If you pray, you might want a spend a minute or two on this.

And this.

Another one of the participants in the August 2005 downtown Portland shootout that had everyone atwitter got sentenced today in federal court. Eight years for being a felon with a firearm. No one has yet been charged in the homicide that occurred that night.

I see that the City of Portland is looking for help with its "hearing conservation program." Judging from the city commissioners' responsiveness to the needs of average residents, I think they're doing fine without any outside assistance. [Rim shot.]

Here's something to be proud about -- the City of Portland ranks third in the nation in the national Humane Society's "humane index." (Via the PDC.)

If the Portland Development Commission is supposed to be so independent under the current City of Portland charter, then how does this happen?

Some commissioners pad their offices by billing their staffers to the bureaus they run. Sten's housing adviser, for example, works in his office but is paid by the housing bureau, the Portland Development Commission and the Housing Authority of Portland. Adams bills two staffers time to the sewer and transportation bureaus. Potter bills three positions to the Police Bureau, one position to the PDC and half a position to the Office of Neighborhood Involvement.

An echo of a conversation we had on this blog a while back, this Times cartoon struck my funnybone yesterday.

We had such great success with Survivor: Portland City Hall that you just knew there had to be a sequel. And here it is, folks: Survivor Portland City Hall: Bureaucracy Edition. We'll take 17 of the city's top agency heads and get rid of them one by one until only a single bureau manager survives. It will take several weeks, but we won't be daunted by the outcome of the proposed city charter changes on the civil service rules -- they don't apply here.

Let's not rush to judgment, though. Since none of our contestants were elected to their public offices, many of them won't be known to a lot of our readers. And so we can't start the voting today -- no, we'll postpone our first tribal council until you've had a chance to... [drum roll...] meet the contestants:

Amalia
Office of Neighborhood Involvement Director Amalia Alarcon

Bruce
Portland Development Commission Executive Director Bruce Warner

Chief Dave
Fire Chief Dave Sprando

Water Dave
Water Bureau Administrator David Shaff

Dean
Environmental Services Bureau Director Dean Marriott

Eloise
Regional Arts & Culture Council Director Eloise Damrosch

Major, major upset in pro basketball tonight. The Golden State Warriors, whom we saw clinch a last-minute spot in the playoffs, now have the no. 1-seeded team in the post-season, the Dallas Mavericks, on the ropes. The Bay Area squad has a 3-1 lead in their best-of-seven series.

And maybe that Baron Davis guy isn't so old and creaky after all...

A lot of readers see it the same way.

The materials that have been sent out to the voters of Portland in connection with the four proposed city charter changes that are currently up for a vote are downright daffy. As we've already noted here, the factions for and against the changes have sent out some highly misleading glossy brochures, and that's disappointing. But even more deflating is the fact that neither the official Voter's Pamphlet nor the ballot materials themselves even bother to print out all the details of the changes that are in the measures! All we get are summaries, prepared by who-knows-who, with who-knows-what agenda. The actual texts of the laws on which we are voting are nowhere to be found.

Oh yeah, I'm sure they're buried on some website somewhere, and I've heard that they're 80 pages long and no one would be able to understand them even if they tried. But hey. There should have been a copy of the full glory of the full text of the actual language in every voter's mailbox, along with the hokum.

Now, there's a charter change that I could get behind -- rules that make sure we get to see what we're actually voting on.

But it gets goofier. It appears that a subliminal message may have been slipped into the Voter's Pamphlet as well. Let's see how good your eyes are. Here are the tops of the first pages of the Voter's Pamphlet sections on two of the ballot measures. See if you notice anything different between them:

Hmmmmm. Very subtle.

... when these dudes are jumping ship.

It's all going so well. Money and lives well spent.

I see that the O is really going to rub Lincoln High School's nose in the drug thing. With Super Vicki busy selecting a moving company, a school board election on, and the school bureaucracy suddenly rudderless, the O will probably go on about it for weeks.

Drugs in our schools is a worthy topic, to be sure, but today's spin -- Lincoln kids are into harder drugs because they have money and are smart -- sounds like a humongous crock to me. Oh, and the reporters can't wait to get some kid at Grant to chime in: "'I'm sure there are drugs at every school, but Lincoln, they can afford the harder ones,' said Libby Watkins, a Grant High junior. 'They're really known as partyers.'"

Sheesh. Don't leave room in the trophy case for another Pulitzer out of that one. And it took six people to write it.

If this horrible incident had gone down at Jefferson, you'd never hear this outcry from our beloved daily. And if you did, you can bet someone would jump right up and say the "r" word. It's a lot easier to pick on Lincoln. And so, it appears, they will.

