Category Archives: All Politics is Local

All Politics is Local
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The Home Stretch, from home

Photo courtesy of erin m

courtesy of erin m

We’re down to the last week before the election, and with it up hard against local deadlines for absentee voting. If you’re in Virginia, today’s the deadline for requesting a mail-in absentee ballot. Make your request by 5pm and they’ll put it in the mail. Alternately you can do in-person absentee voting through this Saturday. You can get your local election board info from Google’s Voting information and it seems that most – perhaps all – will accept the application by fax.

DC in-person voting runs even longer – up to and including the 3rd. All of you go to 441 4th St., NW Ste. 250N. Today’s also the date for them to receive your request for an absentee ballot, though you’ll have to bring the request in yourself since it has to be received by mail before 5pm and no fax number is provided. Additional information can be found by punching your address into Google’s Voting information.

Today’s also your deadline for requesting an absentee ballot from Maryland, though they conveniently will accept requests by fax. Maryland’s absentee voting can also be done at the local board office, though there you’ll receive the same ballot you’d send back by mail. You can mail it later or fill it out and submit it immediately. If you need to find out where to go I found this site you could check out, Google’s Voting information.

Alternately, I’ll see you at the polls in a week.

Alexandria, All Politics is Local, News, People, Talkin' Transit, The Daily Feed, WTF?!
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Joe McCain Calls 911 to Complain About Traffic

Strike one: Calling 911 to complain about I-95 traffic. Strike two: Cursing out the operator when he asks why you’re calling 911 to complain about traffic. Strike three: Voice mail greeting saying you’re working on a “very important family political project.” Joe The McCain, you’re out.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed
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How Crazy Is Politics?

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Miss Peacock In the Kitchen With a Knife by tzofia

Yesterday’s crazy story in the news was about Ashley Todd, who claimed to have been beaten and robbed at ATM, and when they saw the McCain/Palin sticker on her car, the thugs came back to carve a B in her cheek. Creepy. As. Fuck. While it happened up the road in Pittsburgh, it resonated

Yeah, it’s apparently all made up by Ms. Todd. She has now confessed to the police admitting that she cut herself and inflicted the wounds for political ends.

11 days til this craziness abates, right?

All Politics is Local, Arlington, The Daily Feed
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Absentee voting blazing away

Photo courtesy of erin m

Oh for my Pennsylvania residency, courtesy of erin m

I called the General Registrar for Arlington County and talked to her about their in-person and mail-in absentee ballots so far. In person absentee started in Virginia 45 days before the election, as required by state law. Last week they’d had 7,100 total votes – 5,400 in person and 1,600 mail-in. Today, with 13 days left to go, they had almost 14,000.

That exceeds the total absentee ballots cast in 2004 in Arlington Country, and Deputy Registrar Donna Patterson says they’re currently seeing just under 1,000 a day in-person voters. If that number stays constant they’ll surpass 20,000 total absentee votes. While eligible Arlington voters have increased from about 130,000 to 143,000, that’s only a 10% increase. If absentee votes cut off today they’d already have surpassed 2004’s 12,000 absentee ballots by more than 15%. The possible 20,000 is a 66% increase.

It’s pretty impressive, and hopefully an indication of how much turnout there will be on election day.

All Politics is Local, Media, The Daily Feed
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Oh God, It’s Pledge Week

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No More Cash by Wednesday181

There are few things I live in fear of quite as much as Pledge Week on any NPR Radio Station. WAMU’s week to extort their listener base fundraise for their local efforts is this week. You can donate via their website (my personal choice) and pick up any number of their support premium items. Coffee mugs, tote bags, and radio bookmarks are all part of the package this year. So, get out your wallet, you skinflint public radio listeners, and buy a membership.

But in the meantime, set your radio alarm to WTOP or something, it’ll help with the blood pressure.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed
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McCain Campaign: Northern Virginia Isn’t Real Virginia

real 1 |ˈrē(ə)l|
adjective

2 (of a substance or thing) not imitation or artificial; genuine : the earring was presumably real gold.
• true or actual : his real name is James | this isn’t my real reason for coming.
• [ attrib. ] (of a person or thing) rightly so called; proper : he’s my idea of a real man | Jamie is my only real friend.

