Wither DC

Rome, Tokyo, Ottawa, London and (hold your nose) Washington DC:

First the elected clowns insult the tax-paying residents with a diseased public school system that's run like a WPA-era jobs program:

Washington has long been infamous for having the worst performing big-city system in the country. But The Washington Post exposed the scope of the problem earlier this summer in an eye-opening series. According to The Post, the city ranks first in terms of the budget share devoted to administration and last in spending on teachers and instruction. The imbalance is particularly disturbing, given that the District’s children fare worse at school than children in other big cities...

In the past, superintendents who wanted to restructure the disastrously dysfunctional central office were hampered by laws that guarantee displaced administrators the right to keep their salaries even as they moved to lower level jobs in the schools. The City Council will need to eliminate those laws if Washington is ever to remake its schools.

Then they flat out lie to to the same tax-paying residents in a pathetic leap of progressive thought in order to make you wholly dependent on an unaccountable governing structure:

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Attorney General Linda Singer pen an op-ed in today's Washington Post arguing that the Second Amendment does not protect Americans' right to keep and bear arms. They also discuss their appeal of a D.C. Circuit Court ruling that struck down the district's draconian and unreasonable gun ban. Washingtonians are forbidden even from having handguns in their own homes.

The Fenty and Singer piece contains this howler: The handgun ban has saved countless lives, but this fundamental part of the District's public safety laws will be no more if the Supreme Court does not review and overturn this year's decision by the D.C. Circuit. Countless lives? D.C. is consistently at the top of the U.S. murder rate rankings. Was the gun ban saving "countless lives" in 1991, when the rate peaked at 80 murders per 100,000 people? Would the number have otherwise been even higher? Is it still saving "countless lives" when our murder rate for 2005, at
its 20-year low, was still five times that of New York City?

If I'm not mistaken, Fenty and Singer appear to be suggesting that their city is so totally lawless that only a total deprivation of Constitutional rights can make it
moderately livable. I wonder how they feel about wiretapping?

I'll never advocate that only PhDs and Nobel winners can run for or hold public office, but the situation in our national capital city is a direct result of the stupid electing the stupid.