News & Politics

Rebekah Richards • July 26, 2011

Over the past few months Georgetown has seen many businesses open, a few close down, and some move to new locations. Be sure to get all the information before embarking on your holiday shopping in Georgetown!

On Wisconsin Ave., Georgetown has added some sugar, spice and everything nice. The walls of Georgetown Candy, located at 1417 Wisconsin Ave., are covered with all different assortments of sweets and treats for the holidays.

The Tea and Spice Exchange, located at 1069 Wisconsin Ave., offers a huge range of different spices and seasonings, perfect for the Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas ham. You can bet they have those rare spices and unique salts that you might see in a cookbook but wouldn’t know where to find. Their tea selection is an international bazaar of flavors and styles.

Muncheez Mania, at 1071 Wisconsin Ave., right next to The Tea and Spice Exchange, offers homemade fare late into the night. Grab sandwiches, salads, wraps and crepes until 4a.m., when they finally close up.

At 1237 Wisconsin Ave., Madewell, a store in the J Crew chain, opened offering great styles at great prices and perfect gifts this holiday season for women.

Ugg Australia opened a store at 1249 Wisconsin Ave. in late September, just in time for the fall boot craze.

Ed Hardy reopened after closing last spring, bringing back their funky styles to 1250 Wisconsin Ave.

Not too far from Wisconsin Avenue in the Georgetown Park Mall, The Dandelion Patch opened, offering designer stationary and much more with which to announce your Christmas party or to spice up your Christmas newsletter to friends.

At 3221 M St., Barbour opened offering clothes for the country lifestyle with great outerwear for the winter. Hu’s Wear expanded their space on M Street, offering more unique designer items for women.

Cadey’s Alley welcomes Alessi, which sells classic designs for household items. They have a Christmas guide to inspire ideas for those on your Christmas list with a keen eye for home aesthetics. Also in Cadey’s Alley, Design Within Reach, at 3306 M St., expanded their space, where they have modern furnishings to update your home for your holiday parties.

City Sports will soon open a DC flagship store at 3338 M. St. in Cadey’s Alley for all your active-wear needs.

At 1211 Potomac St., the infamous headquarters of the controversial Philly Pizza, Go Fresh opened its doors, serving sandwiches and salads, with unique vegetarian options, including choice baked potatoes with assorted toppings. And while the owners of Go Fresh are the same folks who owned Philly Pizza, it’s safe to say this won’t stir up half the commotion.

P Street saw both closings and openings. At 3236 P St. Ella Rue opened, offering overstock or consignment designer apparel at a low cost. Proper Topper, an accessory and gift store, closed, but there is still a location at Dupont Circle for your holiday shopping. Quantum Fitness closed too, so prepare to work off that Thanksgiving turkey elsewhere.

Formerly located at 1614 Wisconsin Ave. Presse Bookstore closed suddenly in early October, but is still selling online. Bandolino, a shoe store focused on comfortable stylish shoes, formerly located at 1329 Wisconsin Ave., has also closed.

Many are still awaiting the opening of Sprinkles Cupcakes at 3015 M St., which is scheduled to open in January, and Serendipity3 for more unique desert options in Georgetown.

At 2101 L St., nutritional chef Annie Leconte, who attained her MBA from GW, has opened her first restaurant, Litestars, which serves up soup drinks, salads and more. The restaurant aims to serve functional, nutritious foods—perfect for lunch while trying to stay trim through the regular holiday gluttony.

And last but not least, congratulations to Rockland’s Barbeque and Grilling Company, at 2418 Wisconsin Ave., for 20 successful years of cooking up their now-famous, fingerlickin’ neighborhood barbeque. [gallery ids="99564,104789" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

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.

Gary Tischler •

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.

Gary Tischler •

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.

David Post •

My company is a small business. I think. We have approximately 25 employees. Even in our hometown Salisbury, North Carolina most people have never heard of us.

I’m not sure what the word “small” means, but compared to most companies in the US, we may be considered big. The IRS reports that approximately 6 million corporations, 3 million partnerships, and over 20 million proprietorships file tax returns. Corporations make the most money, have the best stats, and hire the most people.

