Unconventional Folly

Slouching from Tucson

2011-01-10T22:57:00.000-08:00

I’m thinking I can no longer call myself a liberal, or progressive. Perhaps I never was, anyway. Liberals tend to believe that people can learn to live peacefully with one another. They believe the human race can make progress towards justice and equality. They think we can learn from our mistakes.

I used to think that way, even as late as 2008, maybe 2009. Not any more.

It’s not the madman’s mayhem in Tucson that brings me to this conclusion. Whether—and to what extent--that sick individual was influenced by the rabid right into attempting to murder Democratic Rep. Gabriel Gifford is something we’ll find out in time. Certainly, the American culture of violence was culpable.

No, what gets me is the hope that liberals profess that maybe this time, we’ll all change for the better, we’ll all put the muffler on runaway rhetoric, we’ll get Congress and state legislatures to pass rational gun control.

Don’t hold your breath.

We live in a plutocracy now, a country where money doesn’t merely talk, but swears (my apologies to Dylan). And those with money are telling us to go fuck ourselves, because nothing’s going to change.

Sure it’s a damn shame that Jared Lee Loughner, by all accounts so psychotic that he scared the bejesus out of his teachers and fellow students, was able to buy a Glock and kill six people, including a nine-year old girl. But as the NRA says, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. He could just as easily have beheaded all those people, and diced up a bag of carrots to boot, with a sharp samurai sword. He could have converted an old hash pipe into a blow gun and strafed them with curare-tipped darts. He could have strapped dynamite around his body and…nah, that’s not the American way.

And as for any other means of killing people, not very likely either. Nothing kills like a high-capacity 33-round hand gun. Unless, maybe, it’s an AK-47.

A sensible thing to do would be to ban assault weapons. Another sensible thing would be to require background checks at gun shows. But none of these proposals will get through any state or federal legislative body because the NRA opposes them. The NRA cites the Second Amendment, but really, it’s policies are based on unfettered free enterprise. Any law that hinders the purchase of firearms cuts down on the profits of gun manufacturers and dealers. That’s what it’s all about, making another buck, or another billion.

Far more people have been killed in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then, there’s been far more money to be made by the American war industry. After all, we gotta keep the economy rolling.

I have a fantasy—and just an abstract fantasy, please—that some day, some guy who’s hearing voices coming through the fillings in his teeth will start firing a gun-show-bought semi-automatic weapon at someone like this guy:

Nice, friendly looking fellow, isn’t he? His name is Ron Schmeits and he’s a small-town banker in New Mexico. Was a mayor of a small town in Minnesota years ago. Today, he’s the president of the NRA. Not quite as studly as Charlton Heston, but just as gun crazy. Just like the premature death of anyone, it would be a shame if someone capped him…but also, deliciously ironic.

By the way, most of the political leaders assassinated in the past 50 years have been Democrats.

So short of evening the score, what can we do? First, recognize that this kind of tragedy is just a more dramatic rendition of the collateral damage wreaked daily by our economic system and the vast inequality of wealth and income in our country. Death just is another externalized cost of doing business in the U.S. The solution isn’t state socialism, but simply the kind of strong regulation found in Europe and most of the rest of the developed world.

Second, people have to put their lives on the line. That means way, way more than starting a Facebook issue page and getting a million people to put some slogan in their status update. Even more than volunteering at the food co-op or homeless shelter, as worthy as those deeds are.

No, it will take active resistance and pro-active organizing. Massing thousands of people at the next NRA convention, for a start. Or organizing a boycott of companies that contribute to the NRA. Perhaps moling inside a large nefarious organization or corporation and causing all sorts of havoc. I don’t think it requires violence, but it does require personal risk.

And that’s the catch. Even as we get picked off one-by-one by the economy, by the housing crisis, by unaffordable health care, by hazardous working conditions, by deadly pharmaceuticals, by random gunfire, we remain all too comfortable, so long as we have our I-Diversions. In a few days, we’ll still be talking about the Auburn-Oregon football game and barely remember who Gabriel Giffords is.

I have to admit, I’m pretty comfortable, too. I haven’t found a cause that I would die for. But if the right cause came along under the right circumstances, I might kill for one.

Dead Men Don't Wear Birkenstocks

2011-01-08T21:48:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed, people in Portland live a little differently than people elsewhere. They die a little differently, too.

One annual piece of good news for our fair city is that not that many people are murdered in Portland. Last year, there were 29 homicides, up from 21 the year before. Still well below the rate of most major U.S. cities.

If you want to live more dangerously, move to New Orleans, which has a murder rate of 52 per 100,000 residents. Portland’s rate is just a tenth of that. Other high-murder cities include Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore and Chicago. These cities average more murders per month than Portland has in an entire year.

Now for the less rosy picture: in 2010, 13% of Portland’s homicides were committed by our police force—and that figure goes up to 22% of the African-Americans killed. Nothing surprising there. We all know that Portland cops have a penchant for shooting people, especially black people. Or mentally disturbed people. They’ll shoot your in your car, they’ll shoot you where you live, they’ll shoot you on the street or when you are in the park.

Best thing to do is avoid the police, because they’ve been getting away with murder for decades and nobody at City Hall has the brains or guts to do something about it.

Nevertheless, in Portland, you have a .00005% chance of getting murdered. About the same as winning at Powerball.

If, however, you want to reduce those odds even further, there are several things that could work in your favor (other than being polite to the police).

Take your meds and don’t hang around people who won’t take theirs. Two of the people shot be the cops were, according to witnesses, behaving in a mentally unstable manner and four other victims were killed by mentally disturbed assailants.
Be white. Forty percent of the homicides were committed against people of color, usually by people of color (except for those shot by cops).
Learn knife defenses, which are taught in many martial arts schools and self-defense classes. Seven victims—about a quarter of the total—died from knife wounds. Portland’s rate is far higher than the national average of 14%. On the other hand, just over half of Portland’s murders were committed by firearms, while the national average is 70%.
If you are a woman, don’t get involved with an angry, obsessive or jealous man—and if you do and want to leave him, you may want to spike his cocktails with a few drops of methyl alcohol. The reason for this precaution is that of the seven women murdered last year, five were killed by their husbands or boyfriends (two after they had become estranged).

This last factoid is a recurring nightmare, worse even than cops killing black folks. In previous years, the number of women murdered by crazed ex-boyfriends or husbands has approached massacre levels. I can only guess at why it happens so much. Some men have a “master” complex and when a man sees his slave leave him, his ego is humbled. He can’t let it go and get on with his life, because a big part of his life is mastery over another human being. So he tries to bring her back home. And if that fails, he kills her.

Restraining orders are futile against crazy men. I propose a law that says that whenever a woman takes out a restraining order against a man, the man has to wear a GPS bracelet for a sufficient period of time, which would allow the police to make sure the ex is not getting too close to the object of his desire, or if he is, to warn her.

Either that, or methyl alcohol (methanol). If administered in just the right amount (about 10 mL), it will lead to blindness, but not kill him.

Free is a very good price

2009-08-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

The ticket to better health care

So here’s the solution to our health care crisis: send all the uninsured sick people to another country that has socialized medicine.

This idea springs from a guest column in The Oregonian by David Lister, a genuinely nice and reasonable guy who also is a political conservative. Lister opposes the single-payer health care systems in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and probably also the public option proposed and possibly abandoned by President Obama.

Yet he recounts his own experience with Britain’s nationalized health care and comes away begrudgingly satisfied:

“Last April, during a trip to Scotland, I had my own encounter with a "socialized" health system. The day before our scheduled return I experienced severe chest pains and labored breathing. Our hosts insisted that I allow them to call the health service. After some discussion with a screener, I was told I should come in to be examined. In less than an hour, I was sitting in an exam room with a Scottish physician. A rapid examination satisfied him that I was not in cardiac distress, but merely suffering from acute indigestion.”

Lister mentions that his attending physician said he would move to American “in a hot minute,” presumably because of better pay, but also notes that his trip to the doctor cost him nothing.

If a doctrinaire conservative can experience socialized medicine first hand and not launch into a voluminous rant about how awful it is, think about how ordinary, non-ideological Americans would react. It seems that Americans are afraid of health care reform because they view it as the devil they don't know. So introduce them to the single-payer system and see how they like it.

This would have two positive effects:

In the short run, it would save us billions of dollars. Buying a plane ticket for an uninsured American would be a lot less expensive than providing health insurance for that person, or treating the illness. Of course, there would have to be some kind of screening to make sure the sick person was actually sick and not trying to finagle a free trip abroad.
After awhile, Britain, France and all the other countries with socialized medicine would catch on and start denying care to American tourists, but by that time, enough Americans would have been treated overseas—or in Canada—to greatly expand the movement for publicly-financed universal health care here. These people would then start showing up at town hall meetings demanding that their representatives pass the legislation that recently was getting shouted down.

In addition, if more people spent time abroad, they might develop an appreciation for such European things as fast and reliable public transit, walking, eating food in small portions and five-week vacations—all of which are good for one's health.

Where there's smoke, there's ire

2009-07-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Great Indoors

Last night I went to Laurelhurst Park and watched “Singing in the Rain” along with a few hundred other Portlanders. I'm not sure there is a better way to enjoy a balmy summer evening that doesn't involve taking off all one's clothes or imbibing tall drinks with Spanish names. There were snow cones for sale at a tropical-themed cart, though most people brought their own picnics. The movie, which I hadn't seen in years, is one delightful song and dance routine after another, including the famous eponymous scene, plus the songs “Make 'Em Laugh,” “Good Mornin'.” and the incomparable “Gotta Dance.”

But this is a somewhat political blog, so for me, it's “Gotta Kvetch.”

It was the cigarette smoke. Enough people were smoking in the crowd that at times I grew a bit nauseous. At the least, it was irritating. And that brings me to my point: cigarette smoking must be prohibited in outdoor public places.

I applauded the extension of cigarette bans to bars, although it went into effect about a year and a half too late. Now I can go into even the most divey (and therefore most interesting) bars in town and inhale comfortably. It's great to be able to walk to my neighborhood pub and have a beer and dinner without suffocating from tobacco smoke.

Unfortunately, by implementing this ban on smoking in bars, we have ceded the outdoors to smokers. It's great indoors now. But it's virtually impossible to sit on at a sidewalk table, or on the patio of a restaurant or bar, without wondering if a tremendous fire is consuming Mt. Hood National Forest—except that forest fires, as devastating as they are, smell better than the incineration of tobacco.

So let's just ban outdoor smoking. Let the smokers puff away in a closet or a car with the windows rolled up. Or their own home, if they own it themselves, since very few landlords want to rent to smokers anymore.

Not that I'm totally unsympathetic. I did make this suggestion last winter when the bar ban took effect:

But don't cry to me about smokers' rights. Those of you who smoke should have no rights. You are drug addicts. You suck on an extremely lethal drug that is more addictive than heroin. Like meth tweaking, your addiction harms the people around you. And the weird thing is, it doesn't even get you high.

In any sane society, tobacco would be illegal. Only the largess and lobbying power of the tobacco companies keeps it legal. So that's not going to happen, but the non-addicted public is going to keep making it more difficult to feed your addiction. Get used to it.

Dagnab gummint burrocrats

2009-07-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

If the DMV did health care

One of the main points in the argument against a single payer, government-sponsored health care system is that it would be run by heartless gummint burrocrats. One line I’ve heard several times is: “Do you want to trust your health care to the kind of people who run the DMV?”

A week ago, I got a letter from the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles. This letter informed me that a vehicle registered to my name was not insured and that I had to procure auto insurance for it unless I had sold it or if it had been wrecked and thus taken out of circulation. In my case, however, the vehicle in question, a 1960s vintage Ford stepside pickup, was in a friend’s garage, not going anywhere until a loving restoration was completed.

There was a phone number at the bottom of the letter. I called it. A person answered. Yes, a real human being answered. No tedious menu of numbers to push or things to say to eventually get to a point where you are on hold long enough to watch Schindler’s List. A woman just answered the phone, said her name and asked how she could help me.

When was the last time that happened when you called your insurance company?

She was very helpful and told me to write my explanation at the bottom of the slip that I was supposed to return and all would be fine.

Again, when did that ever happen when you inquired about something from a health insurance company?

Fact is, the DMV Express center at Lloyd Center has always given me better service than I get from any other commercial interaction, with the possible exception of my favorite coffee house. The people there are friendly, courteous and extremely helpful. And most of the time, you get right in and out, with a minimum of waiting.

So, as to whether I want to have my health care administered by the same people who work at the DMV, I’m saying, “Hell, yes!”

Our sick economy

2009-07-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

Nothing Pencils Out

Nothing pencils out anymore. Maybe nothing ever did, but it seems flagrantly more obvious today that virtually all business activities are entropic. Unsustainable. Oh yes, businesses survive, even thrive, but only by begging, borrowing, stealing, cheating or government subsidy.

No business seems to make it on its own. No business can operate profitably without either cutting corners or receiving unearned revenue.

You know the big names, the ones who got the billions and hundreds of billions from the feds. So you know:

--Banking doesn't pencil out. Banks need large infusions of your tax dollars to stay afloat.

--Ditto for insurance companies. In addition, insurance companies have to aggressively deny benefits to their customers to stay in business.

--American auto companies haven't penciled out for decades and now need not only government money but supervision.

Certainly, the failed economy doesn't help matters, but this thought came to me awhile ago, before millions of jobs went up in smoke.

--Big agribusiness doesn't pencil out. The corporate farms are totally dependent on the pork-laden agriculture bill that Congress passes every few years.

--Small farms haven't penciled out for nearly a century.

--Food product manufacturing doesn't pencil out unless the product is loaded with heavily subsidized commodities such as corn and soybeans.

--Most other kinds of manufacturing doesn't pencil out in the U.S., which is why it's done in China and elsewhere.

In Portland, however, it's no different, just perhaps more bungled up than many other places, but definitely not alone.

--Major league sports franchises, though universally owned by billionaires, evidently can't make it unless taxpayers pay for their stadiums and arenas.

--The hotel industry doesn't pencil out, since it needs to hire illegal aliens to clean the rooms. And it needs subsidies from local governments to build new hotels.

--Restaurants, too, need illegals in the kitchen to pencil out.

--Bars evidently will go bust if they don't get revenue from video poker.

--Newspapers aren't penciling out and thus are near extinction.

--Radio and television news doesn't really pencil out either, because these media really don't report news, just gossip and opinion.

--The construction of buildings no longer pencils out, because there's no buyers anymore. Unless a builder wins a contract from the government, at which point taxpayers foot the bill.

--Pharmaceuticals don't pencil out. Yes, the drug companies make obscene profits, but only by convincing people to take lots of drugs they don't need—and then the government or the insurance companies pay for those drugs.

--Health care in general doesn't pencil out, even though prices are escalating at three times the general inflation rate. Hospitals can't make money treating the sick, but instead have to seek profits treating the vain.

--A lot of little boutiques in trendy areas may appear to pencil out, and do so in the short run, but wait a couple of years and see how many are still around.

--Small business in general hardly ever pencils out. Either the employers or the owners make pitiful wages for what they do, and never have good health plans.

--Big business doesn't pencil out either, because it doesn't have to. Big business is too big to fail, so the government keeps it alive.

I can come up with a handful of business activities—coffee, sex, IPhones—that seem to pencil out. Maye I haven't examined them closely enough. Maybe there are more. There definitely are more that don't. Give me your list.

Keillor gets it right

2009-07-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

Potato Salad is NOT Ice Cream

Garrison Keillor's latest commentary is on potato salad and he nails it. I, too, went to a July 4 potluck and found, among the chips and guacamole, crackers and cheese, carrots and celery sticks, pork and beans and fried spring rolls, buckets of over-mayonnaised goop containing finely diced potatoes and some other stuff mostly added for color. This stuff passes for potato salad in grocery stores and delis these days.

Keillor observes:

The eerie-yellow store-bought stuff in the tubs was manufactured at Amalgamated Salad in Houston by undocumented 12-year-olds from the hills of Michoacan. Worse, it is teaching our children that accomplishment doesn't matter.
A child served yellow slop from a bucket is being told that it's OK to plagiarize a term paper off the Internet just so long as it's poorly written.

He then gives the basics for real potato salad: "Take half an hour away from your Facebook page and do the job right. Boil some eggs, chop the celery and chives and green onions, boil the potatoes, make your mayonnaise, maybe toss in a little sour cream, use plenty of dill, and sprinkle paprika on top." To that I would add some dill pickle and a dollop of mustard (dijon or spicy brown), and probably take out the chives.

Myriad reasons exist for the promulgation of crappy potato salad, not the least of which is at most Americans will put up with anything that has too much mayonnaise in it. But one culprit is the ice cream scoop. Old fashioned potato salad is chunky and you have to use a big spoon to get it out of the bowl and a small spoon or fork to pull it off the big spoon and onto the plate. But sometime in, I think, the 70s, though maybe earlier, deli counters figured out they could more efficiently transfer potato salad from one container to another with an ice cream scoop, if the salad was modified to something with the consistency of rocky road ice cream. And out went the big chunks of potato and the halves of hard boiled eggs and celery slices big enough to crunch. Thus potato salad became tasteless and bland.

So you ask, why didn't I bring real potato salad to this potluck? I guess I should have, but I decided there would be plenty of starchy salads (potato and pasta), and opted to bring real cole slaw instead. Not the ice cream scoop variety, but slaw with coarse cut cabbage, chunks of apple and onion and a few diced pepperoncini tossed in for spice.

Rule of thumb: other than ice cream, food should not be dishable with an ice cream scoop.

Embracing Chavez Blvd.

2009-06-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Naming Rites

If you were asked to prioritize all of the issues that can be appropriately addressed by the Portland City Council, where would you place renaming a street after Cesar Chavez?

Yeah, me too. It definitely wouldn’t crack the top ten. I suspect a significant number of Latinos actually feel the same way, considering the unemployment rate, high cost of housing, decreased funding for public schools and shabby state of public parks. Nevertheless, the issue is not only on the table, it’s jumping up and down and demanding attention like a four-year-old who didn’t get dessert.

Not that I’m opposed to renaming a street after Cesar Chavez. In fact, I have the perfect street in mind. It’s not 39^th Ave., nor Broadway, nor Grand Ave. all of which have been suggested. No, it’s Glisan Street. Glisan is one of the longest and most culturally diverse streets in all of Portland—and even stretches out to the eastern edge of the city where most Latinos live.

Besides that, no one pronounces Glisan correctly. Named after Rodney Glisan, an early Oregon physician who married into wealth, it is supposed to be pronounced like “glisten.” Instead, it’s commonly pronounced “glee-son.” No one knows why, exactly, though many believe this pronunciation emerged after World War II when a James Gleason was a prominent politician in Portland.

The right way to do it would be to keep it Glisan St. on the west side of the Willamette, because the streets go in alphabetical order in Northwest Portland. (The one that starts with “C” is Couch, named after the famous naval captain who owned much of that part of town—and whose daughter Glisan married). But on the east side of the river, name it Chavez. It’s certainly not unusual for streets to vanish at the banks of the river. For example, from the west, you approach the Morrison Bridge on Alder St., but come off it on Belmont St., which is only on the east side.

No matter which street is renamed, people are going to protest it. Businesses particularly get upset with street renaming, citing the cost of changing stationary, business cards and advertising. That’s small change compared to the gain businesses could see were their street to become Chavez Boulevard.

With the economy scraping bottom, businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity. The Latino community in Portland is growing—and also growing more affluent. For the most part, this is a culture with strong family values that also aspires to own all the trappings of the American middle class. It’s a market that is ignored only by the smug and foolish.

Savvy merchants, restaurateurs and barkeeps should lobby for the name change, and then post banners and signs saying “We are proud to be part of the street honoring Cesar Chavez.”

And then make sure they can speak Spanish.

Fauna Chauvinism

2009-06-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Fly

There was a rumor buzzing around the Internet for a few days that Jeff Goldblum had died, joining Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. Fortunately for all us Goldblum geeks, it wasn’t true. Hope still abounds that he will live on to make films as great as The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eight Dimension and Earth Girls Are Easy.

The preceding week, President Obama committed the most famous assassination of a common house fly since The Karate Kid. The swift and sudden hand clap executed by Obama was quite impressive. Yeah, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

So along comes PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) complaining that instead of killing the fly, Obama should have gently caught it and released it later—all the meanwhile carrying on an interview about foreign policy. PETA’s protest generated the usual guffaws among the late night talk show comics, yet the true nature of this insidious organization still needs to be exposed.

