• We left the 4th district candidate forum sponsored by the City Club of Eugene Oct. 7 hoping that Congressman Peter DeFazio lives a very long time with the “energy and determination for the job” he says he still has. Republican Art Robinson, positively Trumpian in his attack, is running against Pete for the fourth time and promises to continue, lest any moderate R would like to run. Remember that Robinson, recently the chair of Oregon’s Republican party, is backed by Robert Mercer, the Wall Street moneyman who dislikes DeFazio, in part because of our congressman’s support for a transaction tax, a tax that needs to happen. After the forum, Peter told us that the 4th is a swing district and could be at risk in the future. Not this time.
• “Grab them by the pussy,” isn’t locker room talk, it’s the language of sexual assault. As Laura Hanson writes in her powerful viewpoint piece this week, don’t rape. Don’t encourage rape. Don’t vote for a man who thinks of and discusses women as playthings and objects. As our cover image by EW graphic artist Trask Bedortha shows this week, with this election we have gone from Hope to Grope.
• How many minutes of the presidential debates have been devoted to global warming? Not enough.
• There’s something particularly tasty in witnessing the precipitous collapse of the Oregon Ducks football franchise, which this past weekend met a Waterloo at the hands of the rival Washington Huskies in a 70-21 shaming at Autzen Stadium. Pride goeth before the fall, and the puffed-up triumphalism of recent years is now turning inward on our hometown Ducks, whose national success is starting to look like an illusory bubble that mirrors the housing market before the 2008 financial collapse. The Duck program is driven by fear, such as filching senior transfer quarterbacks from smaller colleges to plug the Mariota dike, and swapping in a milquetoast Mark Helfrich after the rotund Chip Kelly dipped out (under allegations of NCAA recruiting violations) for the NFL. The real Ducks are now coming home to roost — an entitled program buttressed by Nike founder Phil Knight, who recently dumped a bunch of money on retrograde Republican campaigns. Oh well, we soggy denizens of the Northwest are ungraceful in victory. We’re better at losing. It’s in our DNA.