HR 1

It’s “Time” for Portland to deal with Sam Adams.

Feeling they were on the verge of a breakthrough, Jaquiss and Willamette Week went after Adams again. The new mayor denied the claims again. But on the Monday before Inauguration, he called his colleagues and supporters to say there was truth to the charges. “I believe what I said was, ‘You’re a f___ing moron,'” says Wiener. “I was, and am, pissed and saddened by it.”

Civil rights are for everyone because they’re inviolate. Respect you have to earn and keep.

Adams and the celebrities who threw in to support Adams may have had a point about the traditional media jumping the gun, but come on. Adams is a scumbag and it damages the progressive movement to defend people like this. Enough already.

We’ve got a bridge to build. Six months or a year of the Portland mayor (who is a complete scumbag) being distracted is not what the region needs. And please, spare me the sanctimony about “personal lives.” Honorable people don’t make out with kids in city hall bathrooms and then destroy potential political opponents with lies.

Jobs going in a puff of steam:

Starbucks will cut 6,000 positions as it closes 300 stores worldwide over the next eight months and will eliminate about 700 non-store workers by mid-February as it cuts costs to stem its eroding profits.

The immediate layoffs include about 350 employees at its Seattle headquarters, about 11 percent of the 3,200 people who work there. The 300 store closures will include 200 U.S. shops.

Yet another blow to the Northwest. It’s too bad, I always liked Starbucks. You may now have to cross the street to get to one up there in Seattle, however.

Yesterday Gov. Chris Gregoire was in Clark County to visit with the bidness guys and gals, and the whaaaaambulance was screeching away full throttle. I’m sure someone in the room voted for her. Well, actually, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a theoretical possibility at least.

Like we’ve never heard this one before, but the first thing to do is blame the workers. From The Columbian:

Elie Kassab, president of Prestige Development, said he advertised in The Reflector last year to fill eight entry-level jobs and had 221 young applicants. “The biggest problem we have is the 50-cent minimum wage increase,” he said. The minimum wage, tied to the Consumer Price Index, jumped 48 cents to $8.55, the nation’s highest, on Jan. 1.

Yeah, I’m sure that extra $3.84 per hour to hire eight workers is killing him. You really can’t make this stuff up.

If blaming minimum wage workers isn’t your cup of tea, you could always blame environmental regulations:

Contractor Roy Frederick drew applause when he urged Gregoire to take another look at strict new state stormwater runoff rules that require builders to set aside more land for retention ponds.

“Tell your Department of Ecology to do a cost-benefit analysis on these stormwater regulations,” he said. “It’s a giant train wreck. It has stopped development in Clark County.”

I guess it had nothing to do with the housing bubble, securitization of mortgages or fraud in the house building, financing and selling sector, nor the continued credit crunch caused by zombie banks pocketing taxpayer money instead of lending. Nope, nothing at all.

The whining is not limited to our state, however. The house building industry is peeved over in Oregon as well. From The Oregonian:

Portland-area homebuilders say things are bad enough with the recession. Now they suspect members of the Metro council – elected officials who have much to say about how and where the area grows – are philosophically bent against them.

Tom Skaar, president of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland, says council members think growth means “sprawl” – so he wrote in a letter to Metro Council President David Bragdon

Well, growth has historically meant sprawl, at least since the construction of the interstate highway system.

To be fair, construction and associated businesses are a valuable and needed part of any economy. There are, of course, good and decent builders, real estate agents, sellers of furniture and such who are being wiped out. This is bad, and it’s every bit as tragic as a factory worker or high-tech worker getting wiped out.

It seems not to have really sunk in among the developers, however, that things are unlikely to return to normal any time soon, and may not ever be quite the same. Clark County functioned for years as a safety valve for Oregon, absorbing huge population gains while providing sub-standard urban services in many respects. Many children attend school in portable classrooms, sidewalks go nowhere, parks go undeveloped and public safety services struggle for money.

The citizenry of Clark County has already paid for the bubble, through taxes and hidden costs such as traffic congestion and environmental challenges. We simply cannot afford to keep growing in the fashion we did the last 15 years or so. There’s no money left, anywhere. It’s vaporized, along with the fish.

So while it is in everyone’s interest to have economic recovery happen, and the construction sector should share in that, it’s going to take enormous sums of public money (and it already is, through the TARP and FDIC.) That means the interests of the community as a whole need to be taken into account, not just the pet peeves of bidness guys grinding the same far right axes they’ve been grinding for the last thirty years.

