Flipping off Mar-a-Lago

Ok, here are a few photos I took back in August 2018 and saved for a special occasion that turned out to be today. I was in Florida to watch the Parker Solar Probe launch and had some free time afterward before I had to fly home, so I figured I'd go wander around Miami and the Everglades for a few days since I'd never been there before. (And, um, I'm bound to finish those blog posts eventually, but that's a whole separate issue.) On the way back, I made a little side trip out to Palm Beach to indulge one of my more petty hobbies, flipping off properties that belong to a certain soon-to-be ex-President. I have only actually done this twice (because it's a silly hobby and I'm not going to invest a lot of time or gas money into it): First for his ugly Waikiki hotel, and then this set of photos for Mar-a-Lago, his infamous private club near the beach.

Taking these wasn't eventful at all; I just sort of rolled by, took my photos without stopping, and continued on my way back to Orlando. I can't say it was a highlight of the trip as a whole, but it broke up the monotony of the drive, and it was mildly fascinating to see it in person. It's hard to explain, but as tacky as the place looks here, it's somehow even more tacky in person. In particular, the famous tower on top looks like one of the decorative faux-Spanish towers at a thousand California minimalls, maybe a bit toward the upscale end. It also felt weirdly menacing; it's tough to disentangle the building and its owner, of course, but looking at it it's easy to imagine that really bad things have happened there, and other bad things have been planned there, and that this badness is ongoing, maybe escalating. Honestly the whole surrounding area felt that way, as if his personality had bled into the soil like a leaky septic tank.

One weird detail about the place is that before Trump owned it, it spent a number of years as the most useless and expensive white elephant in the US national park system, deemed unusable as a presidential retreat or as a museum open to the general public, but with exorbitant maintenance costs anyway. They were happy to be rid of it -- which almost never happens -- and almost certainly won't want it back once Trump is done with it. So while it's bound to remain a pilgrimage spot for the world's nazis and braying dipshits, at least it won't happen at taxpayer expense. And given the local geography they'll need scuba gear to visit within a few more decades. Maybe at that point any part of the tower that isn't underwater could be repurposed as a sort of monument to climate denial, I dunno.

Anyway, good riddance.

#OccupyPortland - 10/7/2011

#OccupyPortland - 10/6/2011

joy

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

my best guess.

I'll put $1 down on 338...

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Updated: Looks like Indiana went blue this year, so we're at 349. Wow. Who'd a thunk it? And a couple more states still too close to call, too.

Still, this is why I never gamble with real money...

Um, so there's this election today...

...and I figured, you know, maybe I might say a word or two about it. There was a point a couple of years ago when I thought this humble blog ought to be a humble political blog, and I sort of had a go at it for a while. I soon realized a few things about political blogging.

1. It's very time-critical. I thought I was pretty good about staying on top of current events, but you're basically screwed if you ever miss a day. No vacation, no sick days, no sleeping through any part of the 24 hour global news cycle.
   
2. It's a lot of work. On top of the writing, you have to spend a lot of time reading, looking for new stories.
   
3. It quickly becomes unrewarding, due to the echo chamber effect. There are only so many ways to say "me too". And even if you come up with a new, hilarious, and extremely persuasive way to say it, you're still saying "me too".
   
4. To keep it up, you have to stay angry all the time. And I don't like me when I'm angry.
   
5. It attracts trolls, and trolls suck.
   
6. Others are a lot better at it, and some even make a career of it. They've got all the time in the world, they've got money, they've got a critical mass of contributors and commenters, they get more readers every second than I'd get in a week or more. Not only are you part of the herd, you're a very small part of the herd.
   

Eventually, I realized I was done talking about Bush & cronies. I felt I'd made my point to my own satisfaction, and nobody was exactly begging me to say "Bush = bad!" one more time. It occurred to me that I was past being angry, and I was now simply waiting (impatiently) for the 2008 election, and for inauguration day, 2009. And then I just put politics in a box, taped it up, and put it in storage for a while. Or at least I stopped posting about it. For about the last month or so I've been obsessively watching polls, reading news, following a bunch of blogs by the aforementioned people who are good at this stuff. The long-awaited 2008 general election is tomorrow. Finally. I'm out of practice at actually writing about politics, but I thought I'd have a go at it, this being a special occasion and all.

It's a bit late to really call this an "endorsements" post. Oregon's a 100% vote-by-mail state, and if you're the sort of person who cares about politics enough to wonder what people are saying out here in the far corners of blogospace, you've probably voted already. So instead, I'll merely say that this is how I voted. If you're still an undecided swing voter on any of the candidates or issues of the day, and somehow you managed to end up here, maybe you'll find something persuasive here. Or not.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a swing voter. I wonder what it must be like to have trouble choosing between D's and R's every two years. I wonder what it must be like to vote one way one election, and do the opposite the next time. I imagine that would make elections more interesting, and in a way I'm almost jealous. But as I said, I really am puzzled about what it must be like. I even get party-line Republicans more than I do genuinely undecided people.

As I've explained many times on this humble blog, I'm not much of a joiner, and I'm not much of a herd animal, and I recoil at the idea of just voting a straight ticket on all the candidates and ballot measures. As part of this, I play an occasional game of looking for "Republicans Who Don't Suck". I feel like I'm trying to be responsible that way, holding out the theoretical option of voting for someone if they met my (admittedly high) standards of non-suckage. Which is not to say that I necessarily would vote for such a hypothetical R; to be honest, I still probably wouldn't. But I do think we'd get a better crop of Democrats in office here in Oregon if they had to face an occasional, genuinely competitive race. As it is, every four years they put up another repulsive flat-earth wingnut in the governor's race, so we can nominate a useless doofus like Kulongoski and win, time after time. In general, I'd like to see the Democrat in the race win, but only by a few percentage points, to keep them from getting lazy and arrogant. And if a really bad Democrat came along, which is not as uncommon as I'd like, I'd like to have at least one other viable option on the ballot.

There was a time when I thought McCain might be one of these semi-mythical Republicans Who Don't Suck. Even as recently as the primary season, I remember telling someone that if he was the obvious choice if, for some reason, I was forced to vote in the Republican primary. I may have even said something about giving him a serious look if Hillary was the D on the ticket. Which was silly, of course; in the end I'm not really going to vote for someone who's wrong about just about everything, no matter how sincere and likeable they might seem to be. Whether it's about Iraq, or choice, or healthcare, McCain fails pretty much every litmus test out there. All the wishful thinking in the world won't make the R's nominate anyone remotely centrist-esque. Not now, and I imagine not anytime soon. And about the whole "maverick" thing -- his campaign this time has been your generic paint-by-numbers Republican campaign, riling up the base and spending 98% of the time bashing the other guy. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether his earlier public image was nothing but smoke and mirrors all along.

As for Obama, I admit I initially wasn't sold on the guy. Cynic that I am, I figured that every election cycle has an "insurgent" campaign or two, and they rarely go far, and pinning any hope on one is a recipe for disappointment. Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Mike Huckabee, the 2000 version of McCain... those are just off the top of my head. So I made what turned out to be a dumb call, and decided I was for Edwards. I liked what he was saying, although I wasn't sold on the guy himself. Which just goes to show that the nation is fortunate that I'm merely one voice among millions. Edwards was out (fortunately, as it turns out) by the time the Oregon primary rolled around, so I went with Obama. In the beginning it was strictly for anyone-but-Hillary reasons, but I warmed up to the guy after a while. It occurred to me that if he'd been on the ballot when I was 18 or 24 or so, I'd have been completely stoked about him. It's just that I've gotten more cynical since then, from getting burned one too many times. Even now, just hours from the polls closing, with Obama way ahead in the polls, I still can't quite believe he might pull this off. When I play with one of those clickable interactive electoral maps (the year's most horribly addictive videogame), my best guess is Obama 338, McCain an even 200. Which sounds promising, but my immediate reaction is to scale that back, and point out that 270 is the magic number, and anything beyond that is gravy. It's all about not getting one's hopes up too high.

As for state races, we've got an exceptionally boring set of contests this time around. I may be unusual in calling the Smith vs. Merkley contest "boring", but you know, there wasn't any way I was voting for Smith. Everyone says he's a really nice guy, and I don't doubt that. I'm sure he'd be great as a next-door neighbor, if you could afford to live next to him. On a strictly personal level, he probably is a Republican Who Doesn't Suck, but he's still a very conservative politician, so that's that, then.

