The D.C. Olympic Team is back.

Two years ago, for the winter games in Turin, local voting-rights activists acted on a plan put forth by various folks over the years (among them Sam Smith, John Capozzi, and LL) and tried to pull together a curling team.

This year, says team organizer Mike Panetta, it’s going to be racewalking.

Panetta, who also serves as the District’s elected shadow representative, explains the rationale behind the team thusly: “Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Samoa, and Puerto Rico—all of those territories can field their own Olympic teams, so if we’re going to be the red-headed stepchild of American democracy like those places, we should at least get our own Olympic team, too.” Doing so, he says, also takes advantage of all that Olympic media hype to bring attention to voting rights.

Though a mere three months from the Beijing games’ opening, the DCOC’s efforts are just getting underway. “It’s the sort of thing where the timing is critical. If you do it too far out from the Olympics, you don’t get the attention,” Panetta says. The team’s Web page has been updated, though, and a Facebook group is forthcoming.

So why racewalking? Panetta cites logistical concerns: “You need something that doesn’t require a specific location or equipment or any resources, so that’s why speedwalking is perfect.” Not heeding such considerations last time, he says, made assembling a curling team difficult. And, no, they never made it to Turin.

Also, Panetta says, walking is “a very Washingtonian activity. People are in training 24-7.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The list of groups that Phil Pannell has quit in a huff continues to expand: The longtime activist announced in an e-mail sent early this morning that he “in good conscience can no longer participate” with DC Vote, the city’s most prominent voting-rights advocacy group.

The e-mail was addressed to DC Vote’s executive director, Ilir Zherka and copied to several media and political types. It was prompted by the decision of Eugene Dewitt Kinlow, who is DC Vote’s outreach director, to drop out of a shadow senator race he had entered a mere three days before.

Pannell alleges in his letter that two-term incumbent Paul Strauss had used his “clout” to force Kinlow out of the race. “I personally witnessed Paul Strauss at the Obama fundraiser at Union Station last Thursday and at the Board of Elections the next day state to people that Eugene’s candidacy would be problematic for DC VOTE,” Pannell wrote. “Strauss, in my opinion, clearly stated that he had the clout to get him out of the race, which apparently he did. His hubris was nauseating.”

And, in trademark Pannell rhetoric, he also wrote that Kinlow’s withdrawal made him feel “what it must have been like for African American slaves to witness the beating of slave when they stood by helplessly. I will not sit by and let a Black man be trashed this way and consequently have entered the race for Shadow Senator.”

UPDATE, 4:55 P.M.: Strauss calls to deny Pannell’s insinuation that he intervened with Kinlow’s employer, DC Vote, to get him out of the race. “I never called anyone at DC Vote,” he says. “Any implication that I interfered in his employment situation is false.”

Strauss says he’s mystified and hurt by Pannell’s comments. “No one’s ever referred to me in language like that before.”

Full letter after jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Gertrude Stein Democratic Club’s endorsements are usually noteworthy for no other reason than the fact they happen so damn early in the election cycle. This time though, there was plenty of drama on offer at the club’s meeting tonight at the John A. Wilson Building aside from the timing.

The big scoop: Eugene Dewitt Kinlow took the Stein Club event as an opportunity to drop out of a shadow senator race he’d entered little more than 72 hours prior. That race was shaping up to be a civil war of sorts between Kinlow, outreach director for DC Vote, and Paul Strauss, shadow senator since 1994 and an old friend of Kinlow’s. LL was super-excited about the prospect of another contested race and had hyped it up in a Friday blog post.

Strauss, sources tell LL, raised concerns to folks in the voting-rights crowd about the fact that a paid employee of the District’s best-funded voting-rights advocacy group would run for his unpaid seat. Asked his feelings on the matter, Strauss demurred: “I hope none of us in the movement would do things do divide the movement when we need to unite the movement.” He says he met with Kinlow privately after learning of his run.

