Get the Potomac Off This List
• May 17, 2012

Saturday evening we stood out at the terrace of the Kennedy Center and watched canoes and boats move serenely on the Potomac River, the spires of Georgetown University and the lights of Washington Harbor in the near distance.
It was a bucolic, beautiful scene, one which inspired admiration for the river if you were inclined to think about matters like that. One thing you weren’t thinking was that the Potomac–the “Nation’s River”–was in serious trouble.

But according to American Rivers, a non-profit organization that helps protect America’s rivers and which yearly lists and issues a report on the country’s ten most endangered rivers, the Potomac River is the Most Endangered River for 2012. The causes: urban and agricultural pollution.

It’s not that the river hasn’t been maintained properly or that the Potomac isn’t cleaner than it was before. It’s because it’s the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act this year, which may be in danger of having Congress roll back critical water safeguards. American Rivers is of course a group, as its president, Bob Irvin, said, that will try to “get decision-makers do the right thing”, which would be to preserve all possible safeguards.

We concur. The Potomac, our river here in Washington, and the nation’s river, will keep right on rolling. It needs to do that without being in danger of more pollution. Let’s get the Potomac off the Most Endangered List

The Tax Burdens on Small Businesses
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I am Joe the Plumber. It hit me, as I finished my tax return last week and wrote a check to Uncle Sam.
Joe (really Sam Wurzelbacher ) was the guy candidate Obama patted on the shoulder and suggested that taxes should be increased on the rich. Joe surprised Obama, said he owned his own business and would pay more taxes under the Obama plan.

Mine is the proverbial small business, one of those companies known as a partnership, sub-S corporation, or LLC which combines the business income with the owner’s income on the same tax return.

When my company income is added to my salary, I look rich, even by my own standards. Not rich like Warren Buffett or Mitt Romney. To them, my income isn’t pocket change. But to me, the income on my tax return shocks me.

The problem is that small businesses don’t get to keep or spend the income on their tax returns. Most of it stays in the company to buy new buildings (we built a new one last year), to buy more inventory (did that, too) and to support growth (that, too).

Small businesses are mythically – fired employees start most new small businesses – the job creators. For 30 years, Republicans have had a singular tax mantra: lower taxes create jobs. Our company has grown from one to almost 30 employees. Yet we’ve never thought: “We need to hire a new employee, but our federal income tax is too high. So, we can’t afford it.”

Like many small businesses, my company’s profit doesn’t feel like a profit. Last year, our inventory went up by more than our profit. We had to spend our entire profit, plus more, to replace goods on the shelf for tomorrow’s customers. As a drug store, most of our customers have insurance so that they take their drugs today and we get paid next month.

When the ink dried on my tax return last week, we reported a nice profit. Which landed on my tax return. But, because of our growth, we had no cash. So, I had to borrow money to pay my income taxes. In fact, combining my company’s profits and my salary put me in the Democrat’s “rich” tax bracket. My tax rate is higher than Warren Buffet’s secretary, and more than double Buffet’s and Mitt Romney’s tax rate.

For decades, Republicans have argued that lower tax rates encourage job creators (like me) to hire more employees, and that really low, or zero, capital gain taxes encourage the rich to invest more, thus creating even more jobs. President Bush did that, but no jobs were created during his eight-year presidency. Oh, well. Maybe it will work this time.

President Reagan is looking pretty good to me right now. He installed a 28-percent maximum tax rate on all income, regardless of source, by lowering normal rates from 50 percent and increasing capital gain rates from 15 percent.

Operating businesses that generate jobs, like mine, don’t have capital gains. They pay the full freight. Almost half the income in the economy is from finance, earned by investors who pay lower tax rates. The idea is lower rates reward the risk they take. Of course, investors like the Buffets and Romneys can sell their stock and get out any time.

My house is the collateral for my company’s loans. That’s real risk and normal for small businesses. We have to hang in there or lose our homes. Would one candidate explain how small businesses have less risk and pay twice the tax rate as super rich investors?

Both parties agree that the tax system needs to be reformed and made more “fair” by “broadening the base” and lowering tax rates. That means paying a lower rate on more income. Over the past 50 years, history has shown that when rates are lowered and the amount taxed is increased, normal people pay almost same amount while the rich pay less.