While asserting the sanctity of all life, PETA neglects to protect at least half of it. Do you ever hear PETA screaming about the hellacious juggernaut of agricultural machinery mowing down defenseless little soybeans so that you may have your tofu? Does PETA ever protest the plucking and slicing of tomatoes? Or condemn uprooting the heads of onions from their cozy refuge in the earth? Of course not. It looks the other way when fruits and vegetables are slaughtered mercilessly. In fact, PETA encourages such carnage.

PETA is a fauna chauvinist front. As such, it has no moral authority. Is a fly more important than, say, an apple tree? I think not.

Therefore, I really don’t get too upset when people kill flies. All I ask is that first, they look to make sure that Jeff Goldblum’s tiny head is not affixed to the fly’s body.

While I was out

2009-05-04T22:18:00.000-07:00

For just $1 a day...

My long hiatus from this blog doesn’t signal its (or my) death—just taxes. As usual, I waited until the last few days and then furiously scoured my records for deductions. I used to think it was a national myth that people who file their taxes on the last day are the least likely to get audited, but evidently it’s true. So that’s what I do.

Then I had to take another few days to catch up on all the things I put off while doing taxes. And then the NBA playoffs started and who can ignore that insane scene now that Blazermania has uprisen from the dead? (Does anyone else think the current Blazer ad slogan is as awkward as a pimpled teenage boy asking a girl to the prom?) So the Blazers lost, but the Celtics won a thrilling seven-game series and L.A. is always there to root against.

In the past few weeks since my last post, our world has encountered the likes of Susan Boyle, a new swine flu, a new Arlen Specter, a new-old venue for baseball in Portland, a smashing start of the baseball season for ex-Mariner Raul Ibanez, the resurrection of Wall Street executive pay and the continued decimation of state budgets, particularly those funding education. Not to mention the ongoing sagas of the bridge to oblivion, the dual bush-league stadia and the convention center hovel, er, hotel..

What follows, then, is not my usual wonky and erudite analysis (aka, "rant") of a specific issue, but quick takes on some actually relevant issues:

Education funding: Portland is still haunted by the Doonesbury lampoon of several years ago about being so woefully short of funds that school had to end over a month early. The prospects for the coming year make that scenario look rosy. And yet most of what I see from Salem concerns sharpening the axe and chopping off a chunk of what's left of our education system.

The state is a billion dollars short of what it takes to almost adequately fund public education. According to the Portland Public Schools web site, PPS is $57 million short, though others think these projections are too optimistic. Whatever the case, it's just stupid to cut education budgets. Really, there's enough wealth in this state and city to put that money back into the budget.

Let's put it in the terms used by public broadcasting appeals: $1 billion is just $1 per day every day for every adult in Oregon. And $57 million is a measly 35 cents a day for every adult living in Portland. Sure, for the 12.5% of Oregonians who are unemployed, that $1 a day may be crucial to their own lives—and to be realistic, it's very likely at least 20% of the population isn't employed. On the other hand, the other day on the MAX, I saw one grizzled homeless guy round up $5 and give it to an obviously newly-homeless family. If the homeless can come up with spare change to help each other out, I'm sure we all can chip in.

The legislature should implement a temporary surtax—for just this biennium—that hits each taxpayer's gross income with a percentage charge sufficient to recoup that $1 billion, or however much is needed.

Wall Street Salaries: Yup, the top dawgs on the Street were down for a few months, but then they manipulated their banks' earning statements for the first quarter and as a result, their compensation is as high as ever.

Conservatives like to point out that the wealthiest five percent pay more than half of U.S. income taxes. There's a simple reason for this: they have all the money. (And actually, when you factor in FICA, state and local property taxes and sales taxes, the fat cats don't pay nearly that high a percentage.

Income inequality is at its highest level since the 1920s, perhaps, according to some studies, the highest ever. Either pay scales need to level out or the tax code should be set back to Eisenhower era levels. Under that Republican president, the top rate on incomes over $400,000 was 91 percent. High time to bring those rates back. If Congress won't do it, the Oregon legislature should. After all, the top tax rate in Oregon is 9 percent, which is paid by anyone who earns over $6,500 a year. That's ridiculous. Bump up the tax rate for wealthier people and put the money into education.

Arlen Specter: Sure, he weaseled out of the Republican Party to rescue his sorry butt from defeat at the polls next year, but Specter's defection just shows how irrelevant the GOP has become. Everybody knows that except the lunatics still running the Republican asylum. After all, just 20 percent of all voters are registered in the party.

As Bobby Kennedy once said, “Twenty percent of the people are against everything.” So that percentage is about as low as you can go.

The intriguing question here is how American politics will realign. For the past three decades, since the Age of Reagan, America has only had a far right party (the Republicans) and a centrist party (the Democrats). Liberals have been out of power since the early 1970s. Both presidents Carter and Clinton were centrists, neither of them any more liberal than Richard Nixon.

Obama has succeeded in appealing to liberals, moderates and even some conservatives. The political pendulum swung so far to the right during the Bush era that virtually every thinking person has joined Obama in bringing things back to normal. The cultists in the Republican Party have labeled him a socialist when all he is doing is returning to economic policies that were mainstream under Eisenhower.

Eventually, once these corrections are made, there's going to be discord. It may be delayed until after Obama leaves office, or it may emerge sooner. The Democrats tent has ballooned to include a lot of people who don't necessarily get along with one another. Already, the administration's kid gloves approach to Wall Street has drawn jeers from liberal economists and labor union chiefs.

It makes sense that political parties stand for something, and it's not enough to just stand for sanity and responsibility in government, just because the Republicans seemed to oppose these values. I therefore expect a party shakeout. There will emerge an enlightened pro-business faction that embraces free market approaches while admitting the need for basic government oversight, and a more welfare state faction that demands heavier regulation and government intervention. One of these factions may get to be called Democrats and the other will be named something else. Either that, or as in Europe. there will be splinter parties, such as Labor Democrats, Christian Democrats or just a Liberal party. Or maybe all of the above.

Blazers: On the sports blogs, there's lots of talk about trades and doing things to strengthen the team and take it to the next level. My gut feeling is the less messing around, the better. This is a team that won 54 games and kicked the Lakers' butts this season. The NBA is all about match ups and the Blazers had a hard time matching up with Houston this season. If they had been seeded against Utah, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans or Denver, they would still be playing. They might even have had better luck against L.A.

Fans want to dump Steve Blake and find a better point guard. Newsflash: that guy is not going to come from the Blazers' current roster, unless you switch Roy to point guard. And let's take a look at the league's premier point guards: Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Steve Nash, Tony Parker are all on vacation as of now, too. Meanwhile Derek Fisher of the Lakers is still playing, and he's no better than Blake at this point in his career. Neither, really, is Jason Kidd.

So let's keep Blake and then pick either Sergio Rodriguez or Jered Bayless as the back up and develop him. We all know that Rudy Fernandez is a rising star who can play in big games. Nicholas Batum also has the potential to be another Tayshaun Prince and should be all the Blazers need at small forward. Oden, if he stays healthy, will emerge as a strong, though probably not dominant, center. For next year, I'd still give Joel Przybilla the bulk of the minutes—the 'Zilla earned them by become one of the most reliable defensive forces in the league this year.

So it comes down to this: trade Travis Outlaw, who despite being a relatively good streak shooter can't learn his defensive assignments and doesn't rebound well for his size. He's a nice kid, but he gets way too many minutes as it is. I'd give up on Martell Webster, too—he's not as good as Batum. My ideal move for the off-year is to sign Grant Hill to a two-year deal. Hill has been physically sound the past two years and played marvelously for Phoenix last year. He is a solid citizen and a great team player and he could tutor Batum in the nuances of the game. He signed a two-year contract with the Suns in 2007 and that means he should be a free agent now. The big problem is that he will command a salary higher than what the Blazers can afford under the cap this year.

White elephant in the room

2009-04-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

A beautiful day for a protest

I wanted to work in my yard on this glorious spring day—get some flowers planted along the front walk, weed and till the raised beds, maybe even spread out some compost. Really, I did. Instead, I went for a bike ride down to Waterfront Park. It was my civic duty.

There was a rally down there at noon to stop the $4 billion white elephant known as the Columbia River Crossing (CRC). This is the proposal for a new I-5 bridge of 12 lanes, plus bike lanes and a light rail line. Something for everybody, but mostly, a lot of new capacity for cars and trucks to fill up—or not.

I commented on the CRC several months ago. No information has surfaced since then to change my mind. If anything, it’s even more crucial to stop this bridge and use that $4 billion for something else, given the state of our economy.

Most of the speakers cited global warming and other environmental and health hazards as a key reason why the bridge should not be built. Roadway expansion generally is a function of Parkinson’s Law—stuff expands to fill the space allotted for it. It certainly has been true for freeways; building them only increases traffic and thus never mitigates congestion.

My own take on this project, however, is that by the time it gets built nine years from now (if it does get built) traffic volume will have dropped due to rising gas prices. In addition, the tolls necessary for covering half the cost of the bridge—around $2 billion—will also reduce demand. So we will have spent $4 billion (and likely a lot more than that) for something that isn’t needed.

By the way, the current I-5 bridges are in no danger of falling down, according to recent engineer’s studies. The Marquam Bridge over the Willamette River is in worse shape, as is the poor stepchild of government discord, the Sellwood Bridge.

All of the speakers referred to the historic public uprising against the Mt. Hood freeway that was proposed to run through Southeast Portland in the 1970s. Waterfront Park was a handy venue for the rally, as the speakers could point towards the end of the Marquam Bridge where there is a span that was supposed to link to that freeway. That ill-conceived mega-highway got shot down by tremendous grass roots movement. A good thing, too, as it would have run right through my favorite coffee house on Southeast 26^th Ave. and Clinton St.

But the repeated references to the successful anti-freeway campaign of the 70s reveals a bit of desperation in this current movement. There were maybe 300 people at the rally, the vast majority of whom arrived by bike and, like me, were mixing politics with pleasure. Perhaps we live in different times, or that the circumstances are different. The Mt. Hood freeway provoked extreme outrage, since it threatened to destroy many fine Portland neighborhoods.

The CRC, on the other hand, replaces an existing bridge and adds freeway lanes and ramps in that sort of empty area south of the river. Not so much to get worked up about.

But we should. It’s an enormous expense. At the rally, I talked with a representative from the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates. He told me that for a measly $100 million, all of the track between Portland and Seattle could be upgraded to allow Amtrak’s Talgo trains to maintain their top speed of 125 mph, which would cut train travel between the cities to less than two hours. Right now, Horizon Air has planes leaving PDX for SEATAC every half hour. If we had trains leaving every half hour—or even every hour—they would offer a faster and greener way to go. If we also switched more freight from trucks to trains, there would be considerably less congestion on I-5.

Shouldn’t we get some of Obama’s stimulus money for this? I know Amtrak improvements are slated for the Eastern seaboard, but not out here. So start writing and calling your representatives, local as well as congressional. Especially those of you who didn’t attend the rally and got your garden in ahead of me.

Go to the Council for a Livable Future for ways that you can help stop the bridge.

City Councilor Amanda Fritz speaks at rally.

Greening the Urban Jungle

2009-03-31T14:40:00.000-07:00

The future was 42 years ago

Michelle Obama is getting a vegetable garden going in what was once part of the White House lawn. Good for her. I hope her example has a profound effect on the 49 other states and the District of Columbia.

In Oregon, of course, we don’t need that encouragement. To be a true Oregonian, you have to get your fingernails dirty. You have to dig in the dirt , starting right about now (See Ketzel Levine over in the left column). Sure you can wear work gloves, but it’s just not the same. Wearing work gloves for gardening is like using an umbrella when it rains. It’s for wusses—aka, transplants.

I usually wait until the middle of May to plant my veggie garden, because we all know the sun won’t shine and make crops grow until probably July. I do get the flowers going and plant some seeds in pots and mess around with the compost. Last year, I dug up all the lawn in the front yard and converted it to vegetable garden, though I left the strip between the sidewalk and the street. This year, that's going, too. My back yard is really small and too shaded by neighboring trees, but it provides plenty of ranging room for my hens.

At least I have a yard. A lot of people don't. I suppose the folks who purchased condos in the Pearl made a conscious choice to live without a yard (and thus, without yard work). Thousands of others, however, live in apartment complexes where the only things growing are the ficus trees in the lobby and the intermittent shrubs amidst yards of barkdust on the berm between the parking lot and the street.

Portland's propensity for density has left some parts of the city barren of arable land. This became a sore subject over at BlueOregon a while back, with the usual anti-planning stalwarts citing the lack of garden space as another reason why there should be no urban growth boundary, so that vast suburban tracts of single family homes can spring up across the countryside and let a million gardens bloom. Some people just hate the idea of real cities and they will use any straw man argument that comes along to dispute the notion of growing a city up rather than out, never mind that growing out means replacing honest agriculture on our best soils with faux agriculture, aka well-manicured lawns.

Hate to say it, but they do have a point. With today's urban design, it's awfully hard to grow your own tomatoes in a high rise apartment complex. Some apartment dwellers are lucky enough to have space in a community garden, and they are going to cling to those little plots like a New Yorker with a rent-controlled tenement.

So let's redesign the way apartments are built. A number of small measure can be implemented and some already have. For example, the city has financial incentives for developers to install “eco-roofs” on their buildings. The primary reason for this is to reduce rain runoff and thus not overload the sewer system, but these green roofs could also support high rise tenant or community gardens. Unfortunately, most of them look as if someone threw a few bags of wildflower seeds around and walked away.

I'm not sure the city should mandate greener green roofs, but the incentives ought to go further and encourage the growing of food. The city also should mandate proper balconies on all new apartment buildings, and not those fenced in ledges like you see on the Belmont Dairy.

Useless landscaping and excessive parking can also be transformed into garden space. Recently, a very ordinary suburban-style apartment complex was turned into an “ecovillage” by Ole and Maitri Ersson The Kailash Ecovillage boasts a huge garden space in what formerly was part of the parking lot, Formerly the low-rent, often troubled Cabana apartments, the Kailash is now appreciated by its tenants and neighbors.

But even the Kailash is small potatoes compared to what could be designed from the ground up. For one thing, people with families usually prefer to live in their own houses and have their own yards. And yet, single family homes are at a premium in most parts of Portland, even in this down economy. It's a little easier to find an affordable house now than a year ago, but not necessarily in the vicinity of a good elementary school or easy access to mass transportation.

Creating houses with yards, however, will take up too much of our precious space, won't it? Maybe not. The answer may come from a 42-year-old development in Montreal, known as Habitat 67.

Picture McCormick Pier on steroids. It's a condo development with the difference that one person's roof is another person's back yard, and so on. Designed for the Montreal Expo in 1967 by the architect Moshe Safdie, Habitat aspires to be a hill town built on a flat surface.

"Safdie's dwelling complex 'Habitat' was designed to give 'privacy, fresh air, sunlight and suburban amenities in an urban location.' It was designed as a permanent settlement and consists of 158 dwellings, although originally it was intended to provide 1,000 units. The resulting ziggurat was made up of independent prefabricated boxes with fifteen different plan types."

Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History.

Not all of the units in Habitat have gardens, though many do and some actually have trees growing on those roof/balconies. I don't know if anyone planted a lawn but there definitely are vegetable gardens there.

Safdie envisioned Habitat as a way of building low cost housing for families. Ironically, the uniqueness of this concept has made the units highly desirable and they now are among the highest priced real estate in Montreal. Neither he nor anyone else has built anything like it since. A big reason why Habitat never reached the 900 units that were originally planned is that it cost far more to build this structure than he thought.

Yet now, with land prices being a major cost of development, one would think someone would try to improve on Safdie's design. Certainly, there must have been improvements in building materials that would lower costs, and the way the thing is so strangely configured could be loosened up a bit by departing from the cube-only scheme. For my money, the places could be built so that there's more yard in one place, perhaps by stacking just enough of each unit on the top of the other and supporting the rest of it in another manner.

So anyway, what's the deal? Does anyone have an answer as to why this concept has never been tried again?

Won't you help?

2009-03-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Don't let the AIG bigshots fail

I know the recession is pinching every pocketbook, but please take time to consider the plight of the poor, besieged AIG executive. Not only are these lost souls being maligned in ever corner of America, from the halls of Congress to the local barbershop, but it appears they are going to lose their hard-earned bonuses. Either they will have to give them back, or else their bonus booty will be taxed right out of their Cayman Island bank accounts. Even Oregon is getting in on the action.

How would you feel if you were the target of an entire nation's wrath over our economic meltdown? Pretty depressed, I'd bet. These execs were, after all, just doing their job. In fact, they did their job too well. If they hadn't put in all those 80-hour weeks swapping credit defaults and diddling with derivatives, if they had slacked for the past several years, they might not have found themselves in the middle of this mess.

And so what is their reward for all this hard work and making money out of thin air? They stand to lose their bonuses—er, retention pay. What is going to motivate them? What will make them want to stay on the job? That is other than the fact that probably no one else will ever want to hire them?

They stand to lose their second or third house, or at least that nice condo in St. Lucia. They may have to sell off their Bugatti Veyron and downsize to a totally inadequate BMW Z8. And after cultivating a taste for well-aged scotch, can you expect them to live on Dewar's?

Won't you help? Won't you please help?

For a donation of just $100,000—that's a mere 20 cents per minute—you can keep one broker in Talisker 30-year single malt scotch for one year. (Assuming a fifth a day is enough.)

Please act today to end their pain and humiliation. Send your blank check or credit card (yes, the card itself) to:

Too Big To Fail Foundation

P.O. Box 31337

Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island

KY1 -1209

Your donation is not tax deductible. But then, unlike the poor AIG wretch, you probably won't make enough money this year to need to pay taxes.

Feeling S.A.D.?

2009-03-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

The Oregon Blue Sky Law

I did a fat lot of nothing today. The sun was shining bright, so I took the day off, as is my right under the Oregon blue sky law.

Most states have blue sky laws that regulate the sale of securities to protect the public from fraud. The term comes from the earliest efforts to pass such a law, in Kansas of all places:

The name that is given to the law indicates the evil at which it is aimed, that is, to use the language of a cited case, "speculative schemes which have no more basis than so many feet of 'blue sky'"; or, as stated by counsel in another case, "to stop the sale of stock in fly-by-night concerns, visionary oil wells, distant gold mines and other like fraudulent exploitations."

As you can see from the likes of Bernie Madoff and others, these laws have loopholes big enough to let a python slither through unscathed.

The Oregon blue sky law addresses a more serious subject, however—Seasonal Affective Disorder. It states: “On any day between the first day of November and the last day of April in the following year, when the sky is entirely blue over a community in Oregon, employees in that community may cease their work with impunity.” Meaning, the sun is out, go out and play.

Exceptions are made for those who work in public safety and emergency services, those who work outdoors anyway, and political pundits and bloggers, who could become severely disoriented if they ever saw the light of day.

Tomorrow is supposed to be another sunny, beautiful day (followed by more rain the next few days), so make sure you take off work for at least awhile and get outside. Don’t worry, the law is on your side. You could look it up.

Buses AND Beer

2009-03-04T23:49:00.000-08:00

One more for the road

The other night an empty bar stool was a precious commodity at a favorite neighborhood tavern. This is a friendly little joint owned by some people who escaped to Portland several years ago from Cleveland. It's said that taverns are one business that does well in a recession. If that's true, we're in one hell of a recession, because this tavern was hopping, and it wasn't a weekend.

Shortly after I finally claimed a stool at the bar, I saw a TriMet bus rumble down the street in front of the tavern. The man to my right saluted it with his beer mug and said, “Say farewell to the old Number 41.”

Actually, I didn't say anything, but he went on to explain that this particular bus line is headed for extinction due to TriMet's budget shortfall. The transit agency has to cut expenses by 5% and is doing that by totally axing some lines and reducing service on others, even as ridership has increased on many lines. Overall, riders only pay for 20% of TriMet's operating costs. Most of the remainder comes from payroll taxes and when unemployment increases, payrolls plummet. Of course, the general consensus of the sages gathered around their beers was that TriMet is totally incompetent.

That may be true, but it's possibly no more incompetent than any other large bureaucracy. And like most bureaucracies, TriMet's larger problem is that it's unimaginative.

Or maybe its managers don't get out to bars very often, because sitting there in that pub, I came up with a solution to TriMet's budget crisis in less time than it takes to quaff three beers. And this is it:

Buses with beer.

People don’t like riding the bus and only do it as a last resort. Oh, there’s usually one person on every bus who is having a thoroughly good time. That person sits right across from the bus driver and talks incessantly. Many of the rest of the passengers either do not own a functioning automobile or are not allowed to drive one. And at certain hours, commuters crowd the buses--unperky commuters who do not have the perk of their own parking space at work.

