Media Watching: A Competitive Sport
• July 26, 2011

As the cherry blossoms drop, All Things Media thought it might be worth taking a quick look back at the year in media so far. Only four months you might say, but what a four months. Media-watching is the latest competitive sport in town, with more subplots than a daytime soap.

In the same time it took Sarah Palin to be Trumped, the Washington Media Scene has put on a fireworks display.

TBD was MySpaced. SiriusXM emerged from its merger cocoon and is starting to beef up again on New York Ave. Bloomberg and Politico are rapidly becoming even more dominant players in the DC media scene and doing most of the hiring. The formally local AOL is now the Huffington Post Media…or is it the other way round.

Our very own WTOP is declared the most profitable radio station in the country, throwing a monkey wrench into arguments all news radio is dead.

The traditional 10,000lb gorrila of local media, The Washington Post, publishes an article implying its parent company is putting its journalistic independence at risk because its most profitable business – the Kaplan for-profit education division – relies on government loans.

And then there are the sneekers: AOL’s Patch and Examiner.com (a cousin of the local paper by the same name) are both growing, online news organizations devoted to our local scene. All while local legacy media, such as this newspaper and the Current Newspapers, are becoming even more invigorated.

Chinese news services plan to bring 100s of jobs to DC to improve their coverage of the US, and the recent performance of Al-Jazeera English in the Middle East turmoil may finally give it the kind of attention in the US it has been trying to develop for five years based on its DC regional hub.

Reality TV has helped turn cupcakes into pastry Google.

Voice of American just announced a new director.

The New York Times built its own Berlin Wall.

The FCC ended last year by issuing arguably one of its important decisions in years that will force open the internet to all, and Congress immediately denied funds to implement the new policy.

And we are only just getting started.

It may be unsettling, very unsettling, trying to make a living in this environment. But it is certainly fun to watch.

Stay tuned.

The Joint that Joynt Closed
•

I cannot quite work out whether boarded windows on arguably the most prestigious corner in the most powerful city in the world hint at promise to come or forlornness for the passing of what had been.

And what had been was a focal point of Georgetown: Nathans. The bar and restaurant on the corner of Wisconsin and M Street seemed to have been there forever, and for many regulars and others anchored in Georgetown, it was a neighborhood staple.

“Happiest day of my life when it finally closed,” said Carol Joynt, the last owner. I was not sure what to expect her to say of Nathans closing almost two years ago now, but a hand slapping “all clean” was certainly not it.

Joynt is no longer the owner of Nathans. She is no longer the successful booker for CNN’s Larry King Live. She is no longer even a career journalist (although she does write a society column for a New York online mag). And if you take her at her word, she would walk away tomorrow from this neighborhood that she helped define and that, in no small way, has defined her.

She points to the last page of her memoir she is promoting with every bit of her acquired media skills as professional booker and rolodex-builder. “Moving On,” she noted. Her next home could still be DC, she admits, but it could just as well be any other city where she takes a job.

So this is what it is to watch an era pass—the era that Joynt and late husband Howard Joynt defined from the top rung of Georgetown society. It was an era that Carol defines as one of local culture, small unique shops and local restaurants. “It had its own flavor,” she said.

And Nathans anchored the corner of the main drag. Howard first ran Nathans, then Carol. However, she said, “It began to end with the building of the mall [The Shops at Georgetown Park], and then all the chain stores.”

“Georgetown unique” gave way to brand-name chic. Nathans gave way to perhaps the Apple store as the place to be in Georgetown. But you won’t see Carol fretting over the loss of her restaurant, “Owning Nathans was a nightmare I would not wish on anyone.”

Joynt has a reputation for being tough, and she needed every ounce of it to get through everything that happened upon the early passing of her husband. Her memoir recounts twenty years of the bruising, painful slide from living the good life to beating back the IRS after her husband left her to pick up the pieces of his sins . But even in freefall, Joynt brought her own brand of media to D.C., creating the signature Q&A Café, first at Nathans, and now at the Ritz Carlton down the street, where Georgetowners can pay to eavesdrop as Joynt talks with many of the biggest names to sweep the media. From television news anchors to the inimitable Salahes, Joynt still has the pull to get A-listers to come to her, but that pull may still be the memory Nathans.

