"Given the continued insanity of his successor, I am confident that people will soon look back on Mayor Potter's tenure in office as a relatively benign four years."

Yeah, I don't think I can picture Grampy sharing "mutual back-pattings" with 18(-ish) year old males.

In fact, one might describe his four years as flaccid by comparison.

Now, now.

So I'm currently reading The House of Medici, and I just came to a particularly interesting section about the Pazzi Conspiracy that reminded me of some earlier readers' calls for Leonard's and Adams' heads to be used as soccer balls:

"Jacopo de’ Pazzi, so overcome by despair at the failure of the plot that he boxed his own ears and threw himself to the floor in despair and rage, managed to escape the city to the village of Castagno; but the villagers recognized him and brought him back to Florence where, after being tortured, he was stripped naked and strung from a window of the Palazzo della Signoria [currently the Palazzo Vecchio] next to the Archbishop. Later, he was buried in Santa Croce; but the people, blaming the subsequent heavy rains upon his evil spirit, dug up the body and threw it into a ditch in an apple orchard. From here also it was later removed, to be dragged through the streets by a mob shouting, ‘Make way for the great knight!’  It was then propped against the door of the Pazzi Palace where, to the accompaniment of obscene jokes and cries of ‘Open! Your master wishes to enter!’ its decomposing head was used as a knocker. Eventually, the putrid corpse was thrown into the Arno from which it was fished by a gang of children who strung it up on the branch of a willow tree, flogged it and tossed it back into the water again."

I don't think anybody can read such an amusing account and doubt the relative civility of contemporary Portlanders, what with our waiting about for six months to hold a vote to require somebody please leave their office and please go do something else. But the thing that really struck me about this is that Jacopo obviously had a pretty good idea about what was in store for him if his plot failed—and he undertook it anyway! One can't help but wonder what sort of popular response would have impressed him enough to actually dissuade him from undertaking the conspiracy at the outset.

"Now, now.

Posted by Jack Bog | March 25, 2009 9:22 PM"

ROTFLMAO
-d

Don't blame me, I voted for Sho. (Not that I thought he was the magic answer, but I at least thought Sam needed to go through the scrutiny of a general election.)

“It’s an aggressive schedule but I’m confident the City Council can do it,” said Paulson, who celebrated the franchise award March 20 at a raucous downtown press conference.

City Commissioner Randy Leonard, the most outspoken supporter on the City Council of bringing major league soccer to Portland, agrees the schedule is tight but is confident the deadlines will be met.

“We’re going to do it,” said Leonard.

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=123801683114688900

More insanity - Sounds like Leonard's already written the check on this. We are about T-3days to the famous "We've gone too far too stop" moment.

BTW - Same Portland Tribune article:

"The City Council agreed to support Paulson’s bid for an MLS team on March 11 by approving the broad outlines of an estimated $129 million plan to renovated PGE Park for professional soccer and build a new Triple-A baseball stadium in the Rose Quarter. The deal calls for the city to commit about $70 million to the project, provided that no existing or future agency budgets be cut."

I thought we were at $85M. This keeps changing by the minute, as long as Paulson gets them in rush-mode, he'll get what he wants.