Times are tough for many people. Everyone deserves a seat at the table, but nobody should own the table.

Elections have consequences, you know.

Where will Oregon eventually come down when it comes to the CRC project to build a new bridge on I-5 between Vancouver and Portland? Not clear. From The Columbian:

A high-level meeting of elected officials did little Monday to reach consensus on how many lanes should be built on a new replacement Interstate 5 bridge.

The Portland City Council and the Metro Council, in a rare joint work session, spent close to two hours in a wide-ranging discussion of the lane issue, bridge tolls and projected effects on greenhouse gas emissions and urban development.

The meeting, however, only underscored the division between Washington and Oregon on a bridge-freeway-transit project that could cost $3.5 billion or more.

An interesting comment from one official:

Metro Council President David Bragdon said officials agree on a number of issues, including the need to replace the bridge and to extend light rail into Vancouver. On the day a light-rail line opens connecting Portland and Vancouver, it would have the highest ridership of any route in the Portland-Vancouver area, he said.

If politics is the art of the possible, hopefully a grand compromise can be worked out between the two states and the two cities. There are hysterical types on both sides of the river, on one side proclaiming a new bridge will inevitably lead to greater sprawl and on the other side proclaiming the end of freedom due to communist choo-choo trains. It’s all so silly, and unsupported by fact.

The bridge project (bridge influence area in planner-speak) is focused on a short stretch of I-5, the main commercial artery on the West Coast. The sub-standard interchanges and bridge present a real safety and efficiency hazard, and it’s long past time a new bridge is planned and constructed.

The detail that concerns me the most is how tolls are presented to the public. If the proceeds are used to pay for construction and maintenance, the public will accept them. If tolls are used to “manage demand,” far fewer people will be happy and there is the risk of an intense public backlash in Clark County. Since the public will have to be asked to approve taxes to run light rail on this side of the river, that’s a big risk to take.

That may not be how some transportation experts see it, as new technology and the hope of influencing congestion through pricing is a somewhat attractive proposition, but it will be seen as punitive and an example of government being out to get the little people. And frankly, since any toll would be new, as passage across the bridge has been free for decades now, there would be a de facto limiting effect anyway. The quick jaunt across the river to purchase merchandise from big box retailers will have to be weighed against the cost of the tolls.

Complicated toll pricing schemes will just muddy the political waters. I sure hope they don’t do it that way.

Bellingham Herald reporter-blogger Sam Taylor, regarding a new cat blog put up by someone in the Olympia press corps:

Meanwhile, has anyone else checked on the journalists there lately? They seem lonely.

Um, meeee—ow?

This time it’s H-P:

Hewlett-Packard Co. is in the process of laying off at least 150 Vancouver workers, and possibly more than 200, as it scraps its local Edgeline printer team and shrinks other engineering groups.

—snip—-

HP “is shifting prototype testing, as well as some work on research designs, engineering specifications and drawings, abroad, including to Singapore,” according to U.S. Department of Labor documents. This inkjet lab move will affect at least 52 Vancouver employees, a labor official said.

—snip—

Employees of HP are taking the news as a blow, especially following reports by the Reuters news agency that Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd received compensation of $42.5 million in 2008.

While the news is not unexpected, as it’s well known H-P has been in the process of destroying the company trying to sell the Vancouver campus, the timing is especially horrible for Vancouver. Tax revenue and house sales will continue to suffer.

As for CEO compensation, I find it hard to believe Congress will actually do anything about it. Now shut up and enjoy your jelly of the month.

It’s getting cold out there.

From The Columbian:

Businesses that were drawing down loans to fund these projects have been told by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that their credit is frozen. These borrowers are being encouraged to seek other financing within the next 90 days. They make up an unknown portion of the 1,000 borrowers whose $400 million worth of loans were seized from the Bank of Clark County on Jan. 16.

“The (FDIC) is going to leave me with unfinished homes that cannot be refinanced, rented or sold,” said a local home builder, who asked The Columbian not to publish his name because he did not want public comments to affect his negotiations with the FDIC.

That TARP thing sure is working well. If it works any better you won’t be able to charge a hamburger.

Unrelated but obvious: anonymous bloggers are a threat to Western Civilization. Anonymous developers get to call newspapers and have their complaints published. Seems equal to me.

From The New York Times:

Inspections of the plant in Blakely, Ga., by the state agriculture department found areas of rust that could flake into food, gaps in warehouse doors large enough for rodents to get through, unmarked spray bottles and containers, and numerous violations of other practices designed to prevent food contamination. The plant, owned by Peanut Corporation of America of Lynchburg, Va., has been shut down.

