Governor: "I am NOT corrupt. Just incompetent"

I am insulted, and you should be too.

I mean, you would think they would respect us enough to try to come up with some excuse that at least sounds marginally plausible. But they don't. They know that any old excuse will do, because in our one party state nobody will hold them accountable for wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

I am talking about the Business Energy Tax Credit, and the revelation in yesterday's Oregonian that the Governor's office pressured the Department of Energy to lowball the estimates on how much the tax credit would be used. They were only off by a factor of 40 or so.

When two Department of Energy staffers (one former, one current) say that they were instructed to put down as low an estimate as possible, what is the Governor's response? From the Oregonian:

"Kulongoski staff members deny that the governor or anyone on his staff directed the Energy Department to lowball the costs and said the huge disparity between early cost projections and actual expenses was simply a bad guess. They say no one understood how popular the tax credit would become."

This is just laugh out loud funny. Mind you, they were estimating the impact of raising the tax credit to $20 million per project. And their estimate: $1.2 million in '07-'09 and $4.1 million for '09-'11.

Someone will have to explain that to me. Bad guess indeed.

So they would have us believe that they are really stupid enough to make an estimate like this, and not see how ridiculous it is on its face. As if they asked themselves: "Gee, if we raise the tax credit from $3.5 million to $20 million, how much will get used? Probably about $1.2 million. Yeah, let's go with that."

And when they are caught red-handed, with two different inside sources who say the Governor's office pressured them to minimize the number, they just claim incompetence!

Question: Will Oregonians continue to put up with this BS?