Now, the 16 bedrooms and 35 bathrooms, not to mention an attached garage, make it a pretty nice house, not to mention all of the security features that it contains, many of which aren’t listed in the property detail.

At 55,000 square feet, it does cut a stunning profile, and there’s central air and heat, so you’ve got that going for you. I hear the owner’s in a load of debt, so they could probably turn it into some quick cash if you threw a bunch of money at them.

DC magazine Metroweekly reported late yesterday an incident that occured between two local men and a cashier at the new Safeway store in Southwest DC.  The new location on 4th Street has been a real boon to the neighborhood, but apparently the staff hasn’t undergone any kind of real customer service training.  The two men, purchasing groceries last weekend, were subject to harassment from the cashier.

It’s hard for me to imagine why this cashier still has their job five days later, even with a weaksauce apology. Then again, given our recent trips to the Starburst Safeway (famous for selling unrefrigerated expired ground turkey), attention to the needs and wants of their customer base isn’t exactly priority one over there, is it?

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Okay, the headline on this one is a total joke, but I’m going to stick to my gut this morning and go with it.  I couldn’t believe it as I drove across town, listening to WAMU, but it turns out that John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was:

A) Written here in DC in 1971
B) Was once about Massachussetts
C) Was written for Johnny Cash

Oh God. Really? Yes, Really.

The song that I’d learned to drunkenly love as it was strummed out on the tiny stage at Four Courts by whichever guitar player had the stage that night, had no ties to West Virginia to whatsoever?  Oh John Denver, you’re so full of it.

The song was written in a Georgetown apartment in 1971 by Bill Danoff and his girlfriend Taffy Nivert, just five years before they’d go on to commit the single greatest act of musical atrocity in the modern era by forming the Starland Vocal Band, and writing the song Afternoon Delight.  This, of course, means only one thing:

So, while it’s hard to stay mad at John Denver, I definitely find it quite hilarious that the unofficial anthem of West Virginia is as much about Massachusetts as it is about the Mountaineer state.

Visiting Seattle this past weekend, I found myself jealous of the Emerald City, and not just for their fine food and coffee options, or for the warm weather and gentle rain.  No, what I found most amazing about Seattle was the wealth of transit options I had in the palm of my hand through Google Maps on my iPhone.

If you’ve ever tried to use the transit mode in DC, you know that it holds nothing but certain disappointment, and you find yourself trying to find directions another way.  You muddle through the wmata.com website, you try to remember which bus route runs where, and which ones are named after streetcar routes, and if you’re like me, you can’t keep it all straight.

WMATA has committed to bringing Metrobus and Metrorail routes to Google Transit, but have missed deadline after deadline, first saying January of 2011, and then saying “any day now“.  The project has foundered for reasons that WMATA isn’t discussing publicly.  I do recognize that processing five rail lines, and 300 bus lines is a chunk of work, but after my weekend of wandering Seattle, and spending a chunk of money on fares, it’s awful hard to go back.

The easier you make it for someone to use public transit, the more likely they are to shrug off whatever fears they have about the bus and the metro and just hop on.  Show someone that it takes just 25 minutes to get downtown on the G8 bus, or that they can easily move back and forth between the rail and bus systems, and you might make some converts simply because parking can be a nightmare in some parts of town.

Please, WMATA, make it easy for us to get around by exposing that data to Google. I know you’re worried about the times not being 100% right, or what happens if the fares change, but these are pains we can get through together, if you’re willing to just open up those tools. While Nextbus is tantalizing in its current state, it also doesn’t work about 30% of the time, either through errors of omission or errors of commission.  People give it a hard time on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, but that just shows how hungry we all are for working transit data.

As a tourist this weekend, I found myself farther and farther from the downtown core, into the neighborhoods of Seattle,  despite the lack of the tourist-friendly rail systems of other bigger cities, and I chalk it all up to Google Transit never leaving me truly high and dry.  I missed a bus here and there, but the ability to map out my options with a smart phone, or with a web browser at the hotel, gave me the tools that I needed to be fearless about transit.

