It should be a trivially easy matter for everyone to agree that vandalism and destruction of property, whether public or private, is not an acceptable form of private speech. But I want to drill down on something here:
Two years ago, different groups of people were celebrating the destruction of statues and claiming to be progressive. Both are wrong.
Freedom of speech requires tolerance for all speech. We cannot support the defacing of statues and monuments for reasons we agree with via vandalism of any kind and comfort ourselves with a belief that the ends justify the means.
In the actual end, it means we condone vandalism. Vandalism is lawlessness, and any person—especially a politician–espousing it or excusing it should be resoundingly challenged.
So I presume and hope that the OP distinguishes between an official entity deciding through lawful, peaceful means to take down a statue of a person deemed no longer worthy of public honors and self-appointed actors using criminal or violent means to remove something that they deem offensive.
I wrote six years ago, expressed here in the context of a decision by a municipality to remove a publicly-maintained monument from a public park, that when a public entity maintains a monument, it is making an endorsement of the subject matter of that monument. Perhaps it's only as weak an endorsement as "Whether we like this thing/person or not, we don't dislike them enough to spend the money to remove it, so it's cheaper to maintain it because, hey, public art." But it's still an endorsement.
And maybe times change sufficiently that the thing or person thus commemorated does become offensive enough, to enough people, that they don't want to honor it anymore. Removal (done lawfully and peacefully) is appropriate under such circumstances.
And the public entities endorsed the Georgia Guidestones in this fashion as well. They agreed to accept the donation of the land and the monuments themselves. Public entities agreed to and did pay for security cameras to be on the site.
I'm moved by the TV interview of the executive of the local trade group, particularly when he spoke of the technical difficulties involved in creating the monument, and how it showcased the talents of the local craftspeople who did it. That by itself is a real loss to the community. What happened here was a crime, both literally and artistically.
With that said, the fact that someone in the past created a monument does not obligate those who have the lawful power to remove the monument to refrain from doing so. Successive generations get their ability to speak, too, and are not bound by the preferences and opinions of the dead.
I'd have spent some time thinking about contributions to this list but I was at the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival all weekend (he bragged). Nothing but deeply American music all weekend long!
One song I would have excluded from consideration would have been "The Fourth of July" by X. Lyrically not what you're looking for here. Get some Tom Petty instead, maybe.
I guess part of my despair is that I have no weapons, arguments, shields, tactics, or even ideas for what to say to unelected, unpersuadable mandarins who justify themselves with the reasoning "Because that's what we felt like doing LOL what are you going to do about it? Nothing."
I tell myself not to despair. That the composition of the Court can change in what seems like the blink of an eye. That sometimes Justices can adopt positions that are not expected of them.
I tell myself this is nothing unusual or novel. For most of its history, the Court has served the interests of socially conservative and monied interests. That it's almost always been a trailing check on the progress of politics. Somehow, we've survived.
I tell myself that the arc of history shows both that there are grand cycles of one party overreaching when it has power and the electorate recoiling from them, and then the other party correcting for the mistakes, then overcorrecting for them, and then losing power again, and that this is the natural ebb and flow of democracy over time. So this too shall pass and in the long run, no one has clean hands. I tell myself that the arc of history in America trends towards liberty, towards equality, towards justice. That what we're living through right now is an eddy, a backcurrent, one that will eventually lose power and the course will correct back to its natural and powerful, if sometimes maddeningly slow, path to a better nation.
I tell myself these things and then I look at the accumulated weight of recent experience and I feel despair nevertheless. We've been pushed so far backwards in such a short amount of time!
Justice Kentaji Brown-Jackson took her seat on the Court today. She and her Sisters on the Bench have got a lot of work ahead of them. We in the voting public need to do our part to get them some help, and there's nothing for it but to start cleaning up the mess.
Heh. Just like how my interest in Establishment Clause jurisprudence was rekindled when I found out that a six-foot-high marble monument bearing nothing but a copy of the Decalogue, an American eagle and flag, two stars of David, and a Chi-Rho symbol, on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, does not violate the Establishment Clause (Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005)) while an eight-panel display on the walls of the lobby of a Kentucky county courthouse, including the Decalogue in one panel and other historical documents on the others, does violate the Establishment Clause (McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844 (2005)). Note that these two cases were decided on the same day by the same Court.
If you didn't believe in slippery slopes before, you have to believe in them now. Blaine Amendments are a dead letter.
