Summer Sizzles

Parades, a Near Miss, Waiting for a Shoe to Drop, and Stories You'll Never Read in Portland

We’re Waiting, Ms. Gunderson

You may recall that we wrote recently about former Oregonian (and Portland Tribune) columnist Phil Stanford’s new book, “Who Killed Michael Franke—and How They Got Away With It,” published by the Sager Group. It’s now available on Amazon (where you can read his two essential books : “Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City,” and, “Rose City Vice: Portland in the 70’s Dirty Cops and Dirty Robbers”).

For the youngsters and recent immigrants among us, the Francke killing was a very big deal back in the day (when the governor of the state, political wonder-boy Neil Goldschmidt, ruled and also harbored a secret: his liaison with a 14-year-old Portland girl). Stanford— in the best tradition of journalism—started with the assumption that government officials habitually lie, and questioned the quick solution of Francke’s murder and the sentencing of a minor-league hood to prison. Decades later, thanks to a tireless public attorney, the conviction was reversed. Stanford’s crusade paid off.

That’s the short version.

In the wake of the book’s publication—surely, by any measure a newsworthy event—Jack Bogdanski, aka Bojack, wrote it up in his blog; and then, a few days later, Aaron Mesh, Willy Week’s editor, ran an “edited for brevity and clarity“ Q-and-A about the book under a carefully non-committal headline…

…that essentially covered the facts of the case. And not much else. That not-much-else included these few words from Stanford…

Some of us kept raising questions in the press: Jim Redden at Willamette Week, Steve Jackson at the Salem [Statesman]Journal, Eric Mason at Channel 6, and I was doing what I could at The Oregonian.

…which suggests that in his move to Southern California, Stanford has become a diplomat. That’s because he was savaged by his former employers, The Oregonian, with a three-page slash-and-burn attack by two Oregonian reporters (one, Noelle Crombie,¹ still drawing a paycheck) that, essentially, backed up the prosecution and, tacitly, said Stanford was, at best, a dupe.

For watchers of the town’s paper of record, this was a puzzling event. Some said it was an inner staff rivalry between pro-cop hard news types and the pampered columnist who got to write any damn thing he pleased—and then decamped to the Oregonian’s opposition and kept sniping. Yes, folks, newsrooms are just that petty.

Since The Oregonian writes history, lucky them, we’ll never know.

Following our piece on Stanford and the book, two of our frequent (and best) commenters fired off emails that said, essentially, that we had drunk the Stanford Kool-Aid. Notably, the book hadn’t yet been published, so neither could have read it. That’s how the Francke murder still rouses passions.

Obviously, you’d think that The Oregonian, final defender of the state’s conviction of Francke’s killer, would take some notice of their alumni’s last shot.

As of this writing, the O has done what it usually does when it gets beat or stuff wrong.

Nothing.

They’ve covered the usual quota of anti-Trump, anti-ICE, pro-progressive, love-the-Blazers junk…but Stanford?

Nada.

We’re waiting. And—golly!—what kind of fireworks, even “lightly edited” might result if the interviewer is Ms. Crombie?

Our Last Word on the White Whale in the Room

Every pol in town is trying to figure out how they can triangulate the confused battle over the suddenly-obsolete Moda Center.² Here’s our solution: Tell the city’s renegade city administrator, Raymond Lee III, to ask our absentee Jail Blazers owner to buy the place for what the city paid for it in 2024—$1.

There’s a messy entity that owns the land underneath the white whale (think of Moby Dick, a Cetacean that drove someone nuts); it’s a legal mess, but the land isn’t going anywhere, and contracts exist to be rewritten—or broken. Just ask our current president.

