One Damn Thing After Another

Colliding headlines; a phantom box; PBOT screws up yet again; creepy glimpses inside the progressive mind...

Battle of the Headlines

This popped up in the Oregonian…

…which noted, deep in the story, that the poll was conducted by a Democratic Party outfit, giving the lie to the city charter’s insistence that such elections are non-partisan.

Somehow or other the Oregonian said it had “obtained” the poll. Three guesses who leaked it.

Naturally, the Gonzo campaign pounced…

…which would seem to answer the “who leaked” question.

The poll also took a shot—despite the sky-high “I dunno” responses—at calculating which candidates would survive the city’s untested ranked-choice voting system, which we have written about at tedious length.¹

Keep your eye on that 40-percent number, which we predict will power the number of “wasted” ballots that voters will be too damned confused to fill out. Others will smell a suspicious progressive game and simply fill in one candidate. (Which, having studied the voting scheme for over a year, is our advice to all voters—there’s no game if one of the players doesn’t show up.)

Meanwhile another headline spells out real trouble for the sorta-kinda-tough guy running for capon-mayor…

…from KGW, an oddity since this wasn’t mentioned on the O’s cluttered website even though the paper broke the story a week ago.

This is just the latest in Gonzo’s tippy-toe along the thin line of exaggerations, dodgy deals, and triangulations which have followed him like Linus’s cloud.

Our fearless prediction: tiny Carmen Rubio, black hope Mingus Mapps and Gonzo will split the first place ballots with enough voters smart enough to decline to rank their candidate’s two rivals—opening the way for someone who’s a comfortable third to sneak in. It happened in Alaska; it’ll probably happen here. I’m betting on Liv (Viva) Østhus, aka Viva Las Vegas…

(If Bud Clark, a bar owner, could do it, why not someone from one of the city’s basic industries?)

Let’s Take a Peek Inside the Progressive Mind

This graphic ran in Tuesday’s Jack Bog’s Blog, which is on our daily gotta-read list…

It’s the county’s fevered vision for its oft-delayed “Deflection Center,” which will keep the spirit of Measure 110 alive and kicking in Portland while scaring the hell out of the kiddies at the nearby preschool. Note that whoever drew up the graphic forgot the most important bubble: Back to the Streets.

PSU Makes Headlines in Merry England

The London Daily Mail, one of the UK’s top-selling tabloids, highlighted our very own Portland State University on its website recently…

…yet another example of the mother country’s bafflement at the strange ways of its former colonists…

The Oregon school's College of Education is cited as having one of the most politically-loaded such courses in the country.

Its trainee teachers study America's 'histories of colonization, settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and neoliberalism,' course materials show.

Worse still, says a new report, the 126 teachers who graduated from PSU in spring can go on to spread these ideas to more than 120,000 K-12 students.

The report (weirdly, password-protected if you hit the hotlink) is by “Parents Defending Education, a conservative watchdog,” which disqualifies them from any coverage by local media.

The Mail also reproduced a graphic from the school’s courses—yet another glimpse into the progressive brain…

Round ‘n’ round it goes; where it ends nobody knows…although we’’ll beg to differ that the “visibly homosexuasl” are marginalized in Oregon. Just ask GuvTina, or any of the other pols happily informing us about their sexual preferences on what used to be called “the wild side.”

The Strange Saga of the Box

Since the old writer’s adage is, “Write what you know about,” here’s something that introduced me to yet another surreal adventure in dealing with corporate America.

It was a box, delivered to my doorstep, by FedEx…

…which I promptly opened. First mistake.

Inside, nestled securely, was an IPhone—the latest model. Which, although I’m a couple of upgrades behind the Apple upsell, I did not order. A closer look at the address (why is it always in super-small type?) revealed my address (blanked out above to deter antifa) but not me—instead it’s supposed to go to someone named Enrique Landry.

I only paused for an itty-bitty mad moment to contemplate a hot new Apple phone that had fallen into my hands…but then drove to the nearby FedEx store to return the item.

One of the munchkins behind the counter regarded the box with horror. It had been opened; FedEx does not return opened boxes. I advised them to tape it up and send it back to the return address—clearly an Apple repair depot on the east coast, which I had tracked down with some Googling.

Nope. Can’t be done.

So I left the box on the counter—maybe the kid needed a new phone. To be honest, it was just too damned tempting to have sitting around in the vain hope that Mr. Landry would be able to track it down.

It turned up on my porch the next day.

I called the FedEx help (a misnomer) line, waited while fuzzy classical music came through my phone and finally reached someone who could kinda-sorta speak English in a boiler room far, far away.

It was a long and frustrating negotiation, although the FedExer finally gave up and advised me to leave it on the front porch for a FedEx pickup.

Which never occurred. Weirdly, none of the city’s peripatetic porch-pirates have grabbed the box either.

Hey, Enrique Landry, if you’re out there, I’ve got your phone. Drop me a line.

Oops!

Here in Montavilla, Jacob Loeb covers just about everything that’s happening in the neighborhood (mostly not-so-good unless you’re a fan of GuvTina’s goofy ideas about density and slamming multi-family eyesores into single-family neighborhoods).

And darned if Loeb didn’t turn up this fascinating scandalette…

…a yarn about a garden-variety pedestrian accidents on one of PBOT’s road-candy crosswalks…with a twist:

The marked crosswalk at the intersection had newly installed Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacon (RRFB) signals meant to indicate to drivers that they should yield to people crossing. However, the RRFB lights never began blinking because crews had not activated the equipment in the six months since Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) contractors installed them.

And although PBOT tried to wriggle out and toss the oversight in PGE’s lap, Loeb pointed out that…

After a prolonged delay, the utility company added power line connections to RRFB control equipment in early August.

And PBOT forgot to throw the switch.

Boom! Another pedestrian injured in Vision Zero City. Not surprising for anyone venturing to cross Stark Street, which is a drag-racers delight with loonies regularly ripping off full-powered rubber-burns.

It reminded me of a recent encounter with one of PBOT’s crews of enforcers here. And an old joke: How many PBOT bureaucrats does it take to put in a plug?

1. Here are URLs to the entire corpus of Portland Dissent pieces on (mostly the insanity of) the charter revision: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.