Rob Kremer

Dick Wendt, a great American

2010-08-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Dick Wendt, founder of Jeld-Wen, died today.

I have been absent from my blog for several months while my wife runs for the state senate, but I am breaking my self-imposed exile because of this news.

Dick Wendt was, quite simply, a great man. He bought some sawmill assets out of receivership in the 1960's and built a company that became the world's largest manufacturer of windows and doors. He did it from Klamath Fall, Oregon.

I had the very good fortune to get to know Dick and his lovely wife Nancy. I could write a dozen long blog posts about his accomplishments in life - many of which had nothing to do with his business success - but I will leave most of that to the articles that you will see in the coming days.

But I will mention something about Dick that most people do not know: he was basically the architect of the welfare reform of the 1990's that moved millions of people off the welfare rolls all over the nation. This is not an overstatement.

I had the pleasure of listening to Dick and Nancy tell me and my wife the story of the how he started and grew his company one summer evening a few years back on the deck of his lake cabin in the Cascade Range. There was nothing pretentious about Dick. He lived in the same house in Klamath Falls that he bought in the 1960's. He drove a Jeep. His lake cabin was just that - a cabin. Rustic, maybe 1000 square feet.

When he became wealthy, he turned his talent and treasure to making the world a better place by reforming the institutions that have failed us, such as welfare and social security.

Dick Wendt was a great man. I am lucky to have known him, and I feel a great sense of honor that he considered my own efforts at reforming education to be worthy of his support.

Huffman for Senate. Kremer for Senate District 19

2010-03-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

I've been ignoring my blog lately. Here's why:

I am consulting on the Jim Huffman for US Senate campaign, and my wife is running for State Senate against Sen. Richard Devlin.

This has been consuming all my time that I might otherwise devote to expressing my opinion here on my blog. If you have been checking in, thank you!

I'm sorry, but my updates are going to be less and less frequent for awhile.

Where is the adult in OUR room?

2010-03-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

This is just fabulous. Please take the time to watch this 26 minute address by New Jersey's new governor to the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

When I listen to something like this - an all-too-rare display of straight talk, mastery of fact, and laid-bare reality, I just get angry. Angry that we NEVER see this in our political class in Oregon.

Why do we get buffoons governing us, and other states get guys like Christie?

Where is the adult in OUR room?

Let's put Matt Wingard over the top!

2010-02-28T12:51:00.001-08:00

State Rep. Matt Wingard is doing a "birthday money bomb" fundraiser for his 37th birthday - donate $37 to his reelection campaign.

He is close to his goal - please help me put him over the top. Click here to donate.

Here are a few good reasons to send $37 to Matt:

1) It will annoy the BlueOregon crowd
2) When he meets his goal he can send a press release reminding the Democrats how he beat them last cycle despite them spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the most vicious personal smear campaign in recent memory, perhaps of all time.
3) 37 is a prime number. He won't have another prime number birthday for 4 years.
4) Matt is going to be Speaker of the Oregon House someday soon.
5) If you can find a smarter, more articulate, better state representative - send HIM or HER the $37!

Short takes

2010-02-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

Jeff Mapes is reporting today that Bill Bradbury pulled out of a debate at Oswego Lake Country Club, and issued a press release saying that he wouldn't attend because as a good Democrat he can't justify another event at an exclusive private club when people are jobless and hurting. He is enjoying his taxpayer funded pension at what, $85K a year, and HE is going to go all class warfare on us?
Did you see the nice coverage of the Taxpayer Rally at the Capitol yesterday, where 1500 or so folks expressed their wish that the legislature stop killing our economy? Me either! Just last week there was a nice story complete with a large color picture about the 80 STUDENTS who rallied for more higher ed spending. The Oregonian is still obviously doing its best to alienate itself from as many people as possible. In unrelated news, I hear there are more layoffs coming next week at the O.
I must admit I am enjoying watching the global warming alarmists twist in the wind. Now Phil Jones, former head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, the source of the "Climate-Gate" emails, is admitting basically that the whole thing is a scam! Not in so many words, of course, but read between the lines. He says that the globe hasn't warmed in 15 years, that he doesn't even have the temperature records that the "Hockey Stick graph that was central to the case of the alarmists claims were based on, and that the temperatures during the Midieval Warming Period probably WERE higher than today! And guess who has no story in todays newspaper about it? You guessed it!
But the fact that the whole case for AGW is falling apart before our eyes hasn't made the true believers any less shrill. BlueOregon blogger Carla Axtman and her perpetually-twisted knickers are hammering Rep. Matt Wingard for a short floor speech he made pointing out the disintegrating case for AGW. She is outraged (OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU!) because Wingard took many of the facts he related from a published article. And HE DIDN'T mention it! Talk about a scandal! So on the one hand we have a decades long conspiracy that distorts science so politicians and bureaucrats can ration energy, perpetrated at the highest levels of government, and THAT gets no mention by our intrepid blogger Carla. But a short floor speech that doesn't cite sources? TWO separate posts on BlueOregon with 113 comments (as of this writing) between them. Convene the Grand Jury!

More evidence abstinence education works

2010-02-01T22:07:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many times I have heard from educators and liberals that abstinence education doesn't work. Today a new study was published in the AMA's February 2010 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine gives very strong evidence to the contrary.

The study also showed that so-called "safe sex" training doesn't change sexual behavior one bit. The study is out of the University of Pennsylvania, and was the gold standard of such studies in its design, which used a full random assignment of the different methods studied.

There have been 15 prior scientific studies done looking at the effectiveness of abstinence curricula, and 11 of them have showed positive results.

Don't believe them when they tell you it doesn't work!

Bin Laden offered research fellowship at East Anglia U.

2010-01-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

OK just kidding. But it IS pretty ironic that the world's most notorious terrorist has joined the AGW jihad.

He hasn't been able to bring the US economy to its knees through terror strikes. This is just a change in tactics.

So, what is the difference between Al Gore and Bin Laden? Size of their carbon footprint, I guess. Bin Laden lives in a cave, Gore in a 20,000 sf mansion.

Remember BlueOregon's attack on Matt Wingard?

2010-01-29T18:08:00.000-08:00

Back in the '08 election, Carla Axtman at BlueOregon hyperventilated over an essay that now Rep. Matt Wingard wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was outraged because Wingard wrote that it was actually a "blessing to many" that the hurricane wiped out most of the public schools. He wrote:

In the summer of 2005, Katrina destroyed most of the New Orleans Public School District infrastructure—a blessing to many, since the district was one of the worst performing in the country. According to published reports, 73 of its more than 120 schools were considered to be “failing,” according to the state’s educational accountability standards. On one 2004 measure (the GEE test of highschoolers) 96 percent of Orleans Parish students were below basic in English, and 94 percent were below basic in math.

In the wake of Katrina, the Louisiana State Legislature turned over most of the area to a Recovery School District headed by its own superintendent. That superintendent has begun chartering many of the Recovery District schools, which in turn has attracted some of the leading charter school operators in the country. Sixty percent of schools in New Orleans are now chartered.

Carla Axtman thought that was "disgusting," and called him an "ass."

OK, fine. But guess who agrees with Matt Wingard?

President Obama's U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan! The Washington Post reported today that in an interview to be aired this weekend, Duncan said that the hurricane was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans."

Duncan apparently went on to make precisely the same point that Matt Wingard made, about the fact that New Orleans had a rare opportunity to start over from scratch with their public schools, and they are building a new system based on charter schools, choice and competition.

Gee, maybe Rep. Matt Wingard is perhaps the TRUE progressive here. He cares about how well the school system serves its clients.

It sure seems as if BlueOregon and Carla Axtman care a lot more about unions than about the kids. Gee, how "progessive."

Killing our competitiveness

2010-01-29T06:27:00.000-08:00

The evidence is accumulating daily, so much so that it is seeping into local media coverage and even the race for Metro President:

Oregon's land-use laws are killing our economy. Just in the last few days, more stories have emerged:

Democrat Rep. Peter Buckley from Ashland is trying to help a large southern Oregon orchard operator survive by allowing 1000 acres of its fallow land near urban areas in southern Oregon to be developed. The company is struggling under a large debt load and would use some of the proceeds to make its balance sheet healthier. All the usual land use groups oppose it. Prime farmland! they say.
In today's Oregonian, columnist Andy Parker talks about the race for Metro President, in which all three candidates are talking about how Metro needs to do a better job of "economic development." The only candidate who really has any clue at all is former Hillsboro mayor Tom Hughes, but the other two candidates know which way the wind is blowing, so they have to recreate themselves. So now Rex Burkholder is trying to talk intelligently about job creation! (Breaking news - he can't.)
This farmer out side of Wilsonville wants Oregon land use laws to lock down all the area around his farm for a half-century so his kid can farm it after he dies.

The common thread here is that Oregon's land use laws are killing our economy. We pretend that bureaucrats and planners somehow have superior knowledge about productive use of land than the owners. In reality, the laws just give preservationist no-growth pressure groups a legal bludgeon with which to get their way.

For years, folks like Rex Burkholder and Bob Stacey, two candidates for Metro President, have been at the forefront of this Soviet-style planning system. So it is laughable to see them now try to lip-sync a "jobs" tune.

But the real problem is the land use system itself. Pretending that Metro will somehow reshape itself to have an economic development focus is just dreaming.

Metro, and the land use system it has fed off for thirty years IS THE PROBLEM.

Will Oregon leaders ever figure this out? I doubt it. This is about world view and ideology. That doesn't change. We have competing world views in our political leadership, and one has held power in Oregon for going on three decades. The long-term damage of that view is coming home to roost.

It will have to be defeated.

Wanted: information about impact of tax hike

2010-01-28T16:33:00.000-08:00

Do you know of an Oregon business which will have to lay off workers or might even move out of state because of the impact of the retroactive tax hike voters passed on Tuesday?

If so, please send a message about it to: ortaximpact@gmail.com. Please provide information, e.g. personal stories, news links, contact info, press releases, etc., that is verifiable and not hearsay.

Joe Rodriguez, poster child for Oregon's malaise

2010-01-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

Today in the pages of the Oregonian we are treated to yet another op-ed piece from a fellow named Joe Rodriguez imploring us to "reform the tax code" in order to make sure there is enough money for government.

This must be the 7th or 8th time I have seen this guy's byline on he op-ed pages of the Oregonian, each and every time chiming in on supporting tax hikes, keeping the kicker, reforming the tax code, etc. I would venture a guess that this fellow has been published more as a guest columnist than any other single person over the last five years.

What gives? Who is this guy and why does the Oregonian seem to publish everything he sends to them, especially since every single piece seems to say the same exact thing: "Send more money."

Well, I know the guy. He was superintendent of Hillsboro School District, and I dealt with him on several charter school issues. He was always a huge obstacle to charter schools and school reform, and he supported all the crap like CIM/CAM every step of the way. And his district under his tenure summarily failed students of Hispanic descent - just look at the reading scores.

In other words, he is just the kind of guy who would rise in the dysfunctional bureaucracy of our public school system.

And he retired to enjoy his PERS pension a few years ago. I would estimate his annual PERS income at $120,000. Which he of course gets for life. And because he retired as a young man, we will be on the hook for supporting him this way for a long, long time.

Gee, isn't it just a tad bit self serving for this trough feeder to be lecturing us repeatedly on making sure the government doesn't have to feel the effects of the recession? I mean it is easy to sit on the lofty perch of a guaranteed $120K and tell everyone to pay more lest he have to cut back on his poolside daiquiris.

Joe Rodruiguez - you are the poster child for what is wrong with this state. Thank you for your regular reminders of just how screwed up this place is.

State of the Union

2010-01-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

Not much a speech, really. I don't think he was very convincing.

First, stop the blame Bush already? How many times did he make some disparaging remark about the "last 8 years?" I stopped counting at 19.

He spoke about the economy like a person who thinks he is running "Federal Government Inc." Constantly said "we will invest in..." and talk about something the private sector does. His whole section on business vitality really showed his lack of understanding as to how an economy works and creates wealth.

He tried to be subtantative, but he doesn't do substance very well. He does inspiration well. So it was flat.

And he was constantly telling his lies: His health care bill will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars and make Medicare stronger? Oh yeah we all believe that.

2010-01-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

Some pretty questionable calls in the OT. Every 50/50 call went to the Saints, and that pass interference call was idiotic. For a ref to insert himself into that situation is just horrible. It very well might have changed the outcome, and it was not only an not catchable, but there wasn't even any contact.

But, with apologies to General Larry Platt, here is the Viking's theme song for the game:

Ball on the ground! Ball on the ground! Vikes look like fools puttin' the ball on the ground! Got punched in the mouth/Favre's helmet turned sideways. Can't win the game puttin' the ball on the ground! "

Championship Sunday Predictions

2010-01-23T21:13:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow's games:

Jets lose badly, Vikings win in a good game.

Won't bother to explain all my reasons. Let's just do a post-mortem when it's all done.

How are banks making record profits?

2010-01-21T07:39:00.000-08:00

I need help with this one. I have a serious question, and I think I know the answer, but I need confirmation that I am correct (or correction, if I am not.)

Commercial and investment banks are all of a sudden making huge profits, even though from what I have read, the typical lending and underwriting activities of these institutions hasn't recovered much at all from the economic crisis.

So where is the profit coming from?

Here is what I suspect: The Federal Reserve's balance sheet has ballooned, much of it due to providing massive amounts of liquidity to the banking system in order to forestall collapse. The discount rate (the interest rate the Fed charges member banks when they borrow money from the Fed) is at 0.0%.

Which means the Fed has basically said:

"The government will not let you fail. No matter how bad your own balance sheet, no matter how much your own assets have fallen in value, even if you are completely insolvent from a asset/liability standpoint, we will lend you money so your depositors know they can get their money back if they want it."

Normally, insolvent banks just fail. But in the collapse of 2008 and 2009, both Bush and Obama bought the "too big to fail" line, and the government stepped in to provide banks with the liquidity that the markets would certainly have not.

Which gets me back to my original question: So how and why are these banks making so much money now? Are their balance sheets now healthy? Are their banking activities now generating record revenue? If so, how could this possibly be the case if the economy is still so putrid?

