It happened in August of 2006, and according to Blogtown (although they don’t describe it this way), it’s happened again. The right of anyone to request that items be pulled off the Consent Agenda is enshrined in both the City Code and the City Charter.
As I asked back then: Does no one actually care that both the Code (3.02.036) and the Charter (Section 2-127) specifically preclude preventing someone from pulling items off the Consent Agenda? Was the City Attorney asleep when this happened? Or does City Council — and those in its employ — simply not give a shit about the City’s highest law?
Addendum: WWire details the incident. Nowhere does Potter or anyone else ask Seaton why he wants to pull every item off the Consent Agenda. And there’s no basis under the law for Potter saying that Seaton had “to name one” — the premise there, I assume, being that Potter was trying to say that Seaton could only pull a single item.
Now, I have little doubt that the point was to disrupt the proceedings. It’s unlikely that Seaton or anyone else wanted to testify about each and every item on the Consent Agenda in turn, one by one.
But no one asked him.
Until and unless Potter — or anyone else — asked him about it, there’s no basis under Code or Charter for simply telling City Hall security to remove Seaton for requesting that every item be removed from the Consent Agenda. And given the previous instance of Potter blatantly violating these provisions, it would have been nice if someone had called him on it here.
More’s the shame that Leonard — who was amongst the people during the Joint Terrorism Task Force debate who pointed out that we’re meant to be a nation of laws, not a nation of men, with rules in place to prevent abuse of power — sided with Potter on violating City law.
Now, I love wingnut mayoral candidates. And I love the schtick mayoral candidates. A couple of years after I moved to Portland, I considered a joke campaign myself. In fact, several of the rotating set of campaign slogans have been repurposed into the rotating set of taglines of the top of this site, because I recently came across my joke campaign flyers.
But as much as I love wingnuts, and as much as I love schtick, the best jokes at least maintain some sort of internal consistency.
So what all Portland voters should want to know from Kyle Burris is this: How can someone’s platform be against unconstitutional persecution of the homeless, but at the same time call for the unconstitutional construction of death camps for hipsters, as well as an unconstitutional wall around the Pearl District, complete with armed guards?
Clearly, this is precisely the sort of position inconsistency that primary elections were designed to out.
According to the Portland Butt Hunt, our city should “take the lead on the battle of the butts”. They provide some “general butt stats” to help answer the question, “Why are butts bad?”
Amongst other things, they report that “[p]oisons in butts can kill small animals” and that “[b]utts are ugly”. In addition, “[b]utts can release chemicals such as cadmium, lead and arsenic” and “[p]lastic pieces from butts are often mistaken for food”. What’s more, they suggest that “butt hunt should not be only a one day event, the butt hunt needs to continue until we get ahead of the problem”.
I’m not sure whose butts they’ve been studying, but while flatulence can be a problem, I’m not sure it can kill small animals. I’m fairly certain that no butt I have seen has released any cadmium, lead, or arsenic. Not do I recall any plastic pieces appearing from mine, at least.
So, please Portland Butt Hunt, stay away from my butt. It doesn’t fit your very peculiar butt profile.
Contrary to Shawn Levy’s statement that it is “dearly departed”, The Great Northwest Bookstore (warning: shitty and outdated website) is still alive. It simply moved several years ago from SW Stark to SW First and Gibbs, into an old church (previously the Church of Divine Man Psychic Institute) directly beneath the aerial tram lines.
Whenever a public official facing criticism says that one area needing improvement is “public outreach”, you know that they know they are wrong on the issues themselves. In essence, the last-ditch effort of any given public official to derail criticisms is to argue (usually by implication and insinuation rather than outright statement) that the only problem at hand is that the public is just too stupid and/or uninformed to understand.
Ah, the Web. Where a new media mogul like Sean Bonner apparently is just as much the schmuck as any given old media mogul. If we’re taking a vote of the local blogosphere, consider my vote cast for abandoning The Portland Metblog in favor of a homegrown alternative that isn’t part of a network run by an asshat.
When I walk into Floyd’s Coffee Shop this morning, I am third in line. The couple at the counter pay and step aside. The woman in front of me orders. As she’s paying, a car drives into the empty drive-thru. The woman in front of me pays as one of the two baristas pulling shots crosses behind the one running the cashier to take the drive-thru order. The one running the cashier takes my order and gets it written on the post-it before the other gets the drive-thru order written down.
Now, that’s the proper order of things. But then it plays out like this: The two baristas pulling shots proceed to make the two drinks for the drive-thru customer before making mine. And I sit there for ten minutes longer than necessary or appropriate.
I get that the drive-thru is cool. I get that it’s convenient. But when there’s a customer already in the very short line inside with the drive-thru empty, and a car pulls into the drive-thru with said customer next in line, you serve the inside customer first.
When it’s busy in both lines, I get that things get hectic, and unless you put one barista on the window and one on the inside, things can get a little shuffled. But on days like today, in circumstances such as the above, it’s pretty cut and dry: The drive-thru is not meant to be a de facto means of cutting in line.
Addendum: Oddly, and frustratingly, I seem to have mentioned this very problem almost exactly one year ago, just not in any particular detail.
Regardless of the specific incident which brought the issue to light, at least people now are discussing the rather clear and obvious state rule on when someone is considered a candidate for the purposes of reporting campaign contributions. It continues to confuse me how anyone who bothered to read the state’s manual for city candidates would not understand what it said, given that it is not the least bit opaque on this point.
Mostly south, in addition to west. Whatever the case, today is the day that the Virginia Cafe officially leaves its home since 1922 for its new location. If what the Tribune reported last week and what our server said last night is correct, the actual and alleged “bar stool crawl” will take place sometime during Happy Hour.
Addendum: Just above this post as displayed on ORblogs is this Barfly item which confirms that at 4:00 PM or so they indeed will be “moving up to 10th Avenue via a bar stool crawl up Yamhill then left on 10th to our new home”. It also confirms the Tribune report that one of the booths which cannot follow the VC to their new location will be taking up residence at the Oregon Historical Society.
With the developers of the block having failed to heed the alternative suggestion, the move of the Virginia Cafe now is imminent. So much so that they’ve set the date for the bar stool crawl from its current location on SW Park to its new one on SW 10th for sometime next Monday. “So if anyone wants to come down on Sunday night the 24th to have a drink with me for one of the last times on Park Avenue,” writes the VC’s general manager, “I will be here that evening after I’m done working on the new place. The VC crew and myself will be there saying good-bye to an old friend and looking forward to our future on 10th [A]venue.”