Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would love to see the DC gubmint go away. Except for the guys who work the inspection station. They are great - no joke.

Who do you think is going to run the schools? Parks? Trash collection? Policing?

Your guys aren’t running it now. All that’s running is their jobs for life. I HATE DC government and would welcome DC becoming a federal city

There are schools, and parks, and trash collection, and even if they’re not doing their jobs as well lately, police. You really think absolutely nothing works in D.C.? What city works well by your standards, then?

Did your kids go to DCPS schools K-12? East of the Park? Do you avoid whole swathes of the city? Do you feel like you could take a stroll by yourself in the dark in pretty much any neighborhood?

I guess Akron, or Dhakar are just as bad so its fine?

That's some pretty low standards for the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth.

Every other top capitol city

And none of them have life employment for a small group of unqualified apparatchiks

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would love to see the DC gubmint go away. Except for the guys who work the inspection station. They are great - no joke.

Who do you think is going to run the schools? Parks? Trash collection? Policing?

Your guys aren’t running it now. All that’s running is their jobs for life. I HATE DC government and would welcome DC becoming a federal city

There are schools, and parks, and trash collection, and even if they’re not doing their jobs as well lately, police. You really think absolutely nothing works in D.C.? What city works well by your standards, then?

Anonymous wrote:Up is down, green is red, and better governance is when the voters of Missouri decide who will be mayor of DC.

There won’t be Council nor Mayor

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would love to see the DC gubmint go away. Except for the guys who work the inspection station. They are great - no joke.

Who do you think is going to run the schools? Parks? Trash collection? Policing?

Your guys aren’t running it now. All that’s running is their jobs for life. I HATE DC government and would welcome DC becoming a federal city

Up is down, green is red, and better governance is when the voters of Missouri decide who will be mayor of DC.

I'll address a few questions/concerns "mail bag" style.

Anonymous wrote:
Show us how Home Rule is "obviously not working," with specific examples. "I don't like that the crime rate is going up" is not a reason to throw out principles of local control, nor is "I think I'm smarter than the people who win elections here" or variations on that theme. What would you expect an appointed mayor and Council to do differently on day 1?

And Home Rule is more than 50 years old, and the Control Board more than 20 years defunct, so the fact that D.C. spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries being run without local input doesn't really seem like a great support for your claim that the natural state of affairs here is for the citizens of the city to just shut up and take whatever we get.

and

Anonymous wrote: Except crime declined under Democratic leadership and is already Declining right now under democratic leadership, and sacrificing control of DC also means sacrificing control of women's healthcare rights against the will of DC voters (I know, I know, you are republican so don't care about women's healthcare). And crime is high in plenty of GOP led cities.

These are the comments of people who either blew into town last Tuesday, or have the memory of a grapefruit. A refresher: https://apnews.com/article/crime-district-of-columbia-biden-senate-0d9580c43711a42a3549419b23546726

DC tried to pass a "crime" bill that would have lowered the penalties for carjacking, among other things, in the midst of a carjacking epidemic. Bowser vetoed it, then every member of the council but DCUMS favorite punching bag (Trayon White) voted to overturn that veto. This was such a bad bill that Senate Democrats joined with Republicans (81-14!) and had Biden's blessing on quashing it. The Council has been slightly better on crime since this very public defenestration.

We can only speculate on how bad crime would have gotten without this federal intervention. I can't find a single person that would argue that this bill was good, just that DC should have been able to inflict it upon the residents, workers and visitors of the Nation's Capital.

For many, this was where federal intervention became welcome.

Secondly and related, regarding the Home Rule fetishists:

Anonymous wrote: It's democracy even when the voters elect candidates you hate. When you want to get rid of democracy because the voters elect candidates you hate, that's hating democracy.

and

Anonymous wrote: To be clear, you don't like how DC citizens vote, so you want to override them with your own personal views like a dictator. You are free to move, but instead you just prefer to implement your views against the will of DC voters. This is what you are saying over and over again repeatedly. Maybe you should adopt your writings into your own personal Mein Kampf?

There are more, but you get the flavor.

This is amazing considering that DC is a one-party state-equivalent, and that party seems to be going forward with a presidential nominee that skipped a lot of "democracy" to get that nomination. And I don't mean that as a "gotcha" but rather that its a good thing. By essentially being appointed, she managed to minimize her exposure to the democracy system. This will leave her in a much better position to govern the nation, if she wins the election, because she didn't have to make ridiculous promises to every group of nutjobs and single-issue donors to get there. Democrats, including many here, are down right ecstatic to have her as the nominee now.

An appointed Mayor also would avoid having to make ridiculous promises (Deal for all!) to every fringe, idiotic, and motivated group that dominates the primaries. Further, they wouldn't have to get into the pocket of wealthy donors just to get a campaign off the ground. DCUM likes to point out Bowser's dependance on developers for instance...

No one is arguing that the current system is delivering results, only that its DC voter's right to run the city into the ground. Hardly a winning message.

So if we have a long history of federal intervention, have recently need "refresher training" and would lead to better governance, then why not take it? Why continue to shoot ourselves in the foot when there is a better way? Especially when support for "democracy" seems to be so very situational.

Anonymous wrote:I would love to see the DC gubmint go away. Except for the guys who work the inspection station. They are great - no joke.

Who do you think is going to run the schools? Parks? Trash collection? Policing?