As a city that gets a pretty large quantity of tourists, putting tools in their hands to explore the city means that they spend more time beyond the obvious hubs, and spend more money on transportation, which turns into a boost to fares that doesn’t necessarily require increasing capacity at rush hour, sounds like a pretty good investment of resources, even in a budget crunch.

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Councilman Sekou Biddle (D-At Large) has succeeded in the first part of his challenge to at least one of his challengers’ ballot petitions, and has preliminarily knocked Jacque Patterson off the ballot for the upcoming April election.  Today’s preconference hearings were an “opportunity for the candidate and the challenger to review the staff findings on each challenge and decide whether they want to proceed with a formal request for a public hearing,” according to DCBOEE’s Alysoun McLaughlin.

Preliminary results from DCBOEE showed today that Mara submitted 3,182 valid signatures, Weaver submitted 2,948 and Patterson submitted 2,217.  Each campaign was also furnished with a list of signatures that could be found to be valid, provided DCBOEE receives a change of address form within 10 days of today.  Mara submitted 992 of those, Weaver 261 and Patterson 565. Mara needs none of those potentially valid signatures to qualify, while Weaver would need 52, and Patterson would need a miracle.

Next up would be public hearings, provided that Mara, Weaver or Patterson don’t withdraw their candidacy (unlikely), or their challengers withdraw their challenges (also unlikely).  These public hearings would allow the challenger to present evidence, and the candidate to defend their gathered signatures before the board of elections. DCBOEE has scheduled the public hearings at 2pm on the 9th (Patterson), 10am on the 10th (Mara), and 12pm on the 14th (Weaver) which will determine the final disposition of their candidacies

The high-risk, high-reward maneuver by the Biddle campaign may have been successful, if Patterson and Weaver are knocked off, and proven that the challenges, however haphazard, were necessary with Mara.

Disclaimer: Tom Bridge is a donor to the Weaver campaign, a signer of the Weaver petition (amongst others), and gathered 46 signatures for the Weaver campaign. His name was challenged by Sekou Biddle’s campaign as a petition signatory, but not as a signature gatherer.

The Committee on Public Works and Transportation, chaired by Council Member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), has completed the initial investigation into the District’s fleet management practices, launched as a response to the controversy surrounding Council Chair Kwame Brown’s city-provided, “fully loaded” Lincoln Navigator.

In 2002, the District passed a law forbidding the procurement of SUVs or any vehicle rated at less than 22 miles per gallon, unless it’s for emergency, security, rescue, or an armored vehicle. Since that time, the District has obtained 42 such prohibited vehicles, including the two involved in Navigatorgate.

The report, released this morning, also calls for additional investigation into who is driving these vehicles. Under District law, only the Mayor may have an on-staff driver, and any other assignment of District employees to act as chauffeurs must be approved in writing either by the Mayor or by the appropriate agency head, depending on the situation.

I encourage you to read the report for yourself; it’s only a few pages long, and is pretty hair-raising stuff when it gets to the part about how many vehicles remain unaccounted for.

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Don’t know who Sulaimon Brown is? That’s not a surprise. He was a Democratic Candidate for Mayor in this past summer’s mayoral primary with a penchant for speaking his mind about Adrian Fenty…and then telling everyone to vote for Vince Gray.

“Wait, what?” you say. Yeah, you heard right. He pushed for Vince Gray, despite appearing on the dais at debates and at other events as a candidate himself. I’m just as baffled as you.

It was revealed by the City Paper’s Alan Suderman, that along with Kwame Brown’s SUVs and the growing salaries in the Mayor’s office, Mr. Brown received an auditor’s position in the DC Department of Health Care Finance, making $110,000 per year.

This morning Brown was let go, and escorted by police out of the office of the DHCF by police after troubling remarks made during his termination arrangements.  Then he decided to show up for Mayor Gray’s afternoon press conference. That’s when things got hilarious.

