News & Politics

Marit Fosso • April 5, 2012

Grande Fète de la Francophonie

Friday March 23, 2012 at 7 p.m. | Tickets $35 | Event Website.

La Maison Francaise at the Embassy of France will host the Grande Fète de la Francophonie. More than 35 embassies will unite to present their cuisine and culture. Sample their food and beverages and check out their arts and crafts from 7 to 10 p.m, listen to a live concert at 8 p.m. and dance the night away when the volume gets turned up at 10 p.m.

Address

La Maison Francaise at the Embassy of France

4101 Reservoir Rd NW,

Washington, DC 20007

Family Days

March 24, 2012 at 10 AM to 4:30 PM & March 25, 2012 from 11 AM to 3:30 PM |Event Website

This weekend, the National Building Museum will present Family Days, a two-day festival of family entertainment. Experience fun activities, such as creating shoji screens and pop-up architecture, dressing up in traditional Japanese Costumes and interactive lessons on climate change and energy conservation.

Address

National Building Museum

401 F Street, NW

Washington DC

Girl Scouts in Georgetown Day

Saturday March 24, 2012 |10-11:30 AM | Costs $10 for scouts and tag-alongs and $3 for accompanying adults |Event Website

Scouts can explore architectural styles from around the world, tour Tudor Place and the Georgetown neighborhood and be creative in designing their own landscape and building.

Address

Tudor Place

31st Street NW

Washington, DC

Georgetown University’s Annual Spring Charity Fashion Show

Saturday March 24, 2012 at 7 PM | Tel: 734-717-6056 | Email: vmp22@georgetown.edu

Georgetown University will host its annual Spring Charity Fashion show. Proceeds will go towards the construction of a new kindergarten for the children of Roslin Orphanage in West Timor, Indonesia. There will be designer clothes, Georgetown models, raffles, live music and a beauty queen.

Address

Gaston Hall at Georgetown University

37th and O Streets, N.W

Washington D.C. 20057

Springtime Pops!

Saturday March 24, 2012 at 8 PM | Students get in for free; adults, $17; seniors, $11 | Event Website

The City of Fairfax Band will play a concert called “Springtime Pops!,” featuring a program of classical and popular selections in the format made popular by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

Address

Fairfax High School

3501 Rebel Run

Fairfax Va 22030.

Cherry Blossom Bike Ride & Cycle Expo

Sunday March 25, 2012 from 10 AM to 2 PM | Event Website

The Cherry Blossom Bike Ride & Cycle Expo will take place in Georgetown. There will be rides along the Capital Crescent Trail and educational demonstrations and vendors in front of Jack’s Boathouse on Water Street under Key Bridge. The event will benefit the American Diabetes Association

Address

Georgetown Waterfront Park on Water Street.

Opening Ceremony

Sunday March 25, 2012 5 to 6:30 PM | The event is free but requires that you register online in advance | Event Website

Opening ceremony for the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The ceremony presents performances that tell the story about how the gift of trees turned into the annual festival.

Address

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center

801 Mt Vernon Place NW

Washington, DC 20001

Benetton Spring Fashion Show

Sunday March 25, 2012 from 6 to 8 PM | Tel: 202-625-2183 | Event Website

A VIP Fashion Show at the United Colors of Benetton Store in Georgetown. See the new spring collections, enjoy refreshments and shop the spring/summer collection, enjoying a 20-percent discount.

Address

The United Colors of Benetton Store

1200 Wisconsin Ave., N.W,

Washington, D.C. 20007.

Michelle Kingston •

Bright blue skies and sunshine-filled days have most Washingtonians walking or biking to work, leaving their four-wheel gas guzzlers back at home.

With the increase of foot traffic, the District of Columbia government has considered fining pedestrians who use electronic devices, such as cell phones and iPods, while crossing the street.

“Every day in Washington, sidewalks and crosswalks are filled with people who are plugged in to another environment — the ether,” says the Pedestrian Safety Committee of the Council for Court Excellence, a civic group that works to improve the administration of justice in the District.

According to the council, 12 percent of D.C. residents walk to and from work on a normal basis, which is twice the national average. With the unseasonably warm temperatures this month, that percentage is likely to have been even higher.

These walkers are plugged in during their commutes on foot and, according to the CCE’s Pedestrian Safety Committee report, “Walkers using electronics are bumping, slipping, falling and harming themselves through inattention.”

