All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

Stupid laws for clueless people

 Once again the Worst Law In Oregon returns to fuck up my state's fiscal planning:

"The surge in anticipated tax receipts will also likely trigger a big increase in the state’s unique “kicker” tax rebate that taxpayers would receive when they file their taxes next year: $5.5 billion, up from a predicted kicker of $3.9 billion at the last forecast just three months ago, according to economists’ presentation to state lawmakers Wednesday."

"Unique" is a nice way of saying "this stupidest of all stupid fucking ideas".

Imagine if you had to predict how much you'd earn in overtime for the next two years.

Then if you worked more overtime, you had to hand that money back to your employer.

You'd go fucking nuts, right? And nobody would blame you!

Of course, the anti-tax "conservatives" love this thing, but the other obstacle to flushing it is that Joe and Molly love their "kicker", without ever thinking that the eighty bucks they get is a fraction of the $80 million that Flav-r-pac and Stoel Rives and Nike are getting, all money that could be put to roads and schools and building places for all those smelly homeless people they hate seeing in their parks to live in.

Plus it prevents Oregon from setting aside a rainy day fund when times and revenues are good to help pay when times are not.

Sometimes I swear I'm living in the stupidest timeline.

If you can keep it

 

Well.

Turns out the "red wave' was more like a pale pink splash, kind of "...like when you wash your Klan robe with your MAGA hat", I think Steve Colbert described it.

My personal fave? 

The Oregonian ("Still longing for the firm hand of a Republican Daddy") headlined the Oregon Republicans gaining one - one - seat in the Oregon Senate as...

Republicans yank Oregon Democrats’ Senate supermajority

 

One. Seat.

 

Fuck me. C'mon.

Keeping the number of rabid monkeys in the monkeyhouse down is good but, mind you, ANY gains by Republicans simply mean that too many Americans are 1) too stupid to be allowed out in public unsupervised, or 2) shitty white people. We just don't get it. These people are catching your attention with drag queens and refugee caravans while they break your leg and pick your pocket. A vote for any Republican - now - is a vote for not just dictatorship of the lumpenproletariat but dictatorship of the bone-stupid lumpenproletariat. 

 

Of brain-dead grievance engines like Gym Jordan and Margie Taylor Greene.

 

The GQP potentially regaining the U.S. House is going to be fucking im-fucking-possible. 

 

Despite getting a razor-thin electoral margin largely through grotesquely-warped electoral maps the fucking GQP Nitwit (sorry) "Freedom" Caucus is gonna act like it got the fucking Mandate of Heaven and will immediately begin to  lard the public press (and the public purse) with idiotic bullshit like investigating Hunter Biden! and forming Select Committees to pursue rumors of voter fraud and trans kids using litterboxes in classrooms.

 

And don't even get me started about the "debt ceiling".

Jesus wept.

 

Here in the Beaver State the usual idiots got up to their usual idiocy - the "Greater Idaho" fucktardry gained another couple of unpaved counties - and the QANut GQP candidate for governor got damn near 44% of the ballots cast.

 

Four out of ten Oregonians.

At least Phil Knight's sockpuppet Betsy Johnson couldn't crack double figures.

 

But that in itself should make you think.

This year Oregon's cranky old people, rednecks, and wannabe finance grifters had not just one but two choices:

An old-school pro-business, plutocrat-fluffing, anti-tax, anti-public-service, stodgy, mainstream Republican.

 

 

 And a fucking lunatic, treasonous, Trump-fellating wingnut.

And they preferred the traitor four-to-one.

 

Of course Drazen hasn't conceded. She's a J6 traitor, a Big Lie, 2020-election-denier. She's a worthless lump of human-like skin, so of course she won't concede and more than 40% of the voters luuuuurve her for it.

 

How the hell do we govern a republic with those C.H.U.D.s running loose?

We. Are. So. Fucked.

 

Anyway. 

