Rene Gonzalez has not died

I see Willamette Weed & Mushroom has not one but two "news stories" up today about the ongoing re-election campaign of Portland city commissioner Jo Ann "With the Bullhorn" Hardesty. The weekly's main political assassins sit this one out, but the capos deliver some not-so-subtle messages in classic Weed style.

Their main, yet characteristically unstated, point seems to be that one of Hardesty's main opponents, Rene Gonzalez (pictured), is dead. Between the two stories, they offer a grand total of one dismissive sentence about him. So I guess their main spin is that the race is all between Hardesty and Vadim Mozyrsky now.

But of course, it isn't. It's a three-way race at this point. Unless someone gets a majority in the primary, whoever comes in third is out. The top two run off in November. Given Hardesty's abysmal track record and appalling personal problems, the top two could very well be Mozyrsky and Gonzalez.

Having declared it a two-person race, the youngsters at WW then toil away furiously with their other two points, which are also false:

1. If you don't vote for Hardesty, you're voting to support the police union.

2. Mozyrsky is a right-winger, paid for by rich people and not progressive enough for Portland, not to mention a hot-head.

The second of the two pieces is especially ham-handed. It's one slam after another, with "critics say" sprinkled in here and there.

The 49-year-old Social Security judge wants to bring back dissolved neighborhood watch programs... large emergency homeless shelters, “whether that be temporary shelters in open spaces or garages,”... reservations voiced in corporate boardrooms and neighborhood association meetings... She wears her heart on her sleeve; Mozyrsky’s personality is nearly impossible to gauge in public settings... pandering to wealthy, white Portlanders... has stolen many of the endorsements Hardesty would most like to have... a betrayal of Portlanders who have historically been silenced by the more affluent...

You get the picture. The reporter also rehashes the hissy fit that the "Race Talks" leader threw at Mozyrsky a while back; I wrote about that non-event here. It sounds like the Weed, which enthusiastically backed Hardesty the last time around, is doubling down. But they'll need much better arguments than what they published today to convince anybody to vote for her again.

Let's hope the voters put an end to this in the next few weeks. Vote for Mozyrsky, or better yet, Gonzalez, and let's have a runoff between the two of them in the fall.