The disrespect audience members showed toward Rene Gonzalez at the events described in this piece was deplorable and uncalled-for. Those are the voices of the same badass children who brought us six months or more of rioting in 2020-21 and who marched through Portand neighborhoods with long guns demanding so-called racial justice for a violent perpetrator of criminal gun violence.
The Oregonian didn't help by hanging the label of "law and order candidate" on Gonzalez, a phrase that's the kiss of death among progressive kids and their parents. The truth is that Gonzalez has been the lone reformer in city government since the voters finally had enough of the cop-hating Jo Ann Hardesty and fired her. The youngsters hate that Gonzalez sought to rein in Hardesty's social justice cadres at Portand Street Response and put a halt to their enabling camping by handing out tents and tarps. I'd rather that the capon who sits in the mayor's office under the new form of government be a law-and-order capon than one who's just one more equity evangelist. It's a pity Gonzalez didn't even have the good sense that God gave geese when he made the brilliant decision to burnish his Wikipedia page at taxpayer expense. I voted for him anyway.
Here's a city in deep, deep economic trouble (Intel and Nike in deep doo-doo), downtown hollowing out (bye-bye Big Pink; Montgomery Park broke), and these clowns are mouthing tired old progressive tropes. Have your bags packed and ready to decamp to Sherwood.
I'm only half kidding when I say the new city council's first order of business will be outlawing gentrification and cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes.
Oct 20Liked by Richard Cheverton, Pamela Fitzsimmons
So much to comment on here, but this one stuck in a particularly troublesome spot in my craw:
Rubio suggested hiring more police officers “trained in Portland values."
Dear God, NO.
How about keeping our hoary, ideological paws OUT of law enforcement and let them do their jobs?
The continued malfeasance and meddling in public safety affairs is WHY the PPB suffers such a poor reputation nationally and is still the #1 reason most self-respecting officers in the PPB do NOT recommend getting hired there.
Also: If this gaggle of navel-gazing buffoons is the best we can do, we're not only doomed, we're already unrecoverable. Seriously? Indeed, Representative Blumenauer actually made an accurate assessment - ideology over everything else. Well, Portland, you get the leadership you deserve.
Rubio is one to talk about "Portland values." Since Rubio was exposed recently as a flagrant scofflaw with an appalling record of parking and motor vehicle registration violations, all she has done is feed the press and the public one implausible excuse after another. The tenor of the excuses made it pretty clear Rubio was dying to play the marginalized identity martyr but simply didn't have the facts to back that up.
The right thing for Rubio to have done would have been to level with the public about the real reasons for her noncompliance or drop out of the race. Instead, Rubio has played the sex card and whined about how women are unfairly called upon to make apologies while men get away with their transgressions by calling them youthful indiscretions.
Oct 19Liked by Richard Cheverton, Pamela Fitzsimmons
I am terrified of the potential death knell Portland may experience as a result of the upcoming election. Too many voters are unable to grasp the enormity of the disaster that the City is currently suffering, and they place an inordinate amount of importance on their pet social issues instead of focusing on the reality that it is a healthy economy and a vibrant community that make solutions to social problems possible.
The overwhelmingly liberal voting population in Portland has brought us a great many wonderful things, but tragically common sense and scientific approaches to our problems are not among them. I have commented over and over again that far too many Portlanders vote with their hearts and not enough vote with their heads. The leaders thus elected have turned the “Acceptance of Unacceptable Behavior” into a peculiarly Portland art form. Since 2016 these ill chosen few have been content to allow public acts of destruction and depravity to destroy our once widely admired life style. They permit acts to occur on our streets that they would never allow in their homes, acts that they have raised their own children to never do, and behaviors they have taught them are antisocial.
Portland is far past the tipping point and is rolling downhill under its own power. Good thoughts and feelings have never created safe communities, instead it is a series of agreed upon rules, that when enforced, and only when enforced, can create peace, security, and harmony for its citizens. We must pull out all the stops to enforce the contract for belonging that existed in the first decade of the new century. Only by returning to the norms of behavior that gave us the security and freedom we had as a community at that time will we have a chance to recover. Without strict adherence to this policy we are looking at decades, not years, to regain even a part of what we have lost.
