Our first post-modernist President?

For some time now I have been mystified by the allure of Barack Obama. I get that he’s attractive and articulate. But I’ve been waiting for his rhetoric of change and hope to be backed up by something more than words. So far it has not.

As far as I can tell, here is the rhetorical argument Obama makes for his candidacy:

“Yes we can!” We can what?
“Hope!” Hope for what?
“Change?” What kind of change?
“Change we can believe in!”

There’s nothing there. The logic is circular, at best. Truth is, the pitch isn’t a logical argument in the slightest – it’s entirely emotional.

The few times Obama has talked specifically about policy, he’s trotted out the most mundane, goody-bag list of government program proposals that have been standard faire in Democrat political circles for decades.

If that is the change he is selling as something that will unite people, he better stop being specific.

So I’ve been wondering when would his legions of supporters start to look under the hood of their shiny new sportscar and see the 1200CC four cylinder motor. But that hasn’t yet happened.

I think I now know why.

Obama is inspiring millions of young voters, kids who are mostly a decade or less out of school. For the last 15 or so years in the public schools have been striving to teach “critical thinking skills.”

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, just what is “critical thinking?” They never really do define it, and believe me, I have asked dozens of educrats what they mean when they use the phrase.

In classical education, kids are taught logic. Logical thinking is the “grammar” of rhetoric. Any argument, any educated thought process, has its basis in the fundamentals of logic. Without logic, there is no rationality.

So why would the public schools not want to teach logical thinking? What do they mean by critical thinking, anyway.

If you really drill down and investigate the origins of the phrase, it comes from the post-modernism “critical theory” movement that has been all the rage for literature and history professors in our universities for a couple decades.

“Critical theory” throws logic out the window. It assumes, as its point of departure, that any text, any argument, any event, has no independent meaning other than what is perceived by the recipient. So when analyzing literature, critical theory assumes that it is futile try to understand what the author is driving at, because that does not matter. What matters is what the text means to the reader, and in arriving at that meaning, there are no logical boundaries. It can mean anything the reader wants it to mean.

I know that sounds crazy, but it is true. And this is the philosophical underpinning of what our kids have been taught about “critical thinking skills” in public school. What matters is how they feel about something, not what that thing actually means.

An example of how this philosophy has wiggled its way into our popular and legal culture, just look at sexual harassment policies and laws. Many state explicitly that what matters is not what the accused harasser intended by his actions, but how those actions made the victim feel.

So how does this apply to Barack Obama? Millions of young voters spent their formative years being steeped in this “critical theory” nonsense. Barack Obama makes them feel hopeful. They have been trained to elevate these feelings over and above any logical impulse they might have to analyze them.

So they simply do not subject Obama’s inspirational words to any logical test to see if they make sense. They have been trained not to. His words mean only what they want them to – no more and no less.

So, will Obama be our first post-modernist President? Could be.

Dorothy English, RIP

Well, the government successfully ran out the clock on Dorothy English’s pursuit to win back her property rights. I can’t express how angry this makes me.

I honestly do not understand how anyone can support the government having the power to simply destroy the value of your real estate, and have no accountability for it. And then to cynically use every available legal and bureaucratic roadblock to delay things long enough until the plaintiff dies – this is simply immoral.

In my view, a government that acts in such a way has lost its claim to legitimacy. It really is that simple.

Did she finish high school?

Front page Funny Paper article today about the spike in high school dropouts. State Sup't Susan Castillo was quoted:

"There is no way a student can expect to be successful in the future if they do not graduate from high school today," said Oregon schools Superintendent Susan Castillo.

Anybody else see the glaring grammatical error? Kind of ironic, isn't it, for the leader of our public school system to give such a quote when discussing dropouts.

Update: I was curious whether this quote was given in an interview, or if The Funny Paper took it from a press release, so I went to the Oregon Department of Education website to check. Sure enough, the press release is there, but the grammatical error is not. Which left me to wonder: did The Funny Paper transcribe the quote wrong? Or was the error in the original press release, and then changed after it was pointed out.

Odds are, it was the latter. Whoever writes her press releases needs a grammar check.

I reminds me of when I was running against Ms. Castillo, and her campaign website actually misspelled the word "Superintendent." No kidding!

Update #2: It would be unfair of me to not fess up to a grammatical mistake of my own that happened during my campaign back then. It was in an interview with the Statesman Journal, talking about my early fundraising success. The reporter couldn't believe I had raised so much money so soon, and asked if I had loaned the money to my campaign. I said something like "There's no loans...".

He made sure that the grammar misake was not just printed in the story, but also was a pull quote, prominently displayed.

More propaganda

The Funny Paper has become a leading global warming propaganda sheet. It seems as if every single day there is some story that pushes the Al-Gore-Alarmist viewpoint.

Often they have to really stretch to create "news" that supports the narrative. Yesterday is a case in point.

The story was about a "panel discussion" that was part of "Public Health Week," a weeklong seminar/symposia put on by the Oregon Department of Human Services. The event itself is a perfect example of useless government activity. Governor Kulongoski issued a proclamation declaring April 7th to 13th to be Public Health Week, and the bureaucrats then get to have a conference so they can listen to each other pontificate about ways to empower themselves.

So of course, the government bureaucrats decided that the single most pressing "public health" issue of the day was ..... not sexually transmitted diseases, not Type II diabetes, not methamphetamine abuse, but (drumroll please) ..... global warming!

The theme for the week is: "Climate Change: Our Health in the Balance".

The story reported in The Funny Paper was about the panel discussion by a gaggle of certified smart folks who claim that a warmer Earth will create a health crisis. Read the story - it zigs and zag from the absurd to the easily refuted, then back to the ridiculous.

Featured in the story is Dr. Mel Kohn who tells about the public health disaster that will surely happen if the Earth heats up. More deaths from heatstroke. More allergies, because ragweed and poison ivy thrive on CO2. (Guess what? ALL plants thrive on CO2!) He said diminished snowpack means more wildfires and less water for farmers. (Meanwhile, record snow levels in Oregon's mountains!)

But the best part was the scariest thing I have ever read about the danger of global warmng: specter of spoiled potato salad at our picnics! Oh. My. God. He actually said: "If there's more sun, we're probably gunna see more spoiled potato salad." Sacre Bleu!

The solution to this crisis? You would have never guessed it. Honestly, who would predict that the crisis can be averted by "getting people out of their cars?"

I mean, what are the odds? Here we have a brand new risk to our health, and the solution just happens to be precisely what all the certified smart people have been advocating for years and years! They really ARE smart!

The Funny Paper did its sworn duty reporting this non-news event, without, as usual, so much as asking a single skeptical question. Such as: "Are there any positive health benefits to a warmer climate?"

It would seem that this would be an obvious question to anyone who was making claims that global warming was a huge public health problem. The panel itself, stacked with folks like Rex Burkholder and other members of the choir could hardly be expected to actually discuss the issue honestly - they have an obvious agenda, and the entire even is centered around giving them a forum to advance it.

But if we had a real newspaper rather than a propaganda sheet, we would have a reporter writing the story to whom it might occur that there might be a skeptical question or two to ask.A reporter who might actually look into the issue that was being discussed, and who might find, if such a reporter was actually serious about being a journalist, the following:

• A study by Stanford researcher Thomas Gale Moore found that warmer temperatures were related to lower mortality rates, not higher. Lots of reasons for this, one being there are far more col-related deaths than heat-related deaths.
• A 1999 book called "The Impact of Climate Change on the U.S. Economy" found that warmer temperatures would increase GDP, due to more productive agriculture and recreation sectors.
• Many other positive benefits from warmer winters: fewer highway deaths, lower heating bills, reduced energy needs, more usable land, and a slew others.

But I had to search high and low to find this stuff. Couldn't really expect a journalist to do that kind of research on deadline. After all, it took hours and hours to type "benefits of global warming" into Google, and find all of these things on the very first page.

Is there any doubt whatever that The Funny Paper is simply a propaganda sheet?

Subbing for Lars today

Lars Larson is en route to Israel today, so I'm subbing for him. Bill Clinton is in Oregon, so I'm seeing if KXL has the chops to get him on the air with me today for an interview.

Four days of sanity

I just got back from a few days in Phoenix. It's refreshing to be in a city where Wal-mart is not an eptihet and where they are serious about building roads so people can move around.

And I got back last night, scanned the week's newspapers, and was reminded again why Oregon is going to be stuck in a low growth pattern for the duration.

Just in the last four days, I see articles on:

- 1000 Friends wants to add carbon footprint goals to Oregon's land use policies, and magically, their study shows, the "Smart (idiot) Growth" policies they have pushed for years provide the very very very best model for how to meet those goals.

- The same type of folks are all worked up because if we build a bigger bridge over the Columbia for I-5, more cars will drive over it. "Sprawl and pollution will get worse, they say. Better not build it. If people can't drive, they sure won't sprawl.

