City Politics!

[Guest Vitamin X]

I wanted to start this thread a while ago since we enjoy talking about city politics a lot, and hell, we've got quite a fun little scandal going here locally in Portland. I'll just the subtitle of the thread if it strays to other topics.

 

Mayor Scandal Divides Portland

 

Now, for those of you who don't know- and many probably don't outside the Pacific Northwest- our current Mayor, Sam Adams, is the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. During his campaign, he was accused by some nobody who supposedly wanted to run for office that he had sex with an intern at city hall- Adams denied it vehemently and was offended by the accusation, calling it a "homophobic stereotype." In December of last year, he hired a news editor from one of our local papers, The Portland Mercury, to be his new "Sustainability & Planning Advisor"- despite the fact that, although she was tuned in very well to local politics and reporting on city hall, she had no prior experience in urban/regional planning or sustainability issues. A week ago or so, the Mercury's rival paper, The Willamette Week blew the lid off the story and found mounting evidence (har har) that Adams did have sex with 18-year-old Beau Breedlove. Adams went and issued a public apology to the media and insisted that the sexual relationship occurred after Beau turned 18, although now several people in town, including about four local papers and magazines, are calling for his resignation. This is a pretty big setback for the city, since we had all prided ourselves in being all progressive with electing a gay politician to the mayoral position, and we haven't done a recall election or anything of the sort before. Pretty bad for the gay community too.

 

Although there is a fairly decent joke that came out of all this. Portland's the only place in the country where you can legally enjoy a Sam Adams at 18.