It is clear as she sits at Leopold’s Restaurant, casting looks at a haughty waiter as only a restaurant owner can, that Nathans was hardly her last act. It was Nathans, not she, that stopped breathing. In that, her memoir is an allegory to the slow death of that era when the legacy bar’s and private clubs were the place to be. It was the old Georgetown.

And Joynt is clearly caught between that past and the future, in one breath severing the importance of Georgetown to her identity, and in the next diving deep to conjure up that time, defined by the Control Board and D.C.’s halting steps to be an adult city.

It was a time when, at Nathans, everyone knew your name. And everyone in Georgetown knew Carol Joynt.

Vigilance is Critical to Holiday Safety
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-The recent crime wave in the Georgetown neighborhood, coupled with a handful of rather bizarre local drug busts, has been a source of unease within the community at large. For the past few months, petty burglaries and assaults have been on the rise, with increasing numbers of incidences occurring among our numbered and lettered streets, frequently just off our main intersections and cross streets (M and Wisconsin). In a few cases, houses have been broken into. But let’s not forget the BB&T Bank heist, which was something right out of Bonnie & Clyde.

Approaching the holiday season, shopping and consuming come to a rolling boil, and no one jumps more immediately into the thick of retail frivolity (all in the name of giving, of course) than Georgetown. This means that there is a lot of shopping, which in turn means that there are a lot of folks out there walking around with bags of expensive, nice things. Criminals are aware of this. This is why crime always spikes around the holiday season, like a squirrel fattening up for the winter.

Thankfully, Georgetown has a caring community. The local ANC meetings have been regularly inviting the police chief to speak to the community, and the local crime watch is effective and efficient in releasing statements of burglaries in or around the area. Recently, the Georgetown BID donated two Segways to the police force to be used exclusively to patrol the streets of Georgetown. We just wanted to say thanks.

Please be safe this holiday season, especially around the neighborhood. It is important to be mindful of your surroundings; don’t go walking around the streets with your head buried in your brand new iPhone from the new Mac store. Be mindful of your surroundings. If you’re going on a shopping binge, you might want to rethink parking too far off the main roads. While it may seem irritating to spend $15 to park in a garage, it isn’t much when compared to the amount you would lose if your holiday gifts were stolen.

At Large Candidates, First Look
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Candidate Forums, at this stage in the campaign to fill the At Large City Council Seat vacated by Kwame Brown’s winning bid for the City Council Chair, are a little like large meet and greets. They resemble the political equivalent of speed dating.

The election for the seat isn’t until April 26, which leaves plenty of time for voters and interested parties to get to know the candidates, and vice versa. And there’s a lot to choose from in terms of quantity, with the quality being currently evaluated. Close to ten candidates are in the field, and one of them is already sitting on the council.

We went to a couple of these forums, one in the Downtown area sponsored by the Penn Quarter Association at the Madame Tussauds wax museum, another the Good Will Baptist Church sponsored by the Kalorama Citizens Associations in Adams Morgan. Another forum was recently held by the Georgetown Citizens Association.

Three things frame these forums and this election. Most importantly, this is a citywide election, and whoever wins will get some political cred for having citywide voter appeal. This is not a small thing, because of the second critical factor in this campaign: it is being waged with a noisy background of scandal and uncertainty—so much so that it almost seems like a re-waging of the Fenty/Gray mayoral race.

The third thing is that this is a time when candidates stake out their territory, test their appeal, make claims to being this or that kind of candidate. Like for instance “reform”—this time not of the schools, but of the city and its political culture—a word much overused here.

You’ll hear a lot of that from Joshua Lopez, the Georgia Avenue resident and seeming firebrand who is vocally calling for cutting the salaries of the city council members and who paints himself as an anti-establishment type who “will stand up to people.” He also presents himself as the first serious Hispanic candidate for a major citywide elected office.

