Ridenbaugh Press

Political races are decided in part by the nature of the candidate, in part by the nature of the campaign - but more, usually, by the nature of the place where the campaign is run. Ordinarily, and especially in recent years, places tend to vote R or D, red or blue, up and down the ballot, with ever fewer exceptions. Exceptions remain, but they are fewer now than they once were.

That’s key to the recent analysis behind the political prospects of Oregon state Representative Dennis Richardson, R-Central Point.

Richardson has unleashed several controversial comments of late, notably one which compared passage of the Oregon domestic partnership and gay anti-discrimination measures to the massacre at Virginia Tech. (He later said he “didn’t intend” to make that linkage.) The discussion arose: How might Richardson be defeated in 2008?

The response from some southern Oregon observers was, won’t be easy. The core of the reason being that Richardson’s district is very conservative and very Republican. John Doty, who has run for the legislature in that region, noted, “The district he represents (Northwest Jackson county and a sliver of Josephine… with Central Point being the largest city (along with the towns of Rogue River and Gold Hill) is solidly red - so much so that getting an opponent to step forward at all is like pulling teeth for the county dems.”

Always a point to consider.

Bill Sali

Two strains have been running in the first few months of Idaho Representative Bill Sali’s tenure in Congress. On one hand, to a degree, he has positioned himself as simply another member of the conservative Republican Idaho delegation, alongside Senators Larry Craig and Mike Crapo and House member Mike Simpson. He’s had regular lunches with Simpson, patching up a contentious relationship from years past, and he’s had his place in statements “from the delegation.”

He hasn’t, yet, done much that seems likely to hurt him among the operating majority of 1st district voters, and there haven’t been any wild explosions from afar (that we’ve seen reported).

But there is a growing body of votes marking him as different from the other three, and it’s starting to become noticed. The national satiric web site Jesus’ General posted a sort of open latter to Sali as one “of only seven to oppose helping torture victims, one of twenty who is willing to defund science, and one of a very few who supports enhancing our oceans with chemicals and our leisure time with cockfighting and dogfighting.”

Yes, these have been documented, in part due to the watchfulness of the Mountain Goat Report blog, which has been tracking his votes. Its most recent post concerns the Torture Victims Relief Act of 2007, which passed the House 418-7, Sali being among the minority.

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Port of Seattle

Not something we’ve paid great attention to up to now, but maybe should: A range of issues at the Port of Seattle (maybe other ports, too) that seem to be accelerating.

There’s a good quick overview, with links to the Seattle Times and elsewhere, in the Slog. The immediate trigger has to do with a big severance package where none seemed to be indicated, but other issues bob up nearby. We’ll be back in this territory again, no doubt.

Maybe the fact that Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich spent more time in Oregon in 2004 than any other presidential candidate led to the inquiry at the Oregonian. Which was: Why no news coverage of Kucinich’ introduction of articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney? (At least, until after a bunch of readers inquired.)

The answer is, basically, that national wire services and other news sources had little if anything to say about it: “No wire service purchased by The Oregonian filed a story on Kucinich filing the articles of impeachment. Not one wrote an article about it, or budgeted it.” The editor’s blog item is worth a scan about how these things work.

The high cost of growth is essayed in a new post at the Boise Guardian, by way of pointing out that Meridian residents will choose, on May 15, whether to approve a new school bond.

Write Mike Hawk points out that the district is

asking us to pony up a $30 million dollar bond to build four new schools, purchase twenty school buses and other items essential to the education of the children.

New schools will be built right in the middle of new subdivisions—full of kids— and older schools are cast to the back of the line for funds. A little known fact is that Lake Hazel Elementary is still on septic and the system has failed in the past two years. Past bonds didn’t fix the problem—that money went to growth.

Meridian’s City Council has taken initial steps to charge higher impact fees for roads that facilitate growth. Schools need the same authority. We should not be forced to subsidize the development community. We can take little comfort knowing the Zone 2 representative is a real estate agent.

The growth is real enough. The Meridian district’s web page says “Once again this year, the district has experienced unprecedented growth in student enrollment, with more than 1,700 new students enrolling at the start of this school year. Since November, enrollment has increased by an additional 400 students.”

