January 24, 2025
Some days will pass and there's no reference in any of the usual public sources about the Sam Adams - that is, mayor of Portland - scandal. And it seems to be going away.
But it's not going away yet. Not, at least, as long as someone can make some coin out of it . . .
You'll recall that when the Hearst Corporation owners of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said about a month ago that they will be ending their publication of the P-I print edition (which end date is about a month from now), there was some indication of maybe continuing in some way as an electronic publication.
That possibility is still sort of out there, but it seems to be fading. A blogger at the Stranger's Slog, bringing some of this up to date, throws in a fascinating quote from an e-mail from a P-I staffer:
Can I also go off on a tangent and say how bizarre it is for Hearst to ask us for our groundbreaking, lean, out of the box ideas for a profitable online venture? (1) If they were going to ask, shouldn't they have asked before they let us know via KING 5 that we were probably all about to be laid off? (2) Do they seriously not have a plan already in place? That seems like terrible business planning, (3) Why are they asking us these questions instead of paying someone who might actually know something about how to make money on the Internet? Aren't reporters notoriously bad when it comes to issues like this, because we have always prided ourselves on having nothing to do with how ads are sold? But, (4) Didn't the two reporters who did know something about how to make money on the Internet, John Cook and Todd Bishop, come to them with a groundbreaking, lean, out of the box idea not so long ago and get rejected?
While in Washington and Oregon there's a tone among political people that the federal stimulus money, welcome as it may be, shouldn't be run through too quickly or without thought, the attitude among many Idaho political people suggests that a really foul pile of landfill deposits is about to emptied on the state.
Idaho's portion is thought to be somewhere around a billion dollars (ad about 17,000 jobs, a few more in the 1st district than in the 2nd) - substantial money, of course. But the lather could stand some easing off. The Idaho Statesman's Kevin Richert put the the money in some perspective in a blog post: "All state agencies [put together] received just over $1.9 billion from the feds. And unlike the one-time stimulus money, this represents year-to-year federal spending, outside the state's general fund." And remember that local governments get plenty of federal money on top of that.
Richert concludes: "Idaho has had a federal funding habit for a long, long time."
WASHINGTON/OREGON: Estimated job creation out of the stimulus in Washington is estimated at 75,000, and in Oregon at 40,000.