I had a busy day yesterday. I had two meetings in connection with the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies – a lunch meeting with a young rabbi whom we hope can help us reach a younger audience, and an afternoon meeting with a major donor (and board member) to talk about ways he might be able to connect us with people he knows who might be able to help us. I took extensive notes and part of my tomorrow will be trying to understand at least half of what I wrote down.

I also found out that my friend who sent me a message yesterday that he had fallen, broken his leg and having surgery, wrote me again today saying that he was hacked. I guess that could have meant that someone broke his leg while trying to hack him to death, and that he hadn’t fallen at all. But I assumed he meant that he had neither fallen or broken his leg. If you wonder what he and his wife were doing while all of his friends were feeling empathy (that emotion that Charlie Kirk didn’t approve of) for his condition, it turns out that they were (are) spending a week in Paris. And no, not the Paris in Texas. (By the way, it turns out that there are 10 cities in the United States called Paris. How many have you been to? As for me, I think the answer is zero.)

Mayor Bowser of DC, DC Attornet General Schwab, and City Council Chair Mendelson were called before a House committee to answer questions about the District today. I got to hear a good deal of it driving to my first meeting (40 minutes) and from my first to my second (35 minutes), and frankly I did not know if I should laugh or cry. The witnesses didn’t really have any time to answer any questions. The reasons were simple. As for the Republicans, all they wanted to do was to yell at the witnesses and make sure that they couldn’t get any answers on the record. As for the Democrats, they had nothing to ask, and they just wanted to use their time to talk about how great Washington is and how hard Trump appears to be trying to destroy it. It was all pretty embarrassing and I dare anybody to air the hearing for a group of middle school kids and tell them this is how the government runs. Everything wasn’t bad. I am not familiar with Cong. Shontel Brown from Cleveland OH, but she gave a super explanation of every way Trump is destroying America. She was the winner. The loser, not surprisingly, was an Arizona Congressman who was the first questioner and who simply yelled at the top of his voice for his five minutes about how dangerous Washington was until Mr. Trump came to town. He did berate the AG for the terrible statistics that came out of his office, giving Schwab the chance to say that he was quoting statistics frim the US Attorney’s, not the DC AG office. As Rosanadanana would have said…..”Nevermind”. (I saw on the news last night that a large number of surge arrests are leading to immediate dismissal, and that the US Attorney’s office is short 70 lawyers.)

Actually, this Congressman might have been the biggest loser, but there were others. One was Nancy Mace, who asked Bowser a series of questions such as “What does DC Code Section 12-9303(a)(vi) say?” “Oh, you don’t know? You are the mayor of the city and you have no idea what the laws say?” And then she asked her questions like: “What is a woman?” Bowser’s answer to that was “I am a woman. Are you?” I thought that was pretty good. And then there was a third Republican whose name I didn’t get who kept talking about how dangerous DC was and how its murder rate was greater than a dozen or so foreign cities he listed. “Do you know”, he said, that if DC were a country of its own, the murder rate would make it the 5th most dangerous country in the world and that the State Department would issue a travel warning advising Americans not to go there?” Unfortunately, Council Chair Mendelson didn’t respond by saying that if DC were a country, it would have restrictions on the gun ownership that leads to 80% of DC’s violent crime.

All this made Michigan Congresswoman Talib apoplectic, as she yelled at her Republican counterparts for talking down DC in a ridiculous manner and scaring Americans from visiting, while each of the worked and most lived in the capital and were able to walk around with their families, enjoy the sites, eat at the restaurants and not worry about anything. How, she asked, could they make such ridiculous statement that, by their own lifestyles, they knew were untrue. This led to a retort by one of the Republicans and then they got into a shouting match. No, then they got into a SHOUTING MATCH!!!

At any rate, it was one big mess of a hearing, although perhaps the District got some sort of a commitment that the House would look at the $1 billion of DC taxpayer money (some of which was my money) that Congress forced out of DC’s budget this year and which certainly impacts DC’s efforts to hold down crime.

The Washington Post, several days ago, had an interesting article which showed the results of surveys as to the effect of the federal surge on things like pedestrian traffic, restaurant business, and so forth. Generally, it showed that DC’s economy has been hurt all around (in spite of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims to the contrary).

Meanwhile, I need a new plumber. But that’s a long story.