Ridenbaugh Press/Northwest

Most people who track the news at all see a good deal of news about their own state, but little about others. That allows a particular sort of dishonesty to spread: Making all sorts of claims that one’s state is (depending on the agenda of the speaker) doing a whole lot better or worse than other states, in taxes, education, economy, whatever.

There are real differences among the states, of course. But many of the arguments that pick up the most currency tend to be facile and bogus. Washington state has no income tax? Wow! But before drawing too many conclusions, you have to factor in those high sales taxes (higher than Idaho’s, and obviously much higher than sales tax-less Oregon), not to mention the state’s substantial business and occupation tax. Washington isn’t horribly taxed, but looking at only one piece of the picture is highly misleading.

Oregonian columnist Steve Duin today took this on effectively, most specifically the argument that the state is unfriendly to business because of its tax structure. The argument essentially is a crock. Duin’s sharp, efficient takedown is a must-read. It may be Oregon-oriented, but the points in it are useful for Washingtonians and Idahoans as well.

Not so much for the specifics noted – which seem incomplete and sometimes, to non-wonks, a little unclear – as for the basic approach, take a look at what the Oregon Democrats did with the economic proposal put forth by Republican gubernatorial nominee Chris Dudley.

They took an original version of the file (PDFed originally, probably) and effectively used a red pen to editorially mark it up. (Writers who have worked with editors will immediately grasp the approach.) It makes for a visually arresting approach.

One comment here on one of Dudley’s 26 proposals, the one being part of number 3: “He will budget the way Oregon families and businesses budget, by determining how much money the state will have and then building a “Priorities First” budget within existing revenues.” First, that’s actually not so very different from what’s done now in times of revenue downturn. Second, it assumes something sacrosanct about the current revenue levels: What’s the argument for why they should not be higher or lower? But we’ll return to some of this in another day. The Democrats, as you might imagine, didn’t take quite that approach in their markup.

The train at Rockaway Beach, one of the local coastal attractions/Linda Watkins

Is this what a sort of perfect travel storm looks like?

This weekend, hot temperatures hit the Willamette Valley, including the Portland area, for just the second time this summer. The coast was cool – quite cool, and even foggy in a lot of places. Plus, Portland was being hamstrung by road construction and various sorts of weekend events. Out on the coast, Astoria had a regatta and various other communities were in full summer attraction swing.

So the coastal highways were absolutely jammed. Slow travel almost everywhere. Good economic news, though, for the people on the coast.

Wer’ll be getting into looks at the legislative situation, but for the moment an overview from Governing magazine, where veteran Louis Jacobson has taken a look at prospects in all 50 states.

No reason here to quarrel with the assessment, which ranks Idaho “safe Republican” and Washington and Oregon “likely Democratic.” A fair number of states are teetering in party control, but these three don’t seem to be among them.

Whenever one candidate (ordinarily the one behind) wants to debate more often than the other (usually the frontrunner), there’s an attempt to turn it into an issue aimed at telling the voters something about the two candidates. An attempt to create a narrative. (Your scribe makes that observation partly out of personal experience.)

That usually has limited effect, partly because it often is written off (and often reasonably) as a trailing candidate scrambling to find arrows to throw at the guy in front. Another reason for its limited efficacy is that, more often than not, the leading candidate has little to fear in a debate. The leader usually is leading because he (or she) is well established, has experience in such faceoffs, is running in an area favorable to his party, and so on. And there’s this: Usually, the effort to crank up more debates has no one pushing hard for it other than the trailing candidate.

Taken together, this is why the latest debate push by the Oregon gubernatorial campaign of John Kitzhaber, the Democratic former governor, may matter more than most. Kitzhaber has been jabbing away at his Republican opponent, former basketball player Chris Dudley, for missing the traditional opening midsummer faceoff in front of Oregon’s newspaper publishers, which Kitzhaber attended and Dudley (who was schmoozing business lobbyists in Aspen at the time) missed. Newspapers took notice.