Only a single candidate has proposed a timeline for recovery, and that is limited to a single issue, housing the people who are living on our streets and in our bushes. Everyone else is clueless about how many years their visions will realistically require to achieve a modicum of success! If Portland is to survive, much less recover, we need creative thinking to increase our enforcement of our laws. This will involve methods that bring larger numbers of government employees into play in reducing crimes of all sorts, and possibly the recruitment of community groups to monitor the wrongdoing they see and to report them to the enforcement authorities. One example, enlisting all Lyft, Uber, and Taxi drivers as graffiti observers who would report active graffiti crimes directly to a small specialized squad of police. This could result in an immediate reduction in graffiti and possibly even elimination of the problem.
We may need to turn to the Private Sector for a loan of high performing individuals who operate only on a basis of successfully managing their responsibilities, and does not consider merely “trying” to be enough for continued employment, a practice that is all too frequently seen as sufficient in our local Government Agencies.
You nailed it. I often place more blame on the virtuous citizens versus the politicians. After all, they are simply responding to the progressive policy wills of the people. This could all end overnight if people abandoned the woke agenda and returned to our founding Judeo-Christian principles. https://www.prageru.com/video/what-are-judeo-christian-values
The situation is so bad, that even Congressman Earl Blumenauer (who’s been part of the problem during his long political career) even complained to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (and former Oregon gubernatorial candidate) in a column four months ago:
“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”
At the end of the City Club forum, moderator Jeff Mapes asked each of the candidates who their favorite mayor was.
Østhus picked Bud Clark, a popular choice with the audience.
Wilson went next, and Clark was also his favorite. He told a story about how Clark walked into a small business in Old Town, and the proprietor was having problems with the homeless. Clark turned it over to his aide, Dan Steffey, who produced a 12-point plan. Just like that. Wilson seemed to suggest he would tackle the problem with the same determination.
Next came Gonzalez, smiling at Wilson’s story. Gonzalez’s favorite mayor was Vera Katz, another popular choice with the audience.
“Ask her ghost if Bud Clark solved homelessness,” Gonzalez said. “She dealt with it every day.”
Mapps also liked Katz.
And Rubio? Tom Potter was her favorite because he brought community policing to the Portland Police Bureau and walked in the Gay Pride Parade.
Now, a little more about Clark’s homeless plan. If you go into the archives of The Oregonian on Feb. 23, 1986, there is a story headlined “12-point Dan earns credit for homeless plan.”
According the lede, Steffey brought 10 Portland and Multnomah County elected officials to a meeting in one room to discuss the plan, and surprisingly everybody got along.
“I think you’re looking at an issue whose time has come, and citizens want something done,” Steffey is quoted as saying. That was in 1986.
After seeing the Willamette Week endorsements I'm not optimistic for a turn around in Portland. Save their endorsement for Sam Adams and a few good picks in D4, they are supporting the status quo….oh and plus the experimental mayoral candidacy of Keith Wilson with inept scofflaw Rubio a recommended 2nd pick! I don't think most voters will be able/willing to weigh through the vast number of candidates and will just vote for the same old people as recommended by the local cabal of taxpayer funded non-profits and far left unions (SEIU, PAT, etc).
Back in '22, I bravely predicted that endorsements, given the confusion of the no-primary voting scheme, would assume disproportionate (love to use that term) importance. The idea that any sane voter would listen to the picks of obviously. self-interested people telling you how to vote is beyond absurd. My advice: if you can't do the damn homework, don't vote. You're a citizen--act l ike one.