Here is what I am pretty sure is the answer, and I would very much appreciate someone with more recent industry knowledge than myself to confirm this:

Banks are borrowing massive amounts from the Federal Reserve at zero percent, and lending that money to the ..... FEDERAL GOVERNMENT by buying treasury bonds to finance the deficit.

So if you can borrow basically unlimited amounts at 0% and then "invest" it in Treasury Notes at 2-3%, what a great business model! I wish I owned a bank. I'd think I could manage to turn a profit doing that.

So if I am right, this is just the federal government monetizing its debt, with a 2-3% leakage to commercial banks. From the taxpayer standpoint, we get doubly screwed. Monetizing the debt is hugely inflationary, but normally the government can do it without simultaneously enriching the managers of insolvent financial institutions!

So this brings me to the Obama "tough on banks" rhetoric and his bank tax idea. It is so disingenuous. Should these bank managers be earning huge bonuses? ABSOLUTELY NOT! If I am right about the above, their profits are basically just 100% taxpayer subsidy. Why should they make millions by running a government sanctioned scam in which they borrow money from the taxpayers and then lend it back to us for a 3% spread?

The structural damage this causes is almost incomprehensible. First, when does it end? If the Fed stops lending money to the banks at zero percent, or starts charging what the market would charge for banks with insolvent balance sheets, the banks would fail. So is the Fed going to continue to lend at zero until these bank assets somehow recover in value? That is just not going to happen. These sub-prime loans were NEVER worth what they were valued at, so they will certainly never "recover" to that level.

The only way the bank balance sheets can "recover" to a point where the capital markets will once again lend to them and get them off of the Fed's dole, is by either getting new capital from investors (some of which has happened, but I am pretty sure not anywhere near enough to make the banking sector's balance sheets healthy) or by the US Government taking the toxic assets off their hands at above market values.

In the case of the latter - which is what the TARP program was supposed to do - this is just another form of subsidy.

So the upshot is: Why SHOULDN'T we object when banks are now paying huge bonuses, if their profits are basically from public subsidy?

But I resent we are in this situation in the first place. It was absolutely predictable as soon as we bought the notion of "too big to fail." If we bail out the banks, they will be dependent on taxpayer largesse to survive. And that puts us in the position of either accepting whatever the bank managers want to pay themselves for the "profit" they squeeze out of us taxpayers, or start regulating the salaries of the "private" sector.

Thanks a lot, Bush and Obama!

Election night thoughts

2010-01-19T20:09:00.000-08:00

I watched MSNBC for awhile tonight, and if their reaction to Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts is any indication as to how the Democrats will respond, this next year could be pretty interesting.

The various commentators - Keith Olberman, Chris Mathews, Rachel Maddow - all agreed that the Democrats should use any and all maneuvers they can think of to shove the health care bill through. They all said that the worst thing that could happen now is to lose the health care bill.

I hope the Democrats follow this advice.

Mapes says WSJ got it wrong, but gets it wrong

2010-01-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

A recent blog post by Jeff Mapes takes the Wall Street Journal to task for their editorial last Friday that pointed out the insanity of a state like Oregon, in deep recession, trying to tax itself into prosperity.

Mapes said they were wrong when they wrote: "In the last budget, the Democratic controlled state legislature doled out a $259 million pay raise to the government work force, even as the state was facing a near $1 billion deficit."

Mapes writes:

That's just not the case. State workers agreed to a pay freeze, 10 to 14 furlough days and a year deferral of a step increase. It amounts to a slight pay cut over the 2009-11 budget cycle.

Mapes is wrong. The "last budget" is the 07-09 budget, in which the state was indeed facing a billion dollar 'shortfall" and during which time the governor did indeed raise state manager salaries by $259 million.

Mapes seems to think that what the WSJ was referring to when they wrote "the last budget" is the 09-11 budget, and Mapes is I guess making the point that the pay hike didn't happen in this (current) budget.

This is odd for two reasons:

1) It should be clear that the WSJ was referring to the 07-09 budget because they specifically pointed out that the shortfall at the time was one billion dollars. if they were referring to the 09-11 budget, they would have said the shortfall was around $4 billion.

2) The cost of that pay hike is still included in the 09-11 budget anyway, since they simply work from that level to create the 09-11 budget.

Pretty sloppy reporting, and even though he was corrected by a commenter on his blog, he hasn't acknowledged or corrected the mistake.

Lesson: When you point out mistakes made by others, make sure you got your facts straight!

Now, to give him some credit, Mapes does go on to point out what DOES seem to be an error in the WSJ editorial, where they give some strange numbers about the growth of government jobs vs. the decline in private sector jobs.

Well said!

2010-01-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

This from the National Review "Morning Jolt" email:

3. Now He Gets Combative?

Politico: "President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday's special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say."

Well, we didn't really expect humility, did we?

Great to know, Mr. President, that Iran shot protesters dead in the streets and beat the hell out of young kids, North Korea's firing off missiles so regularly you can set a clock to them, al-Qaeda tried to blow up a plane on Christmas, al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch is winning "Franchise of the Year," China's hacking Google until every search brings back at least one smiling Mao photo, Kabul's blowing up, our southern border looks like a war zone, and after a year of outreach, reset buttons, "changing the tone" and 365 days of kumbaya we finally get to see a "combative response" from you . . . to a Republican winning a race.

I look forward to his Oval Office address announcing that the electorate has deeply disappointed him, and that he expects more of us.

Business Energy Tax Credit's massive budget impact

2010-01-18T17:02:00.000-08:00

Rep. Matt Wingard points out today on OregonCatalyst that the Oregon Department of Energy approved applications for the Business Energy Tax Credit to the tune of $338 million in 2009. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the legislature forced through $733 million it tax hikes.

What's wrong with this picture? The BETC program is nothing more than a huge corporate subsidy. The tax credits pay for up to HALF the capital cost of building out a solar or wind power project. That means these projects are not even close to making economic sense on their own terms.

In other words, our tax dollars buy really really expensive energy. Terrific.

So the Democrats somehow managed to give hundreds of millions in corporate welfare, raise taxes by almost $3/4 billion, and CUT K-12 education.

Think we need a change?

Does he listen to himself?

2010-01-17T20:57:00.000-08:00

I just turned on the TV, and caught the end of the 60 Minutes Andy Rooney segment. It was another one of those pointless chats. He was talking about how much he likes cold days, because it feels good to keep warm.

Then he says he doesn't like air-conditioned air because it feels artificial, and says that he always smiles when he sees a label on a machine that says 'climate controlled."

He finishes:

"It isn't possible to control the climate. The climate goes its own way without worrying about what we want."

Now, I know Andy Rooney is a famous liberal. I would be shocked if he doesn't buy the whole global warming agenda lock stock and barrel. I wonder if he realizes what he said?

Miracle in Massachusetts?

2010-01-17T19:23:00.000-08:00

All week long I followed the Brown/Coakley race and figured that just making it a close race is remarkable enough, and even though the Democrats were likely to eek it out, just making a race of it is a chilling dose of reality to Democrat congressmen all over the country.

But now it looks like Brown might actually win this thing!

A poll just out (taken on Jan 15) by Merriman group has Brown up by 9.6%. This was a touch tone poll, 4.1% margin of error, 565 voters. Not my favorite type of poll, but still. CNN is reporting that White House advisors to Obama think Coakley is going to lose. Charlie Cook says that Brown is now favored. InTrade is now running 60/40 Brown.

President Obama flew to Boston and spoke at a rally for Coakley. At the same time, Brown held his own rally. It is worth the speech Brown gave, knowing that the national media would carry it, because this is a pretty talented guy. I can see why he is winning, with messaging like this.

If Brown wins this race, President Obama loses big time. Not just his health care package, but his own political clout. He will be a political liability in Congressional races around the country - Democrats will look to distance themselves from the President, which means they certainly won't be casting any tough votes for him.

It's far from over, and part of me still can't accept that a Republican could win the seat held for three decades by Ted Kennedy. But if Brown wins, the Obamagenda is toast.

I've said many times in the last year that American's didn't vote for Obama in order for him to fundamentally transform the country, and that I was confident the people won't stand idly by while he turns us into a European welfare state.

I didn't think it would happen this quickly. Holding my breath until Tuesday!

Phil Knight chimes in on 66 & 67

2010-01-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

In an op-ed piece in the Sunday Oregonian tomorrow, Nike chairman Phil Knight suggests that he might actually leave the state if Measures 66 and 67 pass. Here is the money quote:

"One Fortune Global 500 company remains. But its founder and chairman is not merely an economic man. He has webs between his toes. But he, too, has some limits."

What is interesting about this is that Knight is not given to chiming in on Oregon political issues. Nike has avoided political controversies like the plague. To get him to the point of not just taking a position on these measures, but to so publicly and stridently - is quite a development.

I tell you, the sands are shifting. The Democrats have really agitated the business leadership in Oregon. This is significant.

Kitzhaber's "Jobs Plan"

2010-01-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

John Kitzhaber is campaigning on what he calls his new economic vision for the state.

When I first clicked through to the link, I thought to myself: "Interesting. Kitzhaber is a government guy. He spent eight years drafting off of the Intel-created economic boom in Oregon to dramatically expand Oregon's government. If even HE is starting off his campaign by talking about jobs and the economy, then perhaps this will indeed be a different election cycle."

Silly me.

Go read the "plan.' The front page is titled "Jobs for today, jobs for tomorrow - A strategy for Oregon's economic prosperity." He spends precisely two paragraphs giving platitudes about the need for a robust Oregon economy, and then immediately reveals what he believes the whole purpose of the private sector is in the first place: "... to adequately support the public infrastructure on which stable, long term economic growth and prosperity depend."

He proceeds to go on for nine paragraphs about how our "public systems" were created in the 19th and 20th centuries and need to be "transformed" by "challeng[ing] the structures and assumptions of some of our most cherished programs," and "... jettisoning our current state budget process which is inadequate for the kind of transformational change we need; and replacing it with one based on transparent, long term performance-based investment allowing us to set clear priorities among the difficult fiscal choices which will define the next biennium."

This is the FRONT PAGE of his JOBS PLAN!

The 24 page plan itself is just a collection of the same kind of bromides we have heard forever from the central planning culture in Oregon. All the usual genuflections to "family-wage jobs," "energy efficiency" (through subsidies for inefficient energy projects, of course) and government training programs. There is nothing in this thinking that is remotely innovative or new. It is government focused, and even when he talks about natural resources, like forests, he can only imagine using them for "carbon sequestration" and "woody biomass" energy projects.

Perhaps most revealing is his section on how to "Create the Fundamental Conditions for Long-Term Job Creation and Prosperity." This is really the crux of the matter: how do we create the environment for a robust private sector?

According to Kitzhaber, this happens through public sector programs: re-thinking the delivery of education, restructuring health care (even though he is the achitect of our current health care budget disaster,) "progressive land-use policies," and meeting our "goals of greenhouse gas reduction."

This is the kind of thing you get when a public sector guy tries to pretend he understands the private sector. It's like asking a fish to explain the sky. He can only think in terms of government.

Kitzhaber wants to pretend that this is "transformational" thinking, but in truth, there is nothing transformational about even the public sector elements of his plan. Oh sure, he calls for "ten year budgets," but that wouldn't transform anything - it would just calcify the status quo more deeply and increase the damage of any bad decision or incorrect planning assumption.

No, truth be told, for Kitzhaber, this is just a very poor attempt to pretend he actually understands and will be focused on the #1 issue everybody cares about right now, the economy.

He has that fatal conceit of many politicians - that we are no more clever than he. He assumes if he writes a big plan for economic prosperity, that we will be fooled into thinking he "gets it." He thinks we won't read it and immediately recognize that it is nothing more than the same old public sector stuff that got us in this mess in the first place.

Actually, he probably isn't being deceitful at all. Kitzhaber, I think, so badly misunderstands the private sector, wealth creation and economic vitality that he honestly believes this kind of thing is the prescription for prosperity.

And that is perhaps the scariest part of the whole plan.

City of Portland to shoppers: STAY OUT!

2010-01-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I made a big mistake. We decided, as a family outing, to go downtown. THAT won't happen again.

A nice relaxing afternoon, the last day before my son returns to college. We decided to eat lunch at Papa Haydns, and then kill some time browsing at Powells. Found a parking spot about two blocks from Powells, and spent about an hour and a half there.

Returned to the car - oops! A parking ticket. On a Sunday? I then remembered: those geniuses in City Hall decided to start charging on Sundays. Crap. Oh well, I completely forgot. I guess that one is on me.

So my wife opens the envelope - we are both wondering out loud how much they will nick us for. My wife predicted $12. I said "No, these things are $24!"

Forty-two freaking dollars!

OK, I get it. It won't happen again - I can assure you of that. I, and thousands like me have gotten the message.

No more shopping, eating, or any other discretionary activity whatever in Portland. Enjoy my $42.

Just a photo

2010-01-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

Yet another fake business organization

2010-01-08T08:49:00.001-08:00

The interesting thing about the left in Oregon is that they can't concede that there is another side to political debate. Maybe it's a by-product of being a one-party state. But for some reason, in Oregon, the left isn't satisfied with the usual panoply of left-leaning interest groups and advocacy organizations.

No, in Oregon, the left wants to dominate BOTH sides of the debate, so they create a bunch of phony advocacy groups whose name sounds as if they would advocate for the private sector, but who actually just push for the same old stuff that the rest of the left-establishment wants.

For instance, the Oregon Business Association. It was founded in the early 2000's, and it has supported every tax increase since. It doesn't even have the guts to oppose the current measures. Its chief is a former Democrat legislator, Ryan Deckert, who has never had a real job in the private sector in his adult life, much less ever run a business.

The media in Oregon plays along, of course, and writes about the Oregon Business Association as if it is a real business advocacy group. I will never forget a meeting I was in about a year ago, where Deckert described OBA's top issues as "global warming and sustainability."

The political strategy I guess is a good one. If you have a group that presents itself as pro-business but constantly advocates for the public sector's needs, as long as the media doesn't call you out, you can do a lot to diffuse the message and impact of the ACTUAL pro-business advocates.