That’s what the Dictionary on my Mac says “Real” means. But, to hear the McCain campaign say it, Northern Virginia isn’t “Real” Virginia:

Oh c’mon, this is just as much bullshit of not liking NoVA people saying they’re from the DC area.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed, The District, WMATA, WTF?!
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Metro Says No to Bloggers

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I hate reading stories like these about out local agencies. It just pisses me off when arms of public entities, like Metro & WMATA, clam up in the face of blogger requests. Here’s the details:

“But WMATA’s lawyers think blogs definitely aren’t news media, even blogs like Greater Greater Washington. Why? Because they claim we don’t “publish or broadcast news to the public.” To WMATA’s lawyers, “publish” means “disseminate the information, not merely make it available,” citing Judicial Watch, Inc. v. United States Department of Justice, 185 F.Supp. 2d 54, 59 (D.D.C. 2002), and “disseminate” requires more than simply posting information on a Web site where many people go to read about newsworthy information.”

Essentially, bloggers from Greater Greater Washington sent over PARP requests (think FOIA Request, but for Metro), and Metro told them to get bent because they’re not “media.”

Metro should open doors, not shut them. It only looks worse when you turn people away.

All Politics is Local, Business and Money, Fun & Games, Media, Technology
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The City Paper Whines, “It Came From Planet Blog!”

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Chloe the kitten monster! by faeryboots

If you haven’t noticed, the City Paper’s in a bit of a bind. Their parent company has entered bankruptcy, staff cutbacks were threatened, and then rescinded, and now the City Paper’s cover story is in mortal danger.

How does the City Paper respond?

By dissing their readers in a 5,000 word cover story about why their reader-base is forcing them into the poor house. Or the pour-house. Their argument? People prefer blogs and new media to their extensive stories based on their crack investigative team. Shocking. Case in point, their Livingston-award winning story on the arsonist who terrorized neighborhoods in DC over a series of months getting just 5,000 pageviews while a story on Barack Obama’s spittle got them 13,000 pageviews.

No one knows this better than us. The Coffee Kerfuffle back in late July? 16,000 pageviews. Several of our great features? Under 3,000 pageviews. So, yeah, we understand how unpredictable the web is. That’s the joy of it all. Now, I recognize that the City Paper is a business, and it’s their job to make money. That’s our challenge, too. While we’re ad-free now, it’s not going to be that way forever. We just haven’t decided how to do it, yet.

I feel kinda bad for them. They seem to think that the internet came busting on into their office and crapped on their perfectly nice business model. To some extent, they’re absolutely right. But, this is the modern era, and when someone craps in your house, you have to clean it up. So, I suspect this is just the bitching phase from Wemple and his cadre of entitled journalists, upset that they’re being displaced a bit by new media that hasn’t figured out their own business models just yet.

What I can tell you? Four clickthrough pages of faux legalese blaming the readership? Yeah, that’s not going to play well. That’s a pretty shitty underhanded tactic to get you to click through several of their ads and pump their pageviews numbers up even higher. It’s not like the City Paper’s any different from all the other newspapers trying to figure out how to make money online.

Welcome to the club, guys. May the best publication win. And recognize that your competition isn’t who you think it is.

All Politics is Local, Arlington, Technology, The Daily Feed
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Robo-Poll


Clockwork Robot…
Originally uploaded by law_keven

I have a landline, but I rarely use it. Usually it’s for stuff like calling the Chinese delivery place a couple blocks over, and so I have something that really works well in my Condo. It’s not that I get calls on it. Except this morning when it rang about 10:15am. It was a robo-call, I could tell immediately, but I gave it a second to rattle off its spiel before deciding it wasn’t going to waste my time or try to sell me more credit than I need.

It asked five simple questions and the whole thing took 30 seconds:

– Who would you vote for if the election was today?
– Which party do you trust with the economy right now?
– What’s your gender?
– What’s your race?
– What’s your age group?

And away it went. But it was all automated. It wasn’t a real person making minimum wage in a call center, it was a robot doing the polling. I got a little sad. Are you telling me there’s no Josh Lyman standing over a group of midwestern transplants and telling them to spit out their gum?! Sigh. The price of progress.

All Politics is Local
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We Love Voting: Get Registered

Photo courtesy of Glynnis Ritchie

Let the people vote!, courtesy of Glynnis Ritchie

Yep, you guessed it: this is the first in a series of pesky posts about voting. You’re somewhat fortunate that I am the writer who volunteered for this. Personally, I am just as happy if the apathetic stay home and don’t vote – if the direction of the country isn’t important enough to you that you’ll sacrifice an hour then I’m perfectly happy to make the decisions for you. So you’ll get no over-long over-earnest entreats here.

