Sure, Harriette Walters might have stolen upwards of $44 million from the District's coffers, but at least she wasn't stealing directly from low-income school children. According to a WTOP report this morning, District officials have arrested and charged a city official with submitting false expense reports totaling $11,385 for big bills at local restaurants and strip clubs. Emerson Crawley, a program manager at After School for All at Shaw Junior High School, allegedly spent the......

The thinly veiled sexism oozing out of today's Examiner column by veteran local politics observer Harry Jaffe is hard enough to take, but to whomever thought up this gem of a headline, be they copy editor or author, DCist salutes your willingness to go boldly where no human beings in the 21st century were thought to be capable of going anymore. Yes, if the recent Office of Tax and Revenue scandal has taught us......

Via Wonkette, we get this mind-blowingly angry letter to Examiner columnist Harry Jaffe (text doc) from Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry's chief of staff, Keith Andrew Perry. As you'll recall, Jaffe published a column last week wondering why Barry couldn't have used a rather expensive collection of watches and cuff links, which were recently stolen from his home, to pay some of his tax burden in the years when he was known not to......

Good morning, Washington. Remember that recent weird burglary at Ward 8 Council member Marion Barry's house -- the one that Barry seemingly didn't want investigated in favor of telling the police they had more important things to do? Well, Harry Jaffe got hold of the police report, and it turns out Barry may have had good reason not to want it looked at it too closely. Apparently the former mayor had a large collection of......

Harry Jaffe: As the fallout from the shooting of 14-year-old DeOnté Rawlings continues, it's now Mayor Adrian Fenty taking some of the heat. According to Jaffe, Fenty's decision to pay for Rawlings' funeral and invite his sisters to speak at a press conference has soured some police officers on the young mayor, who saw the moves as an indication of where Fenty's allegiances were. "How can Fenty rebuild trust with the police?" asks Jaffe. “'Let......

Harry Jaffe: In writing something of a goodbye column to RFK Stadium, Jaffe recounts the many struggles the District overcame to attract a baseball team. And though plenty of people played important roles, he feels that one deserves extra attention -- former Mayor Anthony Williams. "The hero of the piece has to be Williams, an unpopular mayor who — despite his wandering attention span — kept swinging away at an unpopular crusade to use public......

Jonetta Rose Barras: In a powerfully introspective column, Rose Barras details a recent trip to her destroyed family home in New Orleans. In recounting her visit to the site, Rose Barras writes of the struggles endured by her mother and sister in trying to return and rebuild, drawing comparisons to the District's own troubles. "Truth told, New Orleans looks and feels like Ward 8 circa 1985: few quality retail outlets, high crime, high unemployment, poor......

Marc Fisher: As the Senate gets ready to debate the District voting rights legislation, Fisher lists the dozen top reasons why senators from both parties should vote to enfranchise the city's residents. The more and more we look into it, the better the case looks. Let's hope the Senate agrees. Tom Knott: You know Knott's verbal insanity is in good form when the title of his weekly column is "It's Gathering of Eagles vs. nitwit......

Tom Knott: Once again, Tom Knott has managed to take what seems to be an isolated incident and turn it into evidence that liberalism of any sort is just evil. This week, Knott recounts the badly-handled trial of a Liberian immigrant accused of raping a seven-year-old girl in Montgomery County. Due to some bad decision by the trial judge, the charges were eventually dropped, though the county has stated that it will appeal. Regardless, it's......

Jonetta Rose Barras: "The District government is spending millions to send children to a controversial special education residential facility in Massachusetts that uses electric shock to discipline students." Wow. Talk about an opening sentence. Rose Barras dedicated her column this week to the 10 District students who have been sent to the facility -- the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Ma. -- arguing that its unorthodox methods of treatment are reason enough to bring......

There won't be any hand-wringing or head-scratching over why the Washington Post's foray into radio failed. Today's Post article on the issue pretty much sums it up as well as anyone could hope to: "[Post Radio] was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year." Ouch. The Washingtonian's Harry Jaffe wrote earlier this month of the project's coming demise, and today provides more insight as to why the whole venture......