Fresh off a 3-day closure of two stations in the heart of the city, WMATA announced this morning that they’ll be closing five stations at the end of the Orange Line, as well as splitting the Blue Line, to perform NTSB-mandated maintenance over the weekend of March 4th through 6th.

The Orange Line will not operate between Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton, closing the stations at Minnesota Ave, Deanwood, Cheverly, Landover and New Carrolton. In addition, no Blue Line trains will traverse the gap between Stadium-Armory and Benning Road.  The closures begin at 10am on Friday March 4th, and will conclude when the system reopens on March 7th.

Metro will be working to repair aerial structures at Cheverly, as well as make upgrades to Stadium-Armory and “install 6,000 feet of cellular communication cables to ultimately improve cell phone coverage, replace 2,000 feet of track, 380 insulators, 1,400 rail ties and 400 track fasteners.”

In addition, Metro will be working on the Red Line tracks between Friendship Heights and Medical Center to replace track fasteners, and between Takoma and Glen Forest to improve train control rooms.  Single-tracking in both those situations will add 20 minutes per trip in delays.

Metro plans to operate Blue and Orange line shuttles during the weekend to help handle the coverage:

• Blue Line Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to Benning Road. This bus shuttle will operate between the Stadium-Armory and Benning Road Metrorail stations. Customers using this shuttle bus should add 15 to 20 minutes to their trips. 

• Orange Line Express Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to New Carrollton. This express shuttle bus will operate between the Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton Metrorail stations with no stops in between. Customers using this express shuttle should add 30 minutes to their trips. 

• Orange Line Local Shuttle: Stadium-Armory to New Carrollton. This local shuttle bus will operate between the Stadium-Armory and New Carrollton Metrorail stations and will stop at the Minnesota Avenue, Deanwood, Cheverly, Landover and New Carrollton Metrorail stations. Customers catching this local shuttle should add 40 minutes to their trips.

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It’s been a bad weekend for Mayor Vince Gray and Council Chairman Kwame Brown. The former, it was revealed by the Post’s Nikita Stewart, has been spending quite a lot of money on senior staff.

Vincent Gray has hired a number of senior advisors at significantly higher dollar values than Adrian Fenty, with several salaries approaching, or meeting, $200,000 per year. Most of the people in these positions are getting paid significantly more than their predecessors. Gerri Mason Hall, the mayor’s chief of staff, is being paid over the bracketed salary for the position at $200,000, which is about what the mayor himself draws from city coffers. For comparison, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel at the White House made $172,000 per year. While it’s certain that the White House also pays people in prestige and notoriety, it’s a difficult pill to swallow for many city workers facing furlough and layoffs.

And then there’s Kwame Brown’s “fully loaded” Lincoln Navigators. Yes, he has two of them. Mike DeBonis of the Post did some excellent digging into the circumstances around the council chairman’s ride, and boy is this one ugly. The city has now leased a pair of Navigators – yes, that’s plural on purpose – for the Council Chairman, due to the requirement that the vehicle be black-on-black. The city will pay close to $3,600/mo for these two vehicles, which is, with insurance, about double my mortgage payment in Brookland.

Council Chairman Brown was uncharacteristically silent on Twitter yesterday, but that didn’t stop the rise of a new hashtag: #whatshouldkwamedo. Personally? Cancel the contract of the spare unit, and trade the Navigator for the Mayor’s old Smart car. At least that one’s already paid for.

Most mornings, my radio is tuned to WAMU for Morning Edition, and of course it’s the one morning I need XM that I miss an interesting story centered on DC.  Alex Kellogg from NPR reported a piece titled “D.C., Long ‘Chocolate City,’ Becoming More Vanilla” all about the recent census numbers, gentrification in Anacostia, and the change of the neighborhoods east of the river.

I’d like to say that NPR did a thorough job that represented DC in a good light.

I’d like to say that. But I can’t.

Kellogg’s quick and dirty race narrative is the sort of story that drives me crazy because it sounds right. It sounds like its grounded in good statistics and lengthy discussions with people in the neighborhood.  But it’s not, and NPR wound up providing legitimacy to economic disaster porn in DC when the story should’ve been the recovery of a community.

