dc stuff

[nacho]

Oh, good... The army has re-invented barrage balloons.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike-surveillance-crafts-set-to-deploy-over-maryland-heighten-privacy-concerns/2014/01/22/71a48796-7ca1-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html

We'll stop those Nazis!

[monkey!]

We need Jimmy Page to form a new band now.

[nacho]

Ha! Wow... So I saw this last night and I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a plane going down or something, waited for a flash or a boom, saw nothing, and then went back to playing my video game and didn't think about it again...

Fiery meteor streaks across the Mid-Atlantic sky

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/02/27/%3Fp%3D31648/

[nacho]

Ashley Brandt was all smiles last week when she went to board a flight home after a belated birthday trip to the Grand Canyon.

Then, standing in an airport security line in Phoenix, her jaw dropped.

According to Brandt, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration took a look at her D.C. license and began to shake her head. “I don’t know if we can accept these,” Brandt recalled the agent saying. “Do you have a U.S. passport?’

Brandt was dumbfounded, and quickly grew a little scared. A manager was summoned, she says. “I started thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to get home. Am I going to get home?’ ”

The long Presidents’ Day weekend had been Brandt’s boyfriend’s first chance to make good on a December birthday promise to take Brandt to see the Grand Canyon. The two were now on their way back, and the next morning, a class would be waiting for Brandt at her Cleveland Park preschool a couple of miles north of the White House.

But the implication from the TSA agent seemed clear to Brandt: The District is not a state; TSA requires a state-issued ID to board a plane.

Nevermind that Brandt had used her brand-new D.C. license, the one marked “District of Columbia” over a backdrop of cherry blossoms, to board her flight to Arizona days earlier.

Brandt says the agent yelled out to a supervisor, working in adjacent security line. Are D.C. licenses valid identification?

Brandt says she could hear the response, “Yeah, we accept those.”

“She didn’t seem to know that it was basically the same as a state ID,” said Brandt, who had only recently traded her Maryland ID for one from the District. “D.C. is obviously not a state, but I didn’t ever imagine it would be a problem — I mean, the whole population of D.C. has to use these.”

Within a few minutes, Brandt said she was on her way to the gate and her pulse was settling back to normal. But flabbergasted by the experience, Brandt’s boyfriend, Alan Chewning, who had passed security without an incident in another line, fired off a tweet:

“Holy. [Expletive]. TSA @ PHX asked for gf’s passport because her valid DC license deemed invalid b/c ‘DC not a state.’ ”

By the time the two landed, the tweet had gone viral, and stories were flooding in of residents recounting similar horror stories of trying to board a flight with a license from Guam or Puerto Rico.

Asked about the incident, Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman, pointed a reporter to the agency’s Web site, which has a published list of 15 types of valid IDs for airline travel, including “Driver’s Licenses or other state photo identity cards issued by Department of Motor Vehicles (or equivalent).”

Brandt did not file a complaint and a person familiar with the matter confirmed that no TSA incident report was filed over the encounter.

Social media exchanges that followed between Chewning and a TSA public affairs officer, however, made clear the agency had been alerted to the incident. In a statement Wednesday, TSA said: “A valid Washington, D.C., driver’s license is an acceptable form of identification at all TSA checkpoints.”

If nothing else, Brandt’s ordeal offered a fresh rallying cry for advocates of D.C. statehood.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) issued a statement Wednesday saying Brandt’s trouble in Phoenix “dramatically personified” D.C. residents’ lack of voting representation in Congress.

“The rejection of Ashley Brandt’s D.C. driver’s license by TSA because D.C. is not a state has moved collective insult to personal injury,” Holmes Norton said. “The daily disrespect of requiring D.C. residents to pay up on April 15 without a vote in the House or the Senate has now been dramatically personified in the insult to one of our own.”

It was also, perhaps, a lesson on how foreign Washington might seem in Phoenix.

“The whole thing was kind of ridiculous and strange,” Brandt said. “Apparently in Arizona, they’re not sure we’re all right.”

[RottingCorpse]

I just shrug and say, "Fucking Arizona."

[nacho]

Oh yes...

[Reginald McGraw]

http://theweek.com/article/index/259829/if-a-nuclear-bomb-exploded-in-downtown-washington-what-should-you-do

[RottingCorpse]

Reggie, I always get nervous when you post shit like this.

[monkey!]

http://theweek.com/article/index/259829/if-a-nuclear-bomb-exploded-in-downtown-washington-what-should-you-do

Duck, and cover!

[nacho]

I just hope it happens on a work-at-home day.

[Reginald McGraw]

Reggie, I always get nervous when you post shit like this.

You know...just in case you might need it...

[RottingCorpse]

The question is whether or not I'll need it this weekend in particular.

[nacho]

Here's a link to fallout shelters that'll be open at, say, around 2:47pm this afternoon.

I'd also like to take this moment to say that I've greatly valued your friendship and I'm sorry for any hurts I may have caused in the past. It really has been wonderful knowing you.

[RottingCorpse]

www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2014/05/14/designers-compete-to-build-d-c-version-of-high-line-park/

Designers compete to build D.C. version of High Line park

Six design teams are competing to build a park atop the former 11th Street bridge in the District, a project that is in need of nearly $40 million in funding but which organizers envision as a chance to build a local version of New York City’s High Line Park.

For those who are unfamiliar, the High Line Park is a series of gardens, walkways and performance spaces built on a 1.45-mile stretch of abandoned freight rail line. The public park is at the center of what is now a bustling neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.

[RottingCorpse]

Or as we Washingtonians call it, Wednesday.

http://www.wtop.com/41/3650866/Taxi-drivers-create-gridlock-in-District

Taxi drivers create gridlock in District

WASHINGTON -- Taxi drivers protesting Uber are causing gridlock in downtown D.C.

They've packed the roadways near the Capitol and Freedom Plaza.  The drivers, who are affiliated with the Teamsters Union are taking part in the "Fairness NOW!" caravan. They want to stop Uber and other private sedan services from operating in the city.