Be that as it may, many—but not all—of the candidates gathered at the Penn Quarter forum in monumentally odd circumstances.

Surrounded by wax figures of presidents and politicians—a figure of Marion Barry, no less, greeted visitors to the forum as they walked down the stairs—the candidates were placed at a dais where life-size figures of the Jonas Brothers stood behind them, frozen in mid-performance, and Britney Spears, apparently working a strip pole, flanked the podium. Videos of Miley Cyrus and a gyrating Beyonce played on continuous reel in the background, which may explain the “flimsy top” reference in my notebook.

“I have to say this is the strangest setting for a forum I’ve ever attended,” Bryan Weaver, a veteran ANC commissioner from Ward 1 quipped. He too is a reformist, but Weaver, articulate and known for his community involvement in Adams Morgan for years, wants to reform the political culture. “You have to change things, you have to change the way the council doe’s things, and the way the mayor’s office does things. There are lots of good ideas, but it’s the implementation of policy that matters the most. We don’t have oversight about who gets contracts and how things get done. It’s all well and good to write legislation, propose change, but ideas, once they leave the council chambers, don’t seem to get implemented.”

Sekou Biddle is the focus of a lot of attention these days—the Washington born educator was named to the seat vacated by Brown by the local Democratic committee, pushed by both Mayor Vincent Gray and Brown himself. That might have been an advantage two or three weeks ago, but now it’s an iffy endorsement, which can be used by his opponents against him.

“It’s not about endorsements,” Biddle said. “It’s about experience, what you can do and what you can get done.”

He’s the only one who can say he’s a councilman, which does count for something, because he’ll have a lot more name familiarity, a heads up on the council culture and ways of business, and he can speak from the experience he’s gained. Biddle also comes from the Teach for America environment that brought Chancellor Michelle Rhee and current Chancellor Kaya Henderson to Washington. There’s no question about where Biddle stands on school reform, nor is there a question about his expertise.

Vincent Orange has had a lot of experience too, having served as Ward 7 Councilman before running for mayor five years ago. “I have more experience than anyone, I came with Mayor Anthony Williams, and together, all of us changed the political and practical environment of the city,” he said. “We got things done.”

With Orange, the problem isn’t experience, but familiarity. This is his second recent major run for major office, not counting his mayoral bid, and the first one, in spite of being endorsed by the Washington Post, ended in defeat against Brown in the race for chairman.

Then there’s Patrick Mara, the jaunty, young Columbia Heights residents, who reminds everyone that he is the only Republican in the race. A school board member—and an unsuccessful at large candidate several years ago, in which he helped oust long-time GOP council member Carol Schwartz—he calls himself progressive on social issues and conservative on financial issues. “I’m not your typical Republican,” he says.

He was late to the Adams Morgan meeting, saying, “You know, when you have a name like Patrick Mara, you get invited to a lot of St Patrick Day’s parties. I apologize for being late.”

Weaver hammers the theme of accountability and transparency, but he can get lost in the wonk and details sometimes, peppering his words with acronyms that not everybody is familiar with. But he also comes across as dedicated and smart, with no ax to grind. Lopez says he’s the outsider, but he’s also spent a lot of time working for Adrian Fenty campaigns and in his council office, according to his campaign biography. He also worked as a deputy manager of Muriel Bowser’s Ward 4 City Council Campaign.

The campaign has now become part of the background landscape, and that landscape sees Mayor Gray mired in controversy and Kwame Brown again under fire. The winner in this campaign gets something nobody gets right now: a fresh start.

On Those We’ve Lost This Year
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-When famous people—or infamous, or near-famous, or almost forgotten-people die, they make you remember. You remember headlines, movies, songs you danced to, games you watched. They remind you of the life you’ve lived. If you’re fortunate enough to work in the media, it gets more personal than that: you remember meetings across a table, in a hotel room, voices over the phone.

Just by way of example, I had the chance to talk with the lovely British actress Jean Simmons, small, dark-haired and demure, in San Francisco when she appeared in a road company of “A Little Night Music” decades ago. She was diminutive, still lovely, with a classic British accent that made you almost feel compelled to kiss her hand, which she had offered. You shook it lightly instead.

