Just to clarify, I believe reports have mixed up the numbers a bit... the best I can discern: the jam has persisted for 9 days, but an individual motorist has "only" been in it for ~3 days on average. Not to say that isn't outstanding in and of itself.

by Bossi on Aug 24, 2010 10:15 am • link • report

Correction: Bruce P. Majors a 30 year resident of DC (rumored) created the tea party guide for his tea party blog and the Maine Tea Party member cut and pasted it into his blog, or whatever they have going on there. This Majors guy is a huge piece of work and a quick Google search will reveal his madness (see TPM). But to be fair, the fact should be straightened out.

by RJ on Aug 24, 2010 10:19 am • link • report

The Tea Party pamflet says it all. Ignorance=Fear

by Thayer-D on Aug 24, 2010 10:22 am • link • report

RJ, thanks for the tip, corrected to reflect egregious copying-and-pasting.

by Erik W on Aug 24, 2010 10:28 am • link • report

The collision animation was released by the NTSB on 07 27 2010, the same day of the post "accident" board meeting.

http://www.ntsb.gov/events/2010/washington-dc-metro/AnimationDescription.htm

by Sand Box John on Aug 24, 2010 10:34 am • link • report

The link to the full NTSB report isn't working. Here's the correct one.

by andrew on Aug 24, 2010 10:46 am • link • report

I think the tea partiers are whack-jobs, too, but I really hate when GGW gets political.

by mch on Aug 24, 2010 10:57 am • link • report

Bruce Majors is a real estate agent here in DC (http://www.linkedin.com/in/homesdc). I recall seeing his advertisements in the Current Newspapers. If he has such a low regard of the neighborhoods he's selling houses in, perhaps DC residents shouldn't use his services. This would be his beloved free-market working at its best.

by GO(B)P on Aug 24, 2010 11:20 am • link • report

Regarding the Philly business license... I understand this is just a blurb so it's hard to distinguish, but a few points.

1) The $300 dollar license is a lifetime license. It does not need to be renewed. If you go annual, it's $50. I don't find this unreasonable, assuming your goal actually is to run your blog like a business.
2) I'd agree that the city needs to set clearer standards about who does and does not need to pay the fee. But some blogs pretty clearly are businesses and should pay for a normal business license. Philebrity, for example, mentioned in their commentary on this that they'd acquired a license voluntarily years ago.
3) Technically you owe taxes on profits from your personal blog now, so that really doesn't change anything, other than that having the license presumably makes it more difficult to avoid paying them.

by Nate on Aug 24, 2010 11:45 am • link • report

China's traffic jam, meh - we've had one for ten years on I-66.

by Jamie on Aug 24, 2010 12:26 pm • link • report

DC has sh*t food. It's a function of expense accounts, a non-native population, and an abundance of government types. A few NY eateries opening up (and closing down a year later) is not going to change anything. And on the Tea Partiers -- if they're not allowed on the green line, allowing them to stop at the National Archives -- how are they going to be able to see the Constitution? (This was pointed out in a WPost chat.)

by aaa on Aug 24, 2010 12:46 pm • link • report

"how are they going to be able to see the Constitution?"

Since when were they interested in that? Aren't they busy trying to get an amendment passed to remove the right of citizenship for people born here, for example?

by Jamie on Aug 24, 2010 12:49 pm • link • report

Right AAA. I've been saying that for years, but people wanna argue. If you want good food, you pretty much have to go to the suburbs for some reason. It's either as you say crap food, or overpriced atmospherics where half way through your entree the music's cranked and the waiters and waitresses start ignoring you (after they've plied you with alcohol). It's a formula of money making and little else. No food culture at all in Washington.

by Jazzy on Aug 24, 2010 1:04 pm • link • report

aaa, you need to get off K street / downtown (or, stop following the tea party guide) if that's what you really think of DC.

Jazzy - no food culture? I'm not trying to say DC is some sort of culinary haven, lord knows other cities are much more known for cuisine. But that seems a bit harsh. Have you been to one of the good ethiopian spots?

by doubleyouteeeff on Aug 24, 2010 2:23 pm • link • report

Palisades is in the red zone.

