Washington dc

Rand Paul, BLM and DC’s street harassment laws

Over the past week, Washington, DC has turned into a truly dystopian nightmare. Diners at several area restaurants, including the famous Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, were accosted by a Black Lives Matter mob that bullied them into raising their fists in solidarity with the movement. Restaurant patrons who refused to comply faced further verbal abuse and harassment. The trend continued outside the White House on Thursday night. Attendees of President Trump’s acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention were thrown to the wolves as they left the event, and were chased and screamed at as they made their way back to their hotels. Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his wife Kelley received some of the most aggressive harassment.

rand paul street harassment

After BHAZ

Protesters tried to establish an autonomous zone between the White House and St John’s Episcopal Church on Monday. Law enforcement pushed the demonstrators out of Lafayette Park using pepper spray, quickly shutting down the ‘Black House Autonomous Zone’ and establishing a perimeter much farther away from the White House. The protesters also attempted to topple a statue of Andrew Jackson.By the next morning, law enforcement had set up a perimeter such that it was impossible to venture within a quarter mile of the White House from any direction. https://twitter.com/BenZeisloft/status/1275458551985483776?s=20 The police line in the middle of the newly dubbed Black Lives Matter Plaza was rather calm.

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How much does Trump’s rift with military brass matter?

Donald Trump needs to ramp it up. After he almost bobbled a glass of water and carefully descended a ramp at West Point, Trump tried to go on the attack against his detractors, claiming that his performance was fine and dandy. But Trump, a master of stagecraft for much of his presidency, is increasingly losing the optics battle, particularly as he engages with the military brass.Or so goes the conventional wisdom. But what Trump’s critics are overlooking is that this is just the first stage in his struggle to corral the recalcitrant military leadership. Like his hero Douglas MacArthur, Trump is likely vowing, ‘I shall return!’ He knows that the military rank and file largely support him. Trump’s showered largesse on the troops and his bully-boy act goes over well.

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Arise, the cupcake

Do you know the milquetoast muffin man? His name is Charlie Brooker, he’s the co-creator of the hit television series Black Mirror and he thinks cupcakes are ‘bullshit’. ‘A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping,’ Brooker wrote in 2012. ’Once you’ve got through the clown puke there’s nothing but a fistful of quotidian sponge nestling in a depressing, soggy “cup” that feels like a pair of paper knickers a fat man has been sitting in throughout a long, hot coach journey between two disappointing market towns.’ I’m usually quite skeptical of gastronomic fads — the rainbow bagel and matcha ice creams can go pound sand — but I’m here to defend the cupcake.

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A night in an American riot

Race riots have gripped the nation over the past week, eclipsing the peaceful protesters demanding justice for the death of George Floyd. Violent rioters — including members of antifa — have laid waste to virtually every American city. As darkness descends on an American city, what is it like to be on the front lines of the riots?Reporters who set out to document the chaos described to The Spectator how the mood shifted as the sun went down. Rioters felt empowered under the cover of darkness and set out to fight, destroy, and steal.Krista Oliver, who covered the weekend-long protests in Washington, DC for the Daily Caller recalled ‘how scary these riots are getting as the night progresses.

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War footing: can Trump turn left-wing protests into victory?

Don’t cross Donald Trump. Trump originally ran for the presidency because Barack Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. He has devoted himself to tearing up every accomplishment, every treaty that Obama signed. Yesterday he was mocked for the revelation that he was conducted into the White House bunker by the Secret Service. Now he has had his revenge. Speaking in the Rose Garden today, Trump declared, 'If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for there.' He indicated that he is prepared to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quash to the protests.This isn’t rodomontade.

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small Shop owners survey the damage to their store in Philadelphia, PA

Pity the shopkeepers

Small businesses in America have been hit by a devastating double whammy. Stores that managed to survive the economic shutdown now face a severe outbreak of looting and vandalism that could close them for good. Rioters might justify their actions by arguing that property damage is nothing compared to the suffering of black Americans at the hands of police, but the destruction of small businesses has profound economic and cultural consequences. As of mid-May, economists projected that more than 100,000 small businesses had been lost thanks to the COVID-19 quarantine. That accounts for at least 2 percent of small businesses in America. More than 30 percent of small business owners said they would be at risk if the shutdown lasted more than two months.

