The Oregonian’s editorial page has raised its voice on behalf of NorthernStar Energy LLC, developer of the prospective Bradwood Landing liquefied natural gas terminal. The O’s editorial on July 15 was titled “The overheated LNG debate.” It concludes that, “The Bradwood project should be allowed to move ahead.”

I believe the newspaper’s editors should be more magnanimous about this contentious matter. Believing in LNG as much as the editors do, and believing in NorthernStar, there should be an invitation to bring the LNG upriver to the Portland waterfront.

The O’s pitch on behalf of a Houston-based company reminded me of what my father wrote in 1975 when Willamette Week did a five-part series on The Oregonian. Of the O’s editorial page he wrote: It tends to speak for interests that can very well afford to speak for themselves.

In the O’s defense, that reflex tendency to speak for the money has changed considerably over the past few decades. And that’s why the LNG piece caused my head to turn.

If you tire of commercial television’s bite-sized kernels of substance sandwiched between five minutes of commercials, C-SPAN’s weekend programming is refreshing. Its lengthy Sunday interview is a delight. Last Sunday, Brian Lamb’s guest was Brit Hume of Fox News.

Lamb asked Hume where journalism was going. Among other observations, Hume decried the new Web-based self-styled journalist who “hides behind a Web site” in anonymity.

My frustration is people who won’t come out from behind their e-mails for a face-to-face conversation. Perhaps their impediment is introversion, perhaps gutlessness motivates these folks. Some of my most interesting conversations and relationships over the past 20 years have been with people who reside elsewhere on the political spectrum. In some cases I came by their friendship in the course of doing business. In others, I consciously reached out to them after receiving letters critical of the newspaper’s editorial position.

Bill Bishop has written about the clustering of like-minded people in his book The Big Sort. Speaking July 11 to the City Club of Portland, Bishop evoked the value of public conversation that includes a diversity of political opinion. “The more different ideas you bring together, the better the solution,” he said.

When Jesse Jackson popped off at Barack Obama recently, I thought I was looking at Ralph Nader. Jackson’s off-color remarks revealed a certain jealousy and a craving for ego-feed.

In the past three presidential elections, Nader has decried both principal party candidates as being insufficient and in the pocket of big corporations. Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader share a certain jealousy.Jackson’s recent complaint was that Obama was “talking down” to black people.

There is a distinction between the two men’s complaints, but the bedrock of Nader’s and Jackson’s disquiet is that time is passing them by. Shelby Steele writes of that phenomenon in a fascinating article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (“Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama.”).

Writes Steele: “Not looking old so much as a bit lost within the new Obama aura – it is clear that Jesse Jackson has come to a kind of denouement. Some force that once buoyed him up now seems spent.”

In a much larger sense, Steele says the choice we will make in November is more cultural than political. Obama, writes Steele, “promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.”

– S.A.F.