Re: Bad Sam
So, what about Sam Adams?
There are some weird themes here.
The old progressive gunned down by some arcane struggle within the machine? (In Chicago, they just take you out and beat you up.)
The irony of women bringing him down?
A fickle mayor who can’t stand up to the grievance and victimhood lobby?
We’ll probably never know; in the long-haul it’s unimportant. This is all nervous posturing and shuffling before The Revolution, aka the new city charter, sweeps everything away. After all, didn’t the Charter Commission say its goal was…
A reflective government with Councilors who look like the community they represent.
Golly! That might just happen!
As for Sam, who has made a career of banishment: Isn’t it more than interesting that a few weeks after our mayor got tough with the homeless, the guy who goaded him to do it is out?
Re: Bye-Bye
Speaking of the new charter, veteran Dissenters know that in less than two years, if all goes well—unlikely, given progressive government’s track record with other stuff, such as measure 110—there will be a radical new city government, weird elections, a capon-mayor, and a savior who will be a “professional” city-manager who will save the city from itself.
We can’t wait for the great awakening!
But something odd is going on, right under the noses of our somnolent local media. Bureaucrats are bailing out.
Could be coincidence. Or, one might say, they’re voting with their feet.
For example, three of the city’s five lobbyists resigned on the eve of the state legislative session. No reason for their departures given; local media didn’t see it as clickable.
The most eye-catching departure was one of the city’s most deeply-embedded bureaucrats, none other than PDOT’s honcho Chris Warner, who made failing upward into an art form. He was the staffer who helped the tiny terror, Steve Novick, get too far over his skis in trying to get some asphalt on the city’s 50-miles of gravel streets. Then he somehow bounced into the embrace of Novick’s replacement, Chloe Eudaly, who installed Warner as head of the city’s humongous Transportation Bureau (PBOT).
It may—or may not—have been a coincidence that as the last election approached, Warner’s PBOT dropped weird street-jewelry here and there among the potholes…
…which gave Eudaly a chance to jump on the Covid bandwagon. Alas, she got tossed for being abrasive and dumb.
Then Mayor Wheeler passed PBOT’s supervision to JoAnn Hardesty. She was too busy building her own rival police force in the Fire Bureau (and race-baiting the majority of her constituents) to bother Warner, who got ink for PBOT’s “Vision Zero” program to end traffic deaths, which resulted in a 70-year high in pedestrian deaths in 2022.
His final gift to the city was installation of street barriers in front of Jefferson High School intended to stop a spate of drive-by shootings; critics said that slowing down traffic would only improve the shooters’ aim.
But no matter, Warner has bounced again, this time to Salem as GuvTina’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Public Administration, whatever the hell that means. He has walked away from running the city’s biggest bureaucracy, which gives him miles of streets to play around with, and the prospect of a “professional” city manager to insulate him from petty pols. All this for a non-letterhead job answering to a boss who is well-known for being, shall we say…demanding.
As with all things, when the pee-pul do something dumb the bureaucrats get the final vote.
Re: Caught in the Middle
On Jan 4, we wrote about the $2.250-million purchase by the county of a ramshackle used RV lot at 333 SE 82d Ave in the Montavilla neighborhood as a dumping ground for a handful of the city’s ever-growing population of the “homeless.”
After I punched the Send button, an old memory popped into my head. It took me back to the last century and the only time I was unable to worm out of jury duty in the courts of Orange County, CA.
It was a routine meat ‘n’ potatoes eminent domain trial; the state was widening a freeway and it had gobbled up a house and lot. It was now up to us jurors to hear the case and decide on what the hapless homeowner was owed.
The trial acquainted us with a legal principle none of us amateurs had ever encountered…
“Highest and best use” is a real estate term for the most profitable possible use of a property.
At trial, it developed that the lot was in an area zoned for high-density multi-family housing. The property owner hadn’t built an apartment house—but he could have. Therefore the state owed him for what he could have done.