Simmons, a quite gifted actress, (see “Elmer Gantry”) was known for her heroine roles in blockbusters like “The Egyptians” and “The Robe,” and as the woman loved by “Spartacus.” Those things you remember too.

We remember in Georgetown, like a hundred other reporters, staking out the home of John and Elizabeth Edwards after he was picked to be Senator John Kerry’s running mate—a fleeing glimpse, children in tow, heading toward a black limousine down a cobbled street.

So it goes. (Kurt Vonnegut’s line always sits well on the obituary, and it worked for him two years ago or so.)

In Washington, the whole community and the mourned the death of Dr. Dorothy Height, at the grand fine age of 98. Height, the president of the National Society of Negro Women, was a front-line civil rights activist in the years of strife and turmoil in the South, right alongside Dr. Martin Luther King and the other legends and stalwarts. She was the founder of the Black Family Reunion, a celebration of family held every year on the National Mall and throughout the country. She wore wonderful hats. Her passing and funerals, including a grand funeral at National Cathedral, drew regular folks from the city, as well as presidents, including Clinton and Obama, amid a sea of black women’s churchgoing hats.

Here is a brief look at other notables lost to us and the world in 2010:

Alexander Haig — Former presidential candidate, National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan, famous for his “I’m in charge” (not) quote in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on the president.

Dennis Hopper — The classic Hollywood outsider who became a movie star in spite of himself—“Easy Rider,” “Blue Velvet,” a boy in “Giant,” wonderfully crazy and weird.

Senator Robert Byrd — The classic Southern Democratic giant of the Senate from West Virginia and a great fiddler, to boot.

J.D. Salinger — The hermetic author wrote “The Catcher in the Rye,” the classic slim novel of disaffected American youth, still catching.

Mitch Miller — Following the bouncing ball and sing along from your living room.

Don Meredith — The first Dallas Cowboy, a twangy charmer and foil for and to Howard Cossell on Monday Night Football.

Fess Parker — Davy, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone too, and a tycoon in the end.

Kathryn Grayon — Beautiful soprano who graced MGM workings of “Kiss Me Kate” and “Showboat.”

Leslie Nielsen — The joys of a doofus screen star, proving that comedy really is harder than tragedy in “The Naked Gun” and “Airplane” (Which also featured Peter Graves who passed also passed away).

Dixie Carter — Designing woman star, she showed her stage mettle at the Washington Shakespeare Company in Oscar Wilde plays.

Kevin McCarthy — Forever running in “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.”

Harvey Pekar — the working class stiff who redefined comic books and autobiography as he documented his commonplace life throughout his ongoing comic series “American Splendor.”

Art Linkletter — He asked the questions when Kids Said the Darndest Things.

Tony Curtis—Aka Bernie Schwartz, the kid from Brooklyn who became a huge matinee idol, movie star, Janet Leigh’s husband, terrific actor.

Eddie Fisher — Before there was Angelina and Brad three was Liz and Eddie, and “Oh My Papa” and Debby Reynolds and all that jazz.

Ted Sorenson—One of the last of the Camelot knights, he was JFK’s speechwriter, noted author of “Kennedy” and “Ask not.”

Howard Zinn — He wrote history from the people’s standpoint—meaning native Americans, workers, the under-reported of American history.

John Wooden — Maybe the greatest college basketball coach ever—the UCLA Bruins’ streak of 85 straight wins still stands, as of this writing, until the Connecticut Women’s Basketball team breaks it soon.

Jinny Dean — Country songs and sausages.

Joan Sutherland—The opera diva owned the mad scene from “Lucia Di Lammermoor”

George Steinbrenner—he made the Yankees his own, in more ways than one.

Ellie — The world’s ugliest dog dies at 17.