Kinlow says he “reevaluated what it is I do seven days a week,” explaining that he didn’t want to drive an unpaid volunteer out of the voting-rights-activism ranks; he insists “it was a personal decision” his employer had nothing to do with.

Even his extremely short run, Kinlow says, had its accomplishments: “Since Friday, there’s been a tremendous amount of interest in this position,” he says. “Even by thinking about running I became a catalyst in recruiting more soldier” to the voting-rights cause.

The next big surprise: Ward 8 civil-rights activist/man-of-all-seasons Phil Pannell stepped into the void after he heard of Kinlow’s decision. Pannell, who is gay and a longtime Stein Club member, had a home-field advantage and forced a runoff vote with Strauss, which he won. But because the vote was so close, 26 votes to 21, no endorsement was made.

Says Strauss: “I was very gratified to win the first ballot, which is the one I think that indicates the true support.”

Kinlow made no endorsement, but his wife, D.C. Public Schools ombudsman Tonya Vidal Kinlow rose before the group in support of Pannell. Says her spouse: “She’s a smart woman. She’s a smarter person than I am.”

Other big drama:

• OK, no huge drama in the Ward 2 endorsements. Incumbent Jack Evans was squarely on home turf. He outflanked challenger Cary Silverman by playing up his record on issues close to the gay community over his four terms. (He held up to the crowed a framed ad run in 1992 by then Whitman-Walker Clinic Director Jim Graham touting Evans as the gay community’s “advocate.” Asked how long he’s been toting that ad to Stein Club endorsement meetings, Evans said, “No comment.”)

  Silverman did score some points with his full-time-councilmember pledge and his response to a question on liquor-license voluntary agreements, but then proceeded to blow it while answering a testy question from Pannell on how the gay community hasn’t been able to get a meeting with the Washington Nationals. Silverman tried to to make a point about a bad stadium deal: “We gave away the store….I don’t know what we can do. I look forward to Councilmember Evans’ answer,” he said.

  Well, Evans promised the Stein Club a meeting with Nats President Stan Kasten, to wild applause. Evans won the endorsement (and a $500 campaign contribution), 54-5, with 3 abstentions.

• One of the last uncommitted superdelegates in the District’s Democratic delegation has made up her mind: Anita Bonds, chair of the D.C. Democratic State Committee, had long said it was her job to remain neutral while her group assembled the delegation. Now, with that job complete, Bonds says she’s “leaning heavily” toward Barack Obama, pending a meeting with the Illinois senator.

  Bonds says she hopes the meeting with Obama will happen soon—”I don’t want to have to go to West Virginia”—and she says she hopes to meet with Clinton, too. Asked if Clinton could say anything to change her mind at this point, Bonds says, “I don’t think so.”

• Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s congressional delegate, won the club’s endorsement by acclamation after one of her trademark rambles. Incumbent shadow rep Mike Panetta also won an endorsement without a vote. Lots of other big names came out for the festivities. Besides the combatants, Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser showed, as did Ward 8’s Marion Barry. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray also made a brief appearance, and At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown was in the house.
• As far as verbal fireworks, the highlight of the evening was certainly Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander’s questioning from Rick Rosendall and Bob Summersgill of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance. Alexander’s speech was pretty darn anodyne, pushing her advocacy for getting rid of discriminatory practices in health insurance during her time as a District insurance examiner and her hard-line stance against sex harassment in a Ward 7 firehouse.

  Summersgill, though, brought up Alexander’s decision during her last election campaign to support civil unions but not marriage for gays and lesbians in the District. After citing her “devout Catholic” beliefs, Alexander said she was “willing to look at those options,” but initially was unwilling to commit to marriage. “That’s still a no!” Summersgill, past president of the GLAA, said repeatedly. Rosendall leapt in Summersgill then added: “In this town, if you don’t support gay marriage, you don’t deserve to be on the council.” Alexander finally said, “I guess I’m in support of it; I’m in support of equal rights.”