A typical entry from an inspection report, dated Aug. 23, 2007, noted: “The food-contact surfaces of re-work kettle in the butter room department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.” Additional entries noted: “The food-contact surfaces of the bulk oil roast transfer belt in the mezzazine [sic] room were not properly cleaned and sanitized. The food-contact surfaces of pan without wheels in the blanching department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.”

A code violation in the same report observed “clean peanut butter buckets stored uncovered,” while another cited a “wiping cloth” to “cover crack on surge bin.” Tests on samples gathered on the day of that inspection were negative for salmonella.

Props to Marler Blog.

How much does a tax cut stimulate people who lost their job?

It’s already been a lousy year for workers less than a month into 2009 and there’s no relief in sight. Tens of thousands of fresh layoffs were announced Monday and more companies are expected to cut payrolls in the months ahead.

Lots of lucky duckies at places like Sprint, GM, Caterpillar and Pfizer.

Seriously, I want these Republican Congress-critters who represent some of these districts to go home and tell their constituents they simply must increase the percentage of tax cuts in the stimulus bill, even as job losses mount. They might run into some actual “real” Americans going “WTF are you talking about, I just lost my job and my house!”

Everyone knew the GOP wouldn’t be satisfied with 40% of the package, even though they are in the minority. Enough of this bipartisan artifice, it’s not anything people outside Washington, D.C. care about very much, if at all.

We need to do what we need to do, and if Republicans don’t like it, they can bring it up at the next election.

From The Oregonian:

Two students in a foreign exchange program died and seven other people were injured Saturday night when a 24-year-old man with a gun opened fire outside a popular underage nightclub in downtown Portland.

Police identified one of the victims as Ashley Wilks, 16, of Happy Valley. People familiar with the student exchange program said Wilks — a Clackamas High School sophomore — was preparing to head to a foreign country for study.

It appears authorities have yet to name a suspect, who according to the newspaper shot himself and is in critical condition. At this point police seem to believe the shooting was random.

How utterly awful.

Robert Reich pens an open letter to Limbaugh, Hannity and Malkin. Short version: please stop lying, anyone can read or listen to what I actually said.

As a foul-mouthed blogger, I’m grateful there are smart, nice, civil people in the world like Reich. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

Funny how uncivil and lying behavior by the right is so accepted as part of the media landscape that you rarely see traditional outlets get all upset about it, and in the case of the falsehoods about Reich’s views traditional media figures like Lou Dobbs at CNN have also spread them quite deliberately. As we have seen countless times in the past, deliberately telling outright lies is not just wrong, it warps rational discourse and causes stupid people to believe whatever the hell they want, facts be damned.

And it’s only when the DFH wants something totally insane like health insurance coverage for all Americans that we get the preachy editorials about civility and bi-partisanship.

This country is in a crisis. We can no longer afford to let stupid people believe lies, they must be told the truth. Stupid is what got us here in the first place.

Buying an airline ticket is not a jail sentence.

Some enterprising Congress-critters could create a lot of good will among their bosses (that would be voters) by getting their name attached to the proposed legislation that will give airline customers basic human rights.

So far it’s not clear why customs officials couldn’t be bothered to interview a small number of hungry tourists. If it turns out to be a staffing issue, then that needs to be addressed. Flights sometimes get diverted due to weather, and it’s not like PDX is some teeny tiny airport or something, and it does handle other international flights.

But good on the firefighters who bought the passengers hamburgers and helped some sick people.

Microsoft ouch.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday morning it would lay off up to 5,000 employees, or 5 percent of its work force, over the next 18 months, including 1,400 jobs today, marking the first time in its history that it has laid off workers across the company.

The announcement came as Microsoft posted quarterly results far short of analysts’ and its own expectations.

—snip—

The company said that jobs would be eliminated in research and development, marketing, sales, finance, legal, human resources, and IT. At the same time, the company said it would continue to hire in other areas, including its search business, so its work force would actually fall by between 2,000 and 3,000.

And Intel ouch.

Intel will close an aging computer chip factory in Hillsboro late this year, eliminating 1,000 positions as it ratchets back production in response to a spectacular decline in sales.

The 12-year-old facility, known as Fab 20, is one of five sites worldwide that Intel will shutter in 2009. As many as 6,000 workers will lose their jobs globally, about 7 percent of Intel’s total work force.

People have less money, they buy less stuff, then people lose jobs, meaning they have less money and buy less stuff…