Rain, Rain, Come Our Way. . . .

It may have rained last night; the ground looks damp, and the neighboring roof is shining in the morning sun.

I sure hope it rained. It has been more than 70 days since we’ve had anything like what you’d call rainfall in Portland, Oregon.

Official reports recorded only a “trace” in the entire month of August. In September, a couple of fat drops hit me on the evening of Friday the 14th while I was on my way to see a friend’s production of Yasmina Reza’s “Art”; and a week later I awoke to a damp and shiny neighborhood somewhat like what I can see this morning. Two nights ago, a local news station said we’d had a total of four-hundredths of an inch for the entire month.

Most of the rest of the state of Oregon, and indeed, the Pacific Northwest, has been just as dry. Seattle went 48 days without any rain until mid September.

Normal rainfall in our city at this time of year is a little over an inch in August, a little less than two in September. I can’t say it’s been unpleasant; we’ve had a week or more of 90-plus temperatures and a couple days that exceeded 100, which is not that uncommon for us.

I lead walking tours of downtown Portland for visitors to the city, and tourists from Palm Springs, Phoenix, Texas, and Naples, Florida happily told me they had escaped relentless three-digit temperatures—plus the high humidity that is even more rare than 100 degrees here.

But as a native Oregonian and a resident of Portland the past 21 years, week after week of sunshine and no precipitation (we haven’t even had that many overcast days!) feels very, very strange.

Semi-Happy Birthday, Occupy Wall Street

One year ago today, Occupy Wall Street made its move. Activists hoping to make a statement about corporate greed and multinational economic control took a stand at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, and a nationwide movement was born.

What a year it has been! On the plus side, phrases like “the 1 percent” and “the 99 percent” have entered common parlance, even among candidates for President of the United States. In the wake of Occupy, smaller pro-union protests and citizen reclamation of homes left empty by bank foreclosures have followed.

Legislative attempts to regulate banks and other financial institutions have tried to carry through at the state and federal level what protesters urged last fall. A substantial push is on to pass legislation to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

But for too many Americans sitting in their suburban and Midwestern homes and clicking through the local news with their remotes, the Occupy movement has become a joke … last year’s reality TV hit … a dead cult.

And that’s a pity. Semi-happy birthday, Occupy Wall Street.

This afternoon I joined a Portland, Oregon march and rally in observance of the one-year anniversary of the birth of Occupy Wall Street. We gathered at the east end of the Burnside Bridge and walked with signs and banners to the grounds outside the permanent Occupy Portland office at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Southeast Portland.

It probably wasn’t even a mile. There were barely a hundred of us. But what was interesting to me (along with the reactions of passing motorists) was the overkill of news coverage versus the almost negligible police presence.

The 2012 Election is Over, Folks

The 2012 election has clearly become Obama’s to lose. And I feel confident at this point that he won’t.

As ridiculously tragic as this week’s toppling dominos might have appeared -- from the the promotion of “Muhammad Movie Trailer” by a crazed fundamentalist Christian pastor in Florida, and its excerpting by irresponsible journalists on Egyptian television, to the killing of a U.S. ambassador in Libya by terrorists who coolly manipulated general Muslim outrage over the video -- they will likely solidify the lead the President was already in the process of establishing over his klutz of an opponent.

In an election year, any sort of foreign tension tends to drive voters back to the incumbent; well, they tell themselves, we’d better pull together and stick with the horse in the middle of the stream. No telling what we’d get with the new guy … especially a mere state governor like Romney who has zero international experience.

The news from Benghazi, Cairo, Yemen, and elsewhere over the past four days coincided with reports that the President already was pulling away from the challenger in key battleground states. Polls indicated that Obama has developed a comfortable lead over Romney in the critical swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. See this morning’s report in the Washington Post.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll found the President ahead by 50 percentage points to 43 in Ohio, 49 to 44 in Florida, and the same in Virginia. Such a lead is hardly an insurmountable one, except it was clear from the start that voter uncertainty over these candidates, and the movement of undecideds between them, was going to be smaller than usual.