I went to look at this dump on Alameda that a client might buy, and as you can imagine, she said, “What can we do about the yard?” She was using the term “yard” rather loosely, as you can see. From the front, the house is a perfect Christmas center-hall colonial sitting about ten feet [...]
My local rag, the Oregonian, has an incurable tendency to take up quixotic and unpopular conservative causes, and then make an ass of itself maniacally defending them against the wishes of all present. When they lose, as they did with assisted suicide and measures 66 and 67, they imperiously scold their readers afterward and hamhandedly [...]
The owner of this house (full disclosure: it’s my brother…) tried to unload it last summer, and found that the snobby buyers in that price range in this economy were no longer happy with just view, architecture, and location, but also found the existing 2 1/2 bathrooms inadequate. They required a master bath, and henceforth [...]
Rich people say the darnedest things, and they have for time immemorial, but only recently they have been encouraged to do so free of ridicule on national television. During the Health Care Summit today, (h/t crooksandliars.com) CNN helpfully cut away to have the certifiably cuckoo creationist Ben Stein come on the air and proudly say [...]
If I hear, one more time, someone speak of the wonders of the “free market,” I’m going to do something desperate. Why aren’t these cretinous martinets ever asked to explain what, in heaven’s name, they mean? The reality has gotten so far removed from the homilies that some explanation is in order. In an offensively [...]
I have a strong feeling that our Media Stars are going to be left with even more egg on their faces than usual as the next elections roll around, so convinced they are that, somehow, the Republicans have recaptured the hearts of that imaginary “middle America” that none of them have evidently ever seen. Of [...]
While watching or reading about the headliners at the 2010 CPAC, the title of that great Stephen Sondheim song Send in the Clowns from the musical Little Night Music kept ringing in my head. Using some lines from that song, here in parenthesis are the kind of thoughts that are in the minds of the [...]
Well, today (and I can’t believe it’s taken this long,…) we had our first Wonder Bread version of 9/11, and it does kind of make you realize why all these loser whities got so worked up about the first one. In short, those habibs have it all over on us for both audacity and effectiveness. [...]
I’m in LA at the moment, helping my dearest friend Tina get her house ready to sell so she can finally escape this dreadful place after over a dozen unintended years. And, for me, her time here meant six residences and about twenty remodeling projects, which has enabled me to escape Portland for at least [...]
Every time I start to worry about Republicans’ embarrassing overconfidence in their imminent “resurgence,” along comes Michele Bachmann, and I take heart. Bachmann thoroughly rejected the idea of a social guarantee of health care, saying that the rights guaranteed in America’s founding ideals affirm “your right to own property, not necessarily the right or a [...]