Blaine Amendments are prohibitions against state money being used to aid religious institutions that were part of a wave of state-level legislation about a century ago. It's suggested that they were motivated by a decidedly ugly anti-Catholic biogtry. But at the same time, they are pretty clearly consistent with the Establishment Clause. They have been a particular focus of right-wing legal agitation for some time now.
In 2017, the Court decided Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 582 U. S. ___ (the blank means the final pagination hasn't been determined yet). This ruled that Missouri's Blaine Amendment did not stop the state of Missouri from helping a sectarian school purchase a spongy mat for its playground. Then in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U. S. ___ (2020), Montana's Blaine Amendment was found invalid as for particiaption in state-administered scholarships. And now in today's decision, Carson v. Makin has it apply to direct payments of tuition to religious schools.
If the social conservatives can't bring prayer back to public schools (though prayers never really left public schools, they just stopped being required by them, and even then that may be limited to situations where someone dares to challenge a de facto requirement where it exists) they will bring public dollars to the religious schools instead.
Oh, well, the facts in all of these cases are fairly sympathetic ones in which a well-intentioned state is trying to get some money to a similarly well-intentioned religious school, notwithstanding the wall of separation between church and state, because everyone just wants to help out the kids. I must remember to think of the children.
I think that someone should be held responsible for [Babbitt's death]. The main difference is that I think that person is Donald John Trump.
This ought to be fantastically obvious. Trump set in motion a chain of events that he knew or should have known would lead to violence. Babbitt died in the violence Trump created. Nancy Pelosi did not create that violence. Mike Pence did not create that violence (debatably, he failed to do what he could to prevent it). Joe Biden did not create that violence. Donald Trump did. He did it for terrible reasons, reasons that lack any claim to justification or excuse.
I hope most Americans can see this, and I fear that a substantial number are blinded by partisan preference or defensiveness that they will not.
It's probably true that not a lot of people are going to change their minds about much of anything here. It's entirely possible that a lot of people who ought to reconsider what they think or what they're being told to think don't care much about the truth, because they've been told it isn't the truth and what they want the truth to be is more pleasing to their priors. And it's also the case that people may think that inflation or other kinds of forward-looking problems matter more than the truth about a failed... whatever it was back in January of '21.
But there are people who care about the truth. And the future will mark whether we made any effort at all to figure out what was going on. We can hope that maybe one day when partisan fervor has receded or become obsolete (no one cares whether you were a Dick Gephardt Democrat or a Gary Hart Democrat anymore) that what was learned investigating January 6 now will prove useful for those who follow in crafting policies to prevent crises and craft better policies.
The truth matters precisely because history isn't over yet.
Enjoyed the reviews a lot and of what I've seen, I largely agree with you.
Maybe not directly related to the subject matter, but of great interest to me: the feature picture for the article, a Cinemark multiplex, looked REALLY familiar to me. Including the general shape of the mountains and the color the sky in the background. So I looked up the photographer on Wikimedia Commons. He has a lot of pictures in and around my former haunts in Southern California. So it might actually be the multiplex where I've seen hundreds of movies. (Allowing for the possibility that buildings of this nature are going to be pretty cookie-cutter, of course; mountains are all unique, but in a different sense, they're also all alike.)
A quibble I have with an argument in the article is that our current understanding of psychopathy is that these are people who cannot be taught empathy, but dangerously, psychopaths do learn how to imitate it, and that society dispenses rewards to them when they do so.
One thing that does occur to me as I think this through is that the use of arts to teach empathy (or rather to cultivate it and encourage its expression) may be a way of eliciting a clue as to tendencies towards psychopathy. But I kind of hate to put that sort of thing on arts teachers. It would be interesting to hear from teachers about the spectrum of things they are already required to know and incorporate into their work, and whether this is the sort of thing that could fit into it.
The kind of church one goes to matters in this regard. I was raised Catholic and music in a Catholic mass is not particularly inspiring, particularly to a young person. After acquiring some education, I understood some of it to be evocative of medieval ceremonies but that realization made the church feel more remote from me than before.
As an older teen I went to a Southern Baptist service with a band and was absolutely Blown. Away. by the quality of the musicianship. Anyone who doesn't understand how a church can cultivate amazing musical talent ought to see the Aretha Franklin biopic. (Well, you should see it anyway.)
To a degree, yes; "Shut up!" is usually the first thing a lawyer tells a client who looks like they've done something culpable.
Government entities refusing to cooperate with other government entities, particularly within law enforcement, has some substantive differences to private litigants circling the wagons, including that taxpayers have a pretty principled reason to get upset about it no matter who they think the bad guy is, and the near-certainty that at least one of the actors in the conflict (if not more) is behaving in bad faith.