We do have a semi-interesting state treasurer race, which pits Democrat (and recent ex-Republican) Ben Westlund against current Republican Allen Alley. Much of the print media's endorsed Alley. I think they're nostalgic for the days when we had moderate Republicans here, and they figure he might be one. I suspect they also think an R is the default choice for treasurer, since the job involves handling money. Which suggests to me they haven't thought it through too well; after the events of the last few months, I think we can summarily dismiss any idea that Republicans have any special talent at finance or can be trusted with our money.

Elsewhere on the ticket, my Congressman (David Wu) and my state Senator (Ginny Burdick) face only token opposition this year. I don't care for either of them, so I voted for the token opposition in each case. I've never cared for Wu, as I've explained in previous years' election posts, and his speech a while back about Iraq and "fake Klingons" was just freakin' embarrassing. He's yet another useless doofus who has a safe seat in what ought to be a competitive district, strictly because the R's -- when they nominate anyone at all -- generally nominate someone from the wacky "black helicopter" wing of the party. As for Burdick, two years ago she ran unsuccessfully for Portland City Council, with the backing of the local business community, with the goal of tearing down the city's new public campaign finance system. I still hold that against her. She's also the legislature's #1 advocate of strict gun control laws, which I disagree with -- and which are probably unconstitutional under the state constitution anyway. So that's two strikes, and I decided I didn't need a third. It's not that I'd actually prefer to have an R in either job, because I don't. But sometimes you just have to register a protest vote.

We've got a raft of ballot measures again this year, but the majority are the usual Sizemore/Mannix crap, and I'm not going to waste any time on them. The only two "interesting" ones for me are #56 and #65. Measure 56 would repeal the current double-majority rule for tax measures on the ballot. At present, if a tax measure is up for a vote, to win it needs to get a majority of the votes cast, and the turnout of registered voters must be at least 50%. The only exceptions to the voter turnout requirement are primary and general elections in even-numbered years, which generally pull in that many voters anyway. Measure 56 would expand this exemption to May & November elections in any year. Which sounds like a small tweak, but as a practical matter it's a nearly complete repeal. We'll be back to the old situation where there's one property tax levy up for a special election, and it wins narrowly with just 17% of registered voters bothering to vote. I'm sorry, I don't usually go for Republican tax-limitation ideas, but this strikes me as more of a basic good-government measure. Rather than doing away with it, I'd actually like to expand the double-majority rule to cover all ballot measures, not just tax levies. The state legislature can't do business without a quorum of members present. Everybody agrees it would be unfair to do otherwise. If the public's asked to pass any sort of law directly, I think there ought to be a similar "quorum" requirement. And besides, designing the measure so it looks like it's just a partial repeal is sneaky, and I'd be inclined to reject it on those grounds even if I agreed with its premise. So I voted NO on 56, but I expect it to pass anyway, since the political establishment, the media, pretty much everyone except the hardcore anti-tax crowd, have all come out in favor.

Measure 65 switches us to an "open primary" system, in which all D & R candidates are in the same pool in the primary election, and the top two go to a November runoff, regardless of party affiliation. So if the top two votegetters are both Democrats, there's no Republican on the ballot when the general election rolls around. The idea is that this would somehow reduce partisanship and polarization, and force all candidates to seek the political center. The measure's backed by a couple of former Oregon secretaries of state, one of whom was one of our last moderate Republicans to hold statewide office. Actually she was one of the last Republicans, period, to hold statewide office, and I gather she's nostalgic for the old days before the crazies took over the party. The days when the two parties were fairly similar, ideologically, which made bipartisanship that much easier. Proponents argue that the current closed primary system rewards hardline ideologues and encourages party-line polarization, and by changing the law we can push the voters into picking moderates instead. Two arguments against that: First, it's a poor idea to change election law because you don't like who the voters keep picking. Second, I'd argue that they've got their causes and effects all wrong. Voting patterns have changed because the voting public has changed, not because the election laws are picking the "wrong" winners. The voters here and across the country are more ideology-driven than they once were. When some hard-left or hard-right candidate gets the nod, it's because that's who at least a substantial chunk of the electorate wants. For good or ill, the ideological divide in this country is real, and changing the law to try to paper over it is an ill-conceived idea. It will satisfy nobody, and will reward candidates nobody's particularly wild about. Partisanship is not all bad, you know; remember how people used to complain that you can't tell the two parties apart? Haven't heard anybody say that for a long time, have you? So vote NO on 65.

Oh, and there's a trio of tax measures on the ballot. Portland Community College wants some cash for construction projects, the Zoo wants money for new exhibits, and the city's "Portland Children's Levy" wants money for a smorgasbord of Commissioner Saltzman's feel-good pet projects. I voted for the PCC measure, and NO on the other two. The Zoo's asking for money now because they have an adorable new baby elephant, which features prominently in all of their ads. The ads are odd, actually, going on and on about how substandard the facilities currently are. They're practically running negative ads about their own zoo in the hope of getting more money. That's weird, but the main problem is that I'm not convinced elephants belong in zoos. Wildlife sanctuaries, maybe, but not zoos. It's widely understood at this point that keeping elephants in such cramped, unnatural surroundings causes all sorts of health problems. The zoo isn't proposing to give the elephants a large chunk of acreage to roam around in, and even if they did, there's no room for that up in Washington Park. The situation's similar for many species of bears and big cats, which tend to go utterly insane in this kind of captivity. It pains me to say this. I've enjoyed going to the zoo for as long as I can remember. But at some point you have to accept that certain things just aren't humane, and there's no just way to make them humane within the context of a traditional zoo. When parents have to try to explain to their kids why the polar bear spends all day pacing around its enclosure, endlessly following the same route over and over again, that should be a sign that things are seriously awry. I could go on and on about this, but the bottom line is that I don't want to give them any more money if they're just going to continue their current practices with shiny new cages.

I also object in principle to the "Children's Levy", for a variety of reasons. By standard practice, social programs are the responsibility of the county and state governments, not cities. But somebody (i.e. Saltzman) figured the public could be manipulated/guilt-tripped into coughing up additional money "for the children". It's a bad way to fund programs even if they're desperately needed (which I'm not sold on either). Associating a program and its funding too closely with one politician is a bad practice too -- the program is, in effect, one particular guy benevolently handing out cash to "good causes". It smacks of old-school, East Coast machine politics, and I don't mean that as a compliment. Besides, the campaign signs for the levy are made to look like a kid made them with crayons, although it's pretty much a given that some top-flight graphic designer actually did the job and made a ridiculously large pile of money in the process. I'm sure this is true because I know Portland, and this is what always happens.

So anyway, there's other stuff on the ballot, but these are the interesting races this cycle. We're getting a very promising new attorney general too, but it's not much of a race. Kroger won the Democratic primary, and when nobody ran in the Republican primary, he ended up winning it as well due to write-in votes. We have a long tradition of asleep-at-the-wheel, do-nothing AG's, and he really looks like he'll change that. But in the meantime, it's not exactly a suspenseful race.

So that's about it for now. It looks like the polls will start closing in some eastern states at 3PM Pacific time, and I already have a bunch of political sites open in different Firefox tabs so I can sit there and hit refresh every few minutes, ok, seconds, and see how this goes. Maybe I'll do another post about the results tomorrow or so, if I decide I've got another political post in me.

Obama Sighting

A few photos of Sen. Obama, leaving the Benson Hotel on his way to today's campaign appearance in Portland.

Naturally this was the one day I didn't bring my good camera along. I think I'd make a really poor paparazzo.

A Series of Intarwebs

Apropos of nothing, I just discovered that the phrase "series of intarwebs" appears nowhere on the Series of Intarwebs, at least according to Google. That surprised me a little, so I figured I'd go ahead and address the problem.

Actually I shouldn't say "apropos of nothing", when it's clearly apropos of Ted Stevens . I know I don't talk politics a lot here anymore, but this thing is comedy gold.

Speaking of comedy gold, the David Vitter story sure disappeared quickly. Call me a cynic, but that makes me wonder just who else is on the infamous madam's list. Newspaper editors? Publishers? TV news execs, maybe? Hmmmmm...

Ding, Dong, Falwell's dead

That's one less fundie nutjob out there. Good riddance.

I don't want to hear any of the usual "A Nation United in Mourning" crap from the media about today's blessed event. So here are some fun Falwell links, just so we're all crystal clear on what kind of person he was:

• TheocracyWatch mentions Falwell's unusual views on nuclear war in a piece on Dispensationalism
  
  
• A selection of jawdropping Falwell quotes
  
  
• One Peoples Project: JERRY FALWELL (DECEASED). [Seems they've already updated their piece.] Covers some of Falwell's rather, uh, unreconstructed racial opinions, among other things.
  
