Digital bookmobile @ Lancaster Sprawl, 4/14, 12-6 p.m.

Image via WikipediaDigital Bookmobile National Tour event

One of the interesting things about the event below is the realization that it's being funded by the makers of these digital toys, because they have to create some demand to get our little cash-strapped library to spend money on their ephemera instead of honest-to-God books, which endure much better and don't require the user to have spent hundreds of dollars to use. Still, if you like that sort of thing, you might want to know about this:

Hosted by Salem Public Library
12 noon-6 p.m. Wednesday, April 14
at Lancaster Mall, 831 Lancaster Dr. NE

Salem Public Library is hosting an April visit from the Digital Bookmobile, an interactive download experience inside a 74-foot, high-tech tractor-trailer. The Digital Bookmobile offers interactive learning stations where visitors have an opportunity to search the library’s digital media collection, use supported mobile devices, and sample eBooks, audiobooks, and video, all available locally through the Library2Go digital download service, which is available at Salem Public Library and all area libraries in the Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library System.

Readers of all ages are invited to stop by and learn about digital downloads, visit the Salem Public Library resource table, and even sign up for a library card on site.

The Digital Bookmobile is a service of Salem Public Library and is operated by OverDrive, Inc. Information about all aspects of the Library2Go download service is available from the Salem Public Library Information/Reference Desk at 503-588-6052 or www.salemlibrary.org.

Sonja Somerville
Community Relations Coordinator
Salem Public Library

Phone: 503-588-6083
E-mail: ssomerville@cityofsalem.net

Now is the Time for All Good Citizens to Come to the Aid of Their Heritage Center

Image via Wikipedia

The new thing, the Willamette Heritage Center ... i.e., Mission Mill Museum married to the Marion County Historical Society and given an unfortunately colorless name ... needs all our help.

The good folks running the show have a survey about how you use the place and what you think the priorities are. Check it out -- doesn't take long, and the more people from Salem and surroundings who complete it, the better.

Groups like the historical society and the folks who have worked so hard to preserve the mill have done something very, very important. Salem is very, very young in a historical sense -- yet, we are preserving less of our history than ever, thanks in large part to our own American sense of "history is bunk" but also because technology is sweeping things aside. If we're not careful, we're going to have more newspapers from 17th and 18th C. Philadelphia than from 19th and 20th Century Salem.

The public library should be the great archive of all county newspapers and should be working tirelessly to get them all rescued from the destroyers (the people who thought we should microfiche everything and then pulp it) -- but the library budget is imploding. So we're left with the county historical society, so we need to support them and help them thrive. To be ignorant of history is to remain a child forever, as the saying goes. We're going to face some hard, hard times in years to come -- it's important that we have access to the knowledge of how other people faced prior hard times here.

WORD: Don't support any candidates who won't fix the kicker

Subject: Oregon needs to plan for a rainy day now!

Hi,

Due to a still-weak economy and there being little chance of significant financial help from the federal government, Oregon is predicted to face another huge deficit. Because we started this recession without a well-funded Rainy Day Fund, we have almost no savings left to cushion us.

Our next governor must finally end Oregon's roller-coaster budgeting process. In most states, when revenues exceed expenses, the surplus can be saved for a rainy day. However, due to the flawed “kicker" provisions in the state constitution, we can't act prudently and put unanticipated revenue into an “emergency reserve fund.”

We need to do more to pressure politicians in Salem to start getting serious about revenue stability. Vigorous support for a real Rainy Day Fund via kicker reform should be a litmus test for any candidate who wants your support.

Please join me in signing the petition to each and every gubernatorial candidate to endorse and campaign for a strong Rainy Day Fund to help us weather future economic storms.

http://www.taxfirnessoregon.org/RainyDayGov

Thank you!

One very good reason to support Chuck Bennett

They got rid of city hall and gave us a parking lot -- what a perfect image for Salem. Image by Jason McHuff via Flickr

I don't know why anyone wants to be mayor of Salem much for the years to come -- it's like signing up to be Captain of the Willamette Queen -- you've got very little room to maneuver, you're constantly about a foot or two from running aground, you often face strong currents against you, you don't control your costs, and your only real hope is that institutions you don't control will decide, for whatever reason, to make your success happen.

But one thing I know is that, when times are tough, the better the communicator, the better the result. And, right now, official Salem is a terrible communicator. The city would do better with a team of teens from each high school competing to do public information than it has now.

