Stumbling Towards Bethlehem

Strange new voting machinery clanks ahead; the mob dashes for City Council's payday; DEI eats its own; sex 'n' art 'n' money; let's tinker with the constitution; details-details-details...

Better Late Than Never Dept.

Having ignored the radical new city charter back when it was being cooked up in the progressive oven, members of our dinosaur press™ are still trying to figure out what the hell it means…

…which ran in Willy Week recently. (The Oregonian, as usual, remains above the fray.) It’s a chatty, giggly article that attempts to explain to the morons what they voted for a year ago…

The big idea behind ranked-choice voting is that it captures more “voter sentiment.” If your vote were an orange, regular voting systems would squish it once and take whatever juice came out. Ranked-choice voting puts the orange in a fancy juicer and tries to get every last drop.

And orders us to get with the program…

“…we have to get comfortable with the idea that three candidates will win a seat in each of four districts and more than 25% of the vote is enough to secure one of the three seats in, say, District 1…”

As they say, the devil’s in the details (something that has never bothered Portland’s mouth-breathing voters or the press). Fact is—and folks, we’ve been writing about this since the idea was just a fever-dream—when each candidate gets 25-percent of the total vote (plus one vote, no more or less), counting their votes stops and the leftovers are parcelled out using a weird algorithm, which we revealed back in March, 2023 (reprinted here for you recent-arrivals at Portland Dissent)…

This means that some voters, not oranges, will get to vote two, three additional times, in bits ‘n’ pieces, spread around by an algorithm in the machines that do the actual tabulation.

Which means that voters—never known locally for, like, thinking things through—will confront three separate voting schemes. And (see below) more choices than you’ll usually find on the beer menu at your local dive bar.

The county’s elections director, Tim Scott, joined by Leah Benson, the RCV Project manager, spared us a few minutes last week for an update on preparations for this event. Short version: the county is ready, the software has been written, there will be “challenge” ballots run through the machines soon to wring it out, and—generally—not to worry. In fairness, Mr. Scott has a solid track record on running the count (as opposed to neighboring Clackamas county). And he even passed along a handy guide for those curious about

Still…the tricky part will be that scheme to elect three city council whozises from four districts. Portland will be the biggest city—and just about the only one except, weirdly, our namesake in frigid Maine—to use Single Transferrable Vote (OK, we give up—STV from here on out, although it sounds like a fatal disease). Needless to say, the scheme is a favorite of progressives—including the first tranche back in the late 1800’s.

As the pro-STV website, Protect Democracy, notes…

[Progressives] hooked up with the movement for nonpartisan elections, won STV in 22 cities, and then saw it repealed in all but one. That’s because it eventually frustrated powerbrokers in both major parties. 

The local STV scheme was put together with no regard whatsoever for what the authors of the chatty WillyWeek article assumed—”voter sentiment’—but an effort to grease the skids for the usual You-Know-Whos of Portland progressivism. As the Charter Commission’s slick publications (now buried deep on the city’s website) repeated, this was the real goal…

Increasing opportunities for communities of color to elect their candidates of choice has also been a driving goal for the Commission. Portland does not have a geographic distribution of BIPOC residents that could allow for a drawing of a majority BIPOC district, nor does it have the level of income or age segregation and stratification that characterizes other large cities.

There may be an upside in all this vote-thrashing in this offhand observation from the STV fanatics at Fair Vote…

At times, proportional representation helped undermine the power of political machines and party bosses. In several cities, such as Cincinnati, the machines lost their majorities and their grip on power.

Note that the Charter Commission kept the charade that Portland elections are nonpartisan, so tough luck Libertarians. But we all know which party runs the show in this town.

Hope springs eternal.

How the Hell Do We Rank the 25-Percenters?

…which is beyond Tim Scott’s pay grade. How are Portland’s voters supposed to do a sophisticated ranking if they know next to nothing about the herd of candidates? Which grows almost daily—60 by one count—which is understandable, given the $133,000 waiting at the end of the 25-percent rainbow.

That would seem to be a problem for the town’s dinosaur press which, as we all know, is hardly able to cover the Big News. (As for TV, if it bleeds, it ledes.)

