alternative hippopotamus

After reading through this Marc Fisher Washington Post article on the “Purple Line”, I’m going to say this is a good example of local journalism. The comments are pretty good, and compliment the piece. By “compliment” I don’t mean they’re flattering, but round out what wasn’t said in the original post.

So here’s how the Post lays out the situation:

Pam Browning and Ben Ross have spent decades fighting to get the Purple Line built the right way. Both live where they do, in Chevy Chase and downtown Bethesda, respectively, because they love the convenience of an urban center in a suburban location. Both cherish the Capital Crescent Trail, the former railroad bed that has been transformed into a linear park, a busy pathway for mothers with strollers, exercisers out for a constitutional and bicycle commuters.

But that trail between Silver Spring and Bethesda exists because the government bought the right-of-way from the B&O Railroad in 1988 to build an east-west transit line connecting Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. And that plan is where Browning and Ross’s paths diverge.

The conflict, as Fisher describes, is between the bike path going from Silver Spring to Bethesda center and light rail occupying the same path. As far as I can tell, the bike path pretty much dies east of Meadowbrook Park, but I understand the long term plan does include a path going out to Silver Spring center.

This is a question I’ve had for some time. How can the Purple Line and the bike path coexist? I invited Chris Carney from Sierra Club to Drinking Liberally to talk about green initiatives in DC. One of the questions I put to him was just this one about the bike path. His answer to me, avid bicyclist to avid bicyclist, was that the two can exist at the same time. While I want to believe that, I’m not sure if I see that as a realistic possibility.

Here’s what the Post piece says:

the passageway is so narrow that at one point, in a tunnel in downtown Bethesda, the pedestrian trail would literally run on a deck above the railway

This is of course referring to the tunnel just before Bethesda downtown. Indeed, I can’t see any way that light rail and bicycles can fit on the same bit of earth.

One of the decisions we’ll need to make as a region going forward is how much we want to look like the Netherlands. While my answer to that is “Just like them and moreso” I’m not sure my fellow Washingtonians are there yet.

A very nice feature article from the Washington Post looking at the region vis-a-vis potential improvements from an Obama administration.

I don’t know of any other capitol city with the inequities of power that you can see in Our Fair City. I’ve been in Rome, Paris, London, Brussels, Athens, Edinburgh, Cairo and Tel Aviv. None of these cities has an area as oppressed as Anacostia. And, of course no other capitol city in the world deprives their citizens of the vote other than Washington.

So, yes, I expect Obama to play a role in pushing the evolution of this potentially great city.

The article also mentions Tommy Wells, who is one of the real heroes on the DC council. It’s a good read.

One argument that I’m familiar with is that the current fate of DC is due to the majority minority nature of the population. I’d like to advance a slightly different argument. DC as a symbol is revered by those of us who believe in that story of the city on the hill, featured in Jon Edwards sermons, and feloniously appropriated by Reagan. It ought to be a symbol of government. Is it possible that those who are the enemies of Federal government, are just those who prefer to see the District in it’s oppressed state?

As far as I can tell, the biggest controversy in the Progosophere has been the role that Rick Warren is playing in Obama’s inauguration. It’s not just in the blogosphere. Last Thursday at DL, it was the biggest topic as well. It’s fair to say that folks are pissed.

The only consolation I can provide is that the right wing don’t like Warren either. That, and that in all probability, it will be difficult to actually pay attention while Warren chants the usual mumbo jumboo prevalent during churchie things. Aside from particularly astute theologians, the stuff that passes for religion is nice words, usually accompanied by an underlying violence towards some group that Jesus would have only have had sympathy for. A bigger question is: why have a churchie guy at a political event at all? While I know the answer is that we’re a Judeo-Christian nation, with emphasis on the latter, I’m hoping that someday the question will be asked, and someone will have the courage to create an inaugural event with minimum hypocracy.

I actually think the biggest story of the day is CAP’s little guest post on Yglesiass’ blog, which I first saw at Open Left. The reason I think this is a significant story is that raises the question of neutrality of organizations with regards to blogging. Put in a different way, how am I going to criticize right-wing bloggers from AEI, if there is a similar expectation from CAP that folks like Yglesias will tow the company line? Or, even if Yglesias won’t tow that line, we’ll get a visit from an editor who will?

