A Meeting of Juggalos…And Real Clowns

And they call the Juggalos “thugs”…

The ICP is mostly white folks of not much means

The Chumph Supporters are mostly white folks of not much means.

Juggalos are fans of a Rap Group.

Trump supporter are fans of a fraud and traitor.

Why is it the one that is destroying the country isn’t the “gang”?

Insane Clown Posse followers, AKA Juggalos

The real clowns

“Juggalos,” Trump supporters converge on Washington for dueling rallies

The National Mall has played host to rallies and protests of all sizes, scope and aims through the years, but Saturday it will witness a convergence of groups most likely unique in the park’s history.

Thousands of so-called Juggalos — fans of “horrorcore” hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse who are known for the face paint they wear to match the band’s “dark carnival” aesthetic — are set to march this afternoon, as part of a long-planned protest against what they say is discriminatory treatment by law enforcement.

Scheduled more recently, and set to begin just a few hours before, a crowd marked by the red “Make America Great Again” caps ubiquitous among supporters of President Trump will rally in favor of the administration’s policy agenda.

Though the “Juggalo March on Washington” and the pro-Trump “Mother of All Rallies” are on the same day, and at the same place, their aims couldn’t be more different

The Trump supporters say their event aims to boost the president’s “America First” agenda, which they say will protect “traditional American culture.” The Juggalos, far from traditional, say they have been discriminated against and targeted for their support of the Insane Clown Posse, whose lyrics are marked by violent imagery, and whose logo is a man holding a hatchet.

In 2011, the FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment listed the group as a “loosely-organized hybrid gang,” an unusual designation the agency hasn’t since used. Though the group wasn’t listed in the next two FBI assessments, released in 2013 and 2015, the band says “hybrid gang” designation caused myriad legal, professional and personal problems for hundreds of fans.

Organizers of the two rallies have regarded each other warily against the backdrop of last month’s deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At that event, white supremacists bearing Confederate battle flags sparked violence as they protested the city’s decision to remove Confederate monuments and memorials from public spaces. Dozens were injured in clashes throughout the day, punctuated by a deadly car attack — labeled domestic terrorism by Attorney General Jeff Sessions — that left one dead and 19 injured.

A Mother of All Rallies organizer told CBS News that the group will ask any attendees with Confederate flags, Nazi symbols or hateful signs to leave, or put paraphernalia back in their cars. But Juggalo organizers remain on edge about their proximity to the competing rally, said Farris Haddad, an attorney for Insane Clown Posse who was involved in planning the Juggalo March.

“We’re concerned for the safety of the Juggalos. The last thing we want is any kind of clashes or violence. We’re just here for a peaceful march,” said Haddad, known as the “Juggalawyer” to fans of the group, whose music includes anti-bigotry lyrics and a 1992 song called “Rebel Flag” that’s critical of Confederate ideology.

“After Charlottesville, we were like, ‘Holy (expletive), this could be a problem,'” Haddad said. “[Insane Clown Posse] throws events and concerts every year, and there are never any major issues with violence.”

The Mother of All Rallies organizer told CBS News that two rallies had been in touch and agreed to be “allies,” but Haddad adamantly denied that claim. He said the two groups only conversed on one occasion, when the Juggalos declined an invitation to work together.

The pro-Trump rally is set to commence at 11 a.m., and will feature a series of speeches by prominent members of the alt-right movement. Though organizers initially said they hoped to draw “one million patriots,” about 10,000 people have expressed interest in the event on the group’s Facebook page, and organizers now say they expect fewer than that number to attend.

A few thousand Juggalos are expected to attend their event, which is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. The event will include musical performances and speeches by people who say the FBI’s gang designation caused issues ranging from the loss of employment and being listed in local gang databases, to targeting by child protective services and even the revocation of probation.

 

Local DC News Legend Dies

Rest in Peace, Jim Vance – you were a shining star for a lot of years in DC.

 

Obamas Buy Home in DC

Check out the new neighbors!

Nice place in one of Washington’s more expensive and classy neighborhoods.

The Obamas just bought their rental home in Washington

Looks like former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama are putting down deeper roots in Washington: After renting a Kalorama home for their post-White House stint, the couple have purchased the eight-bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bath home for $8.1 million, according to property records.

The Obamas have said they plan to remain in D.C. while their younger daughter, Sasha, finishes high school at Sidwell Friends. After leaving the executive mansion in January, the family settled into a rental home owned by Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart and his wife, Giovanna Gray Lockhart, an 8,200-square-foot home that was built in 1921 and renovated in 2011.

The Obamas still own a Georgian-style home in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the city that will house the Obama presidential library.