Take the current snoozefest letter, dated March 30, 2010, and attractively headlined in that oh-so-alluring military style SUBJECT: Flood Hazards in the City of Salem. It goes on, for page after crashingly boring page, without ever quite managing to explain why any reader would get past the first paragraph. It should be a case study in "How not to waste public money in public information products." The "overview" doesn't tell you what's in the letter or why you might want to spend precious minutes of your life trying to decipher what it's saying. Rather, the overview is like the "overview" sections of the textbooks you didn't read when you were a kid -- "The City of Salem features the Willamette River and smaller tributaries ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz before finishing with the sizzling news that something called the "Pineapple Express" plus development -- which Salem often approves at a break neck pace -- equals flood risk.

Not a single picture in the whole letter. Not a damn one.

Chuck Bennett was a newspaper guy. And now he's a lobbyist. And some people criticize him for it, but God love a duck, if there's anything Salem needs right now it's someone who actually thinks about how to deliver a message in a way that makes people listen. Because the hard fact is that we. are. in. trouble. Jackson County closing government level trouble. When Oregon faces annual budget deficits -- as we fly over Governor Ted's cliff that he mentioned -- Salem doesn't just get its share of the pounding as a city, we also get a double shot of pain because all economies aimed at government at any level hit us in Salem extra hard.

Anna Peterson appears to be running a campaign to win office as a jobs builder, following in the footsteps of Janet Taylor, following in the footsteps of all the other politicians who campaign on the platform of "getting government out of the way of business so it can ________" (create jobs, cure cancer and psoriasis, clean up the environment, etc.). Got news for you -- being mayor IS a government job, even if we're so cheap that we don't pay for it. And the mayor won't be creating any jobs, no matter who it is, because the revenue won't be there. The only people who can create jobs are those who find a way to make money off making a job, and there's very little that Salem does to discourage that now, if you don't count being a bipolar town with a shrinking middle class as a discouragement to jobs.

One reason we can hope that Chuck wins the booby prize is that, if Peterson actually has any ideas for creating jobs, then she'd be wasted in the mayor's seat. The more likely reason is that all the jobs talk is just code for the SEDCOR and Chamber of Commerce types "Look, I'm not Mike Swaim, I'll do whatever you want and never, never, never suggest that businesses have to help pay the freight around here." But, either way, the bottom line is that neither Bennett nor Peterson are going to have much more control on jobs than does one of the Honorary Captains on the Willamette Queen (the kids who get to spin the wheel around while Capt. C. operates the thrusters that determine where the thing actually goes).

Me, I'd settle for having a good communicator in the mayor's office. And that's Chuck Bennett.

Book of the Year to 3/31: IOU: Why everybody owes everybody and no one can pay

Cover via Amazon

If you want to understand why the City of Salem's budget is collapsing faster than a Minnesota freeway bridge -- and to get a really good, crisp, clear and even witty education in the arcana of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and all the other mumbo jumbo terms that you've heard about -- you can not possibly do better than with John Lanchester's excellent book.

Lanchester does an outstanding job revealing the complete intellectual bankruptcy of economics, which has been taken over by the kind borderline autism that we associate with pimply teens just discovering Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Ayn Rand ... who makes a footnote appearance as a Charlie's Angels devotee in IOU.

This is a great book for the person who is allergic to financial stories, because he keeps bringing it back to how and why people in places like Salem are going to suffer for the sins of the SOBs, and how taking trillions of dollars from the victims of skullduggery and giving it to the crooks who victimized the rest of us in the first place came to be thought necessary, for example.

Publisher Comments:

Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, New Yorker and London Review of Books contributor John Lanchester offers his brilliantly witty, succinct overview of the current financial crisis.

For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete and devastating financial implosion, and how the decisions and actions of a select group of individuals had profound consequences for America, Europe, and the global economy overall. John Lanchester begins with The ATM Moment, that seemingly magical proliferation of cheap credit that led to an explosion of lending, and then deftly outlines the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history — from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages — Lanchester draws perceptive conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism's deepest flaw, and, most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned.

Weaving together firsthand research and superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for the expert and casual reader alike. I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book — it may well provoke anger, amazement, or rueful disbelief — and, as the author clearly reveals, we've only just begun to get ourselves back on track.

