Last month, the District sought redress for yet another federal diss, demanding the right to place two statues in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, alongside those from the 50 states. Congress hasn't agreed just yet, but the District is going ahead with carving the statues anyway (to be placed in the Wilson Building “as suggestions to Congress for placement in Statuary Hall"), according to a city press release. So city officials created a contest to select whose heads will be carved from a ballot of 30 dead, notable Washingtonians.

“There's a phenomenal, phenomenal set of heroes on that list—Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Joe Rauh,” says Shelley Broderick, dean of the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law. But there is one person missing from that list, she says: David A. Clarke.

Broderick sought to remedy the slight with a write-in campaign. Last month, she sent an e-mail to a list of UDC supporters urging them to pencil in Clarke's name, citing his civil-rights work, his 21 years as a councilmember, his role in creating the law school, and his popularity among African-American and Hispanic residents despite the fact that he was white.

Broderick insists it's not accurate to call it a campaign. “If I'd have really done campaigning, I'd have had the students do it,” she says.

In any case, Lionell Thomas, assistant director of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which ran the contest, says the effort wasn't enough to propel Clarke to victory; “very few” write-in votes were cast, Thomas says, but Clarke had more than any other.

Out of 2,826 total votes cast, Clarke received 133, a respectable 4.7 percent—good enough for 8th place. Among white dudes, he did even better, beating out the likes of Edward Miner Gallaudet, James Hoban, and John Hechinger. Only Francis Scott Key got more votes.

The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) has made a number of head-slappingly ludicrous decisions in the past—perhaps most famous among them the pronouncement that the sale of 95 percent of a building is not actually a sale. But for sheer Kafka flavor, a recent ruling in a tenant-purchase issue may have set a new bar.

Jeff Nelson and some fellow residents of 1815 19th St. NW thought their plans to purchase their Dupont Circle apartment building and convert it into condos were coasting along. Like scores of tenant groups before them, they formed a limited liability corporation (LLC) as part of the purchase. The next step in the condo-conversion process should have been a formality—an election whereby the tenants vote to proceed with the deal. “We played by all the rules,” Nelson says.

But Carl Bradford, a DCRA housing-regulation specialist, stopped the process cold. He ruled that the tenants could not vote in the election because they were “employees” of the LLC. The tenants initially thought that the ruling was a simple mistake that would be corrected by Bradford's higher-ups.

At the end of last week, one higher-up declined to do so. In an 11-page decision, Acting Rent Administrator Keith Anderson argues that if he allows the tenants to vote, future landlords might create their own LLCs and have employees move into a building, pay rent, and then vote for conversion, thereby skirting tenants’ rights. Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, who chairs the committee that oversees the DCRA, says he doesn't understand the legal basis of the ruling. It “effectively jettisons [tenants'] ability to convert to condominiums,” he says, which is protected under District law.

Of course, this ruling is miles from lunacy for some in the D.C. housing market. If tenants can't purchase a building and then vote to convert to condos—as is the obvious intent of the law—they have only one other choice: sell their right to purchase to a developer.

DCRA spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson did not comment, other than to say that the decision is “not final.”

Nelson et al.—encouraged by an IRS ruling that says “employees” actually have to be paid—plan to appeal the ruling in court, and Graham says he will formally request that Anderson reconsider his ruling. “It has an Alice in Wonderland quality,” he says. “I thought we were in a little bit of a different era.”

When the Washington Post gets it in its head to tell readers about a threatening new drug trend, there's a general formula a reporter goes after. A good example is Amit R. Paley's piece on the region's (not-so)brewing meth epidemic. Paley has all the necessary elements: hysterical cops, worried public-health officials talking about the drug's physiological effects, and a former addict to peg the story to.

By those standards, Theresa Vargas, in her B1 story yesterday on teens’ “rediscovery” of morning-glory seeds, goes 0 for 3, yet she managed to put together a 1,329-word story anyway.

Her piece, “A ‘60s Buzz Recycled: Teens Rediscover Morning Glories Can Be Used as a Hallucinogen,” tells us that the seeds were “popular in the hippie era of the 1960s…[and] seem to have sprouted once again.” The seeds may have been popular in the “hippie era,” but Vargas doesn't give any evidence that they were—or, for that matter, whether they can actually get you high.