Dudley has been pushing for fewer debates and Kitzhaber more. The normal logic would be that this is because Kitzhaber is clearly trailing Dudley, but that isn’t the case: At most, polling shows the two running closely together, although our estimate remains that Kitzhaber has something of a lead. The other parts of the normal equation don’t fit either. Dudley has only slight experience in head-to-head candidate debates, and when he did them during the primary campaign, he came across as unimpressive. Kitzhaber, extremely well-informed, crisply articulate and sometimes witty on top of that, could be expected to mop the floor with Dudley – in fact, he has more to lose on the expectations front.

But by pressing the case now, Kitzhaber has Dudley on a defensive in part because he has pre-agreed to a string of debates around the state. The Kitzhaber campaign sent a letter (released publicly, of course) to Dudley’s campaign, to drive the point home. From it: Continue Reading »

The new book The Death and Life of American Journalism, by Robert McChesney and John Nichols, does quite a bit of tap dancing around its subject, meditating on what bad news it is that America’s mass news media are in such dire straits, and what bad news that is for democracy.

All of which is something most of us already know. At the book’s core, though, McChesney and Nichols do present several ideas for renewing American journalism and making it stronger. Besides making improved use of the Internet, and moving more toward non-profit or low-profit organizational structures, they also suggest a number of proposals for explicit governmental support or subsidies for news media. (Northwest connection: The author’s main research assistant was R. Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon.)

This is less radical than it sounds, even in the United States. (A number of other countries, especially in Europe, do provide governmental underwriting for man news organizations, and the news environment generally is livelier than it is here and no less critical of its governments.) American support of news media goes well beyond the first amendment; it also includes special cut rates for media postage and contracts for printers.

You wonder what else it might include, though.

The tri-county (Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas) Oregon entity called Metro, which manages a number of regional services, probably isn’t covered as much as it should be by local news media whose reporting ranks have been thinning. So, although itself financially pressed, it has decided on a new job opening:

Metro is seeking to fill a temporary position for a part-time news reporter. The reporter will attend a variety of community meetings and events about growth management and community investment priorities and provide objective, written news coverage of those meetings and events. The reporter also will take photographs, and when appropriate, may be asked to produce short, simple video clips of people offering short comments. Metro will provide for use of cameras and computer equipment if needed.

The announcement says specifically that the agency won’t edit for content, and that it expects some of the reports will be critical of it. It says, at least, that it wants to hire a neutral reporter.

Why? The agency’s communication director Jim Middaugh, was quoted in the Willamette Week, “There’s nobody watching us really. The goal of this is transparency … The intent is to get out information even if it’s critical.”

The future of journalism? Is this the first of many more? And what will it mean?

Haven’t seen anything about this in the Oregonian yet . . .

If you’re of the government-never-does-anything-right frame of mind, the headline in the Oregonian this morning had to be just the thing: “Multnomah County chief apologizes for health inspectors who shut down 7-year-old’s lemonade stand at local art show.”

A 7-year-old’s lemonade stand? What a perfect video clip to demonstrat the point . . .

Except that if you move past the headline into the story, the picture is good deal muddier than that.

Technically, selloing any food or drink – even a child’s lemonade stand – even in front of your house requires a city permit in Portland. As a practical matter, the regulators said, they don’t enforce stands by children in their neighborhoods.

What did get their attention was the case of the 7-year-old from Oregon City, who with her mother’s help decided to set up shop (selling Koolaid) not at home but at a large commercial arts and food event in more of the most bustling parts of Portland, during a festival. Where everyone else selling their wares on the street had to buy a permit.

Which isn’t to say that an exception might not have been reasonable. But if you’re heading directly into commercial competition, as part of something that’s an actual adult business place rather than the place of children’s hobbies, you place by the rules of where you are.

Not as simple as this is likely to be made out to be.

Ben Jacklet’s column in Oregon Business is often good for some unusual takes on the economic picture in Oregon. As with this headline: “Jobs Watch: Marijuana measure makes ballot.”