 

That's it for politics for a while. I'm gonna take advantage of my retirement for a bit and do some random blogging after this.

See you then.

Why we can't have nice things, Part the Infinity; "Run Betsy Run" Edition

So the other month I mentioned Betsy Johnson, the Columbia County airport pest currently running for governor as an "independent".

Now.

First, ol' Bets is about as "independent" as I am the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

She's a bog-standard pre-Trumpian Oregon Republican. She owns a fucking machinegun, for fuck's sake, and checks all the GOP low-tax/pro-plutocrat boxes. She's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big business interests that ran the Oregon GOP before their voters ate the culture war monkey brains and developed the prion disease that has now lobotomized the national Republican party

So the only point in her favor is that she's just not as looney as the actual Republican candidate, who is exactly what you'd expect from the sort of person the GQP wants to rule the libs with an iron hand; a fucking goofy QANut.

No, what's irritating to me is that as a supposed "independent" she's got nothing, and none of the usual media suspects is willing to lay that out to the voters.

The whole point of a third party/independent candidate is that they're outside the whole system, right? They're not beholden to the institutional interests of the two big parties that our electoral system inevitably produces.

If the states are, in fact, the "laboratories of democracy" as Justice Brandeis is supposed to have claimed then Bets is that heroic lone researcher, working tirelessly in her basement to produce the results of ideas that Big Pharma or Big Chem have intentionally left untried. 

She's the one who's supposed to break the bounds of conventional U.S. politics with new ideas and new plans.

So.

How's she doing with that?

Let's take a look at just one issue: homelessness.

I talked at length about it in the link at the top of the page. My conclusion?

"Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care."

So let's go to Bets' campaign page - it's the second link at the top - and see what new ideas and new plans she proposes. We'll start with a screenshot of her "homelessness" issue tab:

Here's her lead-in:

"Under Kate Brown and Tina Kotek, the number of unsheltered homeless has grown; there are more dangerous tent cities in many more locales; more people using, buying, and selling drugs openly on the streets; more people in desperate need of mental health services; more waste and garbage piling up in public areas; and more people dying or being killed on our streets. No issue demands bolder leadership and change than Oregon’s homeless crisis.

As Oregon’s independent governor, I will lead on homelessness with straight-talk and no-nonsense urgency. I will hold state and local officials accountable for achieving results. Having helped establish the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland, which provides a broad array of services to people experiencing homelessness, I know that homelessness is a complex issue."

Having admitted that "homelessness is a complex issue" Bets' signature achievement on the subject, what she touts as her reason for "knowing" about the complexity of homelessness, is the "Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland".

Let's look into that a bit, shall we?

First of all...North Portland! Ma hood! Wassup, brah! Where you at, Hope Center homies? Hopies, testify!

Wait...the fuck?

Where the fuck IS this joint??? What? THERE???

Y'see..."Bybee" is the giveaway. 

Bybee Lake is a remnant of the old Columbia River floodplain, now locked in by diking and filling. 

It's waaaaaaay the fuck out on what's called "the Thumb", miles away from the city center - where things like jobs, SROs, mental and physical health treatment services are - and even too far from "downtown" St. Johns for anyone but a race walker to hike to without getting gassed.

It's buttfuck nowhere.

Here's what Bets' idea of a terrific place to put homeless people so they can "achieve results" looks like:

And here's what's around it:

This is one of the worst industrial deserts in Portland.

There's literally nothing there but miles of empty streets, warehouses, and docks. The bus service is pathetic: the #11 runs a whopping total of 8 times a day on weekdays, neither before 5am nor after 7pm, and not on weekends.

That's Betsy's idea of "helping" solve the homeless problem; an industrial shed in the middle of the least-peopled part of North, impossible to reach without a car, and miles from any sort of human need-fulfillers ranging from food to shelter to a pack of American Spirit.

This is just fucking ridiculous.

But this is Bets' "plan". 