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The Washington war zone

Washington, DCLast night, I took my usual evening stroll in Friendship Heights, only to realize that it could have an insalubrious outcome as I saw a group of 'protesters', as they are known, huddling on Wisconsin Avenue. Discretion appeared to be the better part of valor: I made a swift left to avoid them only to detect another group of about 20 young men and women wearing ski masks and holding what appeared to be sticks and batons. No police were around. A quick calculation suggested that a reversal would be interpreted as fear. I strode ahead and about 10 seconds after I passed the group, I suddenly heard them rush toward me, yelling and laughing. Their target turned out not to be me but the stores on the business strip in Friendship Heights.

Why Joe Biden’s America loves a lockdown

COVID-19, the Wuhan virus, is an epidemiological scourge — but it’s also a clarifying catalyst for American politics. The virus’s relevance for globalization has been widely noted: this disease of Chinese origin has exposed how incapable the de-industrialized West has become of providing its own masks, drugs, and ventilators. It has highlighted the class divide that globalization produces within countries such as America as well. The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand — the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200.

joe biden lockdown

The haunting beauty of empty cities

COVID-19 has a horrid ability to turn fiction into fact. Deserted modern cities are usually the realm of post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. Now, many of us live in them. The world's greatest streets are dramatically empty; suspended suddenly in a dream-like quiet. It's eerie and also very beautiful. We usually often don't notice how remarkable our cities are the commotion. We are distracted by the crowds, the commotion and the congestion. Now it is hard for urbanites to notice anything else. The Spectator has looked around the world, and asked various writers in various places to describe where they live in lockdown.

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In quarantine, we’re all tradwives

Tie up your apron strings— it's time to get to work, ladies. The coronavirus threat has forced all of us into our homes as the CDC and the White House encourage strict measures of social distancing. The disruption to American life and the economy is no joke, and it's going to take some serious resilience and creativity to make it out the other side. The good news? Now is the perfect time to adopt the much-derided tradwife lifestyle, and it seems many women are already on board. I left my self-imposed quarantine briefly on Tuesday to pick up a few essentials at the grocery store: eggs, milk, flour, butter, sugar, and yeast.

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Coughing crotchety codgers at a dull DC coronavirus debate

Two gentlemen considered at 'high risk' of contracting COVID-19 met tonight in the Washington DC studio of CNN, to pitch themselves to an on-edge nation as the best alternative to Donald Trump. The Sunday night face-off between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders was initially supposed to be in Phoenix, Arizona, as the state votes on Tuesday. But that was in The Before Time. Even the CNN panel was socially distanced before the debate, with panelists spaced six feet apart across two studios, as opposed to the usual eight people crammed behind the desk like a pack of hot dogs. This memo clearly didn't get sent down the hall to where the debate was being held, as Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Univision's Ilia Calderón sat unhealthily close together.

Urbino legend

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. At the time of his death on Good Friday, 1520, Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino was the most successful artist the world had ever seen. In terms of sheer skill, expert judges like the historian Paolo Giovio rated him third among the supreme trinity of Renaissance artists — after the stiffest imaginable competition, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But in terms of worldly success, Raphael died as the unchallenged prince of artists. He was the favorite artist of the greatest patron in Christendom, the Medici pope Leo X. He had been commissioned to decorate the most prestigious monuments in Rome.

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Cyrus the Great

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Washington, DC has a proud jazz history: the birthplace of Duke Ellington where he made his first arrangements as a highs-chooler; the home of U Street, where joints like the Crystal Caverns and the Howard Theatre hosted Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Today, jazz holds out in a few spots on U Street and in select clubs such as Blues Alley. A relative latecomer, founded in 1965 near M Street in the heart of hoity-toity Georgetown, Blues Alley touts itself as ‘the nation’s premier jazz and supper club’. Despite a menu featuring such delicacies as ‘McCoy Tyner’s Blackened Catfish’, the supper part can safely be labeled as hearty, but no more.

