Lost in the Deep Weeds

More meandering through the landscape of a town on the way down.

A Modest Proposal

As we have mentioned here, the statue of Abraham Lincoln, toppled by masked marauders in riot-a-day 2020 (and still in a secret warehouse somewhere)…

…will—one day, someday—be returned to public view, perhaps behind bullet-proof glass or in some obscure location where not even our easily-offended citizenry can’t march past it.¹

Since we’re a little slim on the founding fathers front these days, we thought it might be time to reimagine (favorite progressive word you don’t hear much anymore) our public statuary. Here’s a modest proposal for City Hall…

…none other than the “guiding star” for our rump of local socialists. It could also double as a barrier from any rampaging hordes of taxpayers, if and when they realize the dimensions of the scam. We’ll excuse any graduates of the Portland Public Schools from knowing who this guy is. Unlike Ol’ Abe, instead of freeing slaves, he created millions of them.

Now It Can Be Told

We’ll bet you were on the edge of your seat waiting to find out just who are the shadowy figures behind Partners for Progress, which we pondered a few days ago here. The organization has a website and a weird address that appears to be the PSU student union—but, by god, it has a place where you can send contributions—the first order of business for any self-respecting 501-c-3.

I signed up for their email solicitations…

…but there were still no signs of authorship. A deeper dive on their website finally tuned up the partners: a trio of former candidates who got gunned down by the city council’s “elect minorities forever” ranked choice voting nonsense:

Vadim Mozyrsky²—a member of the charter commission (and one of just three votes against the final product)…a classic “always a bridesmaid” candidate who lost runs for both city council and county commissioner…

Eli Arnold—member of the Police Bike Squad, the only vaguely law-n-order candidate on the city council ballot; he was finally kicked off by the election algorithm at round 30…

Bob Weinstein—former four-term mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska (no kidding)…blown out on the rank choice count at round 25…

All three have put together a typical Portland Polite website—not much ranting, no raving, and snark-free. Personally, we’ll take Max Steele as a better read³…

If it looks like the opening salvo of yet another campaign by moderates for city council…who’s to say?

Why Does This Guy Still Have a Job?

From Sophie Peel’s largely incomprehensible piece in WillyWeek, The City Council Continues to Spar Over Procedure. What’s It Really About?

This is the same guy who ruled that the mayor couldn’t break the daylong deadlock over electing the new city council president. He works for the mayor—the guy he handcuffed. So, the question arises, how come he’s still got a job?

Ask yourself: how different would politics be if Mayor Wilson had stood up at that first deadlocked council meeting when the all-powerful council president was being selected, made a grand gesture of reading from the charter, and then, on the spot, fired the city attorney, and cast his vote for….?

Instead, he’s the object of pity.

She’s Baaaaaack!

We were really worried about the absence of our favorite local journalist with a nose ring, Destiny Johnson…

…who has been responsible for some of the strangest interior monologues on the Oregonian’s online video mismash. Her official blurb at the O’s website claims that she ”…thinks it’s weird to write about herself in third person but likes plants, crocheting and hanging out with her dog when she’s not doing the journalism thing.”

Her “thing” is eclectic, to be charitable, as a glance at her most recent items indicates…

…so we were worried that Johnson’s drowsy monotone had gone mssing from our Instagam feed. Perhaps her journalism was so lightweight that it simply drifted off into a typical Portland gray sky.

So we were surprised when she popped on Instagram this week with a call to the ramparts on behalf of frosh f-bomb hurler US Rep. Maxine Dexter, who made a laughable trip to El Salvador on behalf of some guy who may be a gangbanger and/or wife-beater, and who resides in another Congressional district 3000 miles away…

…although—shock!—it had nothing to do with Dexter’s odyssey. Instead it was a ringing endorsement for the Congresswoman’s latest prance on the public stage on behalf of keeping elections under the thumb of various party machines. In our view, it really shouldn’t masquerade as a “news thing,” but would have worked better on the editorial page.

Just to put things into perspective: the only first-term representative with any clout wore screaming red lipstick and was from the Bronx. Dexter? Needs to spend her two years on the back-benches learning how DC really works.