- Cornelius wants to expand the size of their urban growth boundary so they can accomodate more industry. A local business, Sheldon Manufacturing, wants to expand, and will leave if they can't do it in Cornelius. Under Oregon's land use system, they have to go on bended knee to Metro and ask for permission to bring in the 161 acres, and it has so far been a four year process to get the nod.

But Metro says no!

Cornelius is a "severely distressed area" according to OECD. Tough shit, says Metro. We have our rules.

Their rules, according to David Bragdon, say that just because a local business has no room to expand doesn't qualify as "unanticipated need" in order to expand the boundary.

Councillor Rod Park, one of the dimmest bulbs I have ever met in public office, gave a quintessentially dim bulb rationale. He said Metro needs more time to study the regional supply of industrial land before deciding if there is a shortage. This guy thinks like a Soviet. Apparently having a business waiting in the wings wanting to expand isn't enough evidence of a shortage. Markets have nothing to do with it, I guess. It is bureaucrats who decide on supply and demand. Worked fine in Russia, I guess.

Phoenix is looking better all time.

Yet another inconvenient truth

You don't see this kind of thing reported here in the U.S.

The Australian Newspaper published an editorial with a transcript from an ABC Radio broadcast that featured some startling (for those who buy the global warming hysteria) news:

1) The planet has cooled since 1998, precisely the opposite of what the global climate models predict; and

2) The data from a new NASA satellite that can measure cloud formation (and therefore water vapor, thought to be a major player in the CO2 induced greenhouse effect) gives a result also precisely the opposite of the assumptions that underlie the climate models about the effect of H2O.

The satellite data is so strong a repudiation of the predictive ability of the models that the radio show guest said:

"A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience."

Actually, this is not at all likely. Far more likely is that all of these entities will do their level best to ignore this damning evidence, claim that the source of the data is tainted by "big oil," and ratchet up the volume of their calls for panic.

Idiot Chronicles

Every day I read and hear things in and around the political scene in Oregon that are just so idiotic that I've decided to chronicle them on this blog. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments.

Tops on the list this week:

- Maria Rojo de Steffey wants to close the Sellwood bridge. What a flippin' idiotic thing to do. Let's just get it over with and ban cars altogether.

- The Funny Paper reassured us this week that global warming is still real, even though the planet has cooled. Can't assume that weather anomalies like a record cold winter means there is any trend, you see. Of course for the last decade or so every time there has been a weather anomaly that supports the global warming agenda, they have splashed it on the front page. But that's different.

- The Funnty Paper tells Vancouver that it MUST accept lite rail on the I-5 bridge, or NO DEAL. They wrote:

"Political realities are different on either side of the river. Crudely put, support for replacing the bridge runs strong on the Washington side, while support for adding light rail runs stronger on the Oregon side. The two sides (and their respective states) are not likely to cooperate in financing the bridge unless they can meet halfway -- on a light-rail train."

Huh? Isn't that like: "Let's compromise, do it my way?"

- The state is handing out about $100 million a year to people who build solar energy projects that return about 1% on investment. What a great deal. One project written about cost $7 million, and saved $75,000 a year in electricity. REAL smart public policy. I've never heard a liberal whine about Oregon spending $200 million on this program, but propose spending $200 mil on jailing criminals, and oh-my-gosh they turn into fiscal skinflints.

That's it for now. But don't worry: Oregon is the world's export leader in idiotic ideas.

Obama is a pretender

As I write this I am listening to Barack Obama’s speech in Portland.

Talking about schools, he says we know what to do, but we “don’t have the will to fix our schools.” He proceeds to give a list of retreads: more early childhood education, pay teachers more money, maintain the highest standards, (but not high stakes testing!)

Not a word about merit pay, which he brought up several months ago only to be quickly potty trained by those special interest groups (teachers unions) that he likes to pretend he is independent from.

Looking at his plan for schools, it is obvious that 1) he knows squat and 2) his pretense of being a new kind of politician is a complete fantasy. I have yet to seen one idea of his in any policy area – the economy, the environment, foreign policy, etc - that doesn’t fit comfortably within the panoply of leftist/liberal positions.

How can a guy who has never once broken with his party’s interest groups pretend that he is going to unify the country? He’s just a lefty in pretty wrapping paper.

The widest river in the world

This is going to be a lot of fun to watch play out. It would actually be funny if it weren’t so important to the economic future of the region. But the battle lines are being drawn….

The Portland City Council, none of whom have any clue of economics, the private sector, or wealth creation, have thrown down the gauntlet: Unless Clark County and Vancouver agrees to put a choo-choo train over the Columbia River bridge, they will withdraw their support.

Now, last time Clark County had a vote on whether they wanted light rail, it went down 2-1. They opted for a transportation grid that allowed them to be competitive instead.

But it’s a decade later now, and the light rail delusion has infected the political class on the other side of the river. But the business class is fighting them – they see light rail for what it is: a boondoggle that will bring with it the same urban-renewal-transit-oriented-development-payoff-to-favored-developers scam that Portland has suffered through for the last 25 years.

And the people in Clark County? They just want a bridge that will allow them to get to their jobs in Portland and back home as quickly and efficiently as possible. They know that light rail won’t fill that need.

But on this side of the river, all our urban-utopia dreamers don’t want the bridge to handle car traffic. That would defeat the purpose! The purpose is to use the project’s $4.2 billion price tag to advance their agenda, which as Sam Adams told us, is to return to the transportation infrastructure of the 1930’s.

So on our side of the river they want light rail, a pedestrian lane, and probably an eco-roof. Oh – and hefty tolls to discourage cars from using it.

So we have a clash of world views, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. On the one side of the river you have people who want to be competitive. They have a new university campus which is already exposing our sorry excuse for higher education – Portland State – as the Marxist bastion it is. They want roads so they can be productive.

On our side of the river? Sustainability, bikes, choo choo trains and traffic jams. Productivity bad.

So who will win? Well, Sam Adams said to The Funny Paper that all we have to do is “show folks up north that they can enjoy the benefits of a transit-oriented development approach."

Heck, can’t they just look across the river at that wonderful success called Cascade Station? Or South Waterfront? Or the Beaverton Round? How could they be so unable to see all the benefits?

After all, if your name is Homer Williams, or Walsh Construction, or Gerding Edlen, or Mackenzie Group, the benefits are obvious!

Twenty years too late, Senator Obama

Barack Obama has been under fire lately for the incindiary pulpit rhetoric of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.

If you've heard the sermons of this fire breather, it's hard not to wonder how it was that Obama could have attended the church for 20 years, have a close spiritual relationship with this pastor, and consider him a mentor.

Rev. Wright is clearly a racist, and stridently anti-American. As excerpts from his sermons made their rounds for a couple weeks, I was surprised by Obama's silence. He barely bothered to distance himself from the guy. In the backdrop of Michele O'Bama's strange comment about never being proud of America until now, it did kind of make sense.

Yesterday Senator Obama finally came out and denounced Rev. Wright's comments in a post on the liberal blog Huffington Post. That's all well and good, but it left me a bit cold, with a few remaining questions:

- He says "I strongly condemn the statements." Fine. But is there any evidence that he expressed this condemnation ever before? In the last decade while Senator Obama was in elected office in Illinois and then the U.S. Senate, did he even one time say publicly that he rejected Rev. Wright's views? Or is this the first time ever, now that he's faced a cascade of public criticism?

- Is it reasonable to believe that Rev. Wright has been Senator Obama's mentor and spiritual leader and close personal friend for 20 years, so close that Obama's book is even named after one of Wright's sermons, even though Obama rejects Wright's racist and anti American views? How many mentors do YOU have who are racist and anti-American? It makes no sense that if Obama truly condemns such views he would maintain a close mentor relationship with the man who holds and professes them.

- Does Senator Obama have any other close personal relationships with people who think white America is the enemy? If so, he might as well bring it out now.

The fact is that Barack Obama spent his formative years in an environment where such racist and anti-American views were not considered at all extraordinary or out of the mainstream. I know that environment well - I lived for several years in his Chicago senate district.

He's having trouble distancing himself from this particular black urban sub-culture because he was part of it for the formative years of his life, and it is a part of him. Try as he might to distance himself from it now, he can't hide the fact that he was immersed in it for a couple decades, and used it to rise to the position he now holds.

It isn't quite as useful to his political career now, to say the least. But posting a condemnation on the Huffington Post isn't going to make this go away.

He's got a real problem. He doesn't like America. People who don't like America don't get elected president.

The regulatory urge

The state regulators are really trying to put the clamps on virtual charter schools, as reported in the Oregonian today.

For the better part of a year, the State Board of Education has been kicking around the issue of whether to allow additional on-line charter school programs into Oregon. There is currently one program, the Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA) which I helped get started.

The reason the state board is involved at all is because of a closed door deal that was cut in the 2005 session, in which the teacher union wanted to stop the new type of schools in their tracks. They convinced Speaker Karen Minnis to go along with a bill (in trade for something else, never clear at the time) that required any on-line charter school to get half of its students from the sponsoring district.

At the time, we were just getting ORCA organized. We got it done barely under the wire, and so were not forced to comply with this new “50% rule” until its first charter contract expires in 2010.