Comments on the bond range across varied ground, from residents saying they haven’t been notified of the proposal (parents and school personnel, of course, have been) to the ongoing cost that Meridian’s wild, unrestrained growth has engendered.

Another commenter: “Voting for the last school bond was so much fun we can continue to do it year after year. M3, the behemoth developer our of Arizona, that Eagle is wooing to build in the foothills, will provide land for FOUR–yes 4–schools that they’ll expect Meridian School District to build, and Dry Creek Ranch has proposed TWO elementaries, and one combined Middle & High School. Again, they’ll provide the land, but taxpayers must pay for the buildings. One guess as to who gets to pay for it.”

There was a moment, early in the debate yesterday on the children’s insurance fund/cigarette tax legislation (House Bill 2201), of startling eloquence harkening back to a famous speech of old. It came when Representative Ron Maurer, R-Grants Pass, warned that “we should not place our children’s health on the altar of a nicotine addiction.” It echoed the brilliant 1896 speech of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Bryan, of course, lost that election, and the Oregon Republicans who stood (and walked) with Maurer on the health/cigarette bill are likely to lose, in the larger picture, as well. Bryan’s wilver issue eventually fell apart; the Oregon Republicans’ stance on the bill could do them some damage as well.

The bill essentially does two things. It creates a program and fund aimed at greatly expanding health insurance coverage for now-uninsured children in the state; the bill has been haggled over for months and has been significantly amended through that time, but not enough to draw substantial Republican support. Its backing has been almost entirely Democratic (and it is a primary project of Democratic Governor Ted Kulongowski). Because it involves an increase on cigarette taxes (raising the level roughly to that in neighboring Washington), it needs a 60% favorable vote in the Oregon House. To get it, five Republican votes are needed, and that’s more than it could get.

The House floor debate Thursday on the bill has been described as “the most wild day ever seen on the House floor,” which (after reviewing the couple of hours of activity there on the bill) is exaggeration.

The unusual activity consisted mostly of a series of procedural challenges to House Speaker Jeff Merkley (who remained tangled up in them for some time; you could only imagine how the more experienced Washington Speaker Frank Chopp would have sliced through the knots with a swift axe). The other element was the walkout, at one point, of just about all of the House members, leaving the chamber, for a few minutes, without a quorum. They included former Speaker Karen Minnis, R-Wood Village, who must have forgotten her words from June 2004, when Democrats failed to show up for a special session she had sought: “I can respect a worthy adversary if they choose to disagree with my position and vote against me. I cannot however, respect those who use their absence from the body to which they have been elected as a strategy to obstruct a vote which could result in the passage of something with which they disagree. It is a cynical rationalization, a dereliction of duty and an insult to the voters of this great state.”

But the fact that all this occurred at all is striking, since logically it should not have. These sort of activities, the guerilla warfare of legislating, is ordinarily a last resort when hopelessly losing, or else when a majority is almost violently beating down on the minority. Neither was true in this case. The issue at hand was on the floor for an ordinary vote, and the debate was proceeding in ordinary fashion; until the Republican technical questions (which did not relate to any ability to debate or vote properly) the floor status was normal. More striking was this: The Republicans essentially were guaranteed to win the vote, which in the end they did.

We can only suppose here that they did what they did because it was the winning that constituted the problem.

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We have a hard time absorbing the logic against the current plan for Oregon House Bill 3540 - the bill that would amend the land use initiative Measure 37.

There is always an understandable argument against legislative amendment of an initiative: The people have spoken; how dare legislators overturn their will? We have some sympathy for that view, but only up to a point. Legally, laws are laws whether passed by the legislature or by initiative, and either can be amended - changed and hopefully improved - as the years go by. It happens all the time. And there’s an especially good case for amendment of an initiative. Voters acting on ballot measures don’t have the opportunity, as legislators do, to fine tune the language and add language clarifying intent. More cleanup work is apt to be needed where gray areas exist, and Measure 37 is absolutely packed with gray areas.

The measure, as used so far, has resulted in thousands of claims by land owners to develop massive residential areas, shopping centers and even casinos on farm and timber land. Many of the proposals may never be pursued, and many others may prove impractical, but at the moment a lot of Oregonians may have their breath taken away by what they’ve unleashed.