Apparently, my problem is that I’m not rich enough to pay less. Maybe President Obama will drop by my store, rest his hand on my shoulder, as he did to Joe the Plumber, and assure me that I should pay less tax. Maybe Mitt Romney will invest in my company and help it grow into a company with 90,000 employees as he did for Staples. Then, I’d be really rich, he’d be richer, and both of us would pay lower tax rates.

And what about the real Joe the Plumber? He’s running for Congress.

Weekend Roundup May 10, 2012
• May 14, 2012

Blessing of the Bicycles

May 12th, 2012 at 08:30 AM | dumbartonpastor@yahoo.com | Tel: 202-333-7212 | Event Website

Rev. Mary Kay Totty of Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown will bless bicycles to provide safety for their riders, where two bike paths are located: C&O Towpath and Capital Crescent Trail. Open to all, nondenominational.

Address

Fletcher’s Cove,

4940 Canal Road,

Washington DC 20007

The 6th Annual Potomac River Waterfowl Show

May 12th, 2012 at 10:00 AM | 5 | silver.wang@hillandknowlton.com | Tel: (301) 885-0108 | Event Website

The Potomac River Waterfowl Show, sponsored by The Community Foundation of Charles County, features dozens of award-winning artists showcasing their world class wildlife art. Proceeds from the show benefit the foundation’s grant and scholarship program. Admission: $5 per person, 12 years and under free. Purchase decoys, carvings, prints and original artwork directly from artists. Free appraisals of decoys and related collectibles.Food available on-site. Decoy carving contest. Live Auction at 2pm

Address

Grace Lutheran Family Life Center,

1200 Charles Street,

La Plata, MD 20646

A Serene Sunday – Mother’s Day

May 13th, 2012 at 01:00 AM | Suggested donation | Tel: (202) 686-5807 | Event Website

Treat mom to a special retreat at Hillwood. This is one of the select Sundays Hillwood is open during the year. Enjoy a stroll through the spring gardens, Mansion and special exhibition, The Style that Rules the Empires: Russia, Napoleon and 1812. Sunday, May 13 from 1-5 p.m.

Address

Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens,

4155 Linnean Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20008

Retro Garden Games

May 12th, 2012 at 10:00 AM | Free | Tel: (202) 686-5807 | Event Website

Exercise your mind and body by exploring fun outdoor lawn games from a bygone era, including hula hoops, jump rope and pogo sticks. Visit Hillwood at the Smithsonian Institution’s Garden Fest on the National Mall, in celebration of National Public Gardens Day. This year’s theme is “Gardening for Healthy Living” and is part of the Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens initiative.

Address

National Mall

Basya Schechter: Songs of Wonder

May 15th, 2012 at 07:30 PM | $15; $12 for Members/Seniors/Students | Event Website

The newest project from Pharaoh’s Daughter’s Basya Schechter sets the Yiddish poetry of the civil rights activist and Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to music. Songs of Wonder blends soulful grooves and lush instrumentation with Heschel’s powerful poetry. A rich new collection of Yiddish songs, these colorful arrangements feature many of New York’s greatest Jewish musicians.

Address

Washington DCJCC

1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

TREES FOR GEORGETOWN – SPRING CELEBRATION

May 16th, 2012 at 01:23 PM | betsyemes@aol.com | Event Website

Please join Trees for Georgetown on Wednesday, May 16, at the home of Patrick McGettigan, a house with a history.

Mr. McGettigan’s house is one of a row of five “spec” houses built in 1817 by the mayor of Georgetown, John Cox. These were grand houses, in the Federal style, with stables for horses in the back, and became known as Cox’s Row. Mr. Cox gave 3327 to his daughter. The house underwent many changes over the years, including division into apartments, until it was purchased and beautifully renovated by Mr. McGettigan in 1998.

Trees for Georgetown plants, cares for and maintains residential street trees in Geporgetown and has planted over 2,000 trees. Just one new tree costs $900 to purchase, plant and provide protective tree box fencing. We need your help to keep Trees for Georgetown growing!

For tickets and information contact: Betsy Emes, betsyemes@aol.com.

