That's how I remember it: Drew Geraci's HDR Time-lapse video of Washington, D.C.

District 1.5 : HDR Time-lapse from Drew Geraci on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/21291306

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Drew Geraci's VIMEO page is at: http://vimeo.com/user2987882

DCWatch's Gary Imhoff calls out D.C. statehood proponents for their longstanding deployment of childish, outlandish and self-defeating tactics

Above, looking south at The White House as seen from Lafayette Park, with statue of President Andrew Jackson in foreground. Early evening, Fall 2002 photo by South Beach Hoosier.

http://www.visitingdc.com/neighbor/lafayette-park-washington_dc.htm
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc30.htm

In the newest edition of DCWatch that I received via email early Thursday morning, http://www.dcwatch.com/DCWatch editor Gary Imhoff rightly calls out D.C. statehood proponents for their longstanding deployment of childish, outlandish and self-defeating tactics, even while they've acted like they have an almost royal sense of entitlement and national support.

Clearly, they did not and do not have the latter and the former is NOT a particularly good strategy when your ultimate goal is to be a state in a Western Democracy where others have voices and votes, too, not just you, no matter how often or how loudly you yell and impugn others with the worst possible bomb-throwing rhetoric.

All these years later and all these grab-bag cast of characters have accomplished is to thoroughly annoy and irritate the very class of people whom they most need to persuade thru logic, reason
and self-interest: members of Congress.

But when you have a longstanding sense of both grudges AND entitlement, and are indulged a lot by the local political class and news media, it's hard to change course when it's always been easier for you to blame others for your decades of failure.

This spot-on cri-de-coeur by Gary Imhoff could well have been written when I first moved to the Washington, D.C. area, and was constantly running into people like myself who were greatly attracted to the lifestyle and culture of Washington, and had ambition to spare.

For all these other folks like me, who later became my friends, a couple of years out of school or grad school, like most of you, what we knew about the Washington area and the people who actually lived and worked there, we knew from TV, films, books and magazines, albeit perhaps more obscure films that most of you.
Those images and words had created certain key assumptions of what the people would be like, and when you mix in the overwhelming Democratic Party allegiance of the folks moving there, it's easy to see why almost everyone I knew was, in the abstract, in favor of DC statehood.
But the population of abstract is always smaller than you think.

Within weeks of moving there in the summer of 1988, where I moved into a home on Capitol Hill in the 500 block of East Capitol Street, just five blocks from the U.S. Capitol and four from the Supreme Court and Library of Congress, I was running into people like myself who had previously thought they were in favor of D.C Statehood, but who had been quite disillusioned by what we'd seen and heard from its proponents once we were actually living there.

The very people who were in charge and who could never adequately answer the questions that Gary Imhoff so rightly brings to the fore. Obviously, I can't speak for all my friends, but for myself, those assumptions lasted all of about one day. For others, like a friend from U-Texas, who worked in the State Dept., it was almost an entire summer.

In his case, those assumptions came crashing down as he was jumped, robbed and beaten right near the home of one of Washington's most famous talking-heads, Pat Moynihan, the senior senator from New York among many other things, whom I've discussed here previously.

When my friend came by my place just a block away, bloody and groggy, I called the Metropolitan Police to report what happened. I was astonished when I was told that the only way that it would get investigated was if my friend came to the police station -which I hadn't yet learned the location of.

We weren't out in the middle of nowhere in Cow Country, USA, we were on one of the main streets of Capital Hill, the one that connected The U.S. Capitol to RFK Stadium to the east, just like you saw on TV broadcast of Redskins games millions of times.
They wouldn't dispatch a police car to investigate a robbery and beating so we waited 'till the next day.

The worm had definitely turned!

This is THE most cogent analysis of the D.C. Statehood problem I've ever seen.

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dcwatch
Does Anyone Here Know How to Play This Game?
By Gary Imhoff
April 13, 2011

Dear Gamers:

Does anyone here know how to play this game? Does anyone remember how any US territories got statehood? The last states admitted to statehood were Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959, so the answer may be that no one does. Certainly no one playing the game in DC has studied statehood movements that were successful in any territories.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=qjbteicab&v=001YCG7_2nRMIpoulhzWgktXXKZMPYnSvJ0yvyv9iP9hMiKALSAisE_iArDEwBADRy-qZuOmMLKR4kjcIG2yVCDAJJtvddRugtjUQQs8E8PeJSIvX4QPUibqFS3TrCrfbHjhaKIBAMrwHMkX9LWHIPZEU-0F3-FNbJtjs5pe5Oo_8F_JfdHTfPc5cx5L--AV__WxRP2UeIQeNPW47gs1xBjEwgvY232MIlh7qeiNXj1DrA7gn9CjVAcE002Bl0rz0GXp4W4EWQcqVHN0cfv7yJ1H0B6iFf-bNJ8

The National Journal's Yochi Dreazen on the new garrison state of Washington, D.C.: “Walled Off Washington"

Commemorative plaque located by the Document Door in the United States Capitol
IN HONOR AND REMEMBRANCE OF THE HEROISM DISPLAYED BY OFFICER JACOB JOSEPH CHESTNUT AND DETECTIVE JOHN MICHAEL GIBSON UNITED STATES CAPITOL POLICE WHO, ON JULY 24, 1998, HERE BRAVELY GAVE THEIR LIVES DEFENDING THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL
DEDICATED BY THE HONORABLE J. DENNIS HASTERT, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AND THE HONORABLE STROM THURMOND, PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_shooting_incident_%281998%29

At the exact time of the 1998 incident above -near Tom Delay's office- I was over in the Rayburn Building across the street.


