Hello authors and subscribers to the Onward Oregon Blog,
After two and a half years online, our Blog is going away. We’ll really, it’s morphing. Today we are quietly launching Onward Oregon Dialog. All previous blog posts will still be online, but the Blog is no longer linked from the Onward Oregon site and there will [...]

Steve Novick is a political activist and former environmental lawyer, and a 2008 Democratic candidate for the Senate seat now held by Republican Gordon Smith.
From Wikipedia:

Novick was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1963. His parents, a waitress and a union organizer, moved his family to Cottage Grove, Oregon, in 1973.
Novick was born [...]

At noon on Friday, March 14th, Lane County Commissioner Pete Sorenson and Gary Blackmer, auditor of the City of Portland, will speak to the City Club of Eugene at the Eugene Athletic Club on 10th and Willamette on Voter-Owned Elections. Commissioner Sorenson is the principal author of The Oregon Voter Owned Elections Act, proposed for [...]

Bits and Pieces on EB last month:
A. “Most analysts continue to maintain that the 19 percent increase in oil prices during the past month is not supported by fundamentals and is largely driven by speculators fleeing the sagging equities markets….
B. . . . . crude is now selling for $40 a barrel or 95 cents [...]

Salem will soon have red light cameras installed, Portland has had them for some time. A sense of outrage about the practice is building momentum, to the dismay of bloated bureaucracies that have come to depend on Oregon’s drivers as a cash cow. It might come as a surprise to learn that the timing of [...]

A distant friend and former co-worker who knows I’m in Veterans for Peace sent this and asked me if I could explain it to her. I sure can’t, but it doesn’t surprise me a bit.
Okay. So there’s this big article in the paper and I get a notice from the school . . [...]

When I was but a stripling I thought about money. Probably because I’d read a book by Dostoevsky that talked about how to become wealthy. No sweat if you had wealthy parents; otherwise it took a lot of single-minded, dedicated work. Closed out a lot of attractive options. Seemed a severe limitation on one’s life. [...]

By the end of the writer’s strike, authors had triumphed against media conglomerates and raised awareness of intellectual property. The goal was securing rights for digital media, but the withering vacuum of content also signified the power wielded by the pen.
From thefreelibrary.com:

For Thomas Jefferson, the pen truly was mightier than the sword. From his [...]

The Volt is the unit of electric potential difference or electromotive force, named in honor of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), inventor of the first modern chemical battery.
It’s fitting that the Chevrolet Volt should invoke his name, because this vehicle is a breakthrough design that will redefine the concept of electric transportation. The low [...]

I have become involved with a political issue. The issue has nothing whatever to do with partisan politics. It has to do with how elections are financed, whether by wealthy individuals, special interest groups or otherwise. I see a more than superficial attraction in public campaing financing. I intend to speak of it over the [...]