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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Posted inSalem Weekly

Salem Weekly needs to survive. But how should it change?

The most recent issue of Salem Weekly asks a self-reflective question on the cover: "Can Salem Weekly and Other Alt-Weeklies Survive the Tides of Change?" I'd include a link to this cover story, but more than a week after the November 23 bi-weekly issue hit the streets, as of this writing the Salem Weekly web site still hasn't been updated to include content from that issue. Which points to the problem facing Salem Weekly: A.P. Walther, the publisher, is marvelously dedicated to keeping the paper afloat, but along with many other alternative papers around the country, the Salem Weekly ship…
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Posted inStatesman Journal

Cancel your Statesman Journal subscription for 30 days to save $500 a year

I've subscribed to the Statesman Journal for 40 years. Today I cancelled my subscription (for 30 days), because this will save me $510 in 2018 -- following the outrageous Monday-Sunday home delivery rate increase from $44 to $59.01 that takes effect December 1. (What's up with that one cent?) That's a 34% increase, which is on top of a 14% increase last March. In June I wrote a pissed-off blog post, "Statesman Journal outrage: new subscribers charged half of what loyal subscribers pay." Now the situation is even worse. New subscribers are being charged a bit over a third of…
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Posted inSmart growth Statesman Journal

I couldn’t resist commenting on a woman’s praise of Salem

Yesterday the Statesman Journal published a "Your Turn" piece by Emily Skelding that began as a post on her This Is Just to Say blog, and ended being titled either "Salem a fabulous place to raise family" (print edition) or "Salem transplant proud of her new hometown; wants community to stop apologizing" (online edition). I liked Skelding's praise of Salem. I also can't resist commenting on it.  First off, notwithstanding the online title the Statesman Journal gave to her piece, Skelding's blog post says that she grew up in Salem, then lived in other places before returning here.  I must add…
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Posted inChuck Bennett City Council Third Bridge

Ding, dong, the Third Bridge is dead

And so it came to pass that there was cause for much rejoicing at last night's City Council meeting, for the Wicked Third Bridge (of both East and West, since it would have connected these two sides of Salem) almost certainly was put to death. Not by having a house dropped on it, or by being splashed with water, which would indeed be a perplexing way for a bridge to die, but by the City Council approving a motion to establish a committee that will examine ways to reduce traffic congestion around the two existing bridges without building a new…
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Posted inCity Council Third Bridge

City Council plans to reduce traffic congestion without a Third Bridge

The writing is on the wall as regards the eventual demise of the Salem River Crossing, a.k.a. Third Bridge. Or rather, the writing is in the form of a motion to be made by Mayor Chuck Bennett at next Monday's City Council meeting to form a Council task force "to evaluate options for reducing traffic congestion and improving vehicular mobility around the Marion and Center Street bridges." Download CITY OF SALEM - File #: 17-545 It seems clear that this is how the Third Bridge will begin to die after opponents were successful in getting the Land Use Board of…
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Posted inNational politics

Great November election for Democrats. What a difference a year makes.

I needed this -- resounding victories for Democrats in the races that mattered most in this off-year election. Let's count the ways my progressive spirit was lifted in these oft-depressing Trumpian times. (1) Closest to home, the Salem Library Bond passed handily, 63-37 in the first big round of results. OK, this wasn't exactly a Dem victory, but the progressives on the Salem City Council were most in favor of making the Library earthquake-safe when the subject was discussed last year. And it's well recognized that reality has a liberal bias, so approving money for a place that deals in facts…
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Posted inChamber of Commerce City Council Third Bridge

Salem conservatives should do more actual conserving

I remember when conservatives used to actually believe in conserving things. Like money. And nature. My mother, an ardent Republican, was one of those old-time conservatives.  She was frugal. She was an environmentalist before that word came into fashion. Remembering the Great Depression (she was born in 1912), my mother hated to waste anything.  For a long time, "conservative" and "conservation" almost meant the same thing. A 2015 Think Progress piece talked about this in Republican Politicians are Betraying Their Party's Legacy of Conservation.  “You’re worried about what man has done and is doing to this magical planet that God…
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Posted inCarole Smith City of Salem Downtown

