Taxation Without Representation, 2007-Style

Washington D.C. has the best license plate in the country:

Unfortunately, it's awesome because it's quite reasonably resentful of being denied voting rights in Congress, and often having more conservative congressional leadership overrule local preferences. For example, as Ben Adler notes:

Congress has prevented D.C. from having a needle-exchange program, and point to this as one of the biggest indignities that D.C. suffers at the hands of Congress. With one of the worst rates of HIV infection in the country, they desperately need a sensible public-health policy on the issue, but conservative ideologues in Congress foiled them.

Andrew Sullivan, another DC resident with views a tad to the right of Adler, once wrote:

The District of Columbia has the same GDP as New Zealand. Now imagine if no one in New Zealand were allowed to vote for their own government, and they were governed by the Senate in Australia as a colony. Yep: that's how it is in America - the once-colonized now colonize themselves.

Acknowledging the possibility of spending significant parts of my life in DC really makes me ponder this.