Jonetta Rose Barras, the fiery veteran D.C. political analyst, has been fired by her bosses at WAMU-FM, where she served as co-host of the Friday noon show The Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta. Her departure is effective immediately, and the station has changed the name of the show to The Politics Hour.

Barras says that her dismissal was prompted by her persistent appeals for better pay, not to mention a rocky relationship with WAMU Program Director Mark McDonald. “My problems were with the program manager, who had no appreciation for the amount of work I did, the quality of that work, and my reputation, and believed that I should be paid less than a senior career person,” says Barras.

The sharp-tongued Barras has never been afraid to confront power–she did it every week on the airwaves–and she apparently didn’t keep quiet about what she saw as workplace injustices. She says she watched as WAMU staffers who did less work got paid more than she did. Behind the alleged disparities, she says, lie racial and gender discrimination on part of the WAMU leadership.

“I do believe that there was some discrimination involved in the way that I was handled by the program [director] and the senior management,” she says. Barras says she had no problem whatsoever with co-host Kojo Nnamdi and staffers who put together their show.

Barras’ dispute with WAMU follows a classic ’00s model. Over time, says Barras, her managers at WAMU expanded her responsibilities. Whereas the show was once titled The D.C. Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta, the station subsequently expanded its scope to include Maryland and Virginia, rechristening it as The Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta. Though Barras thus gained two big jurisdictions to cover, her compensation didn’t experience a comparable gain. “They changed the name of the show and scope of the show and then were pissed off because I was asking for more money,” says Barras, who has also worked extensively for Washington City Paper over the years.

McDonald declined to comment, citing the manager’s personnel comment exemption. A statement released by the station is light on details, saying only that Barras “is leaving” WAMU.

Every month (sometimes more often) the D.C. Council meets on a Tuesday for its legislative meeting, where the full body sits in the chamber all day and actually passes bills and things like that. There’s usually some fairly interesting stuff, but there’s usually even more not-so-interesting stuff. Of late, Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s started doing a press conference the day before to get reporters acquainted with the concil’s business. LL goes to these things so you don’t have to, and he will now be rounding them up in convenient bullet form:

• The tally this morning: Four reporters (myself, the Examiner’s Michael Neibauer and Jonetta Rose Barras, and the Post’s Nikita Stewart), eight of 13 councilmembers (Gray, Ward 1’s Jim Graham, Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 6’s Tommy Wells, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and At-Large members David A. Catania, Carol Schwartz, and Phil Mendelson), and approximately three dozen staffers and randoms. In other words, about a 10-to-1 nonpress-to-press ratio.
• Gray announced that he’s hired a new communications director to replace Denise Reed, a longtime Wilson Building fixture who left Gray’s office in December for a job with the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency. Her replacement is familiar face: Doxie McCoy, who’s served as the press aide to congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton since October 2001. She starts next week.
• Graham announced emergency legislation to force the mayor to issue rules implementing mandatory inclusionary zoning. (Here’s the whole complicated background on “IZ”—long story short, the rulemaking’s been delayed to give the development community a chance to weigh in.) Graham had introduced a nonemergency bill last month that would have given the mayor 30 days after enactment to issue the regs. This bill gives him until April 1.
• While we’re talking emergency legislation, there’s 10 emergency bills on the agenda coming out of the mayor’s office, all of which are contract approvals (the Council has to approve any contract greater than $1 million). Barras questioned Gray on why this stuff’s being done by emergency legislation. Blame, naturally, went to the mayor’s office and a blown contracting and procurement system. Good question, Jonetta!
• Mendelson announced a pair of bills coming out of his committee. One will require the sale of “fire-safe” cigarettes in the District by July 1. (Fire-safe cigs use a different type of paper that cause them to extinguish themselves if not actively puffed.) The other is the Motor Vehicle Theft Prevention Act of 2007, which creates a fund dedicated to fighting, yes, auto theft, funded mainly by a $5 hike in the yearly car registration fee. The money’s overseen by a mayoral-appointed board and can be spent on more cops, bait cars, public-awareness campaigns, and things like that.
• Schwartz got up to talk about her “Paid Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007,” which is now the “Accrued Sick and Safe Days Act of 2007.” The new name reflects the fact that the bill stands to be heavily amended, mostly to make it more palatable to folks who do the hiring. “We have really worked hard to win a buy-in from the business community,” Schwartz said. Despite the changes, the votes haven’t been counted yet (members of the Service Employees union rallied at the Wilson Building this afternoon, citing “wavering as Tuesday’s vote nears” in a press release) and there’s rumors of mayoral veto being bandied about.
• Gray gave some early, rough numbers on the budget surplus from FY07: Total surplus is about $248 million. About $50 million of that has been earmarked for spending, and another approximately $100 million was allocated in a December supplemental appropriations bill. Of the remainder, Gray indicated he’d hoped to put that money away for a rainy day, and given the economic outlook right now, looks like things could get rainy indeed. Revenue projections won’t be in from the CFO’s office for another few weeks—but LL did get this fun tidbit from Gray: “Dr. [Natwar M.] Gandhi has informed us it will not be like we’ve seen in the recent past.”
• The Fenty steamroll on school closings is all but complete. Last month, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry and Ward 5’s Harry Thomas Jr. introduced their “School Closing Fairness and Accountability Emergency Act of 2008,” which would have given the Council a chance to vote on the proposed school shutterings. On Friday, both Barry and Thomas stood behind Fenty as he announced the final closings list (as Marc Fisher pointed out in his column over the weekend). And today, Gray quiety announced that Barry and Thomas had withdrawn their bill.