That said, I don’t think there’s any reason to make it hard – if you want a say in the direction of the nation you help pay for it shouldn’t be a huge challenge to figure out what the hell to do. Happily, Google agrees with me and has built a nice app on top of their maps application. At this stage it’s a way to find out how to register in your area and what the deadlines are, but down the road it’ll have polling place information.

I’ll summarize it for our area: hurry your ass up. D.C. and Virginia have till the 6th – Monday. Maryland has another week and a day – Tuesday the 14th is your drop-dead date there. In every case you can submit the application by mail or turn it in to a location by hand. Alternately, go to the nearest metro stop – the registration teams are out in force and it doesn’t matter if you intend to vote for their candidate.

Go get it done, and I’ll see you back here next week with some early voting info. It’s the Amazon age, baby – why should any of us ever wait in line again?

All Politics is Local, Entertainment, The Daily Feed
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Drinking It Up Tonight

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Olde Bourbon bottles by brent nashville

Personally, I find myself reaching for the bourbon bottle every time I see Gov. Palin on television spouting a sentence that even Slate’s crack team can’t diagram according to rules of English grammar. However, I understand there are reasons for one to feel the same way about Sen. Biden. Perhaps most recently when he asked the State Senator from Missouri to stand up. Despite being in a wheelchair.

The whole thing has me thinking that drunk as a skunk is the only way to turn on the television tonight. So. Here’s a couple ways to play along with your favorite liquor.

My friends Dori & Tom have whipped up a sweet Palin Bingo card for tonight’s debate. And, We Love DC author Ben Stanfield has whipped up another set of rules for tonight’s debate that will get you utterly soused.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed, The Hill
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Senate Passes the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007

Lincoln Memorial - Lincoln & His Right Hand - 9-30-08
Lincoln Memorial – Lincoln & His Right Hand – 9-30-08
by brian.mosley

Better known as the Bailout. That’s right, folks, it’s really just a Senate Amendment to HR 1424, whose purpose is: “To amend section 712 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, section 2705 of the Public Health Service Act, section 9812 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to require equity in the provision of mental health and substance-related disorder benefits under group health plans, to prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment, and for other purposes.”

Get all that?

Yeah, me neither

But really, it’s the bailout bill.

Or something.

All Politics is Local, Fun & Games, The Daily Feed, The Mall
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The Right Kind of Cruel

Cruel DC.png

This can be a cruel town. Politics. Religion. Money & Taxes. These are our day-to-day discussions! Poor Emily Post would just keel over dead with the inappropriateness of it all. But, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Enter Cruel DC, the second time that Cruel 2 B Kind will be played in our fair city.

What’s the game about? Well, the idea is, you win by complimenting people. Crazy, I know! The boundaries for the game are 7th & Constitution to 12th & Independence, right in the heart of the tourist district. You get a set of “lethal” attacks, like compliments to someone’s shoes, which when they’re used on appropriate targets, will result in you winning the confrontation. Confused? Me too. But it’s fun! Check out the rules in their entirety.

Best of all? It’s free to play. Sign up and have a bit of fun! Game’s not til the 18th, but you’ll need to sign up by the 17th.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed
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The bailout vote

Photo courtesy of andertho

Capitol Dawn, courtesy of andertho

I’m not going to spend time looking up which districts are in our immediate area and then find their representatives, but it’s easy to paste in the names of all the VA and MD reps and how they voted on the bailout bill. I’m not weighing in on my opinion – I’m not even sure I’m of one mind on which way I would  have liked it to go – but almost everyone else seems to have an opinion, and here you can tell how your rep weighed in.

If you don’t know who your rep is you can use Who Is My Representative, though I’d question your right to be pissed off if you hadn’t bothered to be aware of their identity before now…

From Virginia:

  • Rick Boucher: yes
  • Eric Cantor: yes
  • Tom Davis: yes
  • Thelma Drake: no
  • Randy Forbes: no
  • Virgil Goode: no
  • Bob Goodlatte: no
  • James Moran: yes
  • Robert Scott: no
  • Robert Whittman: no

From Maryland:

  • Roscoe Bartlett: no
  • Elijah Cummings: no
  • Donna Edwards: no
  • Wayne Gilchrest: yes
  • Steny Hoyer: yes
  • Dutch Ruppersberger: yes
  • John Sarbanes: yes
  • Chris Van Hollen: yes

gathered from here.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed, The District
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The opposite of reassuring

Photo courtesy of maxedaperture

Immigration March III, courtesy of maxedaperture

If you don’t make it past the first few pages of the Metro section you’d miss it – WaPo reported today that the D.C. Board of Elections still hasn’t managed to certify the primary election results. To some extent it doesn’t matter – we’re assured the announced results won’t change and this is just a legal formality.  However the fact that it’s two weeks on and they still haven’t managed to complete this task certainly raises certain questions about how well they’re going to handle the upcoming Presidental election.

