How to rescue portage on ppc:
Learned by experience:

1.  Don't mess with portage-rescue in the portage tree
2.  Get the new build tarball from sunsite
3.  Unpack it in an empty directory
4.  cp -Rd usr/lib/portage and usr/lib/python* from this to your filesystem
5.  Disable sandboxing if necessary
6.  Emerge portage

Note: emerging portage should pull in python-fchksum and python first. 
 If emerge --pretend doesn't list them, emerge manually first.

Now I wonder what broke it all in the first place...

David