Other school districts are now proposing to create statewide virtual charter schools, and they have filed requests to the State Board of Education to waive the 50% rule, which they have the power to do. This was the question the state board pretty much resolved yesterday.

So the question to the board was basically how far do they want to open the window for on-line schooling? The answer: “Not very.”

I went to all of the meetings as they kicked this thing around. It was grueling, watching these mostly well-meaning people, most of whom have a decided bias toward preserving the status quo, try to get a handle on this innovative way to deliver education services.

Bottom line: the urge to control won out. The longer they kicked it around, the more the board members “concerns” found their way into conditions, limitations, and edicts on how any new school could operate.

The interesting thing to observe was the overriding attitude among the board members that it was absolutely their purview to make decisions about whether or not to allow these types of schools. None of them knew much about virtual schooling to begin with, but that didn’t prevent them from exercising their authority to control them.

Time and again individual board members revealed through their comments that their first concern was “the system.” They worried about the “impact” on school districts if they lost kids to a virtual school. I never once heard a board member worry about the impact on a student who is denied access to the educational option of his choice due to the controls the board was placing on virtual schools.

So it was apparent, after all was said and done, that the majority on the State Board of Education still has the system as its number one priority, and the interests of kids and parents is somewhere down the list. The implicit lack of trust that parents could choose wisely for their kids was obvious.

The irony was that the Board didn’t seem to understand that they actually don’t have the kind of control they assumed they had. The list of conditions they placed on virtual charter schools in Oregon are so onerous, that any school district that wants to create a virtual program will simply organize the school under Oregon’s alternative school law, and be able to circumvent almost every single one of the restrictions the state placed on the schools!

Here’s why: The big reason to organize a virtual school as a charter is because charters can enroll any kid in the state, even without the approval of the student’s home district. But the State Board required virtual charters to get home district approval anyway, and they also slathered on a ton of other restrictions and requirements, like caps on the number of kids they could enroll.

So they took away the “open enrollment” benefit of being a charter. So a virtual school will just organize as an alternative school. Alternative schools have to get approval from the home district also, but the State Board can’t touch them. All the other restrictions disappear!

So the State Board made that classic regulatory mistake: assuming they have more control than they actually do, so the regulations simply will be circumvented.

What does this all mean for ORCA? We don’t know. For now, ORCA is exempt from the “50% rule, so it operates outside the regulatory grip of the State Board. In 2010, ORCA might have to apply for a waiver from the rule, and that would subject the school to any similar restrictions and conditions the State Board wanted to cook up.

So the future is uncertain indeed. Stay tuned.

Filing day

The filing deadline has come and gone, and now it's time to do whatever we can to take back the House. This is NOT IMPOSSIBLE!

The Oregon House hinges on a slim 31-29 Democrat majority. The conventional wisdom says this will be a Democrat year, and Republicans are on the slide. Don't be so sure. State legislative races are where the axiom "all politics are local" was coined.

There are four or five races where the House majority will be determined, and the Republican candidates in these seats have legitimate chances to win. A 30-30 tie or a 31-29 majority for Republicans is NOT out of the question.

So I will be working with the House leadership to make this happen. I was very pleased that there will be no primary fight in House District 26, where Matt Wingard is now running unopposed. That is a reliable Republican seat, and Matt will fill it with distinction.

The work we are doing with the Conservative Majority Project (please click on the button to the right and donate!) I hope will be a big part of bringing a Republican majority to the House. As we identify the races we will be involved in, we will announce it here and then start badgering our friends for donations. So be forewarned.

Bottom line: Republicans have had a down cycle, and EVERYTHING runs in cycles. I am looking forward and seeing things getting better, much better, on the horizon. Like the sideview mirror on your car, I want to be part of making that horizon "closer than it appears."

Kevin Mannix. Matt Wingard. Greg Walden. There are lots of reasons to believe that in a year or two, Republicans will be on the upswing.

OEA endorses Novick

Steve Novick got the OEA endorsement yesterday, getting more than 60% of the votes cast. Hard to say how much, if at all, Merkley's charter school hypocrisy played into the vote, but it couldn't have helped.

The interesting thing is that this is now a real race. The OEA endorsement means money and boots on the ground for Novick, so this is a real race. That means both get bloodied, spend all the money they raise, and fight it out while Gordon Smith stands by and makes sure his hair doesn't get mussed.

Good news for Gordon Smith.

Confirmed: Merkley is now a liar and a hypocrite

It’s now completely clear: Jeff Merkley is both a liar and a hypocrite.

He’s lying about whether or not he and his wife “considered” enrolling their kids in a charter school, and he’s a hypocrite because he now has told the Bend Bulletin that he is still opposed to charter schools.

First, the lie: His story has constantly shifted, but the current version, in The Funny Paper today:

“Merkley said his wife heard about the school from a neighbor and was asked to fill out the forms when she visited. "I never saw the form," he said. "It's not a school we'd ever consider sending our kids to."

Except they did more than consider it. They filled out enrollment applications for both kids, individually. Arthur Academy has no form to fill out to “express interest.” Now, perhaps Merkley’s wife, who he says did the deed, didn’t realize what she was doing was filling out enrollment applications.

OK, let’s go with that. She filled out two forms, both titled “Enrollment Application,” one for each of their two kids, thinking that she was simply expressing interest in the school. Sure, that is believable.

But there is more than just the enrollment applications as a paper trail in this controversy. Merkley’s personal lawyer called the Arthur Academy after this story broke, and the school official sent the lawyer, by his request, copies of the applications along with an email that explained certain realities about what transpired. This e-mail is easily retrieved by a FOIA request, since it is public record.

Excerpt from the email from Arthur Academy to Merkley’s Lawyer:

“There are handwritten notes at the upper right of each form "per phone call 5-24-04 on wait list." We think this was written by someone in our office.

What this implies to me is that after the May 1 cutoff date, we conducted a lottery relating to any then-available spaces in grades for the next fall [September 2004] and that neither child was selected for such then-available spaces [it's possible all seats had already been filled after the earlier, March 1, cutoff and lottery].

Thus, the children were placed on the waiting lists for each grade, and a person in our office apparently called and talked to the parents or left a message to that effect on May 24.”

So not only did the Merkleys enroll their kids, but they were in the lottery, placed on the wait list, and then called and notified that their kids were on the wait list! Does that sound to you like they thought they had just “expressed interest” in the school?

The email answers this question:

“The submitted applications were to enroll the children, not merely to visit or consider the school, neither of which requires any application or other form.”

The Merkley’s say they decided not to send their kids to the school. Well, maybe. The school did not open that fall, so they couldn’t have sent them there even if they had wanted to. But the Arthur Academy has this to say about what the Merkley’s did or did not decide:

“We cannot tell what they decided or when, but the forms have no indication that they communicated to us such a decision before the lottery or before they were told on May 24 that their children had been placed on the waiting list (or at any other time). And there is no indication that when they were given this information, or thereafter, they told us to remove their children's names from our waiting list. But it's possible that happened.”

So they never told the school that they were no longer interested, even after being told they were on the waiting list. How plausible is that?

Bottom line, Merkley’s story makes no sense. He says he still opposes charter schools, but he applied for his own children to attend one. Classic hypocrisy.

When the fact became known, he obfuscated, threw his wife under the bus, basically claiming she was so dim she thought a form titled “Enrollment Application” was a form expressing interest in the school(!) and then lied, saying he would never consider sending his kids to this kind of school.

Not his finest moment.

New, revolutionary teaching method: instruction

I know I won’t be able to keep the sarcasm and anger out of this post, so I apologize in advance.

There’s a story in The Funny Paper today about how much better our schools are doing teaching English to English as Second Language (ESL) students, because they are using a “new way of teaching that has swept Oregon ESL classrooms in the past couple years.”

What is this new approach that our educators only recently discovered?

“Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don't miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.”

In other words: Instruction. The “new approach” is to actually instruct the students in the English language. So what on Earth were they doing before, one might ask? Well, the ESL coordinator at Gresham Barlow is helpful enough to give us the answer, as incredible as it seems.

Before you read the quote, please pause for a moment and prepare yourself to read one of the most idiotic things you have ever heard uttered. It should be enough to completely destroy any remaining confidence you might have in our education establishment:

“For a long time, we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do," said Danelle Heikkila, who directs the English Language Learner program for Gresham-Barlow schools.”

So the strategy before was to not instruct them, and just to hope the non English-speaking students would pick up the complicated English language by osmosis.

This is disturbing on so many levels. First, it reveals an incredible ignorance of how children acquire language skills. Yes, kids learn to speak English by simply being immersed in an environment where it is spoken. But reading is an entirely different matter, and decades of research proves it.

So to say that “native speakers” pick up reading by being “exposed” to English quite simply reveals such a shocking ignorance that this person should be fired immediately. The problem is that this is not an isolated attitude. It is the prevailing notion of how to teach English, as the article points out. Not just for ESL kids, but for all kids.

So for years and years, our public schools have been teaching English by not teaching them English. It’s called “Whole Language,” and it has failed miserably. But it’s not often it gets so clearly exposed as the farce it is, and for that we should thank Ms. Heikkila.