Of the 6 million corporations, only 160,000, or 7%, have more assets than we have, and only 35,000, or 1.5%, have more sales than we do. Are we a small business? I certainly think so. Our employees think so. I wake up every day wondering if CVS or Walgreens or Walmart or all those other huge pharmacies are going to squash us.

So, I feel pretty much in the middle of this tax debate that is using small businesses as the bait for two hot tax issues. First, should taxes go up by 3% for people making over $250,000? Second, should employers have a payroll tax holiday if they hire new employees? Clearly, those tax breaks would increase my profits a little, but would they encourage me to invest and hire more employees? Absolutely not. Will it affect the 2012 election? Probably.

“Small businesses are the engine of job growth,” we’re told. Talking heads say that there are 700,000 small businesses earning over $250,000. On average, every county in the country has 200 small businesses earning that amount. In Virginia, Maryland, and DC, that’s reasonable, but drive 75 miles in any direction to an “average” county. Butch Cassidy was equally perplexed: “Who are those guys?” Most of those 700,000 small businesses earning over $250,000 are doctors and lawyers. Are they the engines for job growth?

Perhaps a brief tax history might help. In the early 1970s, Congress passed a 10% income tax surcharge to pay for the Vietnam War. Back then, both political parties were fiscally responsible, cooperative, and voted for that tax. It was pretty simple: compute your tax and add 10%. (Did you know that North Carolina has an add-on tax now?) If your tax bill was $1,000 and you had paid in $1,300, you would have gotten a $300 refund. But with 10% added to your tax bill, making it $1,100, your refund was only $200.

Over the next 20 years, taxes were cut on the idea that deficits would go down because economic growth would more than offset the revenue loss. Indeed, there was economic growth but deficits went up. President Reagan criticized President Carter’s $50 billion deficits, but his budgets (the President, not Congress, makes out the budget) were above $300 billion.

In 1988, the first President Bush, said, “Read my lips. No new taxes,” but knowing he had to be fiscally responsible, he raised taxes. In 1993, President Clinton raised tax rates at the top of the income scale about 3%. Over the next eight years, the economy grew like never before, tax receipts increased, and deficits disappeared. Microsoft, Apple, Coke, and many new and old companies grew like weeds despite higher taxes. The stock market tripled.

In 2001, the second President Bush passed a 10 year tax cut that is scheduled to expire at the end of this month. Today, compared to 10 years ago, the stock market is the same and unemployment is double.

Consequently, the United States now faces a huge and growing deficit problem. We spend $3 for every $2 we collect in taxes. There is waste, for sure, but not that much. Those dreaded “earmarks” are less than 1/10 of 1% of the entire budget. Contrary to popular belief, Congress cannot eliminate earmarks to balance the budget. In fact, just walking out of our wars and then eliminating the entire defense department completely wouldn’t balance the budget. Nor would eliminating Social Security completely. This is a really big problem.

Like students waiting until the last moment to prepare for exams, Congress has waited until the last moment to deal with the expiring tax cuts. (Frankly, this tax debate should be part of a larger debate about the entire budget.) President Obama is arguing that the Bush tax cuts should be kept for those making under $250,000. That will increase borrowing and the deficit by $2.7 trillion. The Republicans and some Democrats want to extend the tax cuts permanently which will increase borrowing and the deficit $3.7 trillion. So, this argument is about whether to borrow another $2.7 trillion or $3.7 trillion. Eliminating those pesky earmarks saves about $30 billion, or .001% of those amounts.

Why borrow these extra trillions? To help small businesses — like ours — hire people and grow. If my company earns an extra $10,000, these tax cuts save us $300. If Congress also passes a payroll tax holiday and we hire another employee for, say, $25,000, it will save us another $1,200. I’m not fond of taxes, but if the government cuts my company’s taxes $1,500, is that why my company is going to hire another employee? Not at all. We hire new employees when she or he is going to help our business, not to save $1,500 in tax.

Growing a business is about growing a business, not taxes. (Of course, we could move to the Bahamas or Ireland and reduce our taxes, but small businesses can’t do that.) No business decides to grow or not grow because of taxes. No business decides to hire a new employee or not because of taxes. Why doesn’t Congress understand that?

US Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.” No more. Now, we talk trillions.

This debate is silly. Ignore the rhetoric. It’s about how much more are we going to borrow and increase the deficit. It is not about reducing the deficit by a dime.

David Post is the owner of a small business that was founded in Washington, DC and is on Inc. Magazines list of the fastest growing companies in the US. He was a professor at American University and Georgetown for 10 years. Contact him at: editorial@Georgetowner.com

Amos Gelb •

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.

Amos Gelb •

There is a new level of irony in Juan-gate at NPR. Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss, who spent nearly three decades at NPR, recently “resigned” over the issue, and for CEO Vivian Schiller withholding her bonus. Journalist Juan Williams, whose mishandled firing led to these actions, built a career on brilliant journalism, including a nomination for a Pulitzer and his seminal work on civil rights in “Eyes on the Prize.” The irony is that his case has become a distraction from keeping the eyes on NPR’s true prize.

Lost in the accusations and responses about a news organization gone awry is the bigger existential threat to NPR. Although NPR’s listeners are abundant and loyal (bigger than the combined nightly network broadcasts by some measures), and its endowment flush, we should remember that Vivian Schiller took over an organization with a business model that is fundamentally broken. Schiller’s task is nothing less than reinventing the NPR business.

Here is the problem. NPR is not a broadcaster. For all its own fundraising and other undertakings, it relies heavily on local public radio stations to pay to air its programs. But NPR sees a major part of its future online. Yet if the “big money” broadcasts, such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are put live online, then there is no reason for listeners to tune into local stations or their websites to hear them. Obviously, that would eat into the listener loyalty to, say, WAMU (DC’s public radio station) and effect how much listeners will feel compelled to send into the legendary pledge campaigns, which make up a sizable part of their annual budgets and ability to pay NPR’s fees. Furthermore, these local stations control NPR’s board, a development after the stations saved NPR from shutting down in bankruptcy in the 1980s.

Schiller has a history of building new successful media business models, from CNN, to Discovery-Times documentary network, to leading the New York Times newspaper into its current online incarnation. But this is her biggest challenge yet. To be successful at NPR, she needs to find a way to reconcile seeming mutually irreconcilable needs and get the local stations to go along. Withholding her bonus and forcing management changes because of this one personnel issue doesn’t help in that crusade.

NPR has long had a checkered past in its handling of human resource issues. But wherever one stands on Juan-gate, if you are in any way invested in NPR’s existence, there is a far bigger prize to be focused on today. Survival. [gallery ids="99586,104913" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

In this age of wall-to-wall news, the results of a special April 26 election to fill a vacated at-large city council seat in Washington, DC is a small matter, probably not worthy of national attention, and barely noted even by city media.

Yet, in Washington, the election on Tuesday, won by the ever-present, two-term city council member (1998-2006) Vincent Orange, is all of a piece. There is a serendipitous, recurring quality to the campaign, which could be said to have begun in early January when Sekou Biddle, a board of education member, was appointed to the seat vacated by Kwame Brown, who had handily beaten Orange in a race for the city council chairmanship back in November.

Our city is the poster child for the notion that all politics is local. People who live here live in distinct neighborhoods, in areas with distinct qualities, atmospheres, residents and histories. However, the elephants in the Washington neighborhoods are the White House next to Lafayette Park, the Capitol Building, and the people who work in it. Those two places, the members of Congress, the government and the President all make us the center of the world, and entangle our daily lives and local politics in larger national and international issues.

The at-large council race didn’t concern too many people in the beginning, nor did that state of mind change—in the final tally of votes, it showed that 9% of eligible voters took part. It did not concern Mayor Vincent Gray or Chairman Kwame Brown much, except that they supported Biddle for the interim appointment, which in the end did not help Biddle.

Folks did come out to throw their hat into the ring: Sekou Biddle, of course; Bryan Weaver from Ward 1, a liberal community activist with smarts to spare; the youthful Republican Patrick Mara, who had once run for an at-large seat before, in which he managed to beat veteran Carol Schwartz in the GOP primary only to lose to well-know independent Michael Brown; Josh Logan, the young, Hispanic Fenty operative; and inevitably, there was Vincent Orange, not in the least deterred by his previous electoral setbacks.