Did the voters, who passed Measure 37 in 2004 by a big margin, intend all this, or were they simply expressing frustration at a land use governing system that had become too rigid, absolute and sometimes remote from human and societal needs and concerns? The voters never got a chance to say, then. Polling since has suggested that a majority now would repeal 37 but, of course, polls aren’t elections.

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Amajor dump of significant Washington Supreme Court decisions today, including a decision sure to get lots of political attention; and another we think worthy of more consideration and thought.

The flashy ruling came in the oddly-named San Juan County v. No New Gas Tax, that radio political commentary is not a “campaign contribution” under the state Fair Campaign Practices Act.

We hold that the radio broadcasts at issue fall within the statutory media exemption (RCW 42.17.020(15)(b)(iv)) because they aired during the content portion of a regularly scheduled radio program, for which the broadcaster does not normally require payment, on a radio station that is not controlled by a candidate or political committee. Because the media exemption applies, the radio broadcastsare not a campaign “contribution” within the meaning of RCW 42.17.020(15)(a). Accordingly, we reverse the trial court’s CR 12(b)(6) ruling, which was based on the trial court’s incorrect determination that the FCPA required reporting of the radio broadcasts as campaign contributions and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

That may be the result that had to be: To draw the line anywhere other than between paid and unpaid air time would amount to opening an almost impossibly unclear boundary between contribution and commentary. (And if talk radio can be a contribution, why not blog entries? And if so, which?) There’s messy territory here, when - as happened in this case, where a couple of Seattle conservative talkers basically spearheaded the (failed) campaign against the 2005 gas tax increase; putting their activities, which stopped just short of overt political organizing, in the case territory as editorials and news reports seems not quite right. But it will have to do.

The more fascinating read, however, was in Washington v. Timothy Jorden, which centered on a law officer’s viewing of a motel registry.

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In a more normal cycle, Robert Vasquez wouldn’t have even entered the race for U.S. Senate this early. As it is, he’s not only been in but now, also, out.

He was quoted as saying: “We have been unable to meet the funding goals, which are required to run a viable campaign. I cannot in good conscience continue to raise funds, without the viable chance to run a winning campaign.”

Okay. (Though his web site doesn’t yet make reference to the withdrawal.)

We’ll note here too the flurry in the last couple of days about Boise City Council member Alan Shealey, a Republican, making reference to entering the race. He may be well advised to consider the hurdles much as Vasquez has.

Meantime, incumbent Republican Larry Craig will let everyone know his plans in due course.

In the last few months we’ve seen a spike in comment spam, and finally hit a point where manual management of it was becoming a pain. So we tweaked the system a bit and yesterday added a new spam-killer to the architecture.

It appears to be working correctly, killing out the junk while letting through the genuine stuff. But let us know if you try commenting and nothing shows up. The spam-killer does not seem especially over-eager, but it may need some adjustment as time goes on so that it doesn’t harvest the good stuff along with the bad. (You can mail on this, or whatever, to stapilus[at]ridenbaugh.com.)

Norm Semanko

Toward the middle of today’s guest opinion in the Idaho Statesman by Norm Semanko, who leads the Idaho Water Users Association, was this bit of deliberate non-provocation:

Idaho’s Prior Appropriation Doctrine, embraced in its constitution and statutes, has worked well for Idaho for over 100 years. Augmented by additional water supplies including storage reservoirs, it has provided certainty and stability during times of shortage for farmers, cities and businesses alike.

The governor’s water summit was not a referendum on whether to change Idaho’s longstanding set of water laws. There will be no constitutional convention or other revamping of Idaho’s water laws.

The guest opinion was a statement of support for Governor Butch Otter’s recent water summit at Burley, which did not result in any immediate resolutions but did, as Semanko notes, have the virtue of bringing many of the players face to face. The fact that such a meeting might have real usefulness (and why followup meetings probably would be a good idea) is testament to Idaho’s gradually growing difficulties with effectively managing its water supply.

The summit wasn’t, as Semanko says, “a referendum on whether to change Idaho’s longstanding set of water laws.” But left unsaid was this question: Should that be considered? Should, for example, the prior appropriation doctrine (first in time, first in right) be tossed in favor of some other principle?