Oct 19Liked by Richard Cheverton, Pamela Fitzsimmons
Life follows art. As my parents (one an artist, the other a professor of politics) would have said "Opera buffo!" (comic opera). It is highly unrealistic to think that at a time when Oregon's numbers defy the small bit of national good news of a pause in wild growth of drug overdoses (Oregon's continue unabated) that a mass diffusion of political power (the new council structure) combined with raising the salaries of over a dozen legislative bureaucrats and an even more byzantine structure.
In no universe is it likely that the town that proudly proclaimed it weirdness but effectively abolished policing, brought open and deadly drug use into everyday view, made it functionally impossible to intervene into the behaviors of people exhibiting insane and dangerous psychoses, will such a cosmetic fix to the governance act as an air break on the decline of a once great city.
It is a little known fact that the City Club of Portland drew up the blueprint for the new form of city government behind closed doors in the late teens. Unfortunately, the papers in which they laid out their vision for Portland have been taken down from the City Club's site. Suffice it to say that equity principles and copious amounts of white liberal guilt informed their blueprint, as did the progressive obsession with centering marginalized communities.
The last thing the great and good at the City Club had in mind was devising a form of city government that would facilitate the resolution of the city's chronic crises of homelessness, addiction and untreated mental illness. Instead the purpose was to give the usual favored historically marginalized identity groups a greater voice in running the city. In practice this means filling as many seats on the 12-person council with progressives. We know how that's worked out for Portland.
One other thing worth mentioning--the abject failure of our town's media to do their job BEFORE the vote. The charter commission was in business for two years prior to the vote, but coverage was de minimus. The commission was stacked with predictable progressives, public union shills, nonprofteers, with all sex-preference boxes ticked. This was evident from Day One, but the media has done more coverage post-vote, but even now they really don't grasp the realities of how radical (even by Portland standards) the charter is and will be.
The disrespect audience members showed toward Rene Gonzalez at the events described in this piece was deplorable and uncalled-for. Those are the voices of the same badass children who brought us six months or more of rioting in 2020-21 and who marched through Portand neighborhoods with long guns demanding so-called racial justice for a violent perpetrator of criminal gun violence.
The Oregonian didn't help by hanging the label of "law and order candidate" on Gonzalez, a phrase that's the kiss of death among progressive kids and their parents. The truth is that Gonzalez has been the lone reformer in city government since the voters finally had enough of the cop-hating Jo Ann Hardesty and fired her. The youngsters hate that Gonzalez sought to rein in Hardesty's social justice cadres at Portand Street Response and put a halt to their enabling camping by handing out tents and tarps. I'd rather that the capon who sits in the mayor's office under the new form of government be a law-and-order capon than one who's just one more equity evangelist. It's a pity Gonzalez didn't even have the good sense that God gave geese when he made the brilliant decision to burnish his Wikipedia page at taxpayer expense. I voted for him anyway.
Fabulous reporting.
Here's a city in deep, deep economic trouble (Intel and Nike in deep doo-doo), downtown hollowing out (bye-bye Big Pink; Montgomery Park broke), and these clowns are mouthing tired old progressive tropes. Have your bags packed and ready to decamp to Sherwood.
I'm only half kidding when I say the new city council's first order of business will be outlawing gentrification and cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes.
these portland sons of bitches deserve all that they've got and all that is coming. goddamn them
The problem is that I also live here. I'm glad you got out. Hope you're doing well.
So much to comment on here, but this one stuck in a particularly troublesome spot in my craw:
Rubio suggested hiring more police officers “trained in Portland values."
Dear God, NO.
How about keeping our hoary, ideological paws OUT of law enforcement and let them do their jobs?
The continued malfeasance and meddling in public safety affairs is WHY the PPB suffers such a poor reputation nationally and is still the #1 reason most self-respecting officers in the PPB do NOT recommend getting hired there.
Also: If this gaggle of navel-gazing buffoons is the best we can do, we're not only doomed, we're already unrecoverable. Seriously? Indeed, Representative Blumenauer actually made an accurate assessment - ideology over everything else. Well, Portland, you get the leadership you deserve.