‘Green Mural’
courtesy of ‘Phaesia2011′

Kellogg’s story begins with the tale of District Heights, MD resident Robert Adams, who recently made the decision to leave his Anacostia home in search of a five bedroom house with a washer and a dryer.  He decided to spend a bit more than he could in Anacostia, and get a bit more, too. As someone who moved into the District to find more space (and not less) I think that Adams’ calculus was a bit off.

Nikki Peele, who writes Congress Heights on the Rise and runs reSPIN PR in Anacostia isn’t so charitable.

Peele said in an interview this afternoon, “Hard to believe [Adams] turned his back on his community over a washer and dryer.”  The young, African-American professional has her office in Historic Anacostia and lives in Congress Heights, and is skeptical of the narrative that Kellogg has chosen for his view into her part of the District.

“What I see is people coming together, doing things that others didn’t think possible…from all walks of life, a large majority of which are African American,” says Peele of her community and the way it’s changed over recent years.  ”There’s been no voice for East of the River in the past 5-10 years. There’s a voice now, and we won’t stand for it,” she continues, her tone betraying her frustration over media coverage East of the River.  Peele’s interested in seeing the reporters who do “drive-by” economic reporting in her community come to spend time there, go to community meetings, and understand what the area East of the River is really all about.

‘2008 – 03 – 01 – Ready for the great Anacostia flood of 2011′
courtesy of ‘Mississippi Snopes’

“Media outlets are just constantly trying to portray it as a sob story of a neighborhood,” says David Garber of his interview with Kellogg that was part of the NPR piece, “I think it’s time we’re a little more honest about what’s happening east of the river.”  Garber said that when Kellogg contacted him for the piece, the very first thing he wanted to talk about was the holiday party where Garber and his friends were robbed late 2009, and fixated on his departure from the neighborhood eight months later.

“I spend most of my time correcting bad information,” says Peele, talking about her work with reSPIN’s clients and the impression of DC’s neighborhoods East of the River.  On her blog, she’s singled out misconceptions reported as fact in a feature titled, “Southeast Misconceptions.”  ”What I read out of [pieces like Kellogg's] is that people of color can’t fix their communities, and that’s just not true.”  Peele speaks at length and with passion about all of the people that are working hard on Anacostia, Congress Heights and other neighborhoods East of the River to help create jobs, lure businesses and strengthen their communities.

‘Sit Yourself Down’
courtesy of ‘M.V. Jantzen’

It’s working.  Sunday’s front page profile of Uniontown Bar & Grill, which just opened last week on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, speaks volumes about the changes in the community. Where once was a shuttered drug store, now stands a community’s newest sitdown restaurant, something of a rarity for the area east of the river.

The stories East of the River are harder to tell, they require a lot more nuance than can be inferred into a three minute segment on a radio show.  They’re building by building, block by block, and they’re about people that the media usually only has interest in if they’re pictured in a mugshot with an identification board attached.  But Peele and Garber are making sure that they’re being told.  They’re hard at work in their neighborhoods making them better places to live, and that’s what we should be focusing on, not on some bullshit race narrative that makes it feel like pandering to the stereotypes of an era that was long gone when I was in high school.

Kellogg’s lazy dialogue on race relations and economy are the sort of reporting that neighborhoods in a struggling state of economy don’t need.  ”We all kinda want to have [economically-depressed places] still around, so we have places to shove all our ideas about the urban poor,” says Garber.  ”I don’t think the story was the worst thing in the world, it’s just too bad that using a platform like Morning Edition, it seemed like lazy journalism.”

I agree. Anacostia, and East of the River, deserve better.

It’s pledge week for WAMU here in DC, and they’re looking for help raising the funds necessary to buy programming like Morning Edition from NPR.  Perhaps it’s time to use your bully pulpit, DC, and let WAMU know you expect better from their network parent.  I know that I certainly expect better from NPR than the kind of lazy reporting we got here.

