When D.C. residents call their senators, the phone doesn’t ring in the U.S. Capitol.

Promoting statehood in D.C. can be a thankless job, and now one D.C. legislator wants to make a little more worth the while of the people elected to do it.

D.C. Shadow Senator Michael Brown has created and is paying for two billboards promoting D.C. statehood to go up in Charlotte in time for the Democratic National Convention next week.

D.C. Shadow Representative Mike Panetta has decided that he won’t be running again after spending three terms as one part of the District’s three-man Shadow Delegation.

Though being a part of the District’s shadow delegation has a somewhat super-hero sound to it, Representative Michael Panetta, Senator Paul Strauss and Senator Michael Brown toil in almost total obscurity in their fight for D.C. statehood and self-governance. With no salaries and none of the usual congressional perks, the three members of the city’s shadow delegation don’t have much at their disposal to wage what’s already a tough fight. That’s where the D.C….

Let’s face it — a local election in an off year and in the midst of a heated presidential campaign won’t attract much attention, much less lots of voters. And tomorrow’s District primary likely isn’t much of an exception. While in 2006 the mayoral battle between Linda Cropp and Adrian Fenty and the contest for the chairmanship of the D.C. Council gave that year’s electoral season a certain buzz, tomorrow’s choices haven’t provoked the same…

Call them merely symbolic acts, but the D.C. Council and Mayor Adrian Fenty have made a number of gestures this year to express their collective anger at the continued disenfranchisement of District residents. Today there’s one more. Via D.C. Wire, the Council is planning on removing a prohibition on spending federal funds on lobbying activities related to District voting rights from the city’s fiscal 2009 budget. The prohibition has long been imposed by Congress (the…

Remember those billboards that popped up in the 1980s that counted up the national debt, dollar by dollar? Pretty scary, huh? Well, District voting rights activists want something similar for their cause. Today the D.C. Council held a hearing on legislation that would allow the city to place two large LED billboards — one outside the John A. Wilson Building and the other outside the new Washington Nationals stadium — that would display the amount…