Glass Slipper

“There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear,” Buffalo Springfield sang in 1967. Actually it was pretty clear what was happening back then: Hundreds of thousands of Americans were demanding an end to the Vietnam War.
For over a month now, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking part in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Starting in New York, the protests have spread across the United States and the world. There's even an Occupy Bend event, with demonstrators camping in a vacant lot on (where else?) Wall Street.
Compared to the Vietnam-era protesters, the Occupy Wall Streeters are a strangely mixed ideological bag. Their gripes are about everything from home foreclosures to the Federal Reserve to the high cost of gasoline to the alleged cover-up of the real story behind 9/11.
Critics of Occupy Wall Street – mostly Wall Street's Masters of the Universe themselves and their shills in politics and the media – try to use this lack of a single sharp focus to discredit the movement. “It's just a ragtag mob of lazy socialist communist hippie trustafarians with too much time on their hands and no idea what they really want,” their rap goes.

In its abominable ruling in the Citizens United case last year, the US Supreme Court decreed that corporations have the same free-speech rights as actual flesh-and-blood people. Short of a constitutional amendment, there probably isn't anything we can do about that.
But at least government can try to make sure that real citizens know which candidates and causes corporate “citizens” are giving their money to. Oregon Treasury Secretary Ted Wheeler is working to make that happen.
Wheeler sent a letter last week to the US Securities and Exchange Commission asking it to make publicly traded corporations disclose their campaign contributions. Many already do it voluntarily – including 60 of the firms on Standard & Poor's Top 100 list – but a substantial number don't.

In a month when Texas Gov. Rick “Hang 'Em High” Perry is winning applause at GOP presidential debates by talking about his 234 executions and how he'd like to abolish Social Security, it was some comfort to see the Oregon Republican Party take a step – even a tentative baby step – into the 21st
century.
Up until now, the Oregon GOP's official platform included language that condemned gay marriage and civil unions and implied that gay couples were unfit to bring up children. But at its state convention in Bend last weekend, the party – prompted by a coalition of young Turks led by Xander Almeida, 26, of Portland – voted to ditch the worst gay-bashing language.
The revised platform is hardly a ringing endorsement of progressive ideas about gay rights, marriage or reproductive freedom. It proclaims that “the traditional family is ordained by God our Creator and is the foundation of our society. A traditional family is formed through the marriage of one man and one woman. This … environment is the optimum for raising children into responsible, self-sufficient, productive citizens” – apparently implying that kids raised by same-sex couples are destined to become crack-addicted welfare bums.

President Obama and the Republicans have been doing a weird little dance ever since Obama was inaugurated in 2009. It might be called the Congressional Two-Step.
It goes like this: The Republicans take two steps to the right. Then Obama takes two steps to the right. Then the Republicans take two more steps to the right. Then Obama takes two more steps to the right, calls it a “compromise” and declares victory.
Obama and the Republicans just concluded an extended performance of the dance during the fight over raising the federal debt ceiling. On Tuesday – the deadline beyond which the nation supposedly would have gone into default on its debts – the Senate passed and Obama signed what was described as a compromise bill to raise the ceiling in exchange for $2.5 trillion in government spending cuts.

Maybe Oregon should pass a constitutional amendment requiring the state legislature to be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Judging by what the legislature achieved during its last session in spite of its partisan division, we could do a lot worse.
One of the legislature's biggest achievements, which we honored with a GLASS SLIPPER three weeks ago, was passing a redistricting plan – something it hadn't previously managed to do for 30 years. But it racked up a number of other significant accomplishments. Among other things, the legislature:

Redistricting is a job that can't be done without making some people unhappy. In fact, it often seems like it can't be done without making everybody unhappy.
So fraught with partisan rancor and political peril is the redistricting process that the Oregon Legislature hasn't managed to do it in 30 years. Since 1981, every time it tried to draw new district lines it wound up so hopelessly tangled in partisan knots that it had to turn the job over to the secretary of state.

The United States Senate has been called America's most exclusive club. Like many old and exclusive clubs, it has developed a lot of quirky rules and procedures over the centuries. Some are just peculiar; others seriously undermine the democratic process.
Over the past year, Oregon's two senators have led determined fights to change two of the worst, most antiquated, most anti-democratic Senate rules. One of them won and the other lost. But both senators deserve props for giving it their best shot.
The senator who won his reform battle was Ron Wyden. His target was the “secret hold,” a sneaky and sleazy practice through which any senator could block action on any legislation for any reason, or no reason – and without even revealing that he or she was the one doing it.

There have been gays in the American military as long as there has been an American military. But for more than 230 years they've had to hide their sexual identity from the men and women they served with.
That stupid and shameful anachronism will come to an end soon, thanks to the 111th Congress's decision to end the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy. Support for repeal was bipartisan, and the margins were impressive: 250 to 175 in the House (with all of Oregon's representatives voting “yes” except our own lamentable Greg Walden) and 65 to 31 in the Senate (with Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley both in favor).