Portland: We’re so broke our mayor can’t afford a grown-up boyfriend OR his mortgage

by Steve, June 22nd, 2009

…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.)

Wounded mayor defeated by nerds

by Steve, April 21st, 2009

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.

QOTD: Swami Tejomayananda

by Steve, April 1st, 2009

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

Why not single payer?

by Steve, March 29th, 2009

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.

For those who fetishize consensus

by Steve, January 19th, 2009

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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