Party-Time With the Alphabet-People

Well, it’s summer and the whole damn month now belongs to the LGBTQIA+ folks. Kevin Dahlgren shot some vivid video of the gay parade by the Alphabet-People through downtown Portland…

…and WillyWeek, mindful of its circulation, also put gayness (in its many permutations) on the cover…

…and didn’t actually answer the question of why we got so many imports, beyond like-attracts-like. They revealed that…

…same-sex couples make up 3.8% of Portland households…

…and that…

The Advocate once dubbed Oregon “the queerest state,” citing data from the Williams Institute that estimated 7.8% of Oregonians identified as LGBTQ+.

The Advocate being a publication for the many initials, founded in 1967 and now a glossy magazine and web presence. It started printing back when “homosexuality” was a punishable offense, that “dare not say its name,” but that period was long before any of the marchers got city permission to tie up downtown streets.

It was also long before anyone thought to scoop all of the many sexual practices (some added almost daily) into one unitary bunch of letters that any schoolchild in the progressive school districts can rattle off.

To us innocent heteros, the gaggle of initials makes about as much sense, in the real world, as simply saying someone is “Christian.” Big umbrella—but there's a lot of cultural snobbery and fighting going on underneath it. Didn’t the pope just toss out a bunch of Catholics who want to say the mass in Latin?

You’ll get into big trouble with some people by suggesting boys who want to become girls — more on that later — are really just gay, which will come out in the wash if the kid doesn’t get hormones or an artificial vagina first.

Do lesbians automatically love gay guys? I’ve known a fair number of lesbian women and most hated being lumped-in with the boys. Within the many flavors of male gays, there are well-known divisions between the steam-bath types and the effete.

How about the cross-dressers? How about Intersex and Asexual/Agender/Aromantic. Or, “Questioning?” Or, Intersex, Pansexual, Nonbinary … have we left anyone out? They have nothing in common with being “gay.” I know progressives/socialists’ first point of attack is the language…but…really?

Is a politician, such as GuvTina, who made a Big Deal out of her sexual preferences in her inaugural address...

…me, the first openly lesbian governor in the United States, along with the new governor of Massachusetts…

…going to rule differently because she does something in the privacy (one hopes) of her bedroom…or wherever? If a pol wants us to know about their sexual habits, what’s fair to ask? Top or bottom? Tribbing? Pillow princess?

If our anorexic mayor gives the Alphabet-People a whole month to themselves, will anyone in that arbitrary classification (whether they like it or not) drop a vote his way? Will every lesbian in Oregon unite to put GuvTina and the First Lady back into office?

And, to naive little me, why does a certain mode of sexual expression involve “pride.”

Proud about…what? About how tab A fits into slot B?

I’ll confess, as an incorrigible heterosexual, that I have never, as they say, expressed myself in that department and, having done so, felt “proud” afterward. Happy, amazed, maybe even baffled—but “proud?”

Or maybe I’m just Mr. Insensitivity. (Get in touch with my ex-wives for that one.)

Well, the Alphabet-People are now embedded in what’s left of the culture. The boundaries of what is permissible have now been pushed into lands far beyond. If anything, the annual parade looks a little nostalgic; people who once were outlaws now captured by the American ability to subsume everyone and anything into the ooze.

Then again, if you’re a traditional heterosexual, you get no respect—at least from any of our pandering civil servants. So we’d like to propose a month (OK, just a week) of celebrations of Heterosexuality. We asked Grok to envision a parade of our own…

No leather strappage allowed.

Close, But No Cigar Dept.

We last visited one of PBOT’s “quieting” exercises here, and snapped a picture of an “improved” intersection that establishes, conclusively, that PBOT is in league with the city’s numerous body-shops and PI lawyers…

This is at 82d (being beaten into submission by TriMet and PBOT’s engineers) and Washington, a major route over to the I-205 and points south where socialists still don’t run the show.