As you point out, it's not entirely clear what "not cooperating" means in practice.
Dithering for an hour wasn't in the protocol. Lying about their own blamelessness, hiding behind the honor of their badges afterwards was, though.
If Uvalde becomes the time when the public started to see through it and say so out loud, that will be something of a silver lining to this very dark cloud.
Such wisdom as I've managed to accrete has usually come as the consequence of not just a mistake, but a mistake preceded by arrogance and followed by tangible harm.
Some of what I see described as wisdom here is what a Christian might call "grace" or what anyone might call "forgiveness." And I agree it's profound wisdom, for it is a necessary component of both a functioning society as well as a member of that society. It is this flavor of wisdom that feels in such short supply in the age of social media.
Yeah that's a comment I like for the truth ringing in it and hate for the truth ringing in it. Yet despite it being a powerful contributing factor, we can count on no one mentioning this the next time there is a movement like BLM that calls attention to the police's mistakes and failures and once again people protesting bad things police do will be called "antifa" or "anarchists" or whatever the new slur will be by the amazing pro-cop PR machine.
I've gotten to know a lot of people who say they have anxiety issues and come very close to someone whose anxiety issues were from time to time really a stumbling block in life. Wound up having to break off my relationship with that otherwise-quite-enjoyable person because of the way the anxiety got handled.
I don't know if claiming anxiety problems is somehow fashionable, or if it's becoming a convenient excuse for some other thing. I now know that the reality of one is not a status symbol, it's a serious stumbling block. I'm so happy for our author to have found a way through it.
The most interesting result in Oregon was not the Governor's primaries, but the Democratic nomination for the Fifth Congressional District. The district has changed substantially. From 1993 through this year, it encompassed Lake Oswego and other maybe-not-quite-so-well-to-do southern suburbs of Portland, Salem, and a good chunk of the middle of the Coast. Now it extends a little bit further north into the southern stretches of Portland proper, excludes Salem, and goes east over the mountains into the populated portion of Deschutes County (meaning explosively-growing Bend and Redmond). Less than half of the new district's residents lived in the old district.
The 7-term incumbent, moderate Democrat Kurt Schrader, remains a resident of the newly-redrawn district. He was endorsed by President Biden, one of the few primary endorsements Biden made, along with most of the unions who are usually the most powerful force on the Democratic side of things here. However, Schrader lost his primary to a much more progressive challenger, natural resources attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner of Bend, who got an endorsement from Senator Elizabeth Warren and the local Democratic party activist groups in Clackamas, Linn, Marion, and Deschutes counties and various progressive groups.
McLeod-Skinner will face off against Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, another relatively affluent southern suburb of Portland. She may have some machinery available to her from previous unsuccessful runs for the State House of Representatives in 2016 and 2018. Her amply-capitalized platform issues are "Keep Our Communities Safe," "End Cancel Culture," "Oppose Critical Race Theory: NO CRITICALRACE THEORY," "Champion our Constitutional Rights," "Put America, and Oregon, First," "Parental Choice in Oregon Schools," and "Low Taxes. Balanced Budgets," which suggests to me a basically bog-standard national baseline set of following-the-leaders Republican-side talking points for 2022. (And, I belatedly note, that she is focusing on issues she'd have more influence on were she in Salem rather than Washington, but why should that matter in a campaign?)
No one really knows what's going to happen here because the district is brand-new and covers a lot of purple territory. I'm told that the Cook Report is downgrading the district from "Likely Democratic" to "Leans Democratic" and that may be giving the Democrats just a bit too much credit in a cycle where the national fundamentals are going to favor Republicans.
I say, keep your eye on this race as one of the national bellwethers.
On “A Catastrophe of Ignorance: Why Free Speech Cannot Embrace Vandalism”
Sure, and no locksmith will make you a copy of a key that's been engraved with a DO NOT DUPLICATE instruction.
"
It should be a trivially easy matter for everyone to agree that vandalism and destruction of property, whether public or private, is not an acceptable form of private speech. But I want to drill down on something here:
So I presume and hope that the OP distinguishes between an official entity deciding through lawful, peaceful means to take down a statue of a person deemed no longer worthy of public honors and self-appointed actors using criminal or violent means to remove something that they deem offensive.
