Your shelter from the immigrant-bashing storm.

[April 12th, 2006] The City of Portland has paid out $30,000 to settle a disgruntled police worker's claim. No, not that one. This settlement reached last month goes to former Portland Police crime analyst Joe Midgett , who got $30,000 from the city to resolve his claim that he was unfairly dismissed in January 2005 (see "Feeling MS-cast," WW, May 4, 2005). Midgett, who has multiple sclerosis, says he could have performed his job using a specially designed computer. But he'll take the money over returning to work, which he says would be like "walking into a lion's den after personally pissing off all the lions."

The cash-strapped Portland Trail Blazers must have found $1,000 digging through their couch cushions. Campaign fundraising reports filed this week by Multnomah County Chair contender Ted Wheeler show him collecting $1,000 from the NBA team. Perhaps it's the Blazers' attempt to repay his opponent, Chair Diane Linn, who repeatedly butchered Nate McMillan's name when she introduced the then-new coach at a press conference last summer.

Yes, there are big problems with publicly financed elections. But consider this: about half the cash raised by its two biggest critics, City Council candidate Ginny Burdick and the First Things First Committee, comes from two sources: monopoly utilities and the large downtown businesses that control the Portland Business Alliance. Take Comcast, which has a local cable TV monopoly, as but one example of shared donors. Comcast is Burdick's biggest donor at $10,000. And it also gave $5,000 each to two committees that gave most of the money they raised to First Things First , which failed in its recent attempt to repeal public financing. One last factoid: the Portland Business Alliance on Tuesday became the first group to endorse Burdick, who is running against Commissioner Erik Sten.

It's hurry up and wait, at least a little bit longer, for environmental activist and accused arsonist Tre Arrow . Both the Canadian government and Arrow's legal counsel agreed to extend the April 4 deadline for the Canadian justice minister to rule on Arrow's extradition back to Oregon. The new deadline is April 24. If the minister decides to extradite, Arrow can seek a judicial review. If he loses that review by the B.C. Couts of Appeals, he can then appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. Arrow said recently that he will likely use all his legal options, "rather than turn myself over to the wolves down there."

Perfect shit-storm? The Wall Street Journal's weekend edition included Clatsop County DA Josh Marquis' scathing 1,400-word review of A Death in Belmont, the new book by Sebastian Junger of The Perfect Storm fame. "It would take a book in itself to address all the gaps and tangled thinking [in the book]," Marquis writes about Junger's re-examination of a murder in the author's hometown (see Marquis' review at http://joshmarquis.blogspot.com/). The oft-quoted Oregon prosecutor, who has written widely about "wrongful convictions," says he will be in the audience when Junger reads at Powell's May 4.

^WEB-ONLY MURMURS:

The son of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears to have done well in his interviews last month at The Oregonian (see Murmurs, WW, March 8, 2006). The Providence Phoenix in Rhode Island reports that 25-year-old Arthur Gregg Sulzberger will head west to the O after wrapping up a nearly two-year reporting stint at the Providence Journal on April 21. Soon-to-be new colleagues in Portland can rest easy about Sulzberger toting any baggage of entitlement. Tim Schick, administrator of the Providence Newspaper Guild, calls Sulzberger "a good reporter" who quickly eased reporters' concerns there that he'd have an attitude. "He was just one of the guys," Schick told the Phoenix, "looking to do a good job."