Buses are not only slow and inconvenient, but boring. There needs to be something to do other than twitch to the sounds of your I-Pod or stare blankly at the pages of a Steven King novel. Though often crowded, buses are not social places--except for the gaggle of women who sit in the back discussing the relative merits of their lovers’ prison sentences. Because buses are seen only as conveyances, they are nothing more than horizontal elevators.

Now envision what they could be. First, take out all the bench seats and put in those swivel chairs like you find in RVs. And between them put in little cocktail tables. Put a mini bar at one end, like the ones on Amtrak club cars. Serve coffee and scones in the morning, beer and wine for the commute home. The after work drink is a common ritual among may high-stress occupations--think about how much safer it will be if these commuters did their drinking on the bus home rather than before they get into their cars.

There could be market segmentation as well. Instead of mass transit, it will be class transit. On buses going to Lake Oswego, Dunthorpe or East Moreland, one might be able to order an aged malt scotch. Those running up Mississippi or down Belmont might serve absinthe and PBR. The rigs headed to the working class areas of the east side could have sawdust on the floor and a pool table in the back. You could have sports bar buses, piano bar buses, maybe even leather bar buses.

Obviously, a lot of people wouldn’t want to board a perambulatory pub, or wouldn’t be old enough. But the possibilities are endless. There could be rolling boutiques, motorized music stores, double decker discos bringing back the bump and hustle. A lot of people like to work out either before or after work, so line up sets of rowing machines and stair steppers on a bus and tie them into the drive drain, reducing fuel costs

All these buses, of course, would have Wifi.

The best thing about this idea is that rather than increasing fares every year, TriMet could actually reduce fares. Maybe even make the whole system fareless so long as one purchased a beverage upon boarding.

Jeez, Tri-Met could actually make money. Wouldn't that be a novel idea?

California Dreamin"

2009-02-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

As the economy goes to pot

In the post below, I advocate taxing television to save Oregon's public schools during the recession. But Oregon is sitting in high clover compared to California, which faces a $40 billion budget shortfall. Forty billion bucks--that's a lot of money. Why, it's almost as much as we are still spending in Iraq every three months.

The chronically clever Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has a different solution.

A school funding solution

2009-02-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

Tax your television

TV D-Day was supposed to go down on Tuesday, but the digital revolution won’t be televised for a few more months. Those of you who use frail metal rods to conjure television programming out of the ether have a reprieve. I used to be a member in good standing of the Analog and Aerial Society, but about a year ago I figured I was spending way more money in taverns watching the Blazers and Mariners than it costs for the necessary Comcast package.

Being a cheapskate, I finally subscribed to cable. That’s as far as I’m going, though. The 20-year-old set I inherited from my parents still works fine in my opinion. My eyes don’t have crystal clear vision, so there’s no need for my television to be any better.

The digital switchover, however, has gotten me to thinking about another issue that never goes away and only seems to get worse from time to time: education funding. With the state budget shriveling, it appears school children are once again headed for any early vacation this spring. Yesterday, Gov. Kulongoski asked teachers to work several days this year without pay. (Being the big man he is, Kulo announced he also would cut his own pay by five percent--from $93,600 per year.)

Public schools in Oregon are funded through an equalization formula based on local property taxes and to a greater extent general fund revenue from Salem. Portland, being the wealthiest part of the state, sends roughly half a billion dollars to poorer districts in more rural areas. On top of this, so much Portland property is tied up in “blighted” urban renewal districts (like the Pearl) that the tax base is inadequate.

A new source of revenue is needed and the coming digitizing of television offers an obvious solution: tax television.

We tax cigarettes and give the money to health programs. Although an increase in the tobacco tax was defeated last year, each pack of cigarettes carries a $1.18 tax that is sent to the Oregon Health Plan, other state health care agencies and smoking prevention programs. Cigarette smokers can squeal all they want about the tax being unfair, but sooner or later most of them get cancer, emphysema, heart disease, a stroke or an ulcer and the financial burden of these consequences far exceeds the puny amount of revenue collected by the coffin nail tax.

So if we tax cigarettes because they make people sick, we should tax television because it makes people stupid. This is particularly true for children. The more kids watch television, typically the lower their academic achievement. There also is evidence that children who watch television for several hours a day run a higher risk of suffering from attention deficit disorders. Dealing with these kinds of problems costs schools a lot of money.

By the way, no exemptions allowed for “educational television.” You can watch OPB only and still not involve the higher brain area as much as you would by reading Danielle Steele, a graphic novel or the ingredient list on a box of cereal.

Surely by now you are thinking taxing television is a downright commie pinko un-American idea, just like providing universal health care to U.S. citizens. Exactly. And just like universal health care, every other developed nation in the world has a television tax. Most follow the British model that requires citizens to pay for an annual license for each television they own—139 ₤ (approximately $200) for a color set and 47₤ for a black and white one. The money raised from this fee supports the BBC. In many other countries, the tax also funds public broadcasting, though in some it goes into the general fund.

The British employ a fleet of vans equipped with sensors capable of detecting a working television and these vans cruise the streets scanning homes and apartments for unlicensed TVs. With the coming digital switch, such old-fashioned Orwellian tactics won't be necessary. Your television ownership and usage can easily be monitored from the headquarters of your cable or satellite service. Okay, that's even more Orwellian, and it's probably happening to you right now (just as it is with your broadband Internet connection). Might as well put it to good use.

Let's do some paper napkin type of calculations: there are 1.6 million households in Oregon and just to make things simple, assume there is one TV per household. Sure, many homes have no TV, but many others have more than one. If Oregon levied a tax comparable to the British fee--$200--that would generate $320 million per year for education. Add on at least $10 million more from the sets in sports bars and hotel lobbies. That's not quite enough to fill the projected $850 million budget hole the state is in for this fiscal year, but it would certainly hold harmless the education part of it.

Taxing the TV, however, seems shortsighted. What really should be taxed is the amount of time it is on. In the average American household, the TV is on eight hours a day—or 2,920 hours a year. Surely, there exists the technology for cable and satellite television companies to track the amount of time each household has its television on. And if that is feasible, it should also be possible to track the viewing of television programming on one's computer via high speed connections.

If a dime tax were levied on each hour of television viewing—or, as in many cases, of sleeping in the La-Z-Boy with the TV on—that would generate almost half a billion in revenue for education. Maybe allow for a full school year and still pay our teachers.

Bump it up to a quarter, you've got over a billion dollars coming in. Sure, that would be $730 a year for every Oregon household, or $320 per person. But each of us has other options, such as turning off the tube off and maybe reading a book.

Fallen Angels

2009-02-11T22:15:00.001-08:00

Two cupids idled by the St. Valentine's Inc. mass layoff ponder better times.

Cupid Downsizing Derails Valentine's Day

Love became the latest victim of the economic recession Thursday when it was learned that several thousand cupids have been laid off in a cost-cutting measure.

“We regret any inconvenience that the public might suffer from these necessary budget measures,” said St. Valentine Corp. CEO Sodding Malarkey. “But we can no longer afford employees who work only one day a year, if you can call it work.”

When asked how people will now fall in love with all cupids quivering their arrows just two days prior to the annual Valentine's celebration, Malarkey responded, “What's love got to do with it?”

Flocks of despondent cupids have been sighted clustered on the tops of tall buildings, while others have taken to drink or drugs. “Yeah, it sucks,” lamented Rudy Putti, one unemployed cupid. “You practice all year for this one day, honing your archery skills, and then you get canned.

“Oh, people will still fall in love,” he went on, “it just won't be the true love that only we can bring. I mean, you'll still see idiots stampeding into places I wouldn't set foot in.”

St. Valentine's Corp., a successful operation for centuries, was acquired in a hostile takeover in 2001 by Haliburton Advanced Defense and Entertainment Systems. HADES sought to train the winged cherubs for military purposes, such as surveillance and a flying special forces team. The experiments failed as it appeared the cupids were only capable of shooting small arrows that could do no harm. Shortly after HADES gave up on the project, St. Valentine's stock plummeted.

“We need some of the stimulus money,” Putti said. “Sure, people say we need bridges and highways and new schools and all that other stuff. But really, all you need is love."

A political soccer ball

2009-02-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

If you build it. . .

I have a great old car, nearly a classic. At one time, it was a shabby rustbucket, but a few years ago I spent some money on it—new paint job, transmission, audio system—and made it into a real head turner. The problem is, these days, I really want a boat. So I’m thinking of converting this vintage automobile into a motorboat. Yeah, a project like this will take some money, and I’m still paying off the credit cards on the paint job, but I really want a boat.

Naturally, once I change my car into a boat, I will need a new car.

And you are thinking, “This guy’s elevator is stuck between floors.”

You’re pointing out it would be cheaper and better to leave the car alone and buy a boat. But that’s not the Portland way.

For example, here’s Randy Leonard, the City Commissioner who boasts that he represents the little guys on the east side of town. He wants to bring major league soccer to Portland. He wants to make sure his friend Merritt Paulson (son of Hank) gets a stadium that will pack in the crowds of soccer fans. Paulson owns the Portland Beavers minor league baseball team and is vowing to put up $40 million to secure a major league soccer franchise.

Both Paulson and Leonard (and most of the rest of the city council) propose to convert PGE Park (formerly Civic Stadium) into a soccer stadium and then build another venue for minor league baseball somewhere else. This will cost at least $75 million ($45 million for the renovations and $30 million for the new park). These projects will be financed by bonds to be repaid by taxes on the ticket sales.

Never mind the merits of the financing scheme (such as whether the ticket tax revenue will pencil out in the next millennium.) Never mind that major league soccer hasn’t been a big draw in most other cities.

Doesn’t transmuting a baseball park into a soccer field seem like changing a car into a boat? Why not leave PGE Park alone (we still owe $28 million on the last facelift) and build a soccer stadium somewhere else?

Here’s the irony. Leonard wants to build the baseball park in Lents—right at Southeast 92^nd and Holgate. Go over there on a weekend, or a nice spring evening, and you’ll see all sorts of people playing guess what? Yup, soccer.

Lents is the crossroads of immigrant life in Portland. There are Latinos to the east and south, Russians and other Slavs to the west along Foster, and Asians to the north along 82nd. These immigrant and second-generation folks are into soccer big time. If a major league soccer stadium is to be built using public money, it should be situated where the biggest soccer public lives.

Getting Washington's ear

2009-02-05T21:51:00.000-08:00

Any economists out there?

I have no idea who Gerald Scoones is or what else he believes in, but his letter to The Oregonian a couple of days ago is worth republishing:

Cure economic death spiral
Foreclosures are at the root of falling property values that underpin the financial future of every American and the economy as a whole. Banks must race to sell homes from under their owners as long as their collateral's value keeps plummeting. As more foreclosures speed the decline, banks desperately need intervention to end their death spiral. Here's a solution I support:

Require that banks hold foreclosed homes for two years. Banks will then work to keep owners in their homes. Homes not able to be rescued will become two-year rentals, exempt from capital ratios. These can be lease-optioned to worthy prior owners or turned over to property managers.

The downward cycle is broken and home values stabilize. Banks resume lending for construction as well as other industries. Stimulus programs now have a defined framework to work within. A powerful turnaround begins across the entire economy

Better than any stimulus plan, it attacks the source, not the symptoms, of our growing economic crisis. Moreover, it is "shovel-ready," has no pork, and won't pass a big bill on to future generations. Sadly, I can't get Washington's ear. (Any economists listening?)

GERALD SCOONES
Hillsboro

There are probably a lot of devils in the details, but it certainly is an idea that nobody else has floated. What the federal government is doing now is like spackling over seismic cracks.

The idea of letting the “owners” rent their former homes is appealing. One thing that has been galling during this issue is about all those poor folks losing their homes and/or investments when they put down less than what it takes to get into a house as a renter. Consider that a three-bedroom house in decent shape will rent for $1,500 a month. First and last month’s rent plus a security deposit, pet deposit, cleaning fee, etc., can run at least $5,000. So anyone who got a house with a no-money down loan, or a very small down payment, isn’t losing anything if they have to give it up.

A mere $128,000

2009-02-02T22:01:00.000-08:00

It’s not just that former Sen. Tom Daschle failed to pay $128,000 in income taxes, it’s that he made enough money to owe at least $128,000 in income taxes.

After all, Daschle has been appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the government agency most concerned with the needs of poor and working class people.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if Obama appointed somebody who thought $128,000 was a lot of money?

“If you want to see what God thinks of money, just look at all the people He gave it to.”—Dorothy Parker

Missouri Senator Suggests

2009-02-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

Let's Pass a Maximum Wage

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) Friday called Wall Street executives “idiots” for using taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses, then proposed that compensation for the employees of all bailout recipients be capped at $400,000 per year.

A columnist for The Washington Independent, Daphne Eviatar, thinks McCaskill didn’t go far enough. Eviatar proposes that $400,000 be the maximum salary for all executives. After all, it’s still more than our president makes a year. You can read her logic here.

Most people think it’s greed that has driven salaries and compensation packages of corporate honchos into the billions. It’s not greed so much as ego. They are reaping more money than they can ever spend, but money can’t buy them love.

They figure, however, if they make more than the next CEO, it can get them respect.

Their behavior is about as mature as spoiled sports personalities like Manny Ramirez or Terrell Owens. Performance statistics are no longer the measurements by which athletes compare themselves. It’s now all about salary. Every year, some baseball team owner is dumb enough to pay a journeyman pitcher with a 14-12 won-lost record and a 4.25 ERA upwards of $12 million a year over four years. And then every pitcher who has a better record will demand a bigger salary. It keeps escalating. Superstars aren’t super unless they are signing super-sized contracts.

The same applies to corporate superstars. Even when they have an off year, they still get bonuses. They need top dollar not to stick around with the company that hired them, but to make them feel as if they are leaders of the pack of the alpha dogs that have been ripping apart the flesh of Western capitalism.

People that insecure really shouldn’t be running big companies. There are some large companies in the U.S that limit executive compensation to a reasonable amount, such as Whole Foods, whose top execs cannot make more than fourteen times the wages of the lowest paid workers. (According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO earns 360 times the wages of the average employee in the same company. European CEOs make roughly half of their American counterparts, and Japanese CEOs just ten percent. Somehow the companies based in Japan, Germany, Sweden and other enlightened nations compete very well with U.S.)

And it turns out, the more an executive gets paid, the worse his or her performance.

Like power, money corrupts. Or as the Bard of Hibbing sang, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Another senseless shooting

2009-01-29T23:41:00.000-08:00

Fighting firepower with firepower

These killing sprees are just getting old. The names change, the story remains the same. A lot of news really should be labeled olds. Somewhere in Africa, one ethnic group commits genocide against another. Somewhere in the Middle East, a suicide bomber walks into a public place and the ensuing explosion kills children. Somewhere in Southeast Asia, children are sold into sexual slavery.

And somewhere in the United States, a mentally deranged individual with a gun randomly kills and injures a bunch of people.

After Saturday night’s latest bloodbath, there surely will be calls for stricter gun control. These pleadings will be heard by politicians. The politicians will sympathize, but there won’t be enough of them to enact any meaningful reform of our gun laws. The politicians don’t dare tangle with the National Rifle Association, which purports to be a grassroots movement but really is just another powerful business lobby. The NRA vehemently protects the right of its members to sell guns to just about anybody.

Sensible people who advocate for gun control are pretty glum these days. Random shootings no longer provoke outrage, just despair. This mood has even affected our police chief: "This seems at first blush to be a random act of violence of the kind that makes you despair for America," Rosie Sizer said a day after the shootings.

I can offer no solutions to the other world problems, and I’m not suggesting one for American gun violence, but let me throw out some “what ifs.” At the very least, they might bring out some outrage.

So, what if gun control advocates decided that if you can’t beat them, join them? What if they fought firepower with firepower?

What if, for example, they acquired guns and got very good at shooting them? Pistols, rifles, semiautomatic weapons.

Then what if they selected a few key targets? What if someone took an AK-47 and stitched the letters “NRA” on the side of the car owned by the chief lobbyist for the NRA? Probably would just piss him off. But what if a sharpshooter nailed his dog? While he was petting it? Might make him think twice about his job.

What if a marksman shot out the tires on the van carrying a pro-gun legislator’s daughter to soccer practice (while stopped, of course)? He’d get mad, but he’d be scared, too.

I’m not going to escalate this wondering any further than that. One could hope that the gun control warriors could be creative without becoming lethal to humans. Regardless, they would be labeled “terrorists,” just as extreme environmentalists were so tainted when they destroyed the machinery used to mow down our forests. The real terror, of course, comes when some one starts shooting a gun at a crowd of people without warning or provocation.

Again, I’m not advocating any of this. I just want to note that the people who have been victims of gun violence (see James Brady) tend to be more likely to support gun control. From that logic, one might be led to acts of unpredictable folly.

The Breedlove Affair

2009-01-27T23:14:00.000-08:00

Desire and Delusion

Philosophy Talk, an educational and entertaining program aired on National Public Radio (8 p.m. Thursdays on OPB) will be taping two shows in Portland this Friday and Saturday. The first program will be on the subject of “desire” and the second will explore “shams, lies and delusions.”

Whether Mayor Sam Adams will appear on either show is not known at this time. Evidently the topics were picked well in advance of the Breedlove Affair revelations. It’s very possible, if audience members get to ask questions, that the scandal will come up.

Political sex scandals are nothing new and these sideshows will always be a part of politics as long as we keep electing guys like Adams. And we will, because politics attracts that kind of hard-charging, surprisingly charming, smarter-than-everyone-else alpha male. Most such men (they almost always are men) go into private enterprise and rise up the corporate ladder; their private lives never become public. But some develop a strong idealism and enter politics to change the world.

These men carry big egos and big libidos. Hence, you get Neil Goldschmidt, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and now Adams, to name just a few. These four men were political rock stars and thus had throngs of fans. Instead of prancing around a stage with an electric guitar, they put their energy and intellect into solving society’s problems. Their passion for change inspired their constituents, particularly the younger ones.

When you are quantum leaps ahead of most everyone else, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that rules binding ordinary people don’t apply to you. You think that your can handle this particular situation because your heart is in the right place and, besides, you have better judgment than most.

Basically, you start using all your persuasive abilities on yourself. And when it comes to sex, it doesn’t take much to talk yourself into a foolish and potentially destructive affair. It can be tragic. The Goldschmidt case certainly was grist for a Shakespearian tragedy. His statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl and the subsequent cover up corrupted his life. I watched him decay over the decades from the golden boy of liberal politics during his terms as Portland’s mayor in the 1970s to sellout corporate fixer of the 1990s.

Thus it’s a good thing for Adams and the rest of us that his bad judgment came to light early on. I didn’t vote for Adams because I saw a lot of Goldschmidt in him. I was sure he’d get his way with the City Council on almost all of his legacy projects—and there are several, with a total price tag that our citizens can’t afford. The man behind the aerial tram fiasco also wants to spend gazillions on a convention center hotel, the nonsensical Burnside couplet, hundreds of miles of more streetcar track, a new minor league baseball park in Lents, and such crazy notions as installing the old Sauvie Island bridge across the 405 freeway as a bike bridge (as a bike commuter, I generally support improvements to bicycle infrastructure, but that last plan was truly a bridge to nowhere).

If Adams stays in office, the revelations will put a governor on his high-octane engine, slowing down his extravagant ambitions and possibly keeping Portland affordable for the average working class family. Maybe he will have learned something. It’s instructive to once again bring up the words of wisdom of former Sen. Bob Packwood, himself a victim of his own libido: “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

There likely will be a messy recall election hanging over his head. The law states he has to be in office for six months before a recall can be initiated. I suggest he pre-empt the recall by resigning as mayor, which would prompt a special election to replace him, and then run in that election. This would be similar to what frequently happens in parliamentary systems, wherein the party in power seeks a vote of confidence. It may seem to be an odd way to go about resolving the issue, but if Adams wants to get on with the city’s business, and if he thinks Portland’s citizens will forgive him, then he should put the matter up for a vote as soon as possible.

The Audacity of Swope

2009-01-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

No. 44

So Barack Obama is now our President. Number 44. That was Hank Aaron’s number. Another good, calm, steady man, Aaron did some terrific things with a baseball bat, including break Babe Ruth's all-time home run record. Let's all hope Obama has as good a run for the next eight years.