In the text she goes into detail:

"Set a plan to end dangerous and unregulated camping in public places by creating more safe, designated camping areas and more emergency shelters with access to life-saving services. Oregon cannot continue to use public places as a waiting room for services and/or housing. This failed approach is dangerous and inhumane."

Bets is just lying again here. Oregon law as it now stands forbids the local authorities to use force to remove camps unless the campers already HAVE "designated camping areas and...shelters" to go to. It's not that her opponents WANT the situation. It's that it:
1) costs tax money, which Bets' plutocratic owners and her wingnut voters don't want to give, and
2) means putting the hoboes amongst the Good People of Portland, which those people don't want to see, either.

All of which means that places like the cities of Portland and Salem are in binds; they want to move the campers out - because nobody likes nutters living in trash heaps -  but they know that without the money and the political capital to have somewhere better to go they're just chasing them around the open spaces.

And the "shelters" are, still, the worst "answer". People hate them, and 9 of 10 will immediately run back out to the streets.

So. Stupid games for stupid prizes, Bets.

How about the rest of her "ideas"?

Like any Republican, Bets luuurves her some coppers, and her "plan" includes the usual copaganda about how the problem isn't that Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy but that the coppers don't get enough "support" (i.e. head-to-toe tonguebathing) from the local pols.

She also loves some developers, so there's the usual GOP boilerplate about "...outdated rules, regulations, and fees..." which is more than likely the usual GOP-speak for "all that fucking bugs-and-bunnies-enviro-shit". 

Bottom line? The result of 86ing "rules and regulations" is not going to be more affordable housing, but more McMansions in the 'burbs and spendy single-family homes. 

Developers make money building that stuff, and they won't build low-cost units for low-income people unless "rules and regulations" (and development bureaus and tax measures) force them.

And that ties back into her other homelessness "plans"; if she really meant them to work they'd all mean more taxes, more top-down forcing neighborhoods to accept low-cost housing and other residential options, more support (meaning, more money) for things like treatment, medical, psychiatric, and economic assistance.

Helping get anything like close to "solving" the problem of poor people without homes takes fucking time and money. LOTS of time and money.

Is Bets down with ANY of this?

Don't make me laugh.

She wants to let cops jail hoboes, and she wants her developer friends to make lots of lovely money.

That's it. That's all. Everything else is smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.

So:

But you wanna bet me she can't pull about 25-30% of the vote? Enough to throw the election to the Republican nutter...just like she wants to?

Because unlike this post, the Oregonian and all the other "news" outlets refuse to do what it took me about twenty minutes to do - expose "Betsy" as nothing more than the same fucking sort of airport pest she was thirty years ago

And that is part of why we can't have nice things. 

Here in Oregon...or anywhere else in this fucking country.

Make Idaho Great Again

 The rump polity that is Oregon's GQP has a brilliant new idea: secede from lib'rul commie hippie dope-smoking latte-sippin' Oregon and join the Real America of Idaho.

The plan, if you want to call "something that appeared to me in a vision after a long afternoon stting in the garage and huffing several spray-cans of Rust-Oleum" a "plan", is to take the unpaved portions of Oregon - effectively everything east of the Cascades and south of Eugene and spot-weld it onto Idaho. Oh, a couple of the more deserty bits of northern California are included, too.

Having lived with these people for thirty years now, I won't even try and argue about this. It would be like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat. Let me just point out a couple of teensy little issues with this cunning plan.

The parts of Oregon involved are the least populated and poorest parts of the state. At least one of them - I want to say Gilliam County, but it could be any one of the damn dryland parts - tried to dissolve itself some time back because it was so fucking poor it couldn't pay for stuff like courts and roads and tax assessors.

These places can't survive economically without the engine that is Portland and the Willamette Valley. Oh, and you'll notice that these teatards cut out Bend, too, that immigrant-infested Sanctuary City, so as to prevent even the tiniest hint of solvency from intruding on their White American Dream.