That would mean thinking outside of long-standing tradition. But some of the emerging water issues are non-traditional, too. Some large-scale careful consideration might be in order.

Those in the waiting period between the Defazio and Novick announcements and whatever comes next, might check out the thoughtful long take in today’s Eugene Register Guard on Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith - his political stances and his political prospects. Much time has been devoted to the issue of who will run against Smith; probably less has been to Smith himself. This piece is a good overview, with useful ideas and commentary strewn throughout.

Said not because (disclosure here) your scribe was among the people quoted therein.

Rebuffed for a decade or so by residents determinedly opposed, Wal-Mart has finally made its way into Twin Falls, winning a key city council vote on Monday. It will be Idaho store 22.

About a couple of dozen residents, mainly from the North Pointe Ranch and Los Lagos subdivisions, still were there in opposition. Said one: “You have about worn me down. We hope your conscience will let you vote for what Wal-Mart wants because after all you need to respect the integrity of neighbors and the lovely homes that are there.”

The Northwest’s newsrooms, taken wholly, are fitfully represented in the blogosphere, but the editorial pages do seem to be moving a bit ahead.

The latest to run this route is Spokane Spokesman Review, which this month started the Matter of Opinion blog fed by members of the editorial page staff (which can include the paper’s editor and publisher). Two of them additionally have blogs of their own (D.F. Oliveria’s Huckleberries Online being a very regular stop for us).

Neither the Seattle Times nor Post Intelligencer, both of which run a number of blogs (including a good political blog by each), seems to have an editorial page blog, although the Tacoma News Tribune has one. And there’s an editor’s blog at the Yakima Herald-Republic.

The Portland Oregonian has had one too for some time now. The Salem Statesman Journal has an editor’s blog, as does the Medford Mail Tribune, but the Eugene Register Guard doesn’t.

We found interesting that the first blog (that we know of) emanating from the Boise Idaho Statesman was by the paper’s editorial page editor, Kevin Richert. (It too is a frequent stop.) Not many others so far in Idaho, though. Opinion pieces often do show up on the Idaho State Journal politics blog. There are some preliminary blogging efforts at the revamped Lewiston Tribune web site. The only public blog at the Idaho Falls Post Register has to do with its new press.

Our guess is that a couple of years from now, there will be more.

This has been going on for some time, but we’d not seen the web site before today: Oregon 150, the planning group for the 150’s anniversary (the sesquicentennial) of statehood. The group is already highly active; its board next meets on May 9 in Portland.

That anniversary is not for a couple of years yet, in 2009. But these large year-long activities take a while to plan, as the centennial planners in Idaho (1990) or Washington (1989) could tell you. And this one looks as if it has a broad range of activities in store.

It’s in early stages, as yet. (A blog, for example, is promised but not yet developed.) But the early postings are promising.

Those critics of the legislature in Idaho, which adjourned late last month, who blasted it as do-nothing, missed a point: A legislature is there to make decisions, not necessarily to pass scads of bills. Its decisions on passing or rejecting proposals may be variously right or wrong, but turndowns aren’t necessarily bad. It depends on what they are, and where you sit.

A legislature can be judged by its overall approach, and in the cases of Idaho and Washington, that was not hard to read. The Idaho Legislature was what you might reasonably expect when dominated by Republicans; the Washington Legislature this year, similarly, was generally what you’d expect of chambers dominated by Democrats.

Among the major outcomes of the Washington Legislature this year, which sine die’d Sunday evening, were at least two major rejections, of financing for sports facilities, the NASCAR raceway in Kitsap County and a proposed new arena (sought by the Seattle Sonics basketball management) at Renton. And there were scale-backs or hold-offs (notably some of the WASL testing, which has become so contentious). Stronger regulation of payday lenders, and stronger legal protection for homeowners, both failed.

But if this was a less spectacular session than 2005, there were important items passed.

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John L. O’Brien

The Washington Legislature is adjourning today, on schedule. That will be a subject of discussion, but for many in Washington politics, it will be secondary: John L. O’Brien, who entered that body in 1939 and left it in 1993, died today in Seattle.

We never met O’Brien, but sometimes felt as if we had. We’ve spent a fair amount of time in the O’Brien Building, across the way from the Statehouse, where House legislative offices and meeting rooms are located. And one of the first books we read on Washington government was the useful Speaker of the House: The Political Career and Times of John L. O’Brien, by Daniel Jack Chasan.