I had a dream—not a momentous dream, but a silly one—that Obama took the oath of office and then pulled a Putney Swope. For those of you who have never seen this movie (Putney Swope, The Truth and Soul Movie.), a black man is accidentally elected chairman of a major Madison Avenue ad agency. There’s a black humor opening, where the former chairman dies of a heart attack in the middle of a speech. With the corpse still sprawled on the table, the members of the agency’s executive committee cast their votes on who will succeed him. They all want the job, of course, but they are prevented from voting for themselves. So they all vote for the guy they figure is least likely to receive votes, the one token black on the committee, Putney Swope.

Dressed about as conservatively as possible, the Uncle Tomish Swope takes his place at the head of the table and says, “Gentlemen, I don’t want to rock the boat…” The camera pans to the table surrounded by white faces, then cuts back to Swope, who is now wearing a dashiki and has an Afro. He continues, “I want to sink the boat!” The camera pans back to the table, where the faces are all black except for one token white guy.

Maybe it was the cover from The New Yorker with Barack and Michelle dapping that led to this dream. Maybe it’s also the aggressive marketing of Obama merchandise and souvenirs and all those countless e-mails I continue to receive from groups associated with Obama, all asking for more money, that led to the ad agency connection.

Of course, Obama said nothing radical in his inaugural address and no one expected it. If anything, many people on the left have been fearing a reverse-Swope, wherein this young black man changes into a conservative Republican. After all, his transition has drawn more praise from people like David Brooks and George Will than from people like Paul Krugman. He kept Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and has appointed some other conservatives in national security posts. He also appointed Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, two guys who helped create the economic mess we are in today.

Nevertheless, Obama’s address got him off to a good start. It was blunt rather than eloquent and that’s just what we needed. Arianna Huffington nailed it in her recap (Obama’s Somber Sermon on the Steps). She wrote:

For me, the most compelling moment of the speech came when he quoted the Bible. While we remain a young nation, he said, “the time has come to set aside childish things.”

There was something very powerful about watching this relatively young man, one of the youngest to ever hold the highest office in the land, telling the American people to grow up.

Like about three-quarters of the American public, according to the polls, I am just relieved that the dark era of Bush/Cheney is over and we now have a rational, intelligent president who can talk in full sentences using real words and who believes in science. As for the rest of his program, a lot of it is fuzzy. It’s going to be up to all of us, as he has repeatedly declared, to help him bring clarity to his vision.

On Bush's Last Day

2009-01-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

Never Again

It is a fact of human nature that people can’t stand prosperity. Perhaps it is a survival mechanism that enabled homo sapiens to last all these many millions of years. When times are good, we go out of our way to create adversity. Maybe it keeps the human race from getting too soft and decrepit, so that when natural disasters strike, we have the resiliency to keep going.

If so, it might also be one of those evolutionary traits that has outlived its usefulness.

People who are securely rich tend to do risky things, whether it be climbing treacherous mountains, sailing the seas in undersized craft or indulging in large amounts of horse tranquilzer. Entire nations are the same way. The declines of ancient Greece and Rome have been well documented, but you don’t need to go back that far in history. For example, just eight years ago, the United States was an immensely prosperous country and its government boasted a $127 billion surplus. Then Americans went voted for George W. Bush because he was the kind of guy they would most likely want to have a beer with.

Fat and relatively happy, voters made decisions in 2000 based on trivia, personality quirks and other irrational factors. Bush appealed to their narrow self interest. The better off people are, the more selfish they become. It’s only when times are tough do people see the value of supporting the common good. At least that’s the way it plays in the U.S. Europeans tend to have a more enlightened, longer perspective, but then their cultures and societies have been around a lot longer; they are more mature.

I wonder if under Barack Obama, America can start growing up. The odds aren’t good, given our collective civic illiteracy. Obama and his team may work miracles and get our economy moving again, and then in four or eight years turn the reins of government over to another right-wing moron with a simplistic, too-good-to-be-true message.

Can we all work to make sure that won’t happen? Can we say, “Never again?” Here’s some things that must be done:

Investigate and prosecute criminal wrongdoing in the Bush Administration. You know the litany: the deception that led to the Iraq war, the torture, the invasion of privacy, the firing of the federal prosecutors for political reasons, etc., etc., etc. One that I found particularly galling and underreported is the case of Richard Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare. Foster’s supervisor, Thomas Scully, a Bush appointee, threatened to fire Foster if he gave Congress accurate projections on the cost of the Medicare drug plan, which were 50 percent higher than the Bushies were stating—or about $200 billion more. Given that it apparently required bribery to pass this bill, those numbers surely would have scuttled it and saved us from a huge giveaway to private drug and insurance companies. Scully never got charged and today works as a lobbyist for the health care industry. The petty crooks riddling the federal agencies need to be outed and stand trial--and that goes all the way to the top, to Dick Cheney, as well. The investigations should be thorough and the prosecutions should be harsh, to deter future officeholders from the temptation to skirt the Constitution or willfully break the law.
Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. Until 1985, broadcasters of political opinions were required to offer air time to those with opposing points of view. It was repealed by a Federal Communications Commission largely appointed by Ronald Reagan. The death of the Fairness Doctrine corresponds to the rise of right wing talk radio. On the vast majority of these radio shows, there is no debate, merely propaganda. This explains why an astonishing 27 percent of the American people still believe Bush did a good job as president.
Start teaching civics in school. Yeah, students need to become proficient in math and functionally literate, but there needs to be a high standard of civic literacy. Surveys show that large pluralities of voters—and often majorities--do not know how their various levels of government function. They also have erroneous ideas about where their tax dollars are spent. For example, far too many people think our state budget can be balanced by cutting “frivolous” spending, when in fact, over 90 percent of the discretionary budget goes to education, health services and prisons.

I’m sure there are other ways to reduce the risk of America taking another big gamble on an incompetent president. Let me know yours.

When I was growing up, the kind of ideologues that currently constitute the Republican party were considered way out on the fringe. They should be shoved back to the fringe of American politics. The conventional wisdom is that American is a “center-right” nation. It does elect its share of right wing politicians, but mainly because they have more money (until 2008) and thus can control the media. We’re really a center-left democracy. That’s proven by polls that show Americans favor liberal solutions to almost all problems, from health care to education to the environment. The serious debate in this country should not be between conservatives and liberals, but between the moderates as exemplified by the Clintons and probably also by Obama, and the progressives such as Russ Feingold, Peter DeFazio and maybe Ralph Nader. That, however, is the subject for another post.

The Wasted Land

2009-01-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

De-constructing the burbs

"The idea of dismantling elements of human society and reusing and recycling them, while our oil is running out, is making me think that the "Mad Max" and "Road Warrior" movies might have shown us a reality that's a lot closer than we think....”

That’s a comment left on Allison Arieff’s latest By Design blog for the New York Times. Arieff is the former editor of Dwell magazine and currently editor-at-large for Sunset. A woman after my own heart, she also owns an Airstream trailer and has written a book about these land yachts.

In this blog, however, she takes on the notion of recycling the suburbs and exurbs, the McMansions and big box stores, when high oil prices render such auto-dependent developments obsolete.

Actually, oil prices are not the only factor. Like the cars Detroit produced in the fifties and sixties, there is a planned obsolescence built into the suburban structure. The housing stock deteriorates at a faster rate, and architecturally, it’s not worth saving anyway. Even the fanciest of homes is constructed with cheaper materials than used in the simple bungalows built in Portland a century ago. Wal-Mart and other big box retailers routinely abandon their stores for new, larger locations, leaving an empty eyesore for a city to deal with.

Oregon’s land use structure has spared us some of the excesses of development that elsewhere have resulted in subdivision ghost towns, eerie places where a maze of streets leads nowhere, where the houses are all empty shells and there are no lawns to mow. In her blog, Arieff speculates on turning McMansions into condos or retirement centers, but the design aspects are difficult. Read the entire blog here. Don’t skip the comments, which offer a number of unconventional ideas.

Old habits need not die

2009-01-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

Techy bar to beat the ban

The sight of all those smokers huddled in little packs outside of bars, their frosty exhalations of carcinogens forming a fog around them, has to elicit sympathy from even the most hardened anti-nicotine zealot. The poor devils are not only addicted to a substance that will drastically shorten their lives, but they also have to suffer in the cold to get their fix.

As a former cigarette addict, I know that the pleasure of drinking and smoking is greatly diminished if the two activities are separated. Until January 1, when Oregon’s new smoking ban went into effect, one could sit at many a bar inhaling harsh cigarette smoke and washing it down with a sip of beer. Now it’s outside, at least ten feet away from any door and in most places, the drink can’t come with you.

This tragedy--along with the fact that come summer, I will want to be outside too without having to endure such pockets of pollution—leads me to a solution. The main argument for banning smoking inside bars and other establishments is that the second-hand smoke harms the health of the employees (never mind that a large percentage of bartenders smoke themselves).

The answer is quite obvious: open a bar without employees.

The technology is already in place in many other venues, from cleanrooms to supermarket checkouts, though it certainly can be improved and modified to accommodate the needs of a bar.

Take a tour of such a bar:

You enter through a sliding door similar to the kind you see in any science fiction movie involving space ships. There’s an air lock chamber of a few feet and then another sliding door. While in the chamber, you show your driver’s license to an optical recognition device that can read your birthdate and also match your face with your photo on the license. If you are a regular, you will only need to show your face, whose image will be in the device’s memory.

Upon entering the main part of the lounge, you will go to a touch screen display to order your drink. This will be similar to those you see at Fred Meyer when you go through the automated checkout, and equally as difficult to operate. After all, with no bartender to determine your sobriety, you will need to prove it yourself. After passing a random sobriety test, you place your order and pay, just as you do at Fred’s (though with a credit card, you will have the option of leaving your tab open).

You are then directed to a window which slides open, revealing your drink. You also will be able to order food in the same way. Again, you’ve seen this many times on old space opera movies.

Once you’ve been served, you can choose from a multitude of electronic entertainment options, from video poker to sports on big flat panel screens. Or there may be disco music to dance to.

The décor turns out to be as techy as the service. Lots of gleaming titanium as well as very high-tech polymers. The floor, walls, chairs, stools and other things you come in contact with are made of a kind of plastic that is soft enough to keep you from cracking your head open should you flop against it, but smooth enough to easily clean. Sensors on the floor, or perhaps surveillance cameras, will detect anyone who tricked the sobriety test and then passed out. If there is a person down, the floor starts rippling and gently rolls the body to the side of the room, where a conveyor belt whisks the innebriate to a comfort station outside the bar while a call is made to Hooper Detox.

All glasses are made of unbreakable material. There are ashtrays everywhere and they look like the retro ones from the 1950s that have a trap door, only with these, the butts are funneled through the trap door and down a chute to an incinerator. Fans in the ceiling also suck up the smoke, not so much for the health of the patrons but to make sure the machinery doesn't get gummed up. All the furniture is attached to the floor, so people can't walk out with it.

Say you come in and enjoy yourself immensely at this bar, so much so that you are there at closing time. You go to get another drink at 2 a.m. and find the touch screen is blank and the dispensers are shut down, except for one serving coffee.

At 2:25 a.m., the ventilation fans are turned to gale force and all the liquid in the remaining glasses is squooshed up through them, and there is nothing left to drink.

A minute later, the sound system starts playing Creed's “My Sacrifice” repeatedly until the last person is out of the bar.

Then jets of water shoot out through high pressure valves in the walls, washing down everything. At the same time, the floor tilts and all the water and other debris in the bar flows down a drain and into a series of giant sieves where the stuff is sorted out. Within minutes, the bar is cleaned, restocked and ready to go for the next day.

That's Autobar version 1.0. I suspect that in later upgrades, there will be robot bartenders programmed to talk to you about sports, movies and politics, and, of course, light your cigarette.

Fuel for Thought

2009-01-01T22:24:00.000-08:00

Costlier Gas or Cheaper Hybrids?

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is at it again, beseeching President-elect Obama to escalate the gas tax, with the goal of keeping gas prices in the neighborhood of $4 a gallon.

His reasoning is powerful. The only way Americans will switch to more fuel efficient cars is if gas prices are permanently high. If they go up and down, people will go back to buying automotive mastadons when gas prices drop, while hybrids will languish. This further weakens the U.S. position in relation to the Mideast, Russia and other oil-rich despots, while keeping fewer dollars in America. All the while spewing more greenhouse gases.

The only problem with Friedman’s idea is that Congress will never pass it. To betray the name of this blog and spout conventional wisdom, there are too many senators from states with too much wide open space. These senators will never vote for a tax that makes it more expensive to drive long distances. It’s doubtful that even senators or representatives from the smaller, more urban states would go along with this tax.

After all, it’s just downright un-American for the government to make driving more expensive. Never mind that the oil companies, both foreign and domestic, do it all the time.

Friedman writes, “I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of ways to retool America around clean-power technologies without a price signal — i.e., a tax — and there are no effective ones.”

Huh? Well I have one worth a try, especially since the federal government lately has no trouble giving away hundreds of billions of dollars: bigger tax credits for fuel efficient cars, with the credit pegged to the average price of gas as well as the mileage rating for each model.

The decision of most people to switch to hybrids is based on a desire to save money. When gas prices rise, it becomes more economical, and more rational, to buy a gas sipper. But hybrids are not inexpensive and neither are all-electric cars. And for the latter, you need to own another car if you have to travel between cities, such as from Portland to Eugene.

In recent years, you could receive up to a $3,400 tax credit for purchasing a new hybrid. These credits were phased out, however, as sales of each hybrid model passed 60,000. I'm not sure what the government's reasoning was on ending the credits after the early adopters bought in—after all, the price of these cars didn't go down appreciably.

Coming this year and next, there are new tax credits available for plug-in hybrids—up to $7,500 for the Chevy Volt. That credit is expected to bring the cost of this little car down to $32,500, which is still at least ten grand more than a new Honda Civic. The Prius plug-in will be eligible for at least a $4,000 tax credit.

Even with such generous credits, these cars are idle inventory on most car lots with gas at today's price. Short term—most Americans only think short term—it makes more sense to buy a comparable conventional car that gets around 20 to 25 miles per gallon and costs half as much.

The way to goose up sales when gas prices are low is to increase the tax credit, or offer some other kind of subsidy to buyers. Give each buyer of a Chevy Volt a $15,000 tax credit if the price of gas is $1.75 a gallon, as is the current average in Portland. But if gas goes up to $3 a gallon, drop the credit to that $7,500 level. At $4, maybe down to $1,000. At $4.50 or $5 per gallon, zip. At the $5 level, there's no need for a subsidy.

This should accomplish the same goals as Friedman's proposal to artificially prop up the price of gas, with the exception of raising a lot of money for the federal government. The feds could make up the lost tax revenue by fashioning a surtax on vehicles whose mileage ratings exceed a certain standard. Again, peg that surtax to the price of gas and also to the rate of guzzling.

Oh, sure, when gas prices are below two bucks and your car gets 70 mpg, you are going to drive more. There's a limit to how much more driving a person can do, however. Relatively few people will move further away from their jobs just because gas is cheap. Time still isn't cheap. I suppose the combination of cheap gas and highly efficient cars could bring back the teenage rituals of cruising Broadway and drag racing on 122nd.

Gas, however, won't remain cheap. We all know that. We just want to make sure that we can cope when it does. Me, I don't really care because I ride a bike most of the time.

Meanwhile, there's another take on cheap gas by the always unconventional Mark Morford, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who thinks it's time to hit the road.

Post-Holiday Thoughts

2008-12-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

Christmas without translation

"Any man who goes around with the words 'Merry Christmas' on his lips ought to be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart"

Yup, got to play Ebenezer Scrooge in a Christmas play back in grade school and loved it. After getting past the toy/game acquisition phase at some point in high school, I have never been a big fan of Christmas. I used to knock myself out trying to find just the right gift for each family member and friend. It was gratifying when they opened these presents, but I also resented having to spend so much time, energy and money all at once.

These days, I give stuff to people all year around. When I see something a friend would like, I get it and give it to that person, regardless of season. And for the holidays, I get back to the real purpose of all these winter celebrations, which is to counter the seasonal cold and darkness. In the immortal words of Wayne, "Party On!" Such partying is not as uninhibited as in earlier decades, but a lot of lights, imbibing and socializing helps get you past the Solstice.

Receiving gifts graciously is an art I've been slow to develop. Sometimes a gift will come from someone out of the blue and I feel embarrassed that I didn't reciprocate. But finally I've come to learn that the gift you give back is the gratitude you express to the giver, the thanks for caring. (And then, I make a mental note that down the road to keep that person in mind for a gift whenever I come across the right thing.)

The Oregonian gave me an unexpected gift on Christmas Eve, although belatedly. The paper never arrived on my porch that morning, but because of the egregious travel conditions, I didn't call up circulation . Instead, I read the paper later at a coffee house and inside it was a column by Garrison Keillor. Everyone knows Keillor from his radio show and many also because of his Lake Woebegon books, but Keillor also writes a fine newspaper column, the best since Russell Baker retired from the New York Times. He writes one every week, but The O chooses to publish it about as often as every lunar eclipse. Why I don't know. The editors dutifully run syndicated columns by the pathetically predictable David Broder, as well as reprinting all the Times' columnists the following day.

But for Christmas, they gave me Keillor, and I give him to you here.

An Oregon Appointment???

2008-12-20T22:31:00.000-08:00

Who would you pick?

Hendrik Hertzberg is an editor for The New Yorker who always has fresh information and insight on issues even though his columns come out days after the newspapers and blogs have had their say. In a piece on the hubris of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the looming U.S. Senate appointments in Illinois and New York, Hertzberg comes up with an unconventional and brilliant idea.

He suggests New York Gov. David Patterson think outside the political box when choosing the person to replace Hillary Clinton, who will give up her Senate seat when she takes over as Secretary of State:

What if Governor Paterson, prompted by the squalor of his Illinois colleague’s maneuverings, were to put aside mundane calculations and take full advantage of his theoretically unfettered freedom of choice? The Senate was originally conceived as a sort of chamber of notables, but most of its members, over the years, have been notable mainly for their mediocrity. New York is full of interesting people. Want some suggestions? Try these, collected from an informal canvass—a baker’s dozen, in alphabetical order:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, thoughtful and scholarly, would give the new President someone to shoot hoops with. Christiane Amanpour would be a slam dunk for the Foreign Relations Committee. The impossibly distinguished Vartan Gregorian is a one-man academy of arts, letters, and the humanities. Bill T. Jones, who doesn’t need words to make a speech, would make C-SPAN 2 worth watching. A non-dynastic Kennedy, the novelist William, would give upstate New York representation of the first order. Paul Krugman would provide ornery economic smarts. Arthur Laurents, conveniently, is already in Washington, directing the National Theatre revival of his “West Side Story.” If you doubt that Lou Reed knows politics, listen to his album “New York.” Felix Rohatyn is as senatorial as you can get without wearing a toga. Ed Sanders—poet, Pentagon levitator, classics scholar, founding member of the Fugs—is a political force in Woodstock, New York. Toni Morrison’s majestic voice would warm the Senate chamber. No one who ever spent the equivalent of two Senate terms in a complex, ceaselessly scrutinized job in New York has ever done it better than Joe Torre did as manager of the Yankees. Harold Varmus, the head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and, like Morrison, a Nobel laureate, got lots of money from Congress for the National Institutes of Health when he ran them, during the nineteen-nineties. Perhaps he could do the same for New York—not that such petty considerations are worthy of this exercise.

Read the entire column here.

That got me to thinking fanciful thoughts that can only be thought on an inclement day cloistered inside—with an hour’s break to slog a few miles in the snow just for some exercise. Okay, what if Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden somehow got appointed to a post in Obama’s cabinet? Not likely, since his big issue, health care, has been handed to former colleague Tom Daschle. But just suppose? And suppose that Gov. Ted Kulongoski departs from his pedestrian, professional politician’s posture and thinks creatively for once? Even less likely, for sure. But play along with me.

Who among our Oregon citizenry should the Guv select?

It’s not as if Oregon has always sent seasoned politicians to Washington. Wayne Morse, one the greatest, had never been elected to anything before becoming the “tiger of the Senate.” Maureen Neuberger served adequately in the Senate when her husband, Richard, died in the early sixties.

So how about William Kittredge, the foremost authority on the modern West (see Owning it All, among other writings)? Storm Large, who was in the middle of a lot of political events this year, would certainly shake things up in Washington. For a tough, no-nonsense approach to the nation’s business, one could do no better than Gert Boyle, chair of Columbia Sportswear. On the other hand, to get Oregon’s fair share of federal pork, go with Oregon State University basketball coach Craig Robinson, who is Barack Obama’s brother-in-law. Trailblazer GM Kevin Pritchard has shown he is an organizational genius and a great judge of character and talent—and he’s assembled a near-perfect team now; making more trades would only mess up the chemistry. Phil Stanford, who seemed to know a lot of inside stuff, is looking for a new job, I hear. And Simpson’s creator Matt Groening could form the first Senate comedy caucus with Al Franken (if Franken squeaks in).