  
• HufPo on his 2006 comments comparing Hillary Clinton to Lucifer. I mean, I'm not Hillary fan myself, but really. Fundies say the darndest things.
  
  
• NYT, from 1985: " Falwell Appearance Canceled Over South Africa Remarks".
  
  
• Wash. Post, right after 9/11: "God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says". You know, because of the ACLU, feminists, gays, etc. The wingnuts always strut around lecturing us about how they're so much more patriotic than everyone else, and then they turn around and say stuff like this. I don't get it.
  

There's a GOP presidential debate this evening, and the candidates are scrambling over each other to heap praise on Falwell. No big surprise there. And Pat Robertson offers his public condolences as well. At least we've still got ol' Pat to kick around.

Oh, and here's a rich one, a post whining that "Liberal Blogs Spew Hate on Jerry Falwell Death". To which I can only say, hell yeah. What goes around, comes around, after all.

Meanwhile, here among the living, the US Attorney thing gets even uglier. Everyone keeps saying Gonzo's job is doomed, for real this time, definitely, but the Glorious Leader continues to stand by him, just like he's standing by Wolfie. At this point it seems every single personnel issue is the Alamo all over again, so far as the White House is concerned. And like I said before, that's fine with me. I'd rather they stayed around in their current jobs, scorned by all and sundry. I'd like to see Dubya and the R's in Congress keep going to the mat to defend these clowns, further tarnishing their own reputations in the process. It pains me to say this, but a USDOJ that's effectively paralyzed until 2009 is the best outcome we can reasonably hope for so long as Bush rules the roost. It's not a good outcome, by any means, but all the other possibilities are even worse. A new AG with a functioning staff would mean a fresh assault on basic civil liberties, whereas Gonzo & Co. aren't in a position to do much more in that direction right now.

Updated: A short bit ago, I got an abusive comment from some anonymous visitor, calling me all sorts of names because I won't pretend Falwell's demise is some kind of horrible national tragedy. Sure, I could say all that stuff purely for the sake of politeness. I could be all sanctimonious and say I'm taking the high road, and pretend to mourn the death of someone who would've welcomed mine. But I've always believed honesty is the best policy. We're all better off without the guy. If that offends you, tough. Send flowers to the funeral if it makes you feel any better.

(And in case you're wondering, yes, I do delete personally abusive comments. Them's always been the house rules around these parts. If you can't handle that, if you think I'm being unfair somehow, feel free to go get your own blog and swear at me and yell and scream all you want over there, for all I care. Getting a blog is incredibly easy these days. It's so easy even a fundie can do it.)

political odds & ends

• So according to Newsweek 28% of people still think Dubya's doing a heckuva job. Even now. Yikes. On the other hand, 39% of voters surveyed want him impeached. I'm not a big fan of purely symbolic actions, myself, but I still have to take that as an encouraging sign.
  
  Bush's numbers were hanging on in the low 30's for quite a while, so there must've been a recent something that was the last straw for another 3-4% of the population. That actually puzzles me quite a bit. They stood by the guy after Katrina, after four years of Mission Accomplished, after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and wiretaps, and cronies galore, and now they've come to the last straw. I really thought the remaining 30-some percent were all bitter-enders, diehard flat-earthers who will forever worship the ground Bush walks on, no matter what. I really figured the last clue train had left the station, but it looks like a few folks caught the redeye. Well, welcome aboard. Better late than never, I guess.
  
  The really fun bit about the polls is that Bush is still overwhelmingly popular among registered Republicans. It's just that there are far fewer registered Republicans than there once were. People who don't buy the party line are walking away from the party entirely, which may mean we're seeing a longer-term shift in allegiances. This also raises the odds that the remaining faithful will nominate a complete raving whackjob next year, and they'll be absolutely astonished when the rest of the country doesn't want to drink the Kool-Aid.
  
  
• The Wolfie circus continues to entertain. It's fun to watch Bush, Cheney, and friends expending all that political capital on behalf of various bungling cronies. Everything's the Alamo with those guys anymore. All apparatchiks must be defended to the last, no matter how crooked or incompetent they are, because to do otherwise is a sign of weakness, the terrorists win, etc.
  
  In this case, it appears they might manage to keep Wolfie employed through January 2009, albeit to the great detriment of the World Bank as a whole. Since I'm not a big fan of the World Bank and IMF, this would actually be a positive outcome, as satisfying as it might be to see Wolfie get his walking papers.
  
  
• The US media coverage of the French presidential election couldn't have been more predictable. Time's take: "A 'Pro-American' French President?". Seems like we're always being encouraged to root for far-right candidates in other countries' elections, on the vague grounds that they're friendly and "pro-American". Actually we're even told to root for dictators on those grounds (i.e. Musharraf). Do we really have no other standards for evaluating world leaders? Are we really so insecure and needy that the praise we get from the world's petty autocrats and assorted wingnuts really means something to us? That's.... awful.
  
  
• Someone refresh my memory, has political analysis in this country always been this boneheaded? Apparently the French election result proves that Hillary's doomed too, just like Segolene Royal. You know, because both candidates are female.
  
  This is what passes for serious debate these days. Sure, it makes no logical sense whatsoever, and nobody's even trying to locate supporting evidence for it. But it's an extremely simple notion, easily grasped by extremely simple people, which makes it great fodder for the screaming-head cable shows.
  
  
• Closer to home, the political saga in Gold Hill, OR continues. Chaotic council meetings, a disputed recall election that might end in a tie, a completely botched election a few years back, and on, and on. You just can't make this stuff up.
  
  

The Only Voter's Guide You'll Need, Possibly

If you live in Portland, and don't live under a rock, you already know there's a special election coming up. You've read the election coverage in the local papers. You've gotten fliers in the mail. You might've gotten a recorded call or two at home. Chances are you're wondering what all the big fuss is about. We've got four really geeky city charter amendments on the table, plus a handful of school district and other elections to decide on. Everyone else has tried to tell you how to vote, so now it's my turn, I suppose.

To begin with, I've never been a big fan of deciding substantive issues through special elections. Special elections should be reserved for emergencies: Filling vacancies in office, short term stopgap funding measures, that sort of thing. Voter turnout is always vastly lower than in a normal primary or general election, and everyone knows it. So when measures that would make significant changes to the law appear at a special election, it creates an impression -- rightly or wrongly -- that someone's trying to sneak something past the voters. Even if it's done with the purest and noblest of motives, submitting something to a vote when you can be fairly certain less than a quarter of voters will participate is simply undemocratic. A few years ago the state adopted the so-called "double majority" rule, so that tax measures need a majority of votes and at least 50% voter turnout to pass. I realize not everyone likes the double majority rule, but I'm starting to think we ought to do the same for all ballot measures. That would discourage situations like the present one, where major changes to how the city functions could be enacted by a tiny minority of the city's voters.

Since we don't have any sort of rule like that at present, we may as well get to the ballot measures. Let's start off with the one everyone cares about, Measure 26-91. This is the measure that would move the city from the current city commision model to a strong mayor + city council model similar to what's used in most other large cities. The actual text of it and the other proposed charter changes don't appear in the official Voter's Pamphlet -- and don't get me started about that -- but the city's website has 'em in their full glory, and 26-91 is an 80 page, 500k PDF file. But what it does is pretty simple: The mayor would be in charge of all city bureaus, and city council members would have a purely legislative role in the future.

I voted no, and you should too. The most common argument against the measure is that the mayor hasn't made a compelling case for why we ought to change things around. Perhaps if Mayor Potter had spent the last couple of years chafing at the bit, sharing his frustration about all the great things he'd love to do for the city if only he had the power, the measure might have a better chance of passing. But instead we've had a couple of years of that touchy-feely "visionPDX Process" of his, and even now I still don't understand what the heck that was all about. I can't think of a single thing he's tried and failed to do because of commission-style government. If the current governmental arrangement was obviously unwieldy and nonfunctional and everyone knew it, we'd certainly vote for change. Most likely we'd have done so years ago. But as unusual as our current arrangement is, it generally works. It works about as well as any type of city government works, anyway.

I'm actually a fan of the commission form of government. Commissioners are expected to shoulder part of the job of running the city, instead of sitting on the sidelines and carping about the mayor, like you see in most other large cities. It's the closest thing you'll see in this country to a parliamentary system (though it's not precisely the same thing). If I absolutely had to change something, I might add a few more council seats and make some elected by district instead of at-large. But that's about all I'd do.

