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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 10, 2015)
OPINION 4A T HE D AILY A STORIAN THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 2015 Only the shadow knows Other Clintonistas emails she had coughed up when pressed, noting: dismissed the allegorical “I want the public to see shadow as “put-a-bunny- STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher my email.” $6+,1*721 ² in-the-pot crazy.” Less true words were Shanks said it was “like LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor Somewhere in Smithsonian never spoken. an ice pick going through storage sits a portrait of Bill my back” when he learned BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager Schmidt’s scoop fol- Clinton with two odd features: He that his portrait was “ex- lowed The Wall Street CARL EARL, Systems Manager Journal revelation that at is standing next to a shadow meant iled to the dark recesses” JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager least 60 companies that in 2009. On a visit to the WR FRQMXUH 0RQLFD /HZLQVN\¶V DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager lobbied the State Depart- museum a year and a half Maureen blue dress, and he is not wearing ago, he heard a docent tell- ment when Hillary was in SAMANTHA MCLAREN, Circulation Manager Dowd charge had funneled more his gold wedding ring. ing a tour group that the than $26 million to the As we have been reminded by Clintons put the kibosh on Clinton Foundation. the painting. a recent wild cascade of stories, Certainly, Hillary wants a lot +H DVNHG .LP 6DMHW QRZ GLUHF- everything about the Clintons is WRU RI WKH 1DWLRQDO 3RUWUDLW *DOOHU\ of control. She has spent a lifetime FRQYROXWHG1RWKLQJLVVLPSOHHYHQ DQG VKH FRQ¿UPHG KLV GDUNHVW IHDUV cleaning up messes sparked by her a celebratory portrait. in an email, saying that they took it overweening desire for control and 1HOVRQ 6KDQNV SLFNHG E\ &OLQ- down because the Clintons disliked her often out-of-control mate. She WRQWRGRKLVSRUWUDLWIRUWKH1DWLRQ- it. But, in response to a query, Sa- always feared that her emails could al Portrait Gallery, revealed to the MHWDGPLWWHGWKDWVKHZDV³UHSHDWLQJ become fodder for critics, and now Philadelphia Daily News that he had unfounded gossip,” according to a they have. Everyone is looking for signs in used a blue dress on a mannequin to spokeswoman, and insisted that the how Hillary approaches 2016 to see evoke the shadow of the Lewinsky painting is merely in rotation. scandal in the portrait. Shortly after the art imbroglio whether she’s learned lessons from I called the 77-year- broke, an email imbro- past trouble. But the minute this sto- aving a boat repair yard at a Port at the mouth of the old artist to ask about his glio broke. The Times’ ry broke, she went back to the bun- Clinton devilish punking. Michael Schmidt re- ker, even though she had known for Columbia River makes sense. That’s why it was part “It’s an extra little kick ported that, as secretary months that the Republicans knew of the Marine Services Center, which the Port Commission going on in the painting,” Inc. can of state, Hillary did not about the account. The usual hatch- adopted as its strategic plan in 2001. That plan was amended he said. “It was a bit hu- tough it out SUHVHUYH KHU RI¿FLDO FRU- ets — Philippe Reines, David Brock, morous, but there was respondence on a gov- Lanny Davis and Sidney Blumenthal in 2010 to accommodate log exports. also a sort of authenticity and even ernment server and ex- — got busy. Suddenly Port management is In the short run, Knight is to it. To do a Pollyanna, The Clintons don’t sparkle with clusively used a private email account. She used honesty and openness. Between his in a hurry to dismantle the boat mortgaging his personal credibility basically meaningless, make stuff neutral server linked lordly appetites and her queenly yard, which was established with on a Port Commission rationale symbolically disappear. a to private painting of somebody that her Chappaqua home, prerogatives, you always feel as if considerable investment. that lacks substance. Knight KDVKDGDSRZHUIXOLQÀX- only turning over cher- there’s something afoot. Everything Edward Stratton’s Monday story needs to remember that the Port’s ence on society is really ry-picked messages in needs to be a secret, from the Rose reported the Port’s reasons for this dysfunction over many years was copping out.” He said that Clinton’s December at the State Department’s Law Firm records that popped up in a White House closet two years after move. They mainly have to do with there before he got here. Many of lack of a wedding band has no ulte- request. Given the paranoid/legalese per- they were subpoenaed to the formu- alleged requests from the Department us simply aren’t inclined to believe ULRU PHDQLQJ QRWLQJ ³, MXVW IRUJRW of Environmental Quality. the commission. Knight knows that the ring.” But Clinton aides weren’t spective that permeates Clintonland, lation of her health care plan. Yet the Clintons always act as buying it. this made sense: It’s hard to request The problem is that Port Executive WKH 3RUW¶V ¿QDQFLDO GRFXPHQWV DUH +H VDLG ZKHQ WKH RPLVVLRQ ¿UVW emails from an account you don’t though it’s bad form when you bring Director Jim Knight’s version of unreliable. made news after the portrait was un- know exists. And