Patrick Sheehan: How low can you go?

T.A. Barnhart

Check out this picture. I don’t know the location. It’s along a street somewhere, but not a very nice street. You wouldn’t want to walk along this street, and certainly not this side of the street.

Now look at this picture:

This is “shemiafagan.org” and I got the picture from this website; it’s the background image. The website is hosted and run by Patrick Sheehan, former state representative who got beat by Shemia Fagan in November. The site is being used to attack Fagan, who has been in office less than three months. And until contacted by the Oregonian, Sheehan was hiding his involvement with the site. The site’s entries are listed as “Posted by EastPDX”, and that entity goes unidentified.

Just to be crystal clear: this site is meant to deceive people. The site title that appears in your brower window is as shown above. This is meant to make people think that this site represents Rep Fagan. This isn’t a site dedicated to truth as honesty, as Sheehan claims. It’s an attack site.

Sheehan, who is proud of his association with Americans for Prosperity – the Koch Brothers’ anti-democracy campaign – could have picked any number of images for the website. why’d he pick this picture?

No doubt you remember this.

February 28th: a 5-yr-old girl hit by a car crossing a street by her home in SE Portland. No sidewalks, like so many parts of SE Portland. The little girl, unfortunately, is not the first person to die on these underdeveloped and poorly maintained streets; she won’t be the last.

The street where the little girl was killed is in Fagan’s district, but the street looks nothing like Sheehan’s image. Here’s the actual location, as shown on Google Street View:

It’s not great, but it’s nothing like Sheehan’s picture. In fact, the girl wasn’t struck because she wasn’t on the sidewalk. She was struck because while one car stopped to let her and her brother cross the street, another did not. Had there been sidewalks and crossings, especially with signals or signage, then this accident probably wouldn’t have happened. But it did not happen because the shoulder was narrow, full of potholes and trash. And it did not happen because Shemia Fagan replaced Patrick Sheehan in the Legislature.

But that’s what Sheehan wants people to think.

He wants people to think Shemia Fagan is complicit in the girl’s death.

Patrick Sheehan wants voters in HD51 to associate Rep Fagan with streets that are so badly damaged that little girls die.

Patrick Sheehan wants the blood of a five-year-old girl on the hands of Shemia Fagan, herself the mother of an infant boy.

We have reached a new low in Oregon politics, and his name is Patrick Sheehan.

By T.A. Barnhart March 29, 2013