I don't know how Boise feels about this, but if I was an Idaho legislator, wingnut or not, I'd be terrified to see these gomers shambling up to my statehouse doors like so many walking brain-dead under a red MAGA ballcap. If they get their wish the whole fucking place would look Kyrgystan in a week or two.

The complaint that these rural chucklefucks have is that they have no voice now in Oregon. And they're right; the Oregon GOP has become so utterly toxic that it retains only a handful of seats in the lower house. The upper house Republicans have enough warm bodies to deny a quorum, which is their only hope of...well, not really "doing anything" but preventing the rest of the Oregon lege from doing anything, which is why every session now they run and hide. They have no "agenda". All they can do is try and fuck up the rest of the system.

And why is that?

Because back in the 90s - I've told you this before - a couple of fucksticks called Don McIntyre and Bill Sizemore formed something called "Oregon Taxpayers United".

Yep. They were the Original Oregon Tax-Revolters.

The managed to con Oregonians to passing something called Ballot Measure 5 in November 1990. It gutted the property tax system, saving Nonna and Poppy a couple of hundred bucks a year and Intel and Flav-R-Pac untold billions.

But they went beyond that.

The Oregon Republicans became teabaggers before there were teabaggers, and Trumpkins before there were Trumpkins. They went all-in on queer-bashing, immigrant-hate, plutocrat-fluffing, open-carry, sovereign-citizen nonsense before going utterly batshit for Trump. They made the Republican brand so utterly toxic that they managed to lose the fat suburban enclaves of Washington County.

When you're too insane to pander to a Beaverton car dealership owner? You're waaaayyyyy too insane.

Yet somehow, they managed it.

Now this is their desperation play; they hope to leave the fleshpots of Sodom and join the arid manly men of rural Idaho in a MAGAt paradise where men really ARE men (and not he-shes in logging drag), God is in His Heaven, and women are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

You can see how that would appeal to a 21st Century Oregonian!

Anyway, this nonsense isn't going anywhere just for purely procedural reasons. But the mere fact that these nitwits actually want it tells you something about how utterly desperately looney these people are.

And, as I keep saying; a republic cannot function with this level of insanity. At about 30% of the population the pure noise generated by these crazies will drown out everything else.

We can be a republic.

Or we can be Republicans.

But given their current level of insanity we cannot be both.

Even in our own private Greater Idaho.

Into the minefield, ready or not

 Ah, yes…vaccination.

Y’know, I’m absolutely pleased that my son can have at least some of his senior year back at Roosevelt.

I’m excited that my daughter can see her freshman friends again.

I’m very, very glad that my wife working as the school secretary at Astor Elementary is fully vaccinated against the return of students.

So it’s difficult to express how absolutely, completely, incandescently furious I am that within a month these three will be returning home from interacting with who knows how many COVID-infected randos and bringing who knows how massive a viral load to me, who at 63 is NOT vaccinated and, more to the point, cannot GET vaccinated in time to escape the path through this fucking plague pit because my state government apparently considers me expendable if it means getting the schools open.

At least when I was a GI the Army got me a yellow fever shot before sending me out into the mosquito-infested cuna grass.

I checked everywhere. Under 65? Nope. "Multigenerational household"? Nope. There's just no route for me to get protected from this goddamn disaster. I just have to hope like hell my family doesn't bring home a round for the revolver as we begin to play "COVID Roulette" or dance to "The NoPo Minefield Tango"

I don’t expect anyone in the state government to do anything to help me protect myself, since they obviously knew this would happen when they reopened the schools in March rather than next fall and decided in a very Trumpy way that satisfying the people who have been grousing about online teaching (which DOES suck, I get that...) was worth people like me “taking the (fucking) punch”.

But it doesn’t make me any less furious at the whole pack of sonsofbitches that after nearly a year of me being extra careful and doing all the right public health things I was asked to do that this fucking COVID crapshoot is their gift to me.

