The Oregonian has an odd policy about running letters, or rather, not so odd, unfortunately. Like many other withering daily newspapers, it tries to hold onto its old and addled but nonetheless loyal readers at the expense of publishing, daily, such complete nonsense that other readers must find pretty discrediting to the paper, not to [...]
Back in the early 1990′s, the Portland Art Museum bought its next door neighbor, the Masonic Temple, for future expansion. There was some debate about what to do with the imposing 1928 structure, which had been modeled on the Temple of Halicarnassus by architect Fredrick Fritsch and dwarfed Pietro Belluschi’s 1933 original museum to its [...]
Probably the funniest new right wing media meme, started by Jonah Goldberg but lovingly embraced by Glenn Beck and the Teabaggers, is that liberalism is somehow linked to Nazism. Yeah, and down is up on Uranus. Granted, Jonah and Glenn aren’t the brightest bulbs on the chandelier, but it seems to me that some of [...]
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 [...]
UPDATED BELOW: Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently. First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good [...]
Admittedly, the Oregonlive comments section isn’t the best place to gauge overall public opinion, since righties have much more spare time than the rest of us, but I admit I was a bit embarrassed to read how many Oregonian readers think Phil Knight is the best thing since sliced bread, and how dumb they are. [...]
The battle over measures 66 and 67 is heating up here in Oregon; and as an all-mail election state, these battles are more protracted here than other places. Last year the legislature, attempting to close a $700 million or so budget gap, decided to raise our corporate minimum tax (for companies who report no profits) [...]
As often as I express my deep disdain, and often horror, at the way newspapers waste their precious 1st Amendment rights and costly newsprint printing utter garbage, I will miss them when they’re gone, because what they’ll take with them seems precious and uniquely American; that is, what they once were. Newspapers were more than [...]
Reading somewhat dumbfoundedly the meandering and retarded but mercifully brief something or other, evidently scrawled in crayon on the nursing home wallpaper by my own former Senator, Bob Packwood of Oregon, that the ever-forgiving New York Times saw fit to publish today, I kinda felt sorry for the old heel. How the mighty senator, a [...]