After two days of what might best be described as haggling in a Mideast bazaar, we jurors gave the homeowner, as I recall, a multi-million dollar settlement. The dude almost fainted when the verdict was delivered.
So I pondered the question: did the bureaucrats cutting the deal—giving the lot’s owner a profit of 100% on his 2008 investment—think that this is really the highest and best use for 333 SE 82d?
As ace local reporter Jacob Loeb reported about a nearby development….
Although this property will contain three residences, it is zoned as Commercial Mixed Use 2 (CM2) and could have included substantially more housing with commercial units. Buildings in this zone can support four levels with a Floor Area Ration (FAR) of 2.5, allowing 15,000 square feet of development.
Wouldn’t you know: 333 SE 82d is zoned CM2.
Short version: the county could have opted for more housing! For people who pay rent. For small businesses that might, y’know…hire people. For a project that might—God forbid—pay property taxes.
Which our new governess, Tina Kotek, in her first official speech (after congratulating herself for her sexual identity) assured us that the state intends to treat housing as a crisis. She commanded a gusher of housing to erupt. Plus…density! And screw local zoning. We’ll do it for the hordes who, actually, don’t seem to be coming to Portland, but still…build we must!
Except at 333 SE 82d.
Highest and best? Who’s kidding who?
Re: The Oregonian ‘splains it all to you
One could write daily about the Oregonian’s betrayal of basic journalism principles and their tiresome preaching to the progressive choir. But, why waste the bandwidth?
Unless it’s a doozy, such as today’s piece of racial agitprop under the headline…
Portland teacher, students help develop Advanced Placement Black studies course that will spread nationwide
…written by Oregonian staffer Julia Silverman, lauding a new program at McDaniel (nee Madison) High School to give advanced college credits for a deep-dive into…well, here’s how she describes it…
Though the advanced African American studies course has been in development for years, it arrives as conservative politicians have thrust the question of how U.S. schools teach about race into the red-hot center of cable-news-and-talk-radio-fueled culture wars. The question is different, but also fraught, in a deep-blue, majority-white city like Portland that has been jolted over the last 2 1/2 years into a profound reckoning with the enduring legacies of its racist past.
….and if you bother to click on that last hyperlink, you’ll be confronted with the Oregonian’s embarrassing self-flagellation of its racist history. Which renews our perennial question: does the O have any editors who actually read any of this stuff before it gets into print?
Re: Clinging to Covid
Covid really doesn’t get many clicks these days; local media can barely rouse itself to repeat any of the dull OHA press releases.
How odd, then, that the mighty OregonianLive web site just ran this headline…
Where to buy N95, KN95 face masks or respirators on sale: Deals with fast shipping as COVID-19 ‘kraken’ variant spreads
An Oregonian staffer, Amy Leona Haven (great nose ring!), was dispatched to write the shopping guide—have they nothing better to keep the hired help occupied? She managed to get readers’ pulse-rates up by announcing…
…the threat of a new and scary-sounding COVID-19 variant with a recognizable name. The ‘Kraken’ subvariant…With COVID-19 hospitalizations once again on the rise and Oregon reaching over 9,000 COVID-19 related deaths since the start of the pandemic, there’s no time like the present to upgrade your family’s N95 and KN95 masks for everyday use.
Why the sudden excitement?
It would take a sharp-eyed reader to get to the bottom of the piece to find…
Are things really that desperate at the Oregonian?
My bits ‘n’ nibbles on your highly satisfying—and nutritional—smorgasbord repast:
1. Following this latest Adams imbroglio in Willy Week and O-Live with some amusement, it struck me that his sins this time were surprisingly retro. Or rather, his alleged victims? Professional women, and women only, somehow reduced to tears from “bullying”? In the absence of classic sexual harassment, one wonders what form the so-called bullying took, and if women require special protection as such? Perhaps trans women are better suited to take the heat in this sort of kitchen.