O’Brien’s fingerprints are all over Washington government and policy. Inevitably: He was House speaker for four terms, and served in the legislature longer than anyone else in Washington history (and, for a time, held that record nationally, too).

More commentary available at the David Postman blog.

The excellent recent book Illicit by Moises Naim offers a startling overview of a big piece of the global economy little noticed (because it deliberately keeps its head down) - the trade in illegal, contraband or counterfeit goods and services. The longtime editor of Foreign Policy magazine at one point offers this description:

“Since the early 1990s, global illicit trade has embarked on a great mutation. It is the same mutation as that of international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or Islamic Jihad - or for that matter, of activists for the global good like the environmental movement or the World Social Forum. All have moved away from fixed hierarchies and toward decentralized networks; away from controlling leaders and toward multiple, losely-linked, dispersed agents and cells; away from rigid lines of control and toward constantly shifting transactions as opportunities dictate.”

A point to bear in mind, reviewing the announcement last week of a settlement in the great Northwest cigarette smuggling case, now, evidently, mostly settled in advance of trial.

It was a large case, brought in 2003 and worked steadily since in the old-fashioned way, getting participants to roll over on others. If you think cigarettes are a minor deal as crime goes, ask yourself how many crimes would cost taxpayers (in this case in Washington state) as much as $56 million in tax revenue, which federal officials estimate was the case here.

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We know that the constitution says we all have a right to not be required to incriminate ourselves: “No person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In some cases, the meaning of that right, and the line-in-sand it draws, are evident enough. In other cases, not so much.

Consider the appeal (formally, a request for writ of certiorari) of the Idaho Attorney General’s office, filed Friday, to the U.S. Supreme Court, from a decision by the Idaho Supreme Court. Here’s the executive summary:

After his conviction and sentence for rape, Krispen Estrada filed a petition for post-conviction relief in the Idaho district court, claiming ineffective assistance of counsel in sentencing. The district court determined that Estrada’s counsel in the criminal case had provided deficient performance by failing to advise Estrada about his privilege against self-incrimination in regard to a court-ordered psychosexual evaluation. The court denied the claim, however, reasoning that Estrada was not prejudiced because he would have received the same sentence because the sentencing court could have properly drawn adverse inferences at sentencing, such as lack of remorse, non-amenability to treatment, and risk to the community, if Estrada had refused to participate in the evaluation. The Supreme Court of Idaho reversed the district court’s finding of lack of prejudice, implicitly rejecting the district court’s determination that the sentencing court may properly draw adverse inferences from silence at sentencing, and holding prejudice was shown because the evaluation “played a role” in sentencing. The question presented is:

Other than in finding the facts and circumstances of the offense, may a sentencing court draw adverse inferences from a defendant’s refusal to cooperate in a pre- sentencing evaluation?

Estrada’s offense is certainly heinous, “beating, choking and raping his estranged wife in front of their children,” then holding off police in a seven-hour armed confrontation. But the question of self-incrimination - in this case, allowing an effective inference of guilt from a decision not to speak - is a lot broader than one case.

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Athink piece in the current Business Week magazine points out that corporate spending is continuing to grow, but that “just increasingly outside the U.S. A BusinessWeek analysis of financial reports from more than 1,000 large and midsize U.S.-based companies shows that global capital expenditures in the fourth quarter of 2006 were actually up 18.1% over the previous year, a number that includes nonresidential construction as well as info-tech equipment and machinery. The comparable growth for domestic business investment, which is all the government reports each quarter: only 8.9%, without adjusting for inflation.”

Which would be notable but not Northwest-oriented except that one of the handful of corporations the article highlights is Boise-based Micron Technology, on which a large chunk of the Boise-area economy is reliant. And whose CEO, Steve Appleton, is quoted as saying, “I don’t have to hire one more person in the U.S. I don’t have to invest one more dollar here - and we’ll be just fine.”

Back at Boise, where two years ago talk of the town was of a prospective new billion-dollar Micron production operation (not yet materialized), the Idaho Statesman has asked Micron for some further explanation of its growth plans. No response as yet, the paper reports.