Ending Reconstruction before hanging every Confederate was a mistake

I've seen people recommending the Willamette Week voting guide and I gotta tell you - these days Willie Week seems just as much a part of the #portland establishment as The Oregonian to me. Very little difference. The Mercury is the last decent local paper standing.

The way the Oregonian, the governor, and other electeds are pushing narratives that we must unquestioningly give a billionaire millions of tax payer dollars for the Moda center without evidence is astounding. I’ve never clutched pearls but this level of fiscal irresponsibility is getting me there!

What if every vision of the future, seen by a prophet, was actually just a vision of a prestige TV series? How would they know the difference? How could we expect them to know the difference?

this is also one of my hobbyhorses. you want a better caliber of lawmaker? you want to reduce the odds of corruption? pay them more. a lot more.

I bet it ends with “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER” and they cropped it out

This thread is infuriating. If accountability mattered to Democrats writ large, we wouldn't be knee deep in shit. This inability to take critique and do better doesn't show fight, it shows fecklessness. People are quite literally demanding fighters and most of y'all are whining and obfuscating.

I called my senators and my congressperson to tell them my wallet’s closed to democrats until there’s an apology for this. Only the left gets this tough guy talking-to and it’s gross. If wanting the party to be responsive instead of a corporatist fossil makes me the opposition then I’m proud to be.

a critical difference between woke 1 and woke 2 is the understanding that woo is something to be fought tooth and nail

From my cold dead hands RFK you dumb bitch

the old insider politics of city hall over. we built a system designed to destroy it. but that system is only as good as the willingness of your elected leaders to fight to bring about the change that is now possible. i've been in this fight since day one and i'd love your help to stay in it.

Oregon is one of these key states. Someone pretend to own a sports team so Kotek will listen when you tell her we have to do this.

Love a bunch of cute “look how bribable we are” pics from councilors who are supposed to be soberly deliberating their vote. Seems like they should recuse themselves

If you get traumatized while voluntarily attending a leisure event run by Nazis a possible downside is a lack of sympathy.

this dude's a mobster who feeds on the blood of the poor and i don't think the city of portland or state of oregon should enter business dealings with mobsters who feed on the blood of the poor. it's a shame he's holding the blazers hostage but that's just the way it is on this bitch of an earth

It's fun how less than 24 hours after a poll that confirmed that nobody knows or cares about Hasan Piker one way or another you have a thread full of people genuinely angry at the idea that he might be planning an elaborate art heist. Never change Bluesky

It seems urgent to find out how many NDAs have been signed by public officials related to this deal. If electeds or public employees have signed NDAs that prevent them from disclosing things to either the public or to city council in its oversight role then this is a crisis.

Oregon, in unison: “You already said she was an Oregon republican, why are you repeating yourself?”

elon musk-coded

She wants a city government so debilitated by bad policy that she can drown it in a bathtub.

Exactly one year ago today:

It’s so cool when game developers branch out into other media. The creators of Myst designed this AirBnB’s shower controls.

Trump manifesting an army of demons into a depiction of himself as christ is activating every dormant evangelical neuron in the dark corners of my brain. I’m fighting the urge to write letters to my unbelieving loved ones for after I get raptured

Portland residents, @portlanddsa.bsky.social learned that a local company called Sightline Intelligence is shipping lethal drone tech to Israel. Take 2 mins to click & ask electeds to look into Sightline, which uses PDX area footage in its chilling promo materials: actionnetwork.org/letters/sigh...

When we take back power, I do not want unity or healing, I want revenge. I also don't want a lecture on "but that's just like Trump, he wanted revenge." He was wrong, we are right. It's different. Get a moral compass. Revenge or sit down. Call it "justice" if you must, it's that too.

Happy Appomattox Day to all that celebrate

Someone check in on Ted Wheeler, he must be devastated

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

Dracula What is a cat? A miserable little pile of beans!

Jokes aside, councilors haven’t been brought into these discussions until recently and the information we’ve received is vague. If they want public dollars, there needs to be empirical evidence that this will provide massive public benefits. Public dollars are not a slush fund for billionaires.

The city administrator model is just a fast track to corruption unless elected leaders can perform oversight. Any whining about it not being “nice” is a tactic to thwart transparency so wealthy and powerful people can enrich themselves using public money.

Don’t wait. Do this now if you’re able to. If you “do it later” you’ll forget.

One of the lessons from Vietnam is that when they start bombarding you with numbers like these -- ordinance used, targets struck, so many killed and wounded -- there's more we're not being told.

I’m not a mom, but I’ve noticed that “wine mom” and “Patagonia wearing mom” and “moms pushing strollers” are cited as people who aren’t expected to take political action, or even to hold strong opinions. You all had moms, why do you think so little of her? Because she made you eat veggies? Grow up.

Democratic consultants: To replicate Mamdani’s success with the young people we must appeal to their short attention spans with memes and TikTok Mamdani (actual quote): In the fifth century in what we now know as Ireland, a British warlord named Coroticus had laid waste to the countryside

It's time to rename 39th Avenue for someone who truly represents the values of our city. Someone with deep ties to Portland, who best embodies our never say die attitude, who let nothing stand in the way of their dreams: Tonya Harding Boulevard

This one unfortunately continues to be relevant.

An earthquake would still be damaging to a renewable energy powered smart grid, but we wouldn't have to deal with a toxic catastrophe alongside getting our grid back up.

manifesting clot

A Terry Pratchett audiobook taught me that the British call a police station lineup an “identity parade”

this is what society gets for stigmatizing drugs and sex because now some adults are experiencing euphoric feelings for the first time ever from their computers and defining it as celestial and otherworldly and not for what it is - another chemical reaction in the brain

i don't care about any arguments against this. right now the sum total of my political advocacy is: crush the Republicans and make them pay. i don't care what comes after because until we do that nothing better is possible.

I'll admit that I definitely spent a smidge more time than I should have thinking about how much I loathed Rene Gonzalez when he was on council. It will never even come close to comparing to how much time and energy some of these right wingers spend on loathing Morillo, Green and Avalos.

The conservatives on city council love putting money jn the general fund because they believe Portlanders don’t have the attention spans to track what they do with it afterwards.

We get what we pay for, and we pay for part-time legislators.

me in 2050: doctor my nutritional gummy gave me covid 4 doctorbot (alpha) via ZMAIL ver 3: Kill you are self

Nobody ever wants to hear this but our politics would be smarter and less corrupt if elected officials and their staff were paid more. Especially true for state legislatures but it applies to Congress too.

What a miserable pile of steaming grievances Zimmerman is, damn

Zimmerman just said he’s worried about the “Fox News-ites’” opinions, as if he’d be on the receiving end of the harassment instead of the women of color who are bravely pushing this amendment.

With the shitstorm of mess happening at all times, this story of RFK Jr's very own colonial pseudoscience trash study experimenting on extremely vulnerable African babies...that wasn't reviewed for ethics AT ALL...got buried. We now know our efforts led to the halt of the study. Worth every dime.