Posted inYear in Review

Salem Political Snark’s 2017 year in review: top 12 posts

Hey, if the New York Times can do it, then Salem Political Snark sure can follow in those hallowed journalistic footsteps. So here's our very own Year in Review.  I picked a blog post from each month. This led to some tough choices when several posts caught my eye in the same month. For example, I had to pass on "'Illegal signs are trash.' Which is why they make Salem look trashy." Also, the related "'Jesus Loves Strippers' sign gets Salem hot and bothered." And I would have liked to share "Salem Weekly needs to survive. But how should it change?"Oh...…
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Posted inWomen's March

My open plea to 2018 Salem Womxn’s March organizers

I write for lots of reasons. One is to relieve anxiety. Putting my worries into words somehow makes me feel better. And at the moment, I'm not feeling good about the 2018 Salem Womxn's March, which I've argued should be called a Women's March to build on the amazingly successful 2017 event with that name.  Now, because there is very little public information available about next month's march other than this event notification on the Salem Resists Facebook page, maybe the concerns I'm going to relate below are misfounded. If so, I look forward to Womxn's March organizers setting me…
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Posted inJim Lewis Third Bridge

Third Bridge supporters fantasize about taking control of Salem City Council

I just finished a great book, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire." Now, fantasies come in different shades of unbelievability. The Salem Bridge Solutions fantasy reflected in a comment left by one of their leaders, Mike Evans, isn't totally fantastical, but in talking trash about a No 3rd Bridge proclamation of "Our Work is Done," it also isn't highly realistic. A recent post on the Salem Bridge Solutions page points to what I mean. Five positions on the nine-member City Council will be on the May 2018 ballot (whoever gets a majority of votes in the May primary election wins outright,…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Of course FBI staff have political opinions, clueless Republicans

I survived, barely. Watching part of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, I felt like my head was going to explode -- a common side effect of listening to Republicans talking about anything relating to the Mueller investigation. GOP members of the committee were shocked, no, let's make that SHOCKED!!!, to learn that an FBI agent and a FBI lawyer exchanged text messages about their desire for Trump to lose the 2016 election. Well, so did most of the country, judging from Trump's huge popular vote loss by some three million votes. So there was…
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Posted inWomen's March

Salem should have another Women’s March, not a Womxn’s March

Let's get some self-revealing stuff out in the open before I proceed to challenge the wisdom of calling a follow-up to last year's highly successful Salem Women's March a Womxn's March. I'm a heterosexual (cisgender, just to show that I'm clued-in to some new-speak) man. I'm old, 69. I believe in using English words that can be pronounced. I'm married to a woman, Laurel, who was one of the lead organizers for the 2017 Salem Women's March. I created a web page that showcased this event, which attracted 4,200 enthusiastic people -- see below. So depending on your point of view,…
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Posted inLand use

2018 Bi-Mart Country Music Festival could bring 60,000 people to Ankeny Wildlife Refuge area

For 2018, Bi-Mart wants to move its annual Country Music Festival from Brownsville, Oregon to farmland adjacent to the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge near Salem. [Update: the Statesman Journal has a story about the festival, "Willamette Country Music Festival's move to Marion County raises concerns about refuge." Here's how it starts off.] Organizers of the Bi-Mart Willamette Country Music Festival want to move the four-day event to Marion County and more than double its size, to as many as 60,000 attendees per day. But opposition is building over the proposed location: 692 acres of farmland bordering Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge,…
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Posted inCity Council Land use

Salem’s Dogwood Heights development stirs up neighborhood worries

Now that most of the easily buildable vacant land in Salem has been utilized for residential development, construction on the acreage that remains is bound to be more controversial.  This was clearly evident at last night's City Council meeting, which featured a lengthy hearing on the proposed Dogwood Heights subdivision near Croisan Creek Road and Madrona Avenue in south Salem.  I watched much of the hearing via the CCTV stream because my wife and I are looking into buying a house in the Salem city limits (currently we live in rural south Salem), and Dogwood Heights is in an area…
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Posted inDowntown

Downtown Salem Streetscape project will ignore streets

Last night there was an open house kickoff for the Downtown Salem Streetscape Plan. Held in the ground floor meeting room at Courthouse Square, I felt a lot of energy and enthusiasm from the good number of attendees,  City of Salem staff, and the consultants hired to oversee the project.  People could use stickers to indicate a part of downtown where they had an idea for improvements, where they customarily entered the downtown area, and where they thought the heart of downtown was. Not surprisingly, Court and Liberty got the most heart stickers. And you can see that many attendees…
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