I wrote six years ago, expressed here in the context of a decision by a municipality to remove a publicly-maintained monument from a public park, that when a public entity maintains a monument, it is making an endorsement of the subject matter of that monument. Perhaps it's only as weak an endorsement as "Whether we like this thing/person or not, we don't dislike them enough to spend the money to remove it, so it's cheaper to maintain it because, hey, public art." But it's still an endorsement.
And maybe times change sufficiently that the thing or person thus commemorated does become offensive enough, to enough people, that they don't want to honor it anymore. Removal (done lawfully and peacefully) is appropriate under such circumstances.
And the public entities endorsed the Georgia Guidestones in this fashion as well. They agreed to accept the donation of the land and the monuments themselves. Public entities agreed to and did pay for security cameras to be on the site.
I'm moved by the TV interview of the executive of the local trade group, particularly when he spoke of the technical difficulties involved in creating the monument, and how it showcased the talents of the local craftspeople who did it. That by itself is a real loss to the community. What happened here was a crime, both literally and artistically.
With that said, the fact that someone in the past created a monument does not obligate those who have the lawful power to remove the monument to refrain from doing so. Successive generations get their ability to speak, too, and are not bound by the preferences and opinions of the dead.
On “Five Quintessentially American Recordings For Cranking Up on Independence Day”
I'd have spent some time thinking about contributions to this list but I was at the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival all weekend (he bragged). Nothing but deeply American music all weekend long!
One song I would have excluded from consideration would have been "The Fourth of July" by X. Lyrically not what you're looking for here. Get some Tom Petty instead, maybe.
On “Extra! Extra! The Ten Second News Links We’ve Overlooked!”
Phrasing.
Are we still doing that?
I guess not.
On “The Fickle Nature of Supreme Court Rule”
I guess part of my despair is that I have no weapons, arguments, shields, tactics, or even ideas for what to say to unelected, unpersuadable mandarins who justify themselves with the reasoning "Because that's what we felt like doing LOL what are you going to do about it? Nothing."
"
I tell myself not to despair. That the composition of the Court can change in what seems like the blink of an eye. That sometimes Justices can adopt positions that are not expected of them.
I tell myself this is nothing unusual or novel. For most of its history, the Court has served the interests of socially conservative and monied interests. That it's almost always been a trailing check on the progress of politics. Somehow, we've survived.
I tell myself that the arc of history shows both that there are grand cycles of one party overreaching when it has power and the electorate recoiling from them, and then the other party correcting for the mistakes, then overcorrecting for them, and then losing power again, and that this is the natural ebb and flow of democracy over time. So this too shall pass and in the long run, no one has clean hands. I tell myself that the arc of history in America trends towards liberty, towards equality, towards justice. That what we're living through right now is an eddy, a backcurrent, one that will eventually lose power and the course will correct back to its natural and powerful, if sometimes maddeningly slow, path to a better nation.
I tell myself these things and then I look at the accumulated weight of recent experience and I feel despair nevertheless. We've been pushed so far backwards in such a short amount of time!
Justice Kentaji Brown-Jackson took her seat on the Court today. She and her Sisters on the Bench have got a lot of work ahead of them. We in the voting public need to do our part to get them some help, and there's nothing for it but to start cleaning up the mess.
On “New York Times Reports that Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Donald Trump, is detailing what she witnessed during the Capitol attack at the Jan. 6 hearing, including the former president trying to steer his limo to the Capitol”
Everything we've heard from Hutchinson is completely cray-cray. Like, a sack full of rabid meerkats kind of crazy.
On “Supreme Court issues 6-3 ruling on Carson v. Makin”
You and I disagree on many things, but on this, we sing in harmony tighter than the Everly Brothers.
"
Heh. Just like how my interest in Establishment Clause jurisprudence was rekindled when I found out that a six-foot-high marble monument bearing nothing but a copy of the Decalogue, an American eagle and flag, two stars of David, and a Chi-Rho symbol, on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, does not violate the Establishment Clause (Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005)) while an eight-panel display on the walls of the lobby of a Kentucky county courthouse, including the Decalogue in one panel and other historical documents on the others, does violate the Establishment Clause (McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844 (2005)). Note that these two cases were decided on the same day by the same Court.
"
If you didn't believe in slippery slopes before, you have to believe in them now. Blaine Amendments are a dead letter.
Blaine Amendments are prohibitions against state money being used to aid religious institutions that were part of a wave of state-level legislation about a century ago. It's suggested that they were motivated by a decidedly ugly anti-Catholic biogtry. But at the same time, they are pretty clearly consistent with the Establishment Clause. They have been a particular focus of right-wing legal agitation for some time now.