And then we should call for her resignation, and the resignation of the countless other bureaucrats, college of education professors and teachers who have perpetrated this fraud on the public for the last several decades.

But we all know, nobody will ever be held accountable for the untold damage done to kids’ lives by the fact that our schools simply refused to teach English for decades on end.

Which is it, Jeff Merkley, charter school advocate or hypocrite?

Throughout the whole “Charter-Gate” flap, in which Jeff Merkley has looked defensive and shifty trying to explain why he attempted to enroll his kids in a charter school, he is yet to answer the single most important question that the episode begs:

Do you now support charter schools, or are you just a huge hypocrite?

It has to be one or the other. He is backed into a corner, and can’t have it both ways. I know he’d like to tap dance around this core question until after the OEA endorsement convention this weekend, but I think the OEA members should ask him directly.

For some reason, he has not yet been made to answer this so very obvious and basic question in the aftermath of Charter-Gate.

Would you sacrifice your children for the public good?

I've long understood that there are two prevailing world views that are at the center of peoples' political philosophies: individualism and collectivism.

For the most part, conservatives tend to see things in individualist terms, while liberals are collectivist. No one, of course, is a purist. Rock ribbed conservatives understand that there is a role for a collectively funded government, and the most lily-livered liberal realizes that there are some things better left to private enterprise.

But it's a useful dichotomy, because it holds true.

The problem with the collectivist world view is that most people reject it, because they rightly see that it essentially enslaves people. Just how much are you supposed to give up for the public good? Who defines "public good," anyway? Most people understand that every tyranny in history was basically founded on this world view.

But occasionally you run across someone who is such a collectivist that he thinks you should sacrifice your own children for the benefit of the public good. We have one right here in Portland.

Terry Olsen, a former school teacher who blogs on education issues, is one such collectivist. He actually wrote the following on his blog the other day:

I don't think one can run for public office on a pro-public school platform after enrolling one's child in a private (or charter) school. Even to consider public school alternatives is, quite frankly, hypocritical.

I feel strongly about this. To divert human capital --namely good students with strong parental support-- from public schools is to undermine the ability of those schools to succeed. I completely reject the notion that the first responsibility of nominally public school-supporting parents is to consider the welfare of their own children while ignoring the well-being of others.

I cannot say, as others have, that their urge to seek out "better" options for their kids alone is either understandable or forgivable. To do so would be to acknowledge that the individual, or private, good trumps the common good. I don't believe it.

I find it hard to believe that someone would write this down. I know a lot of Democrats basically agree with it, but to actually write it down?

In this guy's world view, parents should sacrifice their children on the altar of serving others. If your school is dangerous and fails to teach your kid a thing? Tough luck - you have to keep your kid there because the other kids need your stablizing presence.

He completely rejects the notion that the first responsibility of parents is to consider the welfare of their own children? WOW!

Have you ever seen a more incredibly naked expression of collectivism?

In his view, your kids are "human capital," to be deployed by the ruling elite according to its objectives (the "common good, which they get to define, and which always somehow ends up benefiting the ruling elites.)

He says it is "unforgiveable" to send your kids to a non-public school. Presumably that would mean he would support using the coercive powers of government to prevent you from doing so. Coercion is the first and last tool of collectivists. Because people don't willingly sacrifice their interests to that of the collective, they must be forced.

It is scary indeed. Almost as scary as realizing that this man taught kids for a quarter century or so.

Phony outrage over the Merkley story

Over at BlueOregon, there’s a post criticizing Willamette Week for running with the Merkley story even though it was (supposedly) “sole-sourced.”

The implication is that Beth Slovic somehow has breached journalistic ethics by going with a story on the word of one person. What the author glosses over is that my information was pretty much confirmed by Merkley’s campaign manager. I say “pretty much,” because what Merkley’s manager did was the classic obfuscation non-denial, which in journalist circles is pretty much always considered a confirmation with damage control.

So, what Beth Slovic did was check out a source’s claim, and have it confirmed. Nothing unusual there.

In the comments section of the post, one guy (anonymous, but almost certainly a Merkley campaign staffer, based on the extensiveness of the post) takes me to task for revealing supposedly private information. He wrote:

"Fact #6 - Rob Kremer has held himself out as someone trustworthy enough to hold public office in the field of education. I can't think of an area where respecting confidentiality is more important than the field of education. To date, no one has written a story about this egregious violation of privacy by a very public person. (In addition, every parent and student at this charter school should ask if their privacy will be thrown under a bus if the school finds it useful at a later time.")

I love this! “Egregious violation of privacy!” Oh the outrage!

I seem to remember when I was “holding myself out as someone trustworthy enough to hold public office in the field of education,” that I was constantly hammered by the Teachers Union and my opponent for the fact that my kids were in private school. The implication being that it was hypocritical for someone to run for Sup’t of Public Instruction whose kids attended private school. (Of course, nobody could imagine that perhaps it was our family’s experiences with our public schools that both drove us to private schools AND motivated me to run for that office to improve the shortcomings we saw firsthand.)

But I didn’t think it was off base for that to be pointed out, and I dealt with that question many times on the campaign trail.

So I find it pretty funny that there would be so much outrage that Merkley has to defend the same question.

Jeff Merkley, Charter School Supporter

In the Willamette Week today: In 2004, Jeff Merkley applied to enroll his child in an Arthur Academy charter school.

Is this a big deal? I sure don’t think so.

Politicians change their minds all the time, and there are lots of Democrats who have changed their mind on charter schools.

Merkley voted against the original charter school bill in 1999, but to my knowledge he hasn’t had the opportunity to cast a vote since then that would reveal whether he now supports charters or not. So I wouldn’t call him a hypocrite – he just changed his mind, and he realizes now that charter schools are a perfectly valid public education option.

And to that I say: welcome, Jeff Merkley, to the growing ranks of charter school supporters!

I was the source of the story for Willamette Week, and over on their site, I’m getting hammered by some commenters who think I somehow did something unethical by “revealing” that he applied to Arthur Academy.

I don’t think so. I never thought it was that big of a deal. And this is not secret information. He applied back in 2004, and I was actually very pleased that we obviously had a convert to the movement. We didn’t get the school opened that year because our facility fell through, so the Merkley application was never processed. If we had opened the school, his application would have been in the lottery with all the others.

Several months ago, I think after Merkley announced he was running for Senate, I mentioned it to Nigel Jaquiss at the Willamette Week in one of our regular conversations. They ran the story this week, I guess because they thought it was an interesting issue just before the OEA did their endorsement in the Senate race. The fact that Merkley supports charters is indeed a newsworthy issue in this context.

What has been amazing is the incredible statements we have heard from the OEA folks. My friend Laurie Wimmer-Whelan told the WillyWeek that “she thinks teachers can separate Merkley's public record from his private actions.”

I guess this would have to mean that it is OK with the OEA that Merkley take advantage of school choices for his own kids as long as he votes to deny these options for everyone else. He gets a pass, I guess, because he is one of the elites. As long as he keeps voting to protect the union’s monopoly and keep everyone else’s kids trapped in a school that is not of their choice, forcing them to go to an OEA run school – he’s good to go!

I hope the truth of the matter is that Merkley is not a hypocrite at all. He may have voted no on the original bill back in 1999, but he now supports charters.

Which is why I say: Welcome to the charter movement, Jeff Merkley!

MEChA

Article in The Funny Paper today how Latino youth in high schools are finding great purpose in the Hispanic advocacy group MEChA, and are supposedly opening up the club to non-Hispanic students.

This is their second prominent article in as many months touting the remaking of this racist, separatist Hispanic organization into a student school based club at high schools and universities. I wrote my January column in BrainstormNW Magazine about it.

The Funny Paper seems to want to convince us that MEChA has changed its ways, that it is no longer just a group for radical Hispanic youth, but that now anybody can join.

The articles is headlined: “At MEChA, everyone can be Chicano.”

The sub-headline reads: “Group - Once criticized as racist, the student club now welcomes all, saying Chicano is a philosophy, not a race.”

The reporter, showing typical Funny Paper skepticism, apparently just took their word for it, and didn’t dig into what they mean by “Chicanismo” being a philosophy. If he had, he would have found on the group’s national web site an “explanation” of exactly what they mean:

"Chicanismo is a concept that integrates self-awareness with cultural identity, a necessary step in developing political consciousness. Therefore the term Chicano is grounded in a philosophy, not a nationality. Chicanismo does not exclude anyone, rather it includes those who acknowledge and work toward the betterment of La Raza."

So, anyone can be a "Chicano," as long as you work for the betterment of the chosen race? (La Raza.) Not a very convincing statement of inclusion and tolerance. And then they lurch right back to their trademark separatism:

"Chicanismo involves a personal decision to reject assimilation and work towards the preservation of our cultural heritage."

Sorry, I am unconvinced that the rapid spread of MEChA clubs in our high schools is such a great thing. Why does The Funny Paper want to lie to us about what this club is really about?