Review:

"With clarity and a conversational style often (sometimes deliberately) lacking in the financial industry and its coverage, British journalist Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure) takes readers on a comprehensive global tour of 2008's economic meltdown, focusing on each guilty parties' contributions to-and missed opportunities to halt-the worldwide crisis. Starting with the political buildup and then marching through the field of 'banksters,' regulators, mortgage companies and everyone else in a position to know better, Lanchester illustrates exactly how loans from predatory and incompetent players wound up being sold as triple-A investments, and how a subsequent housing market dip toppled the financial system. By prioritizing the financial sector and tenets of laissez-faire capitalism (to the point that it 'became a kind of secular religion'), those in charge of the markets failed to identify the growing systemic dangers; meanwhile, those responsible to the public acted as if benefits for financial institutions also benefited every economic participant, no matter how small. Laypeople seeking to understand the crisis, and what it means for their own bank account, will find Lanchester's volume an oasis of understanding in a sea of partisan spin and convoluted financial language." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Bravo! Attack on prison gerrymandering that hurts urban areas

http://prisonlaw.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/second-grader-tests-limits-of-rhode-islands-prison-based-gerrymandering-policy/

The tip of an iceberg we'll be seeing a lot more of

Image via Wikipedia

As the carburban development model becomes increasingly harder to duct-tape together, it's going to drive (ho ho!) lots more cuts like this. Cars are the elephant in the living room--the huge expense that no one ever talks about and that consume so much of our wealth that we feed them whole other programs.

To Whom it may Concern:

The City of Salem has to make cuts in funding, due to the bad economic times. They feel the neighborhood and community parks of Salem is the place to make most of the cut backs by laying off FOUR permanent park maintenance operators from an already skeleton crew of workers. We can barely keep our heads above water as it stands. Once these positions are eliminated, the parks will be severely undermanned for maintenance. Their intentions are to use inmates from state corrections and part time summer seasonal help. If the communities of Salem want to keep our parks safe, usable and in good appearance, we won't let this happen. We believe there are other options to find funding for our parks. In past years the city council has found a way to keep our parks department staffed just enough to keep our parks a place the people of Salem and visitors can use and feel safe in and be proud of. If you have concerns for our parks, please pass the word on to everyone you know and make your voice known. There is a city council meeting that the community is invited to on Wednesday, March 31st at 7:00pm. It is at the Wallace Rd Roths Grocery store in the conference room. If you can not make it, please e-mail your city counsel members with any questions and concerns. You may also email me for information or questions.

Thank You
Rick Rue
City of Salem Parks

An enlightening nascent blog from Doug Parrow

Image by kk+ via Flickr

Doug Parrow is one of our unsung Salem advocates for a saner, better transportation system. He has a blog that he describes as "nascent" and he comments on that thusly:

One definition of nascent is "just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential." Certainly the blog is consistent with the first part of that definition. Time will tell whether that also is the case with respect to the second part of the definition.

If a few of the posts are up to the standard he sets here then it's already shown and delivered on some great potential.

Another must-see from Salem Progressive Film Series

Salem Progressive Film Series

Thursday, April 8, 2010, 7 p.m.
Grand Theatre-191 High Street NE, Salem (corner of Court and High St)

Secrecy

This film is about the vast, invisible world of government secrecy. By focusing on classified secrets and the government’s ability to put information out of sight if it would harm national security, this film explores the tensions between our safety as a nation, and our ability to function as a democracy. Secrecy can throw into the dark our system of justice and derail the balance of power between the executive branch and the rest of government. And we have learned that under the veil of classification, even our leaders can give in to dangerous impulses.

Guest Speaker: Steven T. Wax, Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon

Mr. Wax represented Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield, who was accused of bombing the communter train in Spain in 2001. And Mr. Wax represented men held as "enemy combatants' in Guantanamo.

For more information:
www.salemprogressfilms.net or 503-385-1876 or 503-779-5288

Unsolicited Plug 2010-2: 13th St. Nursery

Salem has a wonderful close-to-downtown nursery just a block east of the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store: The 13th St. Nursery at 13th & Wilbur. The nursery is a wonderful place and with the Re-Store right there, you've got yourself a happy Saturday afternoon of treasure hunting.

A number of their plant starts and some gorgeous raku plant pots (for bamboo) are making their way to LOVESalem HQ this year, and they've got a number of really nice garden art things that would be here if we could afford as much beauty as we'd like. Check it out.

UPDATE: The brains at LOVESalem HQ (she provides the brains; my role is to have a strong back to go with the weak mind) picked out some lovely cold-hardy gardenias, star jasmines, and daphnes today in the rain today. Somehow fitting to pick plants for Salem in a nice afternoon rain.