For as long as I can remember, Jonetta Rose Barras, WAMU’s killer political analyst, has been taking names at the John A. Wilson building. And in the latest installment of her highly successful Barras Report, she slams Mayor Adrian Fenty for wanting to spend too much money. Yeah, pretty predictable stuff, but Barras brings it. She details how much cash Fenty is looking for and where he’s looking to sprinkle it. One beneficiary: The D.C. Department of Transportation, or “d.” Barras notes that this department is slated for a funding bump of $332,000 and provides this analysis as to why the money’s coming through: “It helps when the city administrator is the former DDOT director, and the current DDOT director is the protégé of the past director, who is the city administrator.” OK, that’s a bit circular, but, hey, it’s the Web!

Then, when discussing the ambitions of current D.C. councilmembers, Barras makes this point: “There is still talk that Ward 1’s Jim Graham wants to spread his wings.”

Like, duh, girl! I mean, Graham wants more power? More visibility? More quotes in every news outlet? Jeez, you don’t say! You wanna know why there’s still talk that this guy wants more? Because it’s true. His nickname should be “More.” He’s the most nakedly ambitious guys in this city. In fact, if you compare size of ambition against actual level of power, Jim Graham may well be one of the most out-of-whack people in town. He wants it all, yet he represents only a sliver of the puny, disenfranchised District. He wants to play on the biggest of stages, yet he has to respond to pothole-filling requests on Ingleside Terrace. He wants it all, yet he has to bother with “consent agenda” items every time he turns around. Get this guy, at least, an at-large seat, or perhaps Eleanor’s seat. Otherwise, he’s gonna explode!

So our man Jones is presently over in Tenleytown guest-hosting the D.C. Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta (Kojo’s sick) and pretty quickly James and Ms. Rose-Barras directed their attention to an editorial cartoon (pictured) that ran in the Washington Examiner earlier this week.

The cartoon, by Nate Beeler, was a riff on a missive recently sent out by the D.C. Board of Ed that misspelled “success” as “sucess.” Beeler took the school board’s spelling problems and ran with it.

Jonetta referred to a massive outcry about the unfairness of the cartoon and went on to call it “racially insensitive” and possibly “racist,” because both figures are portrayed as black even though Fenty’s top education aide is white not black.

Mark Tapscott, the Examiner ‘s editorial page chief, was invited on the show and didn’t give an inch.

As far as this disinterested observer goes, I’m closer to Mr. Tapscott than Jonetta. The bad spelling on the letter is certainly within the bounds of satire, and there’s nothing to indicate that the aide was supposed to be Victor Reinoso. Plus, the aide’s not made out to be a uneducated buffoon—just the school board! And OK, the school board’s not full of blithering idiots, but when you don’t run spell check, you give an inch—and don’t be surprised when editorial cartoonists take a mile.

Anyone in the teeming millions care to rebut?

Suzanne Peck, the city’s chief technology officer, has become a darling of the nation’s technomedia. Public CIO magazine, Federal Computer Week, and Government Technology are among the pubs that have rightly hailed her success in turning a municipal technological backwater into a model for other cities. Washington Examiner columnist Jonetta Rose Barras, however, took a pass on boarding this particular bandwagon, calling Peck a “serial District law violator” and a “serial law violator” in two recent columns. The pull-no-punches columnist also advocated Peck’s sacking as part of the mayoral changeover.

Vince Morris, a spokesperson for the Williams administration, rang up the Examiner to express his concern. “To call someone who’s worked in government and turned the city’s Web site into one of the best in the nation…a lawbreaker is pretty serious and completely unfair,” says Morris.

The Examiner responded with a “Clarification” stating, “In neither column was there any support for this phrase and it should have been removed from the column.” Barras offered her “support” materials in an e-mail to Morris that cited findings by city investigators who’d examined various practices of Peck’s office. “More has to be done to hold bureaucrats and people of Ms. Peck’s position accountable,” wrote Barras, a longtime Washington City Paper contributor. She would not comment for this story.

Peck & Co., meanwhile, are satisfied with the Examiner’s mea culpa. “It meets our needs to have false statements corrected,” says Christina Fleps, Peck’s general counsel.