Photograph by Karen A. Szulgit.
DC welcome signs are generally restrained, low-key affairs. That’s definitely not the case with a new one that greets visitors from Maryland in Michael D. Brown’s yard in American University Park: “WARNING,” it screams in large letters. It continues:
YOU ARE ENTERING THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, THE NATION’S CAPITAL.
CAUTION!
BE ADVISED!
Revocation of Your Rights Does Not Relieve Your Responsibility for Obligations to the State for Which You May Be Liable.
TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!
Brown is one of the District’s shadow US senators and was elected to his third six-year term in 2018. The position is unpaid; Brown estimated last year that he had spent $60,000 of his own funds to perform his duties. Reached by phone, Brown says he paid for the sign himself. The pandemic has helped him save money that usually goes to statehood rallies and paraphernalia like buttons.
Photograph via Redfin.
A mobile billboard will drive around DC Wednesday. The message: “Tax the Rich. Save America. Yes, it really is that simple.” Among the locations where it will be seen: Business Roundtable’s headquarters, the White House, the Treasury Department, and the Kalorama home of the world’s richest person.
The DC pied-a-terre of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos certainly helps make something of a case for increasing taxes on America’s wealthy: As Mimi Montgomery reported in 2018, blueprints for his renovation of the former Textile Museum called for 25 bathrooms, three kitchens, a whiskey cellar
and a wine room, more than a thousand light fixtures, and two elevators. (Perhaps that wasn’t enough room, since Bezos bought another mansion across the street last January.)
Share
Masks will no longer be required outdoors in Maryland, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced Wednesday. Hogan attributed the easing to recent CDC guidance that said vaccinated people no longer require masks outdoors and advice from health leaders like Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, and Scott Gottleib.
People who aren’t vaccinated should continue to wear masks, Hogan advised, and said, “The fastest way to put this pandemic behind us is for every single eligible Marylander to get vaccinated as soon as possible.” Masks are still required at outdoor concerts and indoors in public places such as restaurants’ indoor areas. “As the weather gets warmer, we’re encouraging Marylanders to move as much of their activity as possible to outdoors,” Hogan said. The state expects to lift further restrictions soon, Hogan said.
Photograph via iStock.
The District of Columbia’s resident population grew more than 14 percent from 2010 to 2020, the US Census Bureau announced Monday, from 601,723 in the 2010 count to 689,545 last year. That’s a healthy gain, and though DC still has more residents than Wyoming or Vermont, the number is smaller than the Census’s estimate last year that DC would grow to 712,816 residents. In 2018, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrated an estimate from the DC Office of Planning’s State Data Center that said DC would hit 700,000 that year and named two newborns as the people who purportedly put the District over the 700K mark.
Photograph by Jeff Elkins
Like many of us, Denver Riggleman had a long and sometimes lonely 2020. The Republican congressman from Virginia’s Fifth District lost his seat after being defeated in a primary last June. (His opponent decided to run because he was angry that Riggleman had presided over a same-sex wedding.) He spent the remainder of his term pushing colleagues to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory and admit that Donald Trump had lost the presidential election efforts that were about as welcome as you might expect in the party of Trump. Now the co-owner of the Silverback Distillery in Afton, Virginia, is working to combat the spread of disinformation as a top strategist with the Network Contagion Research Institute (which reports on and fights bogus information online), running a consulting business, and mulling a potential run for statewide office.