Hanukkah Presents 8/8
Hannukah is over. 2025 begins!
It’s the last post for Hanukkah and your final gift is political reaction & snark!
The All New Portland City Council was in session today to pick their president. You can watch the whole thing on the Portland Government YouTube channel.
Battle lines were drawn! It was a shit-show. A reminder of the roster:
Candace Avalos - D1 Progressive
Loretta Smith - D1 Liberal
Jamie Dunphy - D1 Progressive
Sameer Kanal - D2 Communist
Elana Pirtle-Guiney - D2 Progressive
Dan Ryan - D2 Liberal
Tiffany Koyama-Lane - D3 Communist
Angelita Morillo - D3 Communist
Steve Novick - D3 Progressive
Olivia Clark - D4 Liberal
Mitch Green - D4 Communist
Eric Zimmerman - D4 Liberal
Equal parts Liberal, Progressive, and Communist - allegedly representative of Portland.
There were three candidates for Council President:
Candace Avalos - D1 Progressive
Elana Pirtle-Guiney - D2 Progressive
Olivia Clark - D4 Liberal
Initially most of the votes were split between Clark and Avalos with Loretta Smith nominating and backing Elana Pirtle-Guiney (EPG). Once it became clear the EPG and Avalos camps were not moving, Clark and her supporters switched to supporting EPG and the council deadlocked until Mitch Green ended it. It took nine rounds of voting to make their first decision.
The mayor could not (by City Code according to the City Attorney) render a tie-breaking vote. This was a disaster and not at all what Portlanders were sold.
The tldr:
Loretta Smith successfully blocked Olivia Clark and selected Elana Pirtle-Guiney for this position.
Portland DSA members lined up behind Avalos and refused to budge, Mitch Green eventually compromised and Tiffany Koyama-Lane was given the VP position as a consolation prize.
Winner & Losers
Avalos and her supporters (Kanal, Koyama-Lane, Morillo, Green) came off as overconfident, and desperate for power. They mostly lost.
Smith flexed her muscles and won big. EPG won as well with Smith’s backing.
Ryan, Novick, Clark, and Zimmerman came across as reasonable team players who were willing to vote for several candidates, as long as they weren’t Avalos.
Portlanders got a mixed bag. Any breaks on Avalos’s ascent should be celebrated but showing how easily the Council deadlocked should alarm voters.
Biggest Surprises
Dunphy disappointed by jumping in line. I didn’t have high hopes but he showed that, while he isn’t a DSA member, he is team Avalos.
Green surprised by recognizing how badly this was going for his team and pivoting to save face.
Zimmerman worried me with his rush to work with the DSA.
Bob Weinstein showed up during public comment to give testimony and was fantastic.
Fun Extras:
This fool, Matt LaVine is the Senior Race Equity Consultant/Facilitator at the Center for Equity and Inclusion. His testimony was unintentionally hilarious. He works in Alberta and lives in Overlook, but proceeded to give a Land Acknowledgment for over half a dozen specific tribes. If you want to know everything wrong with the Land Back movement, I encourage you to watch this Irish/Ukrainian guy rapid fire empty buzzwords in his allotted three minutes. He’s one of Charlie Michelle-Westley’s cohort of confused “Indigenous Rights/Social Justice” activists.
Nothing this group has done will provide improvements for the lives of Black, Indigenous, or other Portlanders. These are the ACAB activists who sit on Police Accountability Commissions. They don’t want better, more accountable police. They want no police, for a start. “We protect us” and all that. “Radical change!”
“Equity.”
Bring Him Back!
I want you to think about Honest Abe here. It was activists cut from the same cloth as Matt LaVine and friends who did this.
I’m assembling the key arguments for my “Chaos Run” for city council in 2026. I wasn’t joking on Rational in Portland. I plan on running because someone has to hop on that stage and say out loud what the rest of us are thinking.
Early on the list of proposals?
Put Abraham Lincoln back in the South Park Blocks! What kind of city allows a masked mob to drag down a statue of the President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation? The anniversary of that document was yesterday, by the way. I was always a fan, but what do I know?
I’m just a hillbilly from Arkansas who learned in school that slavery was evil, men aren’t perfect, and we should probably celebrate our greatest achievements so that children don’t lose sight of what makes America great, along the road to becoming even better.