The report recommends that the District Council consider banning the use of electronics not only by walkers but by bikers as well. If people are listening to their iPods at full volume or in the middle of an intense conversation, they are not giving the road their full attention.

The University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center recently published a study indicating that the number of headphone-wearing pedestrians killed or injured by motor vehicles and trains have more than tripled in six years.

Nothing has been set in stone at this time to prevent more injuries and deaths, but Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, said the time is now to “aggressively enforce pedestrian laws, and pedestrians need to be educated about the hazards of walking distracted.”

Robert Devaney •

Saturday’s misty morning seemed nature’s soft rebuff to Friday’s 80-degree day at the Tidal Basin under the cherry blossoms. A sunny walk near the monuments around the cherry trees with petals at their peak was to be followed by the next day’s climb along the stones into the monumental tower of Washington National Cathedral.

A one-day event was announced by the cathedral for a “tower climb” on March 24 to show that the central tower — its ecclesiastical name is Gloria in Excelsis Tower — was “deemed to be structurally sound and safe for visitors. The tower climbs have been a semi-regular tradition for many years.” It was the first time since the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that visitors were allowed into the central tower, the highest geographical point in Washington, D.C. Four teams of about 80 persons took separate morning climbs.

With volunteer guides to direct and comfort, we began our 45-minute tour in the cathedral’s crypt at the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea and ascended approximately 333 steps to the tower’s bell ringing floor. The stairs, whether of stone or metal, spiraled and challenged some a bit. And whether physical or mental — “I have issues,” said one woman — all made it.

There were stops to look out narrow windows, doors or balconies to see the sides of the one of the largest churches in the world with some of its pinnacles missing and masonry cracked because of the earthquake. Our heavenly view was constricted by the fog to the cathedral’s close and parts of Wisconsin Avenue and Woodley Road, but we were touring through the holy hollow of master work that went on for 83 years. Only in 1990 was the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, a national sacred place of many celebrations and memorials, considered officially completed, its final stone set. Now, with the earthquake damage, the cathedral estimates that it will take 10 years and $20 million dollars to fix the cracks and replace lost finials, pinnacles and other stonework. Only $2 million has been raised for the restoration.

In the bell room, ringers of the Washington Ringing Society showed us the ropes to the massive peal bells above us, heard often up and down Wisconsin Avenue. Spiral stairs above that room are now closed but were used to get to the observation deck years ago. Nevertheless, out on the balcony the view could go down to the Potomac — though not on this drizzly day. Descending to the cathedral’s carillon room, carillonneur Edward Nassor put on another show. Happily, he did not ring the largest bells, closest to the floor and bigger than his visitors.

Moving through the transept, we looked down on the netting that protects worshippers from falling mortar or dust and the rose window unobscured and prepared to climb to the ground floor. Soon enough, we were back on earth, our glimpse of heaven within and without veiled in the fading mist. [gallery ids="100640,100653,100652,100651,100650,100649,100648,100647,100646,100645,100644,100643,100642,100641,100654" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

This is what it’s like to be in Washington in the spring, punchy, yelled at, bowled ever, embraced, cajoled, and awed by history almost everywhere you go.

If you come here to see the sites and sights, history is purposefully and permanently here in all the monuments, past, present and soon to be erected.

If you come here to be in the nation’s capital and ingest the atmosphere of what’s on the nightly news you may get lucky and get more than you bargained for. If you came here to let your passions burn out loud, your feelings spill into parks and streets, your face on television as an army of many on the very same nightly news, well, here and there you are.

And if you want to be a part of something enduring and fragile, all at once and steeped in history, well, there’s that, too.

All sorts of history was going on over a Washington weekend and is still going on. On a Saturday, you could catch a large group of demonstrators at Freedom Plaza, many of them young black men dressed in hoodies to protest the death of as 17-year-old unarmed Florida teenager shot to death nearly a month ago by a self-appointed member of a neighborhood watch in a gated community. The voices were loud, impassioned and as clear as an open wound, even if the larger issues were not so easy to decipher.

You could go over to Capitol Hill (and to the Department of Health and Services) and see the preparations as the country’s highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, prepared to take on the landmark Health Care legislation, called ObamaCare, passed more than two years ago and now under question on constitutional grounds. Tea party demonstrators were already here, demonstrating at HEW, while other folks prepared to get in line for the limited seats available to spectators.

Down at the Tidal Basin, on Friday, history was being honored again — in that unique way that is both immediately, beautifully, sweetly, mysteriously, in the here and now and firmly rooted in the commemorative past.