Who else? What are your suggestions?

Accentuate the Positive

2008-12-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

More Time for ‘Zilla

We break once again from the mundane world of politics, policy and urban agriculture to confront a more serious threat to our city: mainly, what’s with the Blazers as of late?

Going into tonight’s game against Sacramento, the Portland Trailblazers have lost three in a row—three squeakers. Two were decided by last-second shots and the third went into double overtime. They could have—and arguably should have—won all three games.

Blame can be passed around on these losses. In the first two, Travis Outlaw played not only miserably but stupidly, getting beat on defense and attempting poor shots on offense. In the overtime loss to the Clippers, Steve Blake was suddenly possessed by the ghost of Chris Dudley and missed four crucial free throws down the stretch.

These games did not have to be as close as they were. The Blazers, however, are taking a risk and suffering big when that risk doesn’t pay off. They need to make a decision now: whether to go for a high playoff seed by changing their starting lineup or try to develop Greg Oden and because of that settle for probably the last seed or possibly not make the playoffs at all.

Rookie center Oden seems to be a nice, hardworking kid, but as for this year, he’s neither the best center on the team nor the best rookie. Rudy Fernandez, the perpetual motion machine from Spain, could be contending for Rookie of the Year on many other teams, but on the Blazers he doesn’t get the minutes and generally plays behind Brandon Roy.

More pertinently, Joel Pryzbilla has been the Blazers unsung hero so far this season, even gracefully yielding his starting slot at center to Oden and not complaining about declining minutes. But somebody better complain, because Pryzbilla is demonstrably better than Oden. Even now playing less than half the game, ‘Zilla is the Blazers leader in rebounding and blocked shots, the two major stats for centers.

A far more telling stat is the +/- column. You don’t see this stat in The Oregonian’s abbreviated box scores, but you can on ESPN.com or Yahoo Sports. What the +/- shows is how many points his team gained or lost while he was in the game. If you have a +10 for a game, then your team scored 10 more points than the opposition while you played.

Here is the +/- line for Oden and Pryzbilla for the last three games:

Game.....................Orlando................Utah................L.A. Clippers

Oden......................... -10......................-8........................... -3

Pryzbilla ..................+15 ......................-1...........................-2

Now this is not a perfect stat for a player, because the score depends on the other four players in the game. With Blazers coach substituting a whole second unit at a time, it can be like comparing apples to kumquats.

Generally, the starters should have a better +/- than the bench, or else they shouldn’t be starters. Oden plays most of his minutes with Roy, Lamarcus Aldridge, Steve Blake and a rotation of Nick Batum, Outlaw and Fernandez. Pryzbilla usually plays with Sergio Rodriguez, Channing Frye, Outlaw and Fernandez. In the Utah game, Pryzbilla played a lot with Outlaw, who had a horrendous -12 for the game. In the Clippers game, he was stuck for much of the time with Rodriguez, who had a -13 impact on the outcome.

In a close game earlier this year, Oden had a -22 while Pryzbilla was +23.

It’s clear that Pryzbilla should be the one playing 30-35 minutes a game, with Oden getting the remainder. Given real starter’s minutes, Pryzbilla would easily be among the top five in the league in rebounding and blocked shots. He’s not a scorer, but he’s improved immensely in the past year. He’s developed a little hook shot and he seems to have improved his ability to catch passes, which has been his major downside over the years. His free throw shooting is now above average.

More than that, the Blazers seem more relaxed and confident with Pryzbilla in the middle. He’s predictable. He knows what to do and he’s go their back. Oden makes rookie mistakes and is inconsistent. He may develop into an all-star center, but he’s not holding his own against Dwight Howard of Orlando, or even Kendrick Perkins of the Celtics. Someday, he might be another Nate Thurmond, or merely another Tree Rollins. We know what Pryzbilla is going to be, just what he is not, maybe a bit better.

Apparently, after all the hype about Oden—and then the delay of a year because of his injury—the Blazers think they need to play him as much as possible. And talk about hype. Watch a Blazer game and during the commercial breaks, he’s pitching more products than the Schonz ever did. His face is billboarded throughout the city and splashed across all kinds of media. Meanwhile, Pryzbilla probably might get mentioned in the back pages of Mother Earth News.

There are times when McMillan sees the game slipping away and puts Pryzbilla in hoping his defense will reverse the momentum. Yet he seems committed to starting Oden and playing him the majority of the time—or else upper management had ordered him to do so.

To win, the Blazers don’t need to rush Oden’s education in the NBA.

They would be better off to put Oden back on the bench and let him be the understudy to Pryzbilla this year. He would feel a lot less pressure and thus be more relaxed when his time to play comes around. He also fits in with the faster paced second unit.

More importantly, the Blazers would start winning again.

An extraordinary rendition

2008-12-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

Saving Oregon via Outsourcing

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski has released his budget for the coming biennium and it appears the state faces a $1 billion shortfall because of the lousy national economy. The economic malaise is going to precipitate hundreds of cuts to state agency budgets, plus, perhaps, a few small tax increases.

Now if our government was run like a business—specifically like a modern corporation—instead of minor decimation to most departments, the main tactic would be to spin off the unprofitable divisions. And if that’s not possible, then outsource everything that can be outsourced.

Of all the general fund and lottery money spent by the state of Oregon, 93 percent goes to one of three categories: education, health and human resources, and public safety. These are sometimes called “education, medication and incarceration.”

How could we save money in Oregon through outsourcing? Under the Oregon Health Plan, the state pays for certain approved medical procedures and some prescription drugs. Those drugs could be purchased more cheaply from India. In fact, it may also be less costly to send patients to hospitals in several Asian nations that specialize in medical tourism than to treat them here. A lot of the state's health services, however, are for things like immunizing children, pre-natal care and drug treatment—things that might not be feasible overseas.

More than half the budget goes for education, ranging from kindergarten to the university level. Higher education remains grossly underfunded here, even while tuition at state universities continues to rise beyond the means of the middle class. The offspring of wealthy moguls and plutocrats of other nations have flooded Oregon's campuses. Perhaps, then, Oregon should send its students to lower-priced colleges in Europe and elsewhere. After all, it's often said that travel broadens one's perspective.

Oregon college professors complain they are not paid as much as their peers in other states, yet for a fraction of their salaries, the state could hire professors in India to teach via teleconferencing or satellite video hookups. If a daily newspaper in California can do it, why not the University of Oregon, which today is renowned primarily for its football team, anyway.

The best solution, however, comes out of the public safety budget, which comprises 17% of the total. Because of Measure 57, Oregon will have to spend well over $1 billion in the next budget cycle on prisons. Hmmn...$1 billion. Exactly the same as the current budget shortfall.

What if we outsourced all incarceration to some other country? Shortly, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of former Bush Administration officials seeking work and many of them will be experts on the practice of “extraordinary rendition.” They could be brought in as consultants to match Oregon's convicted criminals with the best and most economical black sites. Surely, it would be cheaper to house our prison population in Eastern Europe or Egypt than in Oregon.

Wonder if Kevin Mannix had this in mind all along?

Global warming's upside

2008-11-30T22:16:00.001-08:00

Raspberries in December

I have to admit to some guilty pleasures from the consequences of global warming. Today’s high temperature of 59 in Portland was about a degree off the all-time high for this date. Last night, it was so warm I decided to go on a two-hour bike ride throughout the city, not something one normally does for pleasure at the end of November.

The best investment I made this year was in raspberries—specifically, four everbearing raspberry bushes. I only wish I bought at least four more. I didn’t realize how apt the “everbearing” name is. This morning I picked just shy of a half-basket of the berries, enough for

ten substantial raspberry pancakes, which were delicious.

The berries started producing in July and never stopped. They may continue to ripen well into December. After doing some research on them, it appears they will keep it up until we have a frost. Until that moment, my raspberry patch is like a little bit of summer in the shadows of the winter solstice.

My .02 worth

2008-11-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

Get Serious About Gas Tax

Governor Kulongoski has a plan to finance new road and bridge construction that would jump vehicle registration fees from $27 per year to $100 and charge $100 for vehicle titling fees. He also wants to up the gax tax by two cents a gallon.

Two cents? Gimme a break.

What is really rash is that people are complaining about it.

Drive around town and you see a large disparity in gas prices. I’ve noticed a difference of 12 cents between the highest price for regular and the lowest price on the same day.

I don’t know why people get gas at the Shell station at Southeast 39th and Stark, when the Arco station four blocks away on Belmont is always at least a dime cheaper. Yet the Shell station stays in business. Maybe it’s just more convenient.

In the past year, the price of gas has fluctuated by more than $2 per gallon. Somehow, we survived when the price was at $4-plus a gallon.

My point is that two stinking pennies is nothing when the price of gas changes more than that from one day to the next. Even a dime is not that big a deal. The governor should ask for at least a ten-cent hike in the gas tax. We won’t really notice it and it will pay for five times as many road repairs.

Of course, if he really meant to be green and save the planet, he’d be seeking a 50-cent or better increase in the gas tax, or perhaps a 20-cent increase per year, with the proceeds freed to go to improving railroads and other general fund uses. Some of the money could go to tax relief for people in rural areas where they have to drive longer distances.

A serious increase in gas taxes would get people to drive more fuel efficient cars or just drive less. I know, it seems un-American to force people to cut down on driving, but the way it is now, when gas prices increase, all that extra money goes into oil company profits and the coffers of unfriendly dictators around the globe. We might as well keep a little for ourselves.

The lesser of two evils is still evil

2008-11-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

Dems Get Too Clever by Half

Did the Oregon Legislature outfox itself in the recent election, or is someone pulling a fast one on the voters?

When Keven Mannix, who sponsored Measure 11 fourteen years ago, raised enough signatures to put another mandatory sentencing law on the ballot, Democrats in the legislature thought they had a clever way of foiling his initiative. They drafted a less expensive measure with the same intent of locking up meth dealers, identity thieves and others committing property crimes, only not so many of them.

Mannix’s baby, Measure 61, was estimated to cost as much as $797 million over the next five years, plus forcing Oregon to float bonds of over $1 billion to build more prisons. The legislature’s alternative, Measure 57, would have cost around $400 million over the next five years and required the state to borrow $314 million for prison construction. It also promises some drug treatment for inmates.

Property and drug-related crimes are on a lot of citizens’ minds, most likely because of sensationalized television news reports. Actually, property crimes have been declining for the past several years. So with the economy tumbling like a wounded duck, with the Oregon Health Plan on short rations, with both public and higher education grossly underfunded, I opposed both of these measures. A lot of people did. The Oregonian’s editorial page came out against the measures. A City Club research study concluded that neither measure was in the best interest of the state.

An unusual thing happened when the City Club’s research committee presented its report to the members assembled at a Friday forum luncheon. A motion was made to substitute a minority report that opposed 61 but urged adoption of 57. Some of the speakers spoke glowingly of 57, but others argued that although both measures were a waste of money, 57 was a lesser waste of money. They predicted both measures would pass, so it was crucial that 57 garner more votes than 61, because the measure with the most votes would be the one implemented.

I asked people at the club, some of whom are far more connected politically than I am, what the polls revealed. Everyone assured me that polling showed both measures winning by big margins, with 61 somewhat ahead. But no one could give me specific numbers. Over the next few weeks, I kept asking for poll numbers and all I ever heard was “they’re both going to pass easily, so vote for 57.”

Usually, I turn my ballot in early, but not this year. I kept waffling between following my principles and going along with the tactics of the legislature. Finally, on the Monday before the election, I held my nose and voted for 57—and against 61.

The election results come in and guess what? Measure 57 passes big time. Measure 61? Down the tubes. Yes, by a slim margin, but it lost. So now the state has to pay for this boondoggle, while funding for education and health care dwindles ever more.

Measure 57 won by 374,000 votes out of over 1.6 million cast. I wonder how many of those votes came from people like me, who reluctantly voted for the lesser of two evils. I suppose a survey could be taken to find out. Since the tactical argument was pervasive, it’s very likely that the majority for Measure 57 came from people who were opposed to it, but voted for it to keep Measure 61 from going into effect.

If that’s the case, it seems the legislature screwed up—and screwed us taxpayers royally.

Think it over

2008-11-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton and the Supremes

Compared to the 2004 election, Supreme Court appointments were not so much of a noteworthy issue this year. Of course, after Bush won in 2004, he appointed John Roberts as Chief Justice and Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice, leaving a hyper-conservative legacy for decades. Thus the swing vote on the Court switched from Sandra Day O’Connor to the more conservative Anthony Kennedy.

Still, had McCain won the election, there could have been dreadful consequences for the Court. Three of the so-called liberals or moderates on the Court want to retire (John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and David Souter). McCain, according to his campaign promise, would have appointed replacements similar in their radical thinking to Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Roberts and Alito. These guys, despite claiming to adhere strictly to the Constitution, are judicial activists certainly as much as the former liberal justices they disparage.

Thankfully, Barack Obama will get to appoint the people to replace Stevens, Ginsberg and Souter. He will have a dilemma considerably different than that faced by Bush and Cheney. The Republicans’ quandary was to find someone who passed all their litmus tests and who also could be passed off as qualified to be elevated to the Supreme Court. It wasn’t always easy (remember Harriet Miers?).

Obama faces a totally opposite challenge, that of choosing from a veritable cornucopia of extraordinary candidates—judges, law professors, attorneys general and many politicians who also are legal scholars—who are not locked into a rigid ideology. I’m sure every advisor and wannabe advisor to Obama will have a suggestion. His choice, then, won’t make everyone happy.

So my suggestion is Hillary Clinton. No, she has never sat on a judicial bench, but that’s not a prerequisite for the Supreme Court. Neither had Earl Warren or William Rehnquist. One of my favorites, William O. Douglas, only had experience on the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Hillary graduated from Yale Law School and was listed as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America before she was 30. She’s been a U.S. Senator now for eight years. Many Supreme Court observers credit the conservative O’Conner’s pragmatism and independence to her experience in the Arizona legislature.

No one doubts Hillary’s tenacity or mental capacity. In fact, her detail-oriented intellect is perfect for the intricacies of the thorny legal questions that come before the Court. She would breeze through the Senate confirmation process and be ready for the job from day one.

The main drawback is her age. Bush appointed men in their forties and fifties, who could be on the bench for at least three decades. Obama will want to counter with young justices as well. Hillary is 61, but she appears to be in great shape.

Hillary is most charming and persuasive in small groups, a talent that could bring Kennedy around on a lot of issues. What’s more, she could go toe to toe with Scalia and give him nightmares. That would be worth the appointment just by itself.

The last time a U.S. Senator was appointed to the Supreme Court was in 1945, when Truman selected a liberal Republican named Harold Burton. I always wondered why Lyndon Johnson didn’t name Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon to the Court. Morse, perhaps the most astute constitutional scholar of his era, was a thorn in LBJ’s side over the Vietnam War, though otherwise they were on the same page. LBJ could have muted Morse’s constant criticism of the war by taking him out of the Senate and putting him on the Court. Instead he chose Abe Fortas.

I’ve always thought Morse would have made an excellent justice, but Hillary will be even better.

President-Elect Obama

2008-11-08T22:51:00.000-08:00

"Marvin..what to we do now?"

The title comes from the last line spoken by Robert Redford in “The Candidate,” a 1972 Oscar-winning film about an idealistic young man who gradually sells out to his campaign handlers and is elected to the U.S. Senate from California. Aside from starting out young and idealistic and ending up winning, Redford’s Bill McKay is virtually the exact opposite of Barack Obama. Which is a good thing.

The question, however, is appropriate. What do we do now? All the pundits are now speculating what Obama will do now, and most of them are also making suggestions. Some want him to be slow and moderate, others think he should rally the substantial Democratic majority in Congress to go on a full-scale liberal offensive. I figure Obama will consult with a lot of other smart people and then come up with the wisest course of action. He probably already has several plans ready to go on Jan. 20.

Obama made it clear in his victory speech Tuesday night that he expects all of us to contribute. His election was made possible by the thousands of people who volunteered and organized on his behalf. It appears he is looking for the same kind of service to the governing of the country. I’m sure he will find a way to turn a phrase that basically means the same as John F. Kennedy’s exhortation to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

So what do we do?

We know what Obama will have to do immediately: First, get the U.S. economy back on stable footing and promote new jobs, and second, deal with several major international problems that include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and our disgruntled allies in Europe. I’m sure he also will start cleansing the entire federal government of the incompetent right wing Bush appointees who have flouted the laws they are charged with enforcing and often decimated their agencies for the personal gain of their friends and fellow plutocrats.

Conventional wisdom says Obama's window of opportunity is his first 100 days in office—the honeymoon period. This is ridiculous. A candidate spends almost two years campaigning for the job and then only has about three months to get anything done? The theme comes from Franklin Roosevelt's legendary “First 100 Days,” when he proposed and a compliant Congress passed a spectrum of relief bills aimed at saving banks and spurring economic activity. This is when many of the New Deal acronyms got started—CCC, WPA, TVA and the like.

Obama will also have a pretty compliant Congress—after all, several Senators and possibly dozens of House members owe their election to his coattails, including Oregon's own Jeff Merkley. He will get a lot of what he wants. Will it be what we want and need?

He has invited our participation. We have to tell him what we think. The President-elect and all those new members of Congress. Obama comes off as a visionary, but he's above all a pragmatist. He's going to go for what will work best. At some point, he's going to run into his own campaign promises and proposals.

For example, health care. Of all the positions Obama took during the election, his health care proposal is the weakest. Hillary Clinton has a better idea—the main difference being that in her plan everyone is mandated to carry insurance. Ron Wyden's program goes further. But what works best is a simple single-payer universal health care plan, the kind that all other developed nations have. As well as people in the U.S. who are older than 65.

There shouldn't be a debate about this any more than there should be a debate about evolution or global warming. It's just a fact that single payer systems cover a lot more people at a lot less cost, and that the quality of care is usually better than in the U.S. Of course, it's “socialized medicine” according to its opponents (mostly Republicans, DLC Democrats, and insurance companies.). A survey last year found that most doctors support this kind of universal health care. Even more surprising, more Americans say “socialized medicine” would be better than our current system than say it would be worse.

Socialist? Who Cares?

The term “socialist” seems to have lost its panic-inducing power. Both John McCain and Sarah Palin repeatedly denounced Obama as a socialist for proposing to raise the top income tax rate from 35% to 39%. Evidently, the American electorate didn't believe McCain or didn't care. More than a few, I assume, understood that progress taxation, first implemented by McCain's hero Teddy Roosevelt, is not socialism. In fact, Adam Smith advocated it.

I'm not a socialist, but there are endeavors better left to the government. The military, for example. The Bushies outsourced military operations in Iraq and the consequences weren't good. It's very scary to have a large corporation (I.e., Blackwater) whose revenues depend on the waging of war. A government-run basic retirement account (Social Security) certainly looks better these days than the Bush/McCain notion of having each of us invest in the stock market. Public education, despite its many faults, is also something the free market can't adequately replace.

And so it should be with providing citizens with the means to pay for essential health care. This doesn't mean the government gets into the business of running hospitals or hiring doctors. It means the government takes over the role of insurance companies. That in itself will cut costs for health care.

Crucial to Economic Health

The cost of health insurance is central to our economy. Employers large and small have to scale back hiring because their health care plans are too expensive. Or else they are cutting off health insurance if they don't have a union or are in an industry that has to compete for skilled workers. It's really hard to expand your business if you can't afford to hire new people.

On the other hand, there are potential entrepreneurs who could be starting their own businesses, but instead stay married to their old companies because they can't afford to lose their health insurance.

In addition, studies show that around half of all personal bankruptcies filed in the past several years have resulted from the inability to pay huge medical bills. Rising health care costs are also a factor in the mortgage meltdown.

I have a long list of items for Obama to accomplish, but this one is right at the top. As soon as the new Congress is seated, there will be bills introduced to address health care. Obama will have his introduced, Wyden's will be back and there may be a few more floated out there. But any fix that involves insurance companies won't be a real fix. At this point, with the Republicans' laissez-faire ideology totally discredited, the people are ready for single payer health insurance. We need to make sure our representatives know that.

Obama Wins!

2008-11-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

Dancin' in the Street

I've witnessed, and mostly suffered through, elections for about 40 years, but never have I experienced an election after which there was widespread dancing in the streets. News reports showed euphoric citizens dancing in Chicago and Washington, D.C., but it happened right here in River City too.