Portland allowed masked individuals to make this choice about public art and values for themselves, but then buried the decision about putting Abe back behind YEARS of equity meetings, committees, and public comment.
So, if I don’t like something, I can just get a posse together, mask up, and smash it? No consequences? Maybe even the implicit support of elected officials?
It feels like there’s some bad historical context for that as well…
Maybe deprioritizing literacy and turning our libraries into day shelters had some downstream effects.
Thank you, everyone, for reading these silly Hanukkah posts. Starting today we’re back on our regular (mostly) weekly schedule. I’ll get the podcast up and running soon because I got a good amount of interest in it.
Still accepting name suggestions!
It’s 2025. We live in interesting times. Let’s make the most of them.
You're an extremely well informed, perceptive and incisive critic of Portland's political and cultural scene. What sets you apart from others in this genre is your nuanced knowledge of the leftists who circulate in the activist-advisory board-nonprofit-government staffer-elected official revolving door. It is a pleasure to read your outstanding work.
What makes it stand out even more today is that our local print media has abdicated its responsibility for covering your beat. There was a time when Willamette Week and perhaps even the paper with two names, OregonLive/The Oregonian, would have provided readers with similar coverage, though they would have pulled some of the punches that make your pieces so interesting. The Oregonian's extensive reporting on the Red House scam and debacle not that long ago was extraordinarily detailed. It shows the ability was there. What was missing was the will to supply readers with the relevant who, what, where, why and hows.
Speaking of The Oregonian, it says a lot about the newspaper's priorities that it ran the story about the election of the city council president in 10th place on the randomly assembled scroll that passes for its online edition. The sports editor's complaint about the College Football Playoffs captured the headline, followed by four more sports items, a story about a celebrity, something about a former Intel executive and so on.
I am delighted to see Candace Avalos fail right out of the gate. May that trend continue.
The toppling of the statues of great American presidents and the city's failure to return them promptly to their plinths has pissed me off for years. Here is the letter I wrote then-city commissioner Carmen Rubio about it in February 2024.
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Dear Commissioner Rubio:
I am one of your constituents. I am a moderate Democrat. I am also a retired lawyer and a gay man. I have a long-standing interest in art and art history. A few years ago, I was among a small group of people who received a term paper of the year prize from the Portland State University art history department.
I understand that Portland City Council is the latest holder of Portland's art-historical hot potato. By that I am referring to the fate of the beloved statues of great American presidents and others that were toppled by leftist mobs during the breakdown of law and order following the death of George Floyd. Very shortly you will vote on a process to decide whether or not statues of our nation's greatest leaders should be returned to the places of honor they enjoyed in Portland's cityscape for generations.
Have Portland's elected leaders lost their minds? The nation is just now waking up to the excesses of a small group of radicals and, yes, criminals, during 2020-2021 as if from a bad dream that turned out to be real. It's time for Portland's city commissioners to wake up too. Would you really entertain approving a process that could end by ratifying the actions of a violent and ignorant mob? Do Abe, Teddy and others need to hire historians to defend them against whatever spurious charges the usual contingent of illiberal activists might accuse them of? Is there any doubt that today's Portlanders enjoy a better America because of the presidencies of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt?
As a politician, you are surely savvy enough to realize that most of the loud activists who claim to represent "the community" are not even their democratically elected representatives and almost certainly do not represent or respect the views of the majority. Is it not clear by now that Portland voters are fed up with the grossly disproportionate influence our local governments have given them?
Anything short of returning Teddy and Abe to their original locations without delay will make Portland's politicians an object of ridicule from coast to coast. You will look like one of the out of touch members of the San Francisco School Board who could find no better use of their time than to rename schools because their namesakes failed to live up to the radical standards of 21st century cancel culture.
History has already decided that Teddy and Abe are members in good standing of the American pantheon. All the public requires from Portland City Council is an apology for the disgraceful delay in restoring them to their historic locations and an order to make it happen.
So, what to do if popular sentiment favors erecting new monuments to other individuals? It's simple: if a committee comprising a truly representative group of members of the public and nationally recognized experts in such matters decides the time has come to honor a distinguished person, by all means commission and install a suitable monument. There is no shortage of appropriate sites in Portland for new public art.
The only locations that are off-limits are the places that rightfully belong to Abe and Teddy and their peers.
Free the political hostages NOW.
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I'm looking forward to reading what you have to say in 2025.
You have my vote!