Yes, the murder rate is now dropping from the stratospheric numbers of 2021 and 2022. But what's never mentioned is that it's still well over 100% above the 2019 number. I wonder if the numbers are only dropping because so many of those murdered the past four years were also potential murderers. The city is, still, a total mess.
The Idea of governing Portland is a joke...too many social justice reprobates live in the city, the government is fucking clueless, the city leadership acts like teenagers that need discipline but the parent's are too stoned to offer guidance...I hope the place implodes and then a tsunami sucks it into the sea....there is no political solution for Portland...This is what you get when you elect the left...
I've never been to Portland, but I have read articles about Andy Ngo, a journalist who just received a $300,000 settlement from an assault that took place in Portland. He had been filming an incredible string of violent nights, possibly 100 nights, in which privileged young men put on armor and bashed things, pretending that it had to do with social justice. As I understand it, they noticed that he was recording the truth and beat them up.
I’m hoping your use of the final words “beat them up” was just a grammatical oversight. Journalist Ngo does not refer to himself as non-binary, and he did not beat up any members of Antifa: he was there as a reporter, and he was the sole victim of the assault.
Ngo was attacked by three members of Antifa who hit him on the head so hard that he sustained a traumatic brain injury that required neurophysical and speech therapy to restore normal functioning. This incident occurred in 2019.
Otherwise, your description and characterization of the motives of the Antifa members who assaulted Ngo are accurate.
I doubt that you've ever been to Portland. There is no tsunami danger in a riverside city 80 miles from the ocean. But rather than insult or wish disaster on the many good-hearted people here, perhaps you could be supportive of a one-time beautiful city trying to correct its excessive and/or misdirected attempts at finding a path to justice for all. Which, I hope to believe, is still a worthy goal.
Nah, you have to cull the herd when it is infected with a disease...like progressivism, your understanding of geography might be better than mine but I think you applied too much logic to the tsunami comment...the place is rotten, the people that voted the leadership into office are clueless, Darwin was right, only the strong survive and Portland has no strength
I have no sympathy for residents of Porlandia, who have voted for a progressive agenda for many years. They are reaping what they have encouraged.
Downtown has lost that loving feeling, the underbelly and sides of freeways are homeless dumps, and all of the beauty that Portland use to have has been dirtied.
Until the progressive left in Portland is a minority, nothing will change. It's just like the teachers' unions--until they are non-existent, public education will remain under the control of average bureaucrats.
Portland voters have choices--they just aren't willing to make them. I used to think that the television show Portlandia was an exaggeration of Portland. Now I think the city is an exaggeration of the show.
I was in Portland Oregon throughout all of the Riots. They were more than riots. They were Funded, organized orchestrated and done with the full intent of overthrowing an entire city. for over 6 Months!! And they Succeeded, who was on all the campuses Recently ?? Same group. Same Enemy, real Enemy of America, That's Treason!! But the word Enemy and Treason are Boo Boo words now. wonder why that is. these tactics are no different than Italy in 1930's Mussolini times. thats where REAL fasishism came from, better catch on, because they didn't. they tried to burn down the court house, the city center, the federal building and attacked the mayor's house downtown. they were NOT working for the Republicans. why doesn't that sink in??
Social justice is yet another term meant to hide, not illuminate, an idea. Social justice is the idea that you bend the rules or break them outright, to get the outcome that is perceived to be just. It is an outcome that is not the product of the law or its equal enforcement. Anything can be done under the banner of social justice, and is. It's not wonderful, and I knew it was bogus the very first time I saw the term, as did millions of others. DEI and social justice are just dressed up totalitarian fraud, and it needs to be rejected and discredited completely.
Portland real estate, like the city itself, is in the toilet. Have all the taxes you want, have all the social programs you want, but for god sakes, have a clean, safe city. If you can't do that, people won't stay.
yeah, an average of 13 days on the market for homes, the median home price is over $500k, values going back up. Quite the "toilet." You do realize Portland real estate is located in areas other than downtown and the near Eastside, right? It's still an attractive place and thankfully people are waking up to the disaster of the last few years. Overturning 110 and brooming out Schmidt is the next step.
I read all these stories since 2020 about awful leftist policies that resulted in the exact bad results that all normal people openly predicted. And the more recent stories about the shocked reactions and moves back towards somewhat normal policies. And I think “wouldn’t it have been easier to have just never gone down that road in the first place?”
Then I just whistle Dixie and thank god I’m in a normal part of the USA.
