UPDATE: John Branam responds:

This is a strange and unfortunate development. I’m hopeful this city council race will focus on ideas about Portland’s future and will not be about playing silly games. That someone anonymously registered a similar domain name is just weird and cowardly; especially in Portland politics—or, at least how I would like to see Portland politics play out.

Also, as far as the WWeek news story that the site points to, it hardly seems “newsworthy” that I purchased a book by a well-known NPR correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner. The “news” story’s inference was that it was inappropriate for a black man to give out a book about black America. I don’t know why anyone would want to revisit that story.

Probably the most interesting question is who did this—or who would want to do this. The site was registered just weeks after we started up the campaign—and, at a time that only a handful of people knew my domain name—the web designer, some friends and a few local media people.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT 11:44 am: Hmm… this is interesting. Yesterday, while linking to John Branam’s city council campaign website, I inadvertently plugged in john4pdx.com—when his real campaign site is at john4pdx.org.

But the .com site is active—except it redirects to a year-old Willamette Week Murmurs column with an item on Branam.

Stocking-stuffer shopping for your favorite Portland Public Schools administrator? Cross off Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It from your list. Top administrators, including Superintendent Vicki Phillips, already have copies of the Juan Williams book, courtesy of district development director John Branam. The 2006 book by Williams, an NPR senior correspondent and Fox News contributor, takes the controversial position that black Americans are largely responsible for their own failures. Phillips says in an email that “a colleague passed a copy along to me a couple of days ago, but I have not read it yet.”

Who’s behind the phony campaign site? Who knows! The registration is veiled—but the site was procured on October 10, just a few weeks after the real site was purchased, but before that URL was widely publicized. I’m expecting a response from Branam later this afternoon.

In other election news, the Oregonian reported today that County Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey “will almost certainly seek a seat on the Portland City Council.”

“I’m 99.9 percent there,” Rojo de Steffey, 62, said Wednesday. “Somebody could still talk me out of it, but I’m running.”