And Vargas definitely doesn't offer any proof that kids swallowing morning-glory seeds ever went away. In fact, I had a friend that was eating them back in the mid-'90s, though I had my doubts about whether he ever actually tripped off them. The closest Vargas gets to a kid who actually tried the seeds is Matt Edelblute, a 16-year-old who said a friend of his has used ‘em.

Vargas didn't strike out with the cops for lack of effort. After the jump, she reports that “law enforcement officials across the region” weren't even aware a kid could get high off the seeds, that the Drug Enforcement Administration expressed ignorance, and that the National Institute on Drug Abuse said it didn't know enough to comment. She even approached Lloyd Johnston, lead researcher for the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey. Johnston has dedicated his life to tracking drug trends among kids, and even he came up blank.

“I am afraid kids are ahead of me in that case,” he told Vargas.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what's going on in local Internet discussion groups.

ustreetnews
“DCRA's Communications Team” sent a list of 15 jobs to the Cardozo Shaw Neighborhood Association's e-list, calling it the “VACANCY HOT LIST.” The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, known for years as the city's most inept agency, said it was looking for “high-quality individuals” and asked said individuals to “visit the DC Office of Personnel (DCOP) web site at www.dcop.gov.” Except that's the wrong Web address, an astute poster pointed out.

DCLatinoPAC
ActivistsChica6 have launched what E-List Roundup hopes will become a wider trend, a summary of a lengthy posting. Chica6 begins: “This message is about Human beings, Democracy, UNHCR, Refugees, The Iraqis, Islam, Kurds, Human rights, Respect, Money, Donations, Angelina Jolie, Pavarotti, Giorgio Armani, Donors, Peace, History, Campaigns and about you if you care about these words.” Though the poster signs off as “THE TRUTH WARRIOR,” he asks readers to “google for my name ‘osam altaee'.” A Google search turns up a story of a Mr. Altaee blowing up his own foot in an attempt to get out of serving in the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War.

MPD-5D
A poster wrote in asking for advice in how to stop “prostitutes performing sex acts and leaving their trash after they are done.” ANC Commissioner Kathy Henderson writes back: “I carry a disposable camera with me at all times.…I have…successfully interrupted disgruntled prostitutes and their customers.” Honest, officer, I was trying to get them to stop.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we run down what's going on in local Internet discussion groups.

Brookland
Sarah on 17th and Jackson Streets NE in Brookland expresses shock that a motion-detecting light failed to scare a plant thief from her porch. “3 hanging baskets of flowers were stolen off my front porch despite the motion sensored light. My neighbors saw a man enter my front yard at about 11:30 pm. They scared him away, but he came back later.” A plant pilferer also struck Joel and Hun's porch, despite, or perhaps because of, Hun's premonitory dream the night before that the couple would be robbed. The herb collector made off with six strawberry plants, an aloe plant, some mint, a jade plant, and two plants left unidentified.

ChevyChaseCommunityListserv
A Legation Street NW resident reports an intruder who was “about 22 years old, dark hair, clean shaven, possibly Hispanic, wearing a red shirt.” So, the board ponders, is it racist to refer to someone as “possibly Hispanic”? “Unless someone heard the intruder speaking Spanish, it's an assumption that is not useful in finding the person and it contributes to an impression of bias in a largely white non Hispanic neighborhood,” writes one poster. “I doubt that this is true of the genuinely welcoming spirit I've found in our neighborhood.” Another poster didn't think the post was racist, but suggested “possibly Latin American” would have been a better choice. A leader of the anti-labeling faction wasn't buying it. “If using ‘possibly Hispanic’ as a description is helpful, why do we not use ‘possibly Irish’ or ‘possibly Jewish’ to identify White suspects?’”

Brightwood_DC
Kelley and Karen, a husband-and-wife team in Brightwood, found a small, white dog on the morning of April 23, “with a blackish collar studded with fake diamonds,” wrote Kelley. His wife says that the presumption that the diamonds were of the faux variety “was just kind of a hunch. It was basically your tacky dog-bling.” Prince, as she later learned the dog was called, had no nametag, yet the diamond description was enough for the New York Avenue animal shelter. The owner called within 20-25 minutes, says Karen, and picked him up.

This poem, “What bugs me is the security guards,” was written by an eighth-grader at Garnet-Patterson Middle School, at 10th and U St. NW, where I teach a weekly writing class through DC WritersCorps.

