Category: Politics

Big-time Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski can dish out the criticism but apparently has a thin skin when it comes the other way. I’ve been commenting at his site and submitting topics for consideration (including one that was picked up earlier this month) for several years.

He’s been pushing the story of the recent Reed College heroin overdose deaths and the subsequent warning to the college from federal and local authorities since a letter from President Colin Diver went out last week to students, faculty, staff, and alumni about how Renn Fayre would be impacted.

Reed has had more than its share of heroin deaths. There were a couple around the period I was there in the late ’80s, and there have been heroin overdose deaths in 2008 and 2010. So there’s definitely a subculture of heroin use at the school. But as I pointed out in comments on the posts, smack isn’t exactly conducive to getting through Reed. If you’re smart enough to get in there, you can probably manage to skate through (whether that will get you into graduate school is another story) but if you’re nodding off every day that’s not going to happen. Heroin has a pull for a certain type of “artistic” personality, and those people are going to be drawn to places like Reed more than they are to Lewis & Clark or Linfield.

That, by the way, appears to be where I stepped on Mr. Bogdanski’s toes. Despite my having acknowledged that Reed had a couple clusters of heroin deaths, Bogdanski accused me in one response of denying that Reed had a heroin problem. I reiterated a couple of my remarks disproving that assertion and said that where I disagreed with him was in the size of the problem, then added for comedic effect this comment from a college shopper’s forum that I came across at random, after noting that he worked for the competition (i.e. he is a professor of law at Lewis & Clark)

I’ve posted this before, but it was so strange, I’ll do it again. When we were visiting Reed we called L & C admissions office and asked for directions. The woman at the other asked where we were coming from, we said Reed College, she said, “Oh, that’s a much better school.” It made us wonder what the school really thinks of itself.

And that got me banned. I didn’t realize it right away, because I posted a comment in another, later thread, but when I tried to post something this afternoon on a completely unrelated topic:

My earlier comments had also been deleted from the site.

The stupid thing is, the drug crackdown the US Attorney and Multnomah County DA and others want to use to bring Reed under their heel is just about the most inefficient waste of resources I can think of. Sure, they’ll keep people from smoking pot openly at Renn Fayre, but the kids who take acid or ecstacy or some other pills aren’t likely to be sharing them with random dudes showing up on campus who they’ve never seen before — and that stuff can last for hours. I don’t know what Bogdanski is smoking if he thinks that people are shooting up in public on the lawn in front of Eliot Hall, the only place a law enforcement presence is likely to make any difference. The powers-that-be will be able to strut around saying they’ve finally brought the druggie College under control; meanwhile the dealers will be working downtown Portland just like they do every single day. Sometime in the next decade, another Reedie will OD from heroin they bought within a few blocks of the Justice Center and the Hatfield Federal Courthouse. How will the DA and US Attorney pretend they’ve cleaned up the heroin problem at Reed then?

Felipe (“The Indian Native American”) Rose and David (“The Construction Worker”) Hodo — two members of the Village People — were on NPR’s quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…” last weekend, doing creditable work on the celebrity-appearence segment titled “Really, really not your job.”

Despite their skills at answering questions, I practically fell out of my chair laughing when this email solicitation came through today:

Village People Tickets on Sale Saturday

Tickets go on sale Saturday, April 17, at 8 a.m. for the Blue & White Bash featuring Village People!

The Blue & White Bash will celebrate the 125th anniversary of Dakota Wesleyan University. Tickets are $30 for general admission or $320 for a reserved table of eight; tables are limited. Tickets will be available at the Corn Palace ticket office, by phone at (800) 289-7469 or (605) 995-8430, or online at www.cornpalace.com/shop/.

The concert will be on Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, beginning at 7:30 p.m. with the DWU alumni quartet from the 1960s, The Highlanders, followed by Village People at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, go to www.dwu.edu/press/2010/mar26.htm.

Dakota Wesleyan — in the small town of Mitchell, South Dakota, a couple hours’ drive from Sioux Falls — is the alma mater of Sen. George McGovern, and the campus I visited when I went to the McGovern Conference several years ago. It’s about as unlikely a place as you might expect to run into the Village People, but you’ve got to give the bookers for the Blue & White Bash credit for thinking outside the box.

I’ve been reading Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, about the people who found a way to make a load of money betting on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Over the past decade, I’ve often wished I’d had money to invest in a way to express my feeling that the residential real estate market in the past decade was a house of cards, but as the book points out, it wasn’t enough to merely have the money. The people Lewis profiles also had to figure out how to bet against the conventional wisdom; one of the guys he writes about actually invented the type of trade that the others used to make their billions. Either way, no millions for Darrel.

I can’t help but feeling that we’re going to see some similar stories coming out of the commercial real estate market. A report that came out last month from TARP Congressional Oversight Panel Chairwoman Elizabeth Warren predicting that half of all commercial mortgages would be be “underwater” by the end of this year has been getting some play this week.