In 2017, the Court decided Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 582 U. S. ___ (the blank means the final pagination hasn't been determined yet). This ruled that Missouri's Blaine Amendment did not stop the state of Missouri from helping a sectarian school purchase a spongy mat for its playground. Then in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U. S. ___ (2020), Montana's Blaine Amendment was found invalid as for particiaption in state-administered scholarships. And now in today's decision, Carson v. Makin has it apply to direct payments of tuition to religious schools.
If the social conservatives can't bring prayer back to public schools (though prayers never really left public schools, they just stopped being required by them, and even then that may be limited to situations where someone dares to challenge a de facto requirement where it exists) they will bring public dollars to the religious schools instead.
Oh, well, the facts in all of these cases are fairly sympathetic ones in which a well-intentioned state is trying to get some money to a similarly well-intentioned religious school, notwithstanding the wall of separation between church and state, because everyone just wants to help out the kids. I must remember to think of the children.
On “Justice for Ashli Babbitt”
This ought to be fantastically obvious. Trump set in motion a chain of events that he knew or should have known would lead to violence. Babbitt died in the violence Trump created. Nancy Pelosi did not create that violence. Mike Pence did not create that violence (debatably, he failed to do what he could to prevent it). Joe Biden did not create that violence. Donald Trump did. He did it for terrible reasons, reasons that lack any claim to justification or excuse.
I hope most Americans can see this, and I fear that a substantial number are blinded by partisan preference or defensiveness that they will not.
On “The January 6th Hearings Are What Democrats Need”
It's probably true that not a lot of people are going to change their minds about much of anything here. It's entirely possible that a lot of people who ought to reconsider what they think or what they're being told to think don't care much about the truth, because they've been told it isn't the truth and what they want the truth to be is more pleasing to their priors. And it's also the case that people may think that inflation or other kinds of forward-looking problems matter more than the truth about a failed... whatever it was back in January of '21.
But there are people who care about the truth. And the future will mark whether we made any effort at all to figure out what was going on. We can hope that maybe one day when partisan fervor has receded or become obsolete (no one cares whether you were a Dick Gephardt Democrat or a Gary Hart Democrat anymore) that what was learned investigating January 6 now will prove useful for those who follow in crafting policies to prevent crises and craft better policies.
The truth matters precisely because history isn't over yet.
On “The Month in Theaters May 2022”
Enjoyed the reviews a lot and of what I've seen, I largely agree with you.
Maybe not directly related to the subject matter, but of great interest to me: the feature picture for the article, a Cinemark multiplex, looked REALLY familiar to me. Including the general shape of the mountains and the color the sky in the background. So I looked up the photographer on Wikimedia Commons. He has a lot of pictures in and around my former haunts in Southern California. So it might actually be the multiplex where I've seen hundreds of movies. (Allowing for the possibility that buildings of this nature are going to be pretty cookie-cutter, of course; mountains are all unique, but in a different sense, they're also all alike.)
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Scoring Systems”
I"m planning on introducing some friends to Illuminati! over the next free weekend I have.
On “The Ideology of Musicianship and the Cultivating Of The American Mind”
A quibble I have with an argument in the article is that our current understanding of psychopathy is that these are people who cannot be taught empathy, but dangerously, psychopaths do learn how to imitate it, and that society dispenses rewards to them when they do so.
One thing that does occur to me as I think this through is that the use of arts to teach empathy (or rather to cultivate it and encourage its expression) may be a way of eliciting a clue as to tendencies towards psychopathy. But I kind of hate to put that sort of thing on arts teachers. It would be interesting to hear from teachers about the spectrum of things they are already required to know and incorporate into their work, and whether this is the sort of thing that could fit into it.
"
The kind of church one goes to matters in this regard. I was raised Catholic and music in a Catholic mass is not particularly inspiring, particularly to a young person. After acquiring some education, I understood some of it to be evocative of medieval ceremonies but that realization made the church feel more remote from me than before.
As an older teen I went to a Southern Baptist service with a band and was absolutely Blown. Away. by the quality of the musicianship. Anyone who doesn't understand how a church can cultivate amazing musical talent ought to see the Aretha Franklin biopic. (Well, you should see it anyway.)
On “Uvalde Police, ISD Police “No Longer Cooperating” With Investigation”
To a degree, yes; "Shut up!" is usually the first thing a lawyer tells a client who looks like they've done something culpable.
