I wonder how many people bother to slog through Robert Landauer's Oregonian columns? Too few, probably, which is too bad, because he has a lot to say about important civic matters. And today, apparently, is his last column.
He's not a flashy writer. His prose is at times dense and inaccessible. But he's hardworking and does incredibly thorough research to back his opinions. He even provides website URL's for those curious about actual data. Today is no exception:
"The most pressing is the peril the planet faces in its capacity to deliver basic services as humankind alters natural systems. (Required reading: www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx and links.) A related necessity is to identify the corrective steps we should take as biological diversity is threatened and resources such as fish stocks and fossil fuels are depleted."
He also provides these two nuggets about issues near and dear to me:
"To do that job we also must help convince Oregon taxpayers that we are co-conspirators in legislating ignorance and poverty if we continue to allow spending per student to slide to its anemic level -- $1,000 below the national average."
"We must face the social implications -- bankruptcies, divorce, spousal and child abuse, suicides -- of Oregon's growing financial dependence on gambling. Ours is one of a small handful of states relying on gambling for more than 10 percent of its income. We are introducing highly addictive video slots to increase that income -- inevitably adding many to the state's total of 80,000 problem gamblers."
Meanwhile, over at the Tribune, three fools continue to spout rubbish about city hall, gambling, and school privatization. I refer of course to Phil Stanford, Dwight Jaynes, and Promise King.
Stanford is a bright guy--he went to Dartmouth, after all-- and a good writer. But he's also somewhat OCD, which means obsessive compulsive about two topics: Michael Francke (one of the reasons he was fired from the Oregonian) and the Clean Money--heh heh heh-- initiative at City Hall. He challenges in almost every column the two main supporters of the initiative, Erik Sten and Gary Blackmer, to come up with examples of how private donations to politicians have led to corruption. That's a nice little trick, but entirely beside the point, as this letter to the Oregonian points out:
Open up political process
Your editorial, "Cleaning what isn't dirty" (April 5), misdirects the public from the real motivation for voter-owned elections. The point is not cleaning up corruption, but rather opening our political process. Optional public campaign finance does this in several ways:
1. Reducing the power of incumbency.
2. Enabling good candidates to run who do not wish, or are not able, to raise large amounts of money.
3. Allowing candidates to make voters, not contributors, the major focus of their campaigns.
City Club of Portland urges the City Council to adopt voter-owned elections.
CHRIS SMITH Chairman
SID LEZAK and JAKE OKEN-BERG Members Voter Owned Elections Committee City Club of Portland Southwest Portland
Jake Oken-Berg, you may recall, is the former teen phenom who challenged Vera Katz for Mayor.
Dwight Jaynes also writes a slick column but is nonetheless an idiot. He suppported plunking an Indian casino down in the heart of Portland in return for a baseball stadium. In his last column he attacked the NCAA for pressuring the Oregon Lottery to get rid of its Sports Action game. I say we should get rid of the Lottery entirely.
Promise King doesn't write any better than Landauer, but what he does write is always wrong. That's my opinion, of course. He even gets his facts wrong at times, as I pointed out in this post after he called Jefferson High School "an academic embarassment":
"Jefferson, with a 12% white enrollment, actually has far better test scores than Roosevelt (41% white), which has also experienced a catastrophic loss of students-- about 34% since 1995-6. Marshall (55% white) fares little better in a comparison of test scores. It too has lost a hefty percentage of students since 1995-6 -- 28%. So why single out Jefferson as a district "embarrassment"? Why not Roosevelt or Marshall? ..."
"If Promise King, like the ideologues who concocted No Child Left Behind, believes that a privatized education system can do a better job educating kids--and that means all kids-- than the publicly funded common schools that you and I attended, he ought to just come out and say so. And let the debate begin, openly, without the politics and the subterfuge surrounding federal, state, and local educational policies."
In his latest column, King continued his call for what I believe is school privatization.
Here's what he said:
"I still believe that at the very least we owe it to our children — especially those from low-income and minority communities — to introduce market incentives into our current achievement debate, without the hostility and name-calling that have become the norm."
I like the Tribune. It does a great job of covering local issues in depth. I can just do without its columnists.
Comments