The commission model would be an unworkable disaster in most cities, and I suspect it suits us as well as it does for local cultural reasons. It's fair to say the strong mayor + council model is adversarial by design, and we don't do adversarial very well here in the Northwest. People are too thin-skinned, and take everything personally, and you end up with political gridlock. Look at what's happened with the Multnomah County Commission in recent years, and with earlier versions of the Metro regional government. Strong executives are polarizing, and behavior that other cities would hail as signs of a take-charge leader will just get you called a bully here. For good or ill, that's just the way it is.

A disappointing thing about the debate over 26-91 is that most of the "official" reasons given both for and against the measure are just terminally silly. You're hearing them because they played well with focus groups, and they hope you'll buy 'em, not because anyone sincerely believes them. On the "con" side, a recent mailing warned of the dangers of concentrating too much power in one person, with a photo of Dubya to illustrate the point. C'mon, be serious here. Nobody seriously thinks Tom Potter is a Bush clone, do they? Nobody honestly believes that if you give him more mayoral powers, he'll start in with the wiretapping and waterboarding, right? Right? Puhleeeze. And the specter of a huge changeover cost to move to the new system... well, while I suppose that's possible, that's certainly not why the measure's opponents are against it. And on the "pro" side, they rattle off an array of bad business decisions by various city bureaus (the tram, the water billing software fiasco, etc.), but their argument that these foulups couldn't occur under the strong mayor model is unconvincing. And in truth they don't make an honest effort to connect the dots. It's just: "Remember the tram? You're still angry about the tram, right? Us too, and here's this ballot measure you can vote for." They're hoping you don't notice that the two things are unrelated, so they just do a lot of handwaving. That's most of what their campaign is, handwaving, and a flood of soothing, happy weasel words: "streamline", "efficiency", "modernize", and the like. They're not so big on talking about specifics. They're not so big on talking about anything in particular, come to think of it. But those platitudes sure are soothing. Ok, for most people they're soothing. When I hear politicians using those words, it sets off all kinds of alarm bells. Call me a cynic if you like.

So why the big furor about the measure? It's a measure only a PoliSci geek could love, and reasonable people can disagree on its merits. Let's be honest here, it's what it always is: There's money, power, and influence to be gained by some, and lost by others, and the battle lines are drawn accordingly.

Oh, and if the mayor really truly wants all city bureaus under his control, he can already do that. Let's not forget that part. One of the perks of being mayor in Portland is that you get to dole out, or snatch away, city bureaus as you please. If you don't like the job Commissioner X is doing with the Parks bureau, you just take it away and give it to someone else, or keep it for yourself if you want to. Mayor Potter actually did that for several months after he was elected, before finally doling them out to the rest of the city council. If he wanted them back, he could take them all back at any time, with no ballot measure required.


Measure 26-89 is probably going to pass regardless of anything I say, but hear me out. The measure requires the city to set up a charter review committee at least once every ten years, and this citizen committee would have the power to refer proposed charter changes directly to the voters. This would encourage unnecessary tinkering for the sake of tinkering, and tinkering by an unelected body, no less. If the seats are filled the same way we fill other unelected committee jobs, say, the PDC, the Port of Portland, TriMet, and so forth, this "citizen" committee will inevitably be stocked with political cronies and well-connected insiders, people with ulterior motives. Some of the same people who really want 26-91 to pass would likely end up on the committee, so we'll be voting on a slightly tweaked and test-marketed version two years from now, and when that fails, it'll come back again a few more years down the road. If something is genuinely broken in the city charter, we already have multiple ways to fix it. The commissioners can refer changes to the voters themselves, as they did with this measure, or it can be done by initiative petition. And if a proposed charter amendment can't attract enough signatures, or command a majority of the council, if the only way it can make the ballot is via the proposed charter review committee, it probably doesn't belong on the ballot at all. Vote no.


Measure 26-90 is billed as a housekeeping measure to modernize and streamline the city's employment policies, uncontroversial stuff nobody could possibly disagree with, or so they say. Right now the city charter goes into mind-numbing detail about the city's civil service procedures, and the measure would move the details into a regular city ordinance instead. Sounds nice, right? And once you realize that the measure weakens current civil service protections, it still sounds nice, right? Everyone's heard about those lazy do-nothing government employees who are impossible to fire because of those damn civil service laws. And I'll grant you there can be a grain of truth to that. I've been to the DMV and the post office recently. But let's not forget, the reason this civil service stuff was invented in the first place was to cut down on patronage and cronyism. If you look at US politics in the 19th century, say, the Grant administration, you'll see just how bad things were back before government employees had a layer of insulation between themselves and whatever politicians were in power at the moment. Or you could look at, oh, the last seven years or so. The absence of civil service protections doesn't get you efficient services at a reasonable price, it gets you Brownie doing a heckuva job. We've already seen how bad that can be, and 26-90 goes in the wrong direction. Probably not in quite so dramatic a fashion, I mean, the world's not going to end if 26-90 passes, but it's still the wrong measure at the wrong time. So vote no.


You might imagine that I'm voting a straight 'No' ticket on all the charter measures, but you'd be wrong. Measure 26-92 reins in the Portland Development Commission somewhat, and since it's hard to get more unpopular than the PDC in this town, the measure's bound to pass. I'm voting yes, just like everyone else is. This is the only measure of the four that actualy fixes something that's universally seen as Broken. So let's skip past the merits of the measure, and go straight to managing expectations. The thing not to expect from the measure is an end to the cozy relationship between the city and well-connected developers. The precise cast of characters doing lunch at Bluehour will change a bit, but that's about all. But at least some of 'em will be people you can vote against, unlike the present state of affairs.


My ballot also has a couple of Portland Public Schools races, and a couple of Multnomah ESD races. But I'm not going to make any endorsements of my own on these races; I don't have kids, I don't really like kids very much, and quite honestly I just don't pay that close attention to the issues. Yes, I realize it's important, and I realize children are our future, the little bastards. But seriously, I'm anything but a primary education wonk and it would be irresponsible for me to try to tell you how to vote. Pick your favorite newspaper and vote how it tells you to vote, or read the Voter's Pamphlet and make up your own mind, or flip a coin if all else fails. One thing to bear in mind here is that the PPS races were supposed to be a referendum on the controversial new superintendent, and the media endorsements reflect that. But she just quit to go work for Bill Gates instead. So instead you'll probably want to vote for whoever you think will be good at hiring a new superintendent. Who that might be is anyone's guess.


So there you have it. I've never been very good at predicting what the voters will do, but I'd guess that 26-91 will fail, and the others will pass, giving my "endorsements" a 50% success rate. That would be a lot better than I usually manage, for whatever that's worth. So we'll see how this all turns out.

for some, it's a holiday...

I just ran across this bit of graffiti on the seawall in Watefront Park, and it seemed appropriate somehow.

Besides, that Bogdanski guy already has a post about today's, um, herbal holiday. He's perhaps the only guy in town who's even more tragically unhip than I am (although he might beg to differ), so I simply couldn't let today pass without remarking on it. I don't really have anything useful or interesting to contribute on the topic, but that's never stopped me before. Hey, that's blogging for ya.

The Mercury mentioned the latest initiative a couple of weeks ago. The last time I checked Jack and the Merc were still feuding over something or other, so maybe somebody else clued him in about it. Or, like, not. Whatever, dude.

a tragedy of the commons, pdx style

A few photos from Jamison Square -- or at least that's what it's called for now. If the city gets its way, the name could change as soon as the city locates a well-heeled corporate sponsor. Seriously.

A bit of background: Last September, I wrote about the most recent flareup of the parks department's irrational hatred of Mt. Tabor Park. They wanted to hand over another chunk of the park to the right-wing religious school next door -- blechh -- but backed down due to public outrage.



...Or they seemed to have backed down. If this Bojack piece from last Friday is to be believed, they're back at it once again. If true, they've still got their hearts set on selling that land on Mt. Tabor, and now the park system's looking at corporate sponsorships and naming rights, too. This way, all the city's crown jewels get privatized, some symbolically, and others for real.

You'll also want to read these two posts at Amanda Fritz's blog about the situation. She's been attending public meetings -- quite poorly attended ones -- trying to give input and mitigate the damage. On one hand I feel kind of bad about sitting back and criticizing while others are participating, but I'm also not real big on involving myself in a process when I disagree with the fundamental premise of that process. I'm not interested in mitigation. I'm interested in them abandoning the idea entirely, period.



You wouldn't expect the local parks department to be a hotbed of secret backroom deals and such, but it seems that's what we've got these days. You really don't want your parks department run by people whose eyes light up when they realize they're sitting on a big pile of prime real estate, and see their job as finding ways to "monetize" this asset. I mean, I don't know for a fact that's their real motive. I don't know for a fact precisely what they're up to, but I know it doesn't smell right.

Sure, renaming a park after some big corporation isn't as bad as actually selling the land off. You can try to be pragmatic about it and say that a little symbolism is no big deal when there's cash to be had. And sure, the parks department has complained for years, probably decades, about chronic budgetary problems, deferred maintenance, and all that, basically advertising themselves as an easy mark for the corporate-logos-everywhere crowd. Here's the current draft naming/renaming policy, and sponsorship policy, along with a related doc on signage & memorials at Mt. Tabor.



The last bit is important, unfortunately. There's a current proposal to erect a monument in the park to honor a recently deceased local World War I veteran. The proposal seems well-intentioned, although there's no shortage of local war memorials already. Unfortunately I think the proposal's being used as a Trojan horse to get the other changes through. If you have to tweak city policy anyway to make the monument possible, why not change a few more words here and there, while you're at it? You know, just to be sure the city's policy on creating monuments, naming things, accepting sponsorships, etc., is consistent and all.

And next thing you know, your neighborhood park has a huge Dasani logo at each entrance, and if they catch you drinking Aquafina there, they taser the snot out of you. Ok, maybe they don't taser you, but they'll probably confiscate it, for violating the terms of their sponsorship agreement. And suddenly the public commons are no longer really public, or held in common. Instead what you've got is a giant billboard, and taxpayers still have to foot the bill to cut the grass.

There's also a practical problem with the proposal: The parks that are likely to attract sponsorships are the prominent ones that already attract the lion's share of the parks budget. Jamison Square is absolutely guaranteed to attract a sponsor, so it'd be named after some high-end national retailer, ad agency, or web design outfit. More obscure locales like, say, Kelly Butte will no doubt remain unsponsored. In an ideal world, sponsorships of the "crown jewels" would free up taxpayer cash to be spent elsewhere, but I just don't see that happening.

I'm not saying it's impossible to have a beneficial "sponsorship" arrangement. It's just that when it's done right, it's not very lucrative for the city. Consider Portland's Peace Memorial Park, near the east end of the Steel Bridge, not far from Memorial Coliseum:



(More (and better) photos here.)

A local peace group adopted a chunk of neglected PDOT land and they built a large peace symbol there (now located in the big circle in the middle of this Google map), and the park's located so you get a nice vista of the peace symbol with downtown in the background. Which is great, IMHO. The city couldn't have done this on its own, but it's always willing to accept volunteer labor. I mean, I'm sure it didn't hurt that the peace symbol coincides with the city's (and my) ideological biases; if some creepy suburban megachurch had wanted to build a huge gold equestrian statue of Dubya in Crusader garb, putting unbelievers to the sword, I'm sure they'd have gotten a chillier reception. Not overtly, because that's not the Portland way, but suddenly there'd have been all sorts of complicated forms to complete, and fees to pay, and public hearings to attend, and on, and on. The iron law of bureaucracy is that a bureaucracy can outwait anyone, yes, even a church. Sooner or later, the fundies would give up and build their statue out in Clackamas somewhere, instead.

The problem with the Peace Memorial Park, and peace in general, is that there's no money in it. I would personally award the Nobel Peace Prize (if the King of Sweden lets me) to whoever figures how to make money by not killing people.... But I digress. The main point here is that the sponsorship is not a one-time infusion of cash in exchange for naming+billboard rights, it's an ongoing commitment of volunteer labor to maintain a piece of land the city had completely forgotten about. And there isn't even a sign there to tell you who sponsored the place, or why they did it, or where their nearest store is. If we're really going to do park sponsorships, that's how it ought to work.

Notes from the flight forward...

So apparently our Glorious Leader wants to set the whole Mideast on fire now. More fresh bodies for the meat grinder in Iraq, plus exciting new wars in Iran and Syria, and no doubt that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even with a Democratic congress, it's looking increasingly like there's nothing anyone can do to rein the guy in.
Naturally, nobody in the administration's giving any straight answers on what they intend to do about Iran. They make all sorts of threatening noises day in and day out, but we still get the "no definite plans to attack" charade, just like we did in the buildup to Iraq. That little stunt avoids having any public policy debate about what to do. They already know what they want to do, and they don't want the other 300 million of us to get a word in edgewise about it. And if past history is any guide, there probably is no detailed plan hidden deep in a Pentagon vault somewhere. The plan will just be to roll the dice again and assume a miracle will happen this time.

The title refers to a classic Billmon post from last April, which seems more prescient with each passing day:

What we are witnessing (through rips in the curtain of official secrecy) may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne, the "flight forward." This refers to ta situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive (or, as the White House propaganda department might put it: "bold") A familar analogy is the gambler in Vegas, who tries to get out of a hole by doubling down on each successive bet.

Some people take comfort in W's recent statement taking responsibility for mistakes in Iraq. But even that statement is phrased in a very curious way. What he said, essentially, is that he takes responsibility to the degree that a CEO is responsible for any (purely hypothetical) failings by his underlings. He didn't admit to having personally screwed anything up. That's something we'll never hear from him. I imagine getting him to say the limp words he uttered was like pulling teeth, and he only agreed to it strictly as a PR move, not an actual change of heart on his part. If he'd had a change of heart, or a eureka moment, or any such thing, the response would not be to do even more of what we've been doing without success for a few years now.

Apart from the immediate situation, it's never a good idea when national policies are so closely intertwined with the personal psychological needs of the guy in charge. He won't believe he can make mistakes, and he won't change course, and we all have to pay the price. He's been reading all those history books lately, to the expected round of cheap shots about him reading books for once, but taking cheap shots at the guy just obscures the alarming "lessons" he says he's learning. He knows he's right, he's absolutely sure he's right, he's surrounded himself with toadies and cronies who praise him constantly and tell him he's always right, and now he's got what in his mind is "historical proof" that everyone will realize he was right in a century or two. Therefore, he's free to ignore public opinion, expert opinion (the Pentagon included), world opinion, etc., since he's totally sure that everyone will laugh at all those opinions someday. There's just not going to be any communication into the bubble at this point. He's all defense mechanism, all the time, and nothing gets through.

Reasonable people can disagree, of course, on whether Iran is really the global threat Cheney and friends say it is. I very much doubt that, but even if I was totally convinced, at this point I wouldn't put any faith in the current administration dealing with that threat successfully. They botch everything they touch. If you're a hawk, you probably aren't interested in my advice, but my advice is to find a competent successor for the current guy, and work to get him or her elected in 2008. And please, just put your remaining foreign policy goals on hold until after Inauguration Day. Don't ask anything more of the current bozos, and don't jump on the bandwagon if they're itching to start something new. They've done more than enough damage already.

post-election edition

Well, obviously the big news is that my "endorsees" did a lot better than they did in the May primary, where I didn't pick a single freakin' winner. So clearly the general public learned their lesson and heeded my advice this time. I'm sure that must be it.

Ok, let me qualify that. Three of my high-profile picks were obvious protest votes. I came out against Ted, and David Wu, and Leslie Roberts, even though I was sure all three were a lock to win. If either Ted or Wu had been within a couple percentage points of their Republican opponents in the last polls, I would have at least considered voting for 'em, even though I'm no fan of either guy, just to keep the Rethuglicans from winning. So being able to vote for third-party candidates this year was an enjoyable luxury. And the Leslie Roberts thing, well, a write-in candidacy is always an uphill battle. Charles Henderson grabbing a quarter of the vote in a write-in campaign is huge, almost unheard-of in this state. With any luck, Roberts will get the voters' message and approach the job with at least a vestigial amount of humility, compassion, and professionalism. You're a judge of the Oregon Circuit Court, 4th District, position #37. You aren't Queen of the Universe. Deal.

I didn't mention my local state legislative race in my "endorsements" post, since the R's didn't even bother to nominate anyone this time around. Geez. I'm not actually going to vote Republican in any conceivable situation, but I'd at least like to have them on the ballot. If there aren't any wild-eyed wingnuts to vote against, it takes a lot of the fun out of voting. So anyway, my state rep won. And the D's won the House back. So hopefully they can demonstrate they're a bunch of responsible adults, and we haven't just traded one gang of crazed ideological nutjobs for another.

The voters took my advice most of the time on this year's crop of ballot measures, at any rate. Measure 42, the insurance & credit score measure, didn't pass. It's kind of too bad, but I'm not exactly surprised. The insurance industry ran an effective "no" campaign, and the measure probably lost 10-15% of the electorate just because Bill Sizemore was behind it. Still, a decent measure failing is less bad than a bad measure passing, and no bad measures passed this time around. The thing I'm really confused about is Measure 46. Measures 46 and 47 were a conjoined-twin pair of proposals: 47 was a campaign finance law, and 46 was a constitutional amendment to make campaign finance laws possible in this state. 47 passed, but 46 didn't. WTF?! There's some debate about whether some of the provisions in 47 can take effect without 46 in place, but it's still a peculiar result. Isaac Laquedem, who endorsed 46 and said no to 47, wonders whether the voters didn't understand the two measures. I, too, am surprised that at least 14% of the electorate voted in such a seemingly pathological way. I can think of at least three explanations:
1. The voters are much more sophisticated than they get credit for, and they read M. 47 carefully and decided they wanted only those reforms within it which didn't require a constitutional amendment. That would be suggesting that 50+% of the voters are more sophisticated than I am, since I didn't do that. So I firmly reject that suggestion.
2. The voters want campaign finance reform in the abstract, but not this particular reform, so by deliberately voting yes on 47 and no on 46 they were trying to cast a purely symbolic vote in favor of the general notion of reform, just to "send a message". I doubt this because this kind of behavior is usually media-driven, and I haven't seen or heard of a single media outlet anywhere statewide encouraging people to vote this way.
3. The voters are smoking crack. Lots and lots of crack. And meth, too. And sniffing glue. And slamming down Everclear jello shots, with OxyContin chasers. And maybe licking a toad or two, while they're at it. Plus they're just plain stupid.

I'm leaning toward explanation #3, but hey, I've always been a cynic.

In the ultra-obscure West Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District races, I did better than I thought. I figured that for anything as low-profile as this, a vote for anyone other than the incumbent would be the longest of longshots. But in the sole contested race, the challenger (who I endorsed) won. So I really hope Mr. Goode wasn't the good-ol-boy-network candidate, challenging an "outsider" incumbent. There was really just no way at all to find that out one way or the other. The district's "permanent rate limit" measure passed, although I came out against it. I'm not heartbroken about that, and anyway I figured that anything with the word "conservation" in the name was a guaranteed winner in this neck of the woods. The good ol' boys who got re-elected will probably waste the money on pet projects, or just swipe it, or whatever, but really it isn't a lot of money, all things considered. So no biggie, I guess. It'd take the entire annual budget of 60+ soil-n-water districts to pay for a single aerial tram, to put things in perspective.

In mildly related news, the tram is finally up and running, kinda sorta. So I expect to have pics and/or video of the new beastie here in the near future, when I get around to it.

Rumsfeld Cuts & Runs!

So Rumsfeld's resigned already. That was awfully fast. In a way I'm kind of disappointed. For the last six years Rummy and Dick and George and friends swaggered around like they owned the world and everyone on it, but take away their rubber-stamp Congress and they fold up like a house of cards. That's just sad. If only we'd known this was all it would take to bring the crazies to heel, we'd have done it years ago. Damn.

At least Rummy's guaranteed to get himself a nice, shiny "Medal of Freedom" for his efforts, as a sort of consolation prize. Kind of like what they did with George Tenet, come to think of it. (Unless Rummy gets pissed off about being hung out to dry like this, and writes a lurid tell-all book. Sure, sure, that would never happen in real life, but it's fun to think about.)

All of this is not to say I expect the next two years to be a kinder, gentler era of bipartisanship. I think we can safely ignore all the morning-after happy talk we're hearing today. With Democrats running the show in the House, and maybe the Senate, I imagine Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman will have plenty of stuff to distort and lie about to rile up the wingnuts for '08. I haven't seen a full accounting of the seats the R's lost and where the former occupants fell on the ideological spectrum, but I read somewhere that many of the seats they lost in the northeast were formerly held by "moderate" Republicans. So the hardliners will probably dominate the House Republican caucus even more than they did before, although that fact won't matter as much as it once did.

I also don't expect any serious policy changes in Iraq. Short of cutting off money for the war (a drastic step I don't expect to see), Congress doesn't have a lot of options in the foreign policy area. Even if they did, the Decider's made it very clear he believes he has the inherent, absolute right to take the country to war with anyone, anytime, anywhere, and torture or kill anyone he pleases whenever the mood strikes him, without having to so much as ask anyone's opinion. I don't see that changing. George doesn't say "stay the course" in public anymore, but I expect that's what he'll do, or try to do. And if it ends up in the courts, I don't see the Supremes lining up against him, not with Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito on the bench.

Since he's still basically got a rubber-stamp Supreme Court, I'd be surprised if the Bushies aren't at least daydreaming about how to abuse a certain obscure, never-used provision in Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers: he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

All you'd need to do is engineer a pro-forma adjournment "dispute" between the two houses in the outgoing lame-duck Congress, and have George ride in on his white horse to save the day, adjourning both houses until, for example, Inauguration Day, 2009, or simply "until further notice". Then all you'd have to do is convince five Supremes that the plain wording of this passage doesn't explicitly prohibit that long of an adjournment, and the Decider has clear sailing for the rest of his term in office, with no pesky subpoenas to answer or investigations to stonewall. Sure, the public probably wouldn't take kindly to this, but the next election isn't for another two years, surely they'll get used to the new state of affairs sooner or later. If worse comes to worse, you can always blame the whole thing on 9/11.

In any case, I'm just happy we've gotten through another election without (so far) seeing any mention of the accursed name "Boies". The Virginia senate still isn't settled, so we're not completely out of the woods yet. But I've got my fingers crossed.

Unexposed

The famous "Expose Yourself to Art" statue is gone! This lumpy square of asphalt is all that remains where Kvinneakt (that's her official name) once stood. They're going to tear up the transit mall for MAX construction next year, so it was time for her to go.

On the way home from work yesterday I saw the statue swaddled in a protective wrapper, sort of a bubblewrap burqa. I thought it'd make a good picture and resolved to come back today, but she was already gone. The city can move remarkably fast when it wants to.

I don't know where the statue's going from here. The late, lamented Soaring Stones outside Pioneer Place were handed back to the sculptor, and word is they'll likely end up in Seattle. Call me a cynic, but I have a funny feeling the lovely Ms. K. will put down roots in the Pearl, or maybe South Waterfront, or some other official gentrification zone; or maybe she'll end up in the private collection of a wealthy campaign contributor, or she'll just get lost in the warehouse, never to be seen again. It just stands to reason, the way things usually work out these days.

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Turns out I had a picture of one of the Soaring Stones lying around, and here it is.
("Soaring Stones" would be a good name for a band, btw.)

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Updated 12/27/07: If you look closely at the Soaring Stones photo, you'll see a couple of the transit mall's groovy old 70's bus shelters. Those are gone now too, and like the Soaring Stones, they're not coming back.

Also, this humble post has gotten linkage from Portland Public Art. Yay!

Election Edition

One of the great things about having a blog is that you get to endorse people when there's an election, whereas the unwashed non-blogging masses can't. It doesn't seem very fair, but there you have it. So without further ado, here's who you're supposed to vote for, if you live in Oregon, and Multnomah County in particular.

On the top of the ballot this year we have the Governor's race, and the 1st Congressional District, and I regret to say I couldn't bring myself to vote for the Democratic incumbent in either race. I am, generally speaking, a loyal Democrat, but Gov. Kulongoski is a hopeless do-nothing bozo, and I can't stand David Wu. There's a point where even throwing your vote away is preferable to voting for the "Brand D" empty suit. If either guy loses by exactly one vote, I'll apologize and grovel and all that. Otherwise, I'm voting my conscience, and you can't reasonably ask me not to do that. Joe Keating is the Pacific Green candidate for governor, and I'm voting for him instead of Kulongoski. And in the race for Congress, I'm voting for the Libertarian candidate, Drake Davis, who strikes me as the most acceptable non-Wu candidate, even though Wu's basically a shoo-in this time around. I don't usually vote for the sort of Libertarian who gets on the ballot in this state, but he appears to be the real deal, a Libertarian who's concerned about civil liberties, not just tax cuts. If you're not in the habit of voting for third party candidates, by all means vote for the incumbents. They're useless, but they aren't terrible. Vote for anyone except the Republican in each race, basically.

There's also an open seat on the state Supreme Court. On paper, judicial races are nonpartisan, but everyone knows Virginia Linder is the (moderate) Democrat, and Jack Roberts is the (moderate) Republican. So vote for the Democrat. I don't think Jack Roberts is the Bible-thumpin', wiretappin', waterboardin' kind of Republican, but I'm not taking that chance in a Supreme Court race. One of the great things about this state is that years ago our Supreme Court decided that the state constitution's Bill of Rights confers additional civil liberties on top of those you get from the US Constitution. Since our basic liberties are rapidly eroding on the federal level, our state constitution may soon be the only document that still genuinely means what it says. So Supreme Court races matter now more than ever, is what I'm trying to say here.

The easiest race to call this year was the judicial race for Circuit Court, 4th District, Position 37, where the infamous Leslie Roberts gamed the system so that she's appearing "unopposed" on the ballot. You know it's an extraordinary situation when all the local print media outlets have endorsed a write-in candidate. Take their advice for once, and write in Charles Henderson.

The hardest race to call is another judicial race: 4th District, Position 28, in which there are no less than 9 candidates on the ballot. This race is so hard to call that I haven't actually picked anyone yet. I'll post an update later if/when I make up my mind.

Oh, and in Position 31, vote for Cheryl Albrecht. It's a race between someone with judicial experience (Albrecht) and someone who's been a prosecutor all this time (Kathleen Payne). I tend to look unfavorably on judical candidates who've spent their entire careers handling criminal cases, prosecution or defense. I'm sure it's useful and perhaps even noble work, but I'm not convinced either background makes for a good, impartial judge.

Ok, so now to the obscure special district races. I used to have to vote in a lot more of these when I lived out in unincorporated Washington County, where parks, water, emergency services, and all sorts of other things were handled by single-purpose special districts. Now, to my knowledge, there's just one, the West Multnomah County Soil & Water Conservation District. I wouldn't even have mentioned it, except that I just ran across this item at Bojack, concerning sneaky underhanded doings on the district board. There are four seats up for election. One is contested, two have incumbents running unopposed, and one has nobody running. Apparently under state law only people who own at least 10 acres of farmland in a given zone are eligible to run in that zone. (Is that even constitutional?) Zone 5 was recently redrawn so that nobody is eligible to run for the seat, so that after the election the rest of the board can simply appoint a crony to the job. This sounds like something you'd see in rural freakin' podunk Louisiana, not here in clean-hands process-geek Oregon. So I'm not voting for any of the incumbents, and I'm also not voting for their measure 26-82, the so-called "Permanent Rate Limit", which is actually a weasel-worded property tax increase. Right now the district has no tax base at all, and the measure would give them a small revenue stream of around $1m per year. That's not a lot of money, and the district does good things (at least on paper), so I was all set to vote for it, but I don't trust these people. Throw the bastards out, and then they can ask me for money. Or even better, get rid of this district and its East Multnomah counterpart on the other side of the river, and hand their duties over to the county, or to Metro, someone who's actually accountable. William R. Goode is the only non-incumbent in the race, so vote for him, and either leave the other races blank or write someone in, anybody but the incumbents.

That's the only local levy I'm voting against. As I said, I'm usually a loyal Democratic voter, so I'm voting for money for libraries, schools, and Metro's greenspace program. After spending much of the summer blogging about local parks and such, and wringing my hands about the budget situation, do you really think I'd vote against the greenspace measure? My street cred's on the line here. As with all tax measures, make a list of the measures you agree with, and vote for the ones on the list you think you can personally afford. Nobody should ever ask you to do any more than that.

We've got 9 state ballot measures this year. Most of them are easy calls. Measures 41 and 48 are sneaky, deceptive, and drastic anti-tax measures from Howie Rich and his slimy out-of-state pals. Vote no on those.

Measure 43 is a "parental notification" anti-abortion measure. I always vote against all anti-abortion measures, even ones that appear to be narrowly targeted. The people behind it are the same bible-thumping wingnuts who sometimes put total-ban measures on the ballot when they're feeling their oats. It's not that this is all they want, it's just this is all they think they can pass this year, and if it passes, they'll be back in '08. Never, ever, help the fundies win anything. Vote no on 43.

Measure 44 lets anyone without insurance participate in the state's existing prescription drug plan. It's not universal health care, but it's a step in the right direction, so vote for it.

Measure 40 would require Supreme and Appellate Court judges to be elected by districts. The poorly-concealed motivation behind this is to get at least a few conservative judges onto the statewide bench. The cover story is that judges should represent diverse geographic areas, some of which just so happen to be more conservative than others, by random chance or whatever. And sure, there's a kernel of truth to the complaint, in that almost all judges come from the Willamette Valley. But after all, that's where all the people are, and that's where the most-qualified lawyers tend to gravitate to. The very notion that judges are placed on the bench to represent the "interests" of any narrow subset of the population, geographic, economic, ethnic, or whatever, is disturbing. The courts are not the Legislature, and this measure is a bit hypocritical, coming from the same people who always complain about judges allegedly legislating from the bench.

Measure 45 is a new term limit measure for state legislators, replacing an earlier one thrown out by the state supreme court some years ago. I voted for the original measure, but I'm voting no this time, and so should you. After the last term limit measure passed, we got crop after crop of new legislators who knew nothing about the legislative process and cared even less, and brought nothing to the table but hardline ideology, on both sides of the aisle. When the Legislature wasn't gridlocked, it would produce all sorts of ill-conceived legislation. Lobbyists, who weren't subject to term limits, basically ran the show. We'll recover eventually, but legislative term limits were a mistake in this state, and repeating mistakes when you don't have to is not a sign of intelligence. Let's all admit we made a mistake the first time around, and vote no on 45.

Measures 46 & 47 are campaign finance reform, which this state desperately needs. One of the very few downsides to the state Supreme Court's expansive reading of our Bill of Rights is that "free speech" includes the right of huge corporations and other moneyed interests to spend as much as they like during election season. You don't have to be an Ivy League policy wonk to realize this has a corrupting influence on the political process. The local "liberal media" is spinning this as if voting no was a solemn civic duty. I expect they've been listening to special interests -- public employee unions and whatnot -- who've carved out a bit of turf in the existing system and want to defend it at all costs. The system is broken, and I'm not about to pretend it's any less broken just because the "good guys" can buy politicians too. Measure 46 is a constitutional amendment that allows campaign finance laws, and measure 47 is such a law. Vote for both.

Measure 39 is a local response to the recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed local governments to condemn and seize property, and turn around and hand it to other private parties. For some reason, as with the last 2 measures, loyal D's are supposed to vote against this as an article of faith. I guess we're all supposed to be allergic to anything that looks like a "property rights" measure. One big objection to the measure is that it might make urban renewal plans more difficult and expensive. To which I have to say "damn straight". That's the whole freakin' idea. Duh. Since when has the well-being of greedy rich developers been a progressive cause? Why should I lose any sleep fretting about how to make Homer Williams richer? The fact that we're even having a debate about this is a sign of what's been wrong with the Democratic Party for oh, the last 30 years or so. Sometime in the 70's the party became obsessed with celebrities and "limousine liberal" lifestyle issues and began sneering at the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, resulting in the so-called "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon. Reagan was actually far worse for those people on a pocketbook level than any Democrat would've been, but he never sneered at them, and that counts for a lot. It's not actually a progressive act to look at, say, SE Foster Road and imagine tearing out all the auto body shops and replacing them with doggie day spas and yoga boutiques, even if the affluent gentrifiers moving in to the area would be reliable Democratic voters. Running people off their property because they aren't sufficiently upscale is wrong. Period. Vote yes on 39, dammit.

Which leaves us with measure 42. Measure 42 prohibits insurance companies from using credit scores to determine insurance rates. Insurance companies have increasingly been doing this in the last few years, and the practice disproportionately affects low income people. So you'd think the law would be a liberal cause, but it's actually the brainchild of Bill Sizemore, one of our state's menagerie of colorful far-right nutjobs. Sizemore actually got the Republican nomination for Governor back in 1998, and lost by the most lopsided margin in the state's history, dating back to the 1850s. So my natural inclination is to wonder what the secret catch is, and what icky special interest wins if the measure passes. Everyone's been trying to figure that out and nobody's come up with anything concrete, so I'm inclined to think this is a purely personal crusade on Sizemore's part. He ran into some legal difficulties a few years back, and legal problems often mean financial problems, and thus a lower credit score. I expect he's pushing the measure because his own insurance rates went up, and he was outraged and decided to take it to the voters.

If a bit of adversity can teach the guy a little compassion, at least in a limited area, there may be hope for him yet. I'm not holding my breath waiting on that, but I'm still voting for 42. It feels naughty to be voting for any Sizemore measure, ever, but I'd probably heard of the issue before he ever did, so I like to think Sizemore's agreeing with me, not the other way around.

So there you have it. Now vote, dammit, and make sure the thing's filled out correctly, and signed, and mailed back on time. Someday the powers that be will listen to my pet idea of taxing the bejeezus out of people who don't vote, since if they're that apathetic clearly they're ok with whatever the rest of society decides to do. If they get angry about it, they can simply vote next time and get an exemption from the "apathy tax". Sure, some people may not like it, but what exactly are they going to do about it? If they're too lazy to even fill out a ballot, do you really think they'll go to the trouble of suing? Not very likely, I expect. Complain to their legislators? Their legislators can be sure that, by definition, the complainer did not vote for them in the last election, and may not at the next election. So there's really no upside for 'em in helping this person. Anyway, that's a topic for another day. So vote. Unless you're planning to vote Republican, in which case you ought to fly to Palm Springs and play some golf, or go club some baby seals, or whatever it is you people do for fun, and don't come back until the election's over.

A complete Shimkus

Ok, I'm not quite done with the Foleygate posts just yet. It seems that now John Shimkus, the head of the House page board, has decided he needs to go on the warpath too, and is demanding apologies from the Democrats for allegedly leaking the scandal. You know, because just like the wiretap thing, and the torture thing, the leak is the real scandal, not the act itself. At least that's how it is in the beltway universe. The politicians are outraged, and they demand to know why we can't just leave them alone and let them do their dirty deeds in peace.

The perfect response has already been made, by Nancy Pelosi's spokesperson:

"Republicans just don't get it; every mother in America is asking how Republicans could choose partisan politics over protecting kids, and the Republicans are still asking who could have blown their cover-up," Pelosi spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said.

I admit the title of this post is a cheap shot. I'm making fun of the guy's surname, implying it stands for something obscene, or at least scatological. It's true that he's a congressman, but some of his ancestors who shared his surname might (in theory) have been normal, law-abiding citizens who just happened to have a silly last name. But in this day and age, people don't really understand anything more complex than that, so I might as well, and it'll probably help reel in the Google hits. My original Foley post ended up with a ton of hits just because I used the term "Maf54" in the name, and for a while I was in the top 10 search results for Foley's nym. And if I've learned anything from the Republican response to the scandal, it's that the absolutely most important thing is to figure out how to misuse the scandal du jour for short-term personal advantage. Look at all the R's jockeying for Hastert's job even as we speak. So clearly I can't be doing anything wrong here. You probably ought to elect me to something, if you know what's good for you.

Kirk Fordham: human sacrifice

So now ABC's reporting that Foley/Reynolds staffer Kirk Fordham has been thrown into the volcano by the Repugnican leadership in hopes of quieting the growing scandal. Somehow, I have this feeling the beltway scandal gods won't be appeased by the sacrifice of a mere chief of staff, a guy nobody'd ever heard of before outside Capitol Hill. Wonkette has the story here.

(Never heard of the scandal gods? Most people haven't, so let me try to explain. I'm not religious, and I don't believe in the scandal gods myself, but our nation's leaders do believe. That's the single fact that explains just about everything. It seems that every now and then, the scandal gods become angry, for reasons no mortal can ever hope to understand. So then a scandal erupts. The scandal isn't anyone's fault, it's certainly not because anyone's done something wrong, it's just that the gods sometimes get angry for inexplicable reasons of their own. Since it's always hopeless to try to understand what all the fuss is about, the answer is to just start throwing people into the volcano until the gods are appeased and the problem goes away, and life returns to normal, exactly like it was before. What's sad is that the scandal-god cult persists because throwing random underlings into the bubbling lava appears to work a lot of the time.)

One interesting thing is that the aforementioned ABC story asserts Hastert himself gave Fordham the heave-ho. Which is sort of irregular. Didn't that job belong to Thomas Reynolds, Fordham's actual boss? I guess when everyone's worried about saving their own skins, protocol falls by the wayside.

Oh, and Reynolds really, really wants you to know that he had absolutely no clue what his own chief of staff was up to. Ok, yeah, I'm sure that must be 100% true.

An earlier ABC piece questions Hastert's future as Speaker. Included is a bit from that slimeball Grover Norquist, who has the notion that Republicans can turn the whole thing around to their advantage by harping on the timing of the story, and trying to figure out who leaked it. I guess that's the only thing they've really got to go on, but Norquist's notion that everything will be fine if the R's just attack critics instead of cleaning house, well, that's the sign of someone who's been inside the beltway for too damn long and has lost touch with the outside world.

Norquist's not the only one who wants to go on the warpath. Hugh Hewitt seems to think the real guilty parties are the liberal media and the Democrats. Well, he would, wouldn't he. Big surprise there. Something tells me the R's have operatives scouring the country right now, trying to identify the pages who "leaked" the story to ABC, so they can get the full Anita Hill treatment.

The striking thing to me is how scripted the whole scandal feels. And I don't mean just politicians here. The media response to scandal follows an absolutely rigid template. Everyone asks precisely the same questions, we get the same tired duelling quotes for the requisite number of news cycles, and in the end the problem "goes away" when a key figure or two are offered up as scapegoats, and resign, or get fired and/or convicted. And nobody presses for reforming the system that led to the abuses. What's the point of having a big scandal if nothing changes as a result? If the result is always just that the media and public get jaded and it doesn't even make the papers next time it happens, that should be a sign that the system is fundamentally broken and no longer able to self-correct when it's abused.

It wasn't always like this. Here's a WaPo guest piece by Joseph Califano, describing the last scandal involving Congressional pages back in 1983. I sure do miss the days when we had grownups running the country. Grownups, and people who had basic respect for the institution they went to DC to be part of. The current leadership came to Washington precisely because they hated government and wanted to run the whole thing into the ground, by any means necessary (witness Norquist's infamous remark about drowning the government in a bathtub). And on that count, at least, I have to say they're doing a heck of a job.

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Updated: Ok, now Hastert himself has gone on the warpath. I'd never seen that spectacle before, and it looks sort of like the movie Beverly Hills Ninja, starring Chris Farley as the aforementioned ninja. Yes, the movie's a comedy, not a drama. Anyway, Hastert wants us all to know that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy, in fact, it's all Bill Clinton's fault. No, I'm not exaggerating, he really thinks -- or at least says -- the scandal is the work of some sort of dark Clintonian cabal. Wow. Fascinating. Oh, and George Soros is involved, too, of course. While there probably are some wingnuts out there who still froth at the mouth, Pavlov-style, at the mere mention of Clinton, something tells me this isn't going to be the magic formula that makes it all better for poor ol' Dennis. All in all, today's trial balloons weren't very impressive, so it's going to be fun to see what tomorrow's crop looks like.

The same piece mentions that Roy Blunt, the Republican whip, is also repositioning himself away from Hastert now. As far as I'm concerned, Hastert is a complete nonentity, and nothing will actually change based on whether he stays or goes. The only reason I'd like to see him go is to watch the fratricidal infighting within the Republican ranks as people jockey for the Speaker's gavel, hopefully right before the election. That would be niiiiiiice.

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Even more Hastertia from the "liberal media":

• The NYT claims Hastert said he'd resign if it'd help the party. By doing so, he convinced Paul Weyrich to retract his call for Hastert's resignation. DC is a weird, weird place.
  
• An NYT editorial speculating about the R's using the scandal to go on an anti-gay jihad.
  
• A perceptive opinion piece about the scandal at the Seattle P-I.
  
• The same paper has a bit about Newt Gingrich reappearing to inform us all that Democratic sex scandals are vastly worse than this Foley business. And he should know, since he was cheating on his wife while he was leading the fight to impeach Clinton, and he divorced one of his previous wives while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. Yeah. Gingrich is a total expert on this stuff.
  
• Here's a Sidney Blumenthal piece about Foley written for the Guardian.
  
• Even the Times of London is less than supportive, and they're a Murdoch media property, let's not forget.