Government entities refusing to cooperate with other government entities, particularly within law enforcement, has some substantive differences to private litigants circling the wagons, including that taxpayers have a pretty principled reason to get upset about it no matter who they think the bad guy is, and the near-certainty that at least one of the actors in the conflict (if not more) is behaving in bad faith.
As you point out, it's not entirely clear what "not cooperating" means in practice.
"
Dithering for an hour wasn't in the protocol. Lying about their own blamelessness, hiding behind the honor of their badges afterwards was, though.
If Uvalde becomes the time when the public started to see through it and say so out loud, that will be something of a silver lining to this very dark cloud.
On “Thoughts On Wisdom”
Such wisdom as I've managed to accrete has usually come as the consequence of not just a mistake, but a mistake preceded by arrogance and followed by tangible harm.
Some of what I see described as wisdom here is what a Christian might call "grace" or what anyone might call "forgiveness." And I agree it's profound wisdom, for it is a necessary component of both a functioning society as well as a member of that society. It is this flavor of wisdom that feels in such short supply in the age of social media.
On “Reddit, Accountability, Law Enforcement, and Uvalde”
Yeah that's a comment I like for the truth ringing in it and hate for the truth ringing in it. Yet despite it being a powerful contributing factor, we can count on no one mentioning this the next time there is a movement like BLM that calls attention to the police's mistakes and failures and once again people protesting bad things police do will be called "antifa" or "anarchists" or whatever the new slur will be by the amazing pro-cop PR machine.
On “Mocha-Vodka-Xanax and Learned Mental Helplessness”
I've gotten to know a lot of people who say they have anxiety issues and come very close to someone whose anxiety issues were from time to time really a stumbling block in life. Wound up having to break off my relationship with that otherwise-quite-enjoyable person because of the way the anxiety got handled.
I don't know if claiming anxiety problems is somehow fashionable, or if it's becoming a convenient excuse for some other thing. I now know that the reality of one is not a status symbol, it's a serious stumbling block. I'm so happy for our author to have found a way through it.
On “Wine Tasting Through”
This is a great reminder that wine is also supposed to be FUN.
On “Leaguefest 2022: Save The Date”
This comment is relevant to my interests. What kind of timetable would be involved?
On “About Last Night: Primaries in North Carolina, Pennsylvania & More”
The most interesting result in Oregon was not the Governor's primaries, but the Democratic nomination for the Fifth Congressional District. The district has changed substantially. From 1993 through this year, it encompassed Lake Oswego and other maybe-not-quite-so-well-to-do southern suburbs of Portland, Salem, and a good chunk of the middle of the Coast. Now it extends a little bit further north into the southern stretches of Portland proper, excludes Salem, and goes east over the mountains into the populated portion of Deschutes County (meaning explosively-growing Bend and Redmond). Less than half of the new district's residents lived in the old district.
The 7-term incumbent, moderate Democrat Kurt Schrader, remains a resident of the newly-redrawn district. He was endorsed by President Biden, one of the few primary endorsements Biden made, along with most of the unions who are usually the most powerful force on the Democratic side of things here. However, Schrader lost his primary to a much more progressive challenger, natural resources attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner of Bend, who got an endorsement from Senator Elizabeth Warren and the local Democratic party activist groups in Clackamas, Linn, Marion, and Deschutes counties and various progressive groups.
McLeod-Skinner will face off against Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former mayor of Happy Valley, another relatively affluent southern suburb of Portland. She may have some machinery available to her from previous unsuccessful runs for the State House of Representatives in 2016 and 2018. Her amply-capitalized platform issues are "Keep Our Communities Safe," "End Cancel Culture," "Oppose Critical Race Theory: NO CRITICALRACE THEORY," "Champion our Constitutional Rights," "Put America, and Oregon, First," "Parental Choice in Oregon Schools," and "Low Taxes. Balanced Budgets," which suggests to me a basically bog-standard national baseline set of following-the-leaders Republican-side talking points for 2022. (And, I belatedly note, that she is focusing on issues she'd have more influence on were she in Salem rather than Washington, but why should that matter in a campaign?)
No one really knows what's going to happen here because the district is brand-new and covers a lot of purple territory. I'm told that the Cook Report is downgrading the district from "Likely Democratic" to "Leans Democratic" and that may be giving the Democrats just a bit too much credit in a cycle where the national fundamentals are going to favor Republicans.
I say, keep your eye on this race as one of the national bellwethers.
On “Capacious, Ordered Liberty”
Everyone is a firm believer in the right to privacy when the privacy interest is something they care about, when it's their own privacy at stake.
Do you believe in my privacy interests, now that's a different question.