Rants, Raves, Recriminations and Clowns
•

People of grace and the graceless: We have nothing but admiration for the Japanese people, especially those who suffered directly from the earthquake and the tsunami. No lootings, stoic bearing, grace under pressure. A nice word, too, for the media reporters who stayed and covered this disaster amid the obvious dangers, as well as those covering the tumultuous and continuing events in the Middle East and North Africa. They too placed themselves at risk and worked in dangerous conditions, and some of them paid the price.

Not so for the home front television newsies who keep thinking that all news is about us. How else to explain the amount of time allotted to a local mother and her son who were in Tokyo at the time of the quake, were scared by the swaying buildings, were ripped off at the airport and had to drive from all the way home from Chicago. No disrespect to the people interviewed, but doesn’t that seem a mite less than devastating when compared to the losses suffered by the victims of the disaster? Get a grip or get a gripe.

The scandal at City Hall…don’t get me started. Have you noticed that the wheels of government seem to be grinding like teeth? Now that Mayor Vincent Gray has hired a high profile lawyer and basically dumped his chief of staff—shortly before she was supposed to testify before the city council on hiring matters—things have not gotten better. They’ve just gotten quieter, except for Sulaimon Brown’s occasional forays on local television.

Brown appeared for a Fox TV News interview last week in which he again accused the mayor of being a crook. “The public needs to know that their mayor is a crook,” he said, more than once. Asked about his own status, he said he could not answer that question, or other questions about proof of his charges that he was paid by Gray aides and promised a job for going after Fenty at candidate forums.

He’s kept his concern about what the public needs to know to himself for quite some time, precisely to the time he was ousted from the $100,000 plus job he did end up getting.

Gray’s reactions to all this, and the furor that his hiring of friends and the children of friends at over-the-limit salaries remain strangely muffled and muted, to friends and foes alike.

In the meantime, there’s a growing power vacuum in city government and on the city council. Chairman Kwame Brown, with his own troubles, is becoming less of a factor in the dealings of the council by all accounts. And we hope Mayor Gray isn’t listening to Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry, who’s an expert on matters like these. According to a Washington Post columnist, he’s arguing that Gray is a victim of Fenty supporters on the council and that hiring friends and their children is no big deal. Maybe in Mayor Daley’s day it wasn’t, but it should be for a candidate who ran as a man whose integrity was above reproach.

Barry’s done this kind of thing before when he’s been under fire, or gotten caught on tape. It’s an old Barry game: we call it divide and con.

What it isn’t, and what Mayor Gray shouldn’t let it become, is a barrier to his most effective campaign slogan which is fast becoming an impossible dream: One City.

Now the city is faced with the possibility of investigation by the house oversight committee, which is licking its chops.

This isn’t one of those tempests in a teapot you can ride out. We’d still like to hear some straight, heartfelt and mindful talk from Mayor Gray. A lot of people who supported him based on his apparent merits are sorely disappointed. Among them appears to be Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who, at considerable political cost, supported his candidacy when her constituents were markedly against it.

Where is all this union bashing and anti-collective bargaining coming from? The governor of Wisconsin seems to have touched off both a concerted effort on the part of local governments to punish, debilitate or get rid of public employee unions, which has caused unions (what’s left of them) to rise up. So far the governor insists that he’s a deficit cutter, not a union buster, but he has not shown how busting public employee unions cut the deficit.

But hey, the GOP did manage to pass legislation to cut off funding for Public Broadcasting. Only a trillion and change to go. Way to go, tough guys.

Drawn by the slogan pachyderms and clowns, we ran up to the hill the other day thinking it was a meeting of GOP regulars and their Tea Party additions. Turns out it really was a parade of elephants and clowns. But I repeat myself.

Bed Bugs: Learnings from the Little Ones
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A teenage George Washington quickly abandoned an infested bed in the Shenandoahs more than 250 years ago. Today, area residents of all ages are jumping in their jammies. This region is already among the top ten areas hit by the recent bed bug infestation, and it’s predicted by an exterminator president to approach the notoriously overrun New York City in a year or two. Denizens disturbed by the news, a.k.a. “Attack of the Blood Sucking Bugs,” should take something FROM the creatures for a change.