your own server up their rule-bending. They want us the commission’s reasoning falls This move to eliminate the board veiled in 2006, Hillary Clinton sent can shield you from subpoenas and WRFRPSDUWPHQWDOL]HMXVWDVWKH\GR apart upon cross examination. That repair facility is akin to the Port him “a lovely little note saying don’t other requests. If you want records to connect the dots that form a pret- interrogation took place last week. &RPPLVVLRQ¶V DERUWLYH WD[ RQ ¿VK ZRUU\DERXWLWWKLVLVMXVWDWHPSHVW from the Clinton server, you have to ty picture and leave the other dots ¿JKWIRUWKHP&OLQWRQ,QFFDQWRXJK alone. Knight was challenged by other Port moving across Port docks. They in a teapot.” If you’re aspiring to be the sec- In a blog post last week, Eugénie it out and even make stuff disappear. tenants: Greg Morrill of Bergerson DUH ERWK DLPHG DW PRYLQJ ¿VK ¿VK Bisulco, a Clinton administration Instead of warning the secretary that ond president in the family, why is it Construction, Kurt Englund of processing and maritime-related staffer who led the search team for she could be violating regulations, so hard to be straight and direct and Englund Marine & Industrial Supply services away from the Port in favor a White House portrait artist, said it her aides fetishized her clintonemail. stand for something? Why can’t you and Andrew Bornstein or Bornstein of cargo and the longshoremen who wasn’t Shanks’ attempt to put in “a com account as a status symbol. MXVWEHXSULJKWDQGVWHDG\DQGJRRG" Given all the mistakes they’ve moral compass” that grated. (The Chelsea took on the pseudonym Di- Seafoods. EHQH¿WIURPWKDW made, why do they keep making Clintons didn’t even know about ane Reynolds. In a nutshell, the Port of Astoria In the long run, it would be stupid that.) Bisulco said it was that the 1HDU PLGQLJKW RQ :HGQHVGD\ them? Why do they somehow nev- is not under an ultimatum to shut of the Port to abandon its boatyard. portrait made Clinton look like “a Hillary tweeted that she had asked er do anything that doesn’t involve down the boatyard. There is a way It made sense as part of the Marine disheveled Ted Koppel.” the State Department to release the shadows? to respond to the DEQ and not break Services Center concept. It will the bank. always make sense. Founded in 1873 By MAUREEN DOWD New York Times News Service W Boat facility should not be dismantled H Port of Astoria’s rationale doesn’t pass the sniff test Race, history, a president, a bridge Get used to warmer, A wet winters By CHARLES M. BLOW New York Times News Service R eady or not, here it comes: 2015 is shaping up to be a VQHDN SHHN DW 3DFL¿F 1RUWKZHVW weather patterns expected to become completely normal as this century moves forward. The weather is turning misty again this week and we undoubtedly still have plenty of storms ahead this year, and long into the future. But this extraordinary winter of sunny days, warm temperatures but still- ample rainfall is being described as quite similar to what we and our children can expect every year by 2050 or so. Most local residents are likely to cheer this news. Astoria and its environs have been singled out as having the worst weather in the PDLQODQG 86 E\ VRPH GH¿QLWLRQV — foggy, windy, wet and capricious. We who live here and love it may ¿QG WKLV MXGJPHQW XQIDLU %XW IHZ RIXVZRXOGREMHFWWRKDYLQJURXWLQH stretches of delightful winter sun. An animation on astrophysicist 1HLO GH*UDVVH 7\VRQ¶V UHFHQW television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey showed many years of global temperature SUHGLFWLRQVLQÀLFNHULQJVXFFHVVLRQ ,W ZDV VWULNLQJ WKDW WKH 3DFL¿F 1RUWKZHVW &RDVW FHQWHUHG KHUH ² basically the geographical zone sometimes called Cascadia — is predicted to be an oasis of moderate weather in a world that will be getting more and more uncomfortable. Lucky us, right? Well, kind of. There was considerable regional news commentary last week about the lack of mountain snowpack and the growing potential for a summer DQG IDOO RI GURXJKW DQG IRUHVW ¿UHV Some of this will have direct impacts here. In particular, lack of Cascade Mountains snow will mean warmer water in salmon-spawning beds — something that will hurt reproduction success — and lower, warmer rivers ZLOOLPSDFWWKHPLJUDWLRQRI¿VKWRDQG from spawning grounds. Three and four years from now, depending on ocean conditions, this is likely to mean IHZHU VDOPRQ IRU ¿VKHUPHQ 7KLV in turn argues for ample funding for GLUHFWHGQHWSHQ¿VKHULHVOLNHWKHRQHV in Youngs Bay and Deep River, Wash.; these salmon that return to Columbia estuary bays and tributaries will be far less impacted by drought upriver. Around here, snowpack in the Coast Range is sometimes a helpful natural reservoir for a while in the spring, but our ambient temperatures and rainfall mean that if we want to store water for use between July and September, we must engineer it ourselves. Though lower Columbia residents have a well-founded suspicion of dams and reservoirs, we wouldn’t be remiss in at least starting to brainstorm possibilities for additional water-storage capacity. Wet weather and cool temperatures that have long tortured local sun lovers are well on their way to becoming high-value assets. In coming decades, population growth could be the biggest local impact we see from discombobulations in the weather. Whether it’s extreme heat in the Southwest or extreme winter FROGLQWKH1RUWKHDVWRXUFRQGLWLRQV are highly