I was driving up NE Knott to NE 15th this pm just as the obviously distressed lady in the incident was running into the arms of waiting PDX police.

I have to say , WOW, were there a lots of police very soon on the scene...so good for them, esp. as the incident was right next door to a church kindergarten.

I haven't seen that many cops in NE PDX since I drove past the Starbucks on 15th and Fremont yesterday afternon.

Ok guys..that was just a joke. Honestly.

I was asking myself the same question. Answer: Nobody needs massmind TV media, and like staying off meth and other brain-damaging addictions, true Americans and good citizens are the ones who do without it.

It is easy to pick on ABC/Disney (KATU) just now, when they are scraping the bottom of the dumb-barrel to find anything to report except the news of their own corruption, which they censor from their propaganda-addicted viewers.

May 17, 2007 -- Conflicts of interest in DC Madam case. ... on the phone list suppressed from further release ... are the names of scores of Justice Department prosecutors, Drug Enforcement Administration and Secret Service agents, Internal Revenue Service officers, and US Postal Inspection Service officials, including one involved in ordering the seizure of ...
And why is the Fourth Estate so nervous about pursuing the DC Madam story? It also turns out that among the clients ... are a number of journalists for top Washington news media organizations, including -- ABC News, which spiked the story and said there is no one "newsworthy" on the phone lists it obtained.

So the air has the terror-pulsing of chop-chop-choppers overhead and the feel of revolution in these May days. The firewall keeping heartland Americans from realizing the rotted government establishment collapse going on, is the massmind media LIARS. But now massmind media is going down. Crushed under the internet. A question is going around asking if blogs are journalists. Wrong question. What matters to people is asking if TV and newspapers have information. Answer: No.

It's simple and easy to destroy commercial media -- attack the sponsors on your street, (remember Imus?). I grieve a little to lose massmind media, but good riddance to bad rubbish. Looking ahead, we have a lot of work to do to build the new media mainlines and values, and through them, in such cohesion, assemble the new political establishment.

I have friends from my working days in newspapers and broadcasting, who are still trying to reform the old massminders and save the institutions. Corruption is cancer and those bodies cannot be saved; the past is gone; they're flogging a dead horse to ride again -- example one, example two.

Example two happens to have, today only, a glimpse of the thinking in the rank and file of NYC's Transit Workers Union. This: I want to talk about changing the political climate. I have been asked to frame the discussion and then the panel jumps in. Here’s a 5-point proposition for our discussion.

1. The political climate is very important.
2. The current political climate makes any progressive change almost impossible
3. We are entering a period where the political climate can and will change.
4. Which way it changes - good or bad - is up to us.
5. So the big question is: What do the groups represented here tonight have to do to change the political climate in a progressive direction. That’s our task.

Our Union knows something about message development. 17 months ago, right before our last contract expired, TWU Local 100 put ads in newspapers and issued public statements.

17 months ago newspapers carried their organizing information. That's unlikely from now on.

The metastasis of corruption, graft, and anti-American propaganda in the massmind media is exhibited in a new book -- Who needs TV when there is so much good reading? -- reviewed here: A Review Of Alexander Cockburn's And Jeffrey St. Clair's End Times, By Stephen Lendman, 16 May, 2007, Countercurrents.org

And after the massmind media curtain comes down, and the rotting corpse of government, corrupt and criminal, must be purged and new political understanding constituted, already some of the experienced, wiser elders are sketching out better forms to enstate, and passing along the worklist for us: Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?, By Chalmers Johnson -- In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction.

But, you don't need a TV plan to know which way the news flows ...

They do like to hang there.

What a difference the Nature's made. In the early '80s, the only folks enjoying beverages along the sidewalk there had them in brown paper bags.

I was taking my daughter to swimming lessons at Dishman yesterday and ran into this. The police diverted me about five blocks. Glad it turned out OK.