A Little Perspective: Tell a formerly infested acquaintance that you might have bed bugs. She’ll gasp in horror and drop urgent work and needy kids for you, her new top priority. Bed bug crises were likely atop her and many others’ list of the year’s “Ten Worst” as they lost time, health and sleep in taxing bug battles.

In the past, those pests were more common. But they were less commented upon. Poverty, war and acute hunger relegated bed bugs to a smaller part of the daily struggle for those in World War II concentration camps, Toronto homeless shelters and Freetown refugee camps in Sierra Leone.

Even now bed bugs strike everyone, but they have a penchant for the poor despite their infrequent travel. So, for many of us, appreciation is in order.

Commitment to Fight for Freedom: As horrifying as the experience is, the bugs disappear from many Washingtonians’ homes in just weeks with proper treatment. For many, the hundreds to thousands of dollars – explicitly excluded in home insurance policies – is costly but affordable.

Not so for others. One third of DC children live in poverty (defined by a family of four earning
less than $22,000 a year). Sixteen percent of kids live in families earning half that, leaving no money to spare, according to Children’s Law Center Executive Director Judith Sandalow. The DC government and private landlords are usually responsible for vermin issues, but often unresponsive. Many of those families devoutly scour and clean – an approach woefully ineffective in wiping out rodents, rats, and roaches from multi-unit housing.

Ridding bed bugs may pose an even tougher challenge. Given the cost and complexity of eliminating them from apartment buildings, two kinds of property managers could emerge, says American Pest President Matt Nixon: “People who knock bed bugs back enough to rent the unit and those people who want to completely eliminate the problem.”

Legislation pending in New York, like requiring landlord disclosure and mandating home insurance options, seems to solve only part of the problem. So stay informed and active on the issue.

Save Your Stigma – The intense secrecy surrounding bed bugs may be true to the city’s huge defense presence.

Tenants don’t disclose to landlords fearing reprisal, and infested individuals are silent with schools, offices and friends for fear of the stigma. Landlords sign confidentiality agreements with exterminators and may not confide in their tenants and shoppers, fearing lost revenue and liability.

But such secrecy might speed the spread and deepen the shame.

Destigmatization comes from awareness, education and time. The DC government has launched a public service announcement and held training. More effective than such campaigns is often the coming out and commitment of a celebrity, like Magic Johnson with AIDS.

The infestation affects places more than people, so maybe the insect icon will be a building. Victoria’s Secret temporarily shuttered a Manhattan store, and high-end Bergdorf Goodman is being patrolled by bed bug-sniffing beagles. Until then (and after), be open and accepting.

Plan to Declutter: Bed bugs – and all vermin – love the dirtier living conditions and hiding places that come with clutter. While cleaning up won’t prevent or reduce an infestation, it could slow the spread and facilitate treatment.

Americans accumulate piles of paper and mounds of mish-mash. Adorable tchotchkes and a “really great deal” make them weak in the knees.

Abroad, a more minimalist aesthetic often prevails despite less space. And in Europe, biking and walking to stores often eliminates overloading as an option.

Shopping and splurging makes sense, of course, but be smart about it. Professional organizers
would advise such strategies as ditching one clothing item for each purchased, and cleaning different home areas periodically.

Avoid the graphic pictures of teeming bed bugs. But think about the how we can protect our sanity and our community to create constructive change from the critter crisis.

Guns and Battlecries
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-So, how’s that “reload” slogan workin’ out for you, Sarah?

I know, I know, it seems like piling on. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Everyone on the left has pointed out that Sarah Palin, the patron saint of the Tea Party, had drawn up a map in which several Democratic districts were special targets for extra effort in last year’s election. She marked these districts on a map with rifle sights.

One of them happened to be the Arizona district of Democratic moderate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, up for a tough third term election. Giffords, as we well know now, is hanging on precariously for her life in the aftermath of a horrific shooting in front of a Tucson Safeway Store. Six people were killed, and numerous others were injured. The shooter, a disturbed young man named Jared Loughner, apparently targeted Giffords, using an automatic Glock pistol.