  That wasn’t all, though: Rosendall, the GLAA’s VP for political affairs, then went after Alexander for her support of Ward 5 colleague Harry Thomas Jr. on his efforts to keep gay strip clubs displaced by the baseball stadium out of his ward. (Rosendall had earlier, while standing to endorse Evans, announced that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the GLAA.) Alexander said she tends to defer to the home-ward councilmember in such situations, but Rosendall blew a gasket at that line of reasoning: “She betrayed us on that bill!…You didn’t care about us!” he shouted, while other club members groaned. Said Rosendall, “If you’re more mad at me than at her, then there’s something wrong with you.”

  Alexander won the endorsement by a show of hands, 36-3, with an abstention.

If you were planning to head out to the 51st State tonight to support statehood activist Karen Szulgit’s efforts to pay her protest-incurred tax bill, don’t bother—party’s been canceled.

According to a release from Szulgit, a manager at the bar said: “51st State Tavern has always been happy to host fundraisers for worthy causes…but we have also always felt that such events should benefit a group, not a single person.” (The bar didn’t immediately return a call for comment.)

A little back story: Back in 2003, a bunch of statehood rabble-rousers called, um, D.C. RABBLE, launched a “tax obstruction campaign.” One tactic embraced by some activists, including Szulgit, was to pay their tax bills with “big checks” that included messages including “Emancipate DC Tax Slaves Now!”; “FREE DC!”; “Full Rights for DC!”; and “No Taxation Without Representation!” (The checks had all the necessary information for actual payment and we printed with the requisite magnetic ink and all that.)

The feds, however, wouldn’t take Szulgit’s checks for her 2004, 2005, and 2006 returns, which she enclosed with a letter informing the authorities that her tax return was “paid under protest.” In February, Szulgit got notice from the IRS that she owed more than $1,000—the $850 she originally owed plus interest and penalties. An IRS agent, she says, told her the fines were due to the fact that the “check was not done correct.” Szulgit paid the $850 in February.

The remaining $526.24, however, she was hoping to make up through this fundraiser. Szulgit says she learned about the cancellation in an e-mail from 51st State manager Bjarne Hecht over the weekend.

Says Szulgit, “I’m very disappointed that Mr. Hecht viewed my event as benefiting only me. I always felt that my actions in pursuit of self-determination for D.C. were on behalf of all Washingtonians who value equality, not just me.”

UPDATE, 4/24, 3 P.M.: Finally got in touch with Hecht, who essentially confirms Szulgit’s recounting of the events. “We were led to believe that this was a fundraiser for the organization she represents,” he says. D.C. voting rights, he says, is “a worthy cause,” but when it comes to a benefit for a single person, “That we can’t do.”

The bar’s policy, Hecht says, is that if a private event can guarantee more than 40 people or if it’s a legit fundraiser, the bar will offer a private room. Otherwise, he says, you have to pay for a private room.

Hecht says his bar’s hosted plenty of fundraisers over the years and will continue to: “We’ve had leukemia, tsunami—you name it.”

Cinch that tie up, next time, Senator.

(BTW, I’m getting really good at spelling “Hayden Panettiere.”)

The Shadow Delegation somehow roped Heroes‘ Hayden Panettiere into recording a PSA reminding you, District taxpayers, to donate to the D.C. Statehood Delegation Fund, which is used to support the doings of Shadow Sens. Paul Strauss and Michael D. Brown and Shadow Rep. Mike “Close Enough to Panettiere” Panetta.

The footage was shot back in January, Strauss says, when Panettiere was in town to lobby Congress on whaling issues. Strauss met her at the Barack Obama rally on Jan. 28.

“She was lobbying the Senate on whale issues as part of her Save the Whales campaign….I assured her that she would get my vote, but, hey, I don’t get one.” Over lunch in the Senate dining room, Strauss says, he explained “what I could do for whales and how much more I could do if I got a vote….She saw the injustice and agreed to help us out.”

Lucky for Strauss, a camera crew documenting Panettiere’s whale work was following her around and they agreed to shoot a quick PSA after their lunch.