Thus this sudden appearance in WillyWeek surprised us…

…which might go down as a sort of, “Enjoy your few column inches of coverage, Ms. Routh, and see you in November.”

As for why Ms. Routh was singled out of the herd, who knows?

It’s our suspicion that under its new publisher—a legacy hire par excellence—the weekly is losing its usual antagonistic stance, but as interviews go, the Rouch interrogation was like cream on top of ice cream…

What’s your plan to address homelessness?

I hear a lot of people talking about the number of beds. Our unhoused population is also our most diverse population in terms of age, race, ability, everything except class. And so we need a diversity of shelter options…

…a triangulation worthy of our lame duck mayor—and one of the reasons he didn’t run again.

WillyWeek has roused itself occasionally to occasionally note that other people are running, such as progressive fixer, Marshall Runkle. Their lead shark, Sophie Peel, seemed to have had a recent feeding as she asked powder-puff questions of the “politico,” who answered…

“Take a look at my track record,” he tells WW. “You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at what I’ve done.”

One can only pray the voters will do just that.

Meanwhile, Yet Another ‘How Come They Didn’t Tell Us About This Stuff?’

…as this headline in WillyWeek, still playing catch-up, indicates…

…the story was dense with inside city hall stuff, such as who gets to contribute “in kind,” and how many donors will fit on the head of a pin. Already reported: the city’s matching funds for the candidates were roughly halved down to a measly $150K per campaign.

Not to worry—campaign mailers will continue to be festooned with the logos of all those 501-c-3 nonprofits (whiich aren’t supposed to dabble in politics) and unions (bribing the people who will negotiate their next contracts) and the various other murky players—unless Mr. Runkle has them all tied up.

A cynic might say that our dinosaur media isn’t going to give “proportionate” coverage to the council horde in order to goose up their end-of-campaign endorsements.

Hard as it is to believe, some people think this way.

Always Read the Fine Print…

Local media’s coverage of the abrupt defenestration of the Oregon Health Authority’s longtime head of equity and inclusion, Leann Johnson, was beyond befuddled (although Substack’s Jeff Eager had some proximate thoughts, as we reposted here).

But then WillyWeek mentioned this little aside…

Johnson joined OHA in 2010 and has led the division, which has 86 employees and a budget of $52 million, for over eight years.

…which passed without comment faster than a Tesla heading for a Supercharger. But…really? What in God’s name do all these people do?

Which would seem to be the real scandal.

For a more jaundiced view of the DEI scam, you might want to read Adam B. Coleman’s essay…

…here. Tasty tidbits…

DEI was an employment opportunity for ideological and mediocre college graduates with undesirable degrees, a career avenue for wanderlust executive types and a ploy to siphon money from corporate budgets while producing nothing of substance…

…and…

Every other department has metrics to meet to rationalize their existence and measure performance, but how exactly do you measure diversity?

What metric point can you use to evaluate equity?

Any rational person could see this scheme was doomed to fail economically and environmentally.

Because to justify their existence, “diversity professionals” needed to seek out problems and issues — and if there weren’t any to be found, manufacturing them would suffice.

He discusses DEI in the corporate context, but OHA has always seemed more like the ultimate self-dealing business to us. PS: Coleman runs his own Substack, Speaking Wrong at the Right Time, is author of the book, “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.

Maybe OHA should think about hiring him. He’d be a slam dunk check on the “diversity” box…wouldn’t he?

Annals of Sex

Here’s a money-raising pitch making the rounds lately…

Michaelangelo and Caravaggio (and many others) were…well, they hadn’t invented “gay” quite yet. Suffice to say they’re not remembered for how they chose to fornicate. Will we be able to say the same of those whose narcissism will be on display?

Which prompted this midnight thought: There’s art—and then the stuff that pretends to be art, which is one of the great moral dilemmas of our tawdry time. I figured this out many years ago when one of my universitry professors—it was a Political Science course that was widely rumored to be a “mickey Mouse”—invited a few of his students over to his apartment, where he swore us to silence and then showed us one of the world’s most remarkable movies. “Triumph of the Will.” It was the film that put Adolf Hitler over the top. As well as inspired many other filmmakers—including George Lucas, which quoted from the film in the last scene in the original Star Wars.