It harks back a bit to two, count ‘em two, editorials in the Oregonian in just the last week that seem to be pushing gently but directly in the direction of calling for legalizing marijuana. One arguing that posing that question on the ballot directly, rather than dancing around it with the current measure on pot dispensaries, might be preferable. The second on Friday seemingly expressing support (without daring to be explicit about it) for an international statement saying that the war on drugs is making a number of things, HIV infection rates among them, worse rather than better.

Then there’s Jacklet’s piece from July 16 on the present ballot issue. From the business standpoint: “Such a system would almost certainly result in a gold rush to tap into the growing market for legal weed, which has been lucratively exploited in California and Colorado. Marijuana is the nation’s largest cash crop, and any move to update regulations controlling how it is grown and sold will create opportunities . . .”

He has provided some useful numbers to demonstrate: An Oregon pot crop estimated to have $474 million of value; 36,402 Oregon medical marijuana patients; and a good deal more.

The discussion is changing.

The Independent Party of Oregon, having conducted its online voting among members (just eyeballing it, maybe around 5% of the membership took part), and the results are in.

It’s an eclectic group they voted for. Whatever else you say about it, this is clearly not a group in the pocket of any one political party.

A few thoughts on the results released this evening online.

If the biggest vote-getter was “none of the above,” does that mean no endorsement in that race? There were a bunch of those. In state House 22, incumbent Democrat Betty Komp and “none of the above” each got 12 votes.

The endorsement for governor clearly went to Democrat John Kitzhaber, but a little context is necessary too. Republican Chris Dudley didn’t seek the nomination, so his name wasn’t listed. So: Kitzhaber got 850 votes, but two little-knowns, Jerry Wilson and Richard Esterman, got a total of 738. Were some of those de facto Dudley votes?

In the 4th congressional district, Republican Art Robinson, who’s probably a longshot against incumbent Democrat Peter DeFazio, got most of the votes – 418 to 288. And in the 5th, Republican challenger Scott Bruun took 237 votes to incumbent Democrat Kurt Schrader‘s 211, in a race that could be close indeed.

The legislative races were a deeply split mix. Hard to imagine what single mindset would come up with results like this. (Not an argument that any particular results are irrational, just that some of them seem to run up against some others.) If the original concern was that the process might be rigged, the actual results seem to fly in the face of that idea.

Election nights are always a little fun (at least, for those of us watching): An unveiling of what actually happens. And it happens, you might say (metaphorically), as elections officials unlock the ballot boxes.

Tomorrow night will be something like that for Oregon’s Independent Party. Member of the party have been voting, electronically – will this become commonplace in government-run elections in years to come? – and that phase will wrap up tomorrow at 5 p.m. Members get to choose which candidates should receive the party’s endorsement, and there are a lot of candidates to choose from. And a good many Independent members, probably over 50,000. It may be enough to matter in close races.

In an e-mail release, the party reports:

“We expect to have representatives of the Secretary of State and of several county elections offices present at the unlocking,” said party chair Linda Williams. “The press is also welcome to observe this conclusion of the first online election in Oregon history.”

The outcomes for most of the 60 races for public office (Governor, U.S. Representative, State Senator, and State Representative) will be immediately apparent. The outcomes for some races, however, may depend upon reading and tallying the write-in votes.

The Independent Party is conducting the first-ever Oregon minor party primary election open to every member of the party and the first-ever party election conducted through internet voting. This election includes 86 candidates seeking the Independent Party nomination for 60 different offices.

We’ll keep watch.

Another transition: We’re seeing the phasing-out of fire lookouts.

The Medford Mail Tribune had a piece out today about Ken and Colleen Struck, now in their 70s and nearing a quarter-century of summer work as upper-elevation forest fire lookouts. The Oregon Department of Forestry has only one other fire outlook left in its southwest region. Others seem to be scaling back too, in favor of cameras or satellite observation.

Unclear whether this is a case of new technology simply superseding old. After all, as one person quoted remarked, you can’t get a feel for the situation from a camera.

