Blogs

There is a bad wind blowing from Washington D.C.

We must keep constant pressure on our legislators.

It does not matter what side you're on because they will follow the majority opinion.

 From the Oregoniam

By Steve Novick

On Tuesday, Bill Sizemore's measure to allow an unlimited deduction of federal taxes on Oregon income tax returns -- a repeat of a measure Oregon voters defeated in 2000 -- qualified for the November ballot.  Sizemore's measure will join, among other things, Kevin Mannix's measure to impose mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain property crimes.  What the two ballot titles won't tell voters is what impact either measure would have on education, health care, senior services and child protective services in Oregon.  But, in fact, the measures will divert money that would otherwise be spent on those services.

Sizemore's measure would reduce the amount of money in the state general fund -- by $550 million in the 2009-11 biennium and by $1.75 billion in the 2011-13 biennium.  The bulk of that money would go to the wealthiest people in the state.  The average tax cut for people in the top 1 percent of earnings would be more than $15,000, while the average for people in the middle 20 percent would be $1.

Mannix's measure would increase spending on prisons by $250 million to $400 million a biennium.  Since Mannix's measure is an unfunded mandate, that increase would have to be paid for by reducing the amount of money that would otherwise be spent on other general fund services.

Have
you ever daydreamed about being a Sam Spade, Magnum P.I., V.I.
Warshawski, Miss Marples, Kinsey Millhone, or other hard bitten truth
seeker? Well now is your chance. We have many more unsolved cases
than there are sharp witted sleuths to track down the clues.

For
example, take the case of the missing personality of John McCain.
Surely, somewhere in the swirling reversals and inconsistencies there
lies a knowable person who CAN be found. Or how about the missing
six trillion dollars which have disappeared since the Bush
administration took over the White House by coup? Or where in the
world is Donald Rumsfeld? Where does Gordon Smith get his campaign
money? He talks a good game but does he really deliver? Is it true
that Canadian troops are amassed on our northern border to quell
civil uprisings when Bush declares martial law? I could go on and on,
but ours is a relatively small newsletter.

You
can be trained as a detective and begin to make significant inroads
into these and other nefarious cases, if you join the Legislative
Committee. We are at the beginning of a massive effort to track down
as much information as possible about political issues, legislation,
legislators, and candidates and make it easily available to all of
our Democratic family and others. Call Rich Harisay at 503-769-3339.
After training you will be issued a badge, a gun (pen), and a secret
password.

From Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: 12 Reasons to Get Out of Iraq
 

12 Answers to Questions No One Is Bothering to Ask about Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling?

And here's the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the "success" of the President's surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well.

Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq -- and of thinking in Washington.  So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military's worst Iraq nightmare:

The weekend of April 11th thru April 13th was my first experience with a Democratic Convention and I learned a lot.  As delegates it was our job to arrive at a platform which will direct our energies until we meet again to reconsider it.  We had roughly 65 categories which were to be divided into six legislative action items and six principles for a total of 780 planks of up to 50 words each.  When you multiply that by an average length of 35 words the score is 27,300 words;  a lot of work.

This is the code by which we focus our legislative efforts and formulate our ever changing rules for living together as a society. We could simplify this complex code as follows:

1. Thou shalt not covet.  Think about it;  if you don't covet, you don't steal.  No matter what the object or the size of the object might be.  And you probably would not need the next principle either, but let's throw it in for safety's sake.

2. Thou shalt not kill.  Four words suffice here, we don't need 50.

3. Thou shalt not worship more than THIS ONE GOD. Does away with a lot of conflicting rules and gives the option of not worshiping at all.

This Post contributed by MoveOn 

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China.  Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose.  He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade.  It should be overturned."4

5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children.  He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.5

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires.  The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes!  Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.6

Provided by John Estelle

This is a long excerpt from Lee Iacocca's book . Let's try to remember that Iacocca was Mr. Corporate America, not a lover of unions and chair of the committee that raised funds to refurbish the Statute of Liberty -- in other words, not a charter member of MoveOn.org.

 This article from the Oregonian was written by Juan Carlos Ordonez
communications director for the Oregon Center for Public Policy in
Silverton. It points up what is wrong with the kicker which was
brought to voters by an initiative, not by the legislature. It also
tells why we voters must be much more wary of the measures that sell
us a lie that on its surface seems to give us something but really
takes more away than it gives.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007 

Soon, the state will mail a record-breaking $1.1 billion in "kicker" rebate checks to Oregon taxpayers. Reasons abound for why the kicker is all-around bad public policy or, as The Oregonian noted in an editorial last year, "a dumb, fiscally destructive law." But none looms as large as the fact that it squanders a great opportunity to safeguard Oregonians.