Sharpen your pencils, and knives
The voters’ pamphlet just arrived, and with it our first piece of election porn. Thus, election season has officially begun here at Blog Central. I believe the ballots get mailed out to us voters tomorrow.
With the start of the season, which transcends silliness and achieves a more sublime state of absurdity, it’s always a good idea to check in with the kids at the Willamette Weed to see which political career they are assassinating this time around. This year, it appears that they’re singling out Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Brown for a hit.
On that one, the degree of difficulty is mighty low. No one is going to win a Pulitzer Prize for chronicling Brown’s shooting herself repeatedly in the foot. In her latest spasm of poor judgment, Brown showed up at the Weed offices for an endorsement interview. Bad enough, but there, she launched into a long diatribe against the county district attorney, based on some sort of technicality that no voter would understand, and it wasn’t very convincing even if they did.
The thing about the Weed is that they always give the victim a chance to hang themselves before the reporter has to move in for the kill. Some targets are too smart for that – Eileen Brady comes to mind, although they did eventually take her out – but not Brown. On and on she rambled, at one point blurting out that “democracy is at stake” because she might lose the election.
Gong!
The clip of that part of the interview, here, shows you just about everything you don’t want in a judge. People who would never vote for a public defender type like Brown’s opponent, Peter Klym, are definitely thinking about doing so now.
With Brown essentially defeating herself, the Weed has more energy to go after another weak target, the head of Portland’s housing projects, Ivory Mathews. They’ve busted her for a scandalously bloated salary and car allowance, for her ridiculous “business” travel to Hawaii and Florida, for her using Portland bureaucrats in her campaign for an elected position on a national trade group board, and I’m sure they’ve got more dirt. Clearly, the Weed is not going to let go until she’s gone. They’re peppering the City Council with questions about her. The mayor, I’m sure, will not hear the end of it from the Weed’s Sophie Peel. No one will be permitted to soft-soap Ivory, as it were.
But this being Portland, you know that Mathews will get a hefty severance when she’s shown the door. The only question is how much. Now, I’m not much for prediction markets, but I’m setting the over/under on Mathews’s severance at $750,000. What do you think, readers? Over or under?
Fun times down here in Canby. The school district has a funding levy on the ballot that has split the community. At least judging by Facebook, it has. In a fun twist, Christine Drazen's husband sits on the budget committee and is on record in the voters' pamphlet as supporting the measure. No word from our next governor on her position. I'd love to see someone pin her down on it. While they're at it, maybe they can get her to give us a plan to deal with this statewide-mess when she's governor.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, our very Republican representative to the legislature has also come out in favor. He's got token opposition in the primary and the general will be a laugh, so I guess it's a free spin. But for a guy who's all about freedom and fiscal responsibility and public safety and whatnot, it's an interesting position to take.