One unflattering trait of Portland city commissioner Amanda Fritz is her tendency to lay it on thick when she's fibbing to you. When the city's new 911 computers got negative reviews last year from the police officers who had to use them, she not only denied the problem but actually asserted that the new system was "close to perfect." Uh huh.

Yesterday she tried to spin her vote, against concerned neighbors and in favor of cell phone corporate hacks, as some sort of gift by her to the people whose livability she just trashed. On reversing a hearings officer's decision that had gone in favor of the neighbors -- just as she did in October with the SoWhat immigration jail next door to a grammar school -- she gave this account:

Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who voted to overturn the Hearings Office’s decision, said that even though the code is unclear, the city has interpreted it this way for hundreds of other applications and is maintaining consistency. She also said that federal health guidelines suggest that the code is referring to antenna ERPs.

However, she added that the appeal would force the council to re-examine the code and regulation of cellphone towers.

"The fundamental, big-picture question is: Do we still want to put the antennas on the right-of-way preferentially? Or do we want to look at industrial sites or other sites?" Fritz said. "Within the federal mandate, we can't stop any company from providing service anywhere it wants to, but there are some potential changes that we could make."

That splashing on your shoe? It's raining!

But perhaps the best example of the Nurse's posing came recently when she was asked an obvious question about the influence of campaign contributions on City Council members' votes. Here she is in the Huffington Post, discussing the current taxi-limo licensing flap:

Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz denies the accusations. "Even though my colleagues are funded by traditional (campaign donations), they are very principled men and I don't believe they would be voting on the basis of who gives them money."

This from the poster child for "clean money," who preached for years about the corrupting influence of campaign money so that taxpayers would front more than a half million tax dollars to put her in office!

It's a little too much for us. Which is why we're now casting our own principled vote -- for Bruce Altizer.