Wondering what others were thinking as you muddled through the second presidential debate last night? Well, here’s your roundup in a roundup. Live blogs!

• First and foremost, our very own Amanda Hess (or as she’s known a few clicks over, the Sexist) on City Desk. 

• Next up, The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan says Obama “wiped the floor” with McCain at his blog The Daily Dish. 

• Patrick Gavin, over at FishbowlDC, calls McCain “a little bit bitchy” on post numero uno. 

• The New York Times Katherine Seelye reports the event’s juicy bits: When Tom Brokaw got pissy. “’You’re in the way of my script there,’ Mr. Brokaw told [the candidates], and they jumped apart.” This was, ironically, the most unscripted and real moment of the entire debate. When Brokaw’s amusing and exciting, you know something is VERY wrong. 

• Hard to believe, but apparently true: “Woman slain after refusal to cook hamburger,”  the Washington Post reports. The incident took place near Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens. 

• It’s been a year since the DeOnte Rawlings shooting. The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy has heard Officer James Haskell’s version of what happened that day. “Haskell’s account, which absolves him, is by no means definitive or necessarily accurate. Lattimer calls it “nonsensical.” But it’s his version, which the public should hear.”

• Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke go to Capitol Hill to ask congress to pass their bailout plan. The New York Times writes: “In blunt terms, Mr. Bernanke warned the senators that if they failed to pass the $700 billion plan, they risked causing a recession, increasing joblessness and pushing more homes into foreclosure.” Pardon? We’re not in a recession already?

• GQ has published the absolute best story about Alaska you probably haven’t read. No Sarah Palin. A tiny mention of Wasilla. A lot of men. A lot of alcoholism. Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold. 

• Who cares what the presidential candidates say? We’re not listening anyway, according to Slate’s The Big Sort. ”We gather with like-minded others, and we listen to confirm our pre-existing beliefs. We don’t look for enlightenment, only for confirmation.”

*School recess outsourced? Turns out, yes, according to the Washington Post. In the past two years, principals at 14 elementary and middle schools in the District have brought in non-profit recess instructors to teach and run games, and supervise the kids. “Knowing how to play in a healthy way is not an innate skill. It’s learned,” says the organization’s leader. Sounds fun.

*A homeless, scavenging polar bear visits Columbia Heights! Okay, it was a piece of art. But, let’s not forgot the plight of real polar bears, says Joe Pouliot, director of climate and policy communications for the World Wildlife Fund.”Polar bears are losing their homes. They live on Arctic sea ice, and it’s melting,” Pouliot tells the Washington Post. “It’s not much of a stretch to say that we face an epidemic of polar bear homelessness.” DCist speculates about the bear too. Apparently, it has been making the rounds in D.C.

*Slate praises Meghan McCain: “Young, pretty, and tech-savvy, she’s a tremendous asset, because she’s got a better feel for the way the campaign news cycle works in this era than lots of highly paid strategists. Watch her freely volunteer that, yep, her dad uses that “lipstick on a pig expression,” too—she knows that footage will always come back to haunt you. Or see her deftly put away a query about whether it’s hurtful when people mock her father’s age by laughing “He IS old!”

*”Politicians Lie, Numbers Don’t: And the numbers show that Democrats are better for the economy than Republicans,” Michael Kinsley writes for Slate.

*Brian Beutler, the blogger that got shot in Adams Morgan, is back on the job. “As many of you probably know by now, about two months ago I robbed three bullets of their deadly momentum… and somehow found myself in the hospital as a result.”

*The Post’s fashion insert, FW, debuts on Monday night at the Georgetown home of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. Fishbowl snaps a few photos of the not terribly dapper crowd.

I wish I could have written the article that accompanied the headline above. Better yet, I wish I could have written that headline (It’s sharp, and eye-catching! One for the journalism textbooks!)

Unfortunately, I’m not James J. Cramer. He wrote the piece, published in this week’s New York magazine.

Cramer provides 10 reasons why he believes the market will bottom out at the above-mentioned date. I’ll give you his first five factors summarized, and then you’ll have to click over to the story yourself.

(1) The slide in the number of new homes on the market.

(2)New federal legislation that will stabilize mortgage rates, and hopefully reduce the number of foreclosed homes.

(3) “Bargains!”

(4)New York, “the last holdout area,” is closing in on its bottom. “When the last areas fall, the bottoming process begins in earnest.”

(5) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be in better shape.

I’m curious what other real estate watchers have to say about this…So, I’m going to try to dig up some local responses in the next week or so. If you want to throw in your two cents in the comments section, I won’t stop you.

