Fred Leonhard has a great op-ed in the Eugene Registar Guard comparing Portland and the Neil Goldschmidt child rape story to the title city in Ursula K. Leguin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (Both The Oregonian and Willamette Week declined opportunities to publish this piece.)

The parallels to LeGuin’s story are powerful and haunting.

Many, many still-powerful Portland figures knew about the ongoing child rape. They are accessories to a crime that claimed the life of a girl. So far, nobody’s saying names out loud (ahem– Greg Kantor, Earl Blumenauer), but suffice it to say, the list is extensive and almost all-inclusive. Will nobody pay any price for this woman’s life?

Only Fred has (so far?) had the moral conviction and courage to speak out.

Geo. W. Bush and Henry Paulson

If you know me, or if you’ve read this blog from time to time, you’ve got some inkling what I think of Merritt Paulson, ultra-rich scion of former Goldman Sachs CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (If you don’t know me, and don’t want to follow the links, here’s what I think: he’s a spoiled rich kid playing sports team owner and an annoying little twit.)

After a bizarre series of attempted deals with the Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, and the shadow mayor, Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard — who tried like hell to figure out a way to build the Paulsons two stadiums on the public dime, but ran into tenatious opposition from veterans, architects, urban planners, neighborhood activists and historic preservationists — poor wittle Merrit only got one stadium and had to sell his wittle baseball team for lack of a suitable playground.

(His daddy is a partner in his minor league sports empire, by the way, so it’s a wonder he wouldn’t put up more cash to build a stadium if it’s such a sure fire financial win to invest in sports stadiums as is frequently claimed. But I digress….)

The excavators are already busy at PGE Park (nee Civic Stadium; the Paulsons get the dough on the naming deal), ripping out part of the $38.5 million renovations done in 2001. These renovations, that Portland is still paying off, were done to make it a better venue for baseball, including a retro, manually-operated scoreboard. It’s a long story. Cutting to the chase: they’re re-renovating nine years later as a soccer-specific venue, to the exclusion of baseball.

Today comes the news that the Portland Beavers have been sold as expected, and are officially moving to Escondido, California.

I generally avoid the crappy comments section at OregonLive, the crappy Web partner of our crappy daily The Oregonian, but today I couldn’t resist jumping in to the Soccer v. Baseball war when somebody posted an invitation to a “Timbers Army/Sam Adams joke contest.” Here’s my entry, edited here in a vain attempt to punch it up a little:

A mayor, a councilman and a billionaire walk into a bar. A couple sleepy customers are watching a baseball game on the screen behind the bar. Bartender says, what’ll it be, boys? Mayor says, whatever my friend here wants, it’s on the house. Bartender says, no way pal, hit the road.

Next thing you know, a bunch of drunken, middle-aged, white man-children wearing scarves are flooding through the front door, knocking over tables and singing vulgar songs…. pretty soon the sleepy baseball fans are out on their ears, there’s a soccer game on the TV, the billionaire’s behind the bar with his hands in the till and the bartender’s getting beat up by the councilman.

The mayor takes out his phone and tweets: “This is a great day for Portland. #timbersarmy #mls”

Yeah. It’s a joke, but it’s not very funny.

Do me better. What’s your Portland/Sam Adams/Merritt Paulson/Randy Leonard/Timbers Army/Beavers joke?

My wife friggin’ rocked the school board last Monday… they didn’t voter our way, but I think we made them uncomfortable. All power to the people, sister!

…but at least he didn’t break any laws, at least not that he can be successfully prosecuted for!

WooT!

(Thank goodness for Adams that his paramour is a lying sack of you-know-what, and that there were no other witnesses. Else, things might have come out differently!)

Thanks for keeping Portland weird, Sam! Now, where’s my damn baseball stadium?

(Props to Wacky Mommy for the title of this post, originally intended for a bumper sticker… stay tuned for that.)

A wounded Sam Adams, aided only by an army of man-child soccer fans and erstwhile enemy Randy Leonard, has failed to “get things done” vis-a-vis demolishing the Memorial Coliseum to make way for patrician Merrit Paulson’s stunted sports dreams.

At one point, Adams said he would resign if he could no longer be effective. We’ll never know if this failure had anything to do with his peccadillo, or everything to do with the fact that the whole plan is insanely rushed and involves the almost humorously cocky scion of George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary issuing ultimatums about our civic property.

But this is only the latest failure for the guy who boasted to his friends “I get things done.” Remember, Adams ran on an education platform. He also wanted an “iconic” bridge to Vancouver, Wash.

Perhaps his quixotic attempt to shovel city-backed loans to one of the richest guys on the planet will be his undoing. Having been defeated by a handful of modernist architecture lovers (with support from pissed off veterans and a few nostalgic hockey fans), he’s gone back to the drawing board to find another piece of city-owned land to hand over to Paulson.

Let’s see if he can get things done after all.

Action without spiritual vision gives rise to division.
Vision without action remains mere imagination.
Vision, however, with action becomes a means of peoples’ welfare,
As it brings about an inner transformation in them…

–Swami Tejomayananda

I’ve been pretty hands-off on the new prez, at least publicly. But I keep asking myself a couple things. First, why they hell haven’t we nationalized the banking system yet? Second, why the hell isn’t Obama talking about single payer health care?

(Of course we knew ahead of time that Obama is something of a market fundamentalist, so we already know the answer to those questions.)

“Medicare for all” is the smartest thing we could do for the economy. It would eliminate the wasteful, burdensome, redundant and immoral private health insurance racket in one fell swoop, and eliminate the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US.

Even if Obama isn’t willing to consider it, circumstances may eventually force the issue. Meanwhile, a grassroots groundswell is building, with Laborer’s Local 483 among Portland unions to endorse passage of HR 676, the United States National Health Insurance Act.

I urge you to join with the laborer’s in calling your US Rep and encouraging them to support HR 676.

I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

–Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech “Domestic impact of the war”, National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, November 1967