The Jon Dunne verse “No man is an island, entire of itself,” is one of my favorite. I’d even argue that it’s one of the most important pieces in all of Judeo-Christian philosophy. What could be more important than our ability to look past our individuality and conceive of our existence in society as “a piece of the continent, a part of the main”? How can you walk a mile in another man’s shoes, if you can’t see that those are the shoes in which you yourself walk?

I’m saying this in reference to hearing of the death of Paul Weyrich. It is important to acknowledge that while it may be true that in a universe sense that everyone’s death diminishes me, that there are those who are alive who hate humanity, and take delight in leading their fellow humans astray. I think Weyrich may have been one of them.

I was just looking at this quote of his: (wikipedia)

“I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy.”

The institutions Weyrich referred to are things like public schools and government institutions that provide benefit to people that otherwise would be cut off. By the enemy, he of course means people like me.

You sure get a different sense from Jon Dunne’s regligious views than you get from Weyrich’s. Dunne preached the universality of all living things. Weyrich divided them into friends and enemies. His was a theology that has no foundation in Christianity, and can only be harmful in the context of modern political beliefs. Thank goodness, that bell has rung and gone.

I’ve been staring at this statement from David Sirota since this morning: (Open Left):

Following on last-night’s heated OpenLeft debate about whether it’s fair/acceptable to consider what clients an Attorney General candidate defended, I wonder - if it isn’t fair to judge a lawyer on the clients he/she opts to work for, is it fair to judge anyone else? This is far less about the overall merits of Eric Holder for AG and far more about a deeper issue of values.

Sirota goes on to articulate his understanding of the standard of legal ethics with regard to clients:

The logic goes that every defendant deserves the right to counsel, and therefore that when considering who to appoint as the American people’s official lawyer, we can never question the values-based decision that an individual AG candidate made in choosing to working for a defendant, no matter how awful that defendant is, no matter whether the choice to work for that awful defendant was primarily about making a lot of cash, no matter even if who he worked and how he worked for them may have serious policy and conflict-of-interest implications in the Attorney General’s office. By this logic, even Holder’s germane public policy statements during the case - the ones where he effectively says he wants a Justice Department that doesn’t prosecute supposedly “self-disclosing” corporate executives - should not even be considered. Even the substantive questions from the Center for International Policy are off-limits.

One of the reasons I find Sirota’s comments puzzling is that he’s a big boy and he knows how the legal system works. At the same time, I also understand that Sirota is in the punditry biz. That means that saying something provocative is just part of the job. So, I don’t know if he really thinks we should judge AG nominees by their clients, or he’s trying to tweak his readers.

When we say that our society has a system of justice based on laws, not on men, that includes the notion that an unpopular defendant must be zealously defended. Otherwise it would be a society based on what attorneys think about their clients.

Here’s the argument that I’d make in this case. Instead of being a lawyer, imagine Eric Holder is a dentist. Let’s imagine a truly reprehensible person goes to Eric Holder, DDS with a bad tooth. The ethics of a dentist would require Holder to restore him to good dental health, independent of what he thinks about him. The only consideration should be whether or not Holder is sufficiently skilled in the dental arts pertaining to the reprehensible person’s condition. If Holder refuses to treat him otherwise, then he’s a hack.

Many professions fall under this rubric of putting the good of their skill above the good of their clients. There, too, are obvious exceptions. But lawyer isn’t one of them. Our society says that our system of justice is served both when the League of Orphan Kittens as well as the Smite the Earth Society is well defended.

I’ve had a difficult last couple of days on a business trip for my job. So, it was with some comic relief that I read this on the PUMAPac blog: (emphasis mine)

airforcehusker 12.13.08 at 9:27 am

According to hillaryclintonforum.net the New Agenda is a big hoax. The word is it is being used to have people ask questions. The questions asked are then read by fellow obomobots and vote up or down the chain. If they fall to far off the chain they are discarded. For instance a question like Is Oboma going to be the most transparent President in the history of the united states? Obots like the question so they stamp it and move it up the chain to the top. Now you take a question like why wont you provide your sealed birth certificate? Obots find that hostage and stamp it down and force it off the page.
So in a sense yes these questions are being mainuplated. That is my understanding.