EPIC

by dynaryder on Aug 24, 2010 2:46 pm • link • report

doubleyoutee...K Street is definitely the epicenter of disappointment. (DC Coast comes to mind as a typical example.) The bigger problem, though, is with the lack of quality low end places.

In Philly, B-more, NY, and any other city there are an abundance of hole-in-the-wall places where I can get an awesome burrito, chinese food, or a sandwich. In DC, there might be one or two places that fills the need for each of these, and they are either in the suburbs or miles from where the average person works and lives.

by aaa on Aug 24, 2010 3:03 pm • link • report

I kind of group B*More in with DC... there are some options, but I'd put Philly, NYC, and Boston all in their own league far above those south of the Mason-Dixon Line. (speaking as a Philly native)

...I particularly bemoan the lack of Italian sub shops & Jewish delis. Then again, the former could be partly-attributed to the Italian diaspora's reach not quite being as profound in the Balt-Wash area.

by Bossi on Aug 24, 2010 3:18 pm • link • report

Litteris, Mangialardos, Taylor. You're spending too much time on the West side, boss...

by oboe on Aug 24, 2010 3:27 pm • link • report

@oboe-

Oh there are definitely some good ones out there, but compare that to Boston, NYC, and Philly where there are quality sub shops & delis on just about every corner; and every neighborhood in Philly has its cheesesteak hotspot which they will all vehemently rally behind as "the best"

Though on the other hand, I have to credit DC's recent intiatives with mobile vendors -- particularly some of the food trucks that have been coming online recently. Philly used to have such a great mobile vendor culture (soft pretzels!!) but it was utterly decimated in the 90s and is only now *starting* to rebound in the tourist areas.

by Bossi on Aug 24, 2010 3:35 pm • link • report

The reason that many of the areas people work in DC don't have good food is that hardly anyone lives in them, or even near them. There are excellent low-cost eateries in Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, U St., Mt. Pleasant, Capitol Hill, Chinatown, heck, even Shaw and Dupont. If you want New York style restaurant diversity, you're going to have to abolish the height limits downtown to allow a critical mass of density to develop.

by Nate on Aug 24, 2010 6:23 pm • link • report

Not really Nate.

by Jazzy on Aug 24, 2010 7:36 pm • link • report

It's so sad when flaks like and sheeple lap up the lies.

For the past two days, I have been attacked on line and on TV as a racist for writing a guide for tea partiers coming to this week's Glenn Beck rally (or other marches on DC) at my heretofore almost unknown blog "Tea Parties -- One Lump or Two?" (www.teapartiers.blogspot.com). I am a racist because I advised people to avoid whole sections of our collapsing and dangerous subway system (Metro) unless they took a local like me with them.

What's really funny is the complete journalistic incompetence this has shown. It's like I (and my linked Maine tea partier blogger Andrew Ian Dodge) set a booby trap for MSNBC and the Leftover blogosphere. I have long been of the opinion, even before the Journ0Lists story broke, that other than the Drudge Report and the National Enquirer, many journalists are nothing more than flaks for the political class, covering up their failed stimulus programs, and their exercise of seignorial rights to interns, masseurs, and campaign staffers. This week confirms that for me.

First the Huffington Post and Rachel Maddow erroneously inform everyone that my guide was
written by someone in deepest, whitest rural Maine, when I have lived in DC since 1980 (and before that lived for years in Obama's old south side neighborhood in Chicago).

Then Maddow comes up with a map of where I told tourists it would be safe to go on their own, that consist of a teeny area of the Mall, downtown, and West End. When I clearly said all of the red line in Montgomery County and NW DC and everything west of 14th Street (which includes the historically African American neighborhoods of Crestwood, Shepherd's Park, Colonial Village, and 16th Street Heights). One wonders how many Oxford dons one has to blow to get a PhD when one cannot read?

(In Maddow's defense I believe she was depending on the accuracy of blogs called "Little Green Footballs" by some coward named Charles Johnson, who has blocked my ability to reply to his innaccuracies on his blog, and something called DCist.com produced by people in Manhattan who claim to know about DC, even though they don't know any of the geography I just mentioned above.)

