How many of us have made New Year's resolutions? How many of us have to make economic survival resolutions. Well, if you're a parent, it would be wise and maybe even a bonding tool to make them with your kids, too.
Although children don't purchase the toothpaste or the laundry detergent, they are not exempt from seeing, hearing and feeling the effects of the current economic crisis for the nation, their neighborhood and stress within their family structure....

Singer Chris Brown's arrest for allegedly beating and biting his girlfriend, pop princess Rihanna, the same night vulgar rapper Lil Wayne was being lauded with four Grammy awards, is a reminder of how thuggish rap culture creates a climate for not only male-on male violence but abuse of Black women as well....

As chief executive of a 25-year-old community media organization, I can empathize with the president, congressional leaders and local lawmakers when it comes to figuring out how to get people back to work—or in my case, how to save jobs. Since 1981, Portland Community Media (PCM) has had a successful contractual relationship with the City of Portland, which provides a significant amount of PCM's budget. . . .

A recent CNN poll seems to confirm what a majority of African Americans and a significant percent of Whites seem to think or at least say. And that's that President Obama will have to be better because he's Black. Translated this means that at Obama's first real or perceived screw up there will be howls that that's what you get when you plop a Black into any position that requires a brain and skill. The undercurrent that courses through this warped race tinged view of why Blacks are expected to fail is that they are plopped in an important spot because of affirmative action or unexpunged White guilt, and they're grossly unqualified for it....

As is so often the case, the holiday season marked a time of transition – from warm weather to cold, old to new, from the year gone by to the one yet to come. This year, however, something seems different. This year, a wind blows that portends changes more profound than perhaps any in recent memory. In my estimation, we stand at a point in time when the threads of history have gathered together to pass through the eye of a single needle....

The big buzz around town about Mayor Sam Adams has many people wondering what the city will do about this. Regardless of what type of investigation that may be launched by the Attorney General, we must remember that Portland asked former Police Chief Derrick Foxworth to step down after having a relationship with an adult woman.   The same standards need to be applied here.

Should Sam Adams resign over his recent admissions that he had an affair with an 18-year-old intern, Beau Breedlove -- and then lied about it? That will depend on you, the voters.  Adams was right to apologize to Portlanders for lying. He was right to apologize to Breedlove whom he says he persuaded to keep the affair secret too. But he also should make another important apology – to Robert Ball, the developer whose own political career was sunk by the accusation that he smeared Adams....

According to history books, gun-wielding European slave traders kidnapped one in five Africans and transported them across the oceans to the Americas. A less visible, but no means less drastic technological tool of suppression, is the compass, a device used worldwide for navigation ... The people of Africa must take note that the Internet is our modern-day compass, and within it resides our own clay of wisdom ...

On March 18, 1968, two weeks before his murder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., "It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis getting part-time income." He said, "A living wage should be the right of all working Americans." What would Dr. King have thought of a $6.55 federal minimum wage in 2009, when the 1968 minimum wage is worth about $10 in today¹s dollars? ...

A recall is in order to remove Mayor Sam Adams. Why? He lied. 
Representation of this kind is unacceptable for our city. 
This is not what the City of Roses needs! ...