Two Graphics That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About the ‘Housing Crisis.’

City council would be lost without PowerPoint slides—and these two told the tragicomic story. If you finance one of the most odious city bureaucracies with extorted money, the extortees tend to go somewhere else.

And if you tax the bejabbers out of building houses, they won’t get built.

The Great County Disappearing Act

Here’s another one of those PowerPoints that says more than our rulers might like…

…a hint of the socialization of bums by Homelessness Inc.™ (So much money; so many newly-discovered “homeless.”) Meanwhile, the county can’t stop bragging about throwing a pebble into the pond of despair…

…without mentioning how much catering to the stoners will cost, or that the last sobering center blew up because dopers, well…tend to be unruly.

Nostalgia Dept.

We were cleaning out the junk in an old workroom when he chanced upon this yellowing page from the Oregonian…

…that we hadn’t used as padding for a return package to Amazon. It was written by Douglas Perry, in November 2020. He’s now an “early editor” at the paper, whatever that means. His version of the O’s classic stenography-journalism (all official sources, all the time!) took us back to the good ol’ days.

Gov. Kate Brown has imposed a new round of statewide restrictions on businesses and social gatherings—just in time for Thanksgiving.

…and quoted the governor in the throes of cognitive dissonance:

Brown said people should respond to the flouting of the official constraints in the same way they would, “If there’s a party down the street and it’s keeping everyone awake. What do neighbors do? They call law enforcement because it’s too noisy. It’s just like that. It’s like a violation of a noise ordinance.”

…while letting us know, in Perry’s editorial comment, ”the deadly virus rages through their communities.”

Buried at the end of the story was a quote from Multnomah County chair Deborah Kfoury, who said, “residents should expect to stay home for at least the next four weeks.”

We’d like to invite early editor Perry to assign one of his ace reporters to do a four-years-later account of what really happened and why, including Portland legacy media joining the parade of the befuddled and bamboozled.⁴ It might be useful reading for our fellow citizens who cling to cloth masks.

Alumni Report

There was a time when there was a guy atop the Oregonian’s masthead, Peter Bhatia, who old-timers around town recall as a big mahaff and executive editor of the paper from 1993 to 2014. Which takes us back to the era when the Oregonian had big circulation and big clout.

Bhatia, as we recall, was one of those stellar journalism personalities who was a Big Deal, although no one could say exactly why, like a Triple-A coach who never made it to the bigs.

For reasons probably involving the strange, opaque, private ownership of the paper (run by the Newhouse clan from a New York City skyscraper), Bhatia left pre-Covid to take the helm of the Detroit Free Press (a once-great newspaper devolved into the clutches of the Gannett mega-chain)…and went off the radar screen. We’ll leave it to others to lament his passing.

Then he popped up again recently, online…

…with the flop covered online by the Nieman Foundation, which covered a newsroom bloodbath in January…

…which led to the remaining staff unionizing. A close read of the staff-sympathetic coverage alluded to Bhatia asking the “star reporter” to file a story at least once a month. Which the star reporter regarded as a “demotion.”

O quomodo ceciderunt fortes!⁵

PS: For those of you reading online, for some reason Substack’s inscrutable software doesn’t automatically turn on Comments when I file a story. Sorry for the inadvertant censorship.

1. We still don’t have a clue what those “Hands Off” goofs really want, beyond a presidential head under the guillotine worn as a headdress by one of the mopes.

2. I have written Vadim a couple of notes inviting him to get together to discuss what the hell was going on inside the charter commission, back when no one in local media seemed interested. Having read (my eyes bled!) the minutes and Zooms of commission deliberations, I simply cannot find out where the four districts/three councilors/elected by 25-percent nonsense came from. Mozyrsky voted against the final version…so he doesn’t have anything to defend. The offer still stands.

3. Our apologies for one of those goofy typos that make a writer shake his head in embarrassment in our crosspost of Max’s latest drop.

4. After all, they spent a year proving that the first Oregonian publishers were horrible racists.

5. “O How the Mighty Have Fallen,” from the Latin Vulgate Bible, 2 Samuel 1:19.