The Dog Days of the News
GuvTina goes transcontinental; Portland discovers (finally) that it's summer; PSU looks silly again; and perfumes for every sexual preference.
About That Old Boy…and the Other Old Boys
By now we’ve heard from just about anyone who can put pen to paper about that old guy. Who used to be the big guy.
You would think that our local newsies would be interested in GuvTina getting on a plane and jetting all the way to DC to meet with other Democratic party guvs to discuss what to do with the old relic.
Wouldn’t you?
But if there was anything more than a cursory, “She flew…” story, there’s been no follow-up.
Nope; no one seems interested in what got discussed out there in DC; in what a political lightweight from a securely blue state might add to the conversation; or, for that matter, what GuvTina thinks about the old gentleman’s syntax. Or survivability.
Throw in our two senators—remember them?—and you’d have a trifecta. Both are being schtum, as they say on the other side of the pond.
What the hell: the old guy could be a mummy and he’d get this state’s electoral votes. But still, you’d think that Tina would get on the blower to kanoodle with her chief water-carrier, Noelle Crombie of the Oregonian and dish some inside stuff. After all Crombie put together the cover story that greased the way for Tina to purge the state’s creepy Liquor and Cannabis Control “old boys’” network. It was a pure patronage ploy disguised behind the scandal that rare, hyper-expensive whiskey was going to insiders instead of Mr. and Mrs. Oregon—the shame!
By the way, that rare whiskey got distributed (in laughably small quantities) in a big lottery. It was the payoff to the Oregonian, validating Crombie’s little “bourbongate” scandalette. I filled out the entry for a few pricey bottles, but the call didn’t come from my local liquor store.
And not a word in the dinosaur media about who got the good stuff.
We’re All Going to Fry! Whenever!
It’s a wonder that media hyperventilation over a few toasty days didn’t manage to bring the temperature down. Having grown up in the American midwest, allow me to assure my fellow occupants of the temperate Northwest (where “summer” occurs somewhere around the 4th of July) that a few 100-degree days won’t do much more than cook editors’ brains. It’s called “summer.” Combine that with “slow news days” and you wind up with panic on the front pages, such as this admonition from the Oregonian…
…which, given the city’s escalating homicide rate, ought to be kept permanently in type. TV, meanwhile, adapted its mantra, “If it bleeds, it ledes,” to “If it sweats…” and came up with the predictable…
…although, as usual, the actual truth was deeply buried under bureaucratese…
“Investigators say confirmation will not be complete for several weeks to months,” officials said. “Further tests and investigation will determine whether the deaths are officially hot-weather-related. In some cases, the deaths may be found to have had other causes.”
Short version: who knows? It’s a slow news day.
Our award for the most desperate tag-along weather story goes to this in WillyWeek…
McKibbon came all the way to Portland from temperate New England to pitch the climate armageddon…and his many books on the coming catastrophe (or is it a cataclysm—who knows?), such as…
…which has been predicting the end of the world since 2014, with an update last year. This is keeping with the penchant for climate doomsdayers to miss their end-of-the-world predictions, as documented by the Perplexity AI search engine…
Dire famines by 1975
Ice ages by 2000
Water and food rationing in the US by 1980
Disappearance of nations due to rising seas by 2000
New York City's West Side Highway being underwater by 2019
Children not knowing what snow is by the 2000s
Ice-free Arctic by 2013, 2014, and 2015
…Apocalypses that have failed more often than a snake-handling preacher’s predictions of the Rapture.
McKibbon was sponsored at the boiling church by the folks at Extinction Rebellion, although WillyWeek didn’t credit that organization, since other chapters, mostly in Europe, like to throw tomato soup on art in museums and glue themselves to roads.
McKibbon also didn’t talk about one of his own predictions—that the koala would be "functionally extinct" in Australia because of climate-related wildfires.
The koalas are doing fine.
Why Does Ann Cudd Still Have a Job?