Spokesman Kevin Lewis, in a statement, said the purchase just made sense for the family: “Given that President and Mrs. Obama will be in Washington for at least another two and a half years, it made sense for them to buy a home rather than continuing to rent property.”

D.C. records show that Lockhart sold the home for $8.1 million to Homefront Holdings LLC, which is controlled by the Obamas. The deed transfer was recorded on Wednesday. Lockhart bought the home in 2014 for $5.295 million, records show.

The $8.1 million purchase price makes the Obamas’ new home the second-most expensive in the Kalorama neighborhood, behind the $23 million that Jeffrey P. Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, paid for the former Textile Museum.

The Obamas have called the swanky Washington neighborhood (where neighbors include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner) their home, but it’s really functioned more like a home base for the globe-trotting family. The former first couple traveled to French Polynesia for an extended vacation after leaving the White House and also vacationed in Tuscany.

 

 

Chumph Draining the Swamp? Guffaws!

The problem with draining said swamp, is you have to take down the folks who control the swamp…

Right now, those folks are Republicans.

And Republicans are the only thigh standing between the Chumph and his ass being impeached and convicted of Treason…

And hung.

Kinda sad to see the last few dumb mofos in America still suckered into thinking Putin’s Bitch is going to change anything.

There is just going to be a big Trump Hotel in the middle of the swamp…Oh, there already is one!

Poll: Americans don’t think Trump is draining the swamp

Less than a quarter of Americans surveyed in a new Monmouth University poll released Wednesday said President Donald Trump is making progress on his promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption.

Thirty-two percent of those polled said Trump is actually making the “swamp” worse, while just 24 percent said he is draining it. Thirty-five percent of respondents said the president has done nothing to change Washington’s culture.

Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” was one of his most popular campaign speech bits, a line that evolved into a call-and-response at many of his rallies. And while he has instituted some limitations on future lobbying for those working for his administration, Trump has also taken some steps that seem at odds with his anti-corruption message, including removing from public view the list of White House visitors and installing well-connected individuals within his administration, including several from Wall Street megabank Goldman Sachs.

Among those polled, 35 percent said the president has paid “a lot” of attention to the most important issues to average Americans, while 30 percent said he had paid “a little” attention and 32 percent said he had not been attentive to those issues. Sixty-two percent of participants said they wished the president would pay more attention to the issues that matter most to them, while 34 percent said Trump had paid adequate attention to their preferred issues.

 

DC Area Lawmakers Ask FBI to Help Search for Missing Black and Brown Girls

Eleanor Holmes Norten and others call for FBI help on solving the recent rash of disappearances…

The Twitter thing is great. The only issue I have is there needs to be a focus on all women and girls of color, and not just black girls.

Lawmakers Call on FBI to Help on Missing Black Girls

Black lawmakers are putting pressure on the FBI to help investigate the number of missing black minors in Washington, D.C., the Associated Press reports.

In recent weeks, social media users have been tweeting about the lack of media coverage of missing black and Hispanic girls in Washington, D.C. using the hashtag #MissingDcGirls. In the first three months of 2017, D.C. saw 501 cases of missing children and teens, many of whom are black or Latino. Twenty-two of these cases remain unsolved as of March 22

AP reported that Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. in Congress, penned a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey to ask that their departments “devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed.”

“Ten children of color went missing in our nation’s capital in a period of two weeks and at first garnered very little media attention,” Richmond, who asked to schedule a meeting with Sessions, wrote. “That’s deeply disturbing.”

According to D.C. police, there hasn’t been an uptick in the number of missing children. But they’ve been posting missing person announcements more frequently on their Twitter feed, sparking concerns. Many of the missing children were girls, including 13-year-olds Yahshaiyah Enoch and Aniya McNeil; 15-year-olds Juliana Otero, Jacqueline Lassey, Dashann Trikia Wallace, Dayana White and Morgan Richardson; and 16-year-old Talisha Coles.

Follow

Shalisa Hayes @ShalisaHayes

14 black girls go missing in 24 hrs & I have to rely on Black Twitter to get info cuz mainstream media’s too busy to care.#missingdcgirls

3:33 AM – 24 Mar 2017

• 8,1248,124 Retweets

• 7,8057,805 likes

Follow

Rebecca Theodore

✔@FilmFatale_NYC

Glad to see #missingdcgirls is trending. We need to hold @DCPoliceDept accountable to do their job and bring these girls back home.

10:16 AM – 24 Mar 2017

• 763763 Retweets

• 1,1111,111 likes

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isha♡ @twerkballerina

there are so many girls missing , help find them instead of focusing on some football jersey. #missingdcgirls

8:23 AM – 24 Mar 2017

• 2121 Retweets
• 3333 likes

8 Year old Reliesha Rudd, missing sine 2014 from a Homeless Shelter in DC.

 

Nearly a Dozen Missing Black and Brown Girls in DC So Far in March

They are black and brown…So don’t expect any national outcry.

