If you’ve been reading the opinion pages of the Oregonian lately you probably have noticed the back and forth going on between the O, Republican House Speaker Karen Minnis and Dem reps Jackie Dingfelder and Mike Shaufler on the failed biofuels bill (HB3481) from the ‘05 session.
On Dec. 26 the O wrote an editorial critical [...]

Which Oregon legislators in the 2005 session supported equality and liberty for Oregonians? Which ones opposed or even promoted limiting civil liberties for the people of this state? The ACLU of Oregon has published its legislative scorecard for the 2005 session and there aren’t too many surprises: House Speaker Karen Minnis and [...]

Did you know that in Oregon you can donate $50 as an individual, $100 married/filing jointly, to a political candidate or organization and claim it as a tax credit, not to be confused with a tax deduction? As a credit, it’s a use it or lose it situation: either the $50 gets collected by [...]

I can already imagine the praise the Oregonian will heap on Senator Gordon Smith for voting against the budget bill today. They’ll write about how he stood up for the working poor, the elderly and young students struggling to make it through college on their government student loans. Yup, the editors at the [...]

December’s SUSA ratings just came out on Governor Kulongoski and the trends aren’t good for him, especially amongst those who identified themselves as “liberal” in the survey. Last month he was at an overall 44% approval rating. He’s down one percent to 43% this month, which is insignificant when taking into account the [...]

Let’s say you’re out for a nice walk one day and you see some people hacking up a tree with a chainsaw. What is your first thought? Maybe it’s something like, “What are they doing! They’ve cut down a big old beautiful tree… how dare they… tsk tsk.” Or would [...]

The GOP doesn’t love “up or down” votes that much. If they did, perhaps they would let the Senate vote on ANWR by itself, rather than forcing it into the must-pass Defense Bill. In my ebox this morning:

It’s all come down to this: the U.S. Senate will vote in the next two [...]

Today’s Oregonian carried an interesting commentary piece by E.J. Dionne in its opinion pages. Dionne asserts that the conservative movement and its ideas on the economy are worn-out just as liberal ideas were in the 70s:
…it took until this moment in 2005 for Republicans themselves to realize (even if many won’t acknowledge it yet) [...]

Yesterday I popped into the warehouse of one of my contractors and happened upon an heated discussion among the warehouse workers. It totally caught me off guard since I had never heard any of them talking about politics before. I was short on time and needed to get some work done, but [...]