More on the teacher-predators

The more I think about our public school officials protecting teachers who molest kids and sending them off to molest kids in other districts, the madder I get.

I heard a few politicians talking about the problem over the last 24 hours. Majority Leader Dave Hunt was on the Victoria Taft Show last night, and he was talking in even tones about doing this and that to deal with the problem. He said we could fund more TSPC investigators, and he talked about some other changes the legislature made in 2007.

But what he didn't address: Who is going to hold the public officials accountable who knowingly protected these predators, and gave them a pass so they could molest again? The Oregonian found several dozen cases where such deals were made.

I want to know every single district where this happened, and the names of every one of the superintendents, local union president, and school board members who were party to these decisions, so the public has a full understanding of the unconscionable breach of public trust by these supposed guardians of our childrens' well being.

Dave Hunt acted as if this was a techinical foul-up of some sort, some kind of loophole that needs fixing. It's not - it's adults protecting themselves and their interests at the expense of the kids.

THAT is what we have to keep pointing out, and if that puts the Dave Hunts of the world in a tough spot, well, GOOD!

Children as livestock

Another great example of the attitude of your run-of-the-mill public school educator about the kids: an article in the Register-Guard about on-line charter schools, and whether they should be allowed to enroll kids across district boundaries.

“I call this poaching,” said Bob De La Vergne, superintendent of the Coos Bay School District. “It drains the system.”

It couldn't be much clearer - he thinks of children as captives, his district's exclusive property that exist to feed the system, rather than to be educated. If the parents think the kids will be better served in the charter school, they must be stopped, because "the system" is a higher priority.

Aren't you glad you'll be funding this esteemed "educator's" retirement to the tune of about $90K per year until he dies?

Teacher molesters

Kudos to the Oregonian for an excellent series on how the public schools handle teachers who have abused students. In short, in several hundred cases the Oregonian found, Oregon's schools do pretty much what the Archdiocese got sued for: cover it up and pass the employee to another location.

It's unconscionable, and it is a stark illustration of how much the school system is set up to benefit the adults rather than the children. Teacher gets caught with inappropriate contact with a student, and rather than go throught the expensive and time consuming process to discipline him, the district allows him to leave and agrees not to give a bad reference.

Off he goes to molest again. Imagine being the parent of a daughter who was molested by a teacher who had been passed along like this because the district didn't want to bother with the hassle of doing what they should. I would be murderous, I can tell you.

It is made even more outrageous given that these school officals are all mandatory reporting personnel - they are required by law to report any suspicion of child abuse. But when it's their employee, not only do the fail to report it, but they actively cover it up so the molester can find more victims!

Today the House Republicans tried to introduce a bill to deal with this problem, and the Democrats balked. The bill would have required a rules change, and the D's refused. They called it a cheap political stunt, but in my view they look horrible - standing by their teacher union puppetmasters, kicking the kids under the school bus.

This must be fixed. It's one of those rare issues that is not only the right thing to do, but it is a great politcal issue because the Democrats will only go along kicking and screaming, revealing where their loyalties REALLY lie.

They think you are cute

Read the dismissive tone of this post on BlueOregon about the Conservative Majority Project.

Then come back here and click the button to the right, and send the CMP a contribution.

The Northern Illinois shooter

When I first heard about yet another college campus mass murder, I thought: "I'll lay odds that this guy had recently stopped taking a psychotropic drug."

For several days all I read was what a mystery it was that a guy who was a good student, had a girlfriend, was liked by other students and his professors would do something like this.

Then I read a short blurb in the paper quoting his girlfriend, who mentioned in an almost offhand way, after saying what a great, caring, sensitive guy he was, that he didn't like the effects of the anti-depressents he was taking, so he stopped taking them.

Bingo.

Why is there such reluctance to point this out? So many of the school shootings, both college and high school, have been associated with psychotroic drugs (especially the withdrawal from them) that it is pretty clearly not a coincidence. Look at the research abotut he side effects of drugs like Luvox, Effexor and Paxil - the FDA is considering enhancing its warning labels on these drugs to identify the enhanced risks of suicidal thoughts among young adults who take them. Those warnings already exist for adolescents.

The FDA research on these drugs shows that depending on the drug, from about .5% to 1% of people taking it will have a side effect of "mania" or "hypomania," described as "a terrible form of insanity including symptoms of sexual compulsions, criminal behavior, alcohol cravings, rages leading to domestic violence, delusions of grandeur -- often mistaken for increased self confidence, wild spending and varied types of criminal behavior."

Why are we surprised when another shooting happens? Why does the media feign confusion over why someone would do such a thing? Why do they not look FIRST to the question of psychotropic drugs? Why are they so reluctant to lay these atrocities at the doorstep of the psychiatric profession?

Conservative Majority Project

I am heading up a new political action committee whose goal it is to bring about a conservative majority in the legislature. It’s called the Conservative Majority Project, and it seeks to bring to bear the fundraising power of the Netroots upon selected legislative races.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Republican Party is not dead in Oregon. We are barely in the minority in the House, and there is a good chance the next governor will be a Republican.

I’ve teamed up with Jared McKinney, a young guy with grass-roots political experience way beyond his years, to help make the Republican party once again a majority party in Oregon through the fundraising power of the Netroots.

We need your help. Please go to the web site and contribute what you can. We’ve seen the power of this kind of fundraising; it can make a huge difference. If you are a blogger, please consider linking to our site and encouraging your readers to donate.

Our strategy will be to select a careful few races where there is a reasonable prospect of picking up a legislative seat, and where our resources and tactical campaign expertise can perhaps make the difference.

We are not simply going to be channeling funds to candidates shotgun-style. We will apply our resources in a thoughtful way where we have reason to believe that either we can be the difference in the Republicans holding a seat, or, better yet, picking a seat up.

We will not be interested in candidates unless they are true conservatives. We understand that our party must be a big tent, and that means in some districts, only a less conservative Republican can win. That is fine – but we will almost certainly not be involved in these races.

There is also a chance that we can find a large donor to match donations we receive from the Netroots. We are working on this, and will announce it when we seal the deal.

It is vitally important that Republicans control at least one chamber of the legislature – we have seen what happens when the Democrats are unchecked. I am not ready to give up. I’m not ready to concede that the 2009 session will have Republicans again in the minority.

We need to pick up two seats to control the House. Just one seat to get a tie, and be able to prevent a lot of Democrat mischief.

Please help us raise Netroots funds to bring back a Conservative Majority!

Thank you!

31 votes of ignorance

Yesterday 31 of 31 Democrat state legislators in Oregon proved that they are utterly ignorant of the basic founding principle of our nation.

That is putting it charitably. To be less charitable, perhaps one could argue that these folks know and understand this basic founding principle, but reject it. In other words, they don't believe in America.

On the floor of the House yesterday they debated HJR 100, which basically declares affordable health care a fundamental right, and instructs the legislature to create a program to fulfill this right.

Declaring health care (or any other service government might wish to provide) as a "right" is to completely destroy the entire notion of individual rights, which quite literally is THE most fundamental underpinning of our Republic.

In our system, rights are things the government cannot do to you. They come from God, and it is the purpose of government to secure them. Rights are ALL, by definition, stated in the negative: "Congress shall pass no law abridging...."

This is the most important concept in our nations founding, because up til that time, it was assumed that the soverign was the source of rights, and the people had only such autonomy as the soveriegn saw fit to allow.

But if rights come from God, the government's relationship to the individual is quite different indeed: there are strict limits on the power of government over the individual.

So this notion of individual rights is quite literally the most important founding principle of our country. And 31 legislators, all of them Democrats, just announced that they don't believe in it.

No, they believe that a right can be something that the government must do for you. And so they voted to make affordable health care one of those rights.

When they try to explain their reasoning, things get wierd. The logic gets tortured to the point of their words becoming void of any meaning. Look what Rep. Ben Cannon said in the floor debate, pulled from The Funny Paper, explaining how he views rights:

"He said rights are grounded in allowing 'us to deliberate over and choose a good life for ourselves.' Health care is one such right."

This is utterly meaningless. He has managed to take a concept that is at the core of our founding, and tortured it to a point where it literally has no meaning. Rights are now "grounded" in "deliberation?" Anybody care to take a whack at what that might mean?

If this is all a right is, then is there anything that is NOT a right? I could argue pretty much every mundane thing in life is somehow related to my choosing a good life for myself.

This is far more than a semantic issue. It is not just nit picking definitions.

How can our rights be protected - and I mean our real rights - the rights we have FROM government actions, if our lawmakers destroy the very meaning of rights in the first place? Our nation has set itself apart from every other nation on God's green earth because our founders had the wisdom to realize that rights are vested in the individual, come from God, and put limits on the authority government has over the individual.

It is absolutely essential that this founding principle of our nation survives if we are to continue to exist as a nation. It is THE MOST IMPORTANT principle of our founding, without which we would have been in the dustbin of history along with all the other failed experiments.

And yesterday, 31 Democrat legislators told you precisely what they think of this principle. They don't believe in it, and they will actively work to change it.

