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WINNERS
1. Sex workers, both legal
and otherwise, won a convincing victory in the first round
of their fight against City Hall when a judge ruled that
the city's proposed ordinance regulating escorts and lingerie
models was unconstitutional.
2. In the name of alleviating jail overcrowding,
10 lucky inmates received a "get out of jail free"
card from the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office last week.
A new jail is on the way, but in the meantime the thought
of new criminals roaming our streets won't hurt the sheriff's
budget.
3. For 94 years, Oregonians were blessed with the
wit, charm and integrity of Maurine Neuberger, the U.S.
senator who passed away Feb. 22 and was memorialized last
week at the Portland Art Institute. Among other crusades,
Neuberger was a foe of tobacco long before it became popular
and once, fighting the billboard lobby on the floor of the
Senate, asked her fellow Americans whether "the view from
the highway will be purple mountains' majesty--or ads for
cigarettes."
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LOSERS
1. Deputies needed, portly child molesters need
not apply: Dismal week for the Washington County Sheriff's
Office. A 270-pound deputy was fired, not for
his inability to catch a rapist hobbled by a leg brace,
but for general incompetence. A former fellow deputy was
convicted of sexually abusing children in his wife's care.
2. The state high-school basketball tournaments
focused attention on a bone-headed proposal by the Oregon
School Activities Association to cut the tournament
fields in half from their current fields of 16 teams. If
Portlanders don't support the tournaments and kids miss
too much school, as the OSAA says, why not just hold the
games at night at regional locations as other states do?
3. It's bad enough that Sunnyside neighbors who
protested a poorly-run homeless feeding program were given
the cold shoulder by the City Council March 1, but thanks
to the Methodist church's PR juggernaut, "Sunnyside" is
the nation's new synonym for NIMBYism.
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