TBD.com announced today (okay,  the Post announced, and TBD admitted) that their operations have been placed under the management of Bill Lord, general manager of WJLA (also owned by Allbritton Communications). Coincidentally, it’s exactly six months after TBD’s launch. Way to let the new business model percolate, Allbritton!

The move seems to be designed to bring TBD more directly under Allbritton’s established management team, rather than under Erik Wemple, the Editor-in-Chief who had been recruited to TBD specifically from the Washington City Paper. While there’s no particular indication that Wemple is out at TBD, I’ll just point out that his entire team has just been placed under another manager, and ask whether you would be looking to stick around in that situation.

Right now there are no public plans for staff cuts. While TBD staff emphasize that this is just some internal reorganization, TBD founder Jim Brady, who left the company three months ago over disagreements with Allbritton management about the direction of the venture, is fairly vocal that this is not a positive development.

As part of this move, WJLA.com will be returning as a distinct website, separate from TBD.com. Personally, I’m hoping that this means that WJLA will be getting a redesign that brings it into the 21st century, since the pre-TBD version was, frankly, an embarrassment, and the crack Allbritton web team deserves to be identified with better work than that.

Lostremote.com has some good analysis of why a separate site for WJLA viewers can be a really good and necessary thing, though I remain unconvinced that handing the web team over to the TV people is necessarily the best way to serve the needs of WJLA’s audience.

Since there’s a great big ol’ TBD Community Network badge on every page of We Love DC, I probably don’t need to formally disclose that relationship, but I will take this opportunity to say, on behalf of the owners and author community, that we entered into our relationship with TBD because we appreciated the respectful, non-territorial approach they took toward working with local blogs. Even as TBD emphasized its own reporting more after founder Jim Brady’s departure, we continued to find our relationship with TBD to be a positive force on our site. We hope that the TBD team gets to continue that collegial approach under the management of the TV station.

In my family, to my mother’s constant disappointment, I’m the one who didn’t go to law school. But I grew up around legalese and learned to argue at the kitchen table, so I like to read legal filings and opinions more than the average non-lawyer.

This is how I came to read the filing in Daniel M. Snyder vs Atalaya Capital Management, LP, et al.  I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but here’s a quick analysis of the filing and what it might actually mean. Postscript: TBD has also written about the suit’s merits

• Section 7 of the filing claims that the City Paper “competes directly with Mr. Snyder’s Red Zebra Broadcasting for local advertising in the Washington metropolitan area.” This point is reiterated in section 17.

Eh? Mmmmaybe, but they fail to make this relevant anywhere else in the filing.

• Sections 18 and 19 translate roughly to, “the mean people at the mean paper were mean to me.”

He’s a public figure; the court just won’t care.

• On the other hand, though, there are references in sections 1 and 6 to the characterization of his wife’s role as a spokeswoman for breast care awareness “as that of being a mere ’salesperson’ for the ‘transformation’ of her husband’s public image.”

The court might choose to look into that some more. He’s a public figure, and by becoming a spokeswoman she also entered that realm, but this characterization might make the court more sympathetic to the plaintiff’s case.

• Section 20 complains of “an anti-Semitic depiction of Mr. Snyder with horns on his head, bushy eyebrows, and surrounded by dollar signs.”

Here I’ll let Mike Madden respond for the WCP.

• In section 21, items a-d make specific claims. Section 22 attempts to claim that the defamatory implication and effect was “magnified and aggravated by the outrageous anti-Semitic depiction.”

This is where the case will actually move forward in a meaningful way. This stuff is all a matter of public record and it will depend on who else reported on it and how (for instance, there’s a Slate article on the Six Flags mess, but it was written by … wait for it … Dave McKenna). But since the allegation that the illustration was anti-Semitic won’t hold any water, neither will the claim that it magnified and aggravated the defamation.

My prediction: the defense will move for summary judgment and won’t get it, but the case will proceed only on the narrow grounds of section 21, and maybe on the allegations about Snyder’s wife.

Again: I am not a lawyer, and this is not to be construed as legal advice, just a diversion on an afternoon.

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