Apparently the left isn't satisfied, however, with just having the OBA (and to some extent also the Oregon Business Council) acting as their Potemkin Villages. They have now created yet ANOTHER pro-government "business advocate."

It is called the Oregon Small Business Council.

A couple nights ago I saw a news story on one of the local networks breathlessly reporting that the Oregon Small Business Council supports Measures 66 and 67. They interviewed the owner of the Paloma dancewear store, and he explained how small business benefits from higher taxes.

I wondered who the heck this outfit was. I pay a lot of attention to the Oregon political/business scene, and I had never heard of them. So I did a little digging.

Sure enough, a brand new organization. They have a very basic blog web site, and here is their facebook page. I paged through the "fans" list, and it is all the usual Democrats and lefties, including Jack Roberts, whose claim that he is a Republican is more suspect every day.

It looks like this pretend organization got started in October 2009! I would be shocked if the seed funds didn't originate in the pro-tax campaign. The web site says it is a "project of Oregon Action and the Main Street Alliance." Oregon Action is also brand new, and looks to be primarily a government health care advocacy astroturf non-profit. Main Street Alliance is about a year old, and is a coalition of local chapters pushing, again, for government health care.

So one of our local network news outfits buys the con hook line and sinker, and gives this fake business group prime time coverage because a "business advocate" is supporting the higher taxes.

And then today I open up the Oregonian and see an op-ed piece from the "Executive Director" of the Oregon Small Business Council, Andrew Plambeck. The piece is all about how we should "buy local," since we are Oregon and we can choose to not be a part of the globa economy.

So I looked into this guy Plambeck. Heck, the leader of a major Oregon business advocacy organization must have some pretty substantial bonafides, right? I mean, heck, the Oregonian is prominently presenting his opinions as speaking for small business in Oregon.

Sure enough, Plambeck is a heavy hitter. Here is his Linked-in profile.

After he graduated from U of O (in June of 2009!) he spent 4 months as the Climate Policy Intern for the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon Interfaith Network for Earth Concerns before taking over the helm at the Oregon Small Business Council!

Wow! We haven't seen this level of talent leading Oregon's business community since the OBC tapped that titan of industry Ryan Deckert!

This is just so typically Oregon. Another phony business group, and the mainstream media plays along, elevates these pretenders to a status where the general public finds them indistuishable from the real business voices (such as they are) in Oregon.

So the left invades both sides of the debate, occupies both territories.

And unemployment mysteriously persists.

I suppose they want to be exempt from paying this tax?

2010-01-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

Did you catch Anna Griffin's column today lamenting that Washington, DC has scooped Portland on having a 5 cent plastic bag tax?

She thinks it is just a dandy idea, because of all the environmental devastation caused by the bags. She's all embarrassed that DC did it before Portland.

She might be even more embarrassed when her employer points out that such a tax could cost the paper millions. Every single morning my copy of the Oregonian is delivered in a plastic bag. I find them useful. Not only do they keep the paper dry, but they make wonderful dog-poop bags.

If half of the Oregonian's papers are delivered in these bags, a 5 cent tax would work out to about $2.3 million per year.

Is it possible that Anna Griffin didn't consider that her own employer might be subject to such a tax? What possible rationale would there be for their plastic bags to be exempt from the tax?

Just when I praise the Oregonian...

2010-01-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

They have to go write this ridiculous garbage.

They apparently are unaware of the irony revealed in such obvious and nauseating moral preening. As they try to outdo each other with carbon correctness and confess where they sin, what they implicitly acknowledge is that no matter how "green" you are, no matter how virtuous, their really is only one way to be completely carbon free: stop breathing.

Short of that, once you go along with the game that consumption is a bad thing, you are a hypocrite.

The greatest irony of all is the one that none of the preeners figured out. They all give their green bonafides, but not one of them confessed the biggest green sin that each and every one of them commit:

They all work for what is arguably the biggest greenhouse gas villian in the state. Imagine! A business whose very economic life depends upon the daily harvest of vast amounts of timber, which is then delivered each and every day to roughly 300,000 households by fossil fuel powered vehicles, for a product that literally has a one day useful life!

In terms of green virtue and green sinners, a daily newspaper has to be the moral equivalent of Satan himself!

But somehow none in this collection of oh-so-virtuous-but-still-guilty-'cuz-I-could-do-more hipsters have figured out that their paychecks depend on the least "green" business on the face of the Earth!

Oregonian opposes 66 and 67

2010-01-02T09:57:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure whether this is good or bad. Finally a tax hike the Oregonian opposes.

It is also a bit puzzling that the editorial was posted online Saturday morning for what is no doubt a Sunday edition lead editorial.

Be that as it may, the Oregonian gets it right.

Head of IPCC - Blatant conflicts of interest

2009-12-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

Honestly, are any of us at all surprised by this?

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

I admit I am enjoying this as it all unravels.

A more robust explanation of climate change

2009-12-18T10:54:00.001-08:00

Take a cloud chamber (basically a sealed box with water-saturated air,) and send electrically charged particles through it. What happens? Moisture forms. Clouds.

Why does this matter?

It matters because, as this six-part video documentary explains in full, this high school physics experiment is the point of departure for an exhaustively researched and experiment-verified theory for global climate change conducted by a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark.

Svensmark, in the early 1990's, found a relationship between cosmic rays and the amount of cloud cover on Earth. The term "cosmic rays" sounds like something out of a Roger Ramjet cartoon, but they really are just atomic particles that result from star activity (such as exploding stars) in the cosmos.

So, cosmic rays are bombarding the Earth at all times, to one extent or another. Because our solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, most of the cosmic rays that hit Earth originate from Milky Way star activity. In fact, our solar system circles the Milky Way in a 250 million year orbit.

Because the Milky Way is a "spiral galaxy" with "arms" that protrude from a rough center, this 250 million year orbit takes our solar system through vast relatively empty spaces in the galaxy followed by vast periods when we pass through one of the "arms."

This is important because when the solar system is in one of the "arms," cosmic ray activity is much higher than when it passes through one of the empty areas.

Svensmark, as I said, found a relationship between cosmic ray activity and low cloud formation. But he didn't know the link. He also found a relationship between the intensity of our sun's magnetic field (which fluctuates based on surface activity) and cosmic rays hitting the Earth.

The video tells what he found, through almost two decades of research. Fascinating, and very damning for the AGW crowd who spent years trying to block his research from being published in the peer-reviewed journals and from being funded from the usual scientific research sources.

The sun's magnetic activity acts as somewhat of a shield from galactic cosmic rays. The more magnetic activity, the fewer cosmic rays hit the Earth. That means the more solar activity, the less cloud cover.

Cloud cover is a huge determinant of climate because low clouds reflect solar energy away from the Earth surface. So Svensmark's finding turns out to be a complete and logical alternative to the CO2 global warming theory.

Solar magnetic activity ===> Determines level of cosmic rays ===> determines low cloud cover ===> determines global temperature.

The 52 minute video explains how Svensmark verified the theory, and shows the startlingly close relationship between cosmic ray levels and global temperature, which is valid both on a geologic time scale and on a human time scale.

It also shows Svensmark's frustration with the scientific community that tried to block his theory and his experiments from being published.

Fascinating stuff.

How the left views the Country

2009-12-16T19:09:00.001-08:00

They don't even realize it when they are lampooning themselves!

Take a look at this artwork. Gee, think this reveals anything about what the left believe is the "beating heart" of the country?

It all comes from Washington, of course. That's where the blood returns to be replenished with life-giving oxygen.

And the caption reads: "Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man, without liberty no happiness can be enjoyed by society."

Anyone else think it is just a bit ironic that the folks pushing to socialize health care use a quote from Thomas Jefferson about liberty? Obviously these people don't have much of a grasp on the concept.

Bruce Hanna is not running for Governor

2009-12-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

It really pains me to announce that Bruce Hanna will not be running for Governor.

I spoke to Bruce this morning about his decision. He does not plan a general announcement, but did ask me to let people know. His decision was not made lightly, and it hinged far more on personal family and business issues than it did on political considerations.

I am very disappointed, because Bruce would have easily been the best candidate in the race on either side.

Can we stop hearing about the 'consensus" already?

2009-12-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

For fifteen years they have tried to shut down debate on the AGW hypothesis by claiming there is a consensus among scientists that it has been proven.

The term itself reveals that we aren't dealing with science, here. "Consensus" is a political term, not a science term. And all along, the AGW alarmist movement has been political to its core.

But even their claim to a phony consensus is falling apart at its seams. Read this CBSNews blog report about the schism happening right now at the American Physical Society. Back in 2007, the APS released its position statement on global warming, and it predictably followed the alarmist coda, calling for immediate reductions in CO2 emissions to avert disaster.

An APS member and Princeton physicist William Happer, along with other APS members have pressured the APS to review the position statement, especially now in light of the revelations of ClimateGate.

Sure, said the APS. We will review the position statement. But not for content, only for "clarity and tone," and we will appoint a special subcommittee to do the review.

Their chosen head of the subcommittee: Princeton physicist Robert Socolow, who is a long time AGW partisan, and who heads a research institute whose sole source of funding is global warming research dollars to the tune of $20 million. Having Socolow chairing the review committee appears as if it violates the APS' own ethics policy that tries to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

Happer and other APS members are very concerned over this obvious conflict of interest. They have redoubled their effort to get a thorough substantive review of the APS position, and now say they have 77 supporter in their efforts - members of the National Academies, fellows of major scientific societies, and one Nobel Laureate.

Meanwhile, 141 scientists have signed a statement at CopenhagenClimateChallenge.org that says actual evidence of human-caused global warming is lacking and "unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation."

It is significant, in my opinion, that this was reported in a very forthright and complete manner on a CBSNews blog. For years there have been scientists signing petitions and statements objecting to the AGW choo choo train, but the mainstream media has dismissed them.

Maybe now the pressure is too great. Are they finally reporting the truth?

More ClimateGate revelations

2009-12-09T22:38:00.000-08:00

This is getting very interesting.

The programming code for the climate models at CRU have been released, and now the geeks are tearing into the models, and seeing how the models manipulate the data to force a result the modelers want.

It's unreal. They literally just add a data series to the actual temperature record to force the line on the resulting graph to go up in the 20th century. Take a look here and here.

This isn't just emails that "read badly." It is outright fraud.

Oregonian in denial

2009-12-07T20:14:00.000-08:00

Gotta love the Oregonian's lead editorial on Sunday, the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit. After three weeks of failing to cover anything about ClimateGate, they open their piece with their "world-as-we-wish-it-was" stubbornness:

"The thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from computers of some top climate scientists do not seriously undercut the science of global warming..."

Oh, not at all. Certainly you would think that such a bold assertion might be followed by something resembling supporting argumentation, but nope. Not at the Oregonian. Their assertion is proof enough. They say it, it is so. "Nuff said.

They proceed to dismiss the skeptics: "...the loudest sound since the hacking story broke is the cry of "Climategate!" by the small band of climate change skeptics..."

SMALL BAND? Oh, OK. Another "world-as-we-wish-it-was" statement.

The editorial staff has been hyping this issue for a decade. I guess I don't blame them too much for freaking out like this when the house of cards falls around their dearly held religion.

Another media cover up

2009-12-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't you think that if the Vice President of the United States was at the center of a libel lawsuit in which a global warming skeptic scientist, whose work was a huge embarrassment to the VP, was being defamed by another scientists closely associated with the VP, and the result of the lawsuit was a complete and unequivocal apology and admission that every libelous utterance was untrue - wouldn't you think that this would be news?

Well, it wasn't. I sure never heard about it, and I have been paying very close attention to this issue for a long time.

Read this recount of the entire story. It is a case study in what the global warming crowd, led by its high priest AlGore, does to any dissenting scientists.

In this case, the scientist fought back and won an unconditional surrender that revealed the complete corruption of Gore and at least one prominent Harvard climate researcher.

Covered in the media? I sure never heard about it, and I pay close attention.

Steven Hayward on ClimateGate

2009-12-04T23:28:00.000-08:00

Steve Hayward is one of the smartest guys I know. He is a fellow at American Enterprise Institute. He has written two 700 page books on Reagan (the second of which I am about half done with.) He has long published the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators" which gives real data on exactly what is really going on with the environment.

He wrote the cover story for the Weekly Standard this week, on ClimateGate. Great stuff. He read ALL the emails, and did a great job of characterizing the narrative they reveal. Must read.

A decade of global warming propaganda

2009-12-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

I have studied the global warming crowd for almost fifteen years. More than ten years ago I wrote a cover story for BrainstormNW Magazine that went through my own journey of discovery about the global warming issue, during which I realized that it was nothing more than a large scale scam.

I went back and read the article the other day, and I was struck by how little has changed in the debate over the decade. They are still making the same arguments, and still have the same gaping holes in their theory, that they did ten years ago.

It is satisfying to see the basic integrity of the global warming crowd finally destroyed with the CRU e-mail scandal. It is long, long overdue.

I've pasted the complete article below. It is long, but I don't have another site to put it on and link it to.

Global Warming: The Trojan Horse of environmental scares

By Rob Kremer
April, 1998

I’m just a citizen like anybody else. I have no particular expertise in the field of science, no knowledge of the sub-science of climatology. I have always been as concerned about the environment as the next guy; I recycle.

In the early part of this decade I started hearing about the Greenhouse Effect. It brought back faint memories for me; I remember learning about it in grade school: diagrams of the sunlight penetrating the atmosphere, a large arrow bouncing off the earth, back up to the atmosphere, then back down again to the surface of the earth . Trapping heat.

So when the greenhouse effect came back onto my radar screen in the early 1990’s, I had some visceral understanding. Sure. I knew about this. It was hardly a shock. We had been pumping fossil fuel exhaust into the air for 200 years. Finally the science of measuring gasses in the atmosphere caught up with the reality of what we had been doing to it since the industrial revolution. It was intuitively obvious. Our neglect finally came home to roost.

I remember the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. Or, at least, I remember the reports. All the nations got together to talk about what they were going to do about this global problem. Everyone was there, and it mostly pointed at us: The United States. We consume most of the world’s fossil fuels. We’ve added more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere than anyone, and put all the other nations at risk. Every nation signed an agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions; at least, every nation but the U.S.