Got a great example of student writing? Send it to us.

Recently, the City Paper offices were on the receiving end of a kind Canadian gesture. Our neighbor's embassy had conducted a nationwide study to determine the economic benefits of trade with Canada, state-by-state and the results are laid out on a glossy, color-coded “Trade and Security Partnership Map.” Alabama ships up its auto parts, Florida its tomatoes, Virginia its coal, and Maryland “$89 million in books and pamphlets.” It's odd, though, that the map was sent to us, considering that the benefits of relations with Canada are notably absent with regard to the District of Columbia. (We do get a sharp-looking blue star labeled “Washington.”)

Bernard Etzinger, a spokesperson for the Canadian embassy, says there's a reason for the slight. “We can't get good economic stats to measure the number of jobs created [in the District] by trade with Canada,” he says. But what about the most high-profile bilateral trade—the export of the Montreal Expos to Washington? Well, that isn't officially characterized as a benefit or a loss for either country, Etzinger says.

“We were delighted they were able to find a good home,” he says. “Our old ambassador used to joke that he loved the team so much he followed them to Washington.” Unofficially, though, Etzinger is less enamored. “As a baseball fan, I have my personal opinions about whether that was right or wrong,” he says.

Scare quotes: Not just for the Washington Times anymore.

In 1994, a coalition of union and religious leaders successfully campaigned for a law in Baltimore mandating that employers with city contracts pay workers what they called a living wage. A movement was born, now among the most successful over the past decade; today, 130 cities and counties have similar living-wage ordinances.

But at the Washington Post, “living wage” still needs quotes, meaning it gets the same treatment that the Times gives gay “marriage” and “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. On Sunday, in a story about 17 student protesters arrested at the University of Virginia, the Post's Martin Weil wrote, “The protest has been described as part of a ‘living wage’ campaign.” (Only an Associated Press story is posted on washingtonpost.com; the story that ran under Weil's byline is not listed. Both quote "living wage.")

The Post followed up on Monday with a B1 story reporting that the UVA protests are continuing despite the arrests. The first time “living wage” appears, reporter Jamie Stockwell's article calls it the “so-called living wage,” leaving off the quotes. There are also no quotes around “poverty-level” wages. We meet the phrase “living wage” five more times in the 834-word piece, none inside quotes.

Weil was not available, but Stockwell, when told “living wage” was in quotes in Weil's piece, said, “Oh, God.” Her “so-called,” she said, was inserted by a copy editor. “That was not my writing,” she said. “It is a real campaign. It's a national campaign to call to attention the fact that people are being paid wages that are unlivable. It's not like [the UVA protesters] made it up.”

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Read “Broken Promises II”
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In November 2003, the District's Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program released an interim, and scathing, assessment of the city's nursing facilities. It followed an equally scathing report released by congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton's office in 2002. (In 2001, we did a story of our own on the lax oversight of District nursing homes.) Today, the ombudsman is releasing a follow-up report, “Broken Promises II,” which assesses the District's attempts to improve upon the problems cited by the previous reports.

If the title is any indication, the report is clear that District nursing homes are a long way from providing quality care. The highlights:

• Since 2002, the Health Regulation Administration (HRA) has never had more than seven investigators on staff, despite a promise to triple that number. The current staff has only four investigators. The staffing shortage might have something to do with the four-and-a-half months that it takes the HRA to respond to ombudsman complaints.
• In its May 2005 report, HRA said that “most District [nursing facilities] were found to be in substantial compliance with local nursing home regulations” in 2004. Depends on what you mean by “substantial compliance": The ombudsman points out that 55 percent of facilities had deficiencies with the potential to harm residents and 45 percent had deficiencies causing actual harm to residents.
• Complaints about care logged by the ombudsman increased from 1,296 in 2004 to 1,675 in 2005, even though there was one fewer home last year.
• Despite the thousand-plus complaints, in 2005, only 11 homes were issued a total of 26 notices of infraction, resulting in the collection of $10,110. That's one more infraction than was issued in 2004, despite a one-third increase in complaints.

