It's pretty funny to me that The O will bust some poor bureaucrat's chops eight ways to Sunday for billing a $5 beer to an expense account or spending $50 of bureau money on personal cell phone calls, but they give stuff like this a complete free pass.

So what's new - at least in this little burg? Padilla-Andrews rounds up a bunch of votes and Ms De Steffey pays her back. At least the votes weren't tombstones - who knows maybe they even speak English well enough to know what they are voting for. You should be happy.

I love the part about 'no visible sources of income' listed on the mortgage app that could be used to pay off the building mortgage (other than grants, that is, which shouldn't be counted on as a sustainable source of income, right?)

And yet it (the application/mortgage) sailed right through - with the county absorbing 45K of bad debt in the process...

No corruption in Portland, folks. Go on home, nothing to see here...

I think the blogs are giving journalists fresh eyes into local affairs, something that seems sorely to be needed. Even people in government who are charged with a public mandate to investigate corruption and sincerely want to carry it out, seem to need ideas and support.

This is just the tip of the iceberg - How much money does the County use to pay for positive attention from the SKANNER? Asian Reporter? Others?
This is about buying off groups of votes one group at a time through a community "leaders". It's old style Chicago politics. How many events have the County - and City - "sponsored"? (as if sponsoring things is the role of government)? How many ads have they bought in these papers? It's a lot of money for a few people and their support in the community. It's just a little cleaner than actually handing them bags of cash. Good for WW for once. Hope they stay on the case even when the race baiting diversion tactics start.

After all these years of letting the good-ol-boys reward their supporters with sweetheart deals and county contracts, why not let the mean girls have a turn?

A term-limited politician needs to start feathering her nest early if she's going to land on her feet in the "private" sector.

Portland stinks with the sweat of all manner of social climbers who have come to the "end of the rainbow "to live out their idyllic family-or single- lives; even though government, in theory, is all about public service and regulating business, and many occupations-like journalism and law, maybe medicine too, have public service components. It seems that each profession becomes just another avenue for expressing the corrupt spirit of this place. People who've found their pot of gold just can't get motivated to stretch themselves to the point they can take this on. And people who do are considered too weird and not supported. The in crowd has to live "the good life", even if that means that victims of the corruption have no meaningful recourse.

People capable of waking up should do so. Oncein a while WW does a promising article..even the O has been known to come up with some good ones. But basically, I think Sandy Rowe is too focused on "fitting in". An I don't know what Sussman's problem is, but those editorials on the elections and wonderful Mr. Schrunk were strictly from hunger. These guys need to take a course in Political Machine 1A. I really don't think its a lot of people that are screwing up this place, but they are stategically placed. And too many are just going along for the ride. Wer'e hearing a lot of talk about political "healing", but I don't think that can really happen until we open up our wounds.