Taking steps to limit our emissions seemed pretty responsible. I’m an economist by training, and I recognize an externality when I see one. A cost of production borne by people not involved in the transaction. Here we had an externality on a global scale. Not just a company polluting a river, forcing the cost of making their widgets onto those unfortunate souls downstream, but a global community unable to stop the unbridled consumption of fossil fuels by an economy showing little restraint, almost obscene in its affluence, little concerned about the effects of its bingeing.

So the issue of global warming appealed to my then-limited awareness and understanding of environmental issues, and it also assuaged a certain cultural guilt I carry around, a feeling that the U.S. is too affluent, too prosperous for its own good, and in some sense our good fortune has been gained at the expense of the rest of the world.

And so as information about the global warming issue started to penetrate the background noise of popular culture, I started to pay some attention. I asked a few questions:

Was the globe actually warming up? Is the human population causing it? Is the U.S. to blame? Can we stop it?

I’m an inquisitive sort. I started to look into the various claims so I could talk with some degree of knowledge about the issue. I didn’t want to rely exclusively upon the inherently superficial information given by popular media. To be honest, I get a bit nervous when some of the more extreme groups insist upon draconian changes in our lifestyle to solve one or another crisis. I remember the "global cooling" crisis of the 1970’s, and the "population explosion" predictions of mass starvation by Paul Erlich. I remember the alar scare, "acid rain", and the billions we spent removing asbestos. All based far more on politics than science. Was global warming another of these?

As H.L. Mencken once said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Was global warming just another hobgoblin?

I had no particular standing or background in scientific matters, and so I approached the subject with some degree of trepidation, expecting to be confronted with an avalanche of highly technical data pertaining to subjects about which I know nothing. But, I went ahead and started reading.
I found that the data is not all that hard to evaluate. It’s not that complicated. It wasn’t really hard to understand the claims being made and the veracity of the data and analyses behind them.

What I Found

The point of departure for the global warming issue is an empirical fact upon which all parties in the debate agree: the presence of CO2 in the upper atmosphere has increased by about 25% over the last 250 years.

Also of relative non-controversy is the empirical data that show the globe has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit over the last 100 years. The data are thought to be biased a bit upward, and adjustments have lowered the estimates somewhat.

So far so good. We have an increase in atmospheric CO2 and a measurable (albeit slight) warming over the last century. Are they related?

Climatologists try to answer this question with their Global Climate Models (GCM’s) which attempt to model the earth’s weather and thereby be able to isolate the effects of changes in one variable. If they had a robust and accurate model of the climate, we could easily evaluate the effect of an increase in atmospheric CO2.

Many models have been developed and refined over the last 15 years. The earlier versions spit out a result that said if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase, by the year 2100 the earth will heat up by 8 degrees Celsius.

This caused a lot of alarm, though when the models were refined and improved they lowered the estimates of warming caused by increases in CO2. The current state of the models predict about 1 ½ - 4 degrees celsius warming by the year 2100.

So the models predict that the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature is causal. Increases in CO2 cause the temperature of the globe to increase. If we want to stop the warming trend, stop the increase in CO2. It’s simple. But is it correct?

Testing the Hypothesis

The Global Climate Models give us a good hypothesis: increases in CO2 cause increases in temperature. Have they tested this hypothesis?

Yes, they have. In a number of ways. For the last twenty years, scientists have collected temperature data from satellites and weather balloons. Their data agree totally. The result: over the last 20 years, the globe has suffered a very slight cooling.

Also, from the 100 year temperature record it is revealed that almost all of the 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature occurred in the first 50 years of the century, while by far the most man-caused CO2 emissions took place in the last half of the century. This tends to refute the global warming hypothesis.

Wait a minute! Here I was trying to inform myself about this impending global catastrophe, and my earliest efforts revealed compelling evidence that the global warming hypothesis had been scientifically tested and found wanting.

Was I missing something? These data are readily available. It doesn’t take a scientist to understand them. So why was global warming still an issue? Did there exist data I had not yet found? Why did I keep hearing about an international consensus among scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners?

I dug a little further, and started to pay more attention to what the commonly quoted "experts" were saying. I started to smell a rat.

Just what are greenhouse gasses, anyway? A greenhouse gas is a gas whose thermal properties are such that it retains heat when sunlight shines upon it. There are several such gasses found in our atmosphere, but by far, the most common of these is water vapor, good old H2O. In fact, the amount of H2O in our atmosphere dwarfs all the other greenhouse gasses. Of all the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, around 95% is H2O, and only 2% is CO2.

Of course no one claims that mankind is causing an increase in H2O in the atmosphere; most of it comes from evaporation of the oceans. But if CO2 accounts for only 2% of greenhouse gasses, why are we worried about marginal increases?

Further, of the CO2 in the atmosphere, human activity accounts for only a small percentage. Most CO2 enters the atmosphere from natural processes. Man causes only about 5%, from activities such as fossil fuel burning and breathing.

Wait another minute! CO2 accounts for only 2% of all greenhouse gasses, and of that, only 5% is caused by human activity. This means that our fossil fuel consumption and all the other activities that the global warming crowd is trying to limit causes a grand total of 1/10th of 1% of greenhouse gasses.

Climate History

Is it true that the earth is warmer now then it has ever been before? Not hardly. Scientists know a lot about the historical climate record from analyzing fossils and deep ice layers. They know the earth’s climate is cyclical, going from ice-age to warming to ice age.

The earth’s temperature now, far from being abnormally high, is below the global average of the last 3,000 years. In fact, during the past 3,000 years, there have been five extended periods when the Earth was distinctly warmer than today.

But how about the CO2 level? Is our current level dangerously high, as some insist, or is that cyclical as well?

No, there have been many periods in the earth’s history during which atmospheric CO2 was far higher than today’s levels. "Carbon dioxide concentrations may have been up to sixteen times higher about 60 million years ago." writes Thomas Gale Moore, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Then why should we be concerned about the current level? If we know that the globe was both warmer and had higher CO2 levels before mankind was around, why would we assume the current level of CO2 has anything to do with human activity?

The Kyoto Treaty

And what about this treaty that was agreed to last December in Kyoto? The big issue there was not whether the data indicated global warming was a reality, or whether human activity was causing it. That these were true was assumed.

The data don’t matter" says Chris Folland of the UK Meteorological Office, at a meeting in North Carolina. "We’re not basing our recommendations [for immediate reductions in CO2 emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models."

There you have it. The data don't matter!

In Kyoto, since they blindly accepted the global warming dogma, the main issue was whether every country would be bound by the proposed CO2 emission reductions, or if they would let the "developing countries" off the hook. Last year the Senate sent a strong message to the Clinton administration in a 95-0 vote on a resolution that said they would not ratify any treaty that bound the US to CO2 emission limits unless all the countries were bound to the same reductions.

Nevertheless, Al Gore, in a well publicized cameo appearance in Kyoto, authorized the US negotiators to agree to a treaty that failed to meet this standard. The U.S. agreed in Kyoto to reduce CO2 emissions to 7% percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12, but countries like China, Korea, Brazil, and Indonesia had no such mandate.

The likely instrument to achieve the reduction would be a carbon tax imposed upon all forms of fossil fuel consumption. This would be hugely expensive. A recent DRI/McGraw Hill study estimated that the government would have to increase gas taxes by more than 60 cents a gallon and double the price of heating oil just to hold carbon emissions at 1990 levels. They project that over the next 14 years more than 500,000 Americans annually would lose their jobs if proposed climate change commitments were implemented. A 1990 study by the Congressional Budget Office concluded such a limit would "risk several years of economic stagnation and high unemployment."

Why would we do this? Decreasing CO2 emissions as called for in the treaty would have the effect of reducing global greenhouse gasses by less than 1/100th of 1%. Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel consumption (park your cars, everyone) the resulting decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere would not even be detectable with our current instrumentation.

Official Deceit

So what science is behind the Kyoto Treaty?

The recommendations are based upon reports issued by the IPCC, (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the United Nations science advisory group that arranged the Kyoto "Earth Summit" last December and its predecessor in 1992 in Rio.

The IPCC issued reports In 1990, and then again in 1996 outlining the current state of the global climate models and discussing evidence supporting them. The reports were written by a handful of government scientists, and they are advised by a large number of other scientists who contribute to and review various parts of the report.

The contributors are not necessarily involved in climate research, nor do most agree on the conclusions of the report. They send back their comments, which the IPCC often ignores entirely. Indeed, many of these scientists are outspoken critics of the conclusions made by IPCC. But the IPCC claims nevertheless that their report reflects a consensus.

After getting the input from the reviewers and finalizing the 1996 report, the IPCC wrote the "Policymaker’s Summary", which it released along with the full report. They knew that few in the press would wade through the 2000 page report if the Summary was on the top.

The Summary drastically overstated the case made in the report for the global warming hypothesis. It said "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate."

This statement infuriated many scientists on the review panel. Very little in the report itself supported even such a cautious statement.

Worse, after finalizing the report the IPCC went back and altered the language in a key chapter (8) that deals with the empirical support for the global warming hypothesis. Now, usually report summaries reflect the conclusions of the report. But in this case, they appeared to change the contents of the report so that it would agree with the summary. Here are two statements they deleted:

"None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to . . . increases in greenhouse gases."

And

"No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."

So we have the curious phenomenon of a supposedly scientific body, whose reports form the basis of dramatic and far reaching social and economic policies that are enforced by an international treaty, intentionally doctoring their own report so that it coincides with the conclusions they wished the data showed. All the while claiming the report reflects consensus.

The Manufactured Consensus

What about this consensus? I kept hearing that the scientists all agreed, global warming was real, and that human activity was the cause. But the evidence I had found either refuted or failed to support the global warming hypothesis.

I’m not a scientist, certainly not a climatologist, so how could I presume to make a judgement about the global warming hypothesis better than the consensus among scientists who make it their life study? How did this consensus come about? Did the climate scientists really agree? I dug a bit deeper still.

The consensus usually referred to is the agreement among the scientists who were involved with IPCC Reports. Involvement implies consensus, they say.

Not so, says Dr. Fred Singer:

"The [Policymaker’s]Summary is a political document put together by a handful of scientists who inevitably reflect the official positions of their governments. The claim that these [contributing] scientists are all in agreement is sheer nonsense. ..when they do speak out, when their opinions have been recorded, they express grave doubt about the main conclusion of the IPCC."

Singer, by the way, is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia, and runs the Science and Environmental Policy Project which he started after a long and award winning career in climate-related fields. His bonafides as a climate scientist are beyond dispute.
And he is not alone in dissent. Fifty-five of the world's most respected atmospheric scientists, in a "statement of principle" issued before the Rio UN Conference on global warming in 1992, said: "there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century", and that "we are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science".

Global warming advocates, however, have gone to great lengths to create the illusion of a consensus. The Union of Concerned Scientists circulated a petition in 1989 urging recognition of global warming as a great danger to mankind. It was eventually signed by about 700 scientists, many of them from the National Academy of Sciences, and some of them Nobel Laureates Only about 5 of the signees, however, had anything to do with climatology.

It’s pretty odd for scientists to take public stands upon issues not in their area of expertise. "Biologists and physicians are rarely asked to endorse some theory in high energy physics", writes Richard Lindzen in Regulation Magazine.

Also, the American Economic Association circulated a petition to its members that stated "preventative steps are justified" to deal with global climate change. Eventually 2,300 of the 20,000 members signed it. The organization didn’t mention what standing they had to make such a claim, nor how they would react if the National Academy of Sciences recommended policy changes justified by, say, "supply-side economics".

"Science doesn't operate by vote" says Dr. Singer. "Even if there were a consensus, if the consensus contradicts the facts, it's wrong."

In any case, if a consensus does exist, that consensus is that the global warming hypothesis is wrong:

Almost every state employs a state climatologist; they were recently surveyed, and 65% of them believed that human activity is not causing global warming.

A group of nearly 100 climate scientists signed the "Leipzig Declaration" in 1995 which objected to the conclusions drawn in the IPCC Policymakers Summary.

Dr. Singer’s Science and Environmental Policy Project surveyed the scientists involved with the 1996 IPCC Report and found that about half did not support the conclusion in the Policymakers' Summary.

Nearly 17,000 scientists, more than 2000 of them directly involved in climate-related fields, have signed a strongly worded petition objecting to the Kyoto Treaty. The Petition reads:
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other green house gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth".

Yet President Clinton claimed in his last state of the union address that "the vast majority of scientists have concluded unequivocally that if we don't reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, at some point in the next century we'll disrupt our climate and put our children and grandchildren at risk.."

And Vice President Al Gore writes in his book Earth In The Balance that "There really is no argument about these basic mechanisms. The argument – to the extent there is one anymore among reputable scientists – is instead… by those who are trying to justify a decision to do nothing."

These statements are factual misrepresentations. Lies.

Why do they insist that there is a consensus? Says Dr. Singer: "Since the theory has not been validated and cannot be validated, those who have a political agenda are trying to get around the scientific facts by claiming a consensus which in fact doesn't exist."

So it’s politics, not science, that drives the global warming agenda. The politics of radical environmentalism.

Trojan Horse

What do these people and groups have to gain? The global warming movement is the Trojan Horse of environmental scares. There’s something inside for everybody, and plenty of elbow room. The issue provides cover for a whole range of special interests, so a lot of groups use it to their advantage. Victory is too close to let little things like science and consensus get it in the way.

But first they must convince us to accept a regime of worldwide energy rationing, administered by the UN through a tax on CO2. Which is exactly what the Kyoto treaty proposes to put in place: a climate protocol controlling the use of energy.

The Kyoto treaty forwards an incredible number of prior agendas, which explains why so many groups are willing to ignore the science to see it ratified.

The undeveloped world sees the Kyoto treaty as almost too good to be true: by taxing energy consumption in the developed countries, productive capacity will shift to countries not bound by the treaty. Thus, the treaty enforces a transfer of wealth on a global scale, of unprecedented proportions.

The treaty is a politician’s dream: a tax so pervasive and far reaching that it can’t be evaded and will provide untold revenues for years to come.