 

DC Restaurant Sues the Chumph

Sounds like the basis for a class action lawsuit to me.

The Chumph is making his properties meeting places for government meetings, events, and even strong-arming  foreign visitors to stay at his chintzy Hotel, Taking away legitimate business from much higher quality establishments and even smaller restaurants in the city.

One owner has stood up to this Chumph blackmail and fraudulence…Perhaps more will join.

D.C. Restaurant Sues Trump, Claiming ‘Unfair’ Competition

Diane Gross and Khalid Pitts, owners of the Cork Wine Bar

The owners of a wine bar in Washington, D.C., say they face unfair competition from an unusual source: the president of the United States.

Diane Gross and Khalid Pitts own the Cork Wine Bar, located about 20 blocks north of both the White House and the nearby Trump International Hotel.

Gross and Pitts say that their restaurant is losing business to the hotel restaurant run by the Trump Organization, which is owned by President Trump. So they’re suing him and his hotel.

“We feel that the president of the United States, owning a hotel, owning restaurants, promoting those restaurants, is unfair and to the detriment of other businesses in the city,” Pitts said at a press conference Thursday.

Pitts and Gross were joined by a platoon of lawyers to announce the lawsuit filed in D.C. Superior Court.

The case involves Trump’s hotel located in a taxpayer-owned building, known as the Old Post Office Building. In 2013, the federal General Services Administration leased the historic building to the Trump Organization, which opened the hotel in the fall of 2016.

Here’s the issue: A provision in the lease says no federal elected official
can be on the lease or benefit from it.

Despite that language, GSA has taken no action to force Trump out of the lease. Meanwhile, Trump’s hotel is earning a reputation as “the place to be”
for lobbyists, political players and foreign diplomats. The GSA hasn’t publicly addressed the lease since Trump took office. An agency spokeswoman said it had no comment.

The lawsuit cites examples that it says show the president, his family and administration officials were seeking to boost what the lawsuit calls the hotel’s income-producing potential.

The suit, filed on Wednesday, seeks no monetary compensation. Instead, the plaintiffs want Trump to divest from the hotel or close it for the duration of his presidency.

At the press conference, lawyer Steven Schooner said an elected official shouldn’t be competing with the private sector.

“It’s an unacceptable conflict and nobody ever intended that this be tolerated,” he said.

 

Daily Resistance to the Illegitimate Chumph

Greenpeace rolls out the latest act of resistance to the Illegitimate Chump…

A few minutes ago, Greenpeace activists climbed a construction crane a block from the Whites Only House and unfurled a banner more than 200′ up visible over wide swats of the city.

Good Morning, Chump!

Protesters climb 270-foot crane in downtown D.C., disrupt traffic

Seven activists who D.C. police said are affiliated with Greenpeace climbed a construction crane in downtown Washington on Wednesday morning, snarling traffic and bringing work on a new office building to a halt.

At least two protesters had attached themselves to the crane, police said, while others were on the outstreched arm, or jib, attempting to unfurl a banner 270 feet over the site at 15th and L streets Northwest.

At times, two protesters were dangling from the jib, apparently using safety harnesses.

Dozens of onlookers gathered at the scene, clutching coffee cups and peering upward.

D.C. Police Capt. Robert Glover, of the Special Operations Team, said investigators talked with at least one of the demonstrators. He would not describe how, nor would he say if anything had been discussed. Glover said police are in contact with Greenpeace.

“Safety is our primary concern,” Glover said, adding that police are in contact with the U.S. attorney’s office to determine possible criminal charges.

The protesters were first noticed about 6 a.m., and by 9 a.m. Glover said there was no immediate attempt to have police and firefighters climb the crane and remove the protesters.

“Time is on our side,” Glover said.

Greenpeace is an international environmental group known for activism that sometimes involves confronting authorities and companies.

Cassady Sharp, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace, said the 35-foot by 75-foot banner reads “Resist.” She said the site was chosen because it is near the White House — it’s about one-half mile away — “to send a message to the people who are feeling discouraged after just a few days of [President] Trump’s administration.”

Specifically, Sharp said the protest is targeting Trump’s signatures on executive orders Tuesday signaling support for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. She said the demonstrators “are going to stay up there for as long as they can to make sure their message is heard.”

Sharp said the group hopes the banner can be seen from the White House, and that the protest location was “chosen for its visual value.” She said the demonstrators who climbed the crane are from all over the country, including San Francisco, Brooklyn and around Washington.

