I'm going to try, now that I have a better camera, to take and post at least one picture each day. Here's mine from last night, of the alley in Adams Morgan that connects Columbia to 18th St.

It was a great evening to be on the roof deck of the Reef with Kathleen, once the crowds died down.

So I like Tony Williams. Why? Because he's focused on the dollars-and-cents in the city of DC. Yes, there's been some cronyism, but much less than in the past. Yes, he has neglected building the city into a true livable space in his goal to revitalize downtown and make DC more business friendly. But his primary goal (he was the CFO before the Mayor) seems to have always been to bring the city out of the red and into the black. On a personal level, I admire that. But some aren't happy with the choices he made, especially when he put money pressures above the community.

I tend to think the proof is in the pudding, and anyone walking around NW DC will say that neighborhoods are coming back and the city as a whole looks nicer than it used to. Whether that translates into development east of the Anacostia is another story, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

With Mayor Williams bowing out, the next Mayor will have a much harder time pleasing residents across the city. NW is rapidly gentrifying, development in Anacostia is non-existent, and the school system is, as usual, stuck in a rut. Violence is still troubling, and many of the city's departments are still completely dysfunctional. Tackling these problems has to be a priority of the next mayor. In a way, Williams left just at the right moment: he'll be remembered for bringing the city back to life, but the really tough problems (crime/education/etc) will have to be addressed by the next mayor, who will already be under fire for failing to turn around the city in those areas the same way Williams helped balance the budget. It's a tough road.

That's why it's important the next mayor be the right person for the job, and why I was saddened to see Mayor Williams endorse Linda Cropp. I've never been a fan of Cropp, and the final straw for me came during the baseball debate. No, not her desire to scuttle the deal, which was bad. It was her decision to "postpone" a simultaneous bond sale (essentially, at the same time stadium bonds would be sold, education/library bonds would also go on sale for a similar amount, which would mean that the city was spending just as much luring a team to DC as they were on local educational infrastructure) so that the stadium bonds would be sold immediately, and that the library/education bonds would be taken up later.

And by "later", of course, she meant "never".

As someone who wanted baseball to come to DC, I was excited to see many of the people who were anti-baseball come together for the educational bond issue. I know that the stadium is a money-hole for the city, but by tying it to a real social good, Cropp could've made a real difference in the lives of all Washingtonians, not just the owners of MLB.

Having declared myself anti-Cropp, therefore, I now have to choose a new mayor, which brings me, finally, to my question: who are you supporting for Mayor? I found out last night that Kathleen is a big Fenty backer. But where do the rest of you stand? I know that Pell has seen them all speak (at an HRC forum, which admittedly, meant the questions didn't cover a huge range of topics) but has anyone else?

Normally I don't like to link to articles that have been referenced by JMM or Atrios, simply because I assume most have read them. But if you haven't read this delightful takedown of Tom Friedman, you really should:

Such praise is not uncommon. Friedman's appeal seems to rest on his ability to discuss complex issues in the simplest possible terms. On a recent episode of MSNBC's Hardball (5/11/06), for example, Friedman boiled down the intricacies of the Iraq situation into a make-or-break deadline: "Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we're going to have to just let this play out."

That confident prediction would seem a lot more insightful, however, if Friedman hadn't been making essentially the same forecast almost since the beginning of the Iraq War. A review of Friedman's punditry reveals a long series of similar do-or-die dates that never seem to get any closer.

"The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time." (New York Times, 11/30/03)

Go read them all. Saying that something will be fixed "just around the corner" is punting the ball. Do that enough times and you're back in your own endzone, the game over.

I love lolita. It's hilarious and a great novel.

I hate John Derbyshire. He's not funny, and thinks you can tell what age women are most attractive by the average age they are sexually assaulted at.

Yeah, that's about as sketchy as one can get, right?

Okay, I finally got the archives section working again. Go check it out to see how to navigate back in time through the website.

