A libertarian scholar thinks that D.C. is using a pay-by-phone parking app to track down scofflaw motorists and tow them. He’d be surprised to find out what’s really happening.
According to the Post, a gas leak at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue has forced an evacuation of the headquarters of the Cato Institute. The leak has also closed off Massachusetts Avenue between 9th and 11th Streets NW to vehicular traffic. The building was reportedly evacuated as a precaution….
It’s rare that any of the well-read political blogs based here in Washington take on issues that fit within DCist’s mandate to stick mainly to local issues, but when they do, boy howdy, they can really make a mess of things for themselves. The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein has already issued a mea culpa for a post he put up late last night on his personal blog, which wondered why there aren’t more amenities for…
Samuel Gompers is one of those names you vaguely remember from AP U.S. History, along with The Grange and the Know-Nothings. They fit in somehow, but you don’t exactly remember why. While he may not be on the tips of people’s tongues, he does have a rather large monument on Massachusetts Avenue NW near Mount Vernon Square. Gompers, born in London in 1850, was a major figure in the American labor movement, organizing and…
MONDAY The perniciousness of apartheid, as well as its utter inanity, is well distilled in the person of Sandra Laing. While born to white parents, her darker complexion caused authorities to classify her as black at age nine, then white again at age eleven. For people too casually comfortable with discrimination, Judith Stone’s account of Laing’s life, When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race [in South Africa], is a…
MONDAY: It’s hard to think of a more appropriate person to have written On the Wealth of Nations, part of the new Grove Atlantic Great Books series where contemporary writers flesh out the work of humanity’s most important thinkers, than P.J. O’Rourke. Harder still to imagine a time when everyone agreed that P.J. O’Rourke had a sense of humor. At Politics and Prose at 7 p.m., also Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Cato Institute,…
It’s coming. In just over two months, the District’s bars will go smoke-free. Once the smokers are banished to the sidewalks outside their favorite watering holes, the District will have joined 18 states and 474 municipalities that have done the same. It was at the start of this year the D.C. Council definitively endorsed legislation mandating that bars and restaurants snuff out the smokers; the restaurants did so this April, and the bars will follow…
According to word we have just received, the flat tax that Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is hoping to force upon the District is receiving a second round of debate and consideration today. The District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which he chairs, has scheduled a hearing today to dicuss his flat tax proposal, and it will be receiving testimony from District CFO Natwar Gandhi, Brookings Institution scholar Alice Rivlin, and Terence Golden…
As readers of DCist may well know, the on-going saga as what to name RFK Stadium continues, even though city officials promised on the day of the Nationals home opener that the stadium would officially be christened “Armed Forces Field at RFK Stadium.” Being that the deal has not yet materialized, another name may now be in the running. In an opinion piece posted on Fox News’ website yesterday, CATO Institute policy analyst, blogger, and…