Portland bloggers are buzzing about the mural war that's raging down by the east side of the Morrison Bridge. It seems a business owner there is trying to have some artists put up a mural on his building, but they don't have a permit. So the city keeps painting over their work, and now the artists are painting slogans over the city's coverup. Nyah nyah.

Naturally, there's a lot of rhetoric flying around this dispute. Freedom of expression, property rights, government regulation of commercial blight -- it's all there. In this kind of setting, opinions are like intestinal tracts -- everybody's got one -- but I can't resist chiming in.

All the parties in this picture are wrong in one way or another. The artists, first and foremost, are all wet. They're whining that the city covered up their art, but the city has every right to do just that if they put the art up illegally. For example, if they were painting on property without the owner's permission, including public property, the city would be completely justified in covering it up. The right to make art is far from absolute.

Here, of course, the property owner has given consent to the art work, but even that doesn't immunize it from regulation and removal. For example, just because Clear Channel has enough dough to convince some building's owner to turn her facade into an advertisement doesn't mean that the neighbors and passersby should have to look at it. The creeps from Wenatchee who started slapping up Las Vegas-style animated billboards around town back in '99 are a perfect example of the obnoxious, invasive commercialism that government has the right to restrict. (I had to laugh with guilty pleasure when one angry neighbor in the Sullivan's Gulch 'hood went out in the middle of the night on Fourth of July and literally shot the lights out on one of those animated boards with a shotgun. And more civil neighbors made enough of a stink that that one eventually came down. Good for them.)

The owner and artists down by the Morrison say that there ought to be a distinction made between commercial murals and noncommercial (or "artistic") murals, but there are a couple of problems with that. First of all, the line is hard to draw. How about a 10-story-high (no pun intended) depiction of Rasheed Wallace driving to the hoop (or more characteristically, lazily jocking up an errant 3-point shot)? Artistic homage to an athlete in motion? Or just an ad for the Trail Blazers, a commercial operation? And do we really want the likes of Mayor Katz, Commissioner Leonard, or the minions down in Planning Bureau Shangri-La making that kind of call?

There are also legal problems. It's been nearly three decades since the U.S. Supreme Court began foolishly going to the mat for the right to "commercial speech," and now that brand of "expression" enjoys well established constitutional protection. In the landmark case in the mid-'70s, the Court ruled that it was illegal for states to prohibit pharmacists from advertising prescription drug prices. That decision opened the door for a broad commercialization of many facets of American life. "Side effects are similar to sugar pill" -- you can thank the Supreme Court for your having to hear that one over and over as you try to watch something decent on television.

Here in Oregon, freedom of expression is even more absolute, all the way down to 18-year-olds dancing nude in front of their grandfathers' contemporaries in a bar. (No perverted Google search bait intended.) The Oregon Constitution, as interpreted by our State Supreme Court, is way out there on freedom of speech. So the City of Portland refuses to make distinctions between art and commerce, because it knows that if it did, the billboard weasels would sue the city's butt halfway to Madison Avenue and back, as they have done successfully in the past.

The ironic part is, I'm sure Justices Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and perhaps others would like to pare back the "commercial speech" doctrine, which came in with a lot of other suspect First Amendment law (like the campaign finance morass) back in the '70s. I'll bet that some day, a municipality will get away with making this very distinction, but it sure won't be the City of Portland. The Oregon courts would get in the way.

So the artists and owner are wrong, and the Supreme Court is wrong, and the city may have its heart in the right place but can't do the right thing.

But do you know who's really wrong?

The Oregonian, for publishing a big color picture glamorizing the guy who was painting his words of wisdom over the city's coverup. Dangling at the end of a rope off the roof of the building, no less. All over the state, teenagers are looking at that picture today and saying, "Cool." The fact that the property owner gave permission in the case in point will be utterly lost on them. And thus a new round of obnoxious graffiti taggers is born.

Reprinting the guy's threats to go on an illegal tagging spree if he doesn't get his way was also a lame excuse for journalism. What lousy judgment on the part of the editors.