More revealing than Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair.

[April 30th, 2008]

Last week while hard at work, Murmurs turned up a MySpace page for Mayor Tom Potter’s wife, Karin Hansen. Funny thing: Hansen was listed as “single.” (Gasp!) Potter and Hansen were in China last week, so we asked Potter spokesman John Doussard for an explanation: “Karin doesn’t do much with her MySpace page,” he said. “She is incredibly active on her Facebook page. And on that page, she’s married.” Granted, “single” is the default setting for new MySpace accounts, so it was probably an oversight on Hansen’s part (as of April 29, the listing remained “single”). As Doussard put it, “If it’s a come-on, it’s the most boring come-on I’ve ever seen in my life.”

One word may have touched off an ugly struggle recently on Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus . In advance of a weeklong arts and activism event called “Semana de la Raza,” students at the community college posted a banner announcing the festivities beginning April 21. But an unidentified person or group graffitied the banner with “tan clan” and then, later, the letters “KKK.” After the banner was cleaned and moved elsewhere, someone then stole it. Mandy Ellertson, a student leadership coordinator at PCC, thinks some of the vandal’s anger stems from the word raza, which means race in Spanish but should be translated as “people” in the context of Semana de la Raza. “I don’t know if people know why it’s offensive to them,” Ellertson says.

Although a controversial ethics law passed last year (see “Ethics Bomb,” WW, Dec. 19, 2007) has prompted rural government officials to resign, teachers got good news last week about how the law applies to them. The new law prohibits public employees from accepting gifts worth more than $50, causing some to worry about the impact on teachers, who often get free tickets when accompanying classes on trips. But last Friday, the state Ethics Commission issued a decision that said if a government agency pays and the trip serves an educational mission, freebies are OK. Ethics director Ron Bersin says it’s unclear whether parents or businesses can buy tickets for teachers.

A Lake Oswego woman who’s been imprisoned in Mexico for nearly two years—despite her pleas of innocence—finally had her case reviewed by a Mexican judge (see “Justicia Deferred,” WW, March 14, 2007). And the review last week wasn’t good for Rebecca Roth, 49. The judge sentenced her to nine years with time served on charges that she operated with “illicitly obtained money” and violated organized-crime laws. The charges stem from Roth’s alleged connection to a Puerto Vallarta-based international Ponzi scheme run by Alyn Waage, a Canadian man now serving time in a U.S. federal prison. Authorities say Waage defrauded 3,000 people of at least $53 million. Roth says she was just one of Waage’s assistants tasked with paying some of his household bills and that she didn’t know about his scheme.

Good God, where is the bottom? Murmurs seemingly runs a variant of this item every six months about the latest dismal numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations for The Oregonian and the rest of its daily brethren across the country. The most recent numbers for the Northwest’s largest newspaper shows paid weekday circulation is down 4.8 percent from last year, to 304,400 copies, in the six-month period ending March 31. The O’s Sunday-edition circulation was down 3.7 percent over the same period. Some dailies saw even bigger drops—but the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was one of a few big-city papers to see modest gains. Who knows? Maybe right now some O scribe is polishing a script for The Wire: PDX.

For more on Lanny Hurwitz getting out of prison.