Quips, Quibbles, Quotes

While we wait to close the Doom Loop, this stuff keeps cluttering up our brain.

April is, indeed, the cruelest month…

…as Portland wakes up from its sullen, gray, naked-trees winter and that peculiar damp cold tinged with a certain hopelessness. Then come the daffodils. And once again, Portland is beautiful, which is a fatal delusion: being pretty can make up for the deepening idea that the city is lurching into something both chaotic and rigid.

A tree canopy can cover many sins. The beauty seduces some people (your correspondent among them) into using the town’s appearance and its boasts about beauty (please—try to find it on 82d Ave) as an excuse to only look out of the window with the best view. And pull the blinds on the others. Which brings us to…

The elk that finally came home…

…back on its plinth and it only took six years and $2.2-million. It was a photo-op for various pols…

…who might, in some small way, have been responsible for allowing mobs to rule Portland’s streets back in the Golden Years of riots.

The unanswered (because it wasn’t asked) question among just about everyone who bothers remembering that bit ‘o’ anarchy is: How soon will the elk be attacked again? Knowing that the same impulse that trashed the elk is in full operation, 24/7, down at the ICE HQ. Gonna be a big ask to keep the frog-people in their lane; the leakage is already evident right in front of the mayor’s home (see below).

Another question, never mentioned in any of the happy-face stories in legacy media: what about Abe Lincoln? Or Teddy Roosevelt? Or the Pioneer Family—just as trashed, but still languishing in a secret warehouse. As we noted here one year ago.

Why the delay for Honest Abe—who certainly accomplished more in his lifetime than, well…an animal? Perhaps it’s because the city has paralyzed itself with an ongoing project (which will be appropriately expensive and “inclusive”) to fashion politically appropriate signage that will “explain” Lincoln’, using today’s DEI/equity/socialism/ lenses. Which have a nasty habit of clouding up almost by the minute.

Our bet: Lincoln’s gone for good.

Socialists hate the “rich” unless…

• They’re the owner of a basketball team blackmailing taxpayers…

• Billionaires (calling George Soros!!) who bankroll the DSA…

• Coaches of the state’s two university football teams¹…

• …our new city administrator, Raymond Lee²…

• …Rukaiyah Adams³, CEO of the politically powerful 1803 Fund…

• …and any other CEOs of nonprofits and public employee unions or benefactors of the revolution.

• Anyone else above the county’s magic and arbitrary $120,000 limit is fair game.

Why is Oregon going deeper into the dumper…

…as more women take public office?

If the Orange Man is really a “king”…

…how come he's been sued at least 60 times⁴ by state Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who hasn’t been incarcerated—or lost his head?

Mitch has good news about our taxes…

Councilor Green, one of our non-partisan partisans on council, would like us to know that taxes ain’t that bad in Portland, duly parroted by the Oregonian…

“We’re only 13^th (highest) on those making $25,000 or less per year. We’re only 13^th on those making $50,000 or less per year. We’re ninth on $75,000 less per year,” he said. “When we talk about our tax burden as if everyone’s paying the same thing and it’s the highest burden, we’re engaging in very misleading analysis here.”

This all came from a study by Washington DC’s government, run by Democrats since approximately forever, which was keen on justifying its high tax rates to fleeing taxpayers. Like all such studies, it was a matter of selection—in this case, the biggest cities in each of the nation’s 51 states. Apples for apples? Nope: The study is weighted heavily, as Green, (a PhD in economics) would know, with high-tax cities such as New York, LA, Chicago…you get the idea. It was based on 2022/2023 numbers; a lot has happened tax-wise since then. Plus: one man’s taxes are another man’s “fees”—especially if you’re on the Portland City Council. As they say, there are fibs, and there are lies, and then there’s statistics.

There’s always another view…

Instead of a stable and growing stream of revenue extracted from the rich, you get a slow but steady erosion of the tax base as wealth, income, and taxpayers relocate to friendlier jurisdictions. That loss does not show up all at once, which makes it easy for policymakers to ignore in the short term while they celebrate the initial revenue bump. Over time, though, the math stops cooperating, and the response is almost always the same. If the rich are not paying enough, the definition of rich quietly expands until it includes whoever is still around.

That’s from Chris Irons, the author of the contrarian podcast and Substack, Quoth the Raven.

Not to worry; socialism will fix it, or so we’re told…

Consumption is the only purpose of all production, but the socialist dictators can never know whether production is successfully satisfying consumers. They cannot detect error. They are like a captain lost at sea with no means of navigation. Therefore, production under socialism is arbitrary, chaotic, and wasteful. Rather than organizing economic activity, the violent method of socialism leads to widespread economic disorganization.

—Murray Rothbard.

The mayor learns about his allies the hard way…

Wilson’s home was visited by people who have trouble with the “no one is above the law” stuff when it comes to immigrants. They graffitied the sidewalk and put stuff on his porch, and one (amazingly!) managed to get arrested, hauled off, and (of course!) released.