The cherry blossoms, first presented as a gift to the United States from Japan 100 years ago were in full bloom. And they were early. And there was a storm coming, a “monster storm,” a “huge storm” as told by hyper-ventilating, vibrating weather people and television news in apocalyptic tones who expressed an uninvited opinion that the cherry blossoms were in serious danger.

As if anybody needed that kind of panic-inducing encouragement, everybody showed up. It’s fair to say they showed up in the thousands, on a sunny, brilliant, warm day as far removed from sturm und drang as you can possibly be.

I went to see the cherry blossom with my colleague Robert Devaney. I, too, felt some panic at the dire predictions. So, I feared that my usual penchant for procrastination might have dire results. The cherry blossoms might be gone, for all I knew, something that could not be said about demonstrators for justice or lines at the Supreme Court.

And so, for the first time since I moved in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, I went to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms in full, fabulous, fantastic bloom. Regrets? Boy, do I have a few. Ashamed? I certainly am.

Because the cherry blossoms themselves, and the festival that has evolved out of the gift and the flowering of white and pink blossoms, and that ballet-like swirling dance they do, making you blissfully blinded by the white, as they twirl like bashful multiple twins to earth, is one spectacularly good reason to be alive.

I’ve always seen the pictures, items on the web, accounts by word of mouth, local TV segments, and I have gone to National Cherry Blossom Festival events, such as parades, exhibits, shows, kites, and all things Japanese in America. The festival that has sprung up gets bigger every year until it runs the hopeful course of the coming of the buds, the blossoms and the dying of the light blossoms, a process that will perhaps be a bit shorter this too-sunny and warm year, although the festival will not.

But, as the song goes, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.”

I feel, after all, blessed by blossoms, and the spirit that they so lightly carry. We walked past the Washingtonia of the still slightly wounded-by-earthquake Washington Monument and the future site of the Museum of African-American History. And, as the poet Walt Whitman so sung of ourselves: the world’s humanity arrived pretty much all at once. They jostled for walking space, laid out blankets, kissed and made up, let their hot dogs drink, maneuvered their baby carriages, managed their canes and fragile bones.

All of us walked in splendor.

Across the paths to were the site of where the first trees were planted, you could see the thousands, and the packed blossoms straining successfully to be a vista edging up to either side of the Jefferson Memorial. Choppers in the sky — black ops? — paddle boats on the river, a dangerously flirtatious female duck making her final choice among four or five male admirers who appeared to be trying to drown her. Tough love indeed.

Everybody posed. Everybody clicked the age of the digital camera click — up for the blossom closeup, back for the larger world view, snap, snap. Get the girls lacrosse team, the park cop on her horse, the children running or sleeping.

And there was the group that had laid out a picnic cloth, friends, neighbors, acquaintances and an artist painting. One was a couple who live in Paris: he, American, a retired TWA pilot who once saw a biplane land in a field near his town and never forgot it; she, his instant French love-of-his-life.

Perhaps influenced by his surroundings, he said, “I got to say it. I’ve had a wonderful life.” He hushed my expressions of worry about getting older. “You’re an amateur,” he said. He was 91.

This is the way it was on a Friday in Washington, in the sudden peak time of the cherry blossoms and many other things. There are, I’m sure, very good and always mysterious reasons for believing in God, a deity, a creator, a higher being. The atheists or non-believers among us who were also gathering in Washington this weekend had found none. [gallery ids="100655,100656,100657,100658,100659,100660" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

The murderer of Vladimir Djordjevic, a manager of the strip club Good Guys on Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park, was sentenced to 35 years in prison last week by the U.S. District Court, according to the Associated Press.

Vasile Graure attacked Djordjevic in November 2007 after being thrown out of Good Guys for photographing one of the dancers. Graure then shortly returned to the entrance of the club and poured gasoline on Djordjevic and ignited it, causing burns over 90 percent of the manager’s body. Graure was found guilty of assault and arson four years ago and given a 30-year sentence in prison.

According to WTOP, Djordjevic had undergone dozens of painful surgeries since the attack and testified from his hospital bed by videotape during Graure’s first trial. Djordjevic died from his injuries in May 2010; Graure was convicted of murder in January.

Michelle Kingston •

Behind her ice-blue eyes, Jill Homan — who is vying with Teri Galvez to be Republican National Committeewoman for Washington, D.C. — has aspirations to bring more red into D.C. by connecting voters from all over the city, east to west.

