First, the U.S. Mint nixed “Taxation Without Representation” as the slogan for the D.C. quarter. Now, the Mint has narrowed the choices for the design of the coin’s reverse to three figures from the city’s history: Benjamin Banneker, Duke Ellington and Frederick Douglass.

Each has his merits, of course, but this is a weak field. The problem is not any lack of achievement on the part of the candidates. No, it’s the tenuousness of their connections to the District, which are important but way too brief (Banneker); an accident of birth that had little meaning in his ultimate accomplishments (Ellington); and almost irrelevant to his greatness (Douglass).

Just as almost every state in the union decided that no one person captured the essence of its history and identity, the District should have chosen an inanimate symbol to put on the coin, which so many people fought so hard to get added to the Mint’s state quarters program. (The feds had zero interest in including Washington in the program. The District was added only at the last minute, and then was lumped, insultingly, into the same category as American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. I kid you not.)

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NEW YORK — Gold fell sharply Tuesday after crude oil retreated and traders cashed in profits following the metal’s flirtation with the historic $1,000 mark. Silver and copper also declined. Other commodities fell across the board, with corn, wheat, soybean and energy futures all trading lower in a broad futures sell-off.

Gold has gained more than 15 percent this year, driven up by record high oil prices, steep declines in the dollar and worries about a U.S. recession. The most-actively traded April contract hit an intraday high of $992 an ounce on Monday _ a record high and just shy of the psychologically important $1,000 barrier.

Gold’s failure to breach the $1,000 mark triggered a sell-off, sending the metal $17.90 lower to settle at $966.30 an ounce Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold fluctuated widely, trading as high as $990.30 and as low as $958.30.

“Inability to keep the $1,000 level worried latecomers to the party,” George Gero, vice president with RBC Capital Markets Global Futures, said in a note. “However, past sell-offs turned out to be a buying opportunity.” Read full story from the Washington Post

The U.S. Mint wasted no time in rejecting the District’s idea for a commemorative quarter yesterday, saying a proposed inscription protesting the city’s limited representation in Congress would be unsuitable “as an element of design for United States coinage.”

The Mint, which has nearly finished producing quarters with designs for each of the 50 states, received the District’s proposals for its coin Monday — and within 48 hours, it told the city to come up with something else.

“Never have I seen the government move so fast on anything,” said Paul Strauss (D), the city’s nonvoting shadow senator. “You get the sense that no one over there even looked at this in context.”

The problem was not the proposed images for the quarter. The city offered various suggestions, including the three stars and two bars of the District flag and portraits of either jazz legend Duke Ellington or Colonial-era abolitionist Benjamin Banneker. Read Full Story