In that moment I learned something scary: art can be evil. Even if you can’t take your eyes off it.

Stop screaming—I’m not saying our gay fellow citizens are evil, but that a subminority of the minority is playing around with something that has more power than they can control. Or imagine.

Let’s Write Our Sexual Proclivities Into the State Constitution (and Make Sure OHSU turns a Profit)

Funny thing about constitutions: they tend to outlast (and frustrate) the manias that sweep the mouth-breathing electorate. Oregon’s document (OK, the work of land-robbers and forest-rapers) has been around since 1857, aka the state’s Dark Ages. It has been tinkered with a few times—there was a biggie in 2022, with an amendment to Article IV, section 15 that, essentially, kicked out Republicans who wouldn’t play ball with the progressive machine’s supermajority.

Those later amendments were wordy (as opposed to the inspired brevity of Mr. Madison’s US Constitution—which got a Portland high school named in his honor, which was then withdrawn in 2021’s racialist Floyd hysteria). They’re uniformly fussy, opaque, vain attempts to handcuff future generations to the passions of the present. On that topic, let’s quote another slave-holder, Thomas Jefferson (whose namesake managed to avoid the PPS racial-purity purge)…

We may consider each generation as a separate nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

Which brings us to the progressive sex-maniacs trying to make sure that their sexual proclivites are “enshrined,” right up there with all those other freedoms that GuvKate ran roughshod over in the Covid hysteria.

As the Oregonian reported, with nary a hint that there might be another side to the argument…

“At a time when extremist politicians are rolling back the clock on LGBTQ+ rights nationally, it’s beyond time to cement Oregon’s place as the safest place in the U.S. to be queer,” Evelyn Kocher, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and chief petitioner of the proposed ballot measure, said in a statement.

Hard to square Ms. Kocher’s hysteria with the reality of the number of openly—indeed, insistently—gay folks in positions of power in the city and state; and that the current constitution already forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, which kinda covers the whole fast-moving field.

But, as we observe elsewhere, it’s the details that count. And here it is in the laundry-list of protections and no-touch-’ems…

…gender identity and related health decisions…

…which a cynic might suspect was inserted by the wonderful folks with the magical robotic vagina-making machine over at OHSU’s gender clinic.

They’re probably a little nervous, despite local media’s extreme reluctance to look under the hood of their sex-change business. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, where socialized health was much further along the “trans” transition, second thoughts have been occurring, especially when kids are involved. Just a quick sample of the most recent:

• “New research in the International Urogynecology Journal raises serious concerns about testosterone use among trans-identified female patients. Researchers found that 94% of the patients they studied had developed pelvic floor dysfunction since starting testosterone. What’s more, 87% suffered from issues with bladder control; 53% reported sexual dysfunction, such as pain during intercourse; and 74% reported experiencing issues with bowel movements, such as constipation or faecal incontinence.”

• Eighteen health-policy and medical organizations have signed onto a statement expressing “serious concerns” about gender-transition treatment for minors.

  The “Doctors Protecting Children” declaration, signed by the conservative American College of Pediatricians, the Catholic Medical Association, and nearly 100 doctors and health leaders, says “responsible informed consent is not possible” with minors due to the “extremely limited long-term follow-up studies of interventions, and the immature, often impulsive, nature of the adolescent brain.” (Source)

• Several European countries—including the U.K., Sweden, Finland, Norway and France— now have urged caution in using drugs to help minors with gender dysphoria, stressing a lack of evidence that the benefits outweigh risks. The U.K.’s NHS, the largest state run health system in the world, said it has now stopped offering puberty blockers except for patients in clinical trials.  (Source)

• The leading world medical organization devoted to transgender health care deleted guidance urging invasive interventions for child gender dysphoria from its website after internal documents revealed that its members had doubts about the safety and efficacy of the approach. (Source)

…just since March.

While the world hesitates, Oregon marches bravely into the future. Our compassionista voters will readily go for it.

Then we’ll find that second thoughts about today’s mania won’t be as easy as dumping the name of a high school.

Over and Out