Sorry. I’m more than a bit irked with my supposed “leaders” at the moment.

220 Million Used-car Salesmen

 I have no idea what to say after yesterday. Confronted between the choice of a bland corporate technocrat who would put in place the sort of commonsense public health measures that have tamped down a pandemic disease in places as far apart as Germany and South Korea, and a raging, thieving, lying dumpster fire of a hominid whose insane incompetence has helped kill a quarter of a million of their fellow citizens, nearly half of the U.S. public screamed "FUCK YES!!! I WANT MORE PLAGUE!!!"

I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.

It's the fucking Plague!

Half the goddamn US public can't vote to escape the fucking 14th Century.

Jesus wept.

Actually...I do have this to say; look at this, from last night's Oregonian:

 

This is "Jo Rae Perkins":

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not sunk ass-deep in the wingnut fever swamp, so you won't recognize the little sticker she's holding. 

It's a QAnon thing; "Where we go one, we go all".

Yep. Perkins is a QANut. A drooling, gibbering looney who has no business being let off Monkey Island, much less into the U.S.Senate. And yet...

Oregon is listed by Teh Google as containing about 4.2 million people.

As of this morning a total of 2,125,047 had voted in this race.

That 's about 50.6% of the people in Oregon.  Let's assume that about a quarter are underage, or otherwise unable to vote legally. That brings the total up to about two-thirds, 67%. Repectable, but, still...in the most consequential election in our generation a third of the supposed "citizens" couldn't be arsed to request, or complete, a paper ballot.

And of the group that did, about 835,000 voted for this loon. That's roughly 26% of the vote.

And - as we've discussed here before - that's the Crazification Modulus. That was the "approval" percentage Dick Cheney was riding in 2008, after eight years of nonstop lies, bullshit, and fuckery.

That's what this loon got twelve years later.

 I don't care how much you love your guns, or your God, or your tax cuts.

This nitwit has no more business in the U.S. Senate that she does being the Dragon Queen of Bhutan. And if you think she does, YOU have no business being allowed to handle firearms, operate a motor vehicle, or vote in a democratic republic. 

You're demonstrably completely fucking unfit to associate with actual humans.

And these hominids are a quarter of the U.S. public and half the nutbag of hammers who voted for MOAR PLAGUE!

As we used to say back in the dark days of the Iraq War, back at the old Intel Dump:

We are so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, SO, SO FUCKED!!!

From the edge of the blast zone...

 The past several weeks have put me in strong mind of the images recently coming out of the coast of the Levant.

Because here I sit, quiet in the gray light of earliest morning, with my coffee and my hands lit by the phosphor-brightness before me untroubled by more than the usual reminders that my body has been here for sixty-two years and I have not treated it kindly.

My family are all still asleep...no, wait; I do have another early waker, the Big Cat, Drachma. He's our sniper-scout, authorized to roam the AO without specific direction, and he takes advantage of that with characteristic feline ruthlessness. His junior partner, little Nine, has too many physical issues for me to feel comfortable with that; she has to be "walked" during her much-demanded expeditions outdoors. 

Here they are together on the east deck:

You'll notice the craftily-synchronized tail-wagging. I'm informed that is likely to be proposed as a demonstration sport for the 2021 Olympics, assuming that my country is even capable by next summer of sending representatives.

Sorry. Got sidetracked by cats again. Damn critters, they're like that.

Anyway...my point is that the Fire Direction Center is a quiet place. 

My kids are poised to return to Virtual School in less than a month - Portland Public has decreed online-only until the new year - which as a former teacher and parent I find appalling but as a sixty-two-year-old highly unexcited about the possibility of one of my progeny returning from school with a massive viral load of the novel coronavirus am kinda fine with.