These blurry photos were taken outside the big bash thrown by the Bus Project and Willamette Week at the Grand Central Bowl last night. A brass band in the parking lot was cooking for several hours with hundreds of people clapping hands and dancing around them. You can barely make out a trombone and a couple of other horns in thecenter photo. By that time, I was a little blurry, too.

Ballot Measure 65

2008-10-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

Minor Parties OK With 2nd Class Status

With virtually every organized political party opposed to Measure 65, there must be something good about it.

Measure 65 on the Oregon ballot would change Oregon’s primary election process. Instead of having one primary ballot for Democrats and another for Republicans, there would be one ballot with all candidates for each office listed. In such a primary, all the voters could choose among all the candidates in all the races. The two candidates who receive the most votes then go on to a run-off in the November general election. This is just about the same method used in all the non-partisan races, such as for city council, district attorney or county commissioner.

This “top-two primary” is opposed by the insiders in both the Democratic and Republican parties. That’s understandable, since Measure 65 ends the exclusive primaries these parties hold every two years at taxpayer expense. They fear that party relevance and power would diminish and that’s probably true.

Aside from several political hacks losing their jobs, however, I see nothing wrong with the measure.

What is puzzling is that the minority parties—and specifically the Pacific Green Party—are staunchly against it. People who speak for these parties say they fear that it will spell the death knell of minor parties, because they will never get on the general election ballot.

I seriously doubt the demise of any of these minor parties would be much noticed. All of them combined amount to about five percent of all registered voters. The Libertarians have the most, with about two percent, followed by the Pacific Greens and the Constitution Party, Socialist Party and maybe a couple others. On the other hand, a fifth of all registered voters are not affiliated with any party—and these independents do not get a voice in the primaries for governor, secretary of state, state treasure, and all the state and federal legislative offices.

Currently Second Class

One would think that minority party people would hate being treated as second class citizens. While the state pays for the Democratic and Republican primaries, there are no primary ballots mailed out to Pacific Greens or Libertarians. They have to choose their candidates through some other method, such as a convention.

I’m thinking that the people who run these small parties would rather play the Ralph Nader role of spoiler than grow larger and actually have a chance at governing. When was the last time a minority party candidate won any kind of partisan election in Oregon? It hasn’t happened. The Libertarians have won at least four non-partisan municipal elections in Washing County—two on water boards and two on the Beaverton School Board. And Pacific Green member Xander Patterson was twice elected to the East Multnomah County Conservation Board.

So the only success minor parties have ever had in Oregon came in elections similar to the top-two primary concept. Elections where candidates of all parties were thrown together in the primary.

Many years ago, I registered to vote as a member of a minority party because its positions on issues aligned pretty closely with mine. But when a primary election loomed, I changed my registration back to Democrat so I could actually vote for candidates who were both good on the issues and could also win. According to state records for this year, about 25 percent of the Pacific Greens membership switched to the Democrats, presumably to vote for Obama or perhaps a progressive candidate like Steve Novick, who narrowly lost to Jeff Merkley in this year’s primary.

No Need to Be a Democrat

If there were a top-two primary, it’s possible I would change my registration to the Pacific Green Party, if it showed a bit more common sense on other issues than it is displaying on Measure 65. A lot of Democrats, especially in Portland, subscribe to political philosophies that are closer to the Greens than to mainstream Democrats. With a top-two primary system, they would have no reason to remain Democrats.

In fact, there is a chance some elected Democrats, such as state Sen. Vicki Walker of Eugene, or U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, would run as Pacific Greens or with some other progressive party, since their stature in their districts would guarantee them victory regardless of their party. It’s also possible that well-organized and articulate Pacific Greens running in inner Southeast and Northeast Portland legislative districts could win elections in these liberal/radical enclaves, whereas these races now are settled in the primary and frequently there is no contest in the general election. By the same token, Libertarians could challenge conventional Republicans in the suburbs and rural areas of Oregon, where one rarely sees a Democratic candidate.

Take the primary race in House District 42, where I live. Jules Kopel-Bailey won a lively Democratic primary with 40 percent of the vote over three other worthy opponents. He has no opponent in the general election, so he gets into the legislature without winning a majority in his only contested race. In a top-two primary system, he would have had to face the Democratic runner-up in the general election.

It wouldn't be farfetched to see a viable Pacific Green candidate emerge in District 42, given its extremely liberal constituency (the district encompasses both Reed College and the Hawthorne District).

But maybe the PG's don't want that kind of power. Maybe they don't want to go down to the legislature and actually grapple with the state's problems and get their hands dirty making compromises with other legislators, which is an essential part of democracy. Maybe the are happy to sit on the outside and throw stones that at this point have all the impact of a smurf football.

Hint to Merkley campaign

2008-10-16T01:37:00.000-07:00

This would get my vote

Late stage political advertising runs the gamut from simply annoying to absolutely dispiriting. We’re now hunkering down in the midst of a blitzkrieg of escalating negative commercials on the tube, tabloidized mini-dramas in which one’s opponent is portrayed as the main attraction to a Halloween haunted house. The photo of the poor candidate always has a black background and his or her skin is a ghastly yellow. The TV’s volume mysteriously rises, yet the voiceover sometimes sinks to a stage whisper. Partial quotes are sprinkled around like blurbs from a movie trailer.

The worst thing, though, is that the same commercial is shown six million times. Frequently, it’s run two or three times in a five-minute programming break. The goal is for each and every viewer to memorize the entire attack ad to the point of having bad dreams about it.

These ads eventually disgust a small but significant percentage of the voters to the point of not bothering to vote. This typically turns out to be a Republican advantage, because the base treats an election like a gladiator event that they cannot afford to miss.

Here’s what would get my vote:

Audio: Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” or Pachobe’s “Canon.” Something light and soothing.

Video: Scenes of Oregon’s beaches, mountains, wooded wilderness areas, free-flowing rivers, an elk herd, a salmon jumping, the sun rising over the Wallowa’s and setting at Cannon Beach. Or a bunch of puppies playing.

Voiceover: No voice over.

Text overlay: No text overlay.

Political message: No political message.

Nothing but nice music and pictures. And at the end, “I’m Jeff Merkley and I approved this interlude between negative campaign ads.”

Campaign funds couldn't be spent more wisely.

Modal Matrimony

2008-09-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

Biking into the Sunset

I was out riding my bike on Saturday when I encountered one of those “only-in-Portland” events: a wedding in which the bride, groom, maid of honor, best man and a large number of guests arrived and departed by bicycle. And all dressed up, too. It was at Sellwood Park.

Bride on a bike Most of the guests, too.

Took a few snapshots but didn’t intrude on the festivities. I searched The Oregonian today for the announcement, but could not find the lovely couple.

Didn’t see any tin cans or other debris tied to the backs of their bikes.

Convention center lodging for our times

2008-09-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

Who brought the s'mores?

The juxtaposition of two news stories just gave me an idea. The first is an article in the Business Journal about the proposal for a $240 million convention center hotel, a proposal that is still alive despite misgivings by a lot of people that it will never pencil out.

This story says that Metro is extending its review of the project for another 75 days because of “uncertainty of current market conditions, the commitment to fund the hotel using only existing funding sources and the need to coordinate multiple inter-governmental and public-private agreements” in bumping the project.

The second is the big news that the economy is going crash if American taxpayers don’t chip in $700 – 800 billion to save failing financial services companies. You have read all about that, I’m sure, but this account sums it up best.

Bailout or no bailout, the economy is going to suck for quite awhile. A lot of businesses will feel a pinch, if not a cramp. Consequently, their trade associations will be forced to cut back on their lavish annual conventions. In this economic climate, finding a private party willing to erect a luxury hotel in Portland will be harder than finding an optimistic Mets fan in Queens.

Instead, Metro ought to look to an outfit like REI or G.I. Joes to operate the Portland Convention Center Campground.

Most major conventions are held in the summer, which in Portland, after the Rose Festival is over, is usually gorgeous. Rather than check into a bland, generic hotel room at $400 a night, conventioneers would pitch a tent in a lush green meadow, shaded by towering fir trees for a tenth the cost. They could bring their own tents and camping gear or rent them from the park host. There’s some vacant land down by the river not far from the convention center that would work, as well as some blocks north and south of the center that could be converted to campground land.

Think of the green brownie points Portland—and the convention sponsors—would receive.

Those convention goers who can’t handle sleeping on the ground could check into the adjacent Portland Convention Center RV Park. Plenty of pull through full hookups with satellite dish television and either wifi or broadband cable to each site. The RV park would have plenty of motorhomes available to rent. Now is the time to jump on this idea, since dozens of RV manufacturers are going into bankruptcy because consumers are no longer buying their 50-foot, six-miles-to-the-gallon behemoths. A lot of these motorhomes are being unloaded at very reasonable prices, according to a friend who manages the annul RV Show at the Expo Center.

Now maybe the American Bankers Association is unlikely to choose Portland with its back-to-nature facilities, but then again, the bankers may not even be holding a convention for awhile. Who might go for it? Obviously, camping equipment businesses. Also other industries involved in outdoor recreation. Probably the trade association for bicycling companies, organic foods, alternative health care and green energy. These, by the way, are all growth industries.

Kindergarten Sex Ed?

2008-09-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

This Bill Needs No Lipstick

So the McCain campaign runs an ad accusing Obama of supporting a bill that would teach sex education to four-year-old children. People are aghast.

Then it turns out the bill in question had a provision that would allow kindergartens to teach kids about inappropriate touching by adults or older children.

Now if the Rovians were running Obama's campaign instead of McCain's, they would have come out with an ad accusing McCain of opposing a bill aimed at protecting kids from sexual predators.

Not advocating. Just sayin'.

Obama vs. Palin

2008-09-07T23:26:00.000-07:00

Are You Experienced?

Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.” …Chinese Proverb

Lately I have been rummaging through the vastness of the World Wide Web in search of quotations on “experience.” The one above may be my favorite, although it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

In the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s lack of experience, compared to Richard Nixon, was constantly questioned. At one point, JFK told a little story about a banker who had been in the financial business for 40 years, but whose bank had gone bankrupt. “This man knew the banking business up and down, but you wouldn't hire him to run your bank,” Kennedy said. Or at least, I recall him saying something like that. I doubt if I remember it from his debates with Nixon. It probably was in something I read several years later.

There’s also this pearl of wisdom from another politician: “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” That is attributed to former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood. Let's hope he learned from his.

But the one most pertinent to this year’s campaign comes from Mark Twain (as if there was any doubt): "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."

Or as Aldous Huxley wrote, “Exoerience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you."

Now the opposing camps in this year’s presidential warfare are firing shots at the rival ticket over “lack of experience.” Barack Obama has been a U.S. Senator for less than three years. McCain’s choice for vice president, Sarah Palin, has been governor of Alaska for a little over a year. Obama is just three years older than Palin (47 to 44), so neither has a full lifetime of experiences from which they have learned lessons.

Are neither of them ready for the high office they seek? Does one have better experience than the other? Or does none of it matter? What experience is relevant to the job?

The Republicans claim Sarah Palin is the only candidate among on either ticket who has executive experience. That discounts Obama's stint as president of the Harvard Law Review, director of Project Vote in 1992 and serving on the boards of directors of several foundations, including being chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. None of these roles are as large as being a governor, but they add breadth to his experience. On top of that, he has put together a crack campaign organization that numbers 2,500 paid staff. This is a very disciplined and savvy organization that totally outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton's manager.

Another argument is that McCain has all the experience and he's the one running for president, while Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is the one with deep experience. This is supposed to be a positive for McCain. But look at it this way: if McCain suddenly dies, the reins are turned over to a raw rookie.

The thing I like best about Obama is that he has a very confident management style that allows for extensive debate and challenge among his subordinates. He chose Biden not so much to help win the election, but to help him govern. He realizes that for all his talk of change, there are going to be real hurdles to it and a guy like Biden has the connections to surmount many of those hurdles, not to mention the moxie to tell Obama what he really thinks.

Some people are able to take more from experience than others, and thus may not need as much before getting into a high profile position. Kwame Brown and LeBron James were both number one NBA draft picks out of high school, Brown in 2001 and James in 2003. (The Blazers' Travis Outlaw was also a first round pick in 2003). As things turned out, Brown had tremendous potential but never has lived up to it. Outlaw definitely was not ready to play professional basketball and took several years to develop. James was an instant star. It was his play in the Olympics that produced a gold medal for the U.S. team.

In this election, it's obvious which candidate is most like LeBron James.

So let's just stuff it about experience.

Sizing Up Former Presidents

Let’s take a look at presidents over the past 60 years as to how much experience they had before taking office:

Harry Truman: U.S. Senator for a decade before being selected as FDR’s vice president in 1944. So gobs of experience. He’s regarded now as a pretty good president, though his approval rating upon leaving office was just 22 percent.

Dwight Eisenhower: No conventional political experience, but a great deal of experience in managing an enormous operation—as supreme commander of allied forces in World War II. Considered a “do-nothing” president when he left office, he now is considered one of our better presidents.

John F. Kennedy: Six years in the House and seven years in the Senate. Compared to Nixon, he was called “inexperienced.” Actually, he had a lot of experience. Since he was assassinated in office, the jury is out on how good a president he was or would have been.

Lyndon Johnson: In 1964, when he was 58 years old and running for president against Barry Goldwater, he had spent exactly half of his life in national politics. That included 13 years in the House, 11 years in the Senate, six years as Senate Majority Leader, almost three years as vice president and one year as president. That’s hard to beat. Many regard him as a great president who was able to maneuver the landmark civil rights laws through Congress, as well as his Great Society programs. But his lack of judgment resulted in the U.S. getting deeper into the quicksand pit of Vietnam.

Richard Nixon: Before becoming Ike’s pick for vice president, Nixon has served in the House and Senate for a scant six years, so he didn’t have that much experience for that post. When he ran for president, however, he could claim eight years as vice president. He is always ranked as one of the worst presidents in American history, though he was pragmatic enough to go along with many liberal causes, such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and imposing wage and price controls.

Gerald Ford: Spent 25 years in the House before becoming Nixon’s vice president. A great deal of experience, and yet not much to write home about.

Jimmy Carter: One term as governor of Georgia (after a couple of terms as a state senator). Had executive experience, but his downfall was alienating a Democratic Congress. Conventional wisdom deems Carter’s one term as a failure, but I think he was pretty good and definitely visionary. He definitely is our best ex-president.

Ronald Reagan: Two terms as governor of California is what he had. Plenty of executive experience if you believe Reagan was running the show. Turned out to be fairly pragmatic while adhering to an ultraconservative agenda. He got what he wanted most of the time, but it's questionable that what he accomplished was good for the country.

George H.W. Bush: You want experience? Bush I had more than anyone. Six years in the House, ambassador to the U.N., envoy to China, CIA director and of course, Reagan's VP. So with all that, he turned out to be a poor to mediocre one-term president who only looks better in comparison to his son.

Bill Clinton: Arkansas attorney general for two years and the state's governor for 12, giving him extensive executive and domestic policy experience. He was first elected governor in 1978 and embarked on very liberal policies, which led to his defeat two years later. When he won in 1982, he was more careful. He remained politically cautious in the White House (with the ill-fated exception of Hillary's health care plan). A Republican-controlled Congress and his own foibles may have kept him from being a great president.

George. W. Bush: As a kid, he was exposed to the political experiences of his father, but he must not have payed attention. His business career brings to mind the old joke: What's the easiest way to make a small fortune?* He did have a fairly successful six-year run as governor of Texas. He is now generally judged to be one of the worst presidents in history.

So what does that tell us? That experience is no indicator of presidential greatness, or even competence.

We all know that, of course. Abraham Lincoln, considered our greatest president, had just two years in the House and four terms in the Illinois legislature. In fact, he hadn't been elected to anything for the 12 years prior to winning the presidency.

*Answer: Start with a large fortune.

Fear & Loathing Time Again

2008-08-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

Girding for the Rovian Onslaught

The Rovians have landed again, laying waste to the nation's political climate like alien monsters out of War of the Worlds.

Already you can see their slimy tentacles going after Obama. To his credit, he's responding immediately, unlike Kerry in 2004. The problem with this approach is that he's always playing defense.

Obama—and all Democrats—need a Strategic Defense Initiative, essentially an umbrella ad that defuses the Republicans' smear tactics.

I'm not an advertising guru, but the SDI would go something like this:

Flash through clips of some of the Republicans' most egregious television ads. The Willie Horton ad that brought down Dukakis. The Swift boat ad. Maybe the ad that linked former Geogria Sen. Max Cleland, a war hero and triple amputee, to Osama Bin Laden. Heck, there might even be some kind of ad that Rove used against McCain in 2000. There's also a lot of opportunities to fine tune the ad with local examples in each market area.

While the clips are running, an authoritative voice is saying, “Back in 1988, they castigated Gov. Michael Dukakis for a prison furlough program that let a dangerous man out of prison, when the program had actually been started under his Republican predecessor. In 2002, they questioned the patriotism of war hero Max Cleland. Two years later, they did the same to John Kerry. All lies. It's easy to lie and spread rumors in a 60-second ad. The truth, though, takes a little longer. If you want the whole truth, you can find it here:

http://www.factcheck.org

That would be pretty gutsy for the Obama campaign, since FactCheck also criticizes some of Obama's ads. Overall, McCain's lies and distortions have been worse.

Or they could play it safe and refer voters to this:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome/

That URL uses a lot of words for a television ad, either verbal or on the screen. The web page isn't that dynamic, either. It also has a bunch of bad links.

Instead of the sleazy political ads, they also could do it funny by recalling some just plain stupid TV ads (think the Budweiser farting horse ad or the poor Kenyan runner forced to wear running shoes). Dredge up an ad for Enron or Countrywide. New York's Crazy Eddie (is he still around?). At the end, if it's legal, slip in a clip of the worst attack ad on Obama. Have the voice over say, “A lot of what you see on TV is ridiculous. That's okay for a brand of beer or a running shoe, but this year, there's a big difference between presidential candidates. To make an informed decision, forget what you see on TV and look here:”

Then run one of the web pages listed above.

A problem, of course, is that some of the voters Obama is trying to reach may actually like those ads.

If this all-purpose strategic wall is put up, it will foil a lot of the attack ads. The same kind of spot can be developed for radio, as well.

Still, this is playing defense. The Rovians are going to do whatever it takes to win the election, and that means making voters afraid. They won with an all-out fear offensive in 2004 and they will try it again. Fear trumps all other emotions when it comes to electing the next president. They will find a way to make people think that electing Obama will be tantamount to turning the United States over to the radical Islamic hordes.

On this one, though, Obama can take the offensive, and should. McCain's lack of judgment, ignorance of facts and volatile temper render him a loose cannon should he land in the White House.

The video is there; it doesn't have to be made up: McCain at a town hall meeting saying it would be fine if the U.S. was in Iraq for 100 years. McCain singing, “Bomb Bomb Iran” to the old Beach Boys tune. McCain having to be corrected by Joe Lieberman about Iraqi factions. And then there are all those quotes from fellow Republican senators who question is temperament.

Come September, the Obama campaign should be playing a compilation of McCain's greatest gaffes non-stop. If not the Obama campaign directly, then one of the 527s, like MoveOn.org, has to step up. I like the fact that Obama is taking the high road in this campaign. But if his opponent is truly dangerous—or as dense as the current occupant of the White House—it's important to let people know.

After all, the most effective political ad in history was the classic “Daisy” commercial that made voters think Barry Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected. It was pretty devastating, but Goldwater was really out on the fringe and had openly talked of using “tactical nuclear weapons.”

Goldwater, a maverick senator from Arizona, got trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Let's hope history, this once, repeats itself.

The "Nanny State"

2008-08-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

Enlightened Self-Interest?

About a decade ago, I went shopping for a pickup truck. My old one had been T-boned by a speeding car and was totaled. The insurance payoff wasn’t enough to buy a new truck, but it did give me the wherewithal to buy a good used one.

I spent several days scouring the lots on 82^nd and McGloughlin and yet couldn’t find the exact truck I wanted—a strong and sturdy half-ton with a fuel-efficient six cylinder engine and a manual transmission. So after enduring the sales vultures at several lots, I’m at one on McGloughlin and the sales guy is so laid back that I had to start talking to him. He showed me a couple of trucks and neither of them impressed me, but as I was walking away from the lot, a silver Mazda RX-7 sports car caught my eye.

Wouldn’t hurt to take it for a test drive, I figured. Not gonna buy it, but I might as well have some fun. So the sales guy gets the keys and we get in. It had dark maroon leather seats, a sun roof and it really drove well. I zipped it up and down a series of Milwaukie’s back roads. By the time I pulled it into the lot, I had sold it to myself. I dickered with the sales guy and his boss for awhile and got a couple hundred bucks off the sticker price, which means I left a lot more on the table. Then I drove it away.