The question is, how long will this last – and from what direction will the killer blow come?

Assuming the situation is reported accurately by the Coast Lake News, the city council of Lakeview, Oregon, has passed a “New ordinance [that] allows entry to private property at will and without prior complaint to search for code violations.” (Hat tip here to Blue Oregon.)

Jessica Lloyd-Rogers, the editor of the paper, wrote that “there was no public notice and the item was not listed on the agenda. Brought up under “Items Not on the Agenda” the Ordinance was referred to only by number and once by title before being immediately adopted without discussion. Not content with violating the Fourth Amendment and Oregon’s Public Meeting Law, the Council’s procedure violates the City Charter and continues a pattern of secrecy and targeting citizens.”

Hard to imagine how this lasts for long. Hard to imagine how many of those city council members expect to stay in office for terribly long, either.

Greyhound at Ontario, Oregon/Randy Stapilus

There’s this, to begin with: The Greyhound bus run scheduled to depart Portland at 11:50 p.m. left at 11:50. That is exactly what the big clock on Union Station north of downtown, and next door to the Greyhound station in PDX, said as the bus cleared the building.

The bus was scheduled to arrived at the bus station just west of downtown Boise, more than 400 miles away and after eight intermediate stops, at 10:05 the next morning. It pulled it at 10:04, and I stepped off the bus at 10:05. The precision was impressive.

I hadn’t been at all sure what to expect. But what emerged over the course of the ride is an argument that “riding the bus” ought not to be considered a second-class (or worse) option.

I’ve not taken a long-distance commercial bus ride for a long time, 25 years at least, maybe more. For a long time, I suspected I never would again: The trend lines seem to be running against commercial bus lines. When you see a business, even one as big as Greyhound, scaling back on lines (the closest GH stop to our residence, a long-time stop at McMinnville, Oregon, was dropped a few years ago), expectations aren’t necessarily of the highest. And there’s something about the bus in the culture, as something people wouldn’t take if driving or flying were available options. A mode of last resort. With, maybe, a clientele reflecting that.

The reality turned out to be a little different, and even intriguing.

The bus was neat, clean and comfortable – the seats more comfortable than most airline seats (not to damn with faint praise). Air circulated well through the coach. The driving was smooth and not especially noticeable (which is a compliment). Some Greyhound buses on the east coast have wifi and other services installed, which would be a nice feature. They’re not on the Pacific-side buses yet, but the people at the Portland station seemed to think that may be coming in the near term; more enhanced buses apparently are rolling off the lines this summer.

How much traffic do these graveyard, long-run routes get? Enough apparently. A bus departing Portland station for points south (to California) at 11:25 was sold out at least a half-hour before boarding. A crowd assembled quickly into line for it at gate 8, and everyone there seemed to get a seat.

My bus was about half-full initially, but at a midway stop at a Pilot truck stop at Stanfield about 3:30 picked up a dozen or so more people, apparently on a run originating from the Seattle area but headed southeast. At peak, it was nearly full. I got the impression that’s more or less average.

Who were all these people traveling hundreds of miles in the middle of the night? Continue Reading »

Chris Dudley

The problem is somewhat bigger than it first seemed, and it started as a problem. It has sort of unwrapped, getting more pungent.

If you’re Chris Dudley, the Republican nominee for governor of Oregon, your biggest problem is this: You’re untested in public – governmental and elective – life, and questions both about how well informed you are and about how you react to various pressure stimuli are real questions voters and the people who advise them on voting will be considering. Dealing with that concern will be a main thread of the upcoming gubernatorial contest with Democrat John Kitzhaber, whose issues are in other areas: He has broad mastery of the subject matter, and his reactions to various challenges have been documented for a long time.

One way Dudley could spike the problem is by going right at it: Putting himself out there, answering questions, providing detail, exposing himself to the pressures so people can watch him in action. If, that is, he would leave a good impression afterward. There’s the risk of falling on his face, and avoiding the risk is a way of conceding that those problems people wonder about really are, you know, problems.