We read all the local columnists, so you don't have to. This week we find meat-eaters being compared to Michael Vick, a lot of bum opinions on city schools and District residents being called "granola." Courtland Milloy: According to Milloy's Wednesday column in the Post, your choice to eat a hamburger isn't all that different than Michael Vick's decision to brutally fight, torture and kill dogs for money. "We'll kill a duck, deer, turkey --......

Good Friday to you, Washington. Are you getting psyched for the weekend already? No? Did we mention how nice the weather's going to be yet? Predictions are for mostly sunny skies and low humidity levels on Saturday with below-normal high temperatures in the low 80s and overnight lows sinking down to, get this, the low 60s. It's like Christmas in August! District Plagued By Lead Concerns: It's sure starting to feel like we're having......

>> Experts warn of lightning-strike injuries with iPods [AP via CNN.com] >> "The District has awarded a contract for managing its troubled Medicaid transportation program to a St. Louis-area company that the Missouri governor's office called 'scurrilous' after the company paid millions of dollars to resolve a fraud investigation." [WashTimes] >> "In the lingo of anti-smoking zealots, smoke flow from dwelling to dwelling is called “seepage” and for now, it seems, there’s nothing a renter......

Just when you had gotten control of the size of your blogroll. We've been following the recent changes over at Washingtonian.com, and not just because we have a DCist alumna over there. To be honest, we've long placed Washingtonian Magazine in the "strictly for fogeys" column when it comes to their views on what interesting things are going on in D.C. Constantly compiling "Best Of" lists only relevant to residents of Georgetown and Bethesda hasn't......

We're not big fans of Dick Cheney. It's not the whole obsession with secrecy, or the way he's encouraged his aides to out CIA officers. It's not the refusal to accept that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda are not the same thing, or his long-standing ties to government contracting juggernaut Halliburton. It's that damn motorcade and security detail. A few months back WTOP discovered that Cheney's motorcade -- yes, the one that regularly snarls traffic......

When New York Times journalist David Rosenbaum was attacked and killed while peacefully walking in his quiet Northwest neighborhood last week, we passed over one relatively minor part of the story -- Rosenbaum had headphones on as he walked. Today Examiner columnist Harry Jaffe takes on that very issue, writing: Over dinner one night, my daughters and I talked about tightening up security around the place. Like better control of the front door key, which......

Whether you like the sterile, quasi-corporate feel of the newly-invigorated Chinatown or not, it's near impossible to deny how far the neighborhood has come in recent years. It's brighter, louder, crowded with life, and packed with $5.3 billion worth of development spurred by the MCI Center. But is it the city's hottest nightspot? The Examiner's Harry Jaffe -- a longtime District resident and political observer -- thinks so. In a column published yesterday, Jaffe threw......

In the December issue of the Washingtonian, the magazine lauds the "Best of Washington," including restaurants, dance clubs, pizza, late night dining, hip clothes, and more. Among the magazine's bevy of lists is a ranking of the "50 Best & Most Influential Journalists," written by Garrett Graff, formerly of Fishbowl DC fame. While journalists for the usual suspects abounded -- Mike Allen of Time; Dan Balz, David Broder, Steve Coll, Marc Fisher, Al Kamen, Howard......

Stadium Re-Naming Moves Forward: DCist reported last week that local pro-democracy activists are pushing to have RFK Stadium, currently searching for a $1.5-$2 million a year corporate sponsor, named the "Taxation Without Representation Field at RFK Stadium." The initiative's initial goal was $10,000 by April 3, but overwhelming support for the idea pushed them to up the ante to $20,000 and now $51,000 by April 14, the date of the Nationals home opener against the......

The Washington Post has recently announced that it will be increasing the circulation of the EXPRESS at the one year anniversary of that "commuter paper," from 150,000 per day to 175,000 per day. DCist thought now was the perfect time for one of those misleading, alarmist bar graphs. While the circulation of its free, flaky tabloid paper may be up, the circulation of the real thing over at the Washington Post is decidedly not. In......