But if they re-criminalize crime in Portland, the city will become racist because it will no longer be legal to virtuously burn down city blocks and vandalize stuff to signal outrage on behalf of all the black people who don't live in Portland and would never want to because it's a dumpster fire kindled by white people who act on the assumption that black people have no agency.
Social justice isn't letting people steal and burn up neighborhoods. Letting criminals get away without punishment is insane.
It's like welfare, in the beginning it was supposed to help people get through a bad period. Now we have five generations of lazy people that never work.
Yeah, there's more to SJ than stealing and burning up neighborhoods, it's also about supporting terrorist organizations and threatening people based on their religion or ethnicity.
everything is "communism" to the far right, just as everything is "racism" and "fascism" to the far left. You guys are more alike than you think. I'm surprised you didn't also add in "satanic" or "demonic."
Sure seems like you are the one stereotyping here, with more than a little hyperbole added just for extra effect.
The topic was social justice, and the lack of any clear definition of that. My point was that many of those calling for SJ would probably choose a definition similar to communism unknowingly, based upon their hatred of profit, the "rich", corporations, and CEOs.
When this all started, it was about mentally and emotionally impaired people getting killed by cops when things might have gone differently with appropriate staffing. The idea of taking some of the money allocated to policing and using it to hire mental health professionals who could respond to that type of incident was one I supported. Let cops do what they are trained to do, get people with different training to handle different situations.
I also supported criminal justice slash bail reform. People need to go to jail when they commit real crimes, and they need to post bond to ensure they'll appear in court. But people who screw up (unintentionally, non-violently) losing their jobs and maybe their homes when they get arrested is not productive for them or for society as a whole.
But what's happened is.. nuts.
San Francisco never actually intended to make shoplifting less than $900 an average trip to CVS (though maybe they didn't have a problem with it). They already had a policy that the police wouldn't respond to a call if there was no felony when the state made all kinds of "non-violent crimes" (like kidnapping, rape with an object, and yes, shoplifting less than $900) misdemeanors. We all see where that went.
The defund the police movement is and always was insane. Pay cops more and then hold them to higher standards. Spend less on weaponizing the police to free up funds for community policing. We don't need less policing, but we may need better policing.
Same with criminal justice reform. You shouldn't ruin someone's life for a victimless non-violent crime, but that doesn't mean you don't put criminals in jail and keep them there.
If the government, federal, state, or local, isn't going to keep communities safe then they need to lighten up on the laws against vigilantism. And stop calling it vigilantism. We voluntarily outsource much of our physical safety to the government. If they can't or won't do the job then in a free country it falls on us to take care of it ourselves.
You still come across as someone who sees criminals as just disadvantaged, or poorly educated. In other words, they all have excuses and therefore the justice for their crimes should be minimized. May I suggest that most criminals have little regard for law and order, for personal property, for right vs wrong. And by giving them a pass on their crimes, you show them that crime is a perfectly viable way to make a living, to deal with conflicts, or to deal with their neighbors.
Progressives see drug dealers as just some poor person trying to make a few bucks selling to their friends. The reality is that they are selling fentanyl and other dangerous drugs to anyone with money to spend, and fentanyl is the leading cause of death in young adults. Most of them are killers, plain and simple. No need to worry about ruining their lives, like they have done to so many others.
I'm not talking about criminals. I'm talking about a guy who has one too many and gets busted for public urination in an alley. Or a guy who gets arrested for driving on a suspended license because he couldn't afford car insurance or to pay parking tickets or whatever but still had to get to work.
I get it. I don't want to ruin someone's life over those kinds of issues. But, let the judge decide that, not the prosecutor or the police. Otherwise, people on the street figure it out, and they stop obeying those laws and many others. And they lose respect for the whole process. In other words, if you give them an inch, they will take that inch and another mile as well. And they will tell all of their friends about how you don't really need car insurance, and you don't really need a valid license, and you can just park anywhere you want. Oh, and heck, why not round up the gang and go get some nice clothes and jewelry on the Magnificent Mile. Bash in a few windows, fill a few trash bags and off to Amazon Marketplace. Can't be too big a deal if the police usually don't bother chasing you down, and even if they do you're back on the street in hours.
Justice and racial equality in policing and protecting the rights of citizens are not mutually exclusive, we CAN have both.
The Department of Justice itself found widespread police misconduct in police departments like Baltimore and Chicago. There IS a real problem.
Then you have cases like Camden where crime was completely out of control, they really did rebuild policing from the ground up, and it worked.