*Finally, a little bit of election craziness has come to D.C.: At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz, a 24-year incumbent, loses! The Board of Election and Ethics pulled a Florida! Ward 2 candidate, Cary Silverman, is refusing to concede until all the votes are counted! “Not while there’s still precincts out,” he says. “We can’t say anything until we know what’s going on here. This is a mess. Too many questions.”

*Elsewhere in the city, specifically the desks of the Washington Post’s food writers, people are talking about cupcakes. This week, they launch their six week search to find the best cupcakes in the city. Think they’re two years too late for people to care? Well hold your tongue! “Anybody who thinks the cupcake trend is passe didn’t notice the long lines when Hello Cupcake and Georgetown Cupcake — and hasn’t read a new local blog devoted exclusively to tracking the diminutive desserts (delleicious.blogspot.com).” Cupcakes forever!

*Find out why your tax dollars are now being thrown at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “Allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to collapse would have been akin to letting Japan or the United Kingdom go bankrupt. Global economic leaders say even those unimaginable scenarios would have paled beside the fallout from a Fannie/Freddie implosion.”

*Jack Shafer predicts the Sarah Palin/Charlie Gibson interview.

*Lobbyist launches clothing line. The shirts “amplify cleavage but minimize the notion of someone looking through your shirt.”

…She might be heading to Webster Girls’ School, at 10th and H Streets downtown. Yes, long before Zaytinya was serving up Mediterranean tapas to lobbyists and lawyers a block away, or “Verizon” even existed as a company let alone a sports center, Penn Quarter was home to a little public school for pregnant teenagers and young mothers. Last time I wandered by the intersection, the nondescript brick building was still there, though it was partially obscured by construction barriers.

I first heard about the school working on a story with DCPS historian and former D.C. public schools student Nancye Suggs. Recalling her own middle school years, Suggs said: “Girls would disappear all of a sudden, and then the whispering would start: WEBSTER.”

I was incredulous. That dumpy downtown building was a black hole of suppressed scandals, tucked-away teenagers, and unmentioned infants?

Then, lo and behold, I found a pamphlet in the sizable “Webster School” file at the Sumner School Museum and Archives. It laid out all my basic questions, then responded to them with stunning clarity.

Why should you attend Webster?

• You will be safer during and after your pregnancy.
• Special health services are planned for you.
• Home study materials and assistance will be provided while you are convalescing after the birth of your baby.
• You will receive the same credits that you would receive in regular school.

(This is a selection of responses.)

Do you have to pay to attend Webster?

• “NO”
• Webster is a public school operated by the D.C. Board of Education.

Who may enroll?

• Girls who attend any junior or senior high school in the District of Columbia may apply.
• All pregnant students should try to get into Webster Girls’ School.

Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the Republican convention this week, I couldn’t help but think in Wolf Blitzer-like racial generalizations: the crowd was so white, and so old. Every single time a reporter nabbed a non-white person to interview, I was impressed. Wow, they found one. I wondered if the few black and Hispanic people in the crowd felt extra pressure to primp before the speeches. The cameras would undoubtedly be scanning the crowd for a variety of different faces. If yours didn’t look like everyone else’s, you’d probably be on cable!

My realization was not a very deep one. There’s been an interesting smattering of information on the state of young Republicania in the press recently.

• Yesterday, the Washington Post published a bang-up article on the subject. But, it took many a paragraph to reach this revelation: “the number of black Republican delegates declined from a record 167 in 2004 to this year’s 36.”
• Esquire magazine’s most recent issue features a story on young republicans gathering for a leadership conference in D.C. Toward the end of the piece there is a selection of head shots and quotes from various attendees. And what do you know? One of the few non-white faces in the crowd is none other than Marcus Skelton, former at-large D.C. council member candidate. As long as you’re on the website, check out this article too.
• A piece in The Root on the state of black conservatives takes a while to get to its main point. So here it is: “Until the Republican Party is ready to renounce the politics of division—opening the door to the lives and views of people whose histories and ethnicities don’t mesh with the traditions of modern Republicanism—the GOP brand will remain damaged goods in much of black America, damaged by the brand managers themselves.”

A few months back, I wrote a story about crews in Shaw and the murder of Deon Peoples in January 2007. Two defendants were being held in connection with the crime. Ben Barringer had been arrested last summer; Jeffrey Bright was taken into policy custody in April. As I was wrapping up the piece, I spoke with a lawyer involved in the case, who said that he believed the murder trial would take place late summer. Well, how time flies! Here we are post-Labor Day Weekend.