 

Hubris Leads to Black Restaurateur’s Spectacular Failure

Washington, DC., New York, Chicago, San Fran, LA, and Dallas All host great restaurants – of which a half dozen or so compete on the World Stage of greats.You want to open a restaurant and claim it belongs you better be on the very, very, very top of your game. Legendary locations for exquisite cuisine include The French Laundry, Per Se, Alinea, or  Le Bernadin are world famous. The top 5, 10, or 50 list is hotly contested and changes from year to year. Per person seatings generally run from $80 to $300 before the wine tab.

In the Washington, DC area that list include perennial favorite, The Inn at Little Washington, as well as relative newcomers Minibar, Rasika, Komi, Fiola, and French traditional stalwart L’Auberge Chez Francois.

So when an upstart opens a new place with a price tag of $1,000 a seating, at 4 times the price of 2 of the highest Michelin rated restaurants in the US, you better be able to  produce something so spectacular, people faint at first tasting.

Alas… This foolish brother couldn’t “walk the walk”.

Just from a single guy standpoint, if I’m picking up a $2,000 tab – everything from the decor, ambiance, food, service, wine better be so good – my date hands me the room key to the Presidential Suite she paid for at the hotel…With the bottle of champagne!

I’m not paying 4 times the going rate for some of the very best restaurants in the world…For a place whose decor looks like “Early Howard Johnson’s”

Shaw Bijou Dining Room @ $2,000 for 2

The competition — The Inn at Little Washington Veranda Dining Room @ $300-$500 for 2

Shaw Bijou, one of D.C.’s most expensive restaurants, has closed after less than three months

Fail! Chef Kwame Onwuachi lost his debut restaurant after less than three months of business.

The Shaw Bijou closed today, and the owner says the blame for the restaurant’s two-and-a-half-month existence is shared among all the principals.

Kelly Gorsuch, the principal owner of Shaw Bijou, says he saw himself as a silent investor, providing the capital for first-timers chef Kwame Onwuachi and general manager Greg Vakiner to build and run the high-concept restaurant they had been planning for years. But in retrospect, Gorsuch says he should have pushed the duo more from the start.

He says that the restaurant’s pricey tasting-menu dinner wasn’t filling seats or covering costs. So on Sunday, Gorsuch called Onwuachi and Vakiner into a meeting and told them he was closing Shaw Bijou, effective immediately. Gorsuch and the other principal investor Glenn Paik could no longer afford to keep the place running.

Neither Onwuachi nor Vakiner could be reached for comment.

“[The restaurant] bled too much, at too much of a clip, to be able to salvage it,” says Gorsuch, the president of Gorsuch Holdings, a company that operates upscale salons and other luxury brands. “It just cost a lot of money. It was a very expensive business. I’ve never quite seen that in business at all. That was new for me. The numbers were staggering.”

The closing of Shaw Bijou, first reported by Washingtonian, brings an abrupt end to a restaurant that endured wild mood swings before it served a single meal. Even before appearing on “Top Chef,” where he finished sixth out of 17 contestants last year, Onwuachi was a hot commodity. He not only had a compelling back story, but he also had an impressive run with Dinner Lab, a series of pop-up dinners in which the chef consistently impressed diners. Onwuachi’s appearances on “Top Chef” only contributed to the buzz around the young cook, even though he had never run his own restaurant or managed a kitchen.

The hype took a turn in August when Onwuachi and his team announced the price tag of their 13-course tasting menu, which would take diners on a journey through a converted townhouse. It wasn’t long before Washingtonians realized that dinner for two at Shaw Bijou could top out at $1,000, immediately making it one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Diners couldn’t understand how someone with such a thin resume could compete with the likes of José Andrés, Eric Ziebold and Aaron Silverman.

When Shaw Bijou opened on Nov. 1, the early reviews were mixed. In his First Bite review, The Post’s Tom Sietsema enjoyed several of his savory courses but found the desserts fell flat. More dispiriting, the critic realized that after dropping $500 per person on the meal, he was still hungry. Washingtonian gave the place two stars in a review that couldn’t make sense of the story that Onwuachi was trying to weave.

Two months into its existence, Shaw Bijou slashed its prices and its offerings: Onwuachi rolled out a seven-course, $95 tasting menu on Jan. 3. The chef also offered up a little humble pie. “Humility creeps up on you when least expected,” Onwuachi noted in a letter. “The opening of this restaurant has taught us just that.”

But Gorsuch says it was too little, too late.

“I think all business is difficult. You have to be able to move and change and adapt quickly, especially when you’re starting out,” Gorsuch says. “It wasn’t happening. It wasn’t where it needed to be.”