And finally you have many police departments around the country getting it right.
We just need to take an honest look at what works and what doesn't, absent partisan fantasies based on a world that doesn't actually exist. One party isn't going to win every issue if we want just and effective policing.
But the goal of progressives is not racial equality. It is racial equity. If people can't figure out the difference and reject "equity" as the goal, we will just have more of the same.
Agree, but where the rubber meets the road there are only an extremely small number of people thinking that way. Most people want equality. This story is a perfect demonstration of what happens - white suburbanite liberals get swept up in the rhetoric, realize that all their favorite restaurants downtown have been driven out of business by skyrocketing crime, and all of a sudden they're voting law and order. PoC are more tuned in to reality than social media suburbanites.
The real problem is, there is no mechanism or incentive to reach reasonable middle ground. Institute some reasonable police reforms, like putting mental health councilors on the street so the cops can avoid having to deal with situations they're not qualified for (and don't want to deal with), introduce actual accountability for the very small number of cops who are actually abusing their authority, and most voters are going to accept that.
I think most people think we have achieved equality of opportunity. Oh sure, the race hustlers will never tell anyone that because they get paid for sowing fear, anger, and hatred.
And because of the constant drum of the hustlers, supported by the media, most people are not really tuned into reality, including PoC.
I think the mental health counselors on the street has now been debunked as a solution. The police are perfectly capable of handling non-violent people. And the counselors want nothing to do with confronting an angry, violent person. I think that is just another liberal canard based upon the faulty logic that nearly all police shootings could be prevented if a counselor was just there to talk to the armed, violent person. I have not seen any evidence that that works at all locally.
I don't see any resolution because the race hustlers won't allow it. Every police shooting is preventable according to them and the media plays along when they put the "victim's" family with their lawyer on TV to talk about how the dead person wanted to be a doctor to help people and was just going through a rough patch. No way they should have been shot no matter what they were doing. And that is all the public ever sees until the officer is exonerated, but that just elicits fake outrage from the lawyer and the hustlers, once again on TV.
So how did the suburbanites get on board with this? All it takes is for govt to likewise get on board with the race hustlers and the race lawyers and the media to create a situation where everyone is attacking the police for every encounter, and selling the notion that it is the police and the laws that are the problem. Then the defund the police and the victimless crimes forgiveness nonsense seems to make sense. And what changes their minds? The implementation of this nonsense makes things much worse, not better. And the suburbanites figure that out pretty fast when they see drug use and crime become commonplace and no one does anything about it.
Willamette Week, the NYT. I’ve lived here for 40 years. The Oregonian is known for not supporting public employees and unions. Which in my mind is not a liberal stance.
I live in burbs of PDX for over 25 years, subscribed to The Oregonian all this time and have no idea what you’re talking about. The Oregonian rarely (if ever) endorses a Republican, only Democrats. And nearly every Democrat in this State gains office on the backs of public employees unions, teachers, SEIU, AFSCME. Are you thinking The Oregonian is against unions because they annually publish top $ PERS recipients, of which 99% are union or former union? Portland has gone way downhill in the last 40 years, which is about the time it’s been since this State has had a Republican governor. I’m so glad I left Multnomah county for Washington county. Our DA Kevin Barton is great. Your choices are between dumb & dumber, I’m afraid.
I was thinking of the paper’s lack of support for teachers in particular. I don’t care about the publishing of pers recipients. They are also owned by a conservative publishing company out of California I believe. Since I cancelled my subscription a few years ago, I haven’t kept up with who they have endorsed recently. I have been thinking of resubscribing though.
Truly I guess it all depends upon one’s own lens we are viewing from.
And yes., our lovely city has suffered in recent years. I’m hoping it is starting to come back. We have a lot of issues to solve. Many of us are frustrated. We have also had to accept that some ideas were failures. We are getting there slowly.
By the way, My own neighborhood is perfectly fine and liveable in inner se Portland.
Yes, the murder rate is now dropping from the stratospheric numbers of 2021 and 2022. But what's never mentioned is that it's still well over 100% above the 2019 number. I wonder if the numbers are only dropping because so many of those murdered the past four years were also potential murderers. The city is, still, a total mess.
Portland Rejoice!! Perhaps this city is not doomed! Down with Mike Schmidt and his dipshittery!
Nathan Vasquez and common sense to the rescue! I hope...
