Maxine Bernstein turns The Oregonian into the Weekly World News

There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is the lack of knowledge on a subject, mainly the result of inexperience or total lack of exposure on a topic. Stupidity is when you continue a pattern of beliefs or behavior after given extensive knowledge on the subject at hand.

When The Oregonian promoted an upcoming expose on sex offenders by offering a sneak preview of the story on Oregon Live, they were kind enough to put enough info out there to help people like me know exactly what the article is about. So a number of legal reformists, including myself, flooded Oregon Live (The Oregonian's website) with the facts.

It certainly got enough attention that Oregon Live posted an article just on the early comments. Again, not bad, and Maxi sounded receptive to the facts.

But in the end, she still went for shock value over facts by writing her poorly researched article "Sex Offenders in Oregon: State Fails to Track Hundreds." This fluff was an ad disguised as a news article. In addition to relying on a "per capita" rate to fool readers into thinking Oregon is a "sex offender haven," she boldly stated Oregon is one of the worst states for complying with the federal clusterfuck that is the Adam Walsh Act. (Of interesting note is the county with the highest per capita rate, Harney Co., has a population of less than 8000 people and 73 registrants in a land mass the size of Vermont).

This turd was followed by five anecdotal examples of failure to register cases that Maxi argues would not have happened if Oregon would adopt the "federal standards."

And yesterday, Maxi follows up with another anecdotal example on reservation land, and claiming, "That's because a loophole has kept his tribal sex offense record out of Oregon's criminal database." She glosses over the fact that the tribe is AWA compliant. So much for that federal guideline!

Maxi Bernstein is beyond the point of mere "ignorance." This kind of reporting is stupid. And Shiitake-worthy.