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Standing up to eat is the new line in dining in DC

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Going into Spoken English, you feel a little like Henry Hill taking the back entrance to the Copa in Goodfellas. Wander into the Line Hotel, past the check-in, take a right past the elevators and enter the kitchen. It works best if you’re with someone you need to impress. Unfortunately, this time I’m with a Spectator editor. The Line is one of DC’s newest and hippest boutique hotels. That’s another way of saying it’s slightly less boring than the Hilton about five blocks away.

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Good riddance to the Newseum

The Newseum is officially closing its doors today after 11 years of operation in the nation’s capital and you won’t find me shedding a tear.Some journalists hailed the First Amendment-focused museum as a beacon of hope during a time when the media was facing dangerous attacks in America, like being called 'fake news' or only being allowed to ask one question during a press conference.But the Newseum was hardly the tribute to press freedom that it purported to be; rather, it was a money-hemorrhaging, unfocused building of stuff with a severe identity crisis.The most dynamic and engaging exhibit at the Newseum was arguably the lineup of front pages from the country’s most storied newspapers that sat just outside the front entrance.

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Transparent spirit: craft distilling has come to Washington DC big time

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. A white cross once rested over the door of the windowless warehouse at 1135 Okie St NE in Washington, DC. Residents seeking a reprieve from the street gangs and drugs that plagued the Ivy City neighborhood would huddle on the second floor and listen to the holy men of Old Ship of Zion Baptist Mission Church preach deliverance. Deliverance came. Crime plummeted. The violence and poverty along H Street gave way to Zagat-rated restaurants, organic markets and boutique bars. The closest thing you’ll see to weapons now in Ivy City is at Kick Axe, a new watering hole offering flannel-clad Capitol Hill staffers the opportunity to have a drink and, well, throw axes at wooden boards.

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E-scooters are a wretched species to be introduced into the urban ecosystem

Scattered along the streets of Washington DC are electric scooters. Most have four-letter names: Bird, Lime, Skip, Jump, Bolt. Using one for the first time, you may prefer to employ another four-letter word. I know I did. My first taste of the e-scooter phenomenon was on a visit to Los Angeles in February last year. The Santa Monica company Bird had been up and running for only five months, yet already its scooters were all over the city, like avian excrement. Students at UCLA embraced the Birds. Nobody seemed fazed by the undeniable fact that you cannot look cool on a battery-powered two-wheeler. The epidemic then spread to other American metropolises: Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami. New York has so far held out, but will likely soon fall.

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The media’s forgotten protest

As several hundred climate change activists shut down DC streets and held up morning commutes on Monday morning, a fellow progressive activist, Amy Siskind, was blasting the mainstream media to her 370,000+ Twitter followers: '50 neo-Nazis go to Portland to encourage violence and the media will cover them endlessly for days,' claimed the former Wall Street executive. 'Thousands peacefully protest and march to the Capitol, nothing from the media.'Siskind wasn’t referring to the climate protest taking place that morning. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, ABC, and CBS all covered the activists linking arms and punishing Washington commuters for their climate sins. She was referring, instead, to her own protest that took place Saturday.

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The progressive crusade for DC statehood

Residents of Washington DC want the federal capital to become an independent state. In 2016, 86 percent of DC voters supported a petition to Congress to permit DC into the Union as its 51st state. The chief issue for Washington residents — ‘Taxation Without Representation’ — is displayed on all their license plates: the 700,000 city residents do not have a vote in either House of Congress. Unfortunately for Washington, though, the DC statehood movement is unpopular nationwide. According to a recent Gallup poll, 64 percent of respondents oppose the US capital becoming an independent state, while only 29 percent support the proposition.

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