In other words, they don't believe in America.

Sho Dozono being pretty evasive

Sho Dozono is running for mayor, and before he's barely started, there's already a controversy.

Dozono is qualifying for public financing, but news that a poll was done asking questions about his viability created some questions about whether he had already exceeded the limits on "in-kind contributions" for public financing candidates, and therefore had disqualfied himself.

It appears that he'll be OK, based mostly on the "on-the-fly" rulemaking on the public campaign financing system. But his explanations about the poll are very hard to follow, and make almost no sense.

Dozono says that he did not commission the poll, nor pay for the poll, but he had seen the results. That was how The Funny Paper reported it all week. You would think that such a vague answer would cause any reporter to ask the followup: "who gave you the results?"

But if it was asked, there is nothing written about his answer.

I mean, come on - someone had to give him the poll results, and whoever that is no doubt had some ties back to whoever did it. Unless maybe one of his friends just found it on the streetcorner.

There are slews of questions that anybody who was truly seeking to get the bottom of this would automatically ask: Which firm did the poll? How many questions did it entail? How large was the sample size? But apparently the crack reportage at The Funny Paper couldn't think of them.

If Dozono has nothing to hide, he would have no problem answering these questions. If he TRULY had nothing to hide, he would offer everything he knows, so he could clear the whole thing up and prove that he had nothing to do with the poll.

The way I see it, Sho has given a very evasive and unsatisfactory answer about this whole thing, and that is a bad way to start a mayoral campaign.

I could care less if he caused the poll to be done. Who would run for office without doing a poll? How plausible is it that he DIDN'T cause the poll to be done? Did someone just wake up one day and decide to commission a $10,000 poll on Sho Dozono because he was curious?

If given a choice of Sho Dozono or Sam Adams for mayor, I would vote for Sho (if I lived in Portland, which I don't.)

But it is really irritating to see Dozono default into the same posture we have seen time and again from public officials: obfuscate, tell half the story, evade - and then to have the newspaper of record put its incompetence on display once again and fail to even swerve into a relevant question about the matter that might shed some light.

If Sho Dozono handles such an insignificant issue like this with such guarded secrecy, what would his administration be like? Woould it be any better than the hacks that run city government now?

Delicious Irony

Too funny. The biofuels craze causes global warming.

A new report headlined in the New York Times and breathleslly reported on the front page of The Funny Paper says that planting and harvesting corn for biofuels has a huge net positive carbon dioxide impact!

The Funny Paper headline was even more ironic: it said that biofuels were “not a bargain.” When I read that I thought: “Hey, maybe they finally figured out that biofuels are not cost efficient!” No such luck.

The Funny Paper doesn’t care if we waste tens of millions of dollars subsidizing alternative fuels that cost more to produce than the end product is worth. That wouldn’t be news.

But if it creates greenhouse gasses? Front page news.

Not that it would have been hard to figure out. One more time: if something costs more to produce, then that means it consumes more resources to produce it. Resources always boil down to energy, in one way or another. So the fact that biofuels have a net positive CO2 footprint is a pretty obvious and unsurprising result.

Unless you have no clue at all about economics. What a bunch of dopes.

I miss Phil Keisling

The last Democrat I voted for was Phil Keisling.

It was before I was intensly involved in Oregon politics, although I definitely was very intensely focused on politics, even then. Just as an avocation rather than vocation.

But I met Phil the first time at my next door neighbor's house, a downtown lawyer, who had Phil over for an evening coffee/fundraiser during his first re-election. It must have been 1992. I listened to him speak, and wasn't particularly impressed. Obviously bright guy, doing the campaigning thing.

We chatted before I left, he didn't know me from Adam, and he asked me what I thought of vote by mail. (It was on the ballot at the time, as I recall.)

A while later I reached out to him because I wanted to invite him to speak to a group of educators I was involved with assembling, and he was making noises about perhaps running for Sup't of Public Instruction. His office arranged a time for us to meet, and he came by the office i worked in.

We spoke for over an hour, debated, shared views, argued. We had some common ground and we differed on a lot, but I could see that this was a guy who was not afraid of ideas.

He would prove that to me time and again over the next several years, as we would regularly meet and spar over our various positions on things. Here was a guy who held a statewide office as a Democrat, but who had an enjoyment of the intellectual jousting over ideas that can only come from the confidence that he has subjected those ideas to intense intellectual scrutiny. That's why he was willing to talk them through.

We'd have these 2 hour breakfasts where we debated various things. He was always ready to test what he thought against the best arguments anyone could bring.

Where the Hell is that today? There are only a couple of Democrats I know today who are confident enough in what they believe that they are willing test it against the opposing views. Steve Novick is one. Sam Adams is another.

But for the most part, what we get is hack Democrats who retreat into the comfort of our one-party state. Bill Bradbury knows that the fix is in, so does Ted Kulongoski. Why would they expose their intellectual shortcomings?

And that is why I respect and miss Phil Keisling. He could have gone the Kulongoski route, kissed the unions' asses and maybe been governor. But he cared too much about ideas (many of which I disagree with, and many of which the unions disagree with) so he was too dangerous for the people who really run the Democrat party.

But I miss Phil Keisling.

Our Secretary of State is a crook

One of the costs of a one-party, single newspaper state is that outright corruption goes unchecked, unreported, and openly tolerated.

A prime example is in the petition lawsuit that was decided yesterday by Federal judge Mossman. Mossman probably made the correct decision on the technicalities of the question in front of him, which turned on pretty arcane questions of whether there is a constitutional right surrounding initiative petitions as there is in voting.

He said there was not, and maybe this is correct. This question has nothing to do, in my mind, with the REAL issue at hand: Bill Bradbury openly cheats, and when caught, knows that there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

And The Funny Paper looks the other way, because they got the result they wanted. So do all the Democrats. Ends justifies the means.

In case you don't know what I am talking about: There was an attempt to refer to the ballot the gay marriage law that passed last session. Enough signatures were excluded to barely keep it off the ballot. The problem was that lots of the signatures that were tossed were actually valid, and the people who signed them went into the county elections office and verified that it was indeed their signatures.

But the county election officials still refused to count the signatures! Even though the deadline had not even passed!

So, here is where we stand: Bill Bradbury can exclude any signature he wants from the ballot, and there is no way to challenge or appeal any one of those decisions. His determination is final. So he literally has the power to keep any initiative off the ballot, and there is no appeal, no challenge. If he says the signatures don't match, that is all that matters.

The state lawyers said that all that matters is if, in the opinion of the bureaucrat who looks at the signature, there is not a match. It doesn't matter, according to Oregon law, if the signature actually IS the person's signature. That is of "no moment" under law.

Here is why that cannot be true: that would mean that a forged signature that was traced, and therefore matched perfectly, would have to be accepted, even if the person whose signature it was told officials that they did not sign it. After all - if the only thing that matters is if the signatures match, then the forged signature is valid.

Absurd.

The real crime here is all the Democrats and The Funny Paper who stand silently by as our government officials simply cheat to obtain the result they want.

They are all discussing the court decision, and pretending that the constitutional question is the real issue. It's not. The real issue is integrity, and I have to question the integrity of anyone who pretends that this kind of thing is OK.

I think it's going to be Hillary

I watched the debate tonight - the first Democrat debate I've seen. Hillary won.

It was pretty clear to me that Obama decided going in that he was not going to challenge Hillary in a confrontational way. I think that is a huge mistake, and I think on the strength of this performance, Hillary will all but wrap things up next Tuesday.

My analysis: Hillary's weakness is that she is often unlikeable. Obama's strength is that he is eminently likeable. Obama should have done everything he could to rattle Hillary so her unlikeability would surface as it inevitably does when she gets pissed. We've all seen it: she gets that shrill, defensive, haughty, entitled "how dare you" demeanor, her face tightens, her frozen smile seems even more phony than usual.

Obama should have tried like hell to bring that out, but instead he softened every blow, and actually seemed to intentionally take passes on chances to give her the old backhand.

So Hillary was composed, almost charming at times, and seemed in control all night long. The crowd helped - it was clearly a CNN (Clinton News Network) crowd, so Hillary got applause line after applause line.

I was disappointed, not because I want Obama to win (I think Hillary is easier to beat) but because I was looking for high political theatre with sparks and gnashing of teeth, and instead we got a civil, almost boring debate where the answers were too long by half and nothing at all inspirational or even remotely surprising happened,

On to SuperTuesday.

What a contrast!

A couple weeks ago I wrote about The Funny Paper's insulting and dismissive "Monday Profile" on Randal O'Toole, who is the nation's leading critic of so-called "Smart Growth" transportation and land use policies. Without going over it again, suffice to say that I pointed out that when The Funny Paper does a Monday Profile on some advocate for liberal political causes, they do a fawning fluff piece.

Two days ago we got a great example of exactly what I was talking about. They did a profile on a Lewis & Clark economics professor who is going to save the world. He's going to "re-wire" the planet in order to fight global warming. He plans to completely shift the world's economy from fossil fuel based energy to "sustainable" energy sources.