It might have had something to do with having just gone through a divorce. My ex-wife had just bought a BMW. Whatever the rationalization behind buying the sports car, it was a totally irrational decision.

I’m recalling this misadventure now because so-called conservatives are nattering again about the “nanny state,” particularly here in Portland. `In Sunday’s Oregon, David Reinhard wrote: “Folks who think that individuals cannot be trusted to protect their own interests or make the best decision for themselves and their world will always find plausible, if attenuated, excuses to turn a traditionally private matter into a public cause celebre.”

Their mantra goes like this: “You don’t need the government telling you what to do. And you know how to spend your money better than the government does.”

Except, actually, you don’t.

Predictably Irrational

At least not all the time. Virtually every psychological study of human nature over the past decade—and there have been plenty of studies—demonstrates that people rarely make decisions by doing careful research and weighing the evidence. All kinds of emotions, biases and behavioral conditioning come into play.

A recent best-seller, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Duke University economics professor Daniel Ariely points out a number of human foibles. Such as this one on the fallacy of supply and demand.

The book covers a number of relevant topics as to how humans make decisions. We overweigh negative consequences, we make foolish decisions based on whether or not something is labeled as "free," social norms will often trump cost-benefit calculations, anchoring of choices skews our decision-making, and so on. Ariely concludes ". . .we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend."

Given this information, one could take public policy in two different directions. You could argue that if we act irrationally as individuals, then that irrationality is magnified in groups, such as legislative bodies. You could also observe perversely that people will irrationally ignore warnings and other information put out by the government. To a certain extent, these points are true. Almost all laws are the results of compromises that frequently fail to solve the problem at hand.

Warnings Heeded

People continue to smoke cigarettes, despite the Surgeon Generals' warning on the side of each pack for the past 44 years. The percentage of people who smoke, however, has declined dramatically since 1964—from 42 percent to 20 percent. Thus the package warning, along with other forms of government propaganda, seems to have had a positive effect (unless you happen to work for a tobacco company).

In his Sunday column, Reinhard takes on recent local issues, from the new county law requiring chain restaurants to supply calorie information on their meals to the proposed city law to tax plastic and paper bags by as much as 20 cents per bag.

Reinhard totally ignores reality when ranting about the law proposed by state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, which would require all adult bicyclists to wear a helmet. “Now, there's every good reason for bicyclists to wear helmets, but that's just the point: Adult bicyclists can recognize their own self-interest without the state's help.” Really? If he ever got out of his office and mingled with the bike crowds in town, he'd notice at least a quarter of all adult bikers are helmetless.

State governments had to enact laws to get people to wear seatbelts in cars, even though rational adults know seat belts save lives. Those legislative battles were fought 20 years ago. Nowadays, you don't think twice about instantly putting on your seat belt when getting in a car. The law has modified people's behavior.

Sometimes people do act rationally, given information. In cities which have enacted laws requiring restaurants to post calorie counts, customers are averaging 50 fewer calories per order.

As for the grocery bag law, both paper and plastic pose environmental problems and some of these problems cost the government and/or the public money in dealing with bags that are thrown away. (Or worse, plastic bags that people throw in the recycling bin that gum up the sorting machines.) It makes sense, then to provide consumers with an incentive to bring their own bags. I have one I bought from Fred Meyer several months ago and most of the time, I leave it in my house. And usually, it's still in the house the next time a do some grocery shopping. Being a cheapskate, you can bet I'll remember that bag if I'm going to be charged 20 cents for one of the store's flimsy bags.

A Game With No Refs

Government regulation, on the whole, is a good thing. Commerce without regulation is like playing basketball without a referee. That works okay in pickup games in the park, but can you imagine how nasty it would get in the NBA finals if there were no refs? There's be a lot of cheating, a lot of arguing and undoubtedly several fights. Eventually the game would be so degraded that only thugs and fools would play it—sort of like today's stock market.

If you look at the kinds of cars owned by liberals and conservatives. an ironic picture emerges. The car of choice for ardent liberals is the Volvo 240 station wagon, which may be the best car for the money ever made. This car is sturdy, reliable, extremely safe, wonderfully comfortable and pretty fuel efficient if you get the five speed, four cylinder model—yet boring. It's the ultimate nanny state car, although there are others, such as most Toyotas, Hondas and Subarus.

Meanwhile, the archtypical archconservative drives a Hummer or other macho behemoth, for no good reason other than he or she has the money to own one. Or maybe because in a collision, the SUV will crush whatever it encounters (although it is more likely to just roll over).

So it's weird. The kind of people who think government should be involved in helping people make decisions act rationally when they buy cars. And the people who think its not the government's business to influence individual behavior make stupid decisions about cars.

Go figure.

A Day in the Life of Joe Republican

2008-07-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

Look What Those Liberals Did

The following came in an e-mail and since we occupy a backwater of the Internet, everyone else probably has seen it before. But if not, it's a pretty good description of a certain segment of the political spectrum.

A Day in the Life of Joe Republican

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water for his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging commie liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of coffee, Joe takes his daily medications His medications are safe to take because some evil lefty bomb-throwers fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of Joe's medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some fire-breathing lazy ass union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance -- now Joe gets it too. Never would he turn it down.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In his morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is healthy because some environmentalist wacko troublemaking militant fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

Then Joe walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants limp-wristed freethinkng asshole fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some fire-breathing Viet Cong-loving union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these high standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union in. So Joe benefits from what others have gained.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a workers compensation or unemployment check because some stupid pinko troublemakers didn't think Joe should lose his home because of a temporary misfortune.

At noontime Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal red wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression. He can thank that Stalinist Franklin D. Roosevelt for that.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist pointy-headed liberal decided that Joe and the whole society would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. That's okay, but the bastards tricked him because he has to pay taxes. Bush will fix that, he tells himself.

Joe gets home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big-government New Deal Stalinist liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

Joe is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating Marxist made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that over the decades the beloved Republicans have fought to defeat every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.

Joe agrees with the talk-radio loudmouth: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man and a good Republican and I believe all Americans should take care of themselves, just like I have!"

Trade winds

2008-07-27T22:42:00.001-07:00

Ichiro Must Go

UPDATE: The only player the Mariners traded was left relief specialist Arthur Rhodes. Ichiro stayed put. So did Raul Ibanez, who set a Mariner record with six RBI in one inning Monday and tied another this evening with 14 RBI in three games. After that outburst, the Mets might be regretting their failure to close a deal with Seattle.

We are temporarily abandoning discussions of politics and public policy because there is a far more important and pressing issue at hand. That, of course, is the future of the Seattle Mariners.

There is absolutely nothing important about the Mariners this season. They are the worst team in the American League. They already have waived two players who were in their Opening Day lineup and the rest of the team has been in a season-long funk. When their pitching staff actually pitches well (which is rarely), they don’t score runs. When their batters hit, their pitchers explode. They have some usually exceptional fielders who are having career years for errors committed.

The trading deadline, however, looms at the end of the month. It’s very likely that Jared Washburn, the team’s best pitcher in the past couple of weeks, is going to the Yankees. Arthur Rhodes, a left-handed reliever, is coveted by a few teams. But the big trade rumor is that our favorite Mariner, Raul Ibanez, will go to the Mets.

Definitely, the Mariners should trade an outfielder, but not Ibanez. They should dump Ichiro Suzuki before his skills diminish further and his trade value collapses.

Ibanez is a consummate pro and a team player. He is on his way to his third straight season of over 100 RBI. He is not very fast, but he still plays a decent left field and leads the team in outfield assists. I’m sure he’d love to play for the Mets, since he was born in New York. If he does, I wish him well.

Ichiro has been considered one of the best leadoff hitters in the game ever since he migrated to Seattle from Japan in 2001. The problem is, he’s not. Leadoff guys are supposed to get on base, and while Ichiro gets a lot of hits, almost all singles, he doesn’t walk very much. Thus his on-base percentage is mediocre for a leadoff hitter. On the Mariners, Willie Blomquist has a higher OBP. Willie who? Exactly. Blomquist’s batting average is 30 points lower than Ichiro’s, but his OBP is several points higher. Blomquist is just as efficient as Ichiro in stealing bases, as well. The Mariners would score more runs if he were in the leadoff spot.

Over the years, we’ve come to believe that Ichiro is primarily stat driven, and the stat that gets his motor running is number of base hits. In 2004, when he hit .372 and set a season record for hits, we often wondered whether he could hit .400 if he paid attention to the strike zone. It was obvious even then that he swung at a lot of bad pitches, expecting to use his speed to beat out routine infield grounders.

It appears he’s slowed down a bit, as reflected by his .295 batting average. He still doesn’t seem to know the strike zone, or if he does, he doesn’t care about it.

The number of times he has swung at an obvious ball on a 3 – 1 count indicates he would rather gamble on getting a base hit rather than a take a sure-thing walk. On several of those occasions, he has grounded into a double play.

And then there are the times he has tried to bunt for a base hit with a runner on second base, whereas a single that gets out of the infield would score the runner.

There are reports that Ichiro hasn’t been motivated to excel this year because the team is losing. He doesn’t get it. The superstar is supposed to play harder and motivate the rest of the team when the going gets tough. Instead, the only Mariners putting out are Ibanez and Jose Lopez.

It’s likely that most of baseball’s general managers are hip to Ichiro, but he still is a superstar who draws big crowds. He’d be huge in Los Angeles or New York. (Also in San Francisco, but the Giants aren’t in a pennant race this year.)

There are other downsides: he’s almost 35 (a year younger than Ibanez) and has four years left on a $90 million contract. The Mariners would have to get a lot of really good prospects, and probably at least a couple of established players, in return.

That last negative, however, is why the Mariners should trade him. Under the era of the hastily-departed Bill Bavasi, the team made some egregious moves. Bavasi signed free agents to ridiculous contracts based on flimsy evidence (e.g., Adrian Beltre, signed to a mega contract after one anomalous season of 48 home runs, who since has been just fair to middling.) Worse, Bavasi traded top prospects away for questionable veterans. Now, the Mariners minor league farm system is depleted and weak. If they trade a couple of pitchers this season, we wonder who is going to be able to get the opposite team out.

This year has already been written off. Probably the same for next season. But for rebuilding a team to compete in a few more years, Ichiro needs to go.

It Came From Outer Space

2008-07-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

A Solar Power Solution?

This Op Ed piece in The New York Times certainly fits the definition of unconventional folly. Why is the James Bond movie theme music running through my mind?

No Longer a Serf to Turf

2008-07-22T23:02:00.001-07:00

Farming the Front Yard

The latest issue of The New Yorker, which raised so many eyebrows with the allegedly satirical cartoon of Barak and Michelle Obama on the cover, carried a different sort of heresy in its back pages. In an essay purporting to be a review of a book published in 1841, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with them?”

The book is titled “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening,” by one Andrew Jackson Downing, whose family tree may or may not have a branch ending with Michael “Mouse” Tolliver. The book is somewhat irrelevant to Kolbert’s discourse, except that Downing was the first proponent of well-groomed lawns. Kolbert then spends the next four pages debunking that idea.

She points out that every year, Americans spend forty billion dollars on lawn maintenance. She notes that many jurisdictions in the U.S. have laws or covenants required a regularly mowed lawn. All of this lawn care creates environmental havoc. Lawns don’t naturally get smooth and velvety—they require loads of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which then run off into rivers and lakes. That in turn ends up in drinking water and also causes algae blooms that kill off most other life in lakes. Her assessment is that lawns are bad for us.

Portlanders don’t seem to need much convincing about that. My highly unscientific survey of the front yards of inner southeast Portland shows that nearly a third of them have no turf grass growing on them (Out of respect for privacy and my own safety, I did not survey the back yards). About a fifth of the front yards with a lawn had a very small one surrounded by other kinds of landscaping.

Personally, I’ve hated lawns since I was 10 years old. That was when my parents moved into a big brick ranch style house in the Gateway district. The house was on a huge double corner lot—116th Ave., 117th Ave. and Multnomah St. I spent my first summer there picking rocks out of the ground and pulling up weeds. Every summer thereafter, until heading off to college, I mowed the broad expanse on a weekly basis. It took well over an hour to do it my father’s way, which was to mow the lawn in one direction and then again in a cross direction.

Thus it seems odd that until this year, I put up with lawns in all of the homes I have owned. Being generally lazy, the prospect of digging up all that sod and then disposing of it seemed too much of a chore. That had to change in my current house, where I have lived the past two years. Last year, my back yard garden was almost barren, mainly due to some big trees that blocked all the sun. So this year, with some hired help, I dug up the front yard and planted it all in garden: raised beds of tomatoes, basil, peppers, beans and cucumbers, plus corn, squash and raspberries on their own. Had one of the back yard trees removed; it provided chips in front to keep the weeds down. Then I put up a low fence to make it a bit harder on veggie poachers and planted grapes along the fence.

Right now, the front yard is a lot more appealing than it was when there were just grass and a couple of hydrangas. I've met more neighbors in the past few weeks while working on my garden than in the previous two years. Some of them ask me for gardening advice and some of them give me gardening tips. We all talk about organic gardening, though I couldn't sell any of my produce as organic because the soil hasn't been farmed organically for the requisite number of years and I don't know where a lot of the starts or seeds came from. I haven't had any need for pesticides and the soil was amended (that's farmer speak) with aged compost from my Metro composter. When the chicken coop gets put up in the back yard, I'll have all the fertilizer I need.

The best part, other than not mowing a lawn, is eating from my front yard. I've already eaten four tomatoes, plus a few baskets of raspberries. The summer squash are just now big enough to pick and many of the peppers are also getting there. Which is amazing, since I didn't plant anything until after Memorial Day. Looks like a bumper crop this year.

My only concern is what the yard will look like in November, when the plants start dying out and the rains make a mess of the yard. I'm not worrying too much yet. Maybe someone out there in the blogosphere has a suggestion.

All the Latest Rage

2008-07-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Forget "Bike Friendly" ... Just Make it Work

Recent incidents of road rage pitting automobile drivers against bicyclists may tarnish Portland’s image as a “bike friendly” city. In truth, these are isolated events and though disturbing, not as common as the news media implies. In fact, when a cyclist attacked a motorist with his bike, it was big news precisely because it had never happened before.

Nevertheless, I think it’s time to shed the “bike friendly” slogan. Portland should aspire to become something more than a happy place of free-spirited pedalers. Our “bike friendly” image conjures up a society in which bicyclists have special privileges and don't have to obey basic traffic rules.

There are plenty of bike anarchists cruising the streets, running red lights, cutting off motorists, flipping birds and giving all other bicyclists a bad name. It seems that city officials are afraid to clamp down on the bike punks lest they appear anti-bike. They have a reputation to uphold best bicycling city in the nation, according to the annual Bicycling magazine ranking, plus plaudits from all over the world.

The problem with this lenient attitude is that it consigns bicycling to a novelty status. It's something young, “creative class” hipsters do, primarily on the easy streets of the inner east side of town. Thus, our bicycling culture becomes a sub-culture. For the most part, this culture is benign. Thousands of people in Portland get around nicely without owning a car. They also tend to shop more locally and connect with their neighborhoods. Of course, they also are doing the right thing environmentally.

The culture, however, tolerates bike outlaws, and these outlaws tend to incite road rage among drivers, which leads to dangerous confrontations. Conflict on the roads scares away potential bicyclists. In a survey last year, an amazing 60 percent of Portland citizens said they would like to bike at least some of the time, but are too afraid of accidents and injuries.

Save Your Head

Current bicycle laws need to be enforced and at least one new law needs to be enacted (and also enforced). As I have pedaled around the town the past several years, I've notice the bikers who flaunt traffic laws are also not likely to wear helmets or have proper lights on the front and back of their bikes. Riding without lights is illegal in Portland, but it's rare that anyone gets busted for it. Bicycles need to have lights so that other vehicles can see what's on the road. It's not only a hazard for cars, but other bicyclists. A couple of evenings in the past year, I narrowly avoided T-boning totally dark bikes that ran stop signs at the same time I entered an intersection. I suspect there have been some pretty serious injuries resulting from bike collisions on the side streets of southeast Portland. Do we have to wait until someone dies?

There is no law that requires adult bicyclists to wear helmets, but there should be. Seattle has such a law. In Oregon, we require motorcyclists to wear helmets and of course, all drivers have to put on their seat belts. Yes, should a bike helmet statute be enacted, a lot of bikers would wail about the jackboots of government trampling on their freedom and others would contend that helmets mess up their hair. The same arguments were made about motorcycle helmet and seatbelt laws. Eventually, people came to realize these laws were in their best interests.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with an emergency room nurse at Emanual Hospital, which is where most inner city accident victims are treated. He told me that of all the fatal bicycle crashes over the past decade, 80 percent of the victims had not worn a bike helmet. That means four out of every five people who died in bike accidents might have lived, had they worn a helmet.

If bicycling is going to become more than a “keep-Portland-weird” experience, the city needs to crack down on the bike-riding scofflaws. It's not that the police aren't ticketing cyclists. For a time, they had a bike speed trap set up at Southeast 23rd Ave. and Salmon St. Salmon is a “bike boulevard,” which allows bikers to travel several blocks without a stop sign. But at 23rd and Salmon, which is at the bottom of a steep hill, there is a four-way stop. Now, anyone who rides a bike knows that you want to keep the bike in motion whenever possible. Coming off that hill, you want to let your momentum carry you another block or two. So the serious biker slows down a the intersection,but doesn't come to a complete stop. And—bingo--gets a ticket.

I've been railing here against bike anarchy, but in this case, I think a chainsaw in the wee hours of the morning could solve the problem at this intersection.

As Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” That intersection, and several others, needs to be changed to clear the way for bikes. General traffic rules governing bicyclists, however, usually have sound reasoning behind them and should be enforced.

Get Serious

Of course, to get really serious about bicycling as a transportation option, City Hall needs to come up with a plan for cycling that involves the entire city, not just downtown, the Pearl, Northwest Portland and the close-in east side. If you live in Irvington or Laurelhurst, you have a plethora of choices: MAX, bike boulevards, bike paths, good bus lines and probably a streetcar in the next decade. If you live in Lents or Parkrose, the options aren't as plentiful.

Although City Hall frequently seems to think the eastern city limits are at the crest of Mt. Tabor, a huge number of people live between 82nd and Gresham. These people have to drive their car to get to work, since there are no other viable options. Oh sure, there are bike lanes on some of the streets, but the streets are wide and the cars move faster than, say, on Belmont, which makes riding a bike considerably more daunting.

Instead of shelling out $150 million over the next decade to extend streetcars throughout the east side (mostly in areas already well-served by Tri-Met and bike paths), the money could be better spent acquiring rights-of-way for segregated biking lanes and improvement of bike boulevards, particularly in outlying neighborhoods.

Columbia River Crossing

2008-07-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

We're Getting Railroaded -- What We Need Is A Railroad

For starters, you have to be suspicious when the powers that be—and that be all the regional powers—call it something other than a bridge, though that’s what it is.

It’s the humongous juggernaut of a 12-lane (plus bike lanes and light rail!) bridge over the Columbia River that seems unstoppable, despite a lot of valid questions about it. The conventional wisdom says the current I-5 bridges (there are two of them) are causing major traffic congestion that is only bound to get worse. They also are old and built on old growth Douglas fir pylons (which sounds pretty stable to me, but that’s supposed to be an argument in favor of tearing them down).

The project is called the Columbia River Crossing, I guess because just calling it a new bridge is too, ahem, pedestrian for something costing $4.2 billion.

The scariest part of the CRC is that either it’s going to be a colossal waste of money—or be just the down payment on a continuous line of similar projects costing many more billions.

As the late Sen. Everett Dirkson said, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

Yet there is a need for major improvements on a bridge over the Columbia. Unfortunately, it sits a mile downriver from the I-5 bridge. This is the aged railroad bridge that is one of many obstacles to high-speed rail between Portland and Seattle.

Last Friday, I attended a very lively debate on the CRC at the City Club of Portland. Arguing in favor of the project was Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder, whose green credentials include founding the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. In opposition was economist Joe Cortwright, a guy to whom public officials usually listen because he has the correct numbers on his side.

These are two intelligent, conscientious guys and this might be the only political issue they disagree on. Rex is being viewed as a sellout among environmentalists in town, but I think he is just making some hard choices, based upon the facts as he sees them.

