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1.  I wonder if Portland police officers are trained that if they have to shoot they can shoot to disable and not to kill.  Could they not protect themselves by hitting an assailant in the shoulder or legs?

2.  If the Police Bureau followed the advice from the retired officer who called from Nehelem only to fire when the officer saw a weapon this would probably reduce the number of unarmed suspects killed to near zero (unless there are a lot of people running around with toy guns).  There are probably sudies that show whether officers in jurisdictions that adopt this policy are injured more frequently than they are here in Portland.

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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I'd like to make an elementary but true observation that was not made on your program and has not been part of the national discussion in the campaigns: if we sell leases to drill offshore to Exxon Mobil and British Petroleum, even if the oil were to come online tomorrow it will not be sold in Bend, OR, or Chillicothe, OH. It will be sold on the world market to the highest bidder, perhaps China or Europe, where consumers are paying about $10/gal for gas instead of $4.00. I have no idea what percentage of total worldwide oil consumption the offshore leases might represent, but if we arbitrarily assume they might yield 1% of it in ten years and worldwide consumption rises 5% in that period then the price of gas in Bend will still rise and not fall. And, in the meantime, we will have despoiled our coasts and negatively affected the tourist industry in California, Florida, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, etc. Exxon Mobil will reap a windfall and the average citizen will be worse off.

posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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Silcon Valley has Berkeley and Stanford and its economy benefits enormously from them; Philadelphia has Penn and Swarthmore and Haverford and Bryn Mawr; Connecticut has Yale and Wesleyan; Boston has Harvard and MIT and Tufts, the Research Triangle has UNC and NC State. By contrast, Oregon has an underfunded system of struggling universities whose per capita state funding is 46th in the nation, if I remember correctly. One of them is on the verge of collapse. This parlous situation is already having serious negative consequences for our economy. One example: Vestas, one of the leading wind turbine manufacturers in the world, recently decided to build its research facility in Houston instead of Portland because there was not the depth of engineering talent available here. In Germany and most of western Europe, until recently the state paid the *entire cost* of higher education for every student accepted into a university on the theory that the entire nation benefits from having educated citizens, doctors, lawyers, engineers, musicians. Something needs to be done to make sure Oregon enters the 21st century with at least one world class university instead of continuing to limp along with second-rate, underfunded institutions, losing out in the competition for high tech businesses. Focus on the unwillingness of the state legislature to deal with this problem: Kurt Schrader's willingness as co-chair of the Ways and Means Cte. to cut back on higher education appropriations, for example. David Sarasohn of The Orgegonian has written several eloquent columns about this problem. One creative idea to stop the brain drain and attract talent: Ohio's governor Strickland promoted a law to grant in-state tuition at any Ohio state university to all veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and their spouses and dependents, regardless of their state of residency. Why can't Oregon do the same?

posted 4 years, 9 months ago
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