It’s not just the idea that questions about openness are deemed more reasonable than the COLB (Cult of the Live Birth, per YTD). The image of Obama staffers taking someone hostage and then stamping on them. That’s. Hillarious.

I was doing my daily truth squad prowl when I saw this at the Conflux:

According to Peter Flaherty, President of an ethics group, the National Legal and Policy Center, Obama cannot distance himself from Blagojevich. Flaherty is a former Attorney General of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, former Democratic mayor of Pittsburgh, and served as Deputy Attorney General in the Carter Administration.

Note the expression President of an ethics group. By this do the PUMAs mean a neutral watchdog group, like Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington? Of course not. This has nothing to do with Obama actually being caught up in the Blogojevich scandal. It’s about making the effort to smear him. Neutrality could get in way of rapid hyperbole.

Here’s the wikipedia entry for NLPC: (wikipedia)

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit group that monitors and reports on the ethics of public officials, supporters of liberal causes, and labor unions in the United States. Among the NLPC’s more high-profile targets have been hip hop mogul Sean Combs,[1] Reverend Jesse Jackson, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (while she was first lady), and Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Center files complaints with government agencies, legally challenges what they view as abuse and corruption, and publishes reports. For its efforts, the NPLC has been praised by such media personalities as Rush Limbaugh.[2] The current president is Peter Flaherty. The NLPC is viewed by many as a partisan group, not as a bona fide government watchdog organization.

For even further truth-squading amusement you may want to check out this post at Rumproast. I don’t actually think it’s a coincidence that one of the PUMAs is appropriating Malkin’s work. The Conflux style is based on the same form of right-wing agitprop that Malkin has excelled at: make your readers good and mad, the facts be damned.

I really have to wonder what voices in Steve Hildebrand’s head told him that this Huffington Post post was a good idea.

Greg Sargent observes, correctly, I believe that: (TPM)

As Ben Smith notes, the criticism of Obama from the left has actually been pretty mild, and the notion of a left “angry” about Obama’s “centrism” and “pragmatism” is largely a media creation. The key point here is that Hildebrand seemed willing to feed that creation by perpetuating the false idea that the “left wing of our party” doesn’t want Obama to be “pragmatic” and harbors a set of wild-eyed priorities that are somehow at odds with what Obama views as our major challenges.

There has been a number of stories written about anger at Obama from “The Left.” When I read one of these pieces, I have to shake my hate, and mutter “they’re they go again.” I do run into these fictitiously angry bloggers at sites like Open Left, and while I might not describe them as “sated pussycats” I feel safe in describing them as pretty happy about the state of political life in our fair fictitious city. Certainly, none of them allude to theories of primary stealing, or a conspiracy involving Obama and the DNC.

The PUMAs and their supporters may indeed be angry at Obama, but they’re hardly card carrying progressives. And, to be fair I see the PUMAs as borderline insane, while their supporters I see as just reflexively negative.

I had a very nice Thanksgiving break. Thank goodness I’ll get a chance to do it all over again in 3 weeks.

On Friday, still reeling from the triptaphan, I walked into my local Hudson Trail Outfitters. When I was growing up this was where you got stuff to go camping. Well, JC Penney had some camping gear. But things like kick-ass hiking boots you got at HTO.

Times have changed, of course. Now there’s a bunch of chains competing for the lucrative outdoor/travel clothing dollar. But, HTO has something they don’t have.

Longboards. That’s right, imagine my surprise when I saw that the HTO in Tenley now carries longboards. Good ones, may I add. I may not have discovered skatesonhaight.com if not for the lack of longboards in the DC area.

The bike paths here make for great longboarding. I can’t say how nice it is to skate the path between Old Town, Alexandria and Crystal City. I just never thought that the local businesses would catch up to it.