a little fountain at night

Next to one of the entrances to the Regence headquarters building, in downtown Portland, there's this tiny little fountain. It draws little attention during the day, but at night they light it up with constantly changing colored lights. You could reasonably argue that this is kind of cheesy, but it's also kind of photogenic.

I don't know anything about it except the location, I'm afraid. It's small enough that I can see it not having a name, or being "designed by" anyone in particular. But maybe it is, and the info just isn't on the net anywhere. Sadly, that's been known to happen from time to time.

Stark Street Island expedition

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Today's expedition takes us to semi-fabled Stark Street Island, off in the mysterious, exotic lands east of I-205, where one occasionally sights "pickup trucks", some of which bear mysterious inscriptions such as "McCain-Palin", whatever that means.

Ok, ok, I'm trying to spice things up here, and it's not really working, is it? The place really is called "Stark Street Island" (except when it's called "Park 51"), but it's really only an island in the traffic sense. It's a little triangular wedge of land at the corner of SE 106th & Stark, a few blocks east of Mall 205. And don't bother looking for it on the parks bureau's website, because it's not there.

The park's one feature is the Rose Petal Fountain, one of the short list of fountains run by the city water bureau. There's a Water Blog post from early May when they turned it on for the season. I was hoping it'd still be running now, but sadly it's not. That part of the expedition was kind of a complete bust, as it turns out. So instead I had to try to make a dry fountain interesting, which is rarely easy:



So, uh, imagine it just like this, except with water. And with the sun shining, 85 degrees outside, so long as we're busy imagining stuff.

Updated: Here's a Yelp review of the park & fountain, if you can believe that. Apparently this little park is jammed with kids in the summer. I guess that makes sense, since this is the only public fountain for miles around on the east side.

Also, if you're visiting here and you're on Stark anyway, might I suggest some of the other local sights? Milestone P6 is just 7 blocks west of here. And 11 blocks east will get you to Milestone P7, and Ventura Park with its small-ish rose garden. And those are just things that've shown up on this humble blog. The street also features various things of interest to normal people, or so I'm told.

I hate to say it, but I'm starting to think "explore-the-world season" is about over for the year. I'm still quite willing to drive out and take photos, or take the bus, or walk, or whatever, but if I do that I'll just make everywhere I go look cold and dreary and uninviting. Which would give everyone the wrong idea. Or rather, it would give everyone the right idea about what our fair city's like 9-10 months out of the year. And although that might keep a few Californians from moving here, doing it gets old (and depressing) rather quickly. So I suppose I'll have to find something else to blog about until the weather improves someday.

Or, I suppose, I could move to a distant, tropical, real island, off in a genuinely mysterious and exotic corner of the world -- but not so exotic that there's no broadband, obviously. Also, there needs to be a ready supply of fruity drinks with parasols, or maybe those little plastic swords. Yeah....

Riverside Park expedition

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A few photos from Portland's ultra-obscure Riverside Park, on the east bank of the Willamette, just a few blocks south of the Ross Island Bridge. Usually when I call a place "obscure", it implies that it's somewhere out of the way and doesn't get a lot of visitors. That's not really true this time. Riverside Park gets plenty of visitors; they just don't realize they're visiting, is all. The park, you see, is bisected by the heavily-used Springwater Trail, which is primarily used by Portland's legions of bike commuters.

This segment of the Springwater Trail was only officially opened in 2005, although I went through here once in the early 90's, back when I lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood. "Opened", I think, means that they came in and paved it to make it commuter bike friendly, and it looks like they removed some invasive plants and put in some picnic tables in a few spots. When I was here before, the area had an abandoned, back-of-beyond feel, and there were a lot of homeless people camping in the area. I still saw a few people camping out under the McLoughlin half-viaduct uphill, but in general the city and Metro have done a thorough job of making the area safe, or at least making it feel "safe". Whatever that means.

In recent years, Metro's bought up the land immediately to the north and south of the park, probably with Greenspace bond money. I gather that the stretch of now-public land adjacent to the riverbank stretch of the Springwater trail is called "Springwater on the Willamette". Which makes it sound like an upscale restaurant, or possibly a nursing home.

In any case, Riverside Park itself was here long before there was an improved trail, and before Metro was ever involved. So it really was a remote spot at one time. And don't let the map fool you; although it sits next to McLoughlin Boulevard, you can't get here from there, as McLoughlin is maybe 40-50 feet straight up, at the top of the bluff, and there aren't any stairs. Even if there were stairs, there's no way to get across McLoughlin, and I don't think there's even a continuous sidewalk up there.

Back in December 1980 the city council approved building a pedestrian overpass over McLoughlin at Haig St., which would have created a convenient river access for residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood. The overpass was expected to cost $604,942, plus another $110,000 for a fishing pier at Riverside Park that was also never constructed. I haven't yet seen a definitive explanation for why this never happened, but the article contains a couple of clues. First, the council's main opponent of the project was Commissioner Ivancie, soon to be elected mayor. Second, the money for the park was to come from federal funds originally slated for the cancelled Mt. Hood Freeway. The eastside MAX Blue Line was also funded from this pot of money, so it's possible that the overpass was nixed due to cost overruns on MAX construction. In any case, the unbuilt overpass is the only reference I've found so far to the park in the library's Oregonian database, which stretches back to 1861. The park's generic name doesn't really help the search process, but I get the distinct feeling it's pretty much always been as obscure as it is now. Given the city's current position that Willamette River fish aren't fit for human consumption, it may be just as well that the fishing pier was never built.

These days Riverside Park is merely a small part of "Springwater on the Willamette", and not even the most interesting part. When the trail work happened, Riverside was sort of overtaken by events, and went from total obscurity directly into irrelevance. It's just that it often appears on city maps when the rest doesn't, for whatever reason. So there's this mysterious green square on the river you've never been to, and nobody you know has ever been to, and you can't find any photos of on the interwebs. So naturally I'd wondered about the place for years, because I'm like that. I went into this understanding this was a Quixotic "expedition" even by my usual standards, which is saying a lot. And I have to say the park was about what I'd expected it'd be like.

I haven't been able to discover the original idea behind the city owning the place. The generic-sounding name makes it sound like it ought to be a grand place, like "Waterfront Park", or "Central Park", but it just isn't. To the north and south of the park, there are concrete pilings in the river that seem to be the remains of some kind of dock, maybe. I don't know what was here, but it must've been long ago. Riverside Park is narrower and steeper than the surrounding area, so maybe the city got it by default, way back when, because the site seemed unbuildable. I don't know, really.

The last time I was here, mumble-mumble years ago, I thought I'd try to find this "Riverside Park" place I'd seen on the map, since it was in the neighborhood and all. That effort wasn't too successful. It wasn't at all obvious what part of the area was the park and what wasn't, since it all looked more or less the same. It's also true that the quest didn't have my full attention, as I was soon preoccupied with navigating the crappy old trail, which at the time was pretty much a solid mud bog for the whole 3 mile stretch from Sellwood to the Ross Island Bridge. Or at least that's how I remember it.

Today, thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I think I've finally located the place. There's a short stretch along the trail, a few blocks south of the Ross Island Bridge, where there's a sort of cable barrier separating the trail from a steep slope down to the river. That stretch, plus the chunk of bluff on the other side of the railroad tracks, is Riverside Park, more or less. The bit to the north with the picnic tables isn't, technically. The bit to the south with some mysterious public art also isn't, technically. Technically, PortlandMaps knows the place as 3 parcels, with tax IDs R313370, R313371, and R313372, so you can go look it up if you really care.

The area as a whole is kind of cool. Looking north, there's an unusual view of the Ross Island Bridge, with downtown behind it. Due west, there's also an intriguing view of the South Waterfront towers rising behind the trees of Ross Island. So overall it's worth checking out. Just be sure to keep your eyes and ears open for bike commuters, and try to stay out of their way if you can. Jeebus. Those guys are hardcore.

Lake Oswego Railroad Bridge

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The ongoing bridge project takes us south again, to the often-overlooked Lake Oswego Railroad Bridge. Rail-only bridges are pretty much always overlooked, since nobody uses them except the railroad itself. On top of that, this particular bridge is in an out-of-the-way location, is fairly unremarkable-looking, and is very lightly used even by the railroad. That all adds up to "destined for obscurity" -- although it does have its own Structurae page, which I guess is something.

If you took a local survey and asked people if they'd ever heard of this bridge being here, I'd guess the answers would be split between "No" and "Who cares?". And really, why would you care? You can't drive over it, you can't legally walk or bike over it, and the few trains that use it don't carry passengers. In my case, I'm kind of running low on bridges, and I figured I'd go check it out for the sake of completeness, along with a measure of idle curiosity.

Since I didn't walk over the bridge, I don't really have an adventure story to tell this time. I just drove to Rivervilla Park, at the foot of the bridge on the east bank, took a few photos, and went on my merry way. So pretty much what I've got to offer this time are the photos, plus whatever info about the bridge I was able to dredge up on the interwebs. As a result, this post is somewhat overreliant on bullet-point lists full of links, as you'll see shortly. Literature snobs tend to sneer at bullet-point lists, so this post is unlikely to win any awards for its eloquent and skillful use of the English language -- assuming those awards still even exist -- but that's just how the post wrote itself.



This bridge is the only bridge over the Willamette between Sellwood and Oregon City, which is a pretty substantial gap, so it seems (to me) like kind of a waste that it's only used by a few freight trains now and then. I'm not the only person who thinks so, as I've seen occasional discussion about using it for commuter rail, streetcars, and/or pedestrians/bike access, but as of right now there aren't any firm plans for any of those things. One idea is to run commuter rail across it, similar to the upcoming Beaverton-to-Wilsonville WES line. A line like that could run south from downtown Portland all the way out to McMinnville, possibly as a snooty, upscale "wine train", like the one down in Napa Valley (which some locals have dubbed the "swine train"). This line could even be extended and run to Spirit Mountain, which would make it a total geezer magnet. Every last old guy in the country would insist on making a pilgrimage here, to come ride the casino train. I'm not sure that would be a good idea, but it sounds like a very lucrative idea. Oh, and it'd serve actual commuters too, apparently.



Other ideas include adding overhead wires and turning it into a streetcar bridge, or removing the tracks and making it bike/ped only, or cantilevering an additional bike/ped walkway off one side of the bridge, similar to what was done with the lower deck of the Steel Bridge a few years ago. I kind of prefer the last idea, if it can be done safely. Rail traffic could continue, while also allowing me to walk over the thing and take some photos without dying, which is the main thing of course.

Some people (who I guess aren't down with our fair city's anti-car policy) think there ought to be a vehicular bridge here. It's not a terrible idea, but after looking at the current bridge it's pretty clear to me that you couldn't modify it to carry cars. It's just too narrow for that. You'd have to build from scratch, and maybe right here is the best place for that, and maybe it isn't. Either way, you'll need to get in line behind all the other expensive bridge proposals currently on the table. So don't expect to see this any time soon.



A few semi-recent examples of the on-and-off discussion and handwringing about the bridge:

• The Lake Oswego Trails Master Plan envisions a "Willamette Crossing Trail" someday, with an estimated cost of about $5,670,000, in 2003 dollars.
  
• This City of Milwaukie Transportation System Plan Update mentions in in passing, while brainstorming about future commuter rail options.
  
• A doc from Metro's Lake Oswego to Portland Transit and Trail Study mentions the bridge as an "issue", as in, what to do about the bridge if the westside Portland-to-Lake Oswego rail line is turned into a trail.
  
• The City of Beaverton mentions the bridge a 2006 info packet for city council members, which mentions the possibility of using some Metro bond money to renovate the bridge.
  
• A thread at Portland Transport discusses the streetcar option, because they always love the streetcar option over on Portland Transport. One commenter explains why streetcars and freight trains can't coexist on the same tracks.
  
• A RailroadForums thread about the proposed eastside streetcar and Milwaukie MAX projects mentions the L.O. bridge briefly, as in, why are we building all this other new stuff when this existing bridge is practically sitting idle?
  
• A BikePortland thread about the Portland-to-Lake Oswego rail line gets a couple of comments about the bridge. One poster has ridden the bridge a few times and explains what a hassle it is in its current form.
  
• A commuter rail page on Trainweb calls it "the Forgotten Bridge", which sounds about right.
  
• In the August '08 meeting minutes of Oak Lodge Community Council, the bridge is once again described as the "forgotten bridge", but also as a "major asset". Figuring out what to do with this major asset is the hard part, it seems.
  
• An Oregonian story from January 15, 2004 says "Walkway Over Willamette Gains Favor". Favor, that is, with everyone except the railroad. They think it's way too dangerous, describing it as a "very scary bridge". Even if people behave themselves and stay off the tracks, they say, there's a danger people will be hit by stuff falling off the train -- lumber, sheet metal, stuff like that. They do like the idea of commuter rail, though, so that's something. They lease the bridge, I think from Union Pacific, and their lease runs through 2015. So maybe something will happen after that. This article generated a couple of letters to the editor.
  
• A PSU student project, "Milwaukie to Lake Oswego Willamette River Pedestrian Bridge", looked at the feasibility of adding a walkway to the bridge, and they even have a design mockup. The railroad wasn't interested in talking to them, though.
  
• In related news, the Pacific & Western Railroad (which operates the bridge and leases it from Union Pacific) is pushing a new proposal for a Hillsboro-to-Forest Grove commuter line. It's not hard to see why they like commuter rail: When the Beaverton-Wilsonville line gets going, P&W will be contracted to operate it on TriMet's behalf. They also received a bunch of needed capital improvements to the line, paid for with taxpayer cash, so their freight business benefits too. This is either cronyism or a win-win situation, I guess, depending on how you feel about commuter rail.
  
• And the handwringing about safety along the WES line has already begun.
  
• The bridge is also mentioned in an Aug. 5, 1996 Oregonian article, "Metro Revives 1994 Study On Willamette River Crossings". This is from the early stages of our endless "What to do about the Sellwood Bridge" handwringing, when there were options on the table besides just replacing the Sellwood with a new bridge nearby. In passing, it mentions people have been crossing the railroad bridge for years, despite the lack of a nice, public-friendly walkway.
  
• A blog post and a couple of forum threads discuss cyclists using the bridge.
  
• A 2004 post on foldedspace discusses "The Future of Oak Grove". One commenter claims to have seen people walking across the bridge.
  

If you look closely at the bridge, you can see there's a narrow walkway, more of a catwalk really, on the north/downstream side of the bridge. I thought about taking it, but I was dissuaded by what I thought were a few good reasons.

1. I couldn't get onto the bridge from where I was. I think you have to go find the end of the trestle, and I'm not sure where that is.
   
2. It doesn't look very safe. It's pretty spartan, and looks like it was designed for the exclusive use of maintenance people who know exactly what they're doing, and are paid very well to do it. Not much in the way of solid handrails up there, so I have a hunch my rare, occasional fear of heights might kick in, especially if it's windy.
   
3. Nonzero chance that a train might come while I'm up there. I realize it doesn't get a lot of use -- I've seen the figure of about 2 trains a day bandied around -- but I also know what my luck is like. The walkway's pretty close to the tracks, and trains are substantially wider than their tracks, so I'm not sure how much space that leaves you. The maintenance people this was designed for are bound to have a schedule and know when the next train's due. Me, not so much.
   
4. Nonzero chance of being arrested or fined for trespassing. The bridge is railroad property, and railroads aren't too keen on random members of the general public wandering around on their property, if they catch you. It turns out that, thanks to robber-baron-era laws governing railroads, a railroad doesn't just have security guards, it can actually have own Railroad police force. Seriously. Railroad police can operate with the same legal authority as local or state police, they can make arrests, they can even shoot people if the need arises. As is usual with all things railroad-related, your state and local authorities have no jurisdiction or regulatory authority over railroad police. They answer only to Uncle Sam and the shareholders. So it's not too surprising that the Union Pacific Police Dept. had a turn as Willamette Week's Rogue of the Week a couple of years ago. I'll grant that they have legitimate concerns about trespassers, and a real need to keep people off their tracks and out of their equipment. Since it's, you know, dangerous and all. Also, there was a
   pipe bomb incident at the bridge back in 1993, so there's wannabe-evildoers to worry about too, I guess.
   

I suppose I could just call up the railroad and ask for permission, if I really wanted to walk across the thing that badly. I considered doing that before I actually got a look at the bridge, and now I'm not sure I really want to. I won't rule out that I might try it at some point, although I kind of suspect they'd say no. Maybe if I spun it as "I want to explain to the public why it's so dangerous", with lots of photos illustrating the point. I dunno. I've come to realize that I'm more easily dissuaded than most people by the threat of getting an expensive ticket (or worse), even when the actual likelihood of it happening is probably quite low, as it is with this bridge. I'm not usually big on blaming things on parents, much less grandparents, but in this case I really think it's my maternal grandmother's fault. Where some people use "the bogeyman" to scare kids into behaving, she used "the policeman", so as a small child I got a lot of "you be good, now, or the policeman will get you". I'm not kidding. The evil terminator in Terminator 2 spent most of the movie in the form of a cop, and that's a pretty good approximation of what I thought "the policeman" was like when I was a kid. I still don't think I've entirely gotten over that. You walk over the bridge, you might get speared through the eye with CG liquid metal or something. I've never figured out where Grandma picked up this attitude. Was it just a generic Scots-Irish thing? Or did she have a more exciting youth than she led us all to believe? We may never know for sure. And maybe that's for the best.

As you might expect, the bridge shows up on various railfan websites, where we learn (among other things) that the long, curving trestle on the east bank is called the "Menefee Trestle", after a lumber company that used to be next to the tracks a bit further north. The Brooklyn railyard in SE Portland is home to the historic SP 4449 locomotive, which seems to use the bridge regularly when they take it out for a spin. For example:

• Photos from a rail excursion from Albany to the Brooklyn Yard in Portland, including one from on the trestle.
  
• 
  
• A thread about a different excursion on the same train, including a great photo of it crossing the bridge.
  
• Another photo, same train again, crossing the bridge going the other way.
  
• Another page about the SP 4449, with a few more photos of the train on the bridge.
  

Other assorted photos of the bridge:

• an old photo looking across the bridge
  
• And a photo from the air
  
• And a two photos taken up on the bridge itself. If you want to see what it looks like up there, those are your best bet, because I didn't hoof it across the bridge this time.
  
• Some photos and info on a page of Milwaukie sights.
  
• Some great moody infrared photos of the bridge.
  
• And a few other photos, including one of a steam train crossing the bridge.
  
• These two might be of the L.O. bridge too, but it's hard to tell.
  
• And these three, and probably this one.
  
• photos of various local bridges on Pixelmap
  
• More on Webshots
  
• to willamette falls by kayak. While taking panoramic photos every so often. I'm really curious how this was done.
  
• The Lake Oswego Library has a collection of old photos of the area, and they have old pics of the bridge (such as this one) in several of their categories: "Willamette River", "Railroads", and "Bridges".
  

mmm... fresh hops...

Went to this year's Portland's Fresh Hop Festival a few weeks ago and took a few photos, but I seem to have misplaced my notes on the event. So this really isn't a very helpful or informative beer post. I do remember the first beer of the day, something called "Hoptimus Prime", from... ok, I forgot who brewed it. I also remember someone had a fresh hop imperial stout on tap, which may help explain why I remember very little of the rest of the day, and it may also explain how I misplaced my notes. Oh, well. The Holiday Ale Festival is fast approaching...

Abernethy Bridge

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Couple of photos of the Abernethy Bridge, the rather nondescript bridge that carries I-205 over the Willamette, down in Oregon City. I took these from the much more photogenic Oregon City Bridge, just upstream.

There isn't much to say about the Abernethy Bridge. I'm not about to try walking over it, whether it's technically legal or not. There isn't anything particularly distinctive, historical, or beautiful about it. It does have a Structurae page, if you're really interested. PortlandBridges has some photos of it here. And here's a photo from river level. Plus a few more photos, taken underneath the bridge, on somebody's MySpace page. Oh, and the bridge shows up in a poem, which is either about nuclear war, or uses nuclear war as a metaphor for something else, I'm not 100% sure which.

A recent "Tourism Action Plan" for West Linn says simply "Abernethy Bridge viewed as detriment". It doesn't go on to explain why it's a detriment; it just says it is, and moves on. Maybe they figured it went without saying. I dunno.

So why bother posting this? Mostly I just figured I needed a post about the Abernethy for the sake of completeness, vis a vis my ongoing bridge series. So here it is. Yay.

some autumn leaves

The Quest

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A few photos of The Quest, the notorious, goofy sculpture in front of the Standard Insurance Center, in downtown Portland. Very few people know it by this name, but it has plenty of nicknames: "Three Groins in the Fountain", "Family Night at the Y", "Quest for the Breast", or just "The fountain with all the naked people".

I've never pretended to be an art critic, and I wouldn't presume to speculate about what (if anything) its aesthetic or political meaning might be. So I'll just call it "eyeroll-inducing", and leave it at that.

Notice that the woman on the right has a fading "NO" circle crudely painted on her torso, so obviously someone was deeply offended by the sculpture. This being Portland I'd imagine the "NO" was put there on feminist grounds, and not conservative religious reasons, but I'm not sure they ever found out who did it. If I remember right, this happened in the early 90's, and I was either still in college or had just graduated. This was back in the heyday of identity politics and "political correctness", so it's not really that surprising that it happened. I'm not sure would happen now or not, but I'm quite sure that no business would, uh, erect something like this outside their offices anymore. At the, uh, bare minimum, the kid would absolutely, positively have to go.

• Everything2 has a nice, informative article about it. Portland Public Art (see below) speculates that the author "Strawberry" is actually Chuck Palahniuk. You know, the "Fight Club" guy.
• A page at Health Heritage Research is mostly about a mosaic by Count von Svoboda, but has a section about The Quest and a companion piece(!) titled Perpetuity, both with interesting vintage photos. The companion piece is a section of a redwood tree, with bronze sort-of energy rays shooting through it. It used to be on the other side of the building, but Standard Insurance donated it to the World Forestry Center after they took over the building from Georgia Pacific. So it's up in front of one of their buildings now. Andy Kerr mentions it in passing here:
  

  A couple of years before I moved to Portland, Georgia-Pacific moved its headquarters back to Atlanta. Orange trucks are now more prevalent in the Deep South than in the Pacific Northwest. They took the G-P sign off the building now called the Standard Insurance Center. Mercifully, they also hauled Perpetuity, a work of "art" depicting a young seedling growing in the center of a huge and hollowed old growth log, to the Western—er, now it's the World—Forestry Center, up by the Portland Zoo.

• Portland Public Art calls it "Corporate Schlock". Which, I think, is inarguable. The post also calls it a "great piece of las vegas funky splurt". Which is more debatable -- I mean, it's far too restrained for Vegas, if you ask me. Someday, when Vegas gets a Portland-themed casino (to go along with the existing New York and Paris ones), their "improved" version of The Quest will be ten times this size, the guy will have a Mr. Universe body and the face of the casino's owner, the ladies will all go up to at least a double D cup, and at the top of every hour there'll be a huge extravaganza with flames, a fog machine, lasers, and cheesy pop music. Also, there might be tigers.
• Pin-ups from Portland and Visual Rendering both have more photos.
• Photomic has a couple of nice old photos he took back when The Quest was new.
• Delenda est Carthago mentions it in passing as part of a photo walking tour of downtown.
• Roadside America mentions it too, not as Art but as an oddball roadside attraction. Which may be the right way to look at it, now that I think about it.
• A couple of other mosaic works by Svoboda are at the abandoned Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. The hospital is supposed to be demolished soon, and it's not clear what the future holds for the mosaic.

joy

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my best guess.

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

---

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.