Commentators and politicians are complaining that Palin and some of the more outspoken rhetoric dished out by Tea Party and conservative supporters contributed to an out-of-control atmosphere of confrontational politics in Washington and across the country.

I don’t mean to pick on Palin. All right, yes I do. In spite of her condolences, Palin has never owned up to the severity of her rhetoric and tactics or their possible consequences. It’s especially fair to single out Palin because, prophetically, Giffords herself did, calling her out for the “target” tactic. She insisted that Democrats and Republicans and political opponents had to work together to end the poisonous political and electoral climate. Giffords had voted for President Obama’s health care bill, for which she suffered the political consequence of a very close election victory.

I doubt that Giffords, who is a popular moderate in Congress, would suggest that the shooting was Palin’s fault, nor am I suggesting this. But irrational people (with guns) operate in an environment that is full of hateful and enabling rhetoric, which as historians we have seen in the American past.

That’s no excuse to tolerate such behavior now, or dismiss it as all in a day’s work, including President Obama’s “gun to the party” comment. We shouldn’t let Palin get away with it either. During the presidential election, her outrageous, stoke ‘em up rhetoric, did indeed stoke ’em up – to the point where one man, referring to Obama, shouted “kill him” during a rally. Palin said nothing.

And that’s the problem. Until we have tragedies like this, nobody says anything.

Maybe, if, for instance, the next time Bill Maher snides and snarks up about rednecks, we ought to deluge him with letters or e-mails. Maybe the next time another congressman calls the president a liar during a state of the union address, someone ought to yell “shut up,” and it would be good if it was a GOP leader.

If we wring our hands now, and also let the National Rifle Association spokesmen scare the beejesus out of every elected official in the land, it’s a little late. People have died. Freedom of Speech? Sure. But it doesn’t mean we can’t call the speech ugly and dangerous. Don’t let the stink pass as something windblown and out of our control. Don’t keep spewing out hate until there are battles in the streets, or some other guy with a fast-loading gun feels entitled to use it.

Of Budget Woes, Shutdown Woes, and Trump’s Born-Again Birther
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Earlier this week, I was talking to a neighbor of mine in Adams Morgan. The usual stuff—the Mayor, the budget, the at-large election, the government shutdown, the weather—almost everything but Charlie Sheen.

And like a lot of people in my neighborhood and across the city, he’s interested in the Mayor’s budget proposals—as well as the mayor’s perceived and otherwise problems. Or, as one of my other neighbors put it: “He hired the guy, that’s it.” And everyone thinks there’s going to be trouble over the budget.

Over what? The total of $187 million in spending cuts? Well, yeah. Gotta do it. The $18 million in cuts in education as well as public safety? Well, that’s troubling, sure.

How about the $113.4 million cuts in social services. You’d think that might be a little controversial, given that it’s the biggest percentage of cuts in the budget and is bound to hurt a lot of those who have the least already.

Alas, no. The biggest political struggle is going to be over the tax increases for those earning more than $200,000 a year.

That’s the big divider in the budget issue, the big combat zone when it comes to the city council, which has to approve the Mayor’s budget, and now likely to be a big topic on the campaign trail for the at-large city council seat.

It’s a city divider in a way, but maybe it shouldn’t be. The Mayor’s hiring scandal is a potential city divider and continues to be so. Councilwoman Mary Cheh’s hiring hearing commenced into part two this week, with the appearance of former Gray Chief of Staff Gerri Mason Hall, who was fired in the wake of controversy and investigations surrounding the hiring (and then firing) of Sulaimon Brown, the former mayoral candidate who has accused the mayor of “being a crook.”

According to written and television reports, Hall said that she had not spoken to the Mayor about hiring Brown, as she had been asked to do. Brown showed up at the hearing but left after he decided that it was “a witch hunt,” going to what he thinks might be the friendlier atmosphere of a U.S. Attorney’s investigation and a congressional committee.

Yet to be heard from are Brown and Lorraine Green, the Mayor’s close advisor and longtime close friend who ran his campaign, and who appears to be at the center of the controversy. Still not heard from in any definitive way is Gray himself, who has yet to make any aggressive attempts to clear up the unanswered questions surrounding the controversy.