Uh huh. Good luck with that. Just how will an econ prof from a second tier liberal arts school bring about such massive change on a global scale?

Well, he is going to organize global warming pep rallies on campuses all over the country. That ought to do it, right? He's got 1500 college and high school campuses to hold global warming "teach-ins" tomorrow, where presumably all the mush brained coeds will get their marching orders on what needs to be done to change the world how our megalomaniac Lewis & Clark econ prof thinks is necessary to save the world.

Now, I could go on and on about how idiotic this kind of warmed-over 1960's era activism is, and I could point out how ridiculous it is for publicly funded institutions to be pushing political agendas with our tax dollars, and I could point out how ironic it is that an economics professor would actually have so little understanding of economics that he thinks he could shift the global energy supply from fossil fuels to something else through government action.

But that is not my point in this post. My point here is to show how the Oregonian treats charlatans like this with absolute velvet kid gloves. Nary a critical word in the entire piece. Not a single opposing view on his cause - global warming. Not a single critic on any of the oh-so-ripe subjects above. Nothing.

Just a fawning fluff piece, to make us all realize how wonderful and caring he is.

Contrast that to the O'Toole piece, where they quoted Homer Williams calling him an "idiot," and had PSU's planning pundit Ethan Seltzer saying that nobody should listen to O'Toole, much less write about him.

Apparently The Funny Paper feels no compunction to marginalize an activist who advocates for things they believe in, no matter how Quixotic his quest, no matter how self-obsessed his motives.

So on the one hand you have Randal O'Toole, who just published a thick book with the data supporting his criticisms of Smart Growth, who has had a fellowship at Harvard, and writes for the pre-eminent free market think tank in the world.

With him, The Funny Paper swerves off the road to run him over, the entire piece dripping with sarcasm and dismissiveness.

On the other hand, you have a second tier econ prof who is now writing a memior (why would this guy have a memoir?) called "Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction. How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming."

Guess which guy gets lionized by The Funny Paper?

The best story line

I decide which football team to root for based on which team has the best, most interesting story line. I like football, but I don't really have any team allegiances. I just want to be entertained, and that, for me, means I have to be interested.

So I root for the team that has the most interesting story. Up until last weekend, that was the Packers. What is more interesting than a 38 year old QB having a career year, making it to the Super Bowl and defeating a world class team that is itself on the precipice of football history? Great story.

But the Packers lost, so now the best story line is the Patriots chance at a perfect season. So I'll root for them.

But this post isn't about football. It's about politics. Presidential politics. I am really, really not excited about John McCain as president. So, like football, I don't really have any "team allegiance" in the presidential race. So maybe now I should root for the candidate that makes the best story, like I do in football.

Looking at the now-narrowed field of candidates on both sides of the aisle, which candidate is the most interesting story line? Here's a hint: the three remaining Republican candidates rank #'s 3, 4 and 5.

The story line of both Hillary and Obama are far, far more interesting than any of the three Republicans. And between Hillary and Obama, it isn't even close.

Obama is the most interesting story, by far.

Void of ideas

If Oregon Republicans are ever going to win back majority status in Oregon, it will be because we present a reform agenda with a portfolio of principles and ideas that make sense to people. When voters want reform, they vote Republican, and when they want government programs, they vote Democrat.

So it makes no sense for Republicans to offer establishment-oriented programs as a way to win the hearts and minds of voters, yet that is what our leadership offers time and time again.

We were treated to another shining example of this lack of vision in a post on today's Oregon Catalyst. The source of the press-release that motivated the post is the Senate Republican Office. If this is what passes for a Republican reform idea, we can look forward to a long run as a minority party.

The Senate leaders, in the press release, try to capitalize on a recent report that gave Oregon a failing grade for "preparing and supporting teachers." Senator Ted Ferrioli delivers the punchline:

“Last session Senate Republicans championed a number of proposals to bring excellence to Oregon classrooms, like professional standards and resources for teachers or ensuring financial accountability in school districts. Unfortunately, those proposals received little attention from the Democrat majority.”

Yawn.

So the big problem in our schools is that we dont have sufficient "professional standards" or enough "resources" for teachers? Is this what passes for vision in our Republican leadership?

Hey, I get trying to score political points on the heels of a national report that shows Oregon's schools in a bad light. But to think that this is an effective way to capitalize - by touting things that would only have served to empower the education bureaucracy (and the unions) - shows an intellectual laziness or a complete lack of understanding about the real issues that confront the schools.

It also reveals an inexplicable lack of courage. In the middle of a presidential election where every single one of the Republican candidates have school choice at the center of his education proposals, Oregon Republicans can only muster this kind of mealy-mouthed nonsense.

Here's what Rudy Giuliani (no movement conservative, he) had to say about "resources for teachers" in a video clip that is front and center on the issues page of his campaign web site:

Rudy: What we need is choice.

Questioner: That is going to bring back public school teachers?

Rudy: “I love teachers, I think teachers are wonderful. There are great ones, there are average ones, there are bad ones …. but I really care about the kids more. Sorry. We should have choice. We should empower parents. They should decide - private school, parochial school, public school, charter school, home school - that will give the parents control over the kids education. I think it's the single largest civil rights issue in the 21st century.”

Why is it that a presidential candidate, with his entire national candidacy at stake, has the courage to say this, and our local Republican leadership doesn't?

Honestly, if this is the quality of the ideas coming out of our leaders, we deserve to lose.

Supporters rally behind Wingard

As reported at NW Republican, supporters have rallied behin Matt Wingard in the face of his abandonment by House Caucus Leader Bruce Hanna.

Standing by Matt are all sorts of local dignitaries - incumbent Representative Jerry Krummell, a former Mayor of Wilsonville (and current Chamber of Commerce chair,) State Senator Larry George, and a host of others.

If Bruce Hanna thought that Matt Wingard would just shrink away when he threw him under the bus, I guess he thought wrong. I kind of feel sorry for whoever it is that they are recruiting to run against Matt.

This race will be about whether District 26 wants the well known candidate backed by local people and local leaders who know Matt and his work on local issues, or the candidate chosen by the big money, out-of-district Repblican lobby who needs a more reliable vote for their various insiders schemes and deals they cook up.

I guess the game is on. I just hope that Hanna's candidate knows exactly what he or she might be waing into.

I support Matt Wingard

You probably read about it on the blogs today, and it will be in the newspapers tomorrow: Matt Wingard, Republican candidate for House District 26 (Wilsonville) pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge in 2001 for striking his son on the top of the head.

I know Matt very well. He ran my campaign for Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2001-02, which was when the charges were filed. So I lived through it with him at the time. Before I hired him, he told me what happened and what he was going through legally.

I hired him, and we basically spent 80% of our waking moments with each other for the next nine months. You get the full measure of a man when you spend that kind of time with him in the pressure cooker of a statewide campaign.

The charges filed against him were, in my view, pretty badly trumped up. Yes, he struck his boy on the head. Hard enough to raise a lump. A single moment of frustration, he reacted wrongly and made a mistake.

Our legal system is all-too-ready to take something like this and put a guy through a several year nightmare. In my opinion it didn't come close to rising to the level of anything criminal. But yes, he struck his son. So yes, technically, I guess that is assault.

Matt could have fought the case rather than plead guilty, but he did not have the $20-30,000 his lawyers told him it would cost, and he would have had to have his then seven year old son testify, and be dragged through the trial process. So he pled it out.

So that is it.

I know the other side will make all sorts of hay out of this; there's nothing that can be done about that. But I want readers of this blog to know the full scope and scale of what happened, from the one person who was perhaps closest to him at the time he was going through it.

I am VERY disappointed in the Republican House leadership that they have decided to abandon Matt because of this. I will stand by Matt, whatever he decides to do.

He's still going to run for the House seat, and I will help. I will join the many others: Rep. Jerry Krummel, Rep. Kim Thatcher, Russ Walker, and others - people who know Matt well and have worked with him over the years, who support him and will see to it that he is elected because he is exactly the type of person we want in the Oregon House of Representatives.

I hope Bruce Hanna will reconsider. But if he doesn't - if what the Oregonian reported turns out to be true, that they will run someone against Matt in the primary - well, then I will help Matt beat whoever it is. And I know he'll have plenty of others supporting and helping him as well.

I don't relish or seek out political battles against Republican leadership, but it seems to happen almost every session. I've been involved with several. The House leadership was very angry when we helped Kim Thatcher beat Vic Backlund in the Keizer-area House seat. But it was the right thing to do, and Kim Thatcher is a fabulous legislator - far, far superior to Backlund.

The Senate leadership was apoplectic when Larry George ran against Charles Starr. I supported Larry, helped raise funds, even though I have great respect for Charles Starr, and do to this day. But his time was up. Again, we won. And Larry is an incredibly talented legislator.

So we have some experience with taking on our own caucus leadership when necessary and winning. I am quite confident that it will be no different with Matt.