I’ve driven it often—had a little occasional confusion in the “guess who goes first” squeeze, but last night was really close. I want to thank the driver of the gray F-150 who, headlights blazing, started from a half-block behind, floored it, and elbowed his way past in a slam on the brakes or you’ll be calling Geico, maybe from a hospital bed: a psychopath surrounded by a ton of steel.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away in our targeted neighborhood, PBOT’s bikeomania and ‘quieting” jihad is bearing fruit…

…which featured one of the strangest bits of road candy…

with that microscopic channel on the right just waiting to be blocked (note the bike lane disappears in the following block, which, if you look carefully, has an ambulance waiting to hoover up hapless two-wheelers). This was supposed to sort out traffic at one of the city’s most treacherous intersections, where anyone riding a bike amongst the steel, CO2-belching monsters really ought to be given a lift to the Looney Bin. In reality, it was just another gift to Jonathan Maus and the Bike Believers™—who don’t pay a penny in return for the favor.

Thank you, PBOT. And set aside some big bucks to pay off the lawyers.

That Which Cannot Be Uttered

Speaking of our local media, you will search in vain for any coverage, beyond laudatory, of OHSU’s (and other local hospitals) active “clinics” (one in their children’s hospital) for making boys into girls—or vice-versa. We have written here, here, here, here, here, and here—but that was back starting in 2022, when Portland was in the throes of progressive hallucinations. Who had time for confused kids and billing codes and Dr. Peters’ magical robotic vagina-making machine when other confused kids were trying to burn down the federal building?

Trans—like most other progressive hysterias—had its day; Europe has seen significant rollbacks in trans policies and the British Supreme Court made a ruling that a man is a man and a woman is a woman and that’s that. Several states have clamped down on gender tinkering on the kiddies on the fair assumption that, say, a confused pre-pubescent girl shouldn’t have her breasts cut off when she’s just developing them.

It goes without saying that Oregon is in the vanguard—and a recent piece in Manhattan Institute’s website shows why, and how…

…citing a report that was based, not on emotions, but on hard numbers. The article’s author, Leor Sapir, parsed the data…

A study recently published in Research Connections drew attention for finding very high rates (relatively speaking) of puberty-blocker and cross-sex hormone uptake among adolescents in Oregon….suggesting that Oregon has become a national leader in transgender diagnoses and medical intervention. Not coincidentally, Oregon is the only state in the country to have formally adopted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s recommendations as the basis for its Medicaid benefits. And it did so despite its own health regulatory body acknowledging the absence of supportive evidence.

…and…

Using insurance data for minors ages 8 to 17 between 2016 and 2023, the authors of the recent Research Connections study found that about one in 240 girls and one in 630 boys in Oregon were on hormones by age 17. In addition, 0.98 percent of minors—1.51 percent of girls and 0.46 percent of boys—received a “transgender-related diagnosis” (typically “gender dysphoria”) during these years. In other words, about one in every 65 adolescent girls in Oregon is a potential candidate for medical “sex reassignment.”

…and added…

Last year, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics reported that approximately one in 1,000 American teens was prescribed cross-sex hormones by age 17. The Oregon rate was two to three times higher than that. Indeed, a closer look at the data revealed that hormone prescriptions in Oregon were four to five times the national rate among 14- and 15-year-olds, while puberty-blocker uptake was up to six times the national rate at age 14. Thus, teens in Oregon are not only being medicalized more, but also at earlier ages.

You might think that a legacy press editor might be interested in these numbers. How come kids in Oregon are in so many wrong bodies? Is it something in the water?

Wonder in vain.

1. Ms. Crombie’s last major hit was the “Bourbongate” scandalette—Liquor Control people essentially moving themselves to the head of the line to purchase hyper-expensive bourbon that no mere mortal would think of buying. Some believed that Crombie was carrying water for new GuvTina, who wanted to get rid of officials who might want to question her ties with marijuana wanna-be tycoons who had helped bankroll her campaign. In itself, worth a book.

2. Ever wonder why a health insurance outfit is paying $-zillions to put their name on the arena? Maybe they could give up the naming deal and reduce their premiums and denials-of-service.