Then the Leftover lemmings from the Huffington Post on called me a bigot who was telling people to avoid gays and racial minorities. When I am openly gay and have dated someone from every race and ethnic group on earth, with the exception of Chechnyans, Aleuts, and Eskimos (and I am currently single so if you are reasonably attractive, a good conversationalist, and are in those groups feel free to give a call).

Next a purportedly award winning journalist named Andrea Stone at AOLNews wrote a (slightly more balanced) piece wherein she claims to have tried to reach me repeatedly. No calls, no messages, no emails from her. When I check, just out of curiosity, Andrea and I have 8 FaceBook friends in common. And my phone number is listed. The leftoid Talking Points Memo (which wrote its own Journ-0-Lisp reproduction of the HuffPo stock piece), WMAL radio, David Weigel from Slate. and local WUSA Channel 9 and a local FOX affiliate all managed to call my listed number. Woodward and Bernstein move over -- Andrea Stone is on the beat!

Then MSNBC, which is infamous for having NO African American hosts or co-hosts, employs mush mouthed hack Eugene Robinson on the Maddow show, and that more honest and respectable African American guy who appears on the McLaughlin Group (his name escapes me) to chortle on about how my guide would prevent visiting tea partiers from eating at Ben's Chili Bowl (didn't Michelle Obama say not to eat that stuff?) at 13th and U Streets. Apparently the almost all white MSNBC network needed black faces to give them some street cred on DC neighborhoods.

Now we know that Chris Matthews travels far and wide to find lesbians to molest, sometimes all the way to Burbank, but I suspect I have been out dining and dancing in the New U way more than he has -- and more than Robinson or the other guy. And, as pseudo-journalists and pretend DC citizens, they seem unaware that the New U clubs had stabbings and shootings that led openly gay, left-liberal, Democratic city council member Jim Graham to consider shutting them down (http://dcist.com/2007/06/29/another_shootin.php). I guess Jim Graham has been a Manchurian candidate all this time, a secret raving right-wing conspirator of the Tea Party. Welcome aboard Jim! Cosmos at 5:00 at JR's?

So it is moral and thoughtful to tell tourists to go to this neighborhood at night and to smear me as a racist for telling them not to do so, according to all white MSNBC. Right Chris! It seems that that tingling synapse in your leg is the only part of your central nervous system that is still alive.

What this whole megillah shows us about the Leftovers is what we knew from the first time high school drop out Janeane Garofalo pronounced on the psychology of tea partiers: the left is intellectually bankrupt. Obama is flailing -- at this point his best strategy would be to campaign FOR Republican candidates. Boxer, Reid et al will soon have to become lobbyists or beg Obama for ambassadorships to support their tax predator ruling elite lifestyles. All the Keynesian hogwash their PR flaks spew is rejected by a growing majority of voters (even if in their own little caves at HuffPo and Salon the inmates think "Mises" is the plural of "mice"). They have nothing left but seizing on anything they can and screaming racism. The one tool in their box, and it no longer works. They have already lost this election. What new form of scapegoating and demonization will the invent for the next one?

by Bruce Majors on Aug 26, 2010 6:00 pm • link • report

"the suburbs or miles from where the average person works and lives"

Technically, the "average person" in Greater Washington probably lives nearer to those wonderful ethnic foods available in Fairfax and Mont. County. Doesn't help you DC hipsters w/o cars, though.

I've had very decent fried chicken in dc.

by charlie on Aug 26, 2010 6:19 pm • link • report

"I have long been of the opinion, even before the Journ0Lists story broke, that other than the Drudge Report and the National Enquirer,"

And that about sums it up!

I'm glad that you admitted your piece was a "booby trap" (translation: masturbatory media-whoring, of the Michaele Salahi or "balloon boy" sort). This was pretty obvious from the get go.

But if you think people are actually up in arms about this blog piece, you are really far more narcissistic than I would have otherwise imagined.

We just think it's hilarious.

It really doesn't matter if you are actually as backwards as you appear to be, or if this was written to be intentionally inflammatory.

At the end of the day, we all got a good laugh out of it, and in a week, you'll be forgotten, just like the balloon boy!

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. That was sure a lot of breath to expend on a bunch of people in DC over-analyzing a publicity stunt. Hope you enjoyed your 15 minutes!

by Jamie on Aug 27, 2010 8:16 am • link • report