The owner says he had been trying for weeks to convince Onwuachi and Vakiner to change the concept, but he says he couldn’t convince them.

“I think the biggest problem here, from the get, was that we were not listening to the guests,” Gorsuch says. “We spent two years working on this thing . . . I don’t care what the industry is, you put your people first and you care about the guests and you care about the details. . . I mean, numbers can be tweaked. You can cut things, but you have to have those elements.”

Gorsuch says he had spent most of Sunday trying to find jobs for the servers, cooks and bartenders at Shaw Bijou. The owner wasn’t as concerned about the chef and general manager. The longtime friends, who first met while attending the Culinary Institute of America, will probably find a new home soon, Gorsuch says.

“They’ll be fine,” the owner says. Onwuachi “had tons of offers before us.”

Gorsuch says this experience has shaken him. He’s never closed a business before. “This is probably the roughest week I’ve ever had,” he says.

But more than that, Gorsuch is upset by the lost opportunity. He says he believed in the team behind Shaw Bijou. He thought they could have pulled off the concept with proper oversight.

“The game plan was always to be super innovative,” Gorsuch says. “For all the things we did wrong, the talent that was in that building was special.”

 

No Trumpazoid Kids at DC Elite Schools

It seems the Trump’s dumb blonde advocate is about ready to find out exactly how inhospitable living in DC can be to the “dumbarati”. The DC area has some of the best private schools in the country. The sitting President’s children go the Private Schools for security reasons. Sidwell Friends is probably the best known, and is a highly selective school academically. Both of Obama’s daughters attended there. Other top schools academically are National Cathedral School, St. Albans School, Maret, Madiera (very international), Georgetown Prep, St. Anselm’s Abbey School, and Episcopal High School. Most of these schools offer some number of scholarships for academically gifted poor children, whose  parents can’y afford to fork over the $12,000 to $35,000 annual tuition. And, at schools like Sidwell, you cannot buy your way in. Several of the schools are endowed with enough money they really don’t give a damn who, or how rich mommy and daddy are, if the kid doesn’t have the academic chops…They don’t get in, period.

Selection of school depends on what your objective is:

1. If it is to have your child build relationships with future business and political leaders – it’s St Albans.
2. If it is to have your child build relationships with future International leaders, including perhaps Presidents of foreign countries – it’s Madiera.
3. If it is to have your child build relationships with future thought leaders and intellectuals of America – it’s Sidwell.

If the objective is to get your kid into the Ivy League Colleges – then it actually is one of the free public schools, Thomas Jefferson (IF your kid has near genius IQ), McLean, or Langley in Northern Virginia (If you can afford to live in the neighborhood where the average home is well over $1 million). About 13% of McLean kids wind up in the Ivy League.

Kellyanne Conway’s children have two strikes. They probably attended one of those right wing “christian Academies”, which leaves them about 4 years behind their grade level compared to any of the DC area’s elite public or private schools. She opposes almost every one of the tenets of the elite private schools on Diversity, opportunity, intellectualism, critical thinking, and world view. So why exactly would they be interested in taking on a dumbarati parent who is going to make trouble? Whining about their kid having to sit next to a black kid from the ghetto in class.A kid who, incidentally has an IQ about 50 points higher than Conway’s inbred get.

WTF wants the white trash?

Campus of Madiera School near Washington, DC.

 

The swamp of Washington’s elite private schools want to drain themselves of Kellyanne Conway’s kids

The future counselor of the president suggests her kids are struggling to gain enrollment at D.C. private schools

Kellyanne Conway successfully managed Donald Trump’s campaign all the way to the White House, but now she can’t even enroll her own children in a Beltway private school. Conway reportedly shared her concerns last week at her twins’ current private school in Englewood, New Jersey, telling parents that the Washington, D.C. elite were barring her kids’ admission.

According to Richard Johnson of Page Six, Conway believes prejudice against President-elect Donald Trump might prevent her children from receiving a private education.

Conway, who is set to be the counselor of the president, told Johnson: “I would not characterize myself as ‘worried’ so much as amused by the silence and sighs on the other end of the phone when friends and allies have made preliminary inquiries on our behalf.”

A source confirmed to Page Six that Conway is asking everyone with connections for help.

Conway took a tour of private schools in the D.C. area on Wednesday, but was reportedly disappointed with the double standards in the schools handbooks and websites, which all preach diversity and open-mindedness. Conway sardonically told Page Six: “For some, there is a comfort in sameness.”

But Conway’s right-wing views shouldn’t be a prohibiting factor. After all, D.C. is governed by conservative politicians and government workers.