But why wait until less than a week before tax day to drum up support for a tax-form check-off?

Strauss says getting a hold of the tape was a bit tricky: “The guy who had the footage was out on a boat chasing whales in the Dominican Republic….He was tough to track down.”

A few months ago, LL gave a little ink (second item) to the Statehood Delegation Fund Commission, a body tasked with appropriating the money collected though a check-off box on District income tax forms to the District’s three shadow members of Congress. (Yes, LL’s ink likely would be the only ink it has ever gotten.)

The fund currently holds a little over $30,000. The only member of the board is Barney Circle activist John Capozzi. With no quorum, the money has not been spent.

Last week, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray circulated a memo informing his colleagues that he’d be introducing emergency legislation today that would take the statehood delegation fund out of the statehood delegation fund commission’s hands, essentially disbanding the body. The memo states the statehood delegation would be free to spend the money directly.

Capozzi spoke last night on Gray’s proposal, on behalf of his august institution: “We had a meeting, we discussed it, and it passed with no opposition.”

This could be a bit of a stretch, but I am going there anyhow.

According to the very early reporting on the Spitzer disaster, the feds have records on the N.Y. guv’s use of prostitution services on a Feb. 13 trip to the District. He stayed in a hotel that night, reportedly the Mayflower, and dialed up some services.

Well, if the feds see fit to perhaps prosecute the guy for his misdeeds, they would use something called the Mann Act of 1910, which criminalizes the act of taking someone between the states for the purposes of prostitution.

So Spitzer could be a back-door route to the status that D.C. has deserved for centuries.

“Dissapointing but not entirely unpredictable,” is the also not entirely unpredicatable take of DC Vote’s communications director Kevin Paul Kiger on the U.S. Mint’s rejection of “Taxation Without Representation” for the District’s proposed quarter.

“It’s kind of ridiculous,” Kiger continues, “that the U.S. Mint would take this as a political statement when it’s simply a statement of life in the District for 207 years.”

The phrase faced no fed opposition when it went on license plates in 2000, but as Kiger says: “There was no national DMV that had to approve it.”

As City Desk outlined on Monday, just getting “Taxation…” on the official submission of the coin was quite the coup for DC Vote, and the hits just keep on coming. Google’s throwing back links about the fight and the Mint’s decision from news outlets in Chicago, Wisconsin, North Dakota, India, and—get this—Rhode Island, which has double the population and at least four more members of Congress than D.C. Thanks for representing, R.I.

As for the hardworking folks at DC Vote, they are moving on after this setback—to Oregon. Three people are heading to the Pacific Northwest the second week of March to talk to people about D.C.’s deal. A similar trip to Montana in January yielded results you can’t buy with ads, according to Kiger, who got to go. He and another DC Voter met with the League of Women Voters, college students, various TV stations, and a few editorial boards, landing actual editorials in actual newspapers educating actual residents of Montana, many of whom did not know or, at first, believe District residents have the second-highest per-capita income taxes in the country and are stuck with “shadows” on the Hill. Good luck in Oregon, kids.

(Flickr photo: dbking)

You, DC resident, only have a few more hours to weigh in on an issue of national importance. What message do we as a city want to send out to the rest of the county? Who are we? What matters deeply to us? And most importantly, how can we most appropriately share this…

…on a piece of metal that will float in people’s pockets? That’s right, I’m talking about the quarter. The D.C. Office of the Secretary (Stephanie Scott) has been soliciting suggestions for the District quarter design since late January. The comment period ends at 5 p.m. today. Send ideas to quarter@dc.gov.

At least one group has launched a concerted effort to get a certain design in the running. DC Vote wants to see “Taxation Without Representation” on the quarter. The group sent out a blast e-mail to hundreds of group supporters asking them to write in advocating for their design.

Back in December, commenters on DCist chimed in with some funny thoughts. Someone suggested a crack pipe, calling it “our most enduring legacy.” Another person mentioned legendary graffiti artist Cool Disco Dan. Naturally, pandas came up. But this comment resonated with me: “We all know it’s gonna be the Washington Monument in the center and some equally cliche stuff in the periphery. No use arguing it.”