The Idea of governing Portland is a joke...too many social justice reprobates live in the city, the government is fucking clueless, the city leadership acts like teenagers that need discipline but the parent's are too stoned to offer guidance...I hope the place implodes and then a tsunami sucks it into the sea....there is no political solution for Portland...This is what you get when you elect the left...
I've never been to Portland, but I have read articles about Andy Ngo, a journalist who just received a $300,000 settlement from an assault that took place in Portland. He had been filming an incredible string of violent nights, possibly 100 nights, in which privileged young men put on armor and bashed things, pretending that it had to do with social justice. As I understand it, they noticed that he was recording the truth and beat them up.
I’m hoping your use of the final words “beat them up” was just a grammatical oversight. Journalist Ngo does not refer to himself as non-binary, and he did not beat up any members of Antifa: he was there as a reporter, and he was the sole victim of the assault.
Ngo was attacked by three members of Antifa who hit him on the head so hard that he sustained a traumatic brain injury that required neurophysical and speech therapy to restore normal functioning. This incident occurred in 2019.
Otherwise, your description and characterization of the motives of the Antifa members who assaulted Ngo are accurate.
I doubt that you've ever been to Portland. There is no tsunami danger in a riverside city 80 miles from the ocean. But rather than insult or wish disaster on the many good-hearted people here, perhaps you could be supportive of a one-time beautiful city trying to correct its excessive and/or misdirected attempts at finding a path to justice for all. Which, I hope to believe, is still a worthy goal.
Nah, you have to cull the herd when it is infected with a disease...like progressivism, your understanding of geography might be better than mine but I think you applied too much logic to the tsunami comment...the place is rotten, the people that voted the leadership into office are clueless, Darwin was right, only the strong survive and Portland has no strength
Wow. Have you even ever been here?
Couple of times, would never return!!
Update on this story: Mike Schmidt, the progressive incumbent DA, has conceded the election to his challenger on 5/22.
I have no sympathy for residents of Porlandia, who have voted for a progressive agenda for many years. They are reaping what they have encouraged.
Downtown has lost that loving feeling, the underbelly and sides of freeways are homeless dumps, and all of the beauty that Portland use to have has been dirtied.
Until the progressive left in Portland is a minority, nothing will change. It's just like the teachers' unions--until they are non-existent, public education will remain under the control of average bureaucrats.
Portland voters have choices--they just aren't willing to make them. I used to think that the television show Portlandia was an exaggeration of Portland. Now I think the city is an exaggeration of the show.
I want residents of Portland to suffer more. Reap what you sow.
I was in Portland Oregon throughout all of the Riots. They were more than riots. They were Funded, organized orchestrated and done with the full intent of overthrowing an entire city. for over 6 Months!! And they Succeeded, who was on all the campuses Recently ?? Same group. Same Enemy, real Enemy of America, That's Treason!! But the word Enemy and Treason are Boo Boo words now. wonder why that is. these tactics are no different than Italy in 1930's Mussolini times. thats where REAL fasishism came from, better catch on, because they didn't. they tried to burn down the court house, the city center, the federal building and attacked the mayor's house downtown. they were NOT working for the Republicans. why doesn't that sink in??
Social justice is yet another term meant to hide, not illuminate, an idea. Social justice is the idea that you bend the rules or break them outright, to get the outcome that is perceived to be just. It is an outcome that is not the product of the law or its equal enforcement. Anything can be done under the banner of social justice, and is. It's not wonderful, and I knew it was bogus the very first time I saw the term, as did millions of others. DEI and social justice are just dressed up totalitarian fraud, and it needs to be rejected and discredited completely.
Portland real estate, like the city itself, is in the toilet. Have all the taxes you want, have all the social programs you want, but for god sakes, have a clean, safe city. If you can't do that, people won't stay.
yeah, an average of 13 days on the market for homes, the median home price is over $500k, values going back up. Quite the "toilet." You do realize Portland real estate is located in areas other than downtown and the near Eastside, right? It's still an attractive place and thankfully people are waking up to the disaster of the last few years. Overturning 110 and brooming out Schmidt is the next step.
I read all these stories since 2020 about awful leftist policies that resulted in the exact bad results that all normal people openly predicted. And the more recent stories about the shocked reactions and moves back towards somewhat normal policies. And I think “wouldn’t it have been easier to have just never gone down that road in the first place?”
Then I just whistle Dixie and thank god I’m in a normal part of the USA.
Kind of like Univ of Florida's treatment of the protesters, vs what happened at Columbia and UCLA. Nip that s---t in the bud.