Conway, a mother of four, is married to George Conway, who was the attorney who wrote the Supreme Court brief when Paula Jones sued former President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment.

At Madiera School the kids come from all over the world (they have dorms) – so the school is one of the most racially and ethnically mixed in the area. Some of the childrn are the daughters of foreign government officials including Ambassadors and officials in the World Bank and International Development Bank (IADB).

 

In DC, Broken Trust in Police

Maybe some of the cities wouldn’t be so broke…If they introduced some rationality to their Police forces.

‘It made me hate the police’: Ugly encounters with officers fuel loss of trust, costly payouts

The sound of a battering ram against wood would have been jarring enough, but Viola Briggs had a metal front door.

The only warning that it was about to come crashing open was a knock and a three-word shout: “Police! Open up!”

The 55-year-old legal assistant had just finished watching an episode of “CSI: Miami” on her computer. She would have opened the door but didn’t have time to take a step. She shouted for her older brother, who lived with her in their Southwest Washington apartment. Then, suddenly, the door frame gave way and 13 police officers rushed in, weapons drawn.

Over the past two years, one graphic video after another has captured ugly and sometimes deadly interactions between police officers and black residents of the communities they serve. From one city to the next, the shaky-framed images have fueled demonstrations and made household names of the dead: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile.

But for Briggs, and many people like her across the country, their trust in the police was eroded long before videos of police shootings were going viral on Facebook and Twitter. It was destroyed in moments that were not caught on camera and that might have gone unnoticed if they hadn’t been reported.

An extensive examination of citizen complaints and civil lawsuits filed against D.C. police over the past decade shows that even in a city with a majority-black department and a robust civilian oversight office with newly enhanced powers, hundreds of incidents occur each year in which people feel mistreated by those who are supposed to protect them.

In one case, a 65-year old African American man said he was leaving a library in Southeast Washington when he was detained and handcuffed, even though he did not fit the description of the threatening library patron police had been called about. In another, an officer admitted to spreading a black man’s buttocks twice in an unlawful body-cavity search but denied that he “jammed” a finger inside him, as the man claimed.

Since 2005, the city has agreed or been ordered to pay at least $31.6 million in 173 cases alleging police misconduct, including claims of false arrest and excessive use of force, according to a Washington Post analysis of data obtained from the D.C. attorney general’s office.

Complaints against police — and the settlements that sometimes result — are common across the country. Baltimore, which has a similar-size police force, paid $5.7 million in 102 court judgments and settlements for alleged misconduct between 2011 and September 2014, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of city and court records. During roughly that same period, alleged police misconduct cost the District $2.9 million in 38 cases.

But since then, the District’s payouts have risen sharply. In the first nine months of 2016, misconduct lawsuits cost city taxpayers at least $3.8 million in judgments or settlements. And last week, the family of Terrence Sterling, a motorcyclist fatally shot Sept. 11 by a D.C. police officer, filed a $50 million lawsuitagainst the city and the police department alleging that the 31-year-old “was unarmed and posed no danger” when he was killed.

Some of the District’s lawsuits detail beatings that resulted in hospital stays. Others tell of people who had committed no crimes before contentious encounters with police landed them in jail.

Viola Briggs and her brother, Frank Briggs, were the recipients of a settlement this year.

The two had moved into their apartment three months before the night of Jan. 20, 2012, when the officers, several wearing ski masks, held them at gunpoint.

Police had a search warrant for drugs but did not find any, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the siblings. The case, launched against the city and the 13 officers involved, argued that the warrant was based on a conversation with a confidential informant and that investigators did not attempt to corroborate the information or research who lived at the residence.

Once inside, the officers ordered the siblings to lie on the floor. Viola Briggs did. But as her brother, then 56 and suffering from back pain so debilitating that he qualified for disability, slowly lowered himself, an officer shoved him to the ground, according to the suit.

Before that day, Viola Briggs said, she held a deep respect for law enforcement. One of her three sons is an Army captain who has considered joining a civilian police force, she said. She regularly donated to the Fraternal Order of Police. And, after two U.S. Capitol Police officers were killed in the line of duty, she wrote this on a Washington Post online memorial site: “I would like to express my sincere condolences to the family of the two brave officers who gave their lives for the protection of others. May GOD be with you in your time of need and may HE also bring you peace.”

After the raid on her apartment, she said, she was left not only with a broken door but also with a shattered sense of security. For years, she slept with a baseball bat at her side and a chair shoved against the door.

“It made me hate the police,” Briggs said. “Not all of the police. It made me hate the police at the 7th District because of what they did to me.”…More here…

 

Somali-American State Congresswoman Attacked in DC

Another Trumpazoid, another hate crime…

Another question…There actually is a white, American born cabdriver in DC? I haven’t seen one of those in 30 years! The joke around DC is you can always tell where there is a war in the world by where the cabdrivers come from.