My Bride, likewise, is preparing to return to her job as Miss Debra, School Secretary (which, by the way, isn't nearly as fun as it might have been fifteen years ago. I'm not saying we've reached the post-roleplay stage of our sexual lives, but we have gotten to the point where "too much like work" is a genuine factor. Sorry if that's TMI, but, there you have it...) and seems to be willing to be cautious about it.

My job, while incorporating entirely too much boring grunt-level dirt-nanny bullshit work, is still here. My outfit seems to be managing to hang on to clients, and we haven't been seeing - at least, not yet - the shutdown or suspension of backlog work.

And I'm...okay. Getting out to do some of the things I enjoy, diverted by the return of Portland soccer, reading a crap-ton, exercising, trying to stay as healthy and mentally and emotionally sound as I can; this is from a recent nautical adventure on Columbia Slough, with the Bride as Pirate Queen.

The only personal drawback is my physician has ordered me to cut back to less than a single beer or dram a day and no more than four or five a week! - and that's cruel hard for someone who likes the drink taken as much as I do. 

I find I've resorted to finding bizarre beverages to sample in hopes that a single draft will be enough.

And, yeah, this one surely was. Ugh.

So from the promontory where I stand? Yeah, things are well enough.

And, yet, when I look beyond that, it's more like this:

The Senate Republicans and the White House - that is, the "governing" pieces of the GOP, if you can call governing what they do - have given up trying to keep to the inside of the fog lines and simply let the nation, the public, and the economy drive off a goddamn cliff.

There's no urgency. There's no plan. Except "it is what it is". At least the House Democratic caucus proposed something, a legitimately-WW2-level response to what is an extinction-level epidemiological event. The fucking GOP?

Nothing. Let them die, God will recognize his own. Apparently that's all we're gonna get from the Pary of Personal Responsibility.

The states and cities budgets are going to crater. The death toll is going to keep rocketing up. People - most people, I can't speak for MAGAts - aren't stupid enough to dice with Death if they don't have to; they're not going to flock into IKEA and Cracker Barrel and Spencer Gifts (are there any "Spencer Gifts" left anymore, outside zombie enclosed shopping malls..?) so restaurants and bars and little shops and businesses are going to collapse.

One of my favorite little soccer bars, the Toffee Club down on Hawthorne, tried to reopen under the "Phase 1" rules back in late June. Much as I enjoy sharing a pint and a match I had no interest in going maskless to share recycled air with random strangers in the Plague Year. I didn't go, lots of people didn't go...and so now they're closing again.

That's...very saddening.

And pointless. Utterly uneeded. For a tiny fraction of the money that went to Amazon and Yeezy and Untuckit this little bar could have kept playing until we have a vaccine or effective treatments, another year or two.

But, no.

And I won't even bother to discuss the baboon-assed jackanapes in the Oval Office. We all know that he's useless in this pandemic as a tampon in a typhoon, except to spread lies and bullshit and disinformation and propaganda for his BFF Vladimir. Oh, and golf. That may be his most egregious personal wrong; he's taken a game my father the Master Chief loved and was damn good at, a game I sort-of appreciated, and made me utterly loathe because of his ties to it.

So here I sit, watching, appalled, as roughly four of ten of my supposed-countrymen roar and bay and lust for this bloated fool, for this ridiculous abdication of responsibility and sanity, and while they do the supposed free press refuse to put their thumbs on these people - both the MAGAts and their tin gods, the Cottons and Mnuchins and McConnells and, of course, Il Douche - for that insanity and irresponsibility and stupidity.

And...so than, what? 

Vote? 

Sure as hell, yes I'm going to campaign and vote against every one of these sonsofbitches. Starting right here in Portland, where the combination of a worthless Police Bureau and the worthless Mayor who's humping them, need to go

But I live in safely Blue Portland. There's nothing I can to to stop the chucklefucks in Cornhole, Texas and SisterWife, Tennessee (with the help of Trump's people and the GRU...) from inflicting this lunatic graft and corruption and plutocracy and stupidity on me and my family and my Blue Portland for another interminable four years.