Bureaucrats, both government and U.N. get what they crave: power. The power to decide who gets energy and how much. Better still: there’s no accountability. Unelected, not constrained by issues of sovereignty, they will be the globe's arbiters of productive capacity and living standards.

Environmental groups of all stripes and issues, from saving the rainforest, the salmon, the air, the water, the spotted owl, and the whales, see the treaty can advance their cause.

The most radical of these is the "Global Sustainability" crowd, of which Al Gore is the high priest. These people believe that the fragile earth cannot withstand the pace of human and economic development brought on by our "dysfunctional society", and so it must be slowed, to a "sustainable" level. And who decides what that level is? Why the ruling elite, of course. Preferably headed by Al Gore, President of the United States. (However Bill Clinton, Secretary General of the U.N., will still be his boss.)

Our Vice President believes that every one of our cultural institutions, from schools and churches to industry and commerce, should make eliminating man’s effect on the earth its single overriding goal. This means, he says "embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action to preserve and nurture our ecological system."

And if you don’t agree, or if you object to the abridged freedoms this would entail, there will be "terrible moral consequences". In the ultimate non-sequitir he compares the western ethic of production and consumption (that is, capitalism) to the totalitarian Nazi Germany war machine.

Whew! I thought we had a pretty simple question, here. Is human activity causing the globe to warm or is it not? It seemed to me that the data clearly failed to make a case for taking any action on the global warming hypothesis. But that makes me, according to Al Gore, immoral.

Al Gore sees the United States -- a country that freed an entire people to think and act without shackles, a country that by unleashing the power and creativity of the human mind’s productive capacity attained a level of prosperity that is without precedent in human history -- as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany.

And then he negotiates and has the President sign a treaty that if enacted will do more to limit freedom than any single act in our nation’s history, because he claims, contrary to the science, it is necessary to "save the earth".

Brings to mind H.L. Mencken again, which pretty much explains the entire global warming issue: "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

Sidebars

They Said It - A few very special quotes revealing the true motive of global warming acolytes:

"We reject the idea of private property." -Peter Berle, Former President of the National Audubon Society

"It's easier to get funding if you can show some evidence for impending climate disasters. In the late 1970's it was the coming ice age. Who knows what it will be ten years from now. Sure, science benefits from scary scenarios." -Dr Roy Spencer, NASA, 1990 TV Interview

"We may get to the point where the ONLY WAY of saving the world will be for the industrial civilization to collapse". -Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the Rio Summit in 1992

"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect." - Richard Benedict, State Department. employee working on assignment from the Conservation Foundation.

"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." - Undersecretary of Global Affairs Timothy Wirth (and former Senator from Colorado)

"The trouble with this idea is that planting trees [to consume CO2] will not lead to the societal changes we want to achieve." - Unidentified Kyoto delegate, Dec. 5, 1997

"The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now." - Louis Proyect, Columbia University, Former head of Tecnica, an organization that sent technical aid to the Sandinistas in the 1980’s. Nov. 27, 1997

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. " -Stephen Schneider, an environmental activist, in Discover , Oct. '89

"What should be done ? The ideal approach would be scrap the whole fossil fuel economy, lock, stock, and parking garage." - Joseph Petulla, emeritus professor of Environmental Management, University of San Francisco (San Francisco Examiner, October 27 1997)

"... the deliberate quest of poverty . . . reduced resource consumption . . .and set levels of mortality control." - Maurice Strong, on what is required to achieve global sustainability

Doomsayers Vs Doomslayers

The doomsayers are the most vocal environmental advocates, both governmental and independent. The popular media loves to quote their cataclysmic predictions, even when they prove entirely wrong.

For example, Paul Erlich warned 20 years ago of the impending doom from the globe’s population explosion and the coming scarcity of natural resources that would cause mass starvation. None of it came true. Quite the contrary, natural resources are more abundant now than ever, and the world produces more food per capita than ever before. Yet the media still quotes dire predictions from Erlich, with total credulity of his credentials as a prognosticator.

Another example is Stephen Schneider, a former Stanford scientist. In the 1970’s, Schneidier wrote a book and went on tour warning about the coming ice age. Now, Schneider leads the charge against global warming, and his predictions are still widely quoted.

The following are a few Doomsayer predictions about the dire effects of global warming, alongside the more clearheaded and science-based views of the climatologists, who are rarely quoted in the popular media.

DOOMSAYERS:

Global Warming will cause the polar ice caps to melt, causing sea levels to rise up to 8 feet, drowning entire coastal cities.

DOOMSLAYERS:

If the globe warms, the atmosphere will hold more moisture, causing more precipitation. Because much of that precipitation will fall on the frozen poles, sea levels will fall slightly

DOOMSAYERS:

Global warming will cause a greater frequency of severe weather, more hurricanes and tornadoes.

DOOMSLAYERS:

Warmer temperatures are related to less extreme weather patterns, not more.

DOOMSAYERS:

Global Warming will bring widespread drought in now productive farmland areas.

DOOMSLAYERS:

Higher CO2 levels and warmer average temperatures would be a boon to wildlife and plant life. Forests would thrive, and the globe could sustain much more life than it can now.

DOOMSAYERS:

Epidemics will overrun the earth, and pest-borne diseases such as malaria spin out of control.
Epidemics like malaria are common only in impoverished areas.

DOOMSLAYERS:

The best way to control disease is to raise the standard of living in poor countries.

DOOMSAYERS:

The only way to save the planet is to decrease production and consumption, especially of fossil fuels. Only by tempering mankind’s urge to use nature for its own purposes can we ensure the environment will be sustained in a livable condition.

DOOMSLAYERS:

Environmental preservation is a "luxury good". Poor countries, especially in socialist or communist regimes that allow little private property, have horrid environmental conditions. Only wealthier countries have the available resources to direct to minimizing human impact on the environment. The best way to ensure a clean environment, far from curbing the natural human desire to improve living standards by creating wealth, is to encourage it.

More on Climate Gate

2009-11-30T22:36:00.000-08:00

It's almost funny the lengths the LameStream media is going to ignore the CRU emails.

The Oregonian lead editorial today talks of the upcoming Copenhagen climate confab, and how China and Obama are now ready to agree to CO2 limits. The piece goes on about how promising it is that the two largest "polluters" are finally talking about real limits.

But nowhere is there any mention whatsoever about any little controversy that might be brewing somewhere over some little emails. Not a word.

Question: If a major international scandal occurs that calls into question the basic integrity of the lead scientists on the biggest environmental and political issue of the century, and the Oregonian doesn't report it - did the scandal really happen?

Apparently the Oregonian doesn't think so. Don't report it, and it doesn't exist.

Except this scandal is growing legs. Long ones. And honest journalists, even those who for years have criticized AGW skeptics are now looking at this honestly.

Read this piece from Clive Crook in The Atlantic. Will we ever read anything this honest in the pages of the Oregonian? Doubtful.

Clive Crook is no right winger. He is very smart, and very talented. I have followed his writing for years in the Financial Times. He used to write for The Economist. He's a liberal. As he says - at the very least, these emails show that the leading scientists pushing the AGW hypothesis cannot be trusted.

So where does that leave them? Credibility destroyed. Their original data was deleted.

This is going to be fun!

Climate gate finally getting noticed

2009-11-29T19:10:00.000-08:00

Sure, the mainstream media here in the the U.S. are still refusing to report the story, but the international media sees it for what it is: The biggest scientific scandal ever.

On the eve of the Copenhagan conference, I'll bet this thing cools their private jets just a little bit.

Doing the Lars Larson Show today

2009-11-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Noon til 3:00 Pacific. www.kxl.com

They are coming after your lifestyle

2009-11-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

Here they come: the planners want to change how you live. Everything from what you eat to how warm or cool you keep your home to how you get to work. And they aren't even trying to hide it.

It's all right here in Multnomah County's "Climate Action Plan." The Portland Tribune today does a good job of summarizing its elements (but predictably, there isn't a whisper in the article that some of this stuff might be a tad controversial, or any discussion whatsover from any contrary viewpoint. Isn't it great living in a one party state?)

Pretty scary stuff:

"Actions suggested in the plan aren’t “just a wish list,” says Susan Anderson, director of the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Rather, they will be used to forge new policies, ordinances, incentives and public spending designed to meet the stringent emissions targets."

Go read the plan. It is just breathtaking, the power that the plan contemplates handing over to government. Not to mention the economic devastation if we actually met the goals these folks have in mind.

This is just lunacy!

The document itself is an orgasm of central planning passions that if implemented would without question put the finishing touches on the devastation of the Multnomah County economy. You really have to read the whole thing to appreciate the sweeping breadth of what the planners want to control, and the utter disregard for whether all their arbitrary targets, goals and objectives have any basis in reality.

They want to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by the year 2050, with an interim goal of 40% by 2030. To get started toward these goals, the document develops 18 objectives and "accompanying actions" which are to be pursued in the next three years. These "actions," they are quick to point out, are not an exhaustive list. They are just the "highest priority" stuff, "all of which must be pursued by the end of 2012."

And off they go. Remember - they plan to use coercion to make this stuff happen: taxes, bulding code changes, ordinances, regulations.

I'll just list a few of the things they want to require, so you get a sense of their detachment from any question of viability.

1) They want to reduce the energy consumption of all existing buildings by 25%. First, why? What if energy prices fell because we found a cheap, non-carbon form of energy? Second, what do the planners know about the feasibility of achieving this level of energy reduction? Answer: nothing at all. They just chose a number without regard to what might have to be done to meet this arbitrary goal. It would be easy enough, actually. Just turn the thermostat off. No heat, no cooling. And no occupants!

2) They want all new buildings to achieve "zero net greenhouse emissions." They will use the building code to mandate this. No discussion at all of how this might raise the cost of homes and commercial buildings.

The document gets worse still when it deals with transportation. They want to reduce vehicle miles per person by 30%! They themselves admit that between 1990 and 2008, VMT per capita went up by about 6% (this while they spent the bulk of transportation dollars on light rail.) Just imagine what they are going to have to do to achieve this goal!

Oh - we don't have to imagine! They lay it all out for us.

Objective 5 says they want 80% of all Multco residents to live in an area where they can easily walk or bicycle to meet all their basic non-working needs. Read: ultra-high density. One action plan is to force all neighborhoods into their "20 minute neighborhood" model. They flesh out this model, and claim all sorts of Portlanders are "interested." Yeah, I have been to some of those "Charettes."

In order to reduce vehicle miles traveled, they want only 30% of us to drive alone to work. Their target is that 25% will use mass transit, and another 25% will bike to work!

Sure.

I could go on, but you get the point. The kind of place these planners envision would be one of the least economically productive places in the country. You think there are few jobs now? Implement this plan. You think housing is expensive now? Implement this plan.

What is infuriating to me is that these ivory tower planners and the political structure that enables them have are cranking this crap out as if we are in a robust economy. People everywhere are struggling, and our city and county officials are actually paying people to devise schemes for how to make housing, energy, transportation and food MORE EXPENSIVE!

Happy Thanksgiving!

PAC-10 is the most entertaining football in the nation

2009-11-21T21:49:00.000-08:00

The country was treated to two incredibly entertaining PAC-10 football games today, which put all the other games on TV all day long to shame.

Stanford lost a heartbreaker to Cal when their terrific freshman QB threw an interception on the five yard line with a little over a minute to go. Had they scored a TD, they would have led by a point.

Meanwhile, Oregon and Arizona were playing a classic. What a game! Oregon tied it with 6 seconds left in the game, then won it in the second overtime.

Tbe only game even close to this entertainment value was watching an overrated LSU botch a comeback attempt against Ole Miss. Needing a field goal to win, they made a miracle 4th and 26 conversion with one second left on the clock, but didn't have their field goal team ready to take the field! The QB lined up under center and spiked the ball, which was ridiculous because it was the last play of the game.

Who knows what either he or LSU's coach was thinking. But what can you expect from a guy whose very name, Les Miles, exudes bad grammar.

The PAC-10 has been entertaining all year long. Who knows whether our top teams would beat Texas, Alabama, Texas Tech or Florida (I think we would give them a run for their money) but just from a fan's perspective, there is no more entertaining league in the country.

And speaking of the top PAC-10 teams .... that would be Oregon and Oregon State.

The Civil War will be for the the league title and a trip to the Rose Bowl. Unreal.

December 3rd is going to be an interesting night.

The O: Trying to pretend the fringe is mainstream

2009-11-21T00:50:00.001-08:00

I shouldn't EVER read the "How We Live" section of the Oregonian. I almost never do.

I usually read the front page section, laugh at the Business section, read the Metro section and the editorial page, and then on to Sports. The "How We Live" section is so reliably inane that they have trained me to not even glance at the front page, but rather to just turn to the comics where the Bridge Column is printed, and then head off for my morning constitutional to be reminded why I will never be a world class contract bridge player.

But tonight I made the mistake. Late night snack, paper already read, sat down with my re-heated soup at the table where the paper still lay. I'd already read the rest of it, so it was all I had left. I was immediately sorry.

The article took up almost the entire front page of the section, and continued on to a back page. Which would be fine if the story was at all interesting in the journalism sense.

What was it? An glowing article about a new kind of transformational lifestyle, "CoHousing."

Oh brother. How many stories do we have to read in the Oregonian about some alternative lifestyle that they claim is so much better for our health, our environment, our community, our culture? Here we go again.

So it seems about two decades ago some latter day hippies bought five houses in NE Portland and created a little urban commune. Now about 25 people live there, and they share all the usual stuff in tried and true commune style.

Only now, the fact that they can claim to have a much lower "carbon footprint" gives them all sorts of cache that the Oregonian just can't resist pretending deserves a huge Friday edition multiple color picture story about how morally superior this way of life is to the selfish, high carbon lifestyle we all want to live.

There are a few laugh out loud parts of the story. Like the part where it is revealed the founder lives in the main house with her significant other, their 15 year old daughter and "another couple."

Any takers? Mom and Dads out there - any of you clamoring to share a space with your daughters and another couple? Of course the story doesn't mention any sensitivities around such a situation. Rather, the very next sentence explains that the house gets "40% of its energy needs from solar panels and water heaters."