One of Cortwright's main contentions was that the project's supporters think they are hard-nosed realists, but they are ignoring the current reality. “Their projections on increased automobile traffic are based on gas prices being less than $2 a gallon,” he said. With the cost of regular over $4 a gallon, driving habits are going to change.

Burkholder countered that the cost of gas was not factored in. He observed that when gas prices go up, people will continue driving, but “swap out that F-250 for an economy car.”

That's probably true over the long haul, as long as gas prices continue to rise. But what about the people who already are driving the economy car? Most likely, they don't have any room in their budget for a doubling of their fuel costs, so they will have to cut back on driving.

And if they keep cutting back, there is no need to add more road capacity.

Pig in the Python

But what if Burkholder is right and driving habits remain the same, and thousands of new commuters are added to the I-5 corridor every year as population grows? What happens is that those 12 lanes that would make the bridge a breeze to cross will funnel down to two right in the middle of Portland. The biggest bottleneck on the freeway today is the one-lane exit off I-5 to I-84, which generally backs up traffic north to the Lloyd Center exit or beyond. With more cars coming down I-5, that jam could easily stretch up to Lombard, or at least past the Fremont Bridge ramp.

So that traffic snarl will mean another big project to add more lanes to I-5 and the 405 in the middle of town, where acquiring the real estate is going to be expensive. To keep traffic flowing, it might be necessary to rebuild the Marquan and Fremont bridges, too. And then more lanes down I-5 through the Terwilliger curves. Like a pig in a python, the congestion will keep moving south.

At the City Club debate, the real answer was brought up by Ray Polani, the tireless champion of rail transportation. Polani is legendary for figuring out an angle to put his agenda across at City Club forums no matter what the topic, be it public education, drug addiction or major league baseball. His question on Friday was spot on: “Why is there no consideration or funding to improve the railroad bridge?” he asked.

Burkholder's answer essentially was that the financing scheme for the I-5 bridge, using tolls and federal highway funds, can't be transferred to the railroad bridge, although he supports upgrading that bridge, too.

When it comes to interstate travel and transport, rail is where the priorities should be. Instead, our local and regional governments and quasi-governments are expanding freeways and airports.

Poor Track Record

Amtrak currently runs Spanish-made Talgo trains between Portland and Seattle capable of making the trip in about 90 minutes. But they can't get up to top speed (124 mph) because of a bunch of places where the track isn't safe. So the trip actually takes around four hours. Or an hour more than driving at the speed limit, and who does that?

If the tracks, grades and crossings--including a new bridge over the Columbia—were improved, both passenger and freight trains could travel faster and more efficiently. The freight component is huge. Convoys of semi's clog up I-5 virtually all day long. Truck drivers try to avoid rush hours, but these days, there are too many hours where traffic comes to a standstill.

If the rail system isn't adequately supported, we may face a future where personal automobile travel on the interstate highway system is exorbitantly tolled or taxed, or severely restricted to allow the movement of freight and essential vehicles such as ambulances, fire trucks, delivery vans and police cars. I wouldn't be opposed to that. Nor would I be opposed to segregated lanes for freight hauling only.

The real economies of scale, however, would come if more freight were shifted to rail, which can only happen if the trains move faster. Freight trains are three times more fuel efficient than diesel-burning transport trucks. Trains also can use many different sources of power, including electricity. If the railway web were expanded and made more sophisticated, it could almost eliminate the need for long haul trucking.

Meanwhile, most of the vehicles going across the I-5 bridge are used for transporting one or two people from some place in Vancouver to some place in Portland, or vice verse. The only non-car options are mediocre bus service or taking a long and nerve-wracking bike ride across the 205 bridge, which has a bike lane. I don't know anyone who uses it. The noise created by all the vehicular traffic makes this ride extremely unpleasant.

Thus, an integral part of the Columbia River Crossing project is light rail to Vancouver. A recent news article in The Oregonian speculated that Vancouver, 13 years after voting down light rail, is now ready to support it. Or at least its elected officials are. Of course, the Couv's city councilors know that the City of Portland and Metro have already stipulated that light rail be a part of the new bridge. So they have to go along with it to get what they want, which are more auto lanes over the river.

If they simply wanted a rail system between the two cities, they could upgrade the railroad bridge at far less than $4 billion. Then, as is being done between Wilsonville and Beaverton, the regular rail track could carry a series of small commuter trains. These trains might be less fuel efficient than our standard MAX cars, but the track already exists; eliminating the need to buy land and lay another track will save vast amounts of money and energy.

The Washington Department of Transportation has been gradually upgrading the tracks from Portland to Seattle and has a general plan that stretches out another ten years and eventually will cut Amtrak travel time between the cities to 2 ½ hours.

More money would speed up that process, such as a piece of that $4 billion scheduled for the CRC white elephant. The Port of Portland, too, could help out. Currently, the Port is coveting Colwood National Golf Course for an expansion to PDX. Even though higher fuel prices is going to curtail air travel. Consider, too, that one out of every six commercial planes at PDX is either headed for Seattle or just came from there.

And if there are schemes to expand PDX, I'll bet there also are plans for a bigger Sea-Tac as well. Now we are dealing with different agencies and jurisdictions, but there should be a way to take the money out of those expansion projects and put them into high speed rail. Maybe it will happen when we get regime change in Washington, D.C.

There's more info at the Council for a Livable Future.

What's Good for the Gander...

2008-06-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

Cute letter in The Oregonian Tuesday. The writer most likely was ironically supporting a position opposite of what his letter stated, but it's definitely an unconventional proposal:

Serve this sector

It is lamentable that the residents of the Montavilla neighborhood have to look at prostitutes on their street corners. I think that The City That Works needs to establish an out-call center for the illegal sex workers, just like it has for the illegal laborers.

It seems to be discriminatory and sexist for The City That Works to aid and abet a sector of the illegal workforce dominated by men, and not provide the same level of service to sectors of the illegal workforce dominated by women.

DAVID ZIMMERMAN Northeast Portland

Of course, maybe the city could just hook up the hookers with free laptops so they can advertise on craigslist like all the others.

Groovin' ...down a crowded avenue

2008-06-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

Doin' anything we want to do (except drive)

I usually take a bike ride through some Portland neighborhoods every Sunday. This Sunday, I was joined by several thousand other cyclists. No, not all my close friends—in fact, I recognized only a handful of people. This was the first Sunday Parkways (aka Ciclovia), sponsored by the City of Portland's transportation department.

They blocked auto traffic on six miles of streets in North Portland, stretching from Failing St. and Mississippi to about Greeley just south of Lombard. Four parks on the route had bands, food booths and information centers. It was a very leisurely and social ride, drawing the typical dawdling Sunday biker. There were so many slow bikes, not to mention pedestrians, that it was nearly impossible to hit double digit speed. I suppose that was the point, but me, I like the feeling of the wind blowing through the holes in my helmet.

While it was a pleasant ride, I don't know if it will do much to induce more people to ride bikes under normal traffic circumstances. After all, riding with the roads all closed off to all cars is a lot different than riding a bike in heavy daytime traffic. It may, however, prompt bike newbies to get out on their bikes on Sundays. If they rode a few miles to get to the closed-off route, they discovered that there is hardly any auto traffic on Sundays anywhere in Portland.

Another benefit of this event was letting people discover Peninsula Park, a real jewel in the city's park system with its rose garden, giant fountain and octagonal bandstand.

It was pretty much like Bridge Pedal without the bridges. And also without the free water bottles. When I started out in the morning, it was gray and overcast, but that quickly burned off and I found myself in need of water. At every park on the route, and several stops in between, there were plenty of coffee vendors, but no one was handing out water bottles. I was saved about halfway through the ride by the wonderful women from Blend coffee house, who had set up a table along the route a block away from their new location at Greeley and Killingsworth. One of the owners, Christie, pulled a big bottle of Crystal Geyser out of an ice bucket an just gave it to me.

The route approached bike gridlock at a few points, notably the three pedestrian bridges riders were forced to cross, where dismounting was required. Two of these crossed I-5 and the other the Going Street freeway to Swan Island. On that one, knowing my way around a bit, I just rode east a couple of blocks to Interstate to get around it. My notion of biking is once on the bike, stay on the bike.

Things observed along the ride:

7 yard sales
1 yard art sale
2 kids' lemonade stands (and one kid entrepreneur selling toys)
1 woman in frilly Victorian dress and hat promoting a historic house
8 t'ai chi practitioners in Peninsula Park
1 free hot dog stand (sponsored by the Bicycle Transportation Alliance)
1 free juggling class
2 unicyclists
Dozens of friendly cops stopping traffic
50 (approximately) dogs in Burley trailers, on bike baskets or trotting alongside
300 (approximately) adult bicyclists setting a bad example by not wearing helmets
0 incidents of road rage

I gather that this was the first of maybe several such Sunday street closure events, though the transportation office's web site doesn't say when the next one will be.

Some suggestions, however:

1.Start it later. The streets were closed off from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eight in the morning is a little early on a Sunday. I haven't even read the Sunday comics by then, let alone had breakfast.
2.Close off a commercial street. Almost the entire six mile course was on quiet residential streets, which are fine for biking on and Sunday—or for that matter, most any other day. They should have run this course right down Mississippi Ave. The throngs of bicyclists would easily make up for the lack of auto-borne customers for most of the businesses. The exception would be the Rebuilding Center, but it is accessible by an alley behind the store. Think of how cosmopolitan it would feel to have a street lined with cafes, pubs and stores, no cars and yet thousands of people streaming through them on foot or on bikes.
3.Follow the “Bike Boulevards” more closely. The North Portland route wandered in and out of the assigned bike boulevards for those neighborhoods, but didn't adhere to any. These safer streets are not well marked or publicized by the city, but they do make daily bike commuting much easier.
4.Rotate through Portland's neighborhoods. I think this first event was meant to introduce citizens to North Portland, which has an undeserved sketchy rep. It also was a really flat ride. But how about Foster/Powell to Woodstock in Southeast? From like 52nd to 72nd on Foster down to Woodstock. That's a bid shorter,so maybe wander over toward Reed College, as well. Another good ride would include Northeast Alberta, Killingsworth down to Fremont and Alameda. Ooh, now we're getting into a ritzy area whose residents might object. Screw 'em. On the other hand, the Lents district, often disparaged as “Felony Flats,” would offer a flat ride in a somewhat outlying neighborhood, and it has a farmer's market on Sundays, too.
5.Finally, if Portland really wants to get serious about increasing bicycling and decreasing cars on the road, the city should plan a car-free zone on a different day of the week. Really, it's so quiet and peaceful on Sundays that one doesn't need an inducement to ride a bike. But, say, Friday afternoon from 2 to 6 p.m., in downtown, now that's when I'd like to see some streets—and at least one bridge--closed to cars.

Global Warming: It's Time to Think About Plan B

2008-06-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

You ride your bike to work. You recycle everything that you don't compost. You eat mostly local and organically grown food and eat very little meat, if any. You've weatherized your house and installed energy saving light bulbs and appliances. You just bought a Prius.

You are the archtypical Oregonian, as green as can be for a lot of good reasons, primary among them the threat of global warming.

And then along comes the Tata Nano.

The what?

Just the world's cheapest new car, costing a mere $2,500. It's dubbed “the people's car” by Tata Motors of India. It's going to be on the market soon and it shouldn't be another Yugo. Tata is no backward little Third World company. Earlier this year, Tata bought the luxury lines Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2 billion.

The Nano, however, is the car for people who can't afford to own a car. There are billions of such people in the world. There's a billion each in both China and India. Just think about what's going to happen to the world's equilibrium with a billion more cars on the road. Your conscientiously small carbon footprint is going to seem awfully puny in the fight against global warming.

But don't blame China and India. Most countries in Europe can't meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. And here in the U.S., our Democratic Congress passed new fuel standards for automobiles that set the average fuel economy rating for an automobile company’s fleet of cars at 35 mpg. This law, which is weaker than almost all standards in Europe and Japan, doesn’t take effect until 2020.

Remember the report issued by the International Panel on Climate Change last November? The IPCC, which shared the Nobel Prize last year with Al Gore, issued some dire warnings. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late, there is not time," said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. "What we do in the next 2-3 years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

Pachauri, an Indian, has said he was "having nightmares" because of the Nano and added that the car represents bankruptcy of India's environmental policy.

No one doubts global warming anymore. Even President Bush seems to acknowledge it and has a plan for us to deal with it--as of 2025. Nevertheless, the subject of climate change still suffers from extreme levels of ignorance when politicians and pundits start talking about it. The most widespread layer of manure is that we as individuals, or even as local or regional governments, can do anything meaningful to reverse global warming through the reduction of greenhouse gases.

On a national or international level, it may have been possible to slow down global warming if Gore had become president in 2000 and there were enough other world leaders like him. But after eight years of the Bush regime, the odds don't look good. It looks like we're toast, no matter how many Oregonians buy a Prius or ride a bike.

But before you get so despondent that you go on a gluttonous gas guzzling bender, careening across the land in a 50-foot motorhome from one Arby's to another, all the while tossing beer cans and water bottles out the window until you get so crazed that you obsessively plot to hunt down Dick Cheney and blow him up in his secret bunker with a suicide bomb—wait, there is hope after all.

There is a Plan B. And that brings us to Prof. Paul J. Crutzen, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Crutzen, who won the Nobel prize for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, told the New York Times, “So far, there is little reason to be optimistic.”

He believes a political or social remedy to climate change is implausible and proposes a technological fix instead. Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space.

Crutzen estimates that it would cost $50 billion to cool the earth this way, or about 5% of the world's annual military spending. By contrast, a competing scheme to put trillions of tiny wafer like plastic lenses into space to deflect the sun's rays would cost several trillion dollars.

I bet this “geo-engineering” solution rubs every right-thinking environmentalist the wrong way. It goes against our Puritan nature. It embraces decadence. It's like eating supersized Big Mac meals every day and then erasing the extra pounds through liposuction and stomach stapling. It's like going off to an Ivy League school, partying like there's no tomorrow, flunking out, maxing out the family credit cards, hocking the family jewels, getting busted for drugs and still getting bailed out by your parents.

Just wrong.

On the other hand, what's our goal? Is it to reverse global warming, or just to make people change their profligate ways? We can pass cap-and-trade laws, sign treaties and protocols and provide tax credits for energy conservation, but we're just re-arranging the deck chairs and meanwhile, the Maldives, a small but sovereign nation, is sinking into the Indian Ocean.

Closer to home, huge stretches of ocean front property throughout the United States could easily end up submerged. Worldwide, 634 million people live on coastal land that is 30 feet or less above sea level, all of which could be gone in a couple of decades.

Then there's the drought, flooding, famines, fires, severe storms, rampant species extinction and other environmental maladies which already are striking the world and will get only more severe as the earth warms.

As all of these tragedies become more pervasive, someone is going to act on Crutzen's idea. It could be the U.N. or a special treaty organization or single nation—or even private enterprise. But at some point, global warming is going to be stopped cold by shooting crap into space to block out the sun.

Our environmental crises will not end there, but mucking up the upper atmosphere will clear the air politically. It ought to deprive the corn cartel of a rationale for the ludicrous economics of converting food to fuel. Same thing for the neo-nuclear power lobby. Perhaps it will allow us to take a more comprehensive and balanced look at the environmental problems facing the world.

What we will discover is that most green measures to reduce carbon emissions are necessary for other reasons. China now consumes just nine percent of the world's oil, but accounts for a third of the increase in consumption of oil. And that's before any of those Tata Nanos roll off the assembly line. The recent shock of $4-a-gallon gas has prompted more people to reduce driving, switch to smaller cars and start riding bikes and buses than several years worth of ads about saving the polar bears.

I'm going to keep riding my bike everywhere I can, not to save the earth, but because it saves me money, makes me feel better, connects me with my community and is just fun. Though it would be more fun if, in Portland, we actually had some global warming.

Politicians, of course, aren't talking to or about Paul Crutzen. The notion that it's too late for the world to confront climate change through conservation is too new and perhaps too defeatist in 2008. But by 2012, it will be the hot topic of the presidential campaign.

Thinking Outside the Bike Box

2008-06-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like everyone and their brother is riding a bike these days. It's the right time of year, and then there's the price of gas. So people are parking their guzzler and pulling that old mountain bike out of the garage.

Well, not really. There is a steady upward trend in bike riding in Portland and that trend usually accelerates this time of year. I am hearing from friends who have started riding their bikes to work or for errands. But I'm also now sitting at a coffee house on east Burnside listening to a steady stream of automobile traffic. It's the same as it ever was.

A survey last year found that 60 percent of Portland residents said they wanted to commute by bike, but didn't because they are afraid of getting crushed by an SUV or a garbage truck. If this survey is accurate, that means that if urban cycling was suddenly as risk-free as driving, about 20 percent of our fellow citizens would start biking more often; the other 40 percent would find some other excuse or procrastinate. Even so, adding 20 percent of Stumptown's population to the bike lanes would quintuple the level of riding that exists now.

Actually, cycling in the central part of Portland is pretty safe. Yes, a lot of bicyclists have been killed in accidents in the past couple of years, but many of them were practicing unprotected pedaling. No lights, no light clothing, no helmets. An emergency room nurse recently told me that helmetless riders account for 80 percent of all bike fatalities. People who don't blow through stoplights, pay attention to cars and make sure they are visible to drivers can bike safely in town.

In addition, most major thoroughfares inside of 82nd have bike lines and/or have relatively slow traffic. The inner eastside boasts a network of “bike boulevards” that allow cyclists to ride unimpeded on low traffic side streets like Clinton and Ankeny.

It could be better. It could be a lot better. The outer eastside, and anyplace south of Sellwood, (how, exactly, does one bike to Milwaukie?) remain bike hostile.

Here are three things that could make the biking life far better:

1.Dig tunnels under the major streets that cross bike boulevards. This was done in Eugene years ago on its bike path through the southern part of town. It makes the bike path almost a freeway. If digging a tunnel is not feasible, install a traffic light.
2.Get serious about bikes on MAX. With a bike and the MAX line, you can get to almost anywhere in the Metro area. But can you get your bike on MAX? The cars can hold about six bikes, and don't try that at rush hour. Tri-Met needs to order new cars, or additions to cars, that accommodate up to 20 bikes. There's no way Portland can reach its ridership goals if the mass transit complement is deficient.
3.Bike freeways. I'm sure creative engineering can carve out enough space for a big bike freeway along I-84, the Sunset Highway, or the MAX lines that run in these directions. For future lines, build in the bike freeway component. Look at it as a better use of public transit dollars. Currently, the older MAX lines carry about two percent of rush hour commuters. And the MAX is maxed out. It's impossible to add more cars. A bike line, if built wide enough, may never get maxed out.

I ride a bike almost everywhere in town. If I didn't have to go to lumber yards and home improvement stores for various projects around and in my house, I would hardly ever get into my ramshackle old van. I've been biking most of my life, even the four years I lived in Los Angeles (so okay, I lived in Venice, which has a wonderful long bike path up and down the beach). I bike for a lot of reasons: I'm cheap. I gain humongous amounts of pounds if I don't get on my bike. My butt looks good and I want to keep it that way. I can get to almost anywhere near where I live in less time than I can by car. And mostly because it's fun and makes me feel like a kid whenever I soar down a street.

But to get those reluctant and squeamish citizens on their bikes, we ultimately need to separate bike and auto traffic. Not by means of a painted line, but with physical barriers. That's how it's done in Amsterdam, the world's number one bike city.

In Portland, currently about 5 percent of all commutes are made by bike, and yet bike infrastructure—bike lanes, signage, those new boxes at stoplights, etc.--amounts to just one percent of total government spending on transportation. If bicycling received the same ratio of public dollars per user that light rail does, we might see elevated , covered bike freeways crisscrossing the city. And I say, why not?

This would benefit more than just the bike newbies. Those of us who have biked in heavy traffic would appreciate the added speed that an unencumbered bikeway offers. It's aggravating to be getting up to speed and then have to stop at a light or a stop sign every few blocks, which happens on bike boulevards, while on the main streets, the stoplights are all calibrated for automobile traffic. The only long bike paths useful for commuting in the city are the those on each side of the Willamette River from Sellwood and John's Landing. There's also the Springwater Corridor from Gresham, but there needs to be some police presence along that route as there are parts of it that look like scenes from Mad Max.

Gresham is 12 miles from downtown and most of those miles are pretty flat. With a central bike freeway, you could make a door-to-door trip in about 45 minutes, which is the same amount of time that Tri-Met's web site says it takes to get from Gresham to Pioneer Square.

Pie in the sky? Hey, the real pie in the sky is the notion that hundreds of millions of people can burn a finite amount of fossil fuels for personal transportation and entertainment. And now we have more people in the world eating that pie.