It's maddening. It helps me understand rebellions and the construction of guillotines; when the rulers and their partisans show they don't care if you live or die, well...then it becomes you or me, jack, and I'm gonna make sure it's you if I can.

But...all I have is a vote, and a voice, and a keyboard. 

(And, if it comes to that, an old bolt-action rifle, one magazine, and 120 rounds of ammunition, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.)

And that's arrayed against millions of moronic MAGAts. Fox "News". Page after page of bothsider Quisling press. The fucking GRU! The weight of the Executive Branch, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

Even if Trump loses in November - and even if he concedes without him and his MAGAts picking an actual physical fight, which I am thoroughly unsure they won't - all those other noxious weeds will remain, determined to choke with religion and racism and oligarchy what I had thought were the growing trunks of the Trees of Liberty; secular science, equity, comity, equal justice under law.

Much of the time I feel like Smokey the Bear, clinging to my smouldering and shuddering Cascadia douglas-fir, alone at the top of the ridge, whilst all around me all the forests in the nation are burning to the ground.

Experimenting with the end of the American Experiment

In 1932 Mr. Justice Brandis wrote: "...(a)state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

Today I put to you that if it is, indeed, a laboratory, the State of Oregon is in the process of becoming Dr. Mengele's lab.

The experiment on trial at the moment is to see just how close to death the news media and the Oregon GOP can bring the notion of a "democratic republic".

Let's start here; the Republican Party has made itself widely detested in Oregon.

We are, in large part, what popular culture says we are; a bunch of plaid-shirted, granola-addicted hippies. But in an even larger part we are what I saw back in the Eighties when I was posted abroad; we are Panama.

Just like República de Panamá, Oregon is effectively two separate states.

There's the city - Portland - that is predominantly liberal and Democratic. And the "country", the rural areas outside the metro area, which are largely "conservative" and Republican. Yes, there are some blue islands - smaller cities like Eugene, Salem, and Bend - but the demographic hasn't really budged since I moved here nearly thirty years ago. Slightly more than half of Oregon lives within a thirty-minute drive of downtown Portland, and we vote Left (or left-ish). We broke for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in 2016, and Hillary in the general.

The remainder lives in the hustings and votes Trump.

And, make no mistake - the Oregon GOP was Trump before Trump was Trump. We had a long period where the proto-teabaggers ate away the GOP's brain from the inside. We had tax revolters and Christopaths and ammosexuals that became the animating force of the Oregon GOP and were, as such, so utterly neofeudal and theocratic and insane with the sort of guns-God-gays cult insanity that now rules the national GOP that they turned the stomach of most of the rest of Oregon outside the real cows-outnumber-the-people yick-a-hoo rural fiefdoms. Oregon has become a deep-blue-purple state not so much because Oregonians are commies, but because the "conservatives" here became red-meat, right-wing whackaloons along with the rest of their Party, and the folks who hadn't drunk the Kool-ade were horrified and repelled.

To the point where the GOP is now a pathetic appendix in the Oregon House and a minority in the Senate.

This is the direct result, let me reiterate not of some sort of weed-induced liberal coup, but of the Oregon GOP's utter batshit teabaggery. The Republicans here have stood for things that even fairly "moderate conservatives" couldn't stomach. They've gutted the tax system and starved the schools. They've let the roads and pipelines go to hell. They've completely resisted even the most mild and sensible firearm regulation. They've tried again and again - since we have the "ballot measure" direct democracy system - to push the queers back in the closet and the rule of law on women's wombs.

They're bog-standard deplorable Trumpkins, in other words.