Link

On the same day that we published a story on bicyclists who have had a hail of projectiles lobbed their way as they ride up and down 11th Street NW near Florida Avenue, Martin Nikoloski was knocked off his bike on 11th Street, just south of Florida, and stomped by a group of what he assumed to be middle-school students. Thanks to his helmet, he doesn't appear to have sustained permanent damage. Here's his e-mail to us (emphasis ours):

Dear Mr. Grim,

I have a brand new appreciation for the article that you wrote in City Paper recently[…]

My name is Martin Nikoloski, and I have been a proud resident of DC and Columbia Heights neighbourhood for the past six years. I have been riding my bike as a major form of transportation for few years now and I would always boast to my friends that I've never been mugged because I'm hard to catch on my bike. I'd like to share with you what happened to me yesterday, April 6th, around 3:10pm as I was riding my bike heading North on 11th Street, b/n U St. and V St. NW, on my way home from the grocery store.

There was a group of African-American kids, about a dozen of them that appeared to be coming back from school, as some of them still had their back packs on. My guess is that they ranged b/n 9 and 13 years of age. One of them was crossing the street ahead of me and I wasn't paying too much attention to him when suddenly he turned around and struck me with his elbow. I tried to maintain a balance on my bike with grocery bags hanging on both sides of my bike, when next thing I know I was jumped by around five kids from all directions who started throwing punches and mercilessly kicking me in my head and ribs. For a minute or two in broad daylight, there was this surreal sight of cruelty and terror. I started yelling ‘stop it, Stop it, STOP IT’ raising my voice as I was taking one blow after another in my head…I never had a chance to get back on my feet. As they ran away I could hear a sheer excitement and laughter in their voices. There was a bus (#66) heading north that my bike, grocery bags and body was blocking its way…I had a bloody nose, bloody knees and vicious headache stemming from a blow just above my right ear, which is limiting motion in my jaw…Had it not been for my helmet I would have easily ended up in the emergency room. I just threw my bike on the buses front rack and boarded the bus…the driver and some of the passengers seemed in shock and she was nice enough not to charge me for the fair. I am grateful that none of my injuries are permanent or debilitating, and sad that these kids grow up with so much violence in their lives and actually get joy and pleasure from these acts.

Around 3:40pm I called 311 and asked to file a police report, describing what had just happened to me. The operator took my name and address and said that she will send the next free officer to take my report. And of course the officer never showed up…I've lived in DC for long enough to know that they might not show up and that they have a bigger fish to fry, but I nonetheless wanted to mention this for the record.

I guess I'd like to inform as many bikers as possible to stay away from 11th St. b/n U and Florida, the backyard of Cardozo High, and hope that the community or the DCPD can bring some attention to this problem[…]

Thank you,

Martin

Reading his letter describing the run-in, I realized that Nikoloski is only the latest District resident to feel sorry for the person kicking him in the head as he lied curled up in the fetal position in the middle of the street. Every single victim I spoke to for the article expressed at least some level of sympathy for their attackers.

If Trader Joe’s broke ground on as many stores as the rumor mill says it has in the pipeline, the quirky organic food joint could rival Starbucks for most openings. Here’s one more for the pile: a PN Hoffman manager says the California-based grocer met today with the its representatives to discuss opening a store at 14th and V Streets NW, where the developer is currently building luxury condos. Other possibilities for the space include a bank, restaurant, and furniture store.

Trader Joe’s recently captured plenty of press for its first foray into New York City.

This all raises the question: Is there any upscale-retail chain D.C. still needs?

Yesterday, City Desk banged away at the Washington Post‘s Metro section for repeating an already discredited claim that meth has “infiltrated” the Washington region. The repetition came on the heels of “The Next Crack Cocaine?”—a story about a supposedly growing meth epidemic. We also knocked the paper for a story headlined “Police Find Meth Chemical Cache in Wheaton Townhouse.” It later turned out that there was no meth cache and that police actually found residue of GHB.

Today, though, the wagging finger becomes two applauding hands for the step forward the Post took in this morning's paper.

First, in Maryland Briefing, it set the record straight on the nonseizure of the “meth chemical cache.” (The Post stopped short of running a correction of its incorrect headline(s) and instead blamed the error on what “Police originally believed.")

Next, it did a 180 with regard to the meth problem in the Washington area: “[T]he meth problem in the Washington region is relatively small compared with other parts of the country,” writes Amit R. Paley, the reporter who produced “The Next Crack Cocaine?”, in a story about three Indiana kids who traveled to Maryland to buy $6,000 worth of a meth precursor.