My recent survey of pro basketball playoff teams for Blazer alumni left out a big guy who made quite an impact when he was in Portland: Dale Davis, the power forward who played four full seasons here in 2000-2004. The Blazers were a playoff team themselves in three of those four years.

Nowadays Davis (38 years old and 15 years a pro hoopster on several teams) gets about 10 minutes a game on the floor for the Detroit Pistons, who at this moment are seeking to finish a four-game sweep of the vastly outgunned Orlando Magic. Thursday night, he played 15 minutes, scored 3 points, blocked a shot, and had 1 rebound and 1 assist. Now reunited with his former Portland teammate, Rasheed Wallace, Davis got himself tasered and arrested after allegedly getting rowdy in a Miami hotel last summer, but charges were dropped in December after a surveillance tape showed that the police officers in question had been overly aggressive.

From KGW's website today:

Bill clears committee with no recommendation

09:37 AM PDT on Saturday, April 28, 2007

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SALEM, Ore. -- A bill to require cities with populations of ten-thousand or more cleared a House committee in Salem Saturday with no recommendation.

The hotly debated issue goes to the House floor. A similar Senate bill has yet to get a hearing.

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's mailer urging us to vote against the proposed change of the form of Portland's city government, today we got a smaller flyer in the mail from the other side of that debate. And man, when it comes to obfuscating what it is that we're voting on, the "yes" guys are just as bad as the "no" camp, if not worse. Here's their summary of what we're voting on:

I guess Mom and apple pie weren't available.

I wish that, instead of voting on a "strong mayor" form of government, we were voting on whether to continue the existing "strong developer" system. Now, that would be a meaningful election.

UPDATE, 4:40 p.m.: The type on that image above is pretty small. Just so you can actually see how little content is there, here is the sum total of the explanation of the four measures:

Dave Lister tells me that he's filling in for drive-time talk show mama Jayne Carroll this afternoon from 3 to 6 on KUIK radio (1360 AM). He says that he'll be dialing me in for an interview between 5 and 5:30. I'm not sure what to expect, but tune in and you'll find out at the same time I do.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE, 3:00 p.m.: Wimp! I hope he lets his neighbors borrow it.

I see that "Last Thursday" got way out of hand last night. When the drunken yuppies and the anarchists get together, look out. It's gonna be a Little Beirut good time.

The jumping on cars thing has gotten old, don't you think? Grabbing the police officer's taser, though -- now, that's special. I rag on the police for using excessive force, but the fact that the punk who picked up the taser is not dead today is a testament to some officer's good judgment and sense of restraint.

A reader writes, "I respect anyone who can run in pumps."

Every once in a while, I get not just a good night's sleep, but a Rip Van Winkle session that runs 12 hours or more. The dreams roll on, and in them I usually wind up in some foreign land. This morning I was in Europe somewhere with the family, about to leave for Germany from some other country. Waking up and getting ready to leave the hotel. The Mrs. had us all packed already. The hotel did not have wireless...

Anyway, the reality is, the only place I'm going today is Costco.

I predicted it, and lo and behold, it has come to pass.

We got a flyer in the mail today urging us to vote no on Measure 26-91, the proposal to amend the Portland city charter to change the form of government. (It also urged us to vote yes on 26-92, giving the City Council budget control over the Portland Development Commission.)

These things have gotten awfully familiar:

Why, that one's a dead ringer for the stuff that Commissioner Erik Sten was sending out in his re-election campaign last spring. Must be another Mark Wiener special -- he's the guy who tells the politicians of Portland what they need to do and say to ensure lifetime tenure in their jobs.

You gotta love this one. The box around "no" is green. Get it? "No" is green. Mmmmm... sustainable.

Anyway, when you open this one up, the Wiener touch becomes even more apparent. Get a load of this:

Classic Wiener! When the issue is the running of city government, create a diversion with something "progressive." It's clear, people -- this has nothing to do with managing city bureaus, putting cops on the street, or fixing potholes. If you hate Bush, you have to vote against the charter change, and that's that. Hey, who's still in on American Idol?

As nauseating as the experience of reading this flyer was, I was comforted by the fact that unlike the Sten mailings, which were paid for with "clean money" (furnished by taxpayers) under the city's new "voter-owed elections" campaign finance system, this one was paid for by private funds. But then I thought about it for a minute and realized that those private funds were probably mostly public employees' union dues. Which of course are ultimately paid by the taxpayers anyway. Pass the Tums.