DCBE’s own statistics show this primary had a turnout of less that 13% of the registred voters. The 2004 certified results [pdf] listed a 59% turnout – more than four times as many ballots cast. That doesn’t even address the higher interest in this election or the 12,000 additional voters on the rolls now – a 4% increase with another week and a half left for D.C. residents to register to vote.

Here’s hoping they get their act together by November.

All Politics is Local, Comedy in DC, Entertainment
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Comedy in DC: Sarah Palin Vlogs

Sarah Palin Vlog #8: LIBRARY!

When I was talking with Aparna Nancherla about She-Ha for the last Comedy in DC feature, we got onto the subject of women in politics, and whether or not this year of prominent female candidates would affect the careers of women in comedy. She pointed out the Sarah Palin Vlogs YouTube series, masterminded by Sara Benincasa and DC’s own Diana Saez, who plays the candidate’s fictional hair stylist/assistant/La Leche League liaison/campaign manager Dina Heath-Barr. 

While the appointment of Gov. Palin to the Republican ticket has certainly been a bonanza of material for Tina Fey, Palin’s distinctive hair, glasses, and accent make her an impression-worthy candidate for all manner of female comedians. Saez and Benincasa’s twist on the usual candidate humor, putting her in front of a webcam rather than a lectern and teleprompter, is a unique reflection of our current politics of personality- while it’s debatable whether American presidential elections have ever been about issues and policies rather than personal appeal, an campaign defined by text messages, Facebook fan pages, and other forms of hyper-personal expression is a particularly fine target for parodying with a portrayal of a candidate as the typical narcissistic camgirl. Thanks, Sara and Diana, for shattering the glass ceiling for YouTube bunnies everywhere.

In the interests of equal time and bipartisan mockery, We Love DC is happy to feature a good example of Democratic presidential ticket parody.  Send your suggestions to tiffany -at- we love dc dot com.

All Politics is Local, Sports Fix, The Daily Feed, WTF?!
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On Chris Cooley’s Wang

By now, I’m certain, all of DC has seen Chris Cooley’s wang (SFW) as he was foolish enough to put it on his own blog on Saturday. By Sunday, everyone was chuckling at Cooley’s silliness. However, the best part of all this is the response from Cooley, in a post entitled “We’re Dumb”:

“All apologies from the website. We are very sorry that we showed a penis on our website all day yesterday. That was by no means our intention and we did not want to offend anyone. The picture wouldn’t have been up for so long, but we were in the middle of winning a big game. Once again, this was a complete accident and we regret not reviewing the post more closely. Thanks.”

Sorry about the penis. But we won! Go team!

All Politics is Local, Fun & Games, Technology, The Daily Feed, WTF?!
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So, How Long Til This Reaches Law & Order or 24?

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Apparently, some folks at the Pentagon, unable to make “terrorists might use alternative communication methods and code words” sound sexy to their supervisors, they decided to stage an attack on the White House……in World of Warcraft.

Never mind that there IS no White House in Azeroth, and the closest you could come is setting off goblin grenades in front of Thrall, this is I suppose, a plausible way to have off-the-grid communication between two computers. But really? To blame it on a game?

Are you guys High?!

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed, The District, WTF?!
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More Gun Choices

DC Guns

DC Guns by Mike Licht

HR 6691. Learn the number. It’s going to be a Thing™. It’s the NRA-backed bill in the House designed to torpedo the District’s new version of the law that ended up overturned by the Supreme Court. It’s got a Lengthy list of co-sponsors from both Republicans and Democrats. The NRA is threatening to withhold sponsorship from anyone who dares not sign onto their effort to strip the Registration requirement and the bar on semi-automatic pistols in the District.

Oy. Look, we know the City Council blew it with their new version of the law, which seems to be in direct countervention to the Supreme Court’s direction in Heller, but did you need to get all micro-manage-y on us? Of course, in response, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton has proposed her own compromise and it might make it to the floor before HR 6691.

The message to take home here is: “Hey Congress, you don’t live here, get the hell out of our politics.”