Posts published in February 2010

Oregon has a new political news web site, the Oregon Politico.com; we'll doubtless be checking in for news there.

Beyond that, a little note of perspective on it is warranted.

It presents itself as a straight-up news site, its listed staff includes a political reporter and an investigative reporter, and its mission statement says, "Oregon Politico is dedicated to reporting news from the state’s capitol and government bureaucracies in a fair and balanced manner whilst promoting an open and transparent government."

Maybe the "fair and balanced" reference there should be a clue. Dig a little deeper and check out the "copyright and legal" page, and there's this: "This Site and all of the information it contains (including, but not limited to, news articles, video, charts, graphs, graphics and photographs) is the property of Cascade Policy Institute, unless otherwise noted."

Cascade is not a politically or philosophically neutral organization; its front web page notes it is "Promoting public policy alternatives that foster individual liberty, personal responsibility and economic opportunity in Oregon" - a more subtle version of "free market solutions", essentially libertarian in view, promoted by counterpart organizations in other states. (The most recent headline on its web site: "Unemployment Insurance Extensions Appeal to the Heart but Rob the Soul.") Such descriptions show up in the Oregon Catalyst.

This approach - of seemingly dispassionate news sources cloaking the machinery run in fact by highly ideological organizations (see also the Idaho Reporter.com, a project of the Idaho Freedom Foundation) seems to be a growing trend: Illusory neutrality in news production, a la Fox, spreading now to the state and maybe local level.

If there's a complaint here, it's not with the existence of the sites, or the independent reporting - we need all of that we can get. There are plenty of overtly partisan sites that do a good deal of digging and reporting, and a good deal of it has real value. But those sites (ranging, say, from Blue Oregon to Idaho Conservative Blogger) generally are forthright about their biases and preferences, and don't pretend they're something they're not.

There's news, and there's news. There are all kinds of filters for news. And if you're running your news through a filter, best to be up front with everyone about what it is.

The Oregon Legislature's special session is done as of mid-afternoon, a day later than most members had hoped but still three days ahead of the deadline. It was a special session not because it was called for emergency business - which ordinarily is supposed to be what even-year sessions, when they occur, are about - but as an experiment to see if even-year sessions can work reasonably well.

Evidently they can. The final hangup (and not one between parties but between House and Senate) had to do with how long the sessions in an annual-session scheme should run; those deadlines would be built into a constitutional amendment to set up annual sessions henceforth. On Wednesday (after Senate President Peter Courtney decided against giving up and adjourning), they resolved the impasse. As the Salem Statesman-Journal noted, "The total time of 195 days over a two-year cycle would be shorter than the 211 days that lawmakers have met on average over the past decade, counting the current session in its 25th day."

A call to cut session length might be an overall voter winner in November.

They can add that to a considerable batch of legislation approved in these last three and a half weeks. The list form the House speaker's office included these (and it's a partial list): (more…)

It was a Peter Courtney moment. Presiding over the Oregon Senate, just after absorbing news from across the Rotunda as the Legislature was preparing to adjourn:

"All right, I'll tell you what's happening," as if announcing social plans on a Saturday night. "The House is coming in at 2:45. They're gonna do some stuff. Then they're going to adjourn and come back in at 4:30. Then they'll do some more stuff." (Courtney's style, some combination of informal and driven, is all his own.) The Senate would return around 5, he said, hopefully with most of the House work complete.

The exact clock times, of course, didn't hold. But both chambers continued processing bills, and you could tell from the visitor's gallery that staffers at least were optimistic of an early-evening adjournment. And no late glitches seemed to be lying in wait.

The latest "experimental" even-year Oregon legislative session does seem nearly over, maybe later today. It has worked; substantial legislation moved through smoothly, and the session seems about to end ahead of deadline (which was February 28).

The major loss, as now appears: The proposed constitutional amendment to allow annual sessions. The House and Senate seem positioned to simply agree to disagree. Ironic, since this session seems to have been a good Exhibit A for the proposal.

We just last night caught up with the most current (streamed) episode of Leverage, the TNT series about a group of con artists, set in the Boston area but shot in Portland. The show is well done on its own merits, but we have fun picking out specific scenes at Portland we know. PGE Park and the city hall were two good recent examples.

It's felt a little like an outlier, in that Vancouver B.C. tends to get a lot more TV and film work; it has been the leading film center on the west coast north of southern California. Among other things, shooting costs there may actually be a little lower than in Portland.

But Portland's clout in the biz is picking up. Leverage is one factor, and another is the area's intensive and cutting-edge digital video industry.

The Oregon House Sustainability and Economic Development Committee held a hearing on all this today, and the indications emerging suggest that more of this business may be coming: Not an explosive increase, but more. People working with Leverage were there, and show creator and runner Dean Devlin, who had planned to appear, delivered a statement.

One conclusion was that Oregon isn't notably attractive on the immediate upfront numbers; other states have juicier governmental giveaways. (Michigan evidently is notorious for this.) But Oregon, and Portland especially, has other good advantages: Widely varied and easily accessible scenery, good infrastructure, a solid base of actors and crew to work with. The various sorts of commercial shooting business, from commercials and corporate videos to full-out entertainment programming, seems to be picking up as word of the advantages picks up. (One motion picture, niche-described as "faith-based horror," was said to be in progress.)

The economic advantages were hyped too hard; no one spoke of it as an economic savior. But Representative Vic Gilliam, who played a bit part on Leverage, recalled Devlin telling him on set that about 140 people were working that day, nearly all Oregonians.

And if you're in Oregon, keep a lookout for $2 bills. On item that emerged at the hearing: Devlin apparently paid out much of the Leverage staff per diems with $2 bills. If you see one in circulation, odds are that's where it came from.