Address

the home of Patrick McGettigan

One Lump or Two: Mad Hatters Tea at Tudor Place
• May 10, 2012

On Saturday, March 31, Tudor Place hosted its Mad Hatters Tea. This sold-out event encouraged guests to wear festive hats, enjoy afternoon tea while sampling delicious tea sandwiches and desserts. Following the ceremony, guests were allowed to create and decorate their own spring bonnet.

The highlight of the tea was a lovely talk about “Taking Tea” within Tudor Place and how Federalists preferred their sugar and why tea had to kept under lock and key.

With our hostess’s humorous recant of sifting bugs from tea to explaining what lumps were, taking tea at Tudor Place may turn into a personal tradition for many.

Tudor Place’s next tea event will be Spring Tea and Chocolate Workshop for children 5+ and families
on Thursday, April 5, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Guest will enjoy a festive spring tea, complete with tempting treats and an intriguing lesson to go with it on the history of pouring tea. Following the tea service, children will learn the basics of chocolate – where it comes from, how it is made and how it was appreciated – while creating their own three-dimensional chocolate eggs to take home.

Member child, $20; non-member child, $25; accompanying adult, $10.

Visit Tudor Place at Tudorplace.org to learn of other upcoming teas and events.

Garden Tour: Just the Ticket to See Neighbors, Friends and Get Inspired
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The 84th Georgetown Garden Tour, held Saturday May 5, showed off eight gardens along with side and back yards of varying scale, cresting at the Allbrittons’ Bowie-Sevier House on Q Street. All eight home gardens were on the east side of town, as some observers noted, due to the O and P Streets reconstruction on the west side.

Anna Fuhrman’s P Street back garden, with its clever use of a small space, surprised and delighted visitors, while the mansion on Q Street is large enough to impress as well as include a garden entrance on P Street. Three homes adjacent to each other on 28th Street contain details to show off their own personalities: Boyden Gray’s old-school Georgetown feel; the Wests’ almost exclusive, energetic use of white flowers and plants; a Hugh Jacobsen addition to the Hodges house that leads to a soothing and cozy patio and garden. The Pillsburys’ sculptures from Bali complete a contemplative green space on O Street.

At Christ Church, the Georgetown Garden Club greeted those on the tour, sold items for gardeners, young and old, and had people lined up for its afternoon tea. As sponsor of the tour, the non-profit Georgetown Garden Club stated: “All proceeds from the tour are returned to Georgetown, to its parks, recreation facilities and green spaces and beautiful trees. We dedicate our efforts to a vibrant, clean environment that can be enjoyed by all who stroll the streets of our village.”

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Meeting at UDC Tonight on Wisconsin Avenue Work in Glover Park
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In response to concerns about the construction work in Glover Park along Wisconsin Avenue, Ward 3 council member Mary Cheh and Terry Bellamy, director of D.C.’s Department of Transportation, will meet with residents in Window’s Lounge at the University of the District of Columbia from 7 to 8:30 p.m., 4200 Connecticut Ave., N.W.

Among other upper northwest D.C. items to be discussed, DDOT will address the Glover Park construction on Wisconsin Avenue. The projects widens sidewalks, includes a median and turn lanes and a reduction in traffic lanes.

Residents and Georgetown’s advisory neighborhood commission contend that there is additional traffic on side streets because of Wisconsin Avenue back-ups and want a traffic study on the problem.

DDOT disagree and wrote: “The original Glover Park Transportation Study did basic modeling of future traffic conditions with the recommended improvements and did not identify any critical problems. For this reason we do not believe it necessary to halt the construction project for further study. As DDOT began construction on the Wisconsin Avenue Streetscape project, we have done some spot traffic and speed counts at Tunlaw and 37th Street. This will provide another data point in addition to the baseline data used in the planning study, and we will continue to monitor conditions both during and after construction.”

To improve information about schedules and other questions, DDOT created a website for the job: WisconsinAvenueProject.com.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo at the Washington Monument (photos)
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On May 5, “everyone is Latino”, was the slogan of this year’s National Cinco de Mayo Festival held at the base of the Washington Monument. Cinco de Mayo is a time to commemorate the Battle of Puebla against Frech colonizers, in 1862, an important event in Mexico’s history. The free, family festival, in this 20th annual edition, was organized by the Maru Montero Dance Company and featured dance performances, live music, delicious Latin food and a Mexican market. The festival celebrated not just Mexican Americans but all Latinos in our country.