2. The reference here to Steve Nozick made me picture, not for the first time, Chris Warner navigating Portland on a bike with Nozick riding in a cozy wicker basket up front. If Warner were a large man, the two could assay Halloween as MasterBlaster from “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”. Governor-Elect Kotek could join as a butchier version of Auntie Entity. Who WOULD run Oregon’s own version of Bartertown? Methane from pig feces to run wind turbines and charge EVs?
3. Vision? Zero. Imagine even twenty years ago the City required to brainstorm measures to help abate all the drive-by shootings at a PIL high school. Imagine such a person as JoAnn Hardesty bringing her celebrated acumen to bear, with orange bullet-calming street barrels and cries to Defund and Decarcerate amid record gun homicides. It would have seemed like a Mad Max film.
4. What a prodigious nose ring indeed! Ms. Haven for O-Live had better not be engaging in cultural appropriation, however. The first thing I thought of was the old anthropology textbook, “Yanomamo: The Fierce People”. The writer became unpleasantly controversial, of course, what with his bigoted findings that not all uncolonized aboriginals lived in unspoiled, beatific communion with Gaia amid lollipop bushes and and popcorn-ball trees.
5. But the best for last: Haven’s colleague in, coff coff, journalism, Julia Silverman, doing her share of the antiracist work with O-Live’s Bottomly of the Barrel Brigade. There are new apples to polish, starting here with a properly in-depth treatment of black history. Just in time, eh, against that backdrop of signal neglect for the topic. As a plucky, attentive McDaniel High student notes in the O-Live puff piece, ordinary Portland-area teachers are afraid to address black history, even to acknowledge the historical oppression of blacks in America at all! Sure sounds like the Portland Public Schools pedagogy we all know. Youbetcha.
Still, let’s take at face value and be thankful for what Ms. Silverman assures us will be a “profound reckoning” with the past in the new Advanced Placement Black Studies classroom. That means the whole, expanded story of black history, not just selected “highlights”, she reports. And the teacher of the new course, Maurice Cowley, fresh off his own preparatory subject-area instruction at Howard University, tells Silverman that they will begin by studying ancient African civilizations for six weeks, and hence with “freedom instead of enslavement”, to best help students in “fighting our way back to that”. Okey-dokey.
Being a rank amateur myself in the field of African history, I can only assume, subject to correction from Cowley that he will of necessity feature a time prior to the civilization of ancient Egypt, which I believe was associated with, indeed practically synonymous with, the brutal mass enslavement of “lesser” peoples, in untold numbers, for a couple thousand years on the trot. Doubtless too there will be careful analysis of complex figures like West African warlord Musa I, who pilgrimaged to Mecca three centuries before that seminal year of Horror and Woe, 1619, accompanied by a dignified portion—just 10,000–of his own (black African) slaves.
This, before Mr. Cowley turns to his nuanced coverage of slavery in America, with plantations stocked by men like Emperor Musa I’s descendants, still slaving strong, selling their black brothers and sisters to the sinister Europeans, who rarely even had to venture inland to fill their cargo holds thanks to customer-friendly trading partners of ol’ Musa’s ilk. Indeed, Cowley might cite the classic Partnership for a Drug-Free America teevee ad where the outraged dad confronts his son over drug paraphernalia. Young America reproaches Old Africa, “I learned it from watching YOU, okay?!!” Toss in that Africa remains to this day the only continent with a flourishing trade in human flesh. Free At Last? In America, anyway…
Yea, that “honest reckoning with the past”. Make sure, Mr. Cowley, that your young charges know before all is said and done, coming from Really Credible, Legitimate Scholar and MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow Nikole Hannah-Jones of “1619 Project” fame, no less, that America fought the Revolutionary War in order to preserve the institution of slavery in the States, even though greedy Britain herself did not even abolish slavery…..until the 1830s. We’ll take it as, um, read that everyone knows the Declaration of Independence was in 1776. Scholard Hannah-Jones, to no one’s surprise, late of the staff of The Oregonian….
Great article! Witty and fun to read. Love your sarcasm! It’s perfect and on point! 😊