So far, Dudley has been practicing avoidance. He has been arguing for fewer (and Kitzhaber more) debates. The traditional first one is the summer newspaper publisher’s confab, where since 1986 the party nominees faced off in front of the state’s newspaper reporters. Dudley begged off, saying he had a family vacation to tend to instead.

That sounded pretty weak. And the vacation wasn’t even in Oregon, also not wonderful.

Then it turned out that while in Colorado, Dudley was not just relaxing with the family. Instead of speaking to newspaper publishers in Oregon, he was at Aspen at a Republican governors’ meeting, speaking to the lobbyists and campaign finance people who were there.

As Jeff Mapes of the Oregonian wrote, “When the Dudley campaign declined an offer to debate Kitzhaber before the annual meeting of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association – which has a more than two-decade-old tradition of holding the first gubernatorial debate of the general election campaign – no mention was made that Dudley would be at another political event.”

That’s not likely to be forgotten. And it raises another dimension to the problem he has to deal with headed into the last three months of the campaign. Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon outlined it:

“Dudley’s now in a position where every time he tells folks that he has a seemingly-legit schedule conflict, they’re going to wonder: What’s really going on? What’s he really doing? This is no longer just an issue about whether Dudley is willing to answer tough questions from the press and for Oregon voters – though it is still that – it’s now also a more fundamental issue about his credibility and trustworthiness.”

The latest congressional campaign reports turned up late last week, and they suggest some contours for the races. Not as absolutes; contrary to widely-held belief, money isn’t all in political campaigns. Less-funded candidates win regularly, and we’ve seen significant cases of that happening in this Northwest this year.

But candidates tend to get funded in relation to their overall support system and in relation to what the money people think is their probability of winning. They’re not perfect predictors, but they’re well worth a look. (And one good place to look is at OpenSecrets.org, where we watch for this data most regularly.) These numbers are as of June 30 reports.

One of the most startling and unexpected disparities in the Northwest is in Idaho’s 1st congressional district, where incumbent Democrat Walt Minnick has raised $1.8 million and has $1.1 million still in the bank. Compare that to his Republican opponent Raul Labrador, who has raised $215,671 but (because of a hot primary in which he was major financial underdog) still has (as of June 30) just $68,788. That kind of disparity with Minnick is an enormous problem for Labrador. Why Republican interests would be leaving him so underfunded at this point is unclear (unless they’re still just mad he won the primary instead of the establishment-preferred candidate). In any case, he could wind up at a fatal disadvantage against Minnick if he doesn’t get a major cash dump quickly.

The numbers in the other two hottest House races in the Northwest are a lot less overwhelming, but they are worth reviewing.

In Oregon 5, incumbent Democrat Kurt Schrader has taken his fundraising seriously, and has $915,356 still on hand. His Republican opponent Scott Bruun – probably the best Republican candidate for any major office this year – is way behind on money, with just $178,356 on hand. This should be Oregon’s most competitive congressional race, but these numbers don’t look great for Bruun.

(The closest Oregon congressional race in financing is the 1st, but even there incumbent Democrat David Wu has more than twice as much on hand as Republican Robert Cornilles.)

Washington’s hottest race is in the southwestern 3rd, the open seat now held by Democrat Brian Baird but in a highly competitive district. There, Democrat Denny Heck (the only major Democrat now in the race) has on hand $801,607; the leading Republican (and his probable November opponent) Jaime Herrera has $201,019. She’s a strong candidate and certainly competitive with Heck overall, but she may be weighed down by a fundraising deficit. (She also has to deal with another strong Republican contender, while Heck’s last fellow Democrat dropped out a while back.)

The big-money race in the Northwest, once again, looks to be the Washington 8th. Incumbent Repubican Dave Reichert has raised $1.7 million, and Democrat Suzan DelBene $1.6 million. Lots of political ads in the offing on the King and Pierce eastside this fall.