Another New DC Flag

Just last night here in Your Nation's Capital, an off-duty cop shot and wounded a couple of people over in Southeast. Cripes, it's as if they get even worse when they go off-duty; what's the damn deal with that?

.@DCPoliceDept officer (off duty???? sounds too familiar) just shot 2 people in SE...

REMEMBER #DQuanYoung

Watch each story after this one and watch the discrepancies and character assassination begin. @ChiefNewsham is a pathological liar. #StopMPD pic.twitter.com/YHjqQHP6MB

— BlackLivesMatter DC (@DMVBlackLives) November 9, 2019

I don't know about anybody else in this town, but I didn't like living in the "Murder Capital" the first time around.

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Thanks, Washington Post (finally)

Inspired by a re-reading of this article I saw at CounterPunch back in March. After all this time kind of looking the other way while he raked in the bank on cushy side gigs and other shenanigans, the Washington Post finally could stand no more and actually investigated Ward 2 councilmember Jack Evans.

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DC Council: Give US a "Fair Shot"!

Needless to say, we at DCMJ have some issues with the initial draft of DC Mayor Bowser's reforms to DC cannabis legislation – among them a prohibition on the free distribution of cannabis for advocacy purposes, restrictions on the cannabis "gifting economy" that's sprung up in DC in lieu of regulated legal sales, and the continued denial of access to the legal cannabis market for small-scale growers in DC.

#DCBlizzard

I rather like the shoveling -- repetitive, relaxing, meditative. Big ol' mug of coffee, smoke a bowl, suit up, stomp on out there and just kinda get into it. Some of my neighbors are out shoveling, too, so everybody's taking a break and hanging out. Round 2 begins soon -- or soonish, seeing as it's 8:30 on Sunday morning as I write this.



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Hoorah, sledding!

According to this report on WAMU-FM here in DC, the latest Congressional spending bill prevents the District Of Columbia from funding abortion services for poor women and regulating and taxing the sale of marijuana. They did, however, repeal the ban on sledding on the Capitol grounds, after a vigorous local outcry last winter.

Apparently, they're still hurting from all the bad publicity they caught with the sledding ban, but could care less about all the ill will they get by restricting women's healthcare rights and the right to tax and regulate a plant that's been legal for nearly a year. Still, there's prime sledding opening up on the hill at the West Front, so there's that.

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Speakeasies: Then And Now

From the latest post at DCMJ.org:

Even though Initiative 71 legalized cannabis, it cannot be consumed anywhere in DC other than in a private home. This is because, the week after Initiative 71 took effect, the DC Council passed emergency legislation (Act 21-149) that banned marijuana consumption at any bar, nightclub, bingo hall, or private venue in Washington, DC. Without any pressing reason, the Mayor and the DC Council severely restricted our rights as cannabis consuming adults...

Yeah, that's right, fellow Washingtonians. You can legally drink at an alcohol bar, you can legally smoke cigars at a cigar bar, but if you want to smoke weed communally in a similar setting, you'll have to open a speakeasy -- unless the DC City Council stops doing Congress' dirty work, and Act 21-149 is allowed to expire on January 15 next year.

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Show us your tats, for DC Statehood!

Hey now, DCers! Time to show off your DC Flag tattoos at the Statehood Rally at Dupont Circle on June 14 from 6 to 8pm! Let Congress know where you stand! Bring it on down, and let’s see that ink!

In the meantime, why not download this invigorating art for your leafletting and wheatpasting pleasure in two convenient sizes.

Find out more about DC’s struggle for liberation against the slavemasters on Capitol Hill, and get info on upcoming protests for DC Statehood and voting rights here and here!

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The Spirit of '99

Holy jeez, gang, has it really been ten years already? Phew, now that really makes me feel old. Luckily for me, fiftysomething is the new thirtysomething...or something.

So, when I was asked to design the poster for the Seattle/WTO Tenth Anniversary event here in DC, there was only one thing to do -- another parody of a famous work of art, in this case, a classic of Kitsch Americana, Archibald Willard's iconic Spirit Of '76, the hit of the show at the 1876 Columbian Exposition.



But, aaa-aaaanyway...the big do is on Monday, November 30, at Chief Ike's Mambo Room in Adams-Morgan, 1725 Columbia Road NW, at 7pm; it's a fund raiser for the Washington Peace Center and the Funk The War Alumni Association (for all you ex-college kids who are too old for SDS, but still want to get funky). There'll be the obligatory drinking and party-mix grooves, of course. There'll also be some vintage Seattle/WTO rebellion video running, because we really loves us some anarchy.