From the report’s Executive Summary:

Between 2010 and 2014, about $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will reach the end of their terms. Nearly half are at present ― underwater – that is, the borrower owes more than the underlying property is currently worth. Commercial property values have fallen more than 40 percent since the beginning of 2007. Increased vacancy rates, which now range from eight percent for multifamily housing to 18 percent for office buildings, and falling rents, which have declined 40 percent for office space and 33 percent for retail space, have exerted a powerful downward pressure on the value of commercial properties.

The largest commercial real estate loan losses are projected for 2011 and beyond; losses at banks alone could range as high as $200-$300 billion. The stress tests conducted last year for 19 major financial institutions examined their capital reserves only through the end of 2010. Even more significantly, small and mid-sized banks were never subjected to any exercise comparable to the stress tests, despite the fact that small and mid-sized banks are proportionately even more exposed than their larger counterparts to commercial real estate loan losses.

Presumably, the larger size and smaller quantity of commercial loans (as compared to residential loans) precluded the dive in lending standards that led to stories like the one Lewis recounts where a California crop picker making $14,000 a year got a loan for a $750,000 home, or the baby nurse of one of his profile subjects whose mortgage lenders convinced her to leverage a single townhouse purchase in Queens into five townhouses, but it would be a mistake to think that bankers, developers, and businesspeople are somehow smarter about money just because they have more of it. Someone, after all, lent the money to the crop picker and the baby nurse to buy the house, someone built the houses thinking they could sell them, and someone lent the builder money to build the houses they thought they could sell.

As Lewis elaborates, the initial act of lending the money to the home buyers isn’t where the real money was. It was the bond market — where mortgages were bundled into packages of several thousands and traded between investors and second and third-generation trade instruments were created that simultaneously magnified the volume and obscured the risk of the original mortgages — that was the scene of the real crime. And after reading Lewis’s book, I can’t help but suspect that, while I still don’t have the money to do any investing, that there are probably collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps aplenty to be heard of coming from commercial mortgages.

Barbara saw this Kohler ad by San Francisco photographer Mark Holthusen and was struck by the odd juxtaposition of elegant woman and toilet. My immediate reaction was: Isn’t that Portland’s Union Station tower Photoshopped into the background? And isn’t a $4,400 toilet with “integrated bowl lighting” an appropriate item to be named the Fountainhead and sold by an idealized version of Ayn Rand?

HISTORICAL NOTE: Almost exactly 20 years ago, Barbara was the one who unmasked the use of Barbur Boulevard’s Capitol Hill Motel in a photo illustration accompanying a SPY Magazine article about philandering congressmen.

It must just kill some people to have seen the picture of Dennis Kucinich getting off of Air Force One yesterday. He’s theDFH the people who claim they’re DFHs can’t stand. A post-1972 McGovern of his era, in neat, pocket size. If you’re the slightest bit insecure about your own liberalism, there’s no way you can have Dennis Kucinich around, because he just reeks of libcooties.

LOOKSTRONG!

Joey Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh has a book out (I Slept with Joey Ramone) that I want to read. I have to laugh at the caption informing visitors to the NPR review that in the picture accompanying the piece: “Joey Ramone is second from left.”

I haven’t seen Iggy Pop for a couple of years, but he’s interviewed here. As my friends grow tired of hearing, he touched me once.

And on a non-music note, who in the hell at NPR decided David “Cornel West is a black airhead” Horowitz was the proper contrarian voice to add to the acknowledgement of the death of historian Howard Zinn?

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Guess I picked the wrong decade to give up defrauding the government:

Report: Bush Admin Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man’s Al Jazeera ‘Decoding’ Scam

Working out of a Reno, Nevada, software firm called eTreppid Technologies, Montgomery took in officials in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and convinced them that technology he invented — but could not explain — was pulling terrorist-produced “bar codes” from Al Jazeera television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers. Terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about the next target.

But Montgomery’s “technology” could not be reproduced, and the Playboy piece explains how he fell out of favor after word of what was going on spread in the CIA:

The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. “I said, ‘Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.’ They wouldn’t even do that,” says the first officer. “And I was screaming, ‘You gave these people fucking money?'” …

A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not.

…

But even after the CIA abandoned Montgomery, he appears to have convinced other agencies that his decoding technology was legit. He inked a $3 million research contract with the Air Force in January of this year. An official explained to Playboy, “We were just looking at [software] to see if there was anything there.”

The French save our asses once again.

At this point, I’ve heard and read far more stories about how much carbon the planes, trains, and automobiles taking a few thousand people to the climate change talks in Copenhagen are generating than what—on the off chance that anything actually is agreed upon there—will be done to reduce carbon emissions by the six or seven billion other people on the planet over years to come.

This was one of several Christian-themed candy designs on the same rack. From God’s hand to your mouth is supposed to be the message, apparently.

You do have to wonder about the advisability of associating your religious message with suckers. Then again, perhaps that’s why they were at the Dollar Store.