The campaign did not really get rolling until the last two months, with forum after forum popping up all over the city. In such a race, barring some shocking revelations, forums are the medium and the message rolled into one.

Elsewhere things were not so quiet. Mayor Vincent Gray’s inauguration had been a big success, a one-city dream launched in spite of a looming budget crisis. However, things unraveled after that. Unsuccessful mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown unleashed a stink bomb of a scandal with charges of payoffs and job promises by the Gray Administration, all the while the council investigating Gray’s hiring practices. Kwame Brown, meantime, had his own troubles over ordering up a fully loaded SUV for himself amid questions about missing money from a 2008 campaign.

Investigations, as they say, are ongoing.

The scandals, as they are now lumped, had an effect on the campaign, which eventually had the candidates attacking the ethics of the city council, the administrations, and calling for ethics reform. The once-red-hot education reform issue was still talked about, but at the national level.

Bigger news tends to flatten council races and local governance: the crisis in Japan sucked the air out of local matters for weeks, while the Middle East spring of revolutions and upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and other places took up everything else for a while. Today there is a daily standing headline in the Washington Post: “Turmoil in the Middle East.”

Besides causing all kinds of havoc in the White House, there is this: the Exxon Station at the end of Lanier Place in Adams Morgan is now selling regular gasoline at $4.45 a gallon. No one knows exactly why, except Glenn Beck, who says it’s the Federal Reserve that’s at the bottom of all financial plagues.

During the courses of the campaign, we have lived through Ann Hathaway’s Oscar gown changes, Lady Ga Ga, Justin Bieber (one of Time Magazine’ s l00 most influential people), and yes, Charlie Sheen and one more yes, Donald Trump.

Lest you think this is of no importance and without connection to politics or daily lives: Sheen, full of tiger blood and whatnot, had a tour date at the DAR, was an hour late, and got a full-scale police escort which he tweeted about. Not only that, but he agreed with Donald Trump that he had problems with the president’s birth certificate.

We will survive Donald Trump, of course. The president has now seen fit to present his long-form birth certificate, berating Trump and the birthers for “the silliness.” Trump is not satisfied, but he wants to run for president anyway. This in spite of the fact that he appeared to have no clue what the constitution said about privacy.

You can suspect that the only time Trump is being genuine is when he stands in front of the mirror in the morning and says “I love you.”

Trump has had low points, but as one GOP said, “you can’t fall off the floor.” Actually, Charlie Sheen proved that you can. He was dumped by one of his porn star consorts.

Then there was the budget crisis—not ours, which is coming up in a hearing soon—but the nation’s. There was a big scare covered to within an inch of its reality by the local press: What will happen if the government shuts down?

Well, for one thing, your trash doesn’t get picked up, which surprised many people who did not know how closely we were sleeping with the enemy.

A breathless near-midnight watch produced a tentative agreement signed on by the President and both parties (with major grumbling by the Tea Party house members). For the District, the result was a kick in the butt: the loss of abortion funding, the inclusion of a Boehner private school funding project, the loss of funding for needle exchange programs. The mayor and a number of council members were so incensed that they got themselves arrested in protest, and were forced to stay incarcerated until 3 a.m.

Mistrust was running so strong however, that many locals saw this as a political ploy, especially for Gray who needed a good showing somewhere. Biddle also took the jail route. Ward 8 councilman Marion Barry abstained this time.

You can see how the shadow of the budget debate might darken the thoughts of local politicians. What will the city be forced to give up next? Baseball tickets? Home Rule?

With the election looming fast, interest did not materialize in any strong way.

If campaign signs are a measure of community interest, this is what it looked like on Lanier Place: Several signs for Weaver (he is, after all a local boy), one for Biddle, a number of those ubiquitous “Don’t’ Tread on DC” signs (which now reek of irony, given the voter turnout), and a goodly number of “Scoop your Dog Poop” signs.

The election was held with another horrible and deadly weather story in progress in the South. The turnout was low. Vincent Orange was back on the council.

So it goes. All the news that wraps around itself.