We’re going to front the retrocast in this edition. What happened between 6 pm on Saturday and 7 am Sunday? Something big, ’cause when I went out to check for our newspapers, I felt as if I was in another macroclimate altogether. Talk about a dry front moving in! Was the difference between walking through roof cement and a Newport breeze. We’re looking at a mid-80s day on Monday then back to the low 90s. Those 90s—-they’re not going to stay away all summer!
On the reading front, looks as if the Post‘s Style section is making a move to up their local feature count. Today, Dan Zak goes long on a D.C. mural, following on the heels of other feature-box stuff on D.C., including Michael Rosenwald‘s experiment in listening to sports-talk radio.
Post columnist Colbert I. King goes long and hard about acceptance of violence in the city. Murders, shooting sprees, deaths—-no one seems to care, screams King, citing the emergence of a “new normal.” And it’s not a good normal, either: “That ‘new normal’ view embraces bike paths and a bicycle center at Union Station, townhouses and parks along the Potomac, couples eating al fresco at neighborhood coffee shops, doggy parks, schools befitting the middle class, and poor people who behave themselves and patiently wait their turn.
The city’s chosen means for coping with a crisis shaped by self-destructive forces and a shifting civic landscape? The medical procedure, triage.
Officials won’t say it this way, but this is what it means: dividing our social order into three groups — those who aren’t going to make it, those who might and those who will.”
District rocks!
A perennial: D.C. cops out to get the prostitutes and johns at 5th and K. And another perennial: D.C. voting rights lobbyists are taking their act on the road, where people—-surprise!—-don’t know that we don’t have meaningful congressional representation: “DC Vote is reaching out to people like 62-year-old Henry Perry of Tennessee.
Not until the advocacy group visited Mr. Perry in Mississippi earlier this month did he learn that D.C. residents pay taxes and serve in the military but don’t have a vote in Congress.
‘I think it’s really a disgrace that they’re denied that right,’ said Mr. Perry, president of the Teamsters Local Union No. 667 in Memphis, which also has members in Mississippi. ‘I was kind of shocked.'”
Howie Kurtz discusses how powerless the media is when it’s face to face with disinformation (i.e., death panels).
Solid tale by Post‘s Del Wilber on $3 million, sexual molestation, a duped judge, and a defamation case. Not to mention a stolen barbecue grill!.