But if they re-criminalize crime in Portland, the city will become racist because it will no longer be legal to virtuously burn down city blocks and vandalize stuff to signal outrage on behalf of all the black people who don't live in Portland and would never want to because it's a dumpster fire kindled by white people who act on the assumption that black people have no agency.
It's a real conundrum.
A society/community will experience the behavior it will tolerate.
Social justice isn't letting people steal and burn up neighborhoods. Letting criminals get away without punishment is insane.
It's like welfare, in the beginning it was supposed to help people get through a bad period. Now we have five generations of lazy people that never work.
We've dug a hole so deep we can't get out of it.
Ok, so what is Social Justice?
Yeah, there's more to SJ than stealing and burning up neighborhoods, it's also about supporting terrorist organizations and threatening people based on their religion or ethnicity.
Vasquez: “A lot of people still want social justice, and that’s a wonderful part of what we’re trying to do,...”
I would have liked to hear how this guy (or anyone who uses that term unironically) defines "social justice."
Exactly. My guess is that most of them would unknowingly choose a definition of communism if given a multiple-choice poll.
everything is "communism" to the far right, just as everything is "racism" and "fascism" to the far left. You guys are more alike than you think. I'm surprised you didn't also add in "satanic" or "demonic."
Sure seems like you are the one stereotyping here, with more than a little hyperbole added just for extra effect.
The topic was social justice, and the lack of any clear definition of that. My point was that many of those calling for SJ would probably choose a definition similar to communism unknowingly, based upon their hatred of profit, the "rich", corporations, and CEOs.
When this all started, it was about mentally and emotionally impaired people getting killed by cops when things might have gone differently with appropriate staffing. The idea of taking some of the money allocated to policing and using it to hire mental health professionals who could respond to that type of incident was one I supported. Let cops do what they are trained to do, get people with different training to handle different situations.
I also supported criminal justice slash bail reform. People need to go to jail when they commit real crimes, and they need to post bond to ensure they'll appear in court. But people who screw up (unintentionally, non-violently) losing their jobs and maybe their homes when they get arrested is not productive for them or for society as a whole.
But what's happened is.. nuts.
San Francisco never actually intended to make shoplifting less than $900 an average trip to CVS (though maybe they didn't have a problem with it). They already had a policy that the police wouldn't respond to a call if there was no felony when the state made all kinds of "non-violent crimes" (like kidnapping, rape with an object, and yes, shoplifting less than $900) misdemeanors. We all see where that went.
The defund the police movement is and always was insane. Pay cops more and then hold them to higher standards. Spend less on weaponizing the police to free up funds for community policing. We don't need less policing, but we may need better policing.
Same with criminal justice reform. You shouldn't ruin someone's life for a victimless non-violent crime, but that doesn't mean you don't put criminals in jail and keep them there.
If the government, federal, state, or local, isn't going to keep communities safe then they need to lighten up on the laws against vigilantism. And stop calling it vigilantism. We voluntarily outsource much of our physical safety to the government. If they can't or won't do the job then in a free country it falls on us to take care of it ourselves.
You still come across as someone who sees criminals as just disadvantaged, or poorly educated. In other words, they all have excuses and therefore the justice for their crimes should be minimized. May I suggest that most criminals have little regard for law and order, for personal property, for right vs wrong. And by giving them a pass on their crimes, you show them that crime is a perfectly viable way to make a living, to deal with conflicts, or to deal with their neighbors.
Progressives see drug dealers as just some poor person trying to make a few bucks selling to their friends. The reality is that they are selling fentanyl and other dangerous drugs to anyone with money to spend, and fentanyl is the leading cause of death in young adults. Most of them are killers, plain and simple. No need to worry about ruining their lives, like they have done to so many others.
I'm not talking about criminals. I'm talking about a guy who has one too many and gets busted for public urination in an alley. Or a guy who gets arrested for driving on a suspended license because he couldn't afford car insurance or to pay parking tickets or whatever but still had to get to work.
I get it. I don't want to ruin someone's life over those kinds of issues. But, let the judge decide that, not the prosecutor or the police. Otherwise, people on the street figure it out, and they stop obeying those laws and many others. And they lose respect for the whole process. In other words, if you give them an inch, they will take that inch and another mile as well. And they will tell all of their friends about how you don't really need car insurance, and you don't really need a valid license, and you can just park anywhere you want. Oh, and heck, why not round up the gang and go get some nice clothes and jewelry on the Magnificent Mile. Bash in a few windows, fill a few trash bags and off to Amazon Marketplace. Can't be too big a deal if the police usually don't bother chasing you down, and even if they do you're back on the street in hours.