“I think we can improve our relationships with existing Republicans,” Homan said. “Going door to door has been very beneficial. People see that there is a vibrant party and that we have the opportunities to succeed.”

Homan believes the District can improve its local Republican Party in three ways. First, she said, is connecting with the base. Second is bringing new residents moving to Washington into the Republican Party, and third is taking advantage of the opportunity to connect with voters east of the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8.

These two wards have severely high unemployment rates. “It’s something like 50 percent for ex-offenders,” Homan said. “I would argue that their leaders have failed them.” Unemployment rates for Wards 7 and 8 are 17 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

Having recently held a Black History Month event in Ward 7 with D.C Council candidate Ron Moten, Homan heard firsthand from the Republican voters in the community who are looking for change.

“They say, ‘Why can’t we have more sit-down restaurants nearby? Why is Denny’s one of the only options? Why can’t we have a bank over here?’ ” she said.

Homan also expressed her frustration for those more concerned with legalizing marijuana or conserving the wildlife over more immediate issues. “We need to be equally concerned with lack of jobs, lack of access to healthcare and difficulty with transportation.”

A Penn Quarter homeowner, Homan worked for former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, when he is a representative on Capitol Hill as his press secretary. She earned two master’s degrees from Duke University and co-founded Javelin 19 Investments, a commercial real estate investment company.

“Being able to provide my insight was helpful to people there,” she said. “I am excited, come April 4, to continue.”

If she is elected, her first plan of action is to get some sleep, Homan said laughing. After that, she hopes to get the leadership together. “Everybody, even my opponent,” she said, can “talk constructively about how we can move forward together. I need to take the momentum, the information and the support and transfer that to other campaigns to get more people voting and staying engaged.”

Click Here to Read Michelle Kingston’s interview of Teri Galvez.

Robert Devaney •

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, came to Georgetown University March 28, the day after he cut his campaign staff by a third and spoke to a crowd of well-mannered students at Gaston Hall.

In a seemingly new phase of his campaign, Gingrich was forceful, relaxed, passionate and academic — and still under Secret Service protection. He behaved as a happy warrior of ideas transformed into a 21st-century thought leader, as they say in seminars, ready to speak with anyone. Before the speech, he spoke to student journalists about his “steamlined,” not suspended, campaign, according to the Georgetown Voice.

After citing the dysfunctional political life in this “imperial capital,” Gingrich said, “I have not done a very good job as a candidate.”

Nevertheless, Gingrich lit into his list of America’s best ideas and achievements. He took students and others in the university’s historic hall through parts of his stump speech that became a lesson on history, civics and sensibility. He paid homage and mind to America’s versions of value, innovation and exceptionalism.

Drawing first on the very American stories of Captain John Smith at Jamestown and the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, Gingrich exhorted all to solve the problems of our times, as Americans have in the past. We are “smart by doing something, not by tenure.”

He invoked the name of Abraham Lincoln. Read the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address slowly, he softly advised.

Gingrich also ran through an array of improvements to make America better, smarter that made sense to him on the following: a restrained judiciary, Social Security, neurological research, government efficiency, respect for a higher power and more.

“Ideas matter,” he said, “for people . . . and for reporters.” The former House Speaker said he fights the threats of those overly secular and cynical and discerns the “denseness of Washington that resists innovation.”

During the question-and-answer period, a student, who had been a janitor, said he had felt insulted by Gingrich’s remarks about janitors from months ago. The candidate replied that his daughters had been janitors at his church. Another asked Gingrich, “Why aren’t politicians like you?” [gallery ids="100710,120092,120087" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet •

This week the Supreme Court heald hearings on the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature health care law, which attracted the attention of proponents of both sides of the issue. View our photos of the activity surrounding the Court on March 27-28 by clicking on the photo icons below. (photos by Jeff Malet)

View additional photos by clicking here. [gallery ids="100706,100693,100692,100691,100690,100689,100688,100687,100686,100685,100694,100695,100696,100705,100704,100703,100702,100701,100700,100699,100698,100697,100684,100683,100670,100669,100668,100667,100666,100665,100664,100663,100662,100671,100672,100673,100682,100681,100680,100679,100678,100677,100676,100675,100674,100661" nav="thumbs"]

Emma Watters •

Lights across the world will go dark for Earth Hour 2012. Support the
World Wildlife Fund for Nature’s “I Will if You Will” campaign by
saving energy and flipping those switches.