Rubio is one to talk about "Portland values." Since Rubio was exposed recently as a flagrant scofflaw with an appalling record of parking and motor vehicle registration violations, all she has done is feed the press and the public one implausible excuse after another. The tenor of the excuses made it pretty clear Rubio was dying to play the marginalized identity martyr but simply didn't have the facts to back that up.
The right thing for Rubio to have done would have been to level with the public about the real reasons for her noncompliance or drop out of the race. Instead, Rubio has played the sex card and whined about how women are unfairly called upon to make apologies while men get away with their transgressions by calling them youthful indiscretions.
I am terrified of the potential death knell Portland may experience as a result of the upcoming election. Too many voters are unable to grasp the enormity of the disaster that the City is currently suffering, and they place an inordinate amount of importance on their pet social issues instead of focusing on the reality that it is a healthy economy and a vibrant community that make solutions to social problems possible.
The overwhelmingly liberal voting population in Portland has brought us a great many wonderful things, but tragically common sense and scientific approaches to our problems are not among them. I have commented over and over again that far too many Portlanders vote with their hearts and not enough vote with their heads. The leaders thus elected have turned the “Acceptance of Unacceptable Behavior” into a peculiarly Portland art form. Since 2016 these ill chosen few have been content to allow public acts of destruction and depravity to destroy our once widely admired life style. They permit acts to occur on our streets that they would never allow in their homes, acts that they have raised their own children to never do, and behaviors they have taught them are antisocial.
Portland is far past the tipping point and is rolling downhill under its own power. Good thoughts and feelings have never created safe communities, instead it is a series of agreed upon rules, that when enforced, and only when enforced, can create peace, security, and harmony for its citizens. We must pull out all the stops to enforce the contract for belonging that existed in the first decade of the new century. Only by returning to the norms of behavior that gave us the security and freedom we had as a community at that time will we have a chance to recover. Without strict adherence to this policy we are looking at decades, not years, to regain even a part of what we have lost.
Only a single candidate has proposed a timeline for recovery, and that is limited to a single issue, housing the people who are living on our streets and in our bushes. Everyone else is clueless about how many years their visions will realistically require to achieve a modicum of success! If Portland is to survive, much less recover, we need creative thinking to increase our enforcement of our laws. This will involve methods that bring larger numbers of government employees into play in reducing crimes of all sorts, and possibly the recruitment of community groups to monitor the wrongdoing they see and to report them to the enforcement authorities. One example, enlisting all Lyft, Uber, and Taxi drivers as graffiti observers who would report active graffiti crimes directly to a small specialized squad of police. This could result in an immediate reduction in graffiti and possibly even elimination of the problem.
We may need to turn to the Private Sector for a loan of high performing individuals who operate only on a basis of successfully managing their responsibilities, and does not consider merely “trying” to be enough for continued employment, a practice that is all too frequently seen as sufficient in our local Government Agencies.
You nailed it. I often place more blame on the virtuous citizens versus the politicians. After all, they are simply responding to the progressive policy wills of the people. This could all end overnight if people abandoned the woke agenda and returned to our founding Judeo-Christian principles. https://www.prageru.com/video/what-are-judeo-christian-values
The situation is so bad, that even Congressman Earl Blumenauer (who’s been part of the problem during his long political career) even complained to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (and former Oregon gubernatorial candidate) in a column four months ago:
“The inability of progressives, particularly in the Portland metro area, to deal with the nitty-gritty of governing and to get something done is just staggering,” Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has been representing and championing Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than in actual results.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/opinion/progressives-california-portland.html
Thanks 😊
And to think, Mayor Bud Clark got in trouble for saying “Tits up” to Police Chief Penny Harrington when he fired her.
Thanks. I had forgotten that.
At the end of the City Club forum, moderator Jeff Mapes asked each of the candidates who their favorite mayor was.
Østhus picked Bud Clark, a popular choice with the audience.
