Adate to conjure with on Oregon's calendar: April 3 has been set as the day Portland General Electric formally becomes an independent company once again, and splits off from Enron.

A good thing, most Oregonians will agree, whatever comes next.

April 3 is apt to change the tenor of the debate. It's one thing when you're blasting away at a corrupt and faraway Enron, rather a different when it's your own homegrown utility. More or less.

Credit the Ben Westlund people with getting their message right out there. Running an independent campaign for governor of Oregon isn't an easy proposition, but they're doing a number of things right so far.

Alongside the promotion [in their e-mail newsletter; no permalink available] for opening their campaign headquarters (on Wednesday) in Bend (okay, but they really do need a branch office in the Willamette somewhere), the Westlund campaign casually tossed in a reference to Friday as the close of the next campaign reporting period.

They can still fundraise the rest of this week but they note, "Already 385 people and businesses have contributed or pledged nearly $300,000 to our campaign."

Not bad. Will be intersting to do the comparisons with other campaigns (especially once we see what the others have left after their primaries, a concern Westlund can bypass).

We're not going to argue here that Oregon legislative services are logally in the wrong in their contention that state legislators' web sites should not - under legal and ethical guidelines - include links to non-governmental web areas.

There's some grayness to the top, but you could make a case that they're right. Legally. And that their decision to take down all individual legislator pages to strip them of non-government links was justifiable.

The larger question is, should that be the law?

There's not an absolute in this area. People would have good cause to object if, for example, the state treasurer's web site carried a link to a bank, or if the state forestry web site linked to their favorite restaurant, or some other to a church.

Surely, though, there's a reasonably distinction between that and the things legislators have routinely been linking to. (None of those links, apparently, was the subject of a complaint or a specific tripwire for the removal action.) They've been linking to community service organizations, non-profits, occasionally to a chanber of commerce, sometimes to news stories. Most of them fall either into the category of "here's where you can go to help your community" or "here's some more information." And legislators are, after all, in the business of trafficking in ideas and information - that's what their job is about. Surely there's nothing wrong with that kind of dissemination.

Today's Oregonian news article on this quoted freshman Representative Kim Thatcher, R-Keizer, as suggesting that the system is self-correcting: If legislators post something inappropriate on their sites, they'll hear about it and likely correct it. She also said she may introduce legislation in the next session (if she returns) to allow non-governmental links.

Indeed: You can take the matter of purity a step or two too far.

We know that Measure 37 is live and on the Oregon books, but in so many ways we still don't know what that means. We don't yet know, for example, how the legal argument over transferring property will play out.

Courtesy of Rogue Pundit, another delimiter on Measure 37 is emerging: property taxes.

It cites an article in the Medford Mail-Tribune about Wayne Ralph, who owns five acres of farm land outside White City. Ralph, in common with a bunch of other Oregon landowners, filed a Measure 37 claim on his property, which he sought to turn into a subdivision. His claim was approved about a year ago, and not long after filed a subdivision plat.

Now the other shoe, in the Mail-Tribune's words: "The Jackson County Assessor’s Office sent him a bill recently for $6,000 in taxes for the past 10 years because the property now has a higher value."

Howls of outrage have followed, of course, but county officials have said the law is clear: As soon as someone does what Ralph did, he becomes liable for back taxes.

Just might give some claimants a moment's pause.

The Oregon governor's race won't necessarily be close. The default assumption here is that Democratic incumbent Ted Kulongoski will win it by a significant margin still far short of a landslide; and that much of the chatter against him generates more from activists on the left and right than from the large voting populace.

But the situation is fluid enough that it could easily turn out otherwise. A reminder of that came with the opening of the gubernatorial campaign of Joe Keating - of the Pacific Green Party.

Republicans have been touting this one. They point that, after all, four years ago the Greens declined to run a candidate (former Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Weaver had been mentioned) because they didn't want to risk a Republican winning the office. And they point out that the Libertarians, who had no such compunction about the election of a Democrat, ran and may have siphoned off enough Republican votes to elect Kulongoski. (Doubtful, in our opinion, but possible.) and the Libertarian candidate of 2002 has become a support this year of Republican candidate Kevin Mannix.

For Keating's part, news reports have quoted him as being unconcerned about whether his entry hurts Kulongoski's chances: He's among the disaffected.

However, as an AP story out today soundly notes, there's more to the picture.

The Libertarians won't have the same nominee but say they will be back in the race. And the right will also have the presence of the Constitution Party. That group absented itself from the governor's race in 2002 at the request of some Republicans, just as the Greens did at the request of Democrats.

The big new factor this year is likely to be the entry of Independent Ben Westlund of Tumalo. But it's anyone's guess - and there are good arguments both ways - whether he will draw more from the Democratic or Republican side of the fence. Maybe he'll draw more or less evenly.

Score so far on the fringe party wars: No discerniable change.