For more information, EarthHour.org

Gary Tischler •

Inside, in that majestic, bone-white building, men and women in robes and the best lawyers in the United States were in the midst of a historic debate on the merits, demerits and future of President Barack Obama’s historic health care proposal, passed by Congress two years ago.

Outside near the steps, the masses—many of them highly vocal members of the Tea Party—had gathered to conduct their own debates, large and small, a quartet here, two people finger pointing there, some being interviewed by the gathered media come to this place like bees to flowers.

From the written and televised reports of the three-day review and legal discussions—an unprecedented effort for a piece of major legislation being considered by the Supreme Court—Obama’s health care plan was not faring well, especially the controversial mandate which purports that everyone must buy health insurance or be penalized. And so, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dug in, listened and asked questions and made comments which were studied like runes by the media and opponents and proponents of the health care plan.

Outside were people like Lenny and Dave, who argued vehemently on a first-name basis, and other loud or muted voices weighing in. But by the steps, and certainly at a nearby rally of conservative opponents, which included speeches by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, who talked about budget cuts, debt and freedom, it was clear that the anti’s outnumbered the bill’s supporters.

Tuesday, and no doubt Wednesday, and for sure Monday, was an ongoing replay of the nation’s great divide over the issue, a divide which had all but given birth to the tea party and resulted in the Democratic Party’s loss of the House of Representatives.

Nothing had changed: Tea Party demonstrators pretty much talked and behaved as you might have expected. They argued with some remnants of the occupiers which were still in Washington, they boiled down the health care bill to its mandate provision and, like the GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, rolled up into a one-word cause: freedom.

No such simplicities were evidenced at the Supreme Court case where judges at worst tried to critique the mandate as being the same as being forced to buy food that’s good for you. But everyone inside acknowledged that the bill was much too complicated, big and long, to fully be understood in all of its details.

That did not deter the debates outside, where everything squeezed itself into slogans (OMG-Obamacare-Must-Go) or the classic liberal/conservatives divides and a growing sense of utter frustration and unreasonableness. Two men were arguing about the debt, about the bill, about the growth of government. “I don’t care, Dave,” a man holding up a “don’t touch my health care” sign said, gesturing with his hands. “I don’t know what Reagan did, I don’t care if he did, or what the deficit was then, you’re still wrong. Understand that you’re completely wrong.”

You could see another woman arguing with a young black man, re-interpreting the Civil War and its causes by suggesting that slavery had little if anything to do with it. “The North wanted the South’s money, that’s what it was,” she said. “They had a contract, and they chose to leave it.”

If you’re of a conciliatory, negotiating mind and have your own opinions about health care and the mandate, the tea party folks are a tough sell. To them, it’s all about freedo and big government and how it infringes on said freedoms. And if that argument fails by itself, well, you know, they have a direct pipeline to the hearts and minds of the founding fathers and what they intended. Obviously, they have not seen “1776.”

At the rally, the crowd seemed to sense a wavering of support for what has now been embraced by both sides as Obamacare. The green “Don’t Tread On Me” signs and the “Don’t touch my health care” signs stuck out, as did a sign portraying Obama as the last in a long line of prominent Socialists like Mao Tse Tung, Stalin and Lenin and Marx. Meanwhile, one of the surviving Socialists was at that time having a chat with the Pope in Cuba.

It’s hard to stay out of the talk and just listen to it. The Tea Party is not made up of strangers—they look exactly like many of the out of work teachers and civil servants who came here for the first big rally of the Occupy DC movement. They look like the ruddy salt of the earth, with bills to pay and children to raise (one man was holding a sleeping baby, and pushing a double-baby carriage). The difference is that these people exercising their rights to freely argue and say any preposterous things that come to mind are difficult to talk with on any issue at hand—not because they’re right, but because they’re angry and afraid. They’re angry—like the rest of us—about just about everything, and afraid of the government. Often, their ideas about the government of the United States resembles something that was dropped on us from outer space, intent on controlling every aspect of our lives, and that the president—especially this president—is an alien stranger, and certainly not a real American.

It’s likely that inside the court, the conversation was more muted, and the hope exists among reasonable folks that the three-day talks and the subsequent deliberations will produce a reasonable outcome that’s not purely political. The hope now appears slim: it should be remembered that this court by a 5-4 margin produced a ruling that has resulted in the proliferation of Super Pacs in the 2012 election, a result that’s had a huge effect on the political landscape.

Click Here to View Jeff Malet’s photo Coverage the Supreme Court hearings