Dinosaur media, proving it has the memory of its extinct forebears, has tippy-toed around the disgrace of the trashing of the PSU Library—the heart of any halfway respectable campus—by rioters who thought Hamas is a bunch of wonderful folks. And who trashed the library to prove it.
Cudd, the school’s president, dilly-dallied, tried to cut deals with the kids (who were under the tutelage of professional “protesters”), and finally called in Portland cops to tromp around in the top floors of the library to enable the whack-jobs to flee with their gas masks and garbage-can shields.
Embattled DA Mike Schmidt made a big deal of telling the press that he might charge some of the mopes who managed to get caught with burglary. Have you read any follow-ups on whether he actually did that?
President Cudd, meanwhile, has been issuing estimates of how much damage the kiddies managed to wreak—it just got upped from $750K to over $1-million. KGW and other TV stations got mildly interested…
…and managed to note, in passing, that her original estimates were a little off the mark because of the rioters’ damage to electronic systems and computers. Which are merely the most important part of the library, since books on paper are now considered passé by literati.
But the Big News! was a nasty little lawsuit by a couple of the kiddies having fun in a follow-up “demonstration,” covered by Oregon Public Broadcasting with typical indirection…
Reporter Camhi did her own tippy-toe around the reason the litigants encountered the cops…
That protest over the war in Gaza started out as a peaceful student-led demonstration at PSU’s Urban Plaza. The demonstration then moved to an administration building where two students locked themselves to the building’s doors with chains. PSU’s campus police and the Portland Police Bureau responded.
Portland State students Makayla Topaz Arnold, 25, and David Mosqueira, 28, were in the crowd of demonstrators that attempted to shield the chained students from law enforcement.
…which managed to get the facts of the case wrong—if the Oregonian’s coverage, under an even more tippy-toe headline…
…was correct, or even a good guess…
Two Portland State University students filed a pair of $445,000 lawsuits Monday against the university, claiming it retaliated against them for speaking out about alleged rough treatment by police at a May protest over the war in Gaza that came weeks after the library takeover.
Both news outlets agreed that the students were peeved that, following the mini-riot and their threats to sue, the university invited the two to a meeting to discuss whether or not brawling with the cops might be, well…a “possible violation of the university’s code of student conduct…” which is what got Cudd and the University in the pickle in the first place.
Said the Oregonian, with a straight face…
In the lawsuits filed Monday, both students claim the university’s response impacted their education and distracted them from studying. Arnold is studying biology at PSU.
There will probably be the usual “settlement,” and taxpayers will be on the hook, although PrezCudd explained to a KGW reporter that the university has insurance (which we’d guess will have a whopping premium increase) and, after all, PSU is a public institution, which means... well, you know.
No one bothered to pose the only question worth asking: are these two still enrolled at PSU?
If so, why?
Speaking of Tag-Along Stories…
Just making it under the wire for WillyWeek’s wall-to-wall coverage of Pride Month, was this…
…with plugs for local tag-along businesses, and this curious lesson in why dudes wear the smell-juice…
…some guys use rose and cupcake accords to subversively enhance their masculinity, like pearl necklaces.
Daddy, why’s a man wearing a necklace?
“But still, you’d think that Tina would get on the blower to kanoodle with her chief water-carrier, Noelle Crombie of the Oregonian and dish some inside stuff.”
If you were Crombie’s editor, Richard, she would have at least been required to make an effort. What does Governor Kotek think about Biden’s survivability? Even more important, what does the First Lady think? And who did win the Bourbongate hooch?
Instead, our local newspaper, with its resources and staff, have done a deep dive into Nancy Brophy’s successful murder of her husband. News some folks can use, I suppose.
Those two students who think they deserve $400,000 because the protest and their “rough” treatment made them not want to study? Oh boo hoo. They’re just selfish and lazy and want a big fat payoff. The Oregonian is a joke. That quote was hilarious. What a couple of losers.