Not everyone thinks ‘sanctuary’ is such a great idea…

Once sanctuary states, cities, and counties had established the precedent that, with impunity, they could nullify federal immigration law, then what followed was a logical and mounting descent into the current open defiance of the federal government. How odd that self-described progressives are now acting out the visions of prior kindred nullificationists and neo-Confederates from John C. Calhoun to George Wallace.

—Victor Davis Hanson, “Slouching Toward Fort Sumter?”

PBOT explained in one graphic …

…anyone notice which mode of transportation favored by the vast majority of Portlanders is missing?

Meanwhile, how about those bikers?

Hand’s down, the most effective lobby in Portland is the bike riders’ pressure group, even though, as PBOT’s most recent bike survey put it (in fine print)…

Relative to 2016, the number of people biking in 2024 is down by roughly 40%, based on data from 119 sites.

…and in ‘25 that number remained steady, despite PBOT’s fascination, under considerable prodding, with building bike lanes.

Maybe the idea is to speed socialists on their appointed rounds…

Meanwhile, after a main route in my Montavilla neighborhood got “quieted” (as an excuse to install a bike lane behind tire-blowing curbs), I can report that I have finally seen a bicyclist using the taxpayer-provided strip. Once.

Meanwhile, to build the lane (and grease a private lane for a single bus route), the street’s traffic has become a nose-to-tail procession that is almost impossible to intrude upon from a side-street. Progress!

I have dropped a line to the PBOT folks, asking how many bikes use these new lanes—no reply. But PBOT certainly has two-wheelers front-of-mind, if its official (taxpayer supported) Instagram feed proves, with bikes spotlighted in six of its eight most recent posts…

…not that we have anything against bikes, although their riders (legally empowered to disregard traffic stop signs) are a different matter. Since the local bike lobby runs PBOT (or so it seems), we have a modest request: apply the same rules that govern cars to bikes and make it compulsory to register the vehicles (which now often go faster than “quieted” traffic); and charge them a registration fee. Let’s say a modest $100 a year (since it costs around $120-$140 a year for auto owners to pay off various governments, not including gas taxes)to help with the paint, asphalt and concrete lavished on the lanes.

Only seems fair. Will Jonathan Maus be the first to write a check?

Meanwhile, another multimodal fatality…

Funny that PBOT didn’t put this out, instead of the cops…

…by my count, the fifth fatality in a year for the suicidal-scooters. PBOT, and its political allies, think the crazy vehicles are just great!!! Mostly because they’re not those hated automobiles—but any motorist who has navigated the east side’s cramped streets has probably had, or witnessed, a near-miss as one of these buzz-bombs rockets merrily along, riders without any protective gear or helmet. But, what the hell, they’re making money for the city, so the risk kinda averages out.

Doesn’t it?

More AI fun…

It’s spooky: tell an AI bot what you think (or fear) in a few clumsy words, and an amazing image—like a waking dream just before the alarm goes off—appears as if by alchemy. In truth, it’s a procession of electrons through circuits in one of those windowless behemoths down in Hillsboro, but still…it’s kinda addictive.

So, as promised a few drops ago, here’s AI’s view of yet another of our city councilors’ fantasy-bedrooms…this one for kinda-sorta city council president Jamie Dunphy…

… complete with beds ready for the polyamorous, wallpaper with the council’s fixation du jour, and a fired-up tattoo machine ready to add skin-art to the councilor’s epidermis, who famously wrote (on city letterhead) “Mind your own business,” to a 95-year old constituent who thought his ink wasn’t statesmanlike. The picture on the wall may look like Lenin, but it’s really Mitch Green in disguise.

1. According to USA TODAY’s 2025 compensation surveyccording to USA TODAY’s 2025 compensation survey, Oregon football coach Dan Lanning is set to earn a total of $10,400,000, not including bonuses. Oregon State’s coach JaMarcus Shephard will make $1.6 million in 2026 with an annual increase of $75,000.

2. Mr. Lee, formerly city manager of Greeley, Colorado (famed for its beef packing plant and sugar beets), will clear $528,600 a year in cash and bonuses to go with six weeks off the first year.

3. Ms. Adams runs the fund (nonprofit since 2024) from offices in the Portland school district’s newly-purchased building (for $16-million) that will cost around $25-million to remodel to house the district’s Black Excellence Center. The 1803 Fund is a prime backer of the Albina Vision Trust, which wants to recreate the old Albina ghetto. The Trust will own it and become one of the city’s biggest landlords, if it’s ever built. Since they’re yet another nonprofit, they will pay no taxes. This is how things work in Portland.

4. The state spent $3.1-million in 2025 on Rayfield’s legal stunts. He’s now stacked up in the holding pattern for Oregon governor or US Senator.