View our photos by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100787,123861,123870,123878,123887,123895,123903,123911,123920,123928,123936,123945,123855,123845,123982,123974,123785,123968,123797,123961,123804,123813,123821,123829,123837,123953" nav="thumbs"]

International Children’s Festival (photos)
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The International Children’s Festival is an interactive, educational event that allows children of all ages to travel the world in a single day. This year’s 6th annual edition was held at the The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Sunday May 6, 2012.
The Festival is hosted by Meridian International Center and THIS for Diplomats, in partnership with Cultural Tourism DC and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.

View our photos of the event by clicking on the photo icons below.

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Facebook Initiative Encourages Organ Donation
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Inspired by events such as last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which left countless Japanese citizens in need of unavailable medical attention, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to mobilize organ donator registration among company’s community of 900 odd million users.

Facebook is partnering with Donate Life America, a national umbrella organization for local groups working to increase the number of registered organ, eye and tissue donors, adding a new and human depth to the social network’s role in “keeping people connected.” In its announcement last Tuesday, the social networking behemoth said that it will allow its members to share their donor status with friends and family and to link to state databases where people in the United States can register online to officially become donors. And the results have already been staggering.

“It’s absolutely critical at this time when online communication and social media are really the way people are communicating,” said Julia Rivera, director of communications for the New York Organ Donor Network.

“This is great news,” agrees John Green, community relations director for the Gift of Life Donr Program, based in Philadelphia. “It has the potential to be one of the biggest campaigns to increase donor designation that we’ve ever seen.”

According to Donate Life America, Nearly 114,000 men, women and children are currently waiting for a lifesaving transplant, while thousands more are in need of tissue or corneal transplants to resume normal lives or restore sight. Meanwhile, less than 50% of adults in the US have signed up to be an organ donor through their state registry.

The hope is that Facebook’s initiative will bring out the conversation around organ donation and propel it into the realm of social media trends—a far and noble cry from your standard Facebook memes (God knows, I think we’ve all had enough of “FML” and “Texts from Last Night.”)

“We’re hoping people will be excited about the initiative and it will prompt them to take the next step and register to be a donor,” said Aisha Huertas Michel, who works with Donate Life America.

Sure enough, last Tuesday, the first day of the initiative, organ donation registries in 10 states reported as many new volunteer donors as they typically see in one month. According to Donate Life America’s stats, California alone witnessed a 700 percent increase over the number of new volunteers on a typical day.

By Tuesday evening, 100,000 people had declared themselves organ donors on their Facebook profiles, a critical step, physicians said, in speeding the organ donation process because it lets families know their relatives’ wishes.

Among those 100,000 users, 10,000 had linked through Facebook to sign up directly with their state organ donation registries.

Surgeons and transplant advocates have heralded the program, calling the initiative a “game changer.”

In an interview on Good Morning America on Tuesday, Zuckerberg also cited his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who is studying to become a pediatrician, in inspiring the initiative. “Our dinner conversations are often about Facebook and kids, and the kids that she’s meeting,” he said. “She’ll see them getting sicker, then, all of a sudden, an organ becomes available, and she comes home and her face is all lit up because someone’s life is going to be better because of this.”

Dr. Jeffrey Punch, director of transplant surgery at the University of Michigan, was also complimentary of Facebook’s efforts, though not without emphasizing the severe need for organ donors in the real world, not just online. “This is a huge step forward,” he said. “But nothing is going to solve donation problem overnight.”

USA Science & Engineering Festival Inspires Kids (photos)
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What was billed as the largest celebration of science in the US, the 2nd USA Science and Engineering Festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on April 28-29 featured over 3000 interractive exhibits and 100 stage shows. Funded with money raised by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Larry Bock, a free admission was a factor in attracting an estimated crowd of over 300,000 The goal was to excite students in the US about science and technology to better enable this nation to compete internationally.

View our photographs of the event by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100773,123608,123616,123625,123633,123641,123649,123657,123665,123673,123598,123592,123584,123708,123702,123534,123696,123690,123545,123555,123565,123575,123682" nav="thumbs"]