Paley's not in the clear yet; he still reports that “the number of meth lab seizures in Virginia, Maryland, and the District has jumped in recent years from zero to more than 80,” which makes it sound like there's a growing problem in the region. The whole truth is that 75 of those seizures were in Virginia—none were in the Virginia or Maryland suburbs, and one was in the District. The overwhelming majority were in Southwest Virginia, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration county-by-county breakdown—a crucial detail the Post has yet to mention.

On Sunday, March 19, the Washington Post ran a hysterical story on a growing meth epidemic in the Washington region on the front page of their Metro section. Slate's Jack Shafer dismantled the story in a piece called “How Not To Report About Meth.” We put it back together using accurate data and on-the-record interviews to show that there is no major meth problem in the region.

Though the assertion that meth has “infiltrated” the Washington region has now been thoroughly discredited, we find this in a story in today's Metro section about an alleged lab seized in Wheaton:

Law enforcement officials say methamphetamine has infiltrated many suburbs in Virginia and a few in Maryland.

Cpl. Sonia Pruitt, a spokesperson for the Montgomery County police, says there's no certainty as to what the chemicals actually are. Five gallons of a substance had been left by departed renters in an apartment they had vacated, which raises the question of why they would abandon such a valuable concoction—and leave themselves open to easy prosecution. Pruitt agreed that, for all police know at this point, it could be paint thinner. The chemicals are being tested to determine if they were precursors for meth, GHB, or nothing.

The only evidence offered to support the assertion that meth has infiltrated the region—besides the chemicals found in Wheaton—is that three labs were seized in Anne Arundel County in six months in 2005. Here's what Sgt. Shawn Urbas, spokesperson for the Anne Arundel police, had to say when asked about the meth problem in his county as it related to those three seizures: “It's funny—the Washington Post guy asked me that, but we haven't per se seen any increase in meth possessions here.” But thanks to media reports, his officers are on guard for the epidemic. “I've seen the shows on Dateline and Oprah, and it's a nasty drug,” he said.

ADDENDUM, 5:20 p.m.: It wasn’t meth. According to a statement released this afternoon by the Montgomery County police, “[d]etectives have determined the chemicals contained in the five, five-gallon drums were residual waste from the production of GHB (gamma hydroxbutyric acid) the date rape drug, and not Methamphetamine as was originally thought and reported.”

This afternoon, the D.C. Apartment and Office Building Association (AOBA), held a press briefing at its downtown offices on rent-control legislation currently making its way through the D.C. Council. Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham has been AOBA’s main adversary on the legislation—which would do such tenant-unfriendly things as abolish rent ceilings and penalties for landlords that do not file rent increase notices. Loose Lips wrote about the conflict this week.

Shortly before the briefing started, Vincent Mark Policy, an attorney with landlord-favorite law firm Greenstein Delorme & Luchs, spotted Graham inside the meeting. “You weren’t invited,” he told the councilmember.

“You’re asking me to leave?” Graham replied.

“Politely,” said Policy. “This is not a public event.”

“Let me have someone from AOBA ask me to leave. You’re from a law firm.”

Policy said OK and walked away. Asked if he’d ever been kicked out of an event before, Graham said, “Never. This will be a first….I didn’t even get a cookie.”

Policy returned and told Graham “you can stay if you don’t talk.” Said Graham: “I wouldn’t dream of saying a word. I have my car legally parked. I can go down and get in it.”

“You want some change for the meter?” Policy replied.

After the event ended an hour and a half later, Policy apologized to Graham.

Last Friday, the University of the District of Columbia’s law school held its annual fundraising auction. The items up for bids ranged from the pedestrian—four Capitals tickets, breakfast for two at the Tabard Inn—to the not-so-pedestrian—lunch with Councilmember Phil Mendelson, a tour of Ward 8 led by Philip Pannell, and a citywide gay-bar crawl, also with Pannell.

But the offbeat prizes weren’t exactly a cash cow: Pannell, executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Council and a former mayoral special assistant for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender affairs, was bummed at the paltry sums his prizes garnered—the Ward 8 tour earned $55 for the school, the club romp $60. “It obviously shows I’m a cheap date,” says Pannell. “I would probably spend as much on gas as the person spent on the tour.”

But no need for Pannell to get too down on himself: The Mendelson lunch netted only $50. Says Pannell: “I beat Phil Mendelson. That’s a good thing, I guess.”