Absolutely. That's what judges are for. They just need to do more of it.
Justice and racial equality in policing and protecting the rights of citizens are not mutually exclusive, we CAN have both.
The Department of Justice itself found widespread police misconduct in police departments like Baltimore and Chicago. There IS a real problem.
Then you have cases like Camden where crime was completely out of control, they really did rebuild policing from the ground up, and it worked.
And finally you have many police departments around the country getting it right.
We just need to take an honest look at what works and what doesn't, absent partisan fantasies based on a world that doesn't actually exist. One party isn't going to win every issue if we want just and effective policing.
But the goal of progressives is not racial equality. It is racial equity. If people can't figure out the difference and reject "equity" as the goal, we will just have more of the same.
Agree, but where the rubber meets the road there are only an extremely small number of people thinking that way. Most people want equality. This story is a perfect demonstration of what happens - white suburbanite liberals get swept up in the rhetoric, realize that all their favorite restaurants downtown have been driven out of business by skyrocketing crime, and all of a sudden they're voting law and order. PoC are more tuned in to reality than social media suburbanites.
The real problem is, there is no mechanism or incentive to reach reasonable middle ground. Institute some reasonable police reforms, like putting mental health councilors on the street so the cops can avoid having to deal with situations they're not qualified for (and don't want to deal with), introduce actual accountability for the very small number of cops who are actually abusing their authority, and most voters are going to accept that.
I think most people think we have achieved equality of opportunity. Oh sure, the race hustlers will never tell anyone that because they get paid for sowing fear, anger, and hatred.
And because of the constant drum of the hustlers, supported by the media, most people are not really tuned into reality, including PoC.
I think the mental health counselors on the street has now been debunked as a solution. The police are perfectly capable of handling non-violent people. And the counselors want nothing to do with confronting an angry, violent person. I think that is just another liberal canard based upon the faulty logic that nearly all police shootings could be prevented if a counselor was just there to talk to the armed, violent person. I have not seen any evidence that that works at all locally.
I don't see any resolution because the race hustlers won't allow it. Every police shooting is preventable according to them and the media plays along when they put the "victim's" family with their lawyer on TV to talk about how the dead person wanted to be a doctor to help people and was just going through a rough patch. No way they should have been shot no matter what they were doing. And that is all the public ever sees until the officer is exonerated, but that just elicits fake outrage from the lawyer and the hustlers, once again on TV.
So how did the suburbanites get on board with this? All it takes is for govt to likewise get on board with the race hustlers and the race lawyers and the media to create a situation where everyone is attacking the police for every encounter, and selling the notion that it is the police and the laws that are the problem. Then the defund the police and the victimless crimes forgiveness nonsense seems to make sense. And what changes their minds? The implementation of this nonsense makes things much worse, not better. And the suburbanites figure that out pretty fast when they see drug use and crime become commonplace and no one does anything about it.
Willamette Week, the NYT. I’ve lived here for 40 years. The Oregonian is known for not supporting public employees and unions. Which in my mind is not a liberal stance.
I live in burbs of PDX for over 25 years, subscribed to The Oregonian all this time and have no idea what you’re talking about. The Oregonian rarely (if ever) endorses a Republican, only Democrats. And nearly every Democrat in this State gains office on the backs of public employees unions, teachers, SEIU, AFSCME. Are you thinking The Oregonian is against unions because they annually publish top $ PERS recipients, of which 99% are union or former union? Portland has gone way downhill in the last 40 years, which is about the time it’s been since this State has had a Republican governor. I’m so glad I left Multnomah county for Washington county. Our DA Kevin Barton is great. Your choices are between dumb & dumber, I’m afraid.
I was thinking of the paper’s lack of support for teachers in particular. I don’t care about the publishing of pers recipients. They are also owned by a conservative publishing company out of California I believe. Since I cancelled my subscription a few years ago, I haven’t kept up with who they have endorsed recently. I have been thinking of resubscribing though.
Truly I guess it all depends upon one’s own lens we are viewing from.
And yes., our lovely city has suffered in recent years. I’m hoping it is starting to come back. We have a lot of issues to solve. Many of us are frustrated. We have also had to accept that some ideas were failures. We are getting there slowly.
By the way, My own neighborhood is perfectly fine and liveable in inner se Portland.