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So, hit the copy shop, mix up the paste, grab your rollers, and hit the streets, kids, and I'll see yer butts down at Chief Ike's on N30!

Obama's Economic Stimulus Plan for DC

So far as most of us can tell, the "economic stimulus" plan issuing from The Office Of The President-Elect (snicker) includes the most staggeringly pants-pissing amounts of cash to prop up failing corporations, banks and executives, and jack for the rest of us, unless we're prepared to summon up some cajones and engage in a little good old-fashioned shop-floor smackdown, like those laid-off screen-door plant workers in Michigan.



On the local level, here in DC, as Inauguration Day – or, as now known to some, Barack Obama Day – approaches, The One's economic stimulus program for DC has finally begun to jell; according to The Office Of The President-Elect (smirk), this plan will take a two-pronged approach: one prong for the quite well-off, and another big prong for the rest of us...

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A Fox Five Exclusive!

So, while I'm just finishing choking down the news about the DC Gummint -- at the urging of Fox Channel 5 News -- trying to sock the ANSWER Coalition with a fine for exercising basic Constitutional rights, I get a mailing from Rob Naiman's "Just Foreign Policy" list mentioning that their Iraqi Deaths Estimator has just rolled over a million. That's right, a million Iraqi dead since the "Shock'n'Awe" of March 2003 -- or 1,012,979, to be exact, as I write this.

That's right, one Friggin' MILLION. Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. And that's not counting the million and a half or more Iraqis this nation murdered with sanctions throughout the 1990s (nobody died when Clinton lied? My ass.).

I'd been noticing lately that Fox News hasn't spent a whole lot of time reporting on Iraq because, y'know, there just isn't any goddamn' good news coming out of that goddamn' place, unless you count some oft-repeated DoD press release mentioning that the Army has rebuilt some goddamn' stretch of highway from the airport (that they bombed the piss out of just a while back).

Yeah, when your Empire's crumbling, the outrage and dissatisfaction are so palpable you can cut 'em with a goddamn' knife, the one thing you need your press to be doing is exposing the nefarious doings of bands of left-wing wheatpasters defacing the Seat Of Our Empire with free expression.

Left-wing posters? In OUR Capital?

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The Colonist: Knocking the Cover Off It for DC Statehood

So, anyway, just to recap: we pay more taxes here in DC than many actual states, and have lost far more citizens in places like Vietnam and Iraq. For many a decade now, this city, its citizens and its alleged government have been the Feds' test bed for its policies in places like El Salvador, Palestine, and Baghdad, and the IMF/WorldBank's policies in places like Indonesia and Africa.



No control over our budget, no ability to collect taxes on outfits like the World Bank, or on all the suburban yahoos who roll across the river to Washington Nationals home games and kiss off and spit on any folks from DC who show up to publicly speak out on this predicament.

And, oh, yeah; it's just been leaked that the current budget estimate for shoving an entire neighborhood across the river and building a brand-new monstrous stadium for the ex-Montreal Expos to continue to play suck-ass ball in is now in the billion -- with a "B" -- dollar "ballpark".

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"Poster Boy of Protest", in the Washington Post

For a number of years in high school and college, one of my big dreams was to take over Herblock's job at the Washington Post -- or, perhaps, to hit the front page in the Post's Style/Arts section. Needless to say, as my work took a more radical turn, I realized that my chances of making the Arts page -- let alone becoming the successor to Herblock -- were slim at the very best, and I got a little more realistic and focused my attention to creating cover cartoons for the Yipster Times or trying to break into High Times or Rolling Stone.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself the subject of a front-page "personality profile"-type story appearing on the front page of the Post Style section a good twenty-odd years after my giving up on the idea of ever breaking into the Post at all. The Post had done a couple of previous Style profiles on local antiglob/antiwar movement figures, and apparently, now, it was my turn; it turns out that a certain Post reporter who'd been covering the local movements since Seattle had been a fan of my work for quite awhile, ever since it began appearing with regularity, wheatpasted on DC's streets beginning with the original "Blood For Oil" series during Iraq War I.