Great! My daughter is at risk of being molested by a non family household member, but at least we are sustainable!

The story tells of all the usual commune-style arrangements, which might have been interesting back in 1968 when communes were actually kind of interesting. But it is really irritating that the Oregonian tries to pass this stuff off as either innovative, or as some kind of wave of the future, or anything other than what is: just a small fringe of people living in a way that almost nobody wants to live.

But that is what the Oregonian seems to desperately want to pretend is mainstream. Even though their own reporting proves otherwise:

It says that 5,000 people live in such arrangements in 100 communities in 21 different states. But they have their own national association, which wants to boost that number, "focusing on baby boomers and "cultural creatives," a demographic estimated to top 50 million."

Good luck.

One resident, a 25 year old PSU music student says living with all these different people makes the "human relationships more durable." Really? More durable than a nuclear family living in a single household? I somehow doubt it.

But that really is the point of the whole story. They really are trying to push new social arrangements and claim they are mainstream.

Hey, if people want to live like this, I could care less. Go for it. But why does the Oregonian pretend it merits this kind of fawning coverage as if this is some kind of superior arrangement for how we should live?

The fact is, we don't want to live like this. Normal people want to get married, raise a family, and have a household with their family and nobody else living in it. That is what people overwhelmingly want.

The Oregonian just alienates itself more and more from the vast majority of people by pretending that this kind of lifestyle is anything more than the fringe that it has always been.

And mysteriously, their circulation continues to plummet.

End of the Oprah era

2009-11-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

So Oprah announced that 2011 will be her last year doing her show.

I've never much watched her show because it always ran during the day. So I am not really a fan in the sense of being a loyal follower who watches her show.

But I have long admired her for her talent, her accomplishments, her range of expertise, her business acumen, and the fact that she became the rarest of all things: the transcendent entertainer.

She is incredibly talented, and her ability to connect with an audience is probably without parallel in our time. Her reach was impressive. Her book list spawned probably hundreds of thousands of book clubs around the world devoted to reading her selections. She could make a best seller with her simple recommendation.

She is and always was a class act. Very human, but didn't really cross the line into schmaltz. She opened her own life from time to time up to her audience, like with her struggles with weight. But I never felt that she relied on the sensational or the worst of our pop culture reflexes to keep her audience.

Rather, I think she elevated her audience. She often dealt with serious topics, and she had a way of asking tough questions in a way that did not intimidate. As I say, I didn't watch her show, so my impressions come from the things I would see reported about her show from the other media outlets. But she was not afraid of controversial topics, and handled them very well.

She is still quite young, so she will obviously be around a long time, and will continue to contribute to our culture in many ways. So I don't want this to sound like some kind of professional obituary.

Far from it. I can't wait to see what Oprah does now that she isn't saddled by the responsibility of a daily talk show. I am quite certain her politics are much different than my own, but that doesn't matter here.

Oprah is one of the most talented people of our generation. Whatever she chooses to do, she will have a huge impact. It will be exciting to watch.

Newsweek - a once proud magazine

2009-11-17T21:23:00.000-08:00

Imagine a liberal woman, a national figure, once a candidate for Vice President of the United States, being pictured by Newsweek Magazine as they pictured Sarah Palin on their cover this week. It simply would never happen.

They want to diminish Sarah Palin, so they use a photograph taken from Runners World Magazine and put it on their cover.

They really only diminish themselves. Newsweek used to be a very good rag. Decent columnists, good business coverage, intelligent writing. Now it is just another failing liberal media outlet.

It deserves to fail.

Read this, but make sure there are no firearms nearby

2009-11-16T14:07:00.001-08:00

Because I guarantee you will want to shoot someone after reading it.

Phil Keisling report on PERS

2009-11-12T20:43:00.001-08:00

Former Secretary of State Phil Keisling has drafted a report on the current problems with PERS. Bojack got a copy of it, and I read the thing tonight.

It is quite simply the seminal work explaining the so very complicated structure of PERS and its dizzying problems. The report is more than 50 pages including the footnotes and appendices, but it is very readable.

Making something this complex readable is no easy task.

Keisling is the last Democrat I voted for. I have gotten to know him quite well over the years, as we have had many a conversation over breakfasts and lunches. He has always had my respect.

Now he has my sincere thanks for providing a resource we can all use and refer to when we need a more complete understanding of PERS.

Thank you, Phil Keisling!

This is a must read

2009-11-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

If you want to understand why our financial system collapsed, and why the fixes they have put in place are going to fail, you have to read the column pasted below, which ran in the WSJ Weekend Edition.

The Man Who Predicted the Depression
Ludwig von Mises explained how government-induced credit expansions led to imbalances in the economy.

By MARK SPITZNAGEL
Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our peril today.

Mises's ideas on business cycles were spelled out in his 1912 tome "Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel" ("The Theory of Money and Credit"). Not surprisingly few people noticed, as it was published only in German and wasn't exactly a beach read at that.

Taking his cue from David Hume and David Ricardo, Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money supply, and how this was magnified by government intervention. Left alone, interest rates would adjust such that only the amount of credit would be used as is voluntarily supplied and demanded. But when credit is force-fed beyond that (call it a credit gavage), grotesque things start to happen.

Government-imposed expansion of bank credit distorts our "time preferences," or our desire for saving versus consumption. Government-imposed interest rates artificially below rates demanded by savers leads to increased borrowing and capital investment beyond what savers will provide. This causes temporarily higher employment, wages and consumption.

Ordinarily, any random spikes in credit would be quickly absorbed by the system—the pricing errors corrected, the half-baked investments liquidated, like a supple tree yielding to the wind and then returning.

But when the government holds rates artificially low in order to feed ever higher capital investment in otherwise unsound, unsustainable businesses, it creates the conditions for a crash. Everyone looks smart for a while, but eventually the whole monstrosity collapses under its own weight through a credit contraction or, worse, a banking collapse.

The system is dramatically susceptible to errors, both on the policy side and on the entrepreneurial side. Government expansion of credit takes a system otherwise capable of adjustment and resilience and transforms it into one with tremendous cyclical volatility.
"Theorie des Geldes" did not become the playbook for policy makers.

The 1920s were marked by the brave new era of the Federal Reserve system promoting inflationary credit expansion and with it permanent prosperity. The nerve of this Doubting-Thomas, perma-bear, crazy Kraut! Sadly, poor Ludwig was very nearly alone in warning of the collapse to come from this credit expansion. In mid-1929, he stubbornly turned down a lucrative job offer from the Viennese bank Kreditanstalt, much to the annoyance of his fiancée, proclaiming "A great crash is coming, and I don't want my name in any way connected with it."

We all know what happened next. Pretty much right out of Mises's script, overleveraged banks (including Kreditanstalt) collapsed, businesses collapsed, employment collapsed. The brittle tree snapped. Following Mises's logic, was this a failure of capitalism, or a failure of hubris?

Mises's solution follows logically from his warnings. You can't fix what's broken by breaking it yet again. Stop the credit gavage. Stop inflating. Don't encourage consumption, but rather encourage saving and the repayment of debt. Let all the lame businesses fail—no bailouts. (You see where I'm going with this.) The distortions must be removed or else the precipice from which the system will inevitably fall will simply grow higher and higher.

Mises started getting some much-deserved respect once "Theorie des Geldes" was finally published in English in 1934. It is unfortunate that it required such a disaster for people to take heed of what was the one predictive, scholarly explanation of what was happening.

But then, just Mises's bad luck, along came John Maynard Keynes's tome "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in 1936. Keynes was dapper, fresh and sophisticated. He even wrote in English! And the guy had chutzpah, fearlessly fighting the battle against unemployment by running the currency printing press and draining the government's coffers.

He was the anti-Mises. So what if Keynes had lost his shirt in the stock-market crash. His book was peppered with fancy math (even Greek letters) and that meant rigor, modernity. To add insult to injury, Mises wasn't even refuted by Keynes and his ilk. He was ignored.

Fast forward 70-some years, during which we saw Keynesianism's repeated disappointments, the end of the gold standard, persistent inflation with intermittent inflationary recessions and banking crises, culminating in Alan Greenspan's "Great Moderation" and a subsequent catastrophic collapse in housing and banking. Where do we find ourselves? At a point of profound insight gained through economic logic, trial and error, and objective empiricism? Or right back where we started?

With interest rates at zero, monetary engines humming as never before, and a self-proclaimed Keynesian government, we are back again embracing the brave new era of government-sponsored prosperity and debt. And, more than ever, the system is piling uncertainties on top of uncertainties, turning an otherwise resilient economy into a brittle one.

How curious it is that the guy who wrote the script depicting our never ending story of government-induced credit expansion, inflation and collapse has remained so persistently forgotten. Must we sit through yet another performance of this tragic tale?

Mr. Spitznagel is the founder and chief investment officer of the hedge fund Universa Investments LP, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

Political correctness can be deadly

2009-11-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

The real story is taking shape now. I think it is clear enough to be stated:

The Army had a jihadist Muslim in its ranks. A traitor whose allegiance was to Islam first. Further, he let it be widely known, through his words and actions, that he thught the war on terror was a war on his religion, and that he thought infidels should be murdered.

But these in-plain-sight warning signs were ignored. His fellow students in his master's program didn't file complaints because they were afraid of appearing discriminatory. TWO investigations into his conduct and his correspondence were dropped.

He kills thirteen fellow soldiers and wounds 31.

Why is the mainstream media so reluctant to admit that this guy was a jihadist? As Rich Lowry chronicles in his column today, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the Washington Post keep pushing the "when soldiers snap" narrative, with articles about "Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome."

This is a tragic consequence of political correctness. We pretend in the airports that 85 year old white grandmothers pose the same risk to security as 25 year old middle-eastern males. The U.S. Army ignores obvious and well-reported signs that this madman was a traitor, and did nothing.

And the U.S mainstream media can't even admit that Hasan was motivated by Muslim extremism! For God's sake, he yelled Allah Akbar while killing 13 American soldiers!

Do you think the New York Times will print as many front page stories about this tragedy as they did about the Tailhook scandal? Or Abu-Graib?

I'll bet anybody any amount of money that it won't even be close.

What kind of America are we?

2009-11-09T08:25:00.001-08:00

It has become more and more apparent to me lately that there are really two general world views that determine how a person views the kind of country America is and should be.

The two views are incompatible. There is no "compromise" between them that doesn't move the country toward one or another from where it currently is. The country isn't split right down the middle on these two views, but it is pretty close. Maybe 45%/55%, perhaps just a bit wider.

Because there isn't any compromise possible between these two camps (and what I mean here is that any compromise necessarily moves in one direction or the other, so one side advances, the other loses) the two sides can't even really talk with each other. They have fundamentally different assumptions about the very meaning of America.

One side honestly wants to move America into the European welfare state model: high taxes, with some necessities provided by government for everyone and all necessities provided by government for some people. The private sector and voluntary arrangements between people are restricted in order to forward the social policies that the government has decided are important (workweek, vacation time, hours, working conditions, benefits, etc.)

This view believes the individual is subordinate to the group, and therefore the government's rightful role is often to limit and direct individual behavior in order to create a fairer, more just society.

Let's call this view the "collectivist" vision.

The other side believes the European welfare state model is not what America is and should be about. They believe that government should generally stay out of voluntary arrangements between individuals, and that is should definitely not have the power to attempt to create some vision of social justice through abrogation of these individual rights. At core, they belive that the individual is not subordinate to the group, that limits and directives on individuals is warranted only to prevent one individual from harming others.

Let's call this view the "individualist" vision.

What we see going on now is that President Obama is attempting to move this country rapidly in the direction of the collectivists. He wants government to take over automobile companies and banks and take a proscriptive role in health care and energy use.

So the question for this time is: Is America a collectivist country? Will the people support a President who wants to move us there?

I don't think so. I think the collectivist view is indeed shared a large minority of Americans, but it isn't the majority. And further - America is fundamentally NOT a collectivist society. It is not what our founding fathers created. Quite the opposite!

So a President can't just change the fundamental principles of our country through a legislative agenda.

People have said to me lately: "So what is so bad about the European model?"

Leaving aside the arguments about the structural unemployment rate it creates, and the lower standard of living, the problem with the European model is that it is inherently un-American in that it restricts the freedoms upon which our nation was founded.

Hey, if Europe wants it, have at it. I would argue that Europe accepts the welfare state model because its culture came of age in a fuedal system, where there was no middle class and where the people were literally in serfdom. They got whatever the Lord allowed.

The European welfare state is just the new Lord, and the European people have in their cultural core an acceptance of the notion that they are subservient to the Lord.

That is not how our country came of age. Our forefathers rejected this model. They fled the feudalism that limited their freedom, and at great personal risk forged a new nation here. They even fought a war to sever the ties to the fuedal government of Europe.

They founded a new country based on the primacy of the individual. A radical notion that rights are vested in the individual, and that it is the government's role to secure these rights. No nation on Earth had ever been founded on such a notion.

And look what happened! It unleashed the creative powers of the human spirit in a way that literally changed the world. For the next two hundred plus years, America was the engine that brought unimaginable prosperity to any and every corner of the world that wanted to follow its lead.

So why is it that we have some large minority of the people in America now who want to copy the European collectivist "serfdom" model?

I don't understand it. It is as if, 230+ years after our nation's founding, that many people now literally do not accept the fundamental premise of our nation's founding.

And one of them is in the White House.

I started this post by saying there are two visions for America - which I identified as the "collectivist" vision and the "individualist" vision. I acknowledge that many people are in the collectivist camp, and are trying like hell to move our country into this model.

I know this would anger folks who are of this view, but what they are doing is fundamentally un-American. The society they are trying to create is not what our country was created to be. If they want to change the founding principles of America in order to establish a European model, then they should have to acknowledge that they don't share the basic American founding principles and try to convince us that these principles are wrong and should be changed.

Make no mistake: the path Obama wants us on leads to serfdom. I predict the nation will reject it, because the enough American people have not forgotten - much less rejected - the core principles that made America the greatest nation ever to grace the planet Earth.

Fort Hood shooting reaction

2009-11-06T15:02:00.000-08:00

As the details start to roll in about the Fort Hood shooting, it seems more and more obvious that the shooter was indeed motivated by Muslim extremism. Reports of him yelling "Allah Akbar" as he fired the shots should be a pretty good hint as to his motive.