I want a sweet picture of the members of Congress pointing and laughing at the people who live in the capital of a nation that denies them one of the very rights this country was founded on. The rest of the country probably won’t get it, so you might as well add the old “Taxation Without Representation” line on there. (Yeah, I know we’ve got license plates that say that, but think nationally, dude!) If you want to work Blelvis, a bald eagle with a tear running down its beak, or some bullshit cherry blossoms in there, that’s cool with me, too. Fuck yeah!

While we’re at it, the D.C. quarter should be missing a chunk equal to about 1/5 the size of a regular quarter to symbolize how much of that quarter the federal government is taking out of our pockets without adequate representation. I’d say drill a hole in the center of the damn thing, but I think it’d be better just to have a pie-slice-shaped piece cut out—and make sure that the edges are sharp, so that people slice their fingers open and bleed all over themselves whenever they try to use it.

Thanks for the fucking quarter, douchebags. Now, about that $257.17 you took out of my check this week…

Now for the battle of the Republican v. the Lapsed Republican.

The briefing: Last week, Mike DeBonis, your friendly Loose Lips columnist, wrote a piece about how Republican At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz had opted out of a trip to New Hampshire to further the cause of D.C. voting rights. Mayor Adrian Fenty and several councilmembers went up there to lobby for a resolution scolding the state’s two Republican senators for voting against a D.C. voting rights bill last year.

Schwartz’s reason for opting out was that the move was too partisan, too shrill.

Fellow At-Large Councilmember David Catania, who used to be a Republican, organized the trip and snapped at Schwartz in the column: “Has Mrs. Schwartz gone to visit [Kentucky Sen. Mitch] McConnell? How many times has she gone to visit the Republican leadership? I know it’s uncomfortable for her…but she has to choose. Does she want to be a citizen of this city or a partisan?”

So how does all this make Schwartz feel?

Click here for her letter to the editor.

Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss has made no bones about the fact that he’d like spots for him and his daughter in the city’s Verizon Center skybox for the Jan. 7 Hannah Montana concert.

Well, he asked. And he’s been denied.

“Neil Albert told me there’s no room,” Strauss says, referring to the deputy mayor for planning and economic development. That means Strauss won’t be sitting with Albert, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and offspring.

Strauss says he’s moved on to Plan B: Appealing to the Verizon Center itself for any spare seats.

“I haven’t given up hope yet,” he says. (There’s always Plan C: A glimpse at StubHub reveals that two nosebleed-section tickets could be his for $240 apiece.)

Strauss says he’d love to take his daughter to future skybox events. “She’s 9,” he says, “so I hope there’ll be other opportunities.”

The Post reports that Congress has approved representation for the District! OK. The city will just get its own quarter.

It’s not voting rights.

It may not look as quaint as Rhode Island’s sailing scene. Or look as chill as Vermont’s nature shot. But I think we can do better.

No designs have been drawn up.

Any suggestions for what our quarter should look like?

Maybe it was the free tea bags. Maybe it was the chance to wear funny colonial hats. Or maybe, people are actually amped up again to fight for DC voting rights, after September’s disheartening Senate vote. Whatever the reason, 80 people showed up to DC Vote’s Boston Tea Party reenactment yesterday, according to an article in the Washington Post. The organization says the turnout was closer to 140 people, and they have the video to prove it. Either way, it was cold out there! And probably pretty damn windy, since the event took place by the Georgetown waterfront. DC Vote has its eye on several senators, in particular Max Baucus of Montana and Gordon Smith of Oregon, both of whom, says Communications Director Kevin Kiger, changed their vote last minute. DC Vote staffers are planning on heading out to Montana during the third week of January to meet with residents to make their pitch for DC voting rights. There’s also a scheduled trip to Oregon in February. Besides that, the organization is starting to launch letter writing campaigns in various states, including New Hampshire and Montana.