enviable in comparison. This reality increasingly is coming to the attention of outsiders. Besides water storage, we must pay more attention to development on shorelines, protecting key resource lands for industry, residential use, habitat and recreation. Growth can very quickly gain momentum, as we can see based on recently disclosed Coast Guard expansion studies and Tongue Point development wishes. We can endeavor to shape our communities’ destiny, or else allow circumstances to take their own course. Our area’s active and engaged citizens will clearly prefer to maintain control of our own life raft in these risky times. s our van in the presidential motorcade reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and began the descent toward the thousands of waiting faces and waving arms of those who had come to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder. Charles The mind Blow imagines the horror of that distant day: the scrum of bodies and the cloud of gas, the coughing and trampling, the screaming and wailing, the batons colliding with bones, the opening of ÀHVKWKHUXQQLQJGRZQRIEORRG In that moment I understood what was necessary in President Barack Obama’s address: to balance celebra- tion and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the ac- tivists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete. (I, along with a small group of oth- HUMRXUQDOLVWVKDGEHHQLQYLWHGE\WKH White House to accompany the presi- dent to Selma and have a discussion ZLWKKLPGXULQJWKHÀLJKWWKHUH About an hour north of where the president spoke was Shelby County, whose suit against the Department of Justice the Supreme Court had used to gut the same Voting Rights Act that Bloody Sunday helped to pass. His speech also came after sever- al shootings of unarmed black men, whose deaths caused national protests and racial soul-searching. It came on the heels of the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Mis- souri, which found pervasive racial bias DQGDQRSSUHVVLYHXVHRI¿QHVSULPDULO\ against African-Americans. ,WFDPHDVD&1125&SROOIRXQG that 4 out of 10 Americans thought race relations during the Obama presidency had gotten worse, while only 15 percent thought they had gotten better. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin President Barack Obama, center, walks as he holds hands with Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was beaten during “Bloody Sunday,” as they and the first family and others including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., left of Obama, walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics. The president had to bend the past around so it pointed toward the future. To a large degree, he accomplished that goal. The speech was emotional and evocative. People cheered. Some cried. And yet there seemed to me some- thing else in the air: a lingering — or gathering — sense of sadness, a frustra- tion born out of perpetual incompletion, an anger engendered by the threat of re- gression, a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay. To truly understand the Bloody 6XQGD\LQÀHFWLRQSRLQW²DQGWKHFLY- il rights movement as a whole — one must appreciate the preceding century. After the Civil War, blacks were incredibly populous in Southern states. They were close to, or exceeded, half the population in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisi- ana and South Carolina. During Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th DQG WK $PHQGPHQWV ZHUH UDWL¿HG abolishing slavery, granting citizenship and equal protection to former slaves and extending the vote to black men. As a result, “some 2,000 African-Americans KHOGSXEOLFRI¿FHIURPWKHORFDOOHYHODOO the way up to the U.S. Senate,” according to the television channel History. This was an assault on the traditional holders of power in the South, who re- sponded aggressively. The structure of Jim Crow began to form. The Ku Klux Klan was born, whose tactics would put the Islamic State group to shame. Then in the early 20th century came WKH¿UVWZDYHRIWKH*UHDW0LJUDWLRQLQ which millions of Southern blacks would GHFDPSIRUWKH1RUWK(DVWDQG:HVW This left a smaller black population in Southern states that had developed and perfected a system to keep those who remained suppressed and separate. Here, the civil rights movement and Bloody Sunday played out. 7KH PRYHPHQW ZDV DERXW MXVWLFH and equality, but in a way it was also about power — the renewed fear of di- minished power, the threat of expanded power, the longing for power denied. 1RZZHPXVWORRNDWWKHKXQGUHG years following the movement to un- GHUVWDQGWKDWDQRWKHULQÀHFWLRQSRLQWLV coming, one that again threatens tradi- tional power: the browning of America. According to the Census Bureau, ³7KH86LVSURMHFWHGWREHFRPHDPD- MRULW\PLQRULW\QDWLRQIRUWKH¿UVWWLPH LQ ´ ZLWK PLQRULWLHV SURMHFWHG WR be 57 percent of the population in 2060. In response, fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics — not always explicitly or violently, but in ways whose effects are similarly racially arrayed. Structural inequities — economic, educational — are becoming more rigid, and systemic biases harder to eradicate. But this time the threat isn’t regional and racially bi- nary but national and multifaceted. 6RZHPXVW¿JKWRXU¿JKWVDQHZ As the president told a crowd in South Carolina Friday, “Selma is not MXVW DERXW FRPPHPRUDWLQJ WKH SDVW´ He continued, “Selma is now.”