Time to check in and see if any sentences had been handed down. I called Leah Gurowitz at the D.C. Superior Courthouse. The answer, it turned out, was a straight “no,” though both defendants’ cases had advanced.

On May 30, Barringer pled guilty to conspiracy and carrying a pistol without a license outside a home. He will be sentenced on September 26 at 2 p.m. As for Bright, his jury trial is scheduled for February 2, 2009. It was originally set for August 11, but mid-July his lawyer asked for it to be continued at a later date.

So, any chatter about crew members re-entering the community should be pushed off at least for a while.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

I’m tempted to do a roundup of just Sarah Palin-related items: Sarah Palin news, Sarah Palin analysis, possibly a Sarah Palin picture or two. A Sarah Palin interview? Couldn’t find it. But, what the hell, first I’ll throw in a few other stories—appetizers to the entree.

*City Paper alum Rachel Beckman is mad at her Facebook page, which silently taunts her with advertisements coercing her to lose weight. “Muffin Top?” asks one. “Do you want to be a fat bride?” inquires another. “I averted my eyes and tried to remember that saying about rubber and glue. I didn’t spiral into a body-image crisis, nor did I start to diet. But there’s got to be some kind of psychological toll wrought by so many weight-loss images each week,” she writes in the Washington Post.

*The Washington Post’s Jane Black heads out to San Francisco to cover the Slow Food Nation conference, and guess what she finds? “Prius-driving, Whole Foods-shopping, latte-loving liberals with plenty of time and cash on hand.” In addition, there was also “a troupe of Hmong children who performed a traditional harvest dance.”

*NPR reports “Brenda, Kelly Return in Updated ‘90210′” Need I say more. Click now! Click now!

*Finally, Sarah Palin time: The New York Times writes about the potential, one-heartbeat-away “First Dude” Todd Palin, and his wife’s political history in Wasilla, where she was mayor. The Washington Post writes about the vetting process, and Palin’s late-in-the-game interview. Slate’s Jack Shafer discusses how the news media is receiving Palin. His colleague Troy Patterson praises her TV appearances. Politico reports how John McCain’s campaign plans to defend and bolster support for Sarah Palin with advertisements, speeches, and interviews (read to the bottom; there’s an interesting McCain memo).

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a condominium for sale in this multi-unit townhouse in Petworth or “Columbia Heights East,” as a listing described it. The piece was for our Buyer’s Market feature, which examines properties that have undergone significant price reductions. As of mid-August, the unit—located at 735 Rock Creek Church Road NW—was priced at $325,000. It originally was listed at $442,500. The seller was an investor, who’d been able to get rid of his two top units. All that remained was the basement, home to some lovely high highfalutin appliances, a stylish exposed brick wall, and, at one point, quite a bit of flood water, according to listing agent Roger Neely. After the piece went up online, a few people posted their thoughts and feelings about the property. They were not entirely positive: Read the rest of this entry »

Personally, I thought Barack Obama’s speech last night was a tad humdrum. He got a little feisty, for him. But, the challenges to his opponent—”John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time”—still seemed staid. He said what he need to say, but for some reason, the deliverance fell, mmmm, I don’t know, dare I say it, okay I will: flat.

‘Happy, proud American Obama’ spoke with the same tone and demeanor as ‘Enough is enough, fed-up with the status quo Obama,’ and it just wasn’t working for me. Plus, the fascinating life story doesn’t pop as much the three hundredth time around. Not his fault. But true nonetheless.

When it comes to oratorical ability, I’m throwing my full support behind Pam.

Oh Pam, how you wooed me with your mama-don’t-take-no-shit-from-no-one attitude, disillusioned Republicanism, and undaunted appearance in front of 85,000 people. Pam’s story definitely fit squarely in with the democratic narrative. She is from Pittsboro North Carolina. She and her husband raised four children together, both worked, and led generally content lives. Then, her husband lost his job and, consequently, the family’s medical insurance. Hard times fell on Pam and Mr. Pam. (Her last name is actually Cash-Roper.) It was time to speak out for CHANGE. “I am a lifelong republican who voted for Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, but I can’t afford four more years like this,” she told the crowd. “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!”

Anyway, just watch the video. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wish you could hug Pam through the youtube video. (And for more info on Pam, check this out.)

-Check out the Washington Post’s convention coverage for updates on Denver. However, if you’ve visited City Desk any time in the last two days, then you know Loose Lips is the hardest working man in Colorado right now. Check out his posts here.

-And now we honor one of our City Paper forefathers, David Carr, who has paused his promotional book tour and talk of snorting coke and slapping up bitches in the 1980s, to do some fine video reporting work from Denver. Find his video somewhere on this page in the next day or so (after that, I don’t know where it’s going to be.)