When it comes to the budget, and to the budget battles on the hill which may yet (as of this afternoon) cause a government shutdown: if people with nothing are going to see drastic cuts in safety net services, why shouldn’t people with a little and a lot more than everybody else do a little and a lot more of their share? Of course, President Obama made this a campaign lynchpin and instead ended up having to extend President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy a little while longer. And tax cuts for the wealthy seems to be a core value for the proposed 2012 GOP version of a budget.

What is it about everybody sharing in sacrifice during hard times—you know, state budgets imploding, bankruptcy, high (if declining) unemployment—nobody is appalled about the idea of the rich getting richer and not even paying their fair share.

Why, in short, should General Electric, with profits in the billions for 2010, not pay ANY taxes? Because loopholes exist that allow them to do that? What would happen if you tried to end the loopholes? Stuck pig time, that’s what would happen. It’s all perfectly legal.

Where did we get this notion that raising taxes is a discussion and vote killer?

Why, in short, aren’t people doing Peter Finch’s out their window about this—and about CEO’s who have prospered mightily during the upward surge of the DOW, the fact that the only person going to jail during the economic collapse was Bernie Madoff? They’re angry all right—stoked by the Tea Party. They’re mad at teachers, policemen and firemen, not billionaires who outsource jobs that should have stayed here.

Not only that, but you rarely hear about corporate excesses—no taxes?—because corporations like GE own quite a bit of media outlets, notably NBC. According to a Washington Post story, the GE tax situation has rarely if ever been mentioned on the nightly news with Brian Williams. Shouldn’t Brian Williams say something about Brian Williams not saying something?

I’ve always felt when network news—especially millionaire star reporters, pundits and anchor people—tackles such issues as tax policy, they should first preface anything they might have to say by stating what their yearly income is—how many millions—and how they might profit or lose money from the tax policy under discussion.

Fat chance on that one. But the NFL football players, another group of overpaid millionaires, are on strike for their fair share of billions in television contract revenue, thus making a joke of the collective bargaining process that’s such a combative issue in the national politics.

And speaking of the nightly news on NBC, how about that Donald Trump? Two evenings ago a major segment of the news showed a poll, which showed that Trump, who cast about his usual rumors of a presidential run like pearls before media swine, is second among potential candidates for the GOP nomination, and something of a darling of the Tea Party.

Mind you, this was something like an 8% thing, right up there with such stalwarts as Romney, Palin, Bachman and Huckabee, and for something light years away. But still.

Turns out, as NBC political expert Chuck Todd pointed out, that Trump, who managed to go broke in Atlantic City just like all the other suckers, had a taped interview with Meredith Vierra set to air the next day on the Today Show (on NBC), in which he revealed himself to be something of a birther, asking the president to produce a birth certificate and expressing his doubts about Obama’s citizenship. This plays well with the tea party, but it’s not news. What it was was a plug for the Today Show disguised as news. I expect Billy Bush to someday become the anchor of the nightly news, because he’s really good at this sort of thing, with the added gift of having no shame whatsoever.

As I write this with one eye on the Internet, there’s still no word on a settlement on the hill. But they’re close. The only hitch: that dratted Planned Parenthood thing which is not about cutting spending and, of course, who gets the most blame if a shutdown occurs, which is not about spending either. It’s about politics and politicians. Only lawyers are detested more than politician, and on the hill, that’s a twofer.

Where is H.L. Mencken when we need him? Dead, still. And sit down, Bill Maher. You’re not it.

Stewart-Colbert Rally
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These photos provide a sampling of the estimated 215,000 people that attended a rally organized by Comedy Central talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Saturday October 30, 2010 on the Washington Mall. (All photos by Jeff Malet www.maletphoto.com) [gallery ids="99379,99395,99396,99397,99398,99399,99400,99401,99402,99403,99404,99405,99406,99394,99393,99392,99380,99381,99382,99383,99384,99385,99386,99387,99388,99389,99390,99391,99407" nav="thumbs"]