SLIVER OF AUTONOMY FOR D.C. I recently reported on the bill in Congress to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in Congress. Advocates of D.C. voting rights note that, for the past nine years, 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. But now that the Democrats have taken over Congress D.C. will be able to give it a try. The way the federal government has treated D.C. in recent years has been a disgrace (I think Jose Serrano was right to call it "colonial"), and hopefully this is a sign of a more improvement to come. --Ben Adler