Which makes even more ridiculous the reaction from Congressman Jim McDermott I just heard on the radio. He said the shooting was a "symptom of a stressed military," and showed the need for "mental health counseling." He was quoted as saying we need to end the "stigma" associated with seeking mental health services.

So McDermott thinks that Hasan, who was a mental health medical professional, might not have passed out new bellybuttons to his military colleagues if a sense of shame had not kept him from seeking out mental health counseling?

This guy is such a dope.

Interpreting NY-23

2009-11-04T08:56:00.001-08:00

Here come the post-mortems on the results of NY-23 last night.

Democrats will say it shows the dysfunction of the Republican party, because they ate their own and delivered a victory to the Democrat. They will say it lays bare the rift in the Republican party between the Tea Party element and the party establishment, and ensures that there will be contested primaries all over the country that will further damage the party and weaken it for 2010.

I don't see it that way. I think this has a few relevant facets.

The party screwed up big time by putting Scozzafava up as the candidate. There was no nominating election - it was done by a handful of party establishment types. From the start it was clear that she was a horrible fit for the district. Had they simply put up even a minimally acceptable candidate, they would have rolled to victory and avoided this whole mess.

Hoffman wasn't really an ideal candidate himself. He was pretty much a stiff. Zero charisma. Kind of the fringe type of guy who would step into this kind of a breach - a situation that isn't usually going to attract the most polished and mainstream person, and he wasn't.

So the fact that he lost isn't all that surprising.

Scozzafava proved herself, in the end, to be everything her opponents said she was when she gracelessly endorsed the Democrat. In her heart, she was a Democrat. Why the party ran her is mysterious.

But this loss isn't altogether a bad thing. First, Owens is almost certainly a one termer. This is a Republican district.

So on the negative side of the ledger, we have a one term Democrat in a Republican district. On the positive side, we have a very strong message sent to the establishment Republicans: NO MORE RINOS IN DISTRICTS WHERE A CONSERVATIVE CAN WIN!

And guess what? President Obama is doing a very good job at bringing Conservatism back into vogue again, which means that there will be LOTS of districts where a real conservative can win.
NY-23 was indeed a family fight, and there was some collateral damage. But the result will be a party that fields candidates who are far more in step with the reality of the political facts on the ground.

It was a wake up call to an out-of-step Republican party establishment, and it is a good thing it happened.

2009 election night

2009-11-03T20:02:00.000-08:00

As I write this, it is so far a Republican sweep in the races that have been called so far. The one race not yet determined is the famed NY-23rd district, where the Conservative party candidate is behind by about 4,000 votes with 65% of the count done.

So what does it mean?

I don't know how this can be spun any other way than to say that independent and swing voters moved hard away from the Democrats, and that it means trouble for the Obama agenda and Democrat candidates in 2010.

Over at BlueOregon tonight, there isn't so much as a whisper about the election results. After crowing for a year about the demise of the Republican party, there doesn't seem to be much self-reflection when the first post-Obama election provides them with a small but stern rebuke.

I guess this shouldn't be a surprise. There was nothing on BlueOregon about the apalling "green-gate" scandal in which Kulongoski basically lied about the cost of his tax credit scheme. Kari Chisolm wrote a post today called "Quick Hits: catching up on the weekend," in which he gave a rundown of the major political news stories of the weekend.

The green-gate story wasn't even mentioned!

That is how one-party states become two party states.

Will the 2009 election be a harbringer for 2010 in Oregon and nationally? I think that is a distinct possibility. Obama ran as a moderate, and has governed as a radical. That is not where the people of this country reside.

Governor: "I am NOT corrupt. Just incompetent"

2009-11-02T09:26:00.000-08:00

I am insulted, and you should be too.

I mean, you would think they would respect us enough to try to come up with some excuse that at least sounds marginally plausible. But they don't. They know that any old excuse will do, because in our one party state nobody will hold them accountable for wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

I am talking about the Business Energy Tax Credit, and the revelation in yesterday's Oregonian that the Governor's office pressured the Department of Energy to lowball the estimates on how much the tax credit would be used. They were only off by a factor of 40 or so.

When two Department of Energy staffers (one former, one current) say that they were instructed to put down as low an estimate as possible, what is the Governor's response? From the Oregonian:

"Kulongoski staff members deny that the governor or anyone on his staff directed the Energy Department to lowball the costs and said the huge disparity between early cost projections and actual expenses was simply a bad guess. They say no one understood how popular the tax credit would become."

This is just laugh out loud funny. Mind you, they were estimating the impact of raising the tax credit to $20 million per project. And their estimate: $1.2 million in '07-'09 and $4.1 million for '09-'11.

Someone will have to explain that to me. Bad guess indeed.

So they would have us believe that they are really stupid enough to make an estimate like this, and not see how ridiculous it is on its face. As if they asked themselves: "Gee, if we raise the tax credit from $3.5 million to $20 million, how much will get used? Probably about $1.2 million. Yeah, let's go with that."

And when they are caught red-handed, with two different inside sources who say the Governor's office pressured them to minimize the number, they just claim incompetence!

Question: Will Oregonians continue to put up with this BS?

Here they go again

2009-10-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Sam Adams is just back from DC where he was trying to get $20 million out of the feds to help pay for the latest "linchpin" project that they are just CERTAIN will pay for itself many times over by attracting untold levels of economic activity.

Untold, of course, because nobody can actually explain in concrete terms exactly how the thing will create any jobs or value.

The story is in Willamette Week. The want to build a monument to "sustainability" - an office building that produces all its own electricity. Of course that requires the thing to be hotter in summer and cooler in winter than most of us would want in a building for $31 per square foot. (Which puts it a level above class A office space.)

Heck all sorts of people will line up to have their office in a place where they sweat all summer and freeze all winter, especially if it costs more. Guess who will occupy the space? Sustainability-trough-feeding non-profits and government agencies.

But I mostly LOVE the serious economic analysis they did to show how if we build this outrageously expensive building with taxpayer funds, that it will spur all sorts of economic benefits. Here is what the Chancellor of the Oregon University System, a financial partner in the deal to the tune of $80 million in bonds, says:

"This is going to brand Oregon as a leader in the sustainability movement,” Kenton says. “We think of this building as a portal. People are going to want to come here and connect with it, and it will drive a whole bunch of economic value to the state.”

So there we have it. A "portal" that will "drive a whole bunch of economic value" to Oregon.

And on the strength of that extensive econometric analysis, we commit tens of millions of taxpayer funds.

OK then.

Central planning is dead. Long live central planning

2009-10-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

An article in the Portland Tribune this week is a great example of the ability of our local politicians and planners to refuse to acknowledge the failures of their policies.

The article, to summarize, says: "Shucks, it turns out that remodeling an entire region into our vision of new urbania, with bike paths and lite rail and high density makes those dastardly folks who actually employ people want to leave. Who knew? Guess we need our planners to turn their talents to planning the economy."

The hubris of these folks is startling. Faced with the utter failure of their "livability" dreams and schemes, now they pretend to be able to plan what industries will have job growth. "Clusters" they call them. And they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put their helpful stamp on these burgeoning new employment sectors.

Never mind that the last next big thing, Biotech, which was the justification for their last several hundred million dollar boondoggle, so far has been an utter failure.

Nothing like failure to make them create new plans! It certainly couldn't be that planning itself is a failure. That would mean they wouldn't have jobs!

And THOSE jobs are the ones that these folks REALLY care about!

On cue, the Oregonian praises Nike

2009-10-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

What a surprise that the day after Nike announces it wants everyone in the U.S. to pay higher energy prices, the Oregonian praises them and the other large corporations that are on board with carbon tax legislation.

The lead editorial also praises the "forward looking" companies that support Cap & Trade, such as General Electric, Duke Energy, Exelon, and PG&E.

Forward looking? Is the Oregonian really that gullible, or are they just fundamentally dishonest? Do they NOT know that each and every one of these companies is simply "rent-seeking?" These corporations have a huge financial stake in the the government making fossil fuel energy less competitive. The mandates and controls that would result from carbon taxes will put billions in their coffers.

For the Oregonian to pretend that somehow these companies are just being good corporate citizens is just plainly dishonest.

I'm boycotting Nike

2009-10-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

Nike announced yesterday that the company is withdrawing from the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because if its opposition to the Waxman-Merkey Cap & Trade legislation. So Nike supports raising domestic energy prices.

Pretty hypocritical for a company that makes ALL of its consumer products in places like China, Vietnam, and India - places that never agreed to any CO2 controls - to support making energy more expensive in the U.S.

No more Nike stuff in my house.

Race to the Status Quo

2009-09-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

There's one area of policy that I think President Obama is handling quite well, at least in the sense of using a federal executive branch apparatus to actually bring about positive change: education.

Back when he chose Arne Duncan as his education secretary, I wrote a column in BrainstormNW Magazine praising the selection and detailing Duncan's reform efforts as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools.

I watched the man closely over the years, and talked to him several times at various school reform conferences. His commitment to real, structural school reform is real, even though the implementation of his programs in Chicago were somewhat blunted through opposition and political compromise.

Duncan has maintained his committment to reform during his first year at the helm of the U.S. Dep't of Education. His #1 policy initiative is called the "Race to the Top." The program involves a $4 billion fund that he is allowing states to compete for, but they must first prove they are committed to a number of reform ideas such as merit pay and charter schools.

Probably only about ten states will be selected as Race to the Top (RttT) funds recipients. The stakes are high, because the awards will be in the range of $3-400 million per state. Oregon, of course, wants in.

An article in today's Oregonian by Betsy Hammond tells of the efforts Oregon is making to gin up a winning RttT proposal. The article has links to the five different committees that have been appointed to hammer out the policy statements and other confetti they think will convince Arne Duncan that Oregon is a serious reform state.

It's not going to work. Who can argue with a straight face that Oregon's political establishment is serious about school reform? Arne Duncan isn't going to buy it.

A look at the committees reveals a slew of folks who share one common bond: a steadfast commitment to the status quo. Look at their document titled "Core Values and Beliefs," reveals all the same drivel that the State Department of Education has yammered on and on about for years. Nothing innovative about it at all.

Of course it is authored by the President of the OEA and one of the longest serving school bureaucrats in Oregon history. Why would anyone expect anything different?

So the question really becomes one of this being almost a defining moment - not for Oregon, but for Arne Duncan and Barack Obama. If they are fooled by this pabulum, they aren't the reformers they pretend to be.

I'm betting they are. Oregon won't come close to qualifying for RttT funds.

More, 6:40 pm

I did a careful reading of the "Core Values"document linked above. It is really quite revealing.

It has always been a core philosophy of mine that if you want to solve a problem, don't look to the people who were running the show when the problem arose to provide the solution. After all - if they knew how to solve the problem that arose on their watch, it wouldn't have become a problem in the first place!

The problem in our school system is a shameful achievement gap, a shockingly high dropout rate, and an unacceptably low overall general rate of reading and math proficiency. That these are the problems is pretty much uncontroversial.

It's the solutions that separate the reformers from the pretenders. True reform doesn't mean doing the something slightly different using the same basic structures. It means changing the structure of the system.

Read the "Core Beliefs" document, and it is clear: there is nothing whatsoever in the way of structural change contemplated in this document. It is all about trying to improve what teachers do, the content they deliver, the data they analyze, the training they receive, etc.

My question: aren't these people who are on these committees and writing these documents, telling us how they will use the RttT funds to get better outcomes the same folks who are CURRENTLY running the show? Aren't they the same folks who designed the current curricula, teacher training programs, assessments, data analysis systems, etc?

So what was stopping them from improving the schools before now?

The truth is, they are proposing the very same stuff they proposed at every other juncture when there was money to be chased or political pressure on them to improve their product. All the same college-of-education jargon. All the same basic solutions. It has been intellectually bankrupt for decades.

Their solutions didn't work before, because they doesn't solve the root of the problem: The structure of the system.

Reform has to mean structural change. Everything else is just a song and dance that ends up simply further empowering the very same folks under whose watch the problems arose. We need to DISEMPOWER these folks, not give them hundreds of millions of dollars to err again!

Serena and Kanye

2009-09-15T07:08:00.000-07:00

What a weekend for civility!

At first blush, the actions of Kanye West and Serena Williams appear to be pretty similar: two immature performers acting horribly on an international stage.

But if you drill down a bit, look at the context of what each of them did and consider how they handled the public scorn that resulted from their actions, and there starts to be a glaring difference.

Kanye West swerved completely off the pavement to insert himself into perhaps the biggest moment of Taylor Swift's singing career. It was the kind of thing that is so completely off base that almost no one could muster any sympathy at all for what he could have been thinking and what motivated him to do what he did.

Contrast that to Serena Williams. A very tight match, in the semi-finals of a major tournament. She is serving to tie the critical second set. The line judge calls a foot fault!

Now, I am not a tennis expert. Looking at the replay, it wasn't a foot fault. Her foot was very close to the line, just as it always is. It is hard to imagine what the judge was thinking.

The analogy would be: seventh game of the World Series, Red Sox ahead by a run, and Dodgers have two out and a man on third. Umpire calls a highly technical balk, sending the run home.

Or last few seconds of the seventh game of the NBA finals, Bulls down by 2, Michael Jordan drives the key for a shot - Whistle! Palming the ball! Game over!

It is just a call you don't make. Unless it is egregious. Whether you think Serena's toe touched the line or not, it wasn't a flagrant foot foul. The stupid line judge should have swallowed the whistle, and not inserted herself in the moment when it was completely unnecessary.

So I can absolutely sympathize with Serena's anger. Was her language and reaction wrong? Sure. But TOTALLY understandable.

Now, consider the aftermath. Serena Williams, after the officials basically made her forfeit the match, went to her opponent and shook her hand and congratulated her. Then in the press conference afterward, she repeatedly apologized, congratulated her opponent for a great match, and apologized again. She was dignified and forthright. She made no excuses, and didn't even discuss the stupid call (at least in the part I saw.) She didn't whine about it.