All DC needs is an open Democratic primary. That would move the politicians to the middle. Unfortunately, the progressive lunatic fringe of JLG, Allen, Nadeau, Robert White, Frumin and Mendo is what we get. The red states have the same problem in reverse---whenever one party so completely dominates the political landscape, the extremists in that party take control. I would be happy to have a control board again. Tony Williams saved this city from disaster and laid the groundwork for all the growth that occurred in the first quarter of this century. He realized---unlike the progressives---that the city needed to attract and keep more middle class residents in order to prosper. By the mid 1990s, DC had become a city of the very wealthy---enclaved in upper NW---and substantial poverty. The middle classes ---black and white---had fled during the 1970s and 80s. Now, there were still some middle class AA neighborhoods hanging on---but the children of those older homeowners had mostly decamped to suburbia. Heck, he was even responsible for improving the inspection station. In the early 1990s, you would have to sit in your car for HOURS in order to get through that line.

I would love to see the DC gubmint go away. Except for the guys who work the inspection station. They are great - no joke.

We don't have a democracy. We have a democratically elected republic...if we can keep it.

Things have gotten close to untenably polarized, with compromise more and more seen as less politically profitable than hardline tactics and those representatives more and more often promoting the interests of a "majority-of-the-majority" minority on many issues, even as they might be elected by a majority (though mere pluralities can prevail, there).

Why we hadn't adopted ranked-choice instant runoff voting with automatic hand recounts from duplicate paper receipts after Bush v. Gore is beyond me, except that it does not favor established parties/entrenched interests. It's neither particularly hard, given the technology available, nor particularly expensive, in light both of the import of the process and of the overall budget.

Anonymous wrote:I hate GOP. But I viscerally hate the Council with the exception of Pinto and what DC has become under them much more. I would vote in a heartbeat to get rid of them

Please spend some time watching the dumb*sses in Congress before you say this. They can barely pass any legislation at all. They cannot run a city.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hate the Mendo-Allen North Korea job for life corrupt for me but not for thee brand of “democracy”

You want Mendo and Allen out? Find better candidates to run against them and work hard so those candidates win. Just deciding you don't like the incumbents and can't be bothered to try to defeat them, then asking for Congress to step in and wipe out everyone else's vote, makes you not only antidemocratic but also lazy.

DP. I would prefer to get rid of the people who keep voting for the Mendo and Allens of the world, but getting a Federal takeover is probably easier.

So the majority of the voters, you want to get rid of them because you don't like how the majority votes? I mean I already thought you sounded like you had dictator like tendencies, but whoa.

Keep in mind that the people that voted for Mendo in the last election represent about 22% of the city. Allen much less. The rest of the city, its workers and visitors get held hostage by these people.

A nation's capital should be representative of more than the just the lunatic fringe of residents. The city refuses to admit it has problems, and the activists here are offended anyone would dare try to solve problems. This is why a Federal intervention is inevitable. DC is not capable of restraining its worst impulses.

So having a ward system is unrepresentative? Ok ….

Principles aren’t going to shut down the ATV and roving carjacker gangs.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hate the Mendo-Allen North Korea job for life corrupt for me but not for thee brand of “democracy”

You want Mendo and Allen out? Find better candidates to run against them and work hard so those candidates win. Just deciding you don't like the incumbents and can't be bothered to try to defeat them, then asking for Congress to step in and wipe out everyone else's vote, makes you not only antidemocratic but also lazy.

DP. I would prefer to get rid of the people who keep voting for the Mendo and Allens of the world, but getting a Federal takeover is probably easier.

So the majority of the voters, you want to get rid of them because you don't like how the majority votes? I mean I already thought you sounded like you had dictator like tendencies, but whoa.

Keep in mind that the people that voted for Mendo in the last election represent about 22% of the city. Allen much less. The rest of the city, its workers and visitors get held hostage by these people.

A nation's capital should be representative of more than the just the lunatic fringe of residents. The city refuses to admit it has problems, and the activists here are offended anyone would dare try to solve problems. This is why a Federal intervention is inevitable. DC is not capable of restraining its worst impulses.

I didn't vote for Mendo, either, and I've never lived in Allen's ward, so I've never voted for or against him. I'm not an activist, I just believe in democracy.

You're still reaching for the most extreme possible solution rather than working to address your complaints by, say, persuading some of the remaining 78 percent of residents to vote. Wouldn't it be better to elect people who are representative of MORE of the city, rather than having people be appointed who represent 0 percent of its residents?

There's nothing extreme in returning to a tried and true solution, one that is historically and Constitutionally appropriate.

What is extreme is insisting on Home Rule when its obviously not working. You can churn candidates all you like, but DC is structurally incapable of producing quality leaders. We can go into why in more detail, but in short DC is small city in the heart of a larger metro, its a one-party town, and its population is either highly transient or mired in multi-generational poverty. This makes DC the perfect place for someone to blow into town with a receipt from a fancy college, demand changes and promptly move away as soon as they have to experience the consequences of their demands.

I would be a much bigger supporter of Home Rule if you had to live here another 20 years and keep your kids in the public school system for the duration of that time as a condition to vote. If people had skin in the game, they might actually be forced to make good decisions.

But an appointed Mayor would be easier to achieve.

Ha ha. Yeah, no, that's extreme. "I, a resident of DC, think the voters of Arkansas and Georgia and Indiana should get to make the decisions about my garbage pick-up and recycling!" is extreme.