This means the only sections left to fix are:

• members
• search
• images
• backend

I'll try to get search working next, then probably update the css for the imageserver and backend pages, with the members section (the hardest job of the three) being the final item to tackle.

So, as it turns out, I'm running for a position with the Ward One Democrats, on the slate, no less:

This Saturday, May 20 there will be an election of officers for the Ward One Democrats.

Stop by to vote anytime between 10:30 am to 1 pm

REEVES CENTER at 14th and U St. NW Metro Accessible.

Please attend

Running:

• Kathie Boettrich, Chair
• John Adams, Vice Chair
• Edward, Corresponding Secretary
• Bryan Martin Firvida, Recording Secretary

If you live in Ward One (doesn't everyone?) I could sure use your vote. Just vote for the slate! (Writing in "edward" would be, sadly, somewhat counterproductive)

This is why I like working in our DC office:

The best greenspace means plenty of sun for lunchtime reading. Plus, you get to make fun of tourists. Clearly, a killer combo.

So a long time ago I came up with a bunch of titles for the website, which were seemingly random. They'd show up on the main page and say things like 'the dredwerkz - partisan rangers' or 'the dredwerkz - city of trees'. The full list is located right here.

Only, it's not the full list. Someone (Brad? Helena? Me?) managed to delete all the new entries after the first bunch. So either I can pay my web provider a large amount of money to restore from backup, or I can just try to recreate the ones I remember. Which is where you come in: do you remember any of them? If so, just add a comment and I'll try to add it back in.

For the next two weeks (porchin' and previous calendar items excepted) I'm going into financial lockdown mode: that means no crazy spending, got it?

Being a good capitalist, I always tend to spend almost as much as I take in, but this time I'm serious: no more spending until I climb back into the black.

Did people miss Colbert's performance? Because as I was reading this oh-so-boring profile of Tony Snow I came across this gem of a final paragraph:

Some friends were surprised that Snow accepted Bush's job offer, given his recent health problems. "Why he is doing this is absolutely beyond me," Beckel says. But "he has got a great deal of spiritual faith."

And that may be what becoming the public face of an administration in trouble requires: a leap of faith.

"I agonized a lot about whether to do this," Snow says. "Now I have no doubt. It's just your gut."

At first I thought, "what an idiot, he sounds just like Colbert!" Later, after some reflection, I came to the conclusion that perhaps, oddly enough, Snow as referring to his bout with colon cancer, thus saying it was "just" (as in, only) his "gut" (as in, colon/small intestine) and thus not important. Maybe it's a weird Snow joke. Then I went back to my original conclusion that Snow is an idiot.

Why? Because of thoughts like this:

Snow majored in philosophy and wasn't sure what to do after his 1977 graduation. He was a caseworker for the mentally ill in North Carolina, driving tens of thousands of miles dealing with what he calls "really hard, gut-wrenching cases." He spent time teaching in Cincinnati and also in Kenya, which he says convinced him of "the incredible failure of socialism." And he spent a year doing graduate work in economics and philosophy at the University of Chicago.

There's that gut again! And wow, who knew that in the late seventies, the problems in Cincinnati and Kenya could be tied to "socialism"? I guess the war on poverty was pretty silly stuff, eh? A good thing the private sector swooped in to rescue both of those areas, right? (And what does Kenya have to do with socialism? Perhaps a better analogy would be counter-insurgencies...)

My gut tells me Snow is going to be the worst Press Secretary ever. Why? Because he's trying to be friendly to the journalists...as someone who wants the process to work properly (and it's been broken almost the entire Bush presidency) I admire his efforts. But the sad fact is that Fleischer and McClellan, while awful press secretaries, were quite useful in their roles to the administration. They ensured, day after day, that no news came from the White House. Snow, by contrast, will probably let slip some juicy tidbits from time to time. And in this administration, a "juicy tidbit" is often a "leak which damages credibility". Let's start the snowstorm!