The Boot

Bend City Council elections are supposed to be non-partisan, and generally that's worked pretty well for us. Our council races are far less acrimonious than, say, the typical campaign for president, Congress or even the State legislature.
But Troy Reinhart apparently would like to change that. Reinhart, the Chairman of the Deschutes County Republican Party, ripped into City Councilor Mark Capell, a registered Democrat, in an e-mail to party members last week.
“I think for Republicans, he's a target,” Reinhart said. “He will have competition, I can assure you of that.”

When you're the mayor of a decaying Rust Belt city, you naturally are inclined to grasp at any straw of hope that seems to present itself, so we probably shouldn't be too hard on Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
His Honor has been bragging loudly about how Oregon's passage of Measures 66 and 67, which modestly increased taxes on affluent individuals and big businesses, is going to prove to be a windfall for America's former Second (now Third) City.
“It will help our economic development immediately,” Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times. “You'd better believe it. We'll be out in Oregon enticing corporations to relocate to Chicago.”
Daley couldn't resist throwing in some faux populist, anti-progressive-tax rhetoric: “I've always thought America stands for [rewarding success]. … I never knew it's a class war – that those who succeed in life are the ones that have to bear all the burden. … It will be a whole change in America that those who succeed and work hard, we're gonna tax 'em more than anyone else.”

The United States enacted the federal estate tax in 1916, and conservatives have been trying to get rid of it ever since. Over the decades they've propagated an astonishing array of half-truths and untruths, such as labeling it “the death tax.” (Rest assured that you can die anywhere in the United States without having to pay a tax to do it.)
Carrying on that long tradition of dissimulation, Congressman Greg Walden sent a letter to constituents at the end of last year explaining why he voted against HR 4154, a bill to permanently set the tax at 2009 levels.
The lies begin in the first paragraph: “Estate tax may sound harmless, but here's what it is: the government taxing, when you pass away, about half of what you've worked in a lifetime to save.”

Everybody loves the family farm. According to the conventional wisdom it's the bedrock of American values, the repository of the sturdy virtues of hard work and thrift, the beating heart of the heartland.
So who could possibly have any problem with an organization called Friends of Family Farmers whose aim is to help family farms survive and thrive?
Apparently, of all people, the Oregon Farm Bureau does.
Kendra Kimbirauskas, an organizer of FOFF and owner, with her husband, of a small farm outside Portland, came to Central Oregon this fall to hold a couple of meetings with area farmers to build support for a statewide initiative that would help small farms by improving their access to a labor supply and processing facilities, among other things.

Like all good politicians, the late Ronald Reagan understood that the best way to drive a message home to people was not with dry statistics but with stories – anecdotes about ordinary folks like themselves. (Some of Reagan's stories were true and others were not, but that wasn't the point; the point was they were effective.)
Taking a page from the Reagan playbook, opponents of Measures 66 and 67 tried to tell Oregonians a story. The story was told in the first person by Carol Leuthold, who with her husband owns a dairy farm in Tillamook, in a letter mass-mailed to voters.

Up to now, the ultimate example of “chutzpah” has been the guy who murders his parents, then begs the court for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan. But Bill Sizemore has topped it: “Chutzpah” is a guy who gets convicted of racketeering, spends time in jail for contempt, gets indicted for tax evasion … and runs for governor.
Sizemore, who now resides in Redmond, for about a decade made a living – and a damn good one – by pushing anti-tax and anti-union ballot measures. He was bankrolled largely by a pair of right-wing sugar daddies, Jeld-Wen founder Dick Wendt and eccentric multimillionaire Loren Parks of Nevada.

It was just an intimate, friendly little gathering on the Google campus in Silicon Valley.
The host was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The star attraction was Joel Benenson, President Obama's pollster. Also featured were seven Democratic senators, including Oregon's own Jeff Merkley.
It was billed as a “National Innovation Conference.” Attendees at the two-day event got to listen to panel discussions whose participants included the senators as well as executives from high-powered firms such as Microsoft and assorted venture capitalists.

If nothing else, we have to give Rep. Greg Walden points for consistency – he's consistently against legislation that would help ordinary Americans.
Walden kept his record intact last week by being one of the 215 members of the House – including 39 Democrats and all but one of the 177 Republicans – to vote against the health care reform bill. (Thankfully, none of those 39 Democrats were from Oregon.)
“The country cannot afford a new $1.3 trillion government program that creates 111 new bureaucracies, especially when nationwide unemployment is at its highest level in 26 years,” Walden said after his vote. “Just this year, Washington, D.C. has launched unprecedented national takeovers of the auto industry, the energy industry, and now the healthcare of every American.”
First, on the cost issue: Walden, like all Republicans, pretends to be terrified by the cost of health care reform while ignoring the crippling costs of the present unreformed system.