Yeah, you’ve heard about the Supreme Court ruling and its fallout. It’s been blogged, re-blogged, hashed and rehashed.

So what do folks on the street think of it all? Watch the video and find out.

If making a case to local legislators won’t change weekend parking rules in Adams Morgan, maybe a YouTube video with circa-1998 techno-rock will:

Given the events of the past week on the affordable-housing front–i.e., the displacement of more than 200 from a Mount Pleasant building destroyed by fire–you might suppose that the administration of Adrian M. Fenty would be getting way behind the issue right now.

But check out his budget. According to an account just posted on washingtonpost.com, the mayor is taking the cheap route in this area:

The budget appears to commit $61 million to affordable housing, significantly less than the $117 million the administration promised the Washington Interfaith Network it would spend.

[City Administrator Dan] Tangherlini said the administration will make up the difference by committing new land and other benefits to affordable housing efforts.

Oh yeah, that’s a better approach than actually funding it.

Via the Washington Post this a.m. comes news that the latest round of property-tax assessments has increased slightly citywide. But the variations from block to block provide the really interesting story.

For instance: Brentwood, for the second straight year, posts big increases in assessments. Guess the garbage isn’t stinking quite as much as in the past.

Another for instance: Assessments in LeDroit Park have gone down just a hair, by 1.7 percent. What’s gone wrong over there? Did someone’s cornice fall off? Or did someone in the tax office decide, Hey, Florida Avenue is still a dump?

And while I’m on a property-tax rant, I pose the following question to our world of D.C.-philes out there. Who in this vast universe actually knows, off the top of your head, which neighborhoods fall into the tax office’s “Old City I” designation and its “Old City II” designation?
Yes, these terms are used to cover all those neighborhoods in the the city’s gentrification plume. Yet no one, I maintain, has any clue where the boundaries lie.

If you’re out there, Mr. or Mrs. “Old City I and Old City II,” catch up with me in the comments section. If you can convince me that you have this nailed, and you don’t work in the tax office, I’ll give you a Washington City Paper T shirt plus a $25 money order, even if the latter has to come out of my own pocket, because I haven’t cleared this one with corporate yet.

And merely Googling the tax office’s definitions isn’t going to get you there. I want a phoner interview with you too.

Murky Coffee on Capitol Hill yesterday received a visit from authorities with the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue. The revenue cops shut down the popular Eastern Market hangout at around 10 a.m., hustling out customers and taping notices to the cafe windows.

Murky, it turns out, owed some back taxes.

“It’s like when you get caught speeding,” says owner Nick Cho. “Was I speeding? Yes. Does this feel like bullshit? Yes.”

“It was old sales tax stuff that we missed,” Cho explains. “From there, the penalties and fines kept growing.” According to court records, Cho’s debt stands somewhere around $220,000. Though he knew something like Tuesday’s seizure could happen, the chief barista was surprised by the raid. He’d been negotiating with tax officials, and though they were playing “good cop, bad cop” with him, he thought the talks were going well.

Cho hopes to re-open Murky in the next few days, and though he thinks the tax office went overboard, the coffeephile, whose crackerjack barista team recently took home a second place trophy in a Mid-Atlantic barista competition, mostly blames himself. “I’ve got to live up to my responsibility,” he says. “That’s all there is to it.”

—Rend Smith

One of the District’s gems is the bonsai hut at the Arboretum in Northeast. It’s actually called the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. You can gawk at those little trees for hours without so much as blinking.

Check out this gem:

Well, in the future, as it turns out, your access to this gem may be slightly curtailed, if we are to believe the awesome Mark Segraves of WTOP News. Segraves is telling us that budget cuts are imperiling the Arboretum’s staff and operating hours. If this actually comes to pass, and the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum becomes scarcer to me as a tourist, then some approps person on the Hill’s gonna hear from me!

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…

This morning, my commitment to law and order was tested. Because blocking the Four Mile Run bike trail this morning at approximately 9:20 a.m. was a brown Sheriff’s Office van, within which a deputy or deputies (sorry, Erik, my glasses were fogged up) were “supervising” three poor wretches in orange cleaning up in sub-freezing temps.

Now, I don’t have a problem with forcing Arlington County Detention Facility inmates to pick up trash in the cold. Anyone who manages to screw up so soundly in such a genteel place as Arlington ought to spend a few hours trimming weeds and picking up cans under those bridges so they can revisit their choices! In fact, as work details go, that one may not be too bad, since the area is so frequently picked over by the incarcerated.

But I gotta say it’s the height of lameness for the public servants charged with supervising them to do so from the comfort of a heated van, and even lamer that they blocked the entire freaking no-motorized-vehicles-allowed path doing so. I had to wait for the van to inch forward painfully slowly and then squeeze between its sidewalls and the fence by the run to get through. Hey, Arlington County Sheriff’s Office! I didn’t commit any crimes! Why must you punish me?

An MPD officer shot and killed a D.C. family’s dog on Christmas Eve, Fox 5 is reporting. Stories about pets who are shot to death seemingly write themselves. Still, Fox 5 has outdone itself by managing to recover possibly the most sympathetic accompanying photograph ever:

This shooting victim isn’t just adorable doggy; he’s an adorably patriotic doggy. An internal investigation into the incident is pending: The officer claims Scooby lunged, while the dog’s owner says Scooby was sitting still. Now, I’m no police investigator, but the only photograph of Scooby I’ve ever seen is of him sitting still, lovin’ the U.S. of A. I rest my case.

Anybody who thinks this city’s parking regulations aren’t designed to steal from motorists is a dumbass.

I went to the coffeehouse Tryst on 18th Street this morning, and saw a parking enforcement officer sitting in her car across the street shortly after 9 a.m., writing tickets. She got out and put the tickets on the windshields of a row of cars on the west side of 18th Street.

All the cars that received the $100 fines were parked inside signs that said “Pay Parking” with a one-way arrow down the street. A new Euro style parking-receipt vending machine stood on the sidewalk right next to where these cars were parked, and indicated the spaces were open for business beginning at 9 a.m.

I asked the officer why she was writing tickets when all the signage and writing visible to these motorists indicated quite clearly that the row of spots was absolutely kosher. She pointed to a signpost up the block, near the bank at 18th and Columbia Sts. NW, and said that that sign said there was no parking until 9:30 a.m., and that that rule applied to all of 18th St. on the west side. Even if a motorist somehow saw that sign while driving south and looking for a parking spot, there is no common sensical way anybody would think that a sign at the top of the block would supersede the rules posted not only on signs further down the street, but also the language on the closest pay machine.

“We can’t put signs every 10 feet,” she said.

From her attitude, I would bet this ticket writer shows up at 9:01 every weekday with her ticket book and starts meeting her quota at $100 a pop. The situation on 18th Street isn’t an aberration. These sorts of parking traps are in too many places in this city for this to be accidental. Folks at the tax office are getting fired and probably will be prosecuted for stealing from citizens. How come the parking enforcement people keep their jobs?