It was with a mixture of surprise and ironic glee, then, that I found myself and my work "writ large" on the front page of the lifestyle section of a major US city daily, getting top billing over -- of all people -- Catherine Deneuve (ooh la-la) and Robert Duvall. I was even more surprised to see myself getting an even-handed, quite positive treatment, as I was worried at how I'd be portrayed in print after seeing how the op-ed columnists were savaging the anti-globalization movements ever since Seattle/WTO and A16.

Story by David Montgomery; photographs by Andrea Bruce Woodall.
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Strike for Statehood!

Time for another parody of an iconic American image, this time the famous photograph of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima island during WWII. Once again, it's not like it's been done before, but like all the great Renaissance painters doing their own versions of the Annunciation and Crucifixion, I decided it was time for me to do my own version of Iwo Jima.



This piece advertised the planned "Peoples' Strike" focused on the residents of Washington, DC who, the organizers of the "strike" assumed, had reached the point where things had gotten bad enough to spark a mass general strike to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings. Sadly, somehow, despite the loss of the city's only public hospital, the closure of homeless shelters and the sale of schools and the property under them to condo developers, many residents of DC chose not to join the "strike" as apparently things still hadn't gotten bad enough -- either that or, as I suspect, they were awaiting permission from the local Democratic Party to organize and rise up on their own behalf.

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Fall 2002 IMF/WB "Map"

Part of the '02 IMF/World Bank festivities was a planned widespread, networked civil disobedience around the city of Washington, DC, which organizers hoped would include major highways and subway lines in and out of the city. In order to dramatize the organizers' intent, this poster depicted the entire city of DC squeezed and choked at the various intersections of highways and rapid-transit lines -- or, resembling some kind of weird alien bodily organ, depending on how much Star Trek you've watched.

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Out With the Crew for an Evening's Postering, Fall 2001

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room,
where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece;
she told me she would be there with me
when I paint my masterpiece!
--Dylan.



I try to think more about the guy we met at Dupont Circle who was overjoyed to have finally discovered where these posters came from, or the students from the George Washington Action Coalition out for a late-night bicycle ride on P Street who stopped off and jazzed us up with a quick blast of solidarity ("Yo, wheatpasters!") to take my mind off the "neighbor" on Connecticut Avenue who stalked us -- tearing down posters -- for two blocks, and the DC cop who became frustrated with his own piss-poor knowledge of the law and inability to cite us for anything and proceeded to stalk us and tear down posters all the way down P Street from Dupont Circle almost to Georgetown, committing no less than half a dozen separate basic Constitutional violations in the process against our crew.

So, the next time you bump into some pacifist liberal who wants to "negotiate" with the police, direct them to this video.

Show Us Where It Hurts

When you're a K Street big shot, you like your local politicians to stay bought and keep their campaign promises, and that's why around the turn of the century, Anthony Williams would've been your man. Among his top priorities as Mayor was closing down DC General Hospital, the city's only public hospital and, in spite of constant alarmist rumors in the Washington Times, not a hell hole.



Among the other jewels of the Williams Legacy was his keeping of campaign promises to close homeless family shelters, to close and sell a fistful of public schools for redevelopment as condominiums or health clubs, and to run poor and working-class people out of DC and replace them with people who can afford to shop downtown and who are most likely to vote for Anthony Williams (or someone like him... like, say, Adrian Fenty).

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Anthony Williams' Greatest Hits

Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review, also wrote and edited its "City Desk" column about news and issues local to Washington, DC until his retirement to Maine in early 2009. One of my favorite City Desk columns appeared around 2000, where he details Anthony Williams' numerous achievements during his first term as mayor of DC -- the closing of city shelters for homeless families, the closing of schools for redevelopment as condos, the deterioration of city services, the closing of DC General Hospital -- in a column entitled "Anthony Williams' Greatest Hits". As the run-up to the '02 mayoral election campaign was just getting started, I thought this series would be an excellent and easy-to-remember reminder to potential voters about what, exactly, Anthony Williams had given this city in the past three and a half years.

One happy accident here was, during the initial sketching, finding out how easily my rat could be made to look like Williams with some extra whiskers, a little shock of hair here and there, and a bowtie. I wish now that I'd saved that issue of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine with the cover story on Williams -- while he was running for re-election, I think -- and the photo the Post used was one of him when he was about three years old, wearing an outfit almost identical to the suits we saw him in while he was Control Board honcho and, later, mayor: that dull-assed gray thing with a plain white or light-blue shirt and that friggin' bowtie. So, apart from being a soulless Ivy League technocrat and servant of oligarchs, Anthony Williams really did look like his momma dressed him.

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