Former Wall Street Journal Military Correspondent Yochi Dreazen, now in his sixth month at The National Journal, http://nationaljournal.com/ has a good story on the philosophical and public policy debate on personal security among the official Washington set that's only gotten more hysterical following last week's shooting in Tucson, as that perpetual Inside the Beltway debate over ease-of-access to elected officials vs. adequate security safeguards, and the well-known arguments that underpin the two sides, are both re-evaluated.

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The National Journal
ANALYSIS
Walled-Off Washington

How free can a society be when its elected officials are kept further and further away from those they represent?
By Yochi J. Dreazen
Monday, January 10, 2011 | 2:55 p.m.
Updated at 3:07 p.m. on January 10.

It’s hard to remember, but Washington wasn’t always a city of walls.

Thomas Jefferson held a public reception at the White House after his second inaugural, and citizens were able to freely wander through the building to personally ask presidents like Abraham Lincoln for jobs and other favors. Harry Truman took long walks around Washington each morning protected by just a handful of Secret Service agents. Capitol Hill had no roadblocks or barricades, and cars and trucks passed directly in front of the White House as they drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

Today, those seem like postcards from a forgotten era.

Read the rest of the story at: http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/washington-not-always-a-city-of-walls-20110110

Frankly, there are some people I can think of on Capitol Hill who have long believed that the public already had TOO MUCH access to them and their staffers, yet had no problem in meeting lobbyists in questionable public places where the security was lax to say the least, and where all kinds of things could happen if someone were so inclined.

I've personally seen questionable personal behavior at the area's three main airports among well-known elected and appointed officials -and the press- that was really over-the-top, and while perhaps not exactly TMZ-worthy, was NOT at all what the constituents back home, or even the top echelons of their Dept would want to see or know anything about.

Okay for South Florida, perhaps, but not among the professional institutional set.

Plus, there are SO MANY sieves in security up there, it's ridiculous.
Anyone who has worked there for any length of time can recite all sorts of specific places and circumstances where something could be done simply and quickly with few the wiser.

After 9/11, some effort was made to change some of these places, but others, well, not as much as you'd expect.

When you live just five blocks from the U.S. Capitol, as I did for a while my first year in Washington, you think about all sorts of things, and when you see the U.S. Capitol Police and The Supreme Court Police everyday, security and safety is on that list, especially when you are walking back at night, after work, from your daily walk over to The Washington Monument and back, listening to either talk radio or NPR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_Police

I personally believe that elected representatives who have unreasonable fears should simply hire their own security at their own expense, not ours. If you don't like the working conditions, there's always somebody happy to take your job.
You are completely replaceable.

Many new congressmen and staffers come to town under the mistaken belief that The U.S. Capitol Police are like White House-detailed Secret Service agents and are ready to take a bullet for them. They're not!
http://www.uscapitolpolice.gov/home.php

Having gotten to know many of them over the years because I tended to go to the same floors in the same House and Senate building because of my job and interests, and there are only so many places to cross the street, I can tell you that, collectively, their worst fears were very stupid congressmen -or even stupider staffers- who put themselves in harms way by their foolish personal behavior and choices, and who seem to expect the Capital Police to extricate them.

Representatives who refuse to use prudent judgment or who continually cause problems become quickly known among the police force. Then they become quickly well-known to the media and the general public.

Former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney is perhaps the most obvious example I can think of, and it bears mentioning here that even among the female cops, there's a belief that, for whatever reason, the female Reps are esp. reluctant to follow the simple rules that everyone else MUST follow.

Nobody cares that you used to be the mayor of Dog Patch, ran a Fortune 500 company or were formerly the House Minority Leader in dopey Florida.
You are a dime a dozen!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189553,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/washington/20brfs-010.html?_r=1&ref=cynthiaamckinney

Consider this: based on what we now know about the depth of his myriad problems with substance abuse and anger control, do you honestly think that Patrick Kennedy, now a former Congressman, never drove his car while not under control on the side-streets near the Capitol office buildings? Really?

http://www.wusa9.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=49033 http://www.uscapitolpolice.gov/pressreleases/2006/pr_05-05-06.php

The first thing I thought of when he was arrested was that he was very lucky that he never hit anyone at night, because a D.C. jury would have made an example out of him in a way that would simply not ever happen back in Rhode Island.

See also:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/11/sen-leahy-sees-a-downside-to-more-security/

http://nationaljournal.com/