-The New York Times offers a few reasons why you should not open a restaurant: your home, your savings, your general contentment—they could all go, if your new joint is a flop. “So many people love to cook, they like food, and they think, boy, I’ll have a job where I’ll do what I love,” Mr. Rainsford said. “They don’t realize how hard a job it is, both financially and physically.”

-Aw gee shucks, “ol’ Joe Biden,” he’s making the people at the Wilmington train station proud. And sad. The man’s not going to be boarding his usual Delaware to D.C. ride too often anymore. The Post paints the scene.

-NPR commentator and screenwriter John Ridley is peeved about the portrayal of minorities (or lack thereof) in this summer’s roster of movies. “Well, that’s it. Summer’s about over. Hope yours was good. How was mine? Thanks for asking. Well, I’m not given to absolutes, so I’m gonna say in terms of what Hollywood gave us, this was just the demi-most offensive summer ever at the multiplexes. Offensive, if you happen to be a person of color whom Hollywood in turn mocked, lampooned or humiliated … that is, when we weren’t just being completely ignored.”

This week, students began classes at Gallaudet University, the nation’s preeminent school for the deaf, and probably the most mispronounced institution in the city.

Yes, little acknowledged fact about Gallaudet—nearly everyone (hearing people included) says the name incorrectly.

So, your friends pronounce it this way. And your boss. And the people that mention it on the street. That still doesn’t make it right.

It’s not Gal-yoo-det. It is Gal-luh-det.

“I usually try to correct people,” says Karen Evans from the university’s public relations office. Evans, who has worked at Gallaudet for roughly six months, says that she mispronounced the name during her first week or two on the job. She majored in deaf studies in college, but says that she “knew about Gallaudet for a long time before I ever heard it spoken.”

Gallaudet is located in Northeast D.C., off of Florida Avenue, wedged between Eckington and Trinidad. As of fall 2007, the university’s student population was 1,633, including undergraduate and graduate students.

In a way, the mispronunciation makes complete sense: “It’s because people who are in charge aren’t running around correcting how hearing people talk,” says Judy Termini, associate professor of communications, and Director of the First Year Experience, who has worked at the university for 33 years (and, disclosure, is a family friend).

“People who work here, who are hearing, pronounce it correctly. But we don’t do a lot of voice talking on campus,” she says. “You can’t mispronounce the sign. There’s only one sign.”

But, can she provide absolute irrefutable proof that her way isn’t the flawed way?

“How do I know it’s right? I don’t know,” she says, then directs me to the university’s public relations office. Right there, on the department’s webpage, there’s a link entitled “Commonly Mispronounced Names.” Number two reads: “Gallaudet - gal”udet’ or [gal-luh-det]“

This weekend’s Post tackled one of my biggest pet peeves—when politicians use “Washington” as a disparaging euphemism for the national political scene, in which they willingly participate. The topic, covered by Dan Zak in the Sunday Source section, has been ripe for the plucking for years. But, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a story on it.

And Zak’s piece could not come at a better time, as he points out right away.

“The hating will reach a pinnacle in Denver and St. Paul., Minn., this week and next. At the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, we’ll get soaring speeches about how awful Washington is. How it is a quagmire of corruption. How it does nothing for anyone. How it needs to change.”

Yes, we’re about to be pummeled by a bipartisan bunch of bullies. All the politicians will try to inform the good, decent, humane, wholesome citizens of America that Washington D.C. is a place where the bad, corrupting, manipulative, power-mongering people of the District seek to destroy their integrity. (Though their integrity is of course fully intact, even though they spend all day surrounded by the evil inhabitants of this sinful place.)

“‘The city of Satan,’ John McCain declared to a crowd in Nevada.

The place where people ‘boil all the hope out of” you, Barack Obama warned in Akron, Ohio.

We are all condemned. And you know what, it’s sloppy oratory…is what is!

Let’s take for example a few quotes from the candidates, and consider some edits. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you brush your teeth twice daily, but they never feel clean? Are you wondering why you have three cavities after a lifetime of healthy pearly whites? Is your longtime allegiance to Colgate starting to peter off, and it’s making you question everything that’s holy?

Well, you too, might be a victim of New York City’s brazen toothpaste scam! Man, D.C. criminals are so BO-ring! The last press release from the United States Attorney’s office in D.C. about any sort of fraud is about bribery at DMVs in Brentwood and Georgetown. The case’s defendant, Patricia E. Gonzalez, 39, of Takoma Park, Maryland, made $10,000.

Small potatoes. Read the rest of this entry »