Contrast that to Kanye West. He was on the very first Jay Leno NBC broadcast last night. He sat down all contrite, said he was dealing with lots of hurt in his life and now he would have to deal with the fact he hurt another artist in her big moment. Leno asked him what his Mom would say to him (I guess she is dead) and he tried to choke himself up, but it looked phony. He said something incomprehensible about how he would have to improve as a person.

Everythiing he said was 100% focused on Kanye West. How what he did affected HIM. How HE would have to deal with the fallout. He never so much as apologized to Taylor Swift. Not once.

What a complete jerk. As if we needed any more confirmation.

So, my take is:

- Kanye is a self-obsessed idiot jerk.
- Serena is a classy lady who reacted badly in the heat of a very unfair moment.
- That stupid little bureaucrat line judge should never see another tennis match.

Live lavishly so others can simply live

2009-09-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

The Oregonian today devoted almost the entire front page of the Sunday paper to cheerlead the new state energy conservation program that gives subsidized low interest 20 year loans to homeowners to install insulation and other energy savings stuff.

The huge article, which consumes almost two full pages complete with pictures, graphs, and illustrations, seems to almost go out of its way to obfuscate the inconvenient little fact: the money invested in saving energy costs more than the energy it saves.

Which, in the Oregonian's upside-down world, makes it a great investment. From the article: "The payoff would be huge ... avoid millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate 85 percent of the expected increase in electricity demand by 2029."

First of all, this statement is just blatant editorializing, as is the phrase from the paragraph before this, which said: "Doing so would not only cut consumers' power bills, but virtually eliminate the need to build new carbon-spewing power plants."

For God's sake. Carbon spewing?

Imagine applying this ridiculous logic to any other commercial activity. "If every Oregonian agreed to reduce his consumption of sugar by 4 grams a day, we could virtually eliminate the need to build new carbon-spewing sugar processing plants."

The world view that underlies this attitude is that producing stuff is an evil to be minimized. That there is virtue in producing less.

As per usual, this is entirely backwards. There is virtue in productive activity. The more we produce, the better off we collectively are. The more jobs there are, the more well being there is for even the least productive among us.

This is the same attitude that created that bumper sticker: "Live simply so others can simply live." Exactly, 180 degrees wrong. You want others to live better? Live as lavishly as you possibly can. Produce as much as you can, make as much money as you can, and spend that money to make your life as comfortable as you can possibly afford.

THAT is what will help others to live better. Because every little thing you buy in pursuit of your own hedonistic pleasure must be produced by someone else. They get paid for producing it, and are able to then afford the things they themselves want.

Imagine what would happen to the world economy if we took the advice of this bumber sticker? let's say every single one of us reduced our consumption of everthing we use by, say, 30%. Any idea how many people would lose their livelihoods and be thrown into poverty? Millions. Hundreds of millions worldwide.

Why don't these people understand this? Why do we have to constantly open up the Oregonian and get another lecture on why we should consume less?

Little wonder the Oregonian has found itself needing to produce fewer and fewer newspapers each day.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

2009-09-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a very interesting story from Missouri about a woman complaining to the Sherriff about being inconvenienced by a funeral procession for a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

What an incredibly poignant response from the Sherriff who responded to her email. It read, in part:

"While you were being inconvenienced in your car on your way home, there were soldiers just like Sergeant Woods carrying 100+ pounds of equipment in 120 degree heat, up some mountain or in the middle of some desert. They will shower out of a helmet liner if they get the chance. They will eat a cold meal of MRE's; something most people would consider garbage. They cannot text their family or friends, or go to McDonalds, or watch TV. They can only continue the mission and look out after the guy to the left and right of them. They don't complain because they know they volunteered. The only thing they ask is that we do not forget the sacrifices they have made."

Some pictures are worth 3000 names

2009-09-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

School bureaucrats cry: "We shouldn't have to compete!"

2009-08-31T18:21:00.000-07:00

What an incredible front page article in the Oregonian today.

The Corbett School District is a little district wedged between a couple east county districts and the Columbia River. Over the years, it has developed some very strong academic programs that gained the notice of a lot of parents in the area.

Parents who don't live in the Corbett district could still have their kids attend the Corbett schools as long as their resident district gave permission - which for several years most of them willingly gave. The superintendent signs an "inter-district transfer" form, and the district passes on the roughly $6,000 the state allocates to that student over to Corbett.

But as money became increasingly tight this last year, most of the east county districts said "no more inter-district transfers." They started refusing to sign the forms. Parents who loved the Corbett schools but didn't live in the district were out of luck. Their own district wanted to trap their kids into schools the parents didn't want, because each of those children had $6,000 taped to their foreheads.

But Corbett found a workaround. Charter schools in Oregon can enroll kids without regard to school district boundaries. And if a district wants to turn create a charter school inside one of its own buildings, it is a pretty easy exercise.

So Corbett created a charter school inside its K-12 school building, and now it is free to enroll as many kids as it can accommodate. And THAT is what has the other districts' noses out of joint.

The Gresham superintendent, John Miner was quoted: "We can't cannibalize one another under the guise of curriculum," Miner said. "There is a fundamental flaw in the charter school law that the Legislature must address."

In other words: The charter law allows parents to choose their kids' school, without going on bended knee to their resident bureaucrats. The legislature must fix this.

What Miner calls a "fundamental flaw" is really a fundamental PRINCIPLE of charter schools - parental choice and competition. District bureaucrats don't want to have to compete. It is much easier to have their students assigned to them.

Reynolds School District's superintendent doesn't like it one bit: "This new charter school definitely impacts our district finances negatively," he said. "And it blatantly circumvents the interdistrict transfer process."

If his district is losing students to Corbett, perhaps he should offer what Corbett offers. That's kind of the point of the whole thing: competition drives improvement, because you have skin in the game.

Also, it is absolutely true that charter schools "blatantly circumvent the interdistrict transfer process." In fact it is so blatant that the legislature designed the charter school law specifically to circumvent it!

What we are seeing here is the competitive dynamic at play. It was the whole idea of the charter school law in the first place. For ten years since we passed the law, districts have been able to keep the competitive pressure to a minimum through all sorts of quasi-legal shenanigans that I have spent the last decade fighting.

But finally, the pressure is being felt. It took a deep recession and an innovative, courageous leader from inside the education establishment to bring it to a head.

Corbett's Superintendent, Bob Denton, explained why he used the charter option when local districts started refusing transfers: "I wasn't going to let them take kids who want to be here, whose parents want them to be here. Kids are not a means to an end, to financially support you as a district. That is unethical."

Imagine a school system in which ALL of the school leaders held this view. THAT is the promise of charter schools.

Potpourri

2009-08-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

A few things that have accumulated over the last few days:

The Clackamas Teachers Union insisted on receiving their contractual pay raise, so the district had to lay off 60 teachers. This is a great illustration of what is wrong with how the public sector operates.

The existing collective bargaining contract called for a 3% pay hike this school year. The district asked them to accept no raise, some furlough days, but keep their step raises. No way, said the union. The district used the only cost cutting tool at its disposal in the world of collective bargaining. They had to lay off teachers. Sixty of them.

I'm sure those 60 teachers felt they got good value for the $600 or so a year in union dues they pay. And I am sure the people of Clackamas School District feel that the union is really looking out for the quality of the education they provide.

While people employed in the private sector are taking hefty real pay cuts (in some cases 100%) it is unconscionable for a teachers union to refuse to accept the reality of the deep recession, and basically screw the taxpaying public and the parents of school kids.

Why does ANYONE still believe that teachers unions are a good thing for our society? It is morally corrupt to its core.

Another monument to sustainability is being built with your wasted tax dollars in Portland. The Edith-Green Wendell-Wyatt federal building is getting a $133 million renovation courtesy of stimulus funds. And of course they are going to make it oh-so-sustainable, so efficient that it could qualify for LEED certification. The Oregonian headline hinted at how smart this is: "Makeover motivation: It's eco-logical."

Yes, very logical indeed. Spending $133 million to renovate a 350,000 square foot office building. That only comes to about $386 per square foot!

In Oregon, "sustainability" is defined as "spend a whole lot of money to achieve a very small decrease in energy."

Logical indeed.

Another Clackamas School District controversy has a school board member, Sam Gillespie, complaining publicaly about his own incompetence. Seems the district lent over half a million dollars to one of its quasi charter school organizations. I say quasi, because the schools are really not independent charters. Thier employees are disrict employees and union members.

The schools, the Clackamas Web Academy and the New Urban High School, got a loan from the district, and now are asking for ten years to pay it back.

Sam Gillespie, long time board member who is no pal of charter schools of any stripe, complained about the dsitrict being forced to accept this payback deal, and criticized the charter school movement, saying "That's the problem with charters - there's no accountability."

Huh? His own board authorized the loan, and his own board oversees these two charter schools. If they haven't been overseeing it properly, there is only one person to blame: Himself!

The incredible shriking credibility of Obama

2009-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

President Obama is taking heat from the left, people such as columnist Paul Krugman, for not being tough enough on the opponents of his health care plan and for backing off on the centerpiece, the "public option."

Krugman says

"there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him."

As usual, Krugman gets it wrong. Obama has tried to rebuke his opponents and people aren't buying it. He is coming off as a tin man, and people aren't buying his sales pitch.

Obama doesn't fill the suit of President. Why would this be a shock to anyone? A person with his limited life experience simply cannot possibly have the field vision to do anything but fail.

Who is advising him? A bunch of hack Chicago machine pols who are driving things as if they were back in the swamp they feel comfortable in.

Obama has overreached big time, and the country is rejecting his agenda. Backing off the public option is not a sellout like Krugman's "progressives" are saying, it is a political failure brought on by the same inexperience and hubris that brought the HillaryCare disaster for Clinton.

Clinton, after that failure and the 1994 rebuke in the mid-term election, dramatically changed course, started triangulating, governed more from the center, and had a successful presidency (if marred by his tawdry scandals.)

What will Obama do? Does he have the skills to change course? If not, he is a one termer pure and simple. The country has never liked his agenda nearly as much as they liked him personally. Now voters are starting to inextricably connect the two. Obama IS his agenda in the voters mind, so they are starting to reject him.

As long as he pushes for Cap & Trade, Pubic Option, and the like, his presidency will continue to sink.

Krugman is and has always been blinded by his ideology. He thinks all Obama has to do is get tough, call out the opponents for their demagoguery, and the nation will be convinced.

No, that won't work. The demagoguery on things like the Death Panels works because there is a thread of truth to it. Everyone knows that government takeover of insurance will lead to rationing decisions by government.

As uncomfortable as people are with health care rationing by insurance companies (which undeniably is the reality,) they are FAR more uncomfortable with having those decisions made by the federal government.

And Obama has been totally unconvincing on this point. He tries to pretend that rationing will not be necessary, and people simply do not buy it.

So his credibility shrinks as people realize he is not telling it straight. He starts compromising, and says that which he once insisted upon was never the centerpiece of his plan. Which of course is a lie, and everybody knows it. Credibility shrinks more.

It is early in his presidency, so he does have time to recover. For Clinton it took an historic election in 1994 that gave Republicans control of both houses for the first time in 40 years before he changed course.

The 2010 election could shape up along similar lines if Obama ignores folks like Krugman and starts realizing that this is a center-right nation that won't tolerate his far left agenda.

The next six months will be interesting indeed.

BlueOregon's Chisolm reveals himself as propagandist

2009-08-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

Over at BlueOregon, blog founder Kari Chisolm has the funniest post ever.

He wants the left's narrative of "violent conservative protests against ObamaCare" to stick, but other than some shouting at various town hall meetings (which I think is not the greatest idea, BTW) they don't have any evidence of any real conservative violence or threats.

So Chisolm trumps some up, and gets his plus-sized knickers in a twist at his own propaganda.

First, he posts the audio from a phone call to SEIU from a woman named Diana. In the call, she tells the SEIU to "stop the violence" and to stop suppressing people's first amendment rights, lest they "come up against the second amendment."

Kari Chisolm, with another of his chronic episodes of the vapors, thinks this is a "violent threat."

So if I warn you to stop committing acts of violence, or I will meet your violence with some force of my own, that is a threat? Sounds more to me like Diana is saying folks will defend themselves, and use their constitutionally protected gun rights to do so.

Is that the best they can do to pretend that conservatives have turned into health reform Brownshirts?

But the best part of Chisolm's post is where he claims he has video proof conservative "mobs" assualting SEIU "purple shirts." He posts an SEIU video that juxtaposes peaceful SEIU rallies and protests with clips from recent town halls where politicians are being shouted at by angry participants. At the very end, there's a few short seconds of a clip that supposedly shows an SEIU purple shirt being attacked.

One slight problem with that clip. Look at the whole video - not just the few seconds that the SEIU showed - and guess what? It's the SEIU purple shirt thug who gets arrested! You can clearly see the guy run into the scuffle, grab the black guy who had just got up from the pavement, and throw him to the ground!

Now, to be perfectly accurate (which Kari Chisolm doesn't appear to feel is required) when the video starts you cannot tell what has just occurred. There is a purple shirt on the pavement, and the black guy is also on the pavement. You can't see how they got on the ground.

The black guy gets up, stands on the sidewalk, and that's when the other purple shirt thug literally runs up, grabs him, and throws him to the ground.

And for several minutes, this thug, cigarette dangling from his lips, shouts at bystanders, in a very threatening way, who accuse him of assaulting the black guy. The police come, and the black guy waves them over. The police arrest the purple shirt who assaulted the black guy.

THAT is Kari's proof that "conservative mobs" are resorting to violence! Nice job Kari! Your credibility is, shall we say, on the wane.

What a joke.

Public option leads to single payer

2009-08-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

You've probably already heard or seen this video, where Pres. Obama basically admits that a public option will lead to the end of private insurance. I just wanted to post it on my blog so I would have it handy when I needed it.

There's also some other good quotes from Obama in this NRO Corner post.

Oh... BTW.... be sure to check out the comments in the thread two posts down. Amazing! Our friend David Appell thinks he is no better than a squirrel!

Clunker program hurts the poor and unemployed

2009-08-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that some people think it is a good idea for the government to pay people to destroy things of value. Are you in the habit of taking valuable durable goods that could be easily sold on Craigs List and ