The earth moves

Big news, weblog fans. One of the world's most prominent bloggers, Howard Bashman, has moved his blockbuster blog How Appealing off Blogspot. More significantly, he's apparently picked a sponsor, a magazine called Legal Affairs, and he's posting on their site now.

Good for them. Good for him.

Still no comments, though....

News roundup

In the course of dashing around the last day or two (I managed to fix the toilet without even having to drive to the hardware store), I've read some stuff that made me stop and think.

My former student and favorite hippie lawyer Alan Graf had a nice opinion piece in the Trib about civilian police review.

The Portland State University paper did a good job with the earthquakes that keep occurring down near the South Sister (that's a mountain, for you non-Northwestern readers).

Meanwhile, in a piece that Michael Totten also liked, I was quite impressed by Paul Berman's commentary in the Thursday New York Times about what we have accomplished in Iraq (both for better and for worse), and what we (especially Democrats) should be doing about it now. It's a centrist view that really speaks to me. As John Edwards does.

The money that talks in the City That Works

If you're interested in these things, you've probably already seen this. But here's The Oregonian's compilation of big contributors in the current Portland mayoral and City Council campaigns. The accompanying story is here.

They've got other campaign finance disclosure stories, too, about state legislative races and Metro.

Perfectly lousy journalism

Nothing like the award-winning Oregonian (year after year, voted the best daily newspaper in Portland) to get the blood boiling on Easter.

Today we got an above-the-fold, front page testament to what a wonderful cop and a wonderful guy is Jason Sery, the Portland police officer who shot and killed the unarmed James Jahar Perez two weeks ago. The story (not on line at the moment, but I'll link to it if it reappears tomorrow) runs on for 58 column-inches. Sery got a commendation once when he served on the force in Billings, Montana. His friends and family say he's a saint:

[A] gentle and patient family man. A spiritual person, dedicated to Christian teachings on morality and compassion. A tireless and inventive cop who is a natural at working with the public.

He's gotten a dozen commendations in Portland for his work with neighborhood groups. He doesn't cuss.

How lovely, and how irrelevant. Good people do stupid things sometimes, and when other people die as a result of them, the good people have to be held accountable. I doubt that anyone would ever charge, much less try to prove, that Sery intentionally murdered Perez. The real question is whether he had reasonable cause to kill him, given the facts that Perez was unarmed and that the fatal shots rang out in 24 seconds after the stop was radioed in to the police station. Sery's supposedly model background adds literally nothing to answering that question. Reasonableness is an objective, not a subjective, factual question. If the officer panicked and killed the man without adequate cause, he's committed a homicide that ought to get him thrown off the force, if not criminally prosecuted.

That is so obvious. Why is everyone afraid to say it, and stay focused on it?

The Oregonian's unbalanced report was particularly disturbing in light of the other front-page, above-the-fold story it ran, on Saturday, reminding us yet again that the dead man had a high level of cocaine in his bloodstream when he was killed. The Saturday story, which covered around 30 column-inches, marvelled at how high the levels were, and at how none of the chemical byproducts of cocaine ingestion were present. All of which can only suggest, according to the paper, that the man swallowed a bunch of bags of coke just before he was shot.

Even if he did, so what? If he wasn't armed, he didn't deserve to die. And all the obfuscation in the world isn't going to change that truth in this case.

In a ham-handed attempt at balance, I suppose, The O also ran a very curious pictorial feature on the front page of its Sunday "Living Today" section in which five African-American Portlanders were very briefly interviewed for their views on the meaning of the latest police shooting. The front-page blurb on this piece promises that it will tell us "what it means to be black in Portland." How laughable to claim that it does more than scratch the surface of that subject. And how degrading that it was run in the front of the section of the paper that contains society cocktail party photos, Roseanne Barr's latest doings, Dear Abby, and the horoscopes. Look! We have African-Americans in this city! Now, that's living today!

And of course, one of the five interviewees happens to be a police officer, who'd "never second-guess the officers in the Perez shooting."

I can understand why a paper like The Oregonian runs this kind of material. I was a reporter for a Newhouse newspaper myself once, part of the time covering a police beat in Jersey City, N.J. in the middle of the night. I learned there that the press and the cops get friendly with each other -- often too friendly -- because if the cops stop talking to the press, the press can't get the information it needs to sell papers. There's a lot of one-hand-washing-the-other. It's inevitable.

But this weekend, I think the local fishwrap went a little overboard. Intentionally or not, they're aggravating the frustration and anger that's being felt as a too-limited public inquest and a too-secret, too-familiar grand jury proceeding draw near.

Maybe they should send their "architecture critic," Randy Gragg (stay tuned for another rant about this guy), out to do a piece on buildings in North and Northeast Portland that might burn if the anger and frustration explode this summer.

Everybody wants to get into the act

Portlanders, now look who's blogging.

A great use of newsprint

The April edition of Portland's own Hollywood Star showed up in the mailbox today, and as ever, it's a beauty. As I've mentioned here before, the breadth and depth of coverage that this free monthly "shopper" newspaper gives to neighborhood issues on the inner east side is nothing short of awesome. Pages 2 through 9 are an activist's delight. Everything is there, from issues of citywide importance that are sneaking under the mainstream media radar (even a few stories that the bloggers aren't talking about yet) to neighborhood problems that have an impact on just a block or two.

Nice work, Star! You get the Bojack Prize for Journalism for the current vaguely defined time period. (Sorry, b!x.)

Portlanders, if you see this publication lying around in the lobby of your favorite east side establishment, take it home and check it out. (But don't look for its editorial content on the web -- it's not there yet.)

Making it worse

Portland media is a disgrace sometimes. Now every story we read or hear about last week's police shooting has to include obligatory comments such as the following from KGW-TV:

A deputy state medical examiner said Friday that he found an "extremely high level" of cocaine in Perez’s bloodstream.

Perez had a felony record for burglary, gun and drug possessions and was on parole at the time of his death. His record included a 1998 conviction for assault of a police officer and resisting arrest following a traffic stop similar to Sunday night's stop.

All of which is completely, totally irrelevant to the question now at hand. Even if the man was a hardened con and coked up beyond belief -- even assuming all of that is true -- if he didn't threaten the officers, he didn't deserve to die. Still seated in his parked car. Twenty-four seconds after he was pulled over.

Hey, fourth estate out there. You might as well be telling us, "The victim was wearing socks that had holes in them." It simply doesn't matter.

And shame on those who keep repeating these facts as if they did. What sleaze! The clear implication is: "The guy was a criminal, so it's less of a crime to kill him than an upstanding citizen."

Did they do drug tests on the officer who killed Mr. Perez? That would be far more germane.

They probably didn't.

Not snarky enough

Many in the media are having some fun with the news that Bob Dylan, soon to turn 63, appears in a new Victoria's Secret commercial set to his song "Love Sick." Shot in Venice (as in Italy), the ad features the mysterious bard himself along with the usual scantily clad supermodels.

Virtually all of the commentators have tried to make the story funny. Mostly they offer Dylan song titles and lyric quotes. For instance, the Boston Globe:

Visions of Johanna in floral-lace baby doll sleepwear?

Lay, lady, lay across my big brass bed -- in a mini balconet bra and bun pant?

But IMHO, no one has yet struck comedy "gold" with it. Readers?

Read all about it

For those of you who are willing to go through their registration process (which so far hasn't hurt me, that I know of), the folks at KGW-TV here in town have a page up where they compile many (all?) of the press releases with which they're inundated daily.

Want to feel like a news editor, sorting through all of the raw data that comes across the news desk every day? Have a look.

Is there an echo in here?

The first sentence of yesterday's lead editorial in The Oregonian sounded awfully familiar.

Welcome to my drivel-fest

Greetings to Phil Stanford's readers. If you're looking for 1221 SW 4th, go here.

Cardio killed the video star

When I saw that Prince has been named to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I was reminded that I'm getting up there in years. But with the news today that J.J. Jackson (second left), one of the original MTV VJ's, has died of a heart attack, I'm feeling positively ancient.

Jackson, who was 62, was one of five hosts in the original cable format that brought us the classics of the music video era in the early '80s. After Prince shocked us all with "Little Red Corvette," J.J. would segue us right into Patty Smyth doing "Goodbye to You," and Billy Squier's "Everybody Wants You." With the MTV flag being planted on the moon every so often throughout the day.

I remember when "oldies" meant the Five Satins. Now it means Van Halen. Yikes.

Can you name the four surviving original MTV VJs?

Refuge in abstractions

When I was a newspaper reporter many years ago, the word around the City Room was, "Nobody reads the paper on Saturday." Yet the Saturday New York Times is sometimes, surprisingly, one of its best efforts of the week. Yesterday's op-ed page contained four worthy pieces, including a very insightful commentary by UCLA Law Professor William Rubenstein on gay marriage, which as most readers here know is Portland's all-consuming controversy du jour.

Politicians, Rubenstein notes, "have avoided the main issue and sought refuge in the abstractions of the Constitution. Instead of asking what kind of society we want, they argue about what our structure of government can permit." The Bushites prefer to couch the debate in terms of "judicial activism," while the Democrats talk of "states' rights." The Republican position "turns the debate over gay marriage into an arid discussion about the 'separation of powers,' a concept enshrined in the Constitution." Meanwhile, Rubenstein criticizes Kerry & Crew's states' rights emphasis on the same grounds: "This is how slavery was debated for America's first 100 years, and the rights of African-Americans and women were discussed in these terms for the next hundred."

It's a very thought-provoking piece.

Here in Portlandia, proponents and opponents of gay marriage (including the state attorney general's office, which appears to be taking both sides of the issue) have been busy this week setting up a test case that they hope will result in a quick decision by the Oregon Supreme Court. Apparently, the ACLU will sue the state on behalf of a gay couple for refusing to recognize a gay wedding performed under a Multnomah County license. The trial court proceedings will be expedited to focus on the constitutionality of the state's hetero-only marriage statute, and the parties have agreed to seek to bypass the Court of Appeals and go straight to the State Supreme Court.

Unless some new opponent of gay marriage somehow derails this train, the debate in the Oregon court proceeding will be devoid of the structural issues at which Rubenstein takes offense. It will be the state constitution, not the federal one, involved, and so the separation of powers issue will be absent. And one doubts that much will be heard about judicial activism, at least inside the courtrooms.

Also missing from the test case will be the procedural and structural issues swirling around the county commissioners' actions in licensing gay marriage. With the plaintiff being someone with no grievance against the county, and the challenge being strictly to the acts of the state legislature, we'll probably never learn whether the commissioners violated open meeting rules. Also likely to be rendered moot will be the question whether the county has the power under Article VI of the state constitution to ignore a state statute based on county officials' own view that the statute violates newly emerging constitutional rights. The "defense of marriage" folks point out that the test case agreement preserves their rights to make these arguments, but I suspect that once the main Oregon constitutional question is resolved, courts will find a way to dismiss these claims on the ground that they no longer make a difference.

To the lawyer in me, constructing a fully stipulated case to avoid these issues is a shame. Courts have always tended to avoid the most momentous constitutional rulings when there were other ways to dispose of a case. Given the way the parties have concocted the test case, however, the side issues appears to have been cleared away. Rubenstein would doubtlessly approve.

There could still be some surprises along the way, of course. There are other court proceedings already filed, and some of the litigants and judges in the other cases may not see fit to sit idly by while the official test case moves along.

And it may proceed more slowly than its sponsors want. Judges in Oregon are elected every six years, and probably as a result of that, they move very carefully and give each other as much support as possible. (For example, three State Supreme Court justices, including the only openly gay one, are running for re-election now, although at first glance there doesn't seem to be much of an opponent for any of them; one is completely unopposed.) Therefore, it's not clear to me that the Oregon Supreme Court will agree to bypass the normal appeals route. The case could still wind up going through an intermediate appeal.

Moreover, whenever the Supreme Court takes the case, it may not agree to the wham-bam schedule that the parties prefer. It is entirely possible that no final decision will be reached in the litigation until next year.

By that time, there may be an initiative on the ballot in Oregon settling the state constitutional issue. Whereas it usually takes years to amend the U.S. Constitution, the Oregon Constitution can be amended in a matter of months. Depending on the wording of the ballot measure, the issue in the test case could be rendered moot. Which would be all the greater political reason for the Supreme Court to move at its normal, slow pace.

If an Oregon ballot measure amended the state constitution to define marriage as one man-one woman (or in the unlikely event that the Oregon courts declared the existing statutory ban on gay marriage constitutional), the litigation would shift to federal court, where Oregon law would be tested against the federal constitution. By that time, we'd have a new President, or the same old one we have now, and likely a couple of new justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Those new justices could very well be the swing votes who decide where all this finally winds up.

As I've said, however this comes out, the big winners will be the lawyers.

90K

Sometime this morning, we had visit no. 90,000 to this blog. The latest 10,000 rollover took 32 days. Nice to have so many of you here.

Now allow me to pat myself on the back with my other hand, too. Today this weblog was favorably mentioned in the Willamette Week, to wit: "Fans of local 'blogs' (weblogs to the uninitiated) have long found much to consider at the site maintained by local lawyer Jack Bogdanski." Shucks, I'm feeling like Sally Field.

The latest victim

The New York Times really outdoes itself in the Bullcr*p Department today with its commentaries on the Martha Stewart case. In a front page "News Analysis," some learned law professors remind us that the real reason Martha was prosecuted was because she was a successful woman in the business world.

We also learn that the time-honored prosecutorial practice of standing tough in cases involving high-profile celebrities made Martha a "victim."

It doesn't stop on the front page, either. Back in the Week in Review section, we read that one of the federal statutes that Ms. Stewart was convicted of violating is actually a "remarkable trap."

Shame on the Times (which, by the way, has made lots of money syndicating some of Martha's writings). Martha Stewart engaged in a calculated course of venal, crooked activity, including bald-faced lying, for which she was rightly prosecuted. Her egomania has always bordered on mental illness, and now her detachment from reality appears to have landed her in jail.

The prosecution and the jury are to be congratulated and thanked. Martha Stewart is pitiful, but she has only herself to blame. The true victims are we fools who paid $5 to read the claptrap in today's Times.

UPDATE, 3/8, 2:43 a.m.: On a lighter note, Martha blogs in jail.

Fondue-forked tongue

Friday's New York Times reports that Martha Stewart's felony convictions are not her first run-in with the law. She was also busted civilly a few years ago for some significant misstatements she made in connection with her New York State income taxes.

And that's a bad thing.

Update

The Oregonian reports today that Deborah Kafoury of Portland resigned her state House seat yesterday, and that Jeff Kruse of Roseburg has promised to do the same by Wednesday. As reported here the other day, both had moved outside their districts, but thought it was o.k. for them to remain in the Legislature until they were good and ready to leave.

Why the three more working days are needed for Kruse to do the right thing, I don't know, but I'm glad to see these two have come to their senses. After a very revealing news story about this on Wednesday, I expressed outrage and called for their immediate departures from the House. The Oregonian did the same with an editorial in yesterday's editions, and later in the day, the two politicos made their announcements.

My call for readers to express their own indignation at Kafoury, Kruse and their parties did not fall on deaf ears. Oregon blogger Hilsy sent an e-mail to Kafoury, Pablo expressed his support of my call, and Bix is on it today with a strong, dead-on statement about the disgrace that this kind of incident casts upon both political parties.

Glad that's over.

"The Edwards Surprise"

FWIW, William Safire has some thoughts today on Kerry vs. JRE.

Portland news roundup

Big day yesterday in the Oregonian, and to think I pretty much slept through it! My head hit the pillow just as the paper was going thunk on my front porch at 5 a.m., and I didn't wake up 'til... Well, let's just say I was in the middle of a dream in which a middle-aged contemporary was showing me his collection of wood surfboards and decorative wetsuits...

Cough! Anyway, whatever that dream meant (and I'm not sure I want to know), let's get back to reality, and a positively blockbuster issue of the local fish-wrap. First and foremost, Renee Mitchell apologized for calling the St. Johns neighborhood a "pimple" on the city's "backside." (I've tried but can't get a link to the apology out of The O's horrible web "site" at this hour.)

No word yet on whether Dave "Party Animal" Reinhard is going to do the same for saying he agreed with Osama about American culture. Stay tuned on that one, but until he says he's sorry, he boots Renee out of the tie for Biggest Jerk Lately Among Oregonian Columnists (a tough honor to win).

On that same page, the new Multnomah County Library director, Molly Raphael, is all smiles as she introduces herself to Portland. She's making $138,000 a year from Multnomah County (a 27 percent increase over what her predecessor earned), and she's collecting "as much as" $76,100 a year in pension from her old job as library director in Washington, D.C., where she served as top librarian for six years. You math majors out there can deduce that that makes $214,100. Not bad for a bureaucrat. And she's only 57 years old, so this could go on for nearly a decade. Heck, I'd be smiling, too.

Then there were not one but two articles about the OHSU aerial tram spectacle, part of the continuing development of the Vera Katz Theme Park. That deserves a post of its own, which I'm hoping to get to shortly.

It's a tie

In the race for Most Offensive Comment of the Month by an Oregonian Columnist, David Reinhard and Renee Mitchell have finished in a dead heat.

Reinhard was huffing and puffing on Sunday about the Janet Jackson Breast Incident. It's the end of civilization as we know it, lack of morals, etc. etc. -- the whole William Bennett deal (without the compulsive gambling). Then old Dave let fly this little doozie:

It's times like these that I think Osama bin Laden and his Islamic fundamentalist pals may have a point about American culture.

Nice, eh? I'm sure the families of the victims of 9/11 jumped off their couches and saluted to that one. I remember when a guy named Bill Maher said something like that. That was right before he lost his job.

Mitchell can have a way with words, too. Here's the lead paragraph of her take yesterday on the City of Portland's planning process for the St. Johns neghborhood:

Portland planners are poised to break the skin of the pimple on the city's backside.

Another beauty. Bound to make friends and boost circulation in North Portland.

I guess with talk radio so down and dirty, the folks at The O must be thinking that they have to rub a little of that on themselves to get people's attention any more.

Either that or someone's putting something funny in the water cooler over there. The public editor just got a new weblog. Don't expect too many posts this week; I think he'll be busy with other things.

Keep the kids up, set your VCR

Dave's going to play the videotape of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan tonight, the 40th anniversary of their appearing on his stage.

Mystery train

Oregonian columnist Renee Mitchell has been giving Portland City Hall an earful lately. As noted here previously, her views on the Portland streetcar -- that it's a grand blowing of public money for the benefit of a few wealthy developers -- parallel my own.

Yesterday the promoters of the streetcar had their chance to defend their precious toy on the op-ed page. The writers were Chris Smith and Janet McGarrigle from the streetcar's "citizens advisory committee." Smith is a neighborhood activist from the Northwest District Association, where the trolley runs; he also opposed the Good Government Initiative, and is mentioned as a potential candidate for the state legislature. McGarrigle is apparently a condo owner down at RiverPlace, who will benefit from the expensive streetcar extension that's about to be built down that way; I believe her spouse is a structural engineer.

Anyway, I won't fisk the whole piece here. I will, however, applaud the creativity of its authors in making arguments roughly along these lines:

1. The streetcar pays for itself because there are parking meters along the route, and they raise more revenue than the streetcar costs to operate.

2. Parking revenues should be counted as tax contributions by the businesses in the neighborhood.

3. The Pearl District development is a good thing, and the streetcar can take credit for the $1 billion of development there.

4. City taxpayers didn't pay the whole construction tab; the federal and state governments chipped in, and property owners along the way paid $9.6 million in special district property taxes out of the $56.9 million construction cost.

5. The majority of the operating funds are paid by Tri-Met, so taxpayers shouldn't complain.

6. The streetcar is a "boon to business" along its lines.

7. The businesses down at RiverPlace deserve a streetcar because it will help them get through the winter months, when few people head down that way for waterfront activities.

You know, if we're going to have a Pearl, and if we're going to build the concrete jungle planned for North Macadam, there has to be mass transit to those areas. But can you imagine how much cheaper it would have been just to run two new bus lines through there?

But then again, new bus lines don't get you quoted in The New York Times, and so for Vera and Erik, they're out of the question.

I still think Renee Mitchell and I have it exactly right.

The other topic Mitchell nailed in recent days is the race for the mayor of Portland. She complains that the two mainstream candidates, Francesconi and Potter, are long on slogans and short on specifics. She didn't sound too optimistic for any kind of dynamic leadership out of either one of them.

You know what? Based on what I've seen so far, neither am I.

You talkin' to me?

From the Oregonian public editor's new weblog:

"The personal essay is difficult to write, and if used too often by journalists, can seem self-indulgent to readers."

Not to my readers, right?

Missing

The Portland Tribune -- a biweekly free newspaper that does a great job of keeping other media outlets in town honest -- is published twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday. At its very beginning, the paper offered free home delivery of both editions to many neighborhoods in Portland. After a very short time, however, the deliveries were cut back to Fridays only. For the Tuesday paper, you'd have to stop at one of the many boxes around town.

Alas, now even the Friday delivery has ceased, at least on our block here in inner Northeast Portland. That's not a good sign. Even for a faithful reader like myself, there's a certain inertia. I may read the web version of today's edition, but who knows if I'll remember to grab a hard copy out of a box between now and Tuesday? If I don't pick up a hard copy, I won't see most of the Trib's ads. If readers don't see the ads, people stop advertising. If people stop advertising, the paper folds, which would be a tragedy.

Is it just in my neighborhood, or has the Tribune given up on delivery entirely?

UPDATE, 2/9, 11:16 pm: I got it straight from publisher Dwight Jaynes himself: Home delivery is over.

It ain't the end of the world, I guess. The delivery served its purpose: it got people very aware of, and interested in, the Trib. It's probably danged expensive, and so they're likely thinking that the savings from pulling it will outweigh the costs of lost readership. We'll see.

I love the Trib and would hate to see anything bad happen to it.

Johnny-come-lately

Hot news from Bix: The public editor of The Oregonian has started a blog.

Hammered

Measure 30, the Oregon income tax surcharge, has gone down to defeat by a 3-to-2 margin. It lost big time even in Multnomah County, where the vote was 56% against and only 44% in favor.

It's ugly, but not at all unexpected. As I predicted quite a while back, the average voter in Multnomah County, who has been willing to vote for previous tax increases, has apparently had enough.

To all those who have been giving me grief about my no vote on this measure, let me add this comment: Just because Lars Larson says something, doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.

Math check

The Oregonian's editorial page today exhorts Multnomah County voters to vote for Measure 30, the state income tax surcharge. Perhaps the strongest argument that the editorial musters for a yes vote in these parts is its spin on the new county income tax: "County voters can't forget the original purpose of their local tax: to be a temporary lifeboat until state funding came through. The goal was never to secede financially from the rest of the state. The goal was to meet local needs until the state pulled itself together."

A few paragraphs later, however, The O makes this naked assertion: "With expected refunds if Measure 30 passes, about two-thirds of county taxpayers would pay lower taxes if the state plan passes."

I have to challenge that last statement. First of all, there's no guarantee whatsoever what (if anything) the county will refund if the state surcharge passes. But more importantly, even if the county pays refunds at the highest level estimated so far – by County Chair Linn – county residents as a group will pay more tax.

Linn says she'll refund "up to" 22 percent of the county tax; the tax is 1.25 percent of income. That amounts to a maximum refund of 0.275 percent of income. For most taxpayers, the proposed state surcharge is somewhere between 0.3 percent and 0.8 percent of income, depending on how high one's income is. Thus, it's a mathematical fact that the Measure 30 tax will cost Multnomah taxpayers as a group much more than they're going to get back, even if Linn's wildest dreams come true.

Assume that the total taxable income of all taxpayers in Multnomah County is $1 billion. I have no idea what it is – I'm just making that number up, but the actual amount doesn't matter for these purposes. Here's where the tax chips of Measure 30 would fall:

Total taxable income in county = $1,000,000,000
County tax at 1.25% = $12,500,000
Refund of 22% of county tax (maximum) if Measure 30 passes = $2,750,000

State income tax increase at 0.5% of income = $5,000,000

If The Oregonian is going to make a wild claim, such as that two thirds of county voters will save taxes under Measure 30, it ought to at least have the guts to back its assertions up with the numbers. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd be shocked if the two thirds figure is anywhere near accurate.

UPDATE, 1/28, 7:53 p.m.: The same figure, which apparently comes from some Multnomah County official or another, is repeated in today's Willamette Week. Guess the local press is going to accept this rash prediction uncritically. Why not? It supports their editorial position.

It didn't even dawn on the county until recently that state and federal retirees won't be paying the county's new tax. There's a $1 million blunder. And The O and WW believe the bureaucrats when they say we'll actually pay less if we vote to pay more? That's Portland journalism for you.

Is there an echo in here?

Renee Mitchell had an interesting column in The Oregonian yesterday, in which she concludes that the Portland streetcar is a boondoggle. She writes: "[T]he city is helping pay the fare for a few select developers to get rich. It's not just the public who's taking advantage of a free ride."

Oh? You don't say.

We'll miss them both

One of my earliest memories is of a little red and green wood and metal folding table with bench seats. My parents bought it for my brother and me to share, and share it we did many a day.

In the morning, we would sit on the same side of the table, eating cereal or scrambled eggs with ketchup, in front of our family television set. This was a large wooden contraption with a tiny black and white screen near the top of the front, a bunch of round knobs immediately below the screen, and a large cloth screen covering a speaker below.

The TV fare in those late '50s years included none other than Captain Kangaroo, a.k.a. Bob Keeshan, who died today. It was a wonderful, gentle show for kids, with puppet characters like Bunny Rabbit and the lovable human sidekick Mr. Green Jeans. Parents could leave their kids with the captain for a while and be confident that nothing bad would happen -- in fact, there might be some benefit.

When Fred Rogers recently passed away, he was hailed as a pioneer in children's television. Indeed he was, but for my generation, Captain Kangaroo was the guy. We'll miss them both.

Now, readers, can you help me with a question? The Captain Kangaroo Show would open with a close-up shot of the captain's hand, jingling keys on his enormous keyring. And his theme song was a pretty classical piece (or at least a piece written in the classical style), with the strings singing out a happy tune to go with the image of the jingling keys.

And the name of that tune was ---- ?

Famous for another 15 minutes

It looks as though I'll be getting some more publicity for this blog in the print media sometime soon. The other day I did a telephone interview with the Catholic Sentinel, a weekly newspaper published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland.

Why me? I asked the reporter. My blog isn't about being Catholic, and although it occasionally expresses my honest feelings on matters of spirituality and morality, those feelings are usually not quite congruent with the teachings of the church. The reporter's interest in me reminded me of the age-old question whether something constitutes "Italian food" merely because it's cooked by someone who's Italian.

She responded that her beat is local Catholics (sometimes local fallen Catholics) who are doing interesting things. I'm flattered that this includes me.

If you've got thoughts about blogging generally, the Catholic aspects (if any) of blogging, or this blog in particular, the reporter would also like to hear from you. Her name is Kristen Hannum, and I've put a link to her e-mail address here.

I'm a little uneasy about being written up in the Catholic press. It's just a matter of time before they find stuff like this or this, and I get excommunicated.

"I can beat this guy"

The ninth and final installment of The New York Times's profiles of the Democratic presidential candidates ran yesterday. The subject: Sen. John Edwards.

I've found these articles very valuable in getting a read on the candidates. I missed No. 8 -- I was out in the boonies of central Oregon and far from a Times outlet -- and so I didn't see what they said about Dennis Kucinich until just now. But from what else I've seen and read over the last few weeks, Dennis seems like the wittiest guy we're never going to vote for.

The Times piece on Edwards was pretty reverential. It certainly didn't dissuade me from my view that if nominated (admittedly a long shot), Edwards could actually knock George Bush out of office. Alas, I can't say the same for any of the other eight.

Edwards is sharp, intelligent, fearless, slick, very charming, and most importantly, a self-made success. He's sued the daylights out of big corporations on behalf of little people, which he used to be one of. He takes advice straight from Slick Willie himself. Edwards is not a career politician, and will save the world some other way if he doesn't make it to the White House. Plus, he's 50 years old, and he's got beat-up shoes and Timex watches to go with the spendy haircut -- hey, I'm down with all that.

An Edwards-Clark ticket would be formidable. For that matter, so would Edwards-Lieberman, Edwards-Gephardt -- or how about Edwards-Hillary?! But of course, no one's admitting to being willing to settle for the VP nomination at this point, and so it's pretty dang difficult to envision the second face on the Democratic ticket. But I hope we can get "Johnny" up there at the top.

Edwards has got a good shot at third place in Iowa (he just got a great endorsement by the biggest Iowa paper), and with a little luck he could take first place in South Carolina. The only thing that scares me away from him is the fact that he's going with Hootie and the Blowfish for campaign fundraisers. Yuck! Gee whiz, Senator, call Springsteen and Mellencamp. Or maybe Santana for the California crowd.

In any event, remember, my fellow lefties and centrists, the goal here is to beat Bush at all costs. I'll say it again, Edwards is the guy. As he put it himself in a recent New Hampshire speech: "If I can be on a stage with George Bush in a debate in 2004, with my background, what I've spent my life doing, wouldn't you love to see it?

"I can beat this guy. I can beat this guy."

Love great photos?

Give yourself a half hour, then go here.

Wimps

It's a little after 11 on a Sunday night, and already they're cancelling school for Monday in various school districts in the Portland area. This is ridiculous given the facts that the roads are all perfectly clear at the moment, and that the prediction is for snow to resume here sometime late tomorrow afternoon.

Pretty soon they'll be calling off school days based on the Farmer's Almanac. You wonder why kids don't respect school authorities? It's because the authorities often don't deserve it.

That's fit to print

The Thursday New York Times this week was almost as thick as a Sunday's, and it wasn't just because of all the Christmas ads. There was a ton of editorial content, all of it interesting. Glad I'm on break and had a chance to look at it all, even if I didn't get around to it until it was officially Friday.

On the front page, of course, was the good news that the U.S. Supreme Court has come to its senses and stopped blocking campaign finance reform on First Amendment grounds. As with the court's groundbreaking (and misguided) mid-'70s decision in Buckley v. Valeo, the new case spawned a weird-looking cluster of longwinded opinions on various issues, including one highly unusual co-authored majority opinion. But the basic vote was 5-4, with my fellow Stanford Law alum Sandra Day O'Connor once again calling the shot from the Court's center.

It's amusing to me that when it comes to corporate money controlling politics, Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy are the champions of "free speech," while the Usual Suspects -- Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens -- are the defenders of government's important interests in restricting what special interests can and can't buy ads about. After Bush v. Gore, though, what do you expect? There's really no sense in pretending that we're looking for "neutral principles" any more, I guess.

Hey, I'm not complaining. Any time the ACLU and the NRA lose in the same case, I'm happy.

Also on the front page, W. showed why I call him "Boner," as he stepped in another deep pile of foreign policy kim chee. Just as he's making all nicey nicey with our lukewarm allies, asking them pretty please to forgive Iraq's debt, somebody over at the Pentagon decides to break the news to them that they're not getting any contract work to rebuild Iraq because they didn't send troops in with us. There's that trademark Bush diplomatic timing. "Eh?" say the Canadians. "Ach," say the Germans. "Mon dieu," say the French. "That'll be $2.64 a gallon," says Dick Cheney.

I'm sure W.'s going to go after Dean as knowing nothing about foreign policy. Takes one to know one.

Speaking of which, the Times also reports that everybody in the Bush camp now thinks that Dean will be their opponent in the general election. They're cautioning the GOP faithful not to be overconfident against Dean, which is a sure sign that deep down they, like I, believe that the President will be opening up a major can of whup-a*s next summer.

You know they're gonna produce Saddam Hussein right around Fourth of July, don't you? You just know it.

What else? Oh yeah, inside there's a piece on how hard Memphis, Tennessee is trying to be as hip as places like Seattle and Portland. Down there the goatee-and-black-t-shirt types are all cooing the "creative class" mantra that we hear about on Portland Communique from time to time. Sounds like some guy named Florida is where they're getting it from. Anyhow, so far it ain't working in Memphis, despite a lot of indicators that suggest that it could indeed become a pretty hip place. In the meantime, the coolest thing there besides Dead Elvis is still boomer-going-geezer John Hiatt, whom The Times doesn't mention.

The "Circuits" section gets into the new wave of phone cam regulation. That's not really news, except for a statistic that I hadn't read before: There are now 6 million of those little buggers out there. Scary. (On a related note, tonight on the local TV news I watched a home surveillance video of a truly dopey couple of scuzzbags stealing a lady's Christmas packages off her front porch. The two thieves are sick, but then I noticed that the homeowner had three different cams trained on her front yard. What motivated her to do that? I smell dog poop!)

Thomas Friedman thinks that the occupation of Iraq will make Israel more moderate, since it can no longer point to an Iraqi threat. And op-ed contributor and retired super-high NATO poobah Andrew Goodpaster offers (among other things) a thought-provoking quote from his old boss, George C. Marshall:

Tyranny inevitably must retire before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual. But we have to recognize that these democratic principles do not flourish on empty stomachs and that people turn to false promises of dictators because they are hopeless and anything promises something better than the miserable existence that they endure.

When I get the quarterly bill for my daily Times subscription, I usually wince. But on days like yesterday, that paper's worth its weight in gold.

You read it here first, for free

New York Times columnist and Oregon homeboy Nicholas Kristof warned on Saturday (in a column reprinted in The Oregonian today, but forget trying to find that online) that Howard Dean, though perhaps being right-on on the issues, is not electable. You could have saved yourself a dollar (or 35 cents for the days-old Oregonian reprint) by just listening to me, weeks ago, when I said the same thing.

In today's Times, columnist David Brooks rags on Dean for flipflopping on many issues, which Brooks says will make key centrist voters very suspicious. "On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free," Brooks wrote. "Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations. The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone."

We're starting to sound a bit like a broken record here, but I'm glad to see that the nation's leading lefty paper is seeing the light. Everyone's entitled to my opinion.

Land of opportunity

There aren't too many countries on earth in which accused murderers of teenage girls get their own complimentary public relations agency. But Ward Weaver has one. It's called the Portland Tribune.

Last chance lost

Fresh out of rehab, but with lots of troubles still ahead of him, Rush Limbaugh told his readers on his first day back on the air that he hadn't been brainwashed in his drug treatment program.

That's too bad.

Prepare to snort beverage onto screen

Andy Borowitz has the latest news. But Worldwide Pablo has the photo to go with it.

If blogs had "sweeps" months

All bloggers worth their bandwidth keep a constant tally of how many folks are visiting their sites, and where they're coming from. And there are "ratings" services such as The Truth Laid Bear and Technorati, who give us the rankings of who's hot, who's not as of any given day.

The blogosphere isn't like television, where a couple of times a year (May and November being the biggies, I think), the ratings that a show gets in a particular period count way more than they do at any other time of the year. For example, the David Letterman baby show the other night was a big hit in a key "sweeps" week, but I wonder if Dave and Regina planned it that way. Back in February, did they used the "CBS Rhythm Method" to time the conception? (The way this works, on the nights when you're not supposed to have sex, you watch CBS, which gets you out of the mood.)

What if blogs had "sweeps," and we were all particularly hungry for hits right now? What would we be blogging about?

Here's the headline I'd be leading with: Mohammad Ali has been arrested for sexual abuse.

Or else I'd be calling Jared, the Subway Sandwich guy, and asking him if he's got anything to hide in his video collection.

I'd get my hits -- but probably nothing like what I've been getting for simply mentioning the Coors Light Twins (who, by the way, are Polish-American). Dzien dobry, girls!

Junk journalism

Here with go with more sensational interviews with accused murderer Ward Weaver. A local television station here and even the Portland Tribune now find his jailhouse rantings of innocence once again worthy of top billing as "news."

I can understand television stations foisting trash like this on us. It's "sweeps" time for their ratings, which means they'll be doing "news" stories about prostitution, nude dancing, celebrity pecadillos, cute fuzzy zoo animals, fad diets, and all sorts of other non-newsworthy oddities all month long. They have to. By nature, they're whores for ratings.

But it's not sweeps month for the Trib. I wish they'd stop capitalizing on the deaths of those two poor teenage girls whom this man is believed to have murdered. We don't need another interview with him -- ever.

UPDATE, 6:18 p.m.: A judge has issued a gag order putting an end to the interviews with this fiend. Good for the judge, and shame, shame on the revolting media outlets who made the order necessary.

Dear public editors:

Big front-page banner headline story in today's Oregonian about a group of 40 or so clowns who bike recklessly and at high speed from the Oregon Zoo down to downtown every Sunday night. Forty miles an hour downhill on city streets, in the dark, with no helmets.

How interesting. And now that it's been glamorized so prominently, there will be 80 dopies up there instead of 40, quadrupling the odds of somebody getting killed.

The New York Times is in the same league. Big front page story yesterday about how scientists have now developed a super-lethal form of mousepox, and how they could probably do the same with human smallpox.

The message? It's only a matter of time before the terrorists get their hands on vaccine-resistant human smallpox and wipe us all out.

Again, interesting, even terrifying. But what's the sense of running a front-page story on this?

Thanks to big science for showing us how bioterrorism can be done.

And thanks to The Times for giving every outraged extremist the idea that he or she can do it.

What next? How about "news stories" like "You could drive the wrong way down the freeway"? Or "You could buy a machine gun and take out your co-workers"?

Power to the bloggers!

Here's a good one: Demo Pres candidate John Edwards is bragging over on his website that he will be appearing on a "leading national blog" next Monday to discuss his "technology platform."

Geez, for his sake I sure hope he doesn't take credit for inventing the internet. But it's way cool that blogs are now such a force to reckoned with in national politics.

The mega-blog in question, by the way, belongs to Lawrence Lessig, law prof at my alma mater, Stanford Law School.

Edwards intrigues me as a candidate. I'm starting to think he's the Democrats' best hope. More on that shortly.

Instant classic

Have you read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch column entitled, "If Bill Clinton were an addict, here's how Rush might spin it," by Bill McClellan? You owe it to yourself to do so. (Thanks to Socratic disciple Mellow-Drama for the link.)

Remodel

The Portland Tribune has a new weekend issue out today -- and a new layout for its website. Same great paper.

The new web page points out that the Trib has a news "partnership" of some kind going with KOIN-TV, Channel 6.

As Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know that.

This just in

It's always embarrassing when we Portlanders miss a big news story that's right under our own noses. But that's what happened with this one.

Pulitzer material

The little monthly Hollywood Star newspaper over here in Northeast Portland has outdone itself again with its October issue. The depth and breadth of its coverage of east side neighborhood issues -- particularly those involving land use shenanigans down at City Hall -- put everyone else in the Portland media game to shame.

Most impressive this month is the Star's tattling on the developer of a new Lloyd Center tower, which has apparently broken its promise to keep a public access through its property, connecting a city park to the light rail line. The Star appears to have these people dead to rights, and it's not shy about calling them out on it. Good.

Even if you live in another part of the metro area, you ought to track down a copy of this paper and see how local political coverage can look when it's done right. As for a web site? Well, no word on when this mouse will start roaring electronically.

Media critic

Bob Borden notes in his blog:

This "story" about the guy in the Bronx with the pet tiger and alligator will not go away! Hello news media, it's NOT A STORY!

To which he appends a picture of his own apartment, which proves his point.

Blog buzz

Are local news writers mining this site for story ideas? I dunno. I suspected one was doing so last week, when Bob Packwood's photo popped up on the front page of the Trib, just a few days after I invoked his name here.

I later convinced myself that it was just my ego talking, that Packwood's reappearance at a GOP fundraiser in Portland was so newsworthy that the media couldn't not be drawn to interview him.

But in yesterday's Oregonian was a lengthy profile of a guy whose name I also invoked here recently -- Portland realtor Billy Grippo. That one really makes me go hmmmm.

If the Burgerville cole slaw story makes the papers, I'll know they're coming here for leads -- which, by the way, is fine with me. But I wish someone at one of those papers would call and ask me to knock out a couple of columns a week for some serious thou's.

As ye sow so shall ye reap

Rumor has it that right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, who just resigned in disgrace from his extremely brief side gig as a sports commentator, is under investigation for illegal drug use. His accuser says Limbaugh's been hooked on several painkillers, including oxycontin, the "hillbilly heroin," for years.

The lefties are going to jump all over this juicy scandal, broken in the National Enquirer(!). And although I generally sympathize with drug-addicted people, particularly those who, like Limbaugh, have been treated for painful medical conditions, in this case I'm going to make an exception.

If a public figure whose ideas Limbaugh didn't like were in this position, the Big Fat Fair and Balanced Idiot would be ranting and raving to his drooling faithful about it for weeks.

Cue up "Like a Rolling Stone," folks, because if the reports are true, this gentleman is about to commence his well-deserved new career as a trivia question. Maybe he and Newt can party together.

(P.S. Looks like Tony got to this way before I did, and as usual, he nailed it. How the guy has time to write so well and still keep all the supermodels satisfied, I'll never know.)

On newsstands now

I bought a copy of the new Portland Monthly magazine yesterday. I've opened it a few times, but I can't get into it.

I'm having trouble figuring out what this publication is trying to be. And to the extent that I can catch a glimmer of what it is, I'm not much interested.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for magazines, especially those brave enough to tackle a depressed market like Portland. But this one has quite a few bugs. Start with the title. It's called Monthly but it will be published bi-monthly.

And the identity crisis doesn't stop there. In its introduction, PM claims to aspire to be a force in shaping the destiny of the city: to "be the battleground on which the fight for Portland's future can be waged." But as you thumb through the articles in the inaugural issue, it's hard to see this publication playing anything like that role. For one thing, it covers little of civic affairs, and what's there are exceedingly stale stories -- the Blazers have a PR problem, some angry dog-hater poisoned a number of innocent dogs in Laurelhurst Park, there are new directors in the city's performing arts organizations. What's worse, in rehashing those stories, the authors have little new to say. You'll get more about the future of Portland in 15 minutes a week with Willamette Week or the Portland Tribune than you will with PM.

The rest of the inaugural issue -- by far the bulk of it -- consists of puff pieces on such absorbing topics as mai tais, hairstylists, and gardening. There are lots of gushy restaurant reviews and a chatty arts preview, and a strange "best of Portland" list of 50 disconnected items. No. 2: the Vintage Trolley. No. 3: Mount Hood. Feh.

It's laid out like GQ or Esquire, and the smarmy writing adopts much the same tone. It tries hard to be funny, mostly without success, and that's immediately off-putting. In about a dozen places, it takes an annoying few seconds to figure out whether you're looking at an ad or an article. And the pages and pages of glossy event listings that try to make Portland look like such a young, exciting, vibrant place don't withstand scrutiny. (Example: The 10 "On the Town" special events listings include the Home Improvement Show and the Trail Blazers.)

The cool picture of the staff reveals it to be a bunch of kids, no doubt very bright and oh-so-hip. (Three black shirts out of nine people.) But I can't imagine their brand of journalism speaking to anyone in the Portland area outside the Pearl District.

Indeed, paying $3.99 for this magazine feels like paying $700,000 for a condo in a Pearl tower: Maybe it will appeal to someone who just got here, but not to me or most of the fogies I hang around with. It sure ain't my Portland.

A major oversight

For a few years now, I've kept up a Gallery of Jacks, dedicated to famous guys named Jack (and Jackie). And until now, somehow, inexplicably, inexcusably, unspeakably, I have left out this gentleman:

Champ of the airwaves

FM radio is so bad these days. The rich cornucopia known as music is now choked off by a half dozen or so formats, designed more to get listeners to stick around for ads than anything else. Even noncommercial stations are full of station promos, "underwriting announcements" that are indistinguishable from ads, and interminable, amateurish traffic reports that repeat the same things a couple of times an hour every weekday morning and afternoon. It's downright depressing.

Of course, with push buttons on the car radio (and the home stereo remote), a frustrated listener in a place like Portland can maintain his or her sanity by programming in a dozen stations, and hitting the buttons the very second that the music stops and the bad announcers and inane commercial shouting begin.

I was in just such a mode the other day as I tooled around the east side of town running errands. And in the course of that day of short-hop driving, I discovered who is today's true king of Portland commercial radio.

First I was tuned to KISN, the feel-good oldies station, which tends to play the same 100 songs over and over, except during request times when a smart caller may force the DJ to stretch out a bit. Coming through loud and clear was a funky little number called "Here Comes the Night."

When the traffic report came on, it was time to switch over to KINK, the sensitive adult station that's not ashamed to latch onto an artist and play his or her music 'til you can't stand it any more. I remember the '80s, when every other song on this one was by Steely Dan. Now it alternates between the Bonnie Raitt set and the more modern 20-something whiney guys like Coldplay -- boring! On the day in question, they played a track from a forthcoming new album called "What's Wrong with This Picture."

When the ads resumed over there, I punched in KGON, the preferred classic rock station of bikers and roofers statewide. There they were having a regular festival devoted to the fellow I'm talking about, including "Wild Night" and some other middle-aged chestnuts.

And so it dawned on me who is the master of today's commercial radio formats -- now appearing on at least three of them. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy than:

Van the Man.

Phil-osophy

The Portland Tribune has contributed so much to the city's civic life in such a short time, but one of its greatest gifts was returning columnist Phil Stanford to our kitchen counter.

Phil's column today is a classic. Among the juicy tidbits of news and gossip: Former Mayor Bud Clark's supporting Tom Potter for mayor; Jim Francesconi already has $350K in the bank for his mayoral campaign; Bloomingdale's wants to buy the Galleria.

Oh, yes, and the city hired a "facilitator" to run yet another meeting on the City-Buy-PGE lunacy, and the "facilitator" handed out Play-Doh.

Unfortunately, we taxpayers pay for crap like that with real dough.

Evolution

Tonight I did something that I hadn't done in a long while: I dropped 50 cents in the slot and bought a USA Today. I remember when this newspaper first hit the stands, and we all laughed: "TV on paper," we scoffed at the time. The sports section was fantastic, but the rest of it seemed like a joke, with its super-short news stories, garish color graphics, and predominance of words of one syllable.

Times have changed, of course, and now many hometown papers look just like USA Today, or are trying to. It's no New York Times, but the USA's no longer on a level below papers like The Oregonian. In fact, in some respects, it may be ahead of The O. (For the record, however, The O's cheaper.)

Meanwhile, TV network affiliate news has gone even further downhill, to the point where on most nights it's not recognizble as anything serious. So in the grand scheme of information sources, the USA has ascended a fair amount.

Catching my eye in today's edition was a nice story about a college cross-country runner who accidentally inhaled a rock thrown up by one of her competitors toward the end of a road race. She fell choking to the ground, whereupon she was lifted up and successfully Heimliched by her coach. Way to go, coach!

The editorial page also was interesting. The lead editorial joins the growing chorus, including this blog, to the effect that the Bush tax cuts are, on the whole, irresponsible, and that some of them need to be cancelled before they take effect. As is its custom, the paper then runs an opposing view, this time from someone named Stephen Moore, president of an anti-tax, anti-government group called Club for Growth. Moore offers up these choice morsels:

But the binge in debt spending is not a result of President Bush's tax cuts. At most, only about 25% of the deficits are a result of the tax cuts.... The most vital step in restraining the tidal wave of red ink that has engulfed Washington is to just say "no" to the unconscionable $450 billion prescription drug bill for senior citizens...

That's right. It's more important to get a couple of million a year back in the pockets of the Dick Cheney billionaire types than to give ordinary senior citizens the right to get their prescription drugs without fear of having to eat cat food. That's Stephen Moore's, and George Bush's, America.

The paper also took a strong shot at Abercrombie & Fitch, the giant clothing retailer that's racking up the profits from bringing sex even further into the grammar schools. This fine upstanding company features nude teen models, and sells thongs as small as size girls medium with the words "eye candy" printed on them. I'm no prude, but shame on them (and on all the pervs who come here from Google when they hit on the immediately preceding sentence). Good for USA Today for calling Abercrombie out on it, and pointing readers to groups like Dads and Daughters, who are fighting back.

D&D; is playing an interesting angle. It's calling attention to the people who sit on the Abercrombie board of directors while the company's up to its salacious shenanigans.

For example, here are two of the directors of Abercrombie & Fitch -- Lauren Brisky, vice chancellor of Vanderbilt University and a Girl Scouts Council board chairwoman, and John Golden, a retired financier and head of Colgate University's board of trustees -- along with a photo from the company's latest ad campaign. An interesting juxtaposition:

Hey, Lauren! John! Do you really need to do this to sell the sweatshirts?

In all, the paper was a surprisingly thought-provoking read. Four bits well spent.

Peter Weiss

My old friend, Peter Weiss, the political columnist for The Jersey Jourmal in Jersey City, N.J., died over the weekend. How shocking and sad. He couldn't have been more than 60, I don't think.

I had the privilege of serving a few years as a reporter at "The JJ," as it's known, 30 years ago. And on a quite a few days I found myself at the desk next to Peter's. He was the best co-worker one could ever ask for -- generous, thoughtful, brilliant, kind, and hilarious. His smile is forever etched on my memory.

My condolences to all my former colleagues, who I am sure will miss him deeply.

Our master's voice

My good friend Paul, who writes for The New York Daily News, sent along a nice New York Times profile this morning about the current doings of Jonathan Schwartz, the world's most sophisticated radio disc jockey. Paul and I listened religiously to Schwartz 30 years ago, and then tried to emulate him on a college radio show that we did together.

In those days, we were sure to catch both Schwartz's weeknight FM album rock show and the weekend morning AM show where he spun the sounds of Sinatra, Fitzgerald, and Broadway. When it came to knowing and appreciating the music, and assembling eclectic yet spellbinding collages of songs -- sets that made you think while they entertained -- no one did it better than the enigmatic Schwartz.

And he's still doing it, on a public station in New York City and on XM satellite radio. One of his shows apparently "airs" on the internet on Saturday morning, West Coast time. I might have to start getting out of bed for that one.

Whose session was this?

There was a really informative chart in The Oregonian on Sunday (which you'll never find on its web site), logging all the Oregon legislators' votes on 18 defining measures that passed in the legislative session just concluded.

As regular readers of this weblog may recall, this year I pledged to follow the Salem solons more closely, so that I could get a better read on the internal workings of our state's legislative branch. Heaven knows, I've been dissatisfied with their output, and I resolved it was time to watch things in that realm a bit more closely.

Studying the chart in The O is a great way to do that, and I've been fooling around with the vote tallies there to try to see who really called the shots in the House and the Senate.

Here's one game I decided to play. I counted up how many times each of the legislators voted no on the 18 measures that were passed and selected by The O as key. My hypothesis was that the more times a legislator voted no on the bills that passed, the less influence he or she had in the session.

Talk about unscientific. There's so much to argue with in that supposed logic. First of all, the chart in the paper doesn't show the votes on bills that were voted down -- only on those that passed. Surely people who voted yes on bills that were shot down should be "dinged" in an influence tally, just as those who voted no on bills that passed. And alas, the chart doesn't include measures that were rejected.

Moreover, just because one is in the majority most of the time does not mean that one is influential. Perhaps a legislator who voted yes on all the bills that passed is just, well, easy. And of course, who's to say The Oregonian picked the 18 most significant bills (although its list looked pretty good to me)?

Anyhow, for what it's worth, I ran the numbers (with a ruler and my eagle eye, so there could be a mistake or two), and here's what I came up with:

Legislators who voted no the fewest number of times on the 18 selected passed bills (and thus were arguably the most influential):

In the Senate (drum roll, please): With 0 no votes, Ryan Deckert (D-Beaverton), Rick Metsger (D-Welches), and Jackie Winters (R-Salem). Following close behind were Ginny Burdick (D-Portland) and Frank Morse (R-Albany), with 1 no each.

In the House: With 0 no votes, Mary Gallegos (R-Cornelius) and Vicki Berger (R-Salem). Eight others tied with 1 no each.

How about on the other side of the coin? Who were the naysayers, who voted no most often on the 18 bills that passed (and thus were arguably the least influential)?

In the Senate, Roger Beyer (R-Molalla) and Lenn Hannon (R-Ashland) voted no 9 times out of the 18. Following close behind were Jason Atkinson (R-Jacksonville) and Gary George (R-Newberg), with 8 no's apiece.

And in the House, the Champ of No was Betsy Close (R-Albany) with 13, trailed closely by Tom Butler (R-Ontario) and Dennis Richardson (R-Central Point) with 12 each, and Jeff Kruse (R-Roseburg) with 11.

We need to add an asterisk to that last batch, as there were two House members who were absent for quite a few key votes, and who probably would have voted no had they been on the floor. These are Cliff Zauner (R-Woodburn) who was absent for 12 out of the 18 votes, and who voted no on 3 of the 6 measures that he actually did vote on. Randy Miller (R-West Linn) voted no 6 times out of 12, and was absent for 6 other votes.

So does that mean that the session belonged to folks like Deckert, Berger, and Metsger, and not to folks like Close and Beyer? In some important ways, I think the answer is yes.

Yes and no: Deckert, Close.

Anyhow, here's my whole chart, with legislator and number of no votes. (Corrections will be gratefuly accepted and acknowledged; the master chart that I used as my source was on page A6 of Sunday's paper, if you haven't pitched it yet.)

Senate

Deckert, D-Beaverton, 0
Metsger, D-Welches, 0
Winters, R-Salem, 0
Burdick, D-Portland, 1
Morse, R-Albany, 1
Brown, D-Portland, 2
Carter, D-Portland, 2
Courtney, D-Salem, 2
Devlin, D-Tualatin, 2
Nelson, R-Pendleton, 2
Ringo, D-Beaverton, 2
Westlund, R-Bend, 2
Starr, C., R-Hillsboro, 3
Messerle, R-Coos Bay, 4
Schrader, D-Canby, 4
Walker, D-Eugene, 4
Ferrioli, R-John Day, 5
Gordly, D-Portland, 5
Shields, D-Portland, 5
Starr, B., R-Hillsboro, 5
Corcoran, D-Cottage Grove, 6
Dukes, D-Astoria, 6
Harper, R-Klamath Falls, 6
Minnis, R-Wood Village, 6
Morrisette, D-Springfield, 6
Fisher, R-Roseburg, 7
Atkinson, R-Jacksonville, 8
George, R-Newberg, 8
Hannon, R-Ashland, 9
Beyer, R-Molalla, 9

House

Berger, R-Salem, 0
Gallegos, R-Cornelius, 0
Backlund, R-Keizer, 1
Bates, D-Ashland, 1
Dalto, R-Salem, 1
Farr, R-Eugene, 1
Hass, D-Raleigh Hills, 1
Jenson, R-Pendleton, 1
Patridge, R-Medford, 1
Shetterly, R-Dallas, 1
Barker, D-Aloha, 2
Beyer, D-Springfield, 2
Hopson, D-Tillamook, 2
Hunt, D-Milwaukie, 2
Johnson, D-Scappoose, 2
Morgan, R-Myrtle Creek, 2
Schaufler, D-Happy Valley, 2
Williams, R-Tigard, 2
Hansen, D-Portland, 3
Kafoury, D-Portland, 3
Mabrey, R-The Dalles, 3
Macpherson, D-Lake Oswego, 3
Wirth, D-Corvallis, 3
Zauner, R-Woodburn, 3 (12 absences)
Ackerman, D-Eugene, 4
Barnhart, D-Eugene, 4
Brown, R-Newport, 4
Greenlick, D-Portland, 4
Krieger, R-Gold Beach, 4
Krummel, R-Wilsonville, 4
Minnis, R-Wood Village, 4
Anderson, L., D-Gresham, 4
Nolan, D-Portland, 4
Prozanski, D-Eugene, 4
Smith, P., R-Corbett, 4
Tomei, D-Milwaukie, 4
Verger, D-Coos Bay, 4
Anderson, G., R-Grants Pass, 5
Avakian, D-Beaverton, 5
Knopp, R-Bend, 5
March, D-Portland, 5
Dingfelder, D-Portland, 6
Kitts, R-Hillsboro, 6
Merkley, D-Portland, 6
Miller, R-West Linn, 6 (6 absences)
Rosenbaum, D-Portland, 6
Smith, T., R-Molalla, 6
Garrard, R-Klamath Falls, 7
Gilman, R-Medford, 7
Scott, R-Canby, 7
Flores, R-Boring, 8
Kropf, R-Sublimity, 8
Smith, G., R-Heppner, 8
Doyle, R-Salem, 10
Nelson, R-McMinnville, 10
Kruse, R-Roseburg, 11
Richardson, R-Central Point, 12
Butler, R-Ontario, 12
Close, R-Albany, 13

Whether you like what the Legislature did this time around or not, there's one very rough measure of who made some important things happen.

Unemployment trend

There was a piece in Sunday's Oregonian (which, of course, cannot be found today on the O's miserable website) reprinted from Salon. In it, a pundit declares that the extremely popular no-call laws enacted around the country, and now by the federal government, are a mistake. The author claims that these laws violate telemarketers' rights of free speech. Besides, the article complains, the national no-call list could put as many as 2,000,000 telemarketers out of work immediately.

One can only hope so.

What they were thinking

A "workaround"

My rant about the deficiencies in The Oregonian's website struck a chord with a number of readers. (I was afraid of comments on my blog before I switched to Movable Type, but now I see that overall, they're a very good thing. Keep 'em coming, all.) From my friend and research guru Rob Truman comes a suggested "workaround" -- i.e., a way to work around some of the headaches that one encounters on that site:

Saw your early morning post-o'-frustration regarding The Oregonian's horrific website and I did, indeed, feel your pain. This might help: try using Google News. Sure, sometimes it is balky, mainly because oregonlive.com changes/deletes/screws up links. More often it works:

Google news: http://news.google.com/
Search: (w/o the quotes) "source:oregonian searchterms"

For example, try this:

source:oregonian baseball kanter

Using the source: syntax also allows you to limit to the washington post, new york times, etc. For example, if you want a streaming version of the new york times online, search Google News for:

"new york times" source:new_york_times (quotes and underscores required)

If you then click on Sort by date (top right) it seems to pull up the NYT articles as they are posted online.

Thanks for the tip, Rob. I'll file that one for future late night use.

Unfortunately, even the Google trick won't work with the piece I was looking for. It was in Saturday's paper (on the front page of the Metro section, no less), and from what I can tell, that entire day just isn't in the oregonlive.com database.

As a legal researcher, I do have access to The Oregonian on Westlaw, and the story I want is there, all right. But I can't link it for my readers, even with the clever Google trick. Oh, well. It was the Kathryn Bogle obituary. I think I was able to give readers here the gist of it.

You know who has a crummy website?

The Oregonian. Here I am trying to find a story that I read in hard copy on Saturday. Wasting all sorts of time trying to find it. There's supposedly a 14-day search tool, but it's worthless.

And forget about "sidebars" and photos. The cheapies at The O (or more likely, its parent company, the Newhouse newspaper chain) won't spring for them.

Then every night all the current stories are taken down, and there's nothing on the "current day" page until mid-to-late morning.

Yuck! Is it just me, or does this thing bite?

Bob Borden's back from vacation

And he's got a great diary to show for it, including:

Hey, I went to the zoo today. My sister-in-law Liz, the kids, myself got in the old van and did all things zoo. It was pretty cool. I even fed a giraffe! I'd like to give you some line about how I lived through the kid's eyes but the truth is, I almost knocked those kids over to get to that giraffe.

Like I said (only better)

Echoing my comments of yesterday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman today takes the administration to task for its "faith-based deregulation."

That one is right up there with "voodoo economics," the other Bush specialty. Beautiful turn of phrase.

Fair and balanced

If there's one thing I pride myself on, it's being fair and balanced.

An open letter to Dwight Jaynes

Dear Mr. Jaynes:

I'm writing to you as publisher of The Portland Tribune. This is in reference to yesterday's front-page story in the Trib about the potential for gang violence in North and Northeast Portland. Even assuming that this story merits a screaming banner headline, what purpose is served by running a large, sexily lit photo of an identified gang member on the front page, above the fold?

Don't you think this kind of treatment glamorizes the gang life to impressionable young people? Perhaps I can understand the need for the warnings, but do we have to turn the gangsters into celebrities?

If it were a different publication, I'd accuse you of using sensationalism to sell papers, disregarding the harm it can cause. But your paper's free, so I guess the harm is all there is.

This reminds me of your similar "inside the mind of Ward Weaver" feature from last year's holiday season. You gave an attention-desperate accused murderer exactly the coverage he craved.

In general, the Trib deserves all the awards it gets. It's a great contribution to the life of our city. But please stop marring its record with irresponsible practices such as this.

A faithful reader,
Jack Bogdanski

Thought for the day

From pinktalk:

I hate people who are all, "I don't even own a teevee, I have trouble enough just keeping up with my subscription to The New Yorker!" Gag.

On the street where you live

Over here in Northeast Portland we have a monthly "shopper" newspaper called The Hollywood Star. Portland has a Hollywood district, and that's what it's named after. The Star part is just a play on the usual connotations one has about things from Hollywood.

One thing the Star does extremely well is cover local land use issues. There's always a bunch of shenanigans going on with land use in the Rose City, and it's good to keep up with them. The periodic updates run several pages each issue.

The only downside of this feature is what it will do to your blood pressure if you're a taxpaying, law-abiding homeowner on the east side who would just like to retain the character of a nice neighborhood.

This time around we have a controversy a couple of blocks from where I used to live regarding the plan to knock down a recently abandoned nursing home and put up a new one that's about three times as tall. The neighbors hate the idea, but the owner is giving them the proverbial digit. If you don't like my supersized nursing home, he says, I'll lease the space to a drug treatment center. See how you like that. You signed up for a nursing home when you bought a house here, and you should have to live with one as big and as tall and as ugly as I want to make it.

Great neighbor, huh?

The locals have appealed to the City Hall planning bureaucrats, but the odds of them getting any help from that quarter are slim indeed. That's the same planning department that told the same neighborhood a few years ago that a commercially run halfway house for convicted gangsters straight out of prison is technically (I am not making this up) a "disabled" "family," and so the city couldn't keep it from locating in a residential neighborhood and a block from an elementary school. And the city didn't. And the neighbors moved.

I finally moved out myself after another commercial outfit sneaked a methadone clinic into the neighborhood over Christmas without so much as a courtesy notice to the neighborhood association. They're still there / He's all gone. In Portland, a methadone clinic, which brings 400 struggling heroin addicts and ex-addicts into a neighborhood every day, is zoned the same as a Baskin-Robbins.

I think we need a methadone clinic in the new North Macadam development. Let's spread the joy.

Then there's the airport, the infernal, constantly droning Portland Airport, that's pushing to expand, expand, expand, even though the economy here stinks and there's nobody new flying here. The Port of Portland (motto: "Megalomania in Government") is hell bent on sticking a new runway down the throats of about a quarter of the city, which doesn't want it. And the city seems poised to give the Almighty Port what it wants.

When homeowners complain about the noise, Portland government pulls out the oldest line in the book. {nasally voice of Mayor Katz} We don't control airport traffic. That's the FAA's responsibility. We don't run the airport. That's the Port of Portland. Here, let me transfer you. {/nasally voice of Mayor Katz} But here's the city's chance to say no the proposed monstrosity on all sorts of grounds that are appropriate, and the council's going to quietly say yes.

Folks, the airport is unfortunately located too close to the middle of the metropolitan area. It would never be built there today. If we need a new runway, put it at the Salem airport.

Why do we read about these issues only in offbeat papers like the Star and on cranky old Jack's weblog?

Because our municipal leaders have mastered the art of burying important livability concerns. They make deals in smoke-filled rooms long before you hear about them.

I'm sure the airport expansion is a done deal. The only item left on the to-do list is figuring out how to build it before anyone notices.

Oh, there'll be a public meeting on the new runway, all right. But the bulldozers will start building it first.

Iconography

The hideous aerial tram that will be built and run as part of the North Macadam development project is fast becoming the symbol of what many Portlanders feel are City Hall's misplaced priorities. In today's skinny Tuesday Tribune alone, there are two unflattering mentions of this Toy of the Rich Developers and Doctors.

Dwight Jaynes, publisher of the Trib, weighed in with these thoughts:

Just one brief mention of major league baseball last week, and the e-mails started anew. The city is getting ready to fork over something like a quarter of a billion bucks to developers for that South Waterfront improvement and it barely gets talked about.

I mean, we're getting ready to fund a tram down the side of the West Hills, just to keep the folks at OHSU happy. That's OK. We're going to provide money for development near the Willamette that not only will block a lot of people's view of the river but also will largely be millionaire housing.

But build a ballpark? Oh, heavens, there's so much alarm when the state has a chance to come up with $150 million that probably won't cost the taxpayers a dime.

What, those needle-nosed skyscrapers and that tram are more beneficial to the average citizen of Portland than major league baseball? Sorry, I don't think so. Not even close.

My sentiments exactly, Dwight.

Meanwhile, reader James Jenkins out in Randy Leonardland wrote this letter to the editor:

While the Portland City Council is planning on spending millions of dollars in public funds on the South Macadam Project -- a project that has seen little public review -- many of us on the east side of the Willamette River are wondering if the city limits now stop at the river.

Twenty years ago, residents on the east side were promised a main sewer line to be built down Southeast 174th Avenue. As the City Council continues to polish the Pearl District, we still wait for our promise to be fulfilled.

Our project can be built at a fraction of the cost of the Macadam project, yet time and again, residents are told there are no funds on the budget for our much-needed sewer line.

Maybe if residents demanded an aerial tram over 174th Avenue, we could get the city's attention. We don't need one, but it certainly captivates the City Council.

I hope these folks vote.

Search o' the Day

Someone was here looking for:

new york times bill keller's first wife

Neither right nor wrong

Harold Schonberg, the chief music critic for The New York Times in the '60s and '70s, died over the weekend. They don't give out too many Pulitzer Prizes to music critics, but Schonberg was so good that he won one.

Schonberg was a most accomplished and colorful writer. He was not too shabby a pianist himself, and so he knew what he was talking about. Back when I was first learning about classical music around 1970, his reviews were a significant part of the educational process. A few years later, I was a professional newspaperman myself, and so I can relate well to the picture of him, at the manual typewriter and squinting through the sting of cigarette smoke. (I hope he gave those up, as I did. In any event, he made it to age 87.) Of course, to compare me with Schonberg then would be like comparing me with Shakespeare now. But he set standards for journalism and music appreciation to which many of us could at least aspire.

You blog pundits out there should get a kick out of this quote:

I'd be dead if I tried to please a particular audience. Criticism is only informed opinion. I write a piece that is a personal reaction based, hopefully, on a lot of years of study, background, scholarship and whatever intuition I have. It's not a critic's job to be right or wrong; it's his job to express an opinion in readable English.

In the late critic's honor, tonight we'll dust off some Guiomar Novaes recordings of Chopin, and remember for a few minutes the feel of a crisp morning newspaper bearing the Schonberg byline.

No kidding

Today's Trib has a screaming banner headline about the new ground for opposition to the City of Portland's plan to substitute underground water tanks for its open Mount Tabor Reservoirs: It's too expensive.

Hmmm... Now where have I heard that argument made before?

LOL

Dave Letterman was really "on" last night. Can't remember when his monologue last amused me so much.

Summertime is so festive in New York City. Today on my way to work, my cab driver had, in his turban, chips and salsa.

Uday and Qusay are dead. Now Saddam's down to his last two sons -- Jermaine and Tito.

The show also featured an on-stage horse, which defecated. That's comedy gold, folks. Go, Dave!

My prayer

Dear Lord,

May Ruth Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens serve on the Supreme Court until they are 100 years old at least.

And dear Lord, if you wouldn't mind sending down genital acne, gluteal boils, and ingrown nose hairs to Pat Robertson, that would be helpful as well. Thanks.

Amen.

Stag or drag

Rumor has it that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft will be in Portland tomorrow. Wonder if he's bringing the wife.

Hail and farewell

The New York Times has kicked Bill Keller upstairs to be its new executive editor. At least, that's what it says in The Times, but you know, sometimes they make things up -- ha ha ha!

Good for The Times, but maybe not so good for us readers. I for one have been an admirer of Keller's writing ever since the days he was covering the former Soviet Union. More recently, his op-ed columns and longer pieces have spoken to me on several occasions.

Whether you loved or hated his politics, the guy can think and write up a storm.

Little known fact: Keller was a reporter for The Oregonian from 1970 until 1979.

Shocking!

I get a kick out of our mass media. All of a sudden the big breaking news is, George Bush manipulated the truth, misled the American public, and maybe even outright lied to get his way on the invasion of Iraq.

You don't say!

What do you think he's doing to get his way with the tax system? The deficit? Corporate responsibility? The environment?

What do you think his predecessor did?

Where's b!X?

Readers of Portland Communique are wondering where its chief scribe, who calls himself The One True b!X, has been the last two days plus. It's not like him to remain silent so long without advance warning.

Speculation runs rampant: Found a job? In jail following a beef with the cops over his "press" credentials? Paid hush money by the Portland Business Alliance? Detained by Ashcroft? Soon to resume blogging from an undisclosed location? On vacation? Chained himself to the Tabor Reservoirs in protest?

Mystery of the Day.