Here’s why Salem needs a genuine downtown association

Salem no longer has a downtown association. We need one. What happened at last night's City Council meeting is only one of many reasons why.  But before I explain what transpired at the meeting, a bit of relevant history about how downtown lost its downtown association is in order. I wrote about this in a couple of blog posts. My November 2013 post "Should Salem City Manager be known as Exalted Emperor Linda Norris?" explained how the existing downtown association, Salem Downtown Partnership, had its contract terminated by the City Council after Chuck Bennett (then a city councilor, now Mayor)…
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Posted inJobs

Robots could replace many of Salem’s 1,000 Amazon warehouse jobs

Amazon is betting big on robots handling many, if not most, of the order fulfillment tasks now being carried out by humans in its giant packing and shipping warehouses.  So even though it's good news that Amazon is going to build a warehouse here in Salem that reportedly will employ a thousand full-time employees, this excerpt from an article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords," gives good reason for concern about how long those jobs will last. For low-skilled workers, warehouse jobs have seemed to be something of a bright spot. Even if…
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Posted inCity Council

Salem Strategic Plan a mix of yawns and yays

Next Monday, October 23, the Salem City Council is set to vote on whether to approve the Strategic Plan that it's been working on for about a year.  Looking over the plan, I was hoping to find a lot that excited me. Maybe I was expecting too much, since only a few things made me think, Wow, that's cool! Download Salem Strategic Plan Still, I give the City of Salem and its consultants credit for page 1, "Plan on a Page." The only problem is, on that page there's little to be enthused about -- since this is where the…
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Posted inChamber of Commerce City Council

Chamber of Commerce no longer running Salem. Let’s keep it that way.

When I first got heavily involved in Salem politics about four and a half years ago (after the horrendous needless killing of the U.S. Bank trees got my ire up), fellow progressive citizen activists would tell me, "The Chamber of Commerce runs this town."  Well, this isn't true any more. And that's a very good thing.  To understand why, take a look at the goal of the Chamber of Commerce's political action committee, Build Jobs PAC. As should be obvious from its name, the Chamber really is only interested in one thing: jobs. But obviously there's a lot more to…
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Posted inCitizen involvement T.J. Sullivan

Challenged to say what I’ve done to make Salem better, I’m pleased to reply

Blogs should come with a warning: If you ask a blogger questions that require some talking about themselves, expect a verbose answer. Especially if the challenge is to explain my contributions to Salem from a couple of people who appear to doubt that I've done anything useful in my entire life. Today they left rather similar comments on my post, "T.J. Sullivan is the Chamber's President-Elect. He's gotten well-deserved snark from me."  Concerned Citizen left the first comment. Hi Brian. Honest questions: What concrete things have you done to make Salem better? How many people do you currently employ and…
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Posted inChamber of Commerce T.J. Sullivan

T.J. Sullivan is the Chamber’s President-Elect. He’s gotten well-deserved snark from me.

Ah, it's so fitting. The Salem Chamber of Commerce has chosen T.J. Sullivan to be its president-elect. Meaning, Sullivan is in the on-deck circle to come up and bat for this town's most notorious promoter of selfish right-wing business interests. To "honor" T.J. Sullivan (note the ironic quotation marks) I spent some time this evening Googling my previous blog posts about him.  Here's what I found, in chronological order: February 2016: "Salem Chamber of Commerce mass transit bill to aid Cherriots is dead." Sullivan led the Chamber's fight to defeat a payroll tax that would have brought weekend and evening bus…
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Posted inThird Bridge

Third Bridge supporters resorting to ridiculous arguments

Over the years I've heard lots of ridiculous arguments about why Salem should build a billion dollar (with financing costs included) Third Bridge across the Willamette River. For example, back in 2013 I asked Public Works Director Peter Fernandez to give me the "single most important reason Salem needs a Third Bridge." How did he respond? By saying that the single most important reason is that there is only one way into and out of West Salem. Redundancy and safety were the top reasons a Third Bridge is needed. He said that the bridges are seismically unfit. Currently serious accidents…
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Posted inNational politics

Hell, yes, today is the day to talk about American gun violence

The White House doesn't want to have a debate about gun control today, because last night 59 people were killed in the largest mass shooting in American history, with 527 injured.  That's incredibly wrong. This is precisely the day we need to start talking about why the United States has so many gun deaths compared to the rest of the world. After every mass shooting I roll out the same plain fact: more guns means more gun violence. Today Vox updated their excellent  explanation in "Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts." America is an exceptional country…
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