Here's a perfect example; this is a sample of what's on the Oregon legislature docket for this session:

House Bill 3427, a taxation measure that would fund education through imposition of a "corporate activity tax".
House Bill 2007, which would establish deadlines for cleaner trucks and require large state public construction projects to use vehicles with cleaner engines.
House Bill 2016, a pro-labor bill that would block public access to public employees’ information and lock many requirements that are currently negotiated during collective bargaining into state law.
House Bill 2020, a far-reaching cap and trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.
House Bill 3063, which passed the House on Monday and would eliminate loopholes in Oregon’s vaccination mandate.
Senate Bill 750, which Republicans described in their document as the “bounty hunter bill.” It would authorize lawyers to enforce public contracting, minimum wage and other labor laws that currently only state labor regulators and the Department of Justice can enforce, according to a state document.
Senate Bill 978, a package of gun law changes including penalties for some gun owners who fail to lock up their weapons and a provision to allow gun dealers to refuse to sell guns to people younger than 21.
House Bill 2014, which passed the House earlier this year and would lift the cap on damages juries can award for so-called “pain and suffering.”

None of these are particularly looney-left, and several of them - in particular HB3427, HB2007, HB3062, and SB978 - are favored, and favors strongly, by anywhere between a bare majority to a supermajority of Oegonians.

In a functioning republic the legislature would debate these issues but the majority would rule. The whole IDEA of a republic is that the government acts on the citizen's convictions as expressed through the ballot box.

The Oregon GOP could "debate" - but would lose - on these measures because, well, their convictions have been such an anathema to the citizens that their place in government has been reduced to a cipher.

Because a majority of the people of Oregon ain't buying what the GOP was and is selling.

The Republicans' solution?

They've run away.

Seriously.

The GOP legislators have fled the state and effectively stopped the legislature's business by denying the Senate a quorum.

Now...this isn't just a GOP thing. When the Republicans controlled the legislature (which they did until about a decade ago) the Democrats did something similar when the GOP introduced something fairly draconian - IIRC it was an abortion-restriction bill - and forced the GOP to back off.

The difference here is that Oregon in general doesn't give a shit about abortion. Anti-abortion ballot measures have died by big losses every time the bible-bangers have gotten them on the ballot.

This is the Oregon GOP seeing the "will of the people" and telling The People; "Fuck you!"

And what does our Oregon paper of record do about this?

Does the front page of the Oregonian's online newspaper open with the screaming banner headline: "Oregon GOP STILL thwarting the People's Will!!!"?

Ummm...no.

You wanna know about "warding off depression" by drinking coffee? Which of your favorite TV shows got cancelled? "Why moms rank as our No. 1 heroes, while dads come in distant second.", or how somebody fucking shot a fucking dog in fucking SE Portland? The Oregonian is your go-to news site.

You wanna know how your political will is getting fucked by Oregon's Republican minority?

You gotta hunt through the below-the-fold "politics" section, and do it yourself. If you're a "low-information" (i.e. about 85% of the public) voter? You're either gonna give up long before that or not even start.

This - this - is how you take a republic into that laboratory...and inject it with a whomping dose of poison, and fucking kill it.

You ensure that a small group of cult dead-enders place their own fanaticism above the public weal. You ensure that the "news media" either doesn't report it at all, or, when it does, "both-sides" the shit out of it so Joe and Mary Lunchpail can't tell that it's one side that's shooting the hostage. And then you wait, while the bulk of the public doesn't understand why the things they think that a good government is supposed to do - like keep the schools open and keep nutters away from firearms and regulate dangers like dirty air and filthy water - don't get done.

And, eventually, the People give up on government, and either don't care, or openly welcome the Man on Horseback that comes promising that the trains will run on time.

While all eyes are drawn to the freak show in the White House, out here in Oregon we're giving you an experiment. An experiment in terror, frankly, that shows how easy it is to kill a republic.

Nearly 150 years before Justice Brandis concluded that the states would provide lab rats for the American Experiment another pretty well-known public figure observed that the important thing about republics wasn't getting them, but keeping them.

That's not looking particularly good out here in the great Northwest.