Matt will run, the leadership will slate another candidate, raise the funds, run the campaign, and we will win. And all will be right with the world. We'll still be friends with Bruce Hanna and the rest of the House Caucus, and Matt will be a productive and teamwork oriented caucus member. And we will have yet another terrific legislator, far better than the candidate the leadership runs, and the Republican party will be stronger and better for it, despite the best efforts of leadership.

I wish it didn't have to be this way, but we did not pick this fight. But we will win it!

I support Matt Wingard.

I know how to cure the recession!

The New York Times is working overtime to convince everyone how bad the economy is. Headlines every single day on the mortgage crisis, the real-estate bubble bursting, developers going banko, etc.

We've seen this movie before - right about 1992 as I recall, when Bush 41 was running for re-election. The economy was in a slowdown, nothing serious, but they had to support Bill Clinton's campaign narrative that we were in the "worst economy of the last 50 years."

It's starting again, right on schedule. With the presidential election 10+ months out, expect increasingly hysterical accounts our of the "newspaper of record" about how awful the economy is, timed to reach a crescendo right about November first.

Those articles on the economy have replaced the articles they thought they would be writing in that space to convince people to vote for the democrat candidate: articles about how bad the war in Iraq was going.

The war, oddly enough, is almost totally off the pages of the New York Times. It's just not very useful for them when casualties are way down and things are looking up.

So they've changed topics, and are trying to make the economy the biggest issue for the election. And that means they have to convince us all we are in a horrible recession.

So, how to end the recession? Simple: have the Surge stop working. If things start going badly again in Iraq, you can bet your bottom dollar the NYT shift gears right back to Iraq, and we won't hear how bad the economy is anymore.

Absolutist interpretation of establishment clause in McKenzie, Oregon

The senior class in McKenzie, Oregon, chose a class motto for their graduation ceremonies that was loosely based on a scripture, Isaiah 40:31. The school district has banned it.

The motto reads: "They that believe shall mount up with wings as eagles."

The original passage reads: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles."

The school’s mascot is the Eagle, and the students thought that if they removed reference to God in the motto, it would be OK. Not so, according to the school district’s attorney, Bruce Zagar. In his formal opinion to the school district, he gave one of the most absolutist interpretations of the establishment clause that I have ever heard.

From the KATU story: “he advised the district that both the U.S. and Oregon constitutions prevent any public entity from taking any action which establishes, sponsors, supports or otherwise condones a particular religion or religious belief.”

Wow. If this is true, how can the U.S. Supreme Court start its sessions with a prayer? How can high school choirs sing Christmas songs?

I know something about this because just a couple weeks ago I asked Dave Fidanque, a lawyer for the ACLU, about high school choirs singing religious based songs in their Christmas programs. He said there really is no problem as long as the program itself does not constitute a religious ceremony.

Clearly, a high school choir singing Handels Messiah would constitute “condoning” a particular religion.

Apparently, according to this lawyer, any motto or expression published by the school that is based on a religious principle is off limits. So I guess they could not have an ethics code published that says “don’t steal.”

This is a ridiculously extreme position to take. It is wrong on the law, and it reflects the hostile attitude toward religion in our public schools.

The next sure thing - must act now!

The lead editorial in The Funny Paper today sounds like one of those breathless mortgage radio spots where the fast talking huckster tells us we will never see rates this low again.

Or maybe like one of those penny-stock broker cold-calls where we are urged to act now, because this company you've never heard of is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The Funny Paper's next "Can't Miss Sure Thing:" Sustainability.

First, with a track record like theirs, one would think they might keep their hubris under wraps just a tad. These are the same people who brought you the bio-tech boom, touting the 10,000 biotech jobs that were sure to come from the half-billion or so public dollar investment in OHSU/South Waterfront.

But there's a reason for my slogan for Portland: "Where nothing succeeds like failure."

The fact that The Funny Paper has been the mouthpiece for every high profile failure in Oregon government over the last few decades is no reason to stop now. They are so sure that Oregon can be the global leader in sustainability that they want to bet the bank - again - to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

They want Portland to create a "major research institute," which would "anchor the emerging 'innovation quadrant' of degree programs" in our universities. Huh? What on Earth does that mean? When The Funny Paper starts talking about "emerging" this-and-that, I think of their touting "creative industiries," "bio-tech," and all the other expensive failures they have shoveled up over the years.

But it gets better. Not content with just throwing public dollars at the latest fad, they want to infuse the fad into all our public institutions: "Imagine, too, a systemwide commitment to infuse sustainability into ALL college-level programs. And yes, to reach down into public schools."

"None of this can wait," they tell us. I can almost hear their heart palpitating. Of course it can't wait. If we wait, we might see that this sustainability craze is just the latest in a long line of fads that The Funny Paper has been suckered by over the years. If we wait, we will realize that most of the so-called sustainable building and energy practices are really not cost effective - that they really involve spending a lot of money to save a little energy, and the only way there will be any demand for it is if government mandates it. (Which of course they support.)

Well, let's call The Funny Paper's bluff. Let's one-up them. Let's embrace sustainability in a major way.

What, I ask you, is less sustainable than the newspaper business? Think about it! It requires cutting down trees. It uses harmful and unnatural chemicals to process the pulp and run the printing presses. It burns fossil fuels to deliver the product to every nook and cranny of the region every single day.

And all this for a product that has a one-day useful life! What could be less sustainable than that?!!

So I propose that we re-raise The Funny Paper in the sustainability game. No more hardcopy daily newspapers - internet only.

It's just not sustainable!

Barack-Star

The Barack Obama meteor has been a very interesting phenomenon to watch.

His campaign is at an interesting juncture right now. In the next three weeks I think it will become clear whether he is a legitimate nomination-worthy politician, or just another mecurial flight of fancy.

I was skeptical from the start of the Obama craze. I read parts of his books and found them wholly without substance, and I doubted that any kind of true political coalition could be built on such a flimsy, cotton candy foundation. At some point, I argued, he would have to dispense with the inspirational but empty rhetoric about "change" and talk about how he would actually govern. And then people would see he is basically your garden variety big-city lefty.

But as he gathered steam and steamrolled Hillary in Iowa, I started to rethink it. I believed the New Hampshire polls, and thought "Holy crap! The Democrats hate Hillary so much they just might hand it to this eminiently unqualified guy!"

But the polls were wrong, and now everything is up in the air again. As much as it was very satisfying to think Hillary was getting a much deserved comeuppance, and that the end of the Clinton era was upon us, I also knew that Hillary is the candidate I want a Republican to run against in the fall.

So it is all in flux now, and that makes things very entertaining. It should remain so right up to super-Tuesday.

On Obama, an editorial today by Rich Lowry put it quite well:

Ultimately, the problem for Obama is that he is promising something that is impossible - a harmonic convergence of the country around what, at bottom, is an utterly conventional liberal policy agenda.

MacPherson disqualifies himself

Rep. Greg MacPherson is running for Attorney General, and he has a tough primary fight on hands. Judging from a recent campain release he put out, he apparently thinks he has to pander to his party's left wing to get the nomination. But in doing so, he has pretty much demonstrated that his legal mind is not competent to be Oregon's AG.

Here's the deal: MacPherson sent a campaign e-mail complaining about the "Washington-based religious zealots" who filed a lawsuit to stop Oregon's civil union law from taking effect, asking that signatures that were disqualified from the referendum petition be reinstated so that the voters would get to vote on the measure.

MacPherson's legal error is that he charged conservatives with only caring about "states' rights" when it suits them, but when a state passes some law conservatives don't agree with, the principle of states' rights goes out the window.

The question I have for MacPherson: Are you that stupid? Or do you just assume that WE are that stupid?

First, there is no such thing as "states' rights." States don't have rights. States have powers. Only individuals have rights.

It is revealing, however, that liberals so often make this mistake. They actually believe that states have rights, just as they often believe that government creates wealth.

But the more significant legal error MacPherson makes, one that cannot be just passed off as a semantic error, is his assertion that the civil unions lawsuit is an example of misguided "federalism."

He gives a couple examples of where Oregon has passed some law but then the federal government stepped in to prevent the law from going into effect. Then he claims the civil union lawsuit is another example.

It's not.

Referendum petitions were circulated to allow voters to vote on the civil unions law. It failed by 95 signatures. More than 20 signatures were excluded by the county elections officials because they supposedly did not match the signers' signatures on the voter registration card.

The petitioners went to the signees, got them to sign an affadavit attesting that it was indeed their signature, and took the affadavit back to the counties. Some counties still refused to allow the signatures to be counted as valid!

For each signature let back in, it results in 19 more valid signatures in the total count, since the procedure of validating petitions is to sample 5% of the signatures submitted.

So the lawsuit is simply asking the question whether the government should have the power to unilaterally disqualify signatures without any check or balance on whether the reason for invalidating it was valid. If it is a question of "states' rights," (states' powers) then the question is whether the state should have the unfettered power to exclude signatures from petitions for any reason whatever.

Apparently MacPherson thinks it should.

And he is running for Attorney General.

Terrific.

Hosting Lars Larson Show today

From 11:00 til 3:00 today and tomorrow I will be subbing for Lars.

Tune in/call in!