Portland is at a crossroads


The fun never stops here in Portlandia any more. Now the avengers of all societal wrongs have blocked off a part of North Mississippi Avenue, where they've been camped out for weeks to protest a foreclosure, and declared the area a police-free autonomous zone.

Our newly re-elected mayor, F. Ted Wheeler, has sent out a stern tweet.

The cops left the scene after the protesters attacked them. Apparently there are a couple of hundred people involved in this. A deputy chief says “our approach is going to be to think our way through the problem and consider all the angles and do our best to resolve the situation as safely as possible.”

It's all become so incredibly tiresome. If the police can't, or won't, bring this latest round of nonsense to a swift conclusion, the mayor needs to give the chief his walking papers. And maybe follow him out the door.

And the district attorney and the judges had better wake the heck up. Because if this keeps up much longer, Portland can write off the next five to ten years.

Comments

  1. Well if it is truly “Indigenous land” then what are all those pasty Antifa types doing here clogging up the streets and in the housing that supposedly belongs to the indigenous peoples? Not saying that American Indians were treated well in the past, but this whole colonizer and stolen land crap coming from the mouths of the ones who who supposedly have been ‘privileged’ by it is just rich. Good thing that I am not the mayor. Just saying..........

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  2. Shhhhhhhhhhh....my house is going on the market this weekend. Let's get me out of here first and then we can let everything go to seed.

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  3. Wait, I thought we had to reelect Wheeler because having someone new on the job would be too much of a setback. You mean more of a setback than losing Portland for 10 years?

    Oh well. As the old country western song goes, "It's a Little Too Late to Do the Right Thing Now."

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    1. If Chloe and Sarah had won, it would be game over; you would never get the city back. Mapps, Ryan, and Wheeler can turn the whole thing around if they want to.

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    2. I disagree about Wheeler turning things around. Even if he went to a leadership retreat every weekend, he's lost the respect of both the police and protesters alike. He probably does have enough political skill to stay in office, while Sara would probably get tossed out. That would position us to hit bottom and get a great leader. But now we're stuck with waiting for Wheeler to change. What's that old saying? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

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    3. Mapps, Ryan, and Wheeler no tienen cajones, so not sure what any "turnaround" would look like.

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    4. I don' t think Ted is going to make it through four more years. He won't be recalled, but he'll leave. Before he hits the road, he could decide to swing right to try to save his career.

      Mapps has police union backing, at least to start. And Ryan has already gotten a taste of the anarchist bit at his front door at midnight. Those two might turn out to have a pair.

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  4. Yes, "Tiresome" is definitely the most appropriate description. Here is the first paragraph from The O's article tonight: "Uncertainty heightened late Tuesday outside a North Portland home where 150 people huddled behind makeshift barricades to prevent the ouster of a Black and Indigenous family who owned the home for decades." The horror.

    Actually, they haven't owned the home for some time. Nietzsche is nothing more than a "Sovereign Citizen" litigant who has gotten every single ounce of due process he asked for over many years and his home is a blight on the neighborhood with numerous nuisance calls. It doesn't matter though, because there are plenty of loud people in Portland who will buy what he is selling as long as it is wrapped in a social justice cause. https://casetext.com/case/nietzche-v-freedom-home-mortg-corp

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    1. Thanks for the link. Incredible. They were paying on the loan over several years, then it seems, wanted an out and pulled the Sovereign Citizen routine.

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  5. Don't worry...that stern tweet from the Mayor should solve this.
    To put it in terms of Mel Blanc - an iconic Portlander who grew up here and went to Lincoln High School - we've got Mayor Tweety Bird.

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  6. I don’t always agree with your views but always appreciate your timely reporting and commentary. And I often agree with your views, too! This one I don’t know enough about to have an informed opinion, other than the general sentiment of being OVER it and hoping everyone will put on their big kid pants and realize we live in a society with rules—on both sides.

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  7. And my other middle of the night insomnia thought: could some of these protestors just go down to Baton Rouge/Birmingham/Jackson/the MS Delta for just one night, and protest the actual injustices that have been committed there for the past 200 years, and continue today? Or just donate to the southern poverty law center, who knows what’s it’s doing already?

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  8. Ye of little patience. We have problems that need solutions. Busting heads and firing political leaders gets us nowhere. We're all weary but let's stay rational. Maybe many of us that are weary and understandably concerned about the state of our great city need to come together to assist our political leaders in finding solutions.

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