Wilson went next, and Clark was also his favorite. He told a story about how Clark walked into a small business in Old Town, and the proprietor was having problems with the homeless. Clark turned it over to his aide, Dan Steffey, who produced a 12-point plan. Just like that. Wilson seemed to suggest he would tackle the problem with the same determination.
Next came Gonzalez, smiling at Wilson’s story. Gonzalez’s favorite mayor was Vera Katz, another popular choice with the audience.
“Ask her ghost if Bud Clark solved homelessness,” Gonzalez said. “She dealt with it every day.”
Mapps also liked Katz.
And Rubio? Tom Potter was her favorite because he brought community policing to the Portland Police Bureau and walked in the Gay Pride Parade.
Now, a little more about Clark’s homeless plan. If you go into the archives of The Oregonian on Feb. 23, 1986, there is a story headlined “12-point Dan earns credit for homeless plan.”
According the lede, Steffey brought 10 Portland and Multnomah County elected officials to a meeting in one room to discuss the plan, and surprisingly everybody got along.
“I think you’re looking at an issue whose time has come, and citizens want something done,” Steffey is quoted as saying. That was in 1986.
For more history: https://www.oregonarchive.org/12-point-dan-earns-credit-for-selling-homeless-plan/
If you our your friends are looking for election help for Portland or Oregon elections….check out PDX Real recommendations:
1) PORTLAND https://www.instagram.com/p/DBAQh7OyrGT/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
2) OREGON:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DBAe0d5PM-G/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
After seeing the Willamette Week endorsements I'm not optimistic for a turn around in Portland. Save their endorsement for Sam Adams and a few good picks in D4, they are supporting the status quo….oh and plus the experimental mayoral candidacy of Keith Wilson with inept scofflaw Rubio a recommended 2nd pick! I don't think most voters will be able/willing to weigh through the vast number of candidates and will just vote for the same old people as recommended by the local cabal of taxpayer funded non-profits and far left unions (SEIU, PAT, etc).
Back in '22, I bravely predicted that endorsements, given the confusion of the no-primary voting scheme, would assume disproportionate (love to use that term) importance. The idea that any sane voter would listen to the picks of obviously. self-interested people telling you how to vote is beyond absurd. My advice: if you can't do the damn homework, don't vote. You're a citizen--act l ike one.
Life follows art. As my parents (one an artist, the other a professor of politics) would have said "Opera buffo!" (comic opera). It is highly unrealistic to think that at a time when Oregon's numbers defy the small bit of national good news of a pause in wild growth of drug overdoses (Oregon's continue unabated) that a mass diffusion of political power (the new council structure) combined with raising the salaries of over a dozen legislative bureaucrats and an even more byzantine structure.
In no universe is it likely that the town that proudly proclaimed it weirdness but effectively abolished policing, brought open and deadly drug use into everyday view, made it functionally impossible to intervene into the behaviors of people exhibiting insane and dangerous psychoses, will such a cosmetic fix to the governance act as an air break on the decline of a once great city.
It is a little known fact that the City Club of Portland drew up the blueprint for the new form of city government behind closed doors in the late teens. Unfortunately, the papers in which they laid out their vision for Portland have been taken down from the City Club's site. Suffice it to say that equity principles and copious amounts of white liberal guilt informed their blueprint, as did the progressive obsession with centering marginalized communities.
The last thing the great and good at the City Club had in mind was devising a form of city government that would facilitate the resolution of the city's chronic crises of homelessness, addiction and untreated mental illness. Instead the purpose was to give the usual favored historically marginalized identity groups a greater voice in running the city. In practice this means filling as many seats on the 12-person council with progressives. We know how that's worked out for Portland.
Josh: couldn't agree more.
One other thing worth mentioning--the abject failure of our town's media to do their job BEFORE the vote. The charter commission was in business for two years prior to the vote, but coverage was de minimus. The commission was stacked with predictable progressives, public union shills, nonprofteers, with all sex-preference boxes ticked. This was evident from Day One, but the media has done more coverage post-vote, but even now they really don't grasp the realities of how radical (even by Portland standards) the charter is and will be.