History-Making Somali-American Legislator Reports ‘Hateful’ Taunts In D.C.

For the first Somali-American lawmaker in the U.S., it was meant to be a day to remember: a visit to the White House for policy meetings before she takes office in Minnesota. But as she left the seat of U.S. power, Ilhan Omar says, she was subjected to a hateful and threatening verbal attack in a cab.

“I pray for his humanity and for all those who harbor hate in their hearts,” Omar, a Muslim who wears a head scarf, wrote of the cab driver who she says assailed her. In a Facebook post, she says the encounter took place on Tuesday.

State Representative IIlhan Omar with other women leaders, Emily’s List Wendy Davis and R. Weingarten

Saying that she was “subjected to the most hateful, derogatory, Islamophobic, sexist taunts and threats I have ever experienced,” Omar says the cab driver “called me ISIS and threatened to remove my hijab.”

Omar, 34, recounted the abusive encounter in the nation’s capital just one month after she made both history and headlines with her inspiring personal story of a former refugee who won a state House seat in southeast Minneapolis, years after her family fled Somalia’s civil war.

“This really was a victory for that 8-year-old in that refugee camp,” Omar said of her Election Day win. “This was a victory for the young woman being forced into child marriage. This was a victory for every person that’s been told they have limits on their dreams.”

This week, Omar has been in Washington, D.C., to attend the State Innovation Exchange conference along with hundreds of other state legislators. She also spoke at the U.S. Institute of Peace on Monday — Arab American Day. One day later, she was at the White House for a discussion about economic issues facing the middle class.

After the White House session, Omar said, she was verbally abused during the cab ride to her hotel, adding that she “wasn’t really sure how this encounter would end as I attempted to rush out of his cab and retrieve my belongs.”

Omar added, “I am still shaken by this incident and can’t wrap my head around” the increasing boldness of people “displaying their hate towards Muslims.”

Her Facebook post about the incident has drawn thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments from people who expressed their sympathy and solidarity with the mother of three who will be sworn into her new office in January.

One of the most popular responses to Omar’s post came from another Minnesotan who had recently visited the nation’s capital.

“I just got back from Washington too,” Christopher L. Wendt wrote. “I had a cab driver originally from Somalia. When I told him I am from Minnesota and that we have a ‘first’ Somali woman legislator, he got very excited. ‘Ilhan!’ he said – very proud. Keep it up. We’ve got your back.”

 

Black White Wealth Gap in DC…Likely to Get Worse Under the Chumph

Black workers are more likely to be employed in the public sector than are either their white or Hispanic counterparts. In 2011, nearly 20 percent of employed Blacks worked for state, local, or federal government compared to 14.2 percent of Whites and 10.4 percent of Hispanics.

Blacks are 30 percent more likely than nonblacks to work in the public sector, according to the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. And roughly 21 percent of black workers are public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblacks.

So when Putin’s bitch says he is going to “reduce government” who exactly gets hurt here?

George W. Bush (AKA the Bushit) “privatized” significant swaths of the Federal Government by outsourcing jobs to the private sector resulting in “whitening” Government.

More than a third (36.2%) of the Military are Minorities. Depending how you count (multiracial, other, etc) something between 17 and 20% of the US Military is black.

Partially as a result, the “wealth gap” between black and white is very bad in Washington, DC.

In D.C., White Families Are on Average 81 Times Richer Than Black Ones

Other major cities aren’t much better

The wealth discrepancy between blacks and whites is one of the most stark examples of inequality in America. White American families have, on average, around $142,000 in savings and assets, minus debt. Black families’, meanwhile, amounted to only $11,000, according to a 2014 Pew Research study. The gulf between black and white wealth is the worst it has been since the 1980s. Put differently, an average white family has 13 times the wealth of an average black family.

But as though the median numbers for the country as a whole weren’t bad enough, things look much worse in America’s cities, according to a new paperfrom the Urban institute—even cities such as D.C. where the prevalence of public-sector jobs, a large black population, and a high share of black business owners might make it seem like a place that black families could thrive. But in Washington D.C., the median white family has a staggering 81 times as much wealth as the median black family.

D.C. is not an outlier: In general, urban areas have much more severe racial inequalities, in part because of the concentration of white wealthy people, and the fact that their wealth has not “trickled down” to poor and middle-class black families. According to a 2015  National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Colors, D.C.’s racial wealth gap falls just behind Los Angeles’s, where median wealth for whites was closer to 89 times as much as blacks’. In Miami it was 30 times as high; in Tulsa, 18 times.

Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School and one of the authors of the Urban Institute’s study—along with fellow economists Kilolo Kijakazi, Rachel Marie Brooks Atkins, Mark Paul, Anne Price, and William A. Darity Jr.—says that while many ethnic groups might do poorly in one city and thrive in another, that’s not the case for black Americans. “No matter what the geographical context is, black Americans are a low-wealth group,” he told me. “I think the disparities are going to be dramatic wherever we look.”

Hamilton says that while the statistics about magnitude are useful for distilling the gap in balance sheets, they do little to capture what the wealth gap means for black families. In practice, less wealth means diminished access to the education and opportunities that help many Americans reach the middle class. Less wealth decreases opportunities for savings, homeownership, and economic security. And limited wealth accumulation also means that parents and grandparents have little to pass along to the next generation—from paying for school to helping with down payments—which dampens opportunities for intergenerational mobility.

D.C.’s wealth inequality stems from a combination of factors. According to the study, homeownership plays a significant role: Whites living in the District are much more likely than blacks to own homes—something that’s true around the country. In the District, whites with less than a high school education were more likely to own their homes than blacks at any education level, even those with college degrees. And for those who do own their own place, home values for black owners were around $250,000, about 30 percent less than the average value for white owners. Blacks in the District have a much higher unemployment rate, lower education rates, and are much more likely to have received a subprime mortgage.

The District’s racial wealth divide has old and deep origins in centuries of racist policies. The authors highlight a few in particular: the “black codes” of the 1840s, which prevented black people from owning successful stores or working in certain professions; the return of land in the District to the South in the 1870s, which decreased opportunities for ownership among newly freed blacks;  the demolition of Barry Farms—a black enclave founded by freed blacks—in the 1940s to make way for public housing and highway projects; the wave of “urban renewal” projects that swept out black businesses and residents in the 1960s and 70s. The effects of these policies have never been adequately dealt with. “Black people in D.C. have faced more than two centuries of deliberately constructed barriers to wealth building, and some of the highest barriers were embedded by design in law,” the study says….More…

 

7 Year Old Punched By Adult At School

Pitiful…

 

 

DC Metro Subway Police – No Food on the Trains or We Will Bust You

No food on the trains was one of the original rules of the DC Metro System. Actually, I’m glad they are enforcing this again. The Washington Metro Train System used to be the cleanest subway system in the world. Unlike NYC or Chicago, the cars are not painted over with grafitti, and until the last two years or so, you could comfortably take a seat without messing up your suit because some ass left his happy meal on the seats.

Apparently the new management at Metro has decided to clean up the trains again, in light of their numerous other problems.

Young lady deserved to get arrested. Nobody want to ride the subway sitting in your shit.

Having worked underground in Metro’s tunnels installing equipment, I can tell you it is rather nice when you reach in an electronics cabinet not having a 3′ long rat hanging on your arm when you pull your arm out unlike in NYC.

Keep it clean!

The Black Lives that matter in this case are the other riders. About 60% of all subway rides on Metro are intra-city, serving the poorest sections of the city as well as some well to do areas. People in the Southeast section of the city, where some of the poorer areas are located, depend on that train to get to work every day, go to weddings, funerals, or to shop. There is no reason they should be forced to wade through some thoughtless cretins crap along the way.

DC transit cops hauled a teenager to juvie because she had snacks

They’re not charging her in the apparent case of “contempt of cop.”

Transit police in Washington, D.C., violently arrested a young black woman on Tuesday night because she was carrying snacks.

Videos posted Wednesday do not capture the beginning of the interaction between a trio of Metro Transit Police officers and the unnamed teenager.

But they show one of the cops kicking the woman’s feet out from under her and shoving her to the ground, while she is in handcuffs. And officers in the video confirm to angry bystanders that the arrest happened because the teenager wouldn’t relinquish a bag of chips and a lollipop when they confronted her in the Columbia Heights metro station.

After the takedown, the heavy-set officer who knocked the teenager down seems to realize the rough arrest has attracted a crowd. “Have a good day, folks,” he says. “If you wanna ride the system, put your card through and go attend the trains. If not, leave the station.”

In the first video, the teenager expresses distress at how tightly they cinched her handcuffs and shouts at a second officer who starts rifling through her backpack.

“You acting like it was a four-course meal,” she says. A moment later, one of the bystanders begins to address the officers directly, telling them their actions are ridiculous. The officer who earlier knocked the handcuffed girl to the ground and a second officer in a bike helmet argue with the woman criticizing them briefly.

“Little girls break the law, little girls get arrested like anybody else. And she goes to juvenile detention and her mom comes and picks her up, that’s how it works,” the bike cop says.