Posted 12:18 AM by Ben | Link
RHONANI. Today I'm off to Cape Town, South Africa, for this. I doubt I'll do much blogging while I'm there, if any. Expect activity at this site to pick up again around February 10th. In the meantime, keep up with Portland over at Portland Communique. With war looming, read passionate and thoughtful analysis at Talking Points Memo and OxBlog.

(BTW, "rhonani" means "good night" in Xhosa, the language spoken by many Cape Town blacks).

Posted 9:57 AM by Ben | Link
MY FINAL WORDS ON 28. I slipped my ballot in the post today, pretty confident that it is the most expensive vote I will ever cast. Not because Measure 28's passage would cost me much in additional taxes (it wouldn't), but because it cost me $5 in postage to ensure a timely overseas delivery.

I've spent quite a bit of time in this blog attempting to explain misperceptions about what Measure 28 would actually cost Oregon taxpayers. And I've taken the Libertarian Party to task for its cynical anti-28 campaign. But the truth is that supporting Measure 28 doesn't really have much to do with whether it will raise taxes by $5 or $7, or about the campaign tactics to which its opponents have resorted.

Measure 28's really about what kind of responsibility we, as a society, owe toward people like these:

•The Pusieski family of Oregon City, who rely on state support to help take care of their mentally retarded and autistic daughter and a son with learning disabilities.

•The 106-year-old woman who stands to get kicked out of her Tillamook County nursing home,

•26-year-old Billy Malloy of McMinnville, whose combination of cerebral palsy, severe autism, and mental retardation left him incapable of interacting with the world until he hooked up with the state-supported Tualatin Valley Workshop South.

•Ashleigh Campi, a Crescent Valley High School senior who worries that losing 10 days of school would mean crunching her honors literature and film studies classes.

•78 and 75-year old Robert and Hazel Herron, who are trying to figure out which of their medications they will be forced to stop taking if Measure 28 fails.

•Lori Schneider of Oregon City, who stands to lose medical, mental and dental care, as well as a living allowance of $314 per month while she waits for her application for disability coverage to be processed.

•41-year-old Kathy Shak of Corvallis, whose hopes for regaining the employment she lost due to a severe mental illness depend on state-subsidized treatment and medication benefits she would lose if Measure 28 fails.

I guess one of the things that really gets me about these stories is my sense of just how fragile is the line that separates their lives from my own. I'm young, healthy, and reasonably bright; I have a loving wife and a great family who would do everything they could for me. But the world's an unpredictable place and, in the end, we're all pretty vulnerable creatures.

To lend a helping hand to others is deeply and instinctively human. To extend that care to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they worship, or what they own, would be mankind's most profound act. We're a long ways off yet, but let's not let go of the goal.

Posted 4:55 AM by Ben | Link
TED'S FIRST WEEK. What is leadership -- seeking consensus among existing points of view or calling people to a higher path? Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski has heard praise and criticism for a first week that appeared crafted to soothe legislators still smarting from Kitzhaber's confrontational approach; praise from those who think the governor won't make headway until he makes allies, criticism from those who believe it's up to the governor to sound "notes of urgency" on behalf of Oregon's students, disabled, elderly, and poor.

Posted 4:38 AM by Ben | Link
NOT AN OREGON LINK. Nope, just one to honor my grandpa, an incredible person and star retiree (click the right arrow for a second photo).

Posted 1:16 AM by Ben | Link
BLACKMAIL? Mitch Shults, chairman of the Oregon Libertarian Party, is confident that the failure of Measure 28 wouldn't actually result in cuts to the budgets of school districts, state police, prisons and programs for elderly, poor and mentally ill people. No, he reassured Jackson County voters this week, you don't have to worry about the consequences of voting no on Measure 28 because the Legislature will step in and find enough money to save the really important programs.

Er, okay. This is not only wrong but is a bizarre rationale to hear from the mouth of a libertarian. Don't these guys believe that government should have no role except for a few key functions such as defense and law enforcement? For a truly principled Oregon libertarian, it has to be disheartening to hear the party's leader describe plans that would only nibble around the edges of "big government" -- Shults suggests a temporary hiring freeze, updating of the state retirement system mortality tables, cutting middle management, temporary wage reductions, privatization of the state motor pool, and elimination of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (a perennial favorite). What about cutting all those wasteful social services, privatizing education, ending land use planning, and dismantling environmental regulations?*

Shults' statements can be understood in only one of two ways. Either he is (a) backing down from libertarian ideals when confronted with the reality of what their fulfillment would mean for Oregonians or (b) making the false promise that "it won't be as bad as they say" in a cynical attempt to confuse centrist voters into supporting a libertarian agenda that not only endorses the proposed cuts but is committed to seeing them substantially deepened.

If it's the latter, then Shults is hardly one to accuse Measure 28 supporters of blackmail.

*If you think I'm misrepresenting the libertarian point of view, here are some quotes from the Oregon Libertarian Party's Statement of Principles:

The protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of government ... Government intervention in such areas as pollution, health care delivery, decaying cities, and poverty, must properly be limited to protection of individual rights.

We advocate ... ending tax supported "mental health" propaganda campaigns and community mental "health" centers and programs.

We support the abolition of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

We support the repeal of all compulsory education laws, and an end to government operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges.

We oppose all government welfare, relief projects and "aid to the poor" programs. All aid for the poor should come from private sources.

Posted 4:10 PM by Ben | Link
REDUX: WHO'S VOTING NO on Measure 28?

Not the editorial boards of the Eugene Register-Guard, the Oregonian, the McMinnville News-Register, the Medford Mail Tribune, or the Salem Statesman-Journal.

Posted 3:56 PM by Ben | Link
WHO'S VOTING NO on Measure 28? The online version of this anti-28 commentary in the Oregonian does not include the writer's name. I suppose this is a mistake on the part of the Oregonian, although it wouldn't really be surprising if the person who penned it preferred to withhold his or her name, especially when he or she resorts to arguments like this:

It's hard to believe a 12 percent reduction can be accomplished only by cuts to K-12 school spending, laying off state police, letting inmates out of prison and ending support for the aged and mentally ill.

You have to figure that when opponents resort to claiming that "it won't be as bad as people say," they don't have much of a case. For a more detailed analysis of what's wrong with the claim, see my earlier post here.

Posted 3:41 PM by Ben | Link
SECRET MEETINGS of the Oregon legislature. The Associated Press, the Oregonian and 15 other Oregon newspapers sign a letter asking legislators to open their party caucuses to the public. According to the Oregonian,

Caucus meetings determine which bills live and die, which will get hearings and votes, and which will be quietly, even secretly, buried.

The newspapers should be lauded, but in an era of a federal administration whose policy is to reject all record requests if there is any possible legal basis for doing so, I fear the effort won't amount to much.

Posted 9:55 AM by Ben | Link
DEMOCRACY AND SCHOOLS. When democracy isn't working, what's the solution -- more democracy, or less? Last week's Tribune reports that several Portland education leaders are in favor of scrapping school board elections in favor of an appointed board. According to Board Chairwoman Karla Wenzel:

My opinion is that this doesn’t work ... That’s my starting point: An elected board of seven people doesn’t work.

With startling candor, Wenzel blames the current system for producing a board whose members lack sufficient expertise (especially fiscal and managerial) and tend to look out for the people who elected them rather than the system as a whole.

These are serious failures. But Alexis DeTocqueville, John Dewey, Amy Guttman, and Portland school board member Marc Abrams are right: moving to an appointed board would impose a fundamentally antidemocratic solution on a public project -- education -- that needs more democracy, not less.

As the Trib mentions, the past decade has seen mayoral takeovers of "failing" public school districts in a rash of major cities, including Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York. But the good news for democrats (little "d") -- and what the Trib fails to mention -- is that several have found ways to increase democratic control over public schools even while dismantling the elected board.

In Chicago, for instance, the mayor appoints the Board of Education, which deals with district-wide issues such as taxation and distribution. But for the last decade, individual schools have been run by locally-elected Local School Councils. LSCs hire the principal, approve the school budget, develop and oversee individual school improvement plans, and act as the final arbiter for most school issues. Now, improvement has been uneven, with some LSCs replicating the disfunction that existed on the district's board before the reform (see the Consortium on Chicago School Research for a gateway to good Chicago schools research). But overall, most observers seem to think that that the experiment has shown that when parents, teachers, and local community members are given meaningful responsibility for the governance of the local school, the result has been positive for students and for democracy.

Posted 4:28 AM by Ben | Link
GIVING US A BAD NAME. Grrr. It's enough to make you gnash your teeth... another example of lefties using shallow arguments and even worse tactics in support of causes that have some merit. I'm referring to the attempts by protesters to stop a family rabbit hunt sponsored by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department. The hunt will go on but it will not be sponsored by OFWD, which backed down after receiving physical threats from opponents.

This says plenty already about the tactics of some protesters. But let's look at some of their arguments against the hunt. Matt Rossell, the Portland director of Defenders of Animals, showed up in a bunny costume to tell the Department that:

We’re opposed to a state agency encouraging people to kill animals as a fun, family event.

If Rossell's problem with hunting is the suffering and untimely death of innocent animals, then raising such a stink when the stakes are so comparatively low -- a few wild rabbits versus, say, millions of factory-raised chickens -- just serves to trivialize the cause of animal rights. If Rossell's opposes hunting in particular because of the attitude toward life that he believes the sport inculcates, then he's on much shakier ground. I don't know of any evidence to support the idea that hunting makes someone more callous toward human or natural life any more than something like fishing, say. There are other reasons one can oppose hunting – the preservation of a species, for instance, or the fact it makes certain areas of land virtually unusable for anyone else – but those arguments don't really seem in play here.

Rossell adds this:

We are all too familiar with the tragic events when children and firearms mix.

The article goes on to explain, predictably:

As with several other anti-hunting speakers, he alluded to Columbine and Thurston high schools as graphic examples of children and guns.

Yikes! Now the problem with the rabbit hunt is that it will turn kids into school shooters. Never mind that far more children are hurt as a result of accidentally mishandling guns than are hurt in school shootings, so that even if learning to hunt rabbits with family did somehow slightly increase a kid's likelihood of intentionally killing a classmate (which I doubt), this would almost certainly be more than offset by the many kids who learn enough gun safety to avoid accidentally hurting themselves or others by screwing around with the gun at home.

From where I stand, some amount of hunting is a given in the USA. The important fights are over who should be allowed to own a gun, what types of guns should be permitted, and where, when and how hunting should be allowed to take place. The family rabbit hunt doesn't have any bearing on these.

What the family rabbit hunt does touch on is what kind of attitude toward guns a kid who grows up in a gun-owning family develops. And an event where kids learn the importance of gun safety, experience for themselves the very real danger of the weapon, and see it put to an appropriate use is a good thing, indeed.

Posted 2:37 AM by Ben | Link
CITY CLUB UPDATE. The City Club of Portland voted yesterday to endorse Measure 28, upon the recommendation of the research committee that produced this Beaverblog-corrected study.

Posted 2:09 AM by Ben | Link
WHAT THE OPPONENTS SAY. The Measure 28 ballots are out (mom or dad, please send mine, quick!). Pretty much every newspaper and every state leader supports the measure, yet most people think it is doomed to fail. I think that's partly because of the damage done by the point raised here:

Given that the total budget for the current two-year period is still larger than the previous two-year period, someone has mismanaged even more money than I had first thought.

That's from PDX Nag although, to be fair, I can't be absolutely sure that Ron opposes Measure 28.

I admit this touches on what could be a very reasonable argument against raising taxes. It basically says to the state, "Yeah, we know that during the flush years of the 1990s you got used to big budget increases, and now that's going to have to end. But the bottom line is that you'll still have the biggest budget in history, so first, what's with these threats you're making that you'll have cut to a third of your workforce if the increase doesn't pass? Either you're just trying to blackmail voters into supporting a tax increase or you're guilty of serious budget mismanagement."

Now, let's think about this for a moment. Imagine running a state agency back in 2001, or 1999, or 1997, when times were good. Money is pouring in, and the budget you get from the legislature every two years just keeps growing. Revenue forecasts continue to look strong. So, what do you do? You hire a few more staff, upgrade some equipment, and give your staff modest pay raises. You get around to catching up on the work that didn't get done during the last recession. Of course, like any good fiscal administrator, you know that your money will go farther if you're willing to spread the costs out over the long run. So when you upgrade the department's computers, for instance, you make a contract with Dell to pay for 20 percent now and the rest, with a little interest, over the next few years. You do the same for the office furniture, the new vehicles, and the land for the new operations center that your additional staff requires.

Now, it's 2003. You're in the final six months of a two-year budget that the legislature passed back in 2001 based partly on economic forecasts from the previous year, back when the economy still looked pretty good. This budget included your ongoing payments to Dell, Ford, etc., plus salaries and other month-to-month operational expenses. It even included money for more capital upgrades, so it was pretty big. Of course, when the economy began to tank -- pretty much at the beginning of the 2001-03 budget cycle -- you realized you wouldn't be able to make those additional upgrades. But now that the bottom has really fallen out of revenue, what are you going to do? You still have the promises to Dell, et.al. to fulfil.

The state of Oregon -- unlike the federal government or a private company -- can't simply borrow money to cover a deficit. So, unless the legislature finds a way to generate more revenue, your only option is to cut back on month-to-month expenses. In other words, you've got to cut staff.

I submit that this is basically why the Oregon State Police says that it will have to cut a third of its employees if Measure 28 doesn't pass, even though it would still have spent more over the last two years than any other two-year period in its history. It's not clear to me that this necessarily involves "mismanaging" money, unless you think that incurring debt on the basis of what future revenue you expect is an irresponsible way to run an organization.

Still, I don't intend to suggest that the government never "wastes" money. Did your agency really need the new vehicles back in the late-1990s? I only mean to show that government's past actions have future consequences, and making budget cuts isn't as simple as "cutting out the waste" while preserving essential services. There is a reason that the failure of Measure 28 would have such an immediate and drastic effect on state services even though state spending would, overall, remain level. Measure 28's opponents will go on saying it, but the cuts we've been hearing about do not necessarily reflect mismanagement, nor are they idle threats to goad Oregonians into voting yes.

Posted 12:51 AM by Ben | Link
BLOGS IN THE PRESS. The Oregonian features a story about blogs in Friday's Living section. Local blogs Jack Bog's Blog, The Portland Communique, and Matt's Angry Little Thoughts earn a mention. Sadly, nothing on Beaverblog, but I did get a few more visitors than usual via the link on Jack's page.

It's interesting to note that at least three local blogs -- mine, The Portland Communique, and PDX Nag -- began within a week of each other last month, helping fill what had been almost the complete absence of "newsy" blogs focused on Portland or Oregon.

Posted 5:43 PM by Ben | Link
OOH, SCORE ONE FOR BEAVERBLOG! And two for the integrity of the City Club of Portland. This just in from Wade Fickler, the City Club's research director, in reference to the issue I raised in my earlier posts about the Club's Measure 28 study.

Ben,

I have received feedback from City Club's Measure 28 committee and the State Revenue Office. We have reached consensus that the sentence "Because state forecasts project the additional tax revenue from Measure 28 will be less in 2003 and 2004, the annual average impact on Oregon taxpayers over the three-year period will be significantly less than the dollar amounts in the table indicate" is inaccurate. Footnote #5, however, is accurate and perhaps is still an important piece of information. The aforementioned statement did not lead to a conclusion and, therefore, does not affect the committee's recommendation to vote "yes" on Measure 28.

City Club will vote on this report and the committee's recommendation on January 10 (tomorrow). Prior to the vote, the chair of the Measure 28 committee will announce the correction. This will ensure that all members present will have the correct information prior to their vote. In addition, we will post an amended version of the report on our website. Copies of the report distributed after today will include a correction statement, or we will send the amended report in lieu of the original.

[Etc.]

I think it is the sign of an intellectually honest organization that it would amend its own findings on the basis of an inquiry from a random person like me (I am not a member). The Club's reports continue to be the most reliable way I have found to cut through the thickets of partisanship or complexity that surround most "serious" research on topics of major local and state importance.

If you want to know why City Club research works, check out their self-imposed rules for doing it. Unfortunately, I can't find their research guidelines online now, but they include things like thorough screening of potential committee members for real or apparent conflicts of interest, interviewing experts who testify on all sides of the issue, and commiting members to approaching the question at hand with a fair and open mind. Good stuff.

Posted 4:09 PM by Ben | Link
SUNSET LADIES. Preview a calendar that features the women of Seaside, Oregon, in various states of undress (link courtesy of Margie Boule's column in today's Oregonian). It's certain to quicken the pace of many a Hood to Coast runner on their way to the finish line at Seaside.

Posted 3:03 PM by Ben | Link
DON'T MESS WITH JOURNALISTS. Ever. No matter whether they're smaller than you, or younger than you, or dumber than you. It doesn't pay.

Just ask Stephen Rogers of Joseph, Oregon, who was cited Saturday for the theft of several hundred copies of the Wallowa County Chieftain. He and his bowling alley boss bought or stole every copy of the Chieftain they could lay their hands on in an effort to keep the public from reading about a co-worker whose conviction for sexual abuse of a minor was reported in the Chieftain's Jan. 2 edition.

This caper story is full of twists and turns, including the crooks' attempt to pay for the stolen issues and, when that failed, their attempt to deliver the stolen issues back to the newspaper office.

It's really amazing to me that there are intelligent people who think this kind of thing can work. What did the Chieftain editors do when they noticed all their copies had disappeared overnight? Printed 1,000 more and rushed the story online, of course. The college newspaper I edited had a similar problem with an administrator who was offended by our annual April Fool's edition (with pretty good reason, too, but that's another matter). He was seen emptying our bins directly into the dumpster behind his office. What did we do? Reported the story as serious news on the front page of the next week's issue. He didn't try it again.

While there's a comical side to the Wallowa County story, it's basically sad. Rogers and his boss were trying to protect a guy who had been convicted of a sexual assault two years earlier in another state. Should the Chieftain have printed the story?

Posted 9:36 AM by Ben | Link
ANTI-WAR OREGONIANS, PART TWO. I just can't help updating my earlier post with this, from Sherman Alston in Vale, Oregon:

"I say, 'stay out of Baghdad.' They've had a system there for 2,400 years -- they've had a good system and besides, I believe in God. You're tromping on his side now. Not too far from Baghdad is where the old Garden of Eden is hidden. Don't get my young men into this mess now in that country with the different things they have to do to fight.

"No, we don't need to go to war. If we need to go to war, let's get some of us old buzzards out there and send them first, instead of our young men and our young women. I'm not against all wars -- just this one. I say leave Baghdad alone. One little old town, one might, one power. Even if it looks like it might come out good, even if everything comes out just right for a while, we're going to have to pay for this one. It ain't gonna work. I say stay out of it."