Man, I love how DC refuses to learn from anything! Thank you, DC Public School System. I'm not even talking the Katrina level disasters. Check your history books; prior to the Corps of Engineers dredging Hains Point and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the Mall used to flood on a regular basis. Center Market, where the National Gallery is now, would flood out all the time when the C&O Canal was in its backyard. Yeah, that s**t's never gonna happen again, because George Bush cares about downtown condo dwellers.

So DC's like, "FEMA? Can you please change the results of your study so that we don't have to actually fix any problems? K THNX BAI!" On the brighter side, the Penn Quarter condo crowd just got some new Olympic size underground swimming pools with no hike to their condo fee! Hot tip: be sure to trade in that Mini for a kayak. And I know somehow they will try and sell a soccer stadium as a solution to all this.

That $2.5 mil isn't going to fix the problem. It's going to a consultant so that they can fly to the Australian Outback to study how they deal with floods. $2.5 mil wouldn't pay for a thumb to stick in a dike. And speaking of dikes, mad props to all my newly married homo brothers and sisters in Frisco. Now you can be just as miserable as your hetero counterparts. You did get them to sign the pre nup, right?

Let's do the jury pool math:
City: 60% black
Jury: 30% black
Defendants in criminal cases: 99% black
Well, there are your missing 30% who aren't sitting on jurys

"FEMA rescinds policy that would have made downtown a flood zone..."

Well, shoot, this one is easy. All you need is a Hurricane Katrina memorial that actually serves as a working levee. Even better, put a 500 ft. statute of Brownie on top of the levee, ostensibly fixing his Internationla Arabian Horse Association tie and looking in a mirror checking his makeup for the cameras. We could call it the Colussus of FEMA. Of course, you'd have to figure out how to write: "If you poor black folks weren't who you were, you have had one of these babies" in latin and use Vs for Us to be printed in a banner along the face of said levee. But hot damn--- you can get a hell of a lot more cash for a memorial than you can some stupid public works project.

Pfft. Nobody reads Latin anymore. To be relevant to future generations, the memorial should bee in leet:

"YR D01N A H377UV4 J08 8R0WN13"

And can we please up the ratio of American Apparel booty shorts ads and ditch the ones with the androgynous blond manorexic? He's really providing a negative body image to our young boys. How many impressionable lads will look at that picture and tell their heartbroken mothers, "No Steak Ums for me tonight, mom. I'm on a diet so I can look like John Mayer! Now I have to practice playing his coochie-begging music on my sousaphone. BYE!"

It just breaks the heart.

Kudos to DC1974. It is in fact still Tuesday here in the Somerset Maugham suite of my Bangkok brothel.

Get Thai'd! You're talking to a tourist whose very move's among the purest.

I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.

Monkey, that song came up on shuffle during my morning commute. Eerie.

Hillman's right, those statistics are total junk. They were based upon voluntary and completely unscientific surveys that are taken at the end of jury duty. It might as well have been stats from a "Take this survey and win a free ipod" ad. I know that when I finish up jury duty, I just want to get the hell out of there and make sure I'm not being followed by the family of the man I just sent to prison.

What I'm confused about is that the article I read last night on the Post was a lot more detailed than this article. Does the Post routinely publish articles online, and then edit them down?

The article I read last night had the detail on where the public defender got their stats (the unreliable voluntary surveys I mentioned above). And it also had stats showing specifically how the DC courts send out a disproportionate amount of jury summons to African-Americans (I think it was something like 60-65%). The conclusion that the Post was too delicate to make explicit was that in DC fewer African-Americans show up for jury duty than whites.

But the thing is, the courts don't ever try to track down people. They just end up calling back the people that actually show up. Once they identify you as a good citizen, you will get hit up every two years, almost to the day.

so far 43% of the comments on this thread are from monkey. crack delivery? hmmmm, not that kind of crack. my guess is that mrs. monkey gave it up this morning (i.e peeled his banana).

"my guess is that mrs. monkey gave it up this morning (i.e peeled his banana)."

There's a visual I did not need during my morning cup of coffee.

OldPoster: Just because you're not in a FEMA flood zone doesn't mean you're not at risk for flooding. I'm pretty sure Fenty understands this.

Who wants to rub me for good luck?

Cranky, put on a panda costume and a ball gag and you've got a deal.

"who's wearing a XXXXXL Tupac teeshirt, poopy pants, and flipflops."

It was one Wednesday, in August. That's all I had clean.

Quite riding my ass already.

Doesn't the stadium lease give the Nats full control over every sign that goes (or does not go) on stadium property? Good luck getting that tax sign ever to see the light of day. Marion Barry will become an upstanding citizen of unimpeachable conduct before that happens.

The FAR bigger problem here is jury nullification. Quite a few people have served on DC juries, only to say that there was absolutely no way a guilty verdict was possible, no matter what the evidence.

Quite often there's a least one person there saying 'there's too many of our black babies in prison already, so I'm not adding one more even if he's guilty'.

It's not really scientific, but three different guys I know say this is exactly what happened on juries they were on.

This is a story the Post will never touch.

To follow Hillman's point - a colleague of mine was on a murder trial 2 years ago. The evidence was overwhelmingly clear that the defendant was guilty (didn't help when defendant was laughing at the testimony of how the shooting occurred). The jury deliberated for several days before telling the judge they were hopelessly deadlocked. It was 11-1 in favor of a guilty vote. There was one woman who refused to vote guilty, even though she acknowledged the evidence was pretty clear on the guy's guilt, because she didn't want to send another young black man to jail and she believed the trial was an effective wake-up call to him to change his ways. She wouldn't budge from her position and the judge declared a mistrial.

Jury duty pleases the judges' booty.

How is this "tax sign" going to be paid for? With my taxes I assume?? Now THAT'S an effective use of money. I guess it's a good thing there's no crime in this city, the public school system is outstanding, and the Metro is functioning perfectly. Otherwise it would just be silly to waste money on this sign...

Cranky: that is quite amazing that you've never been called for jury duty.

DC tried getting me to serve even before I became a citizen.. and now that I am a merkin, they've called me twice- served on one.

Only two African Americans in that jury, even though all the people involved in the trial were African American.

How much of the problem is jury nullification, and how much is the fact that the same hundred guys are committing 90% of the crimes in DC?

Over on 12th Place in Northwest there's a little rowhouse where the family's been dealing drugs since the 1960s. Granddad started the business, got arrested, gave it to his kids, who got shot, and there's the current generation running the business. From heroin to reefer to crack and back to reefer again. I gotta wonder how much of a generational criminal class DC has.

Who says kids today can't learn?

FEMA rescinds flood zone map of the National Mall? What horrible news !

I will be setting up a "Rub Cranky for Jury Duty Immunity" booth somewhere Metro convenient. Details to follow.

Connie:

It's a huge problem. I know we all get a trial by jury, but the system breaks down totally when jury nullification is so common as it is in DC.

I'm no lawyer, but perhaps there's some way we could devise a system where we could identify jury nullification and retry the individual if we can prove that jury nullification was the reason for the hung jury?

I'd say educating jurors better would be good but, honestly, that ain't going to work.

"What I'm confused about is that the article I read last night on the Post was a lot more detailed than this article. Does the Post routinely publish articles online, and then edit them down? The article I read last night had the detail on where the public defender got their stats (the unreliable voluntary surveys I mentioned above)."

Reid: Yeah, I noticed that, too. The print edition of the Post went into much more detail, talking about how they used the nine-digit ZIP codes provided by jurors who served between Nov 2005 and Nov 2007, geocoded them to Census 2000 blocks (translation: figured out which Census 2000 block that particular piece of the ZIP code was in), and then took into account the Census 2000 race/Hispanic data for that particular block to guess at the likely race of the juror.

This method would work fine except for the fact that in 2007 the racial patterns in some DC census blocks (note: blocks are very small units of geography, often just 1 city block) looked nothing like they did in 2000 and in many cases would greatly overestimate the number of Black jurors and underestimate the number of White (and Asian) jurors.

Flapjack- so you're the one who took that username! Does this mean I have to change names? (I'm new here--it's no big deal for me to change names...)

You people are DEAD to me!

People who know about the human heart, though, mebbe they'd say, Monkey over here, he gives his honey love, and she pays him back with pity – the basest coin there is.

HONEY? WHERE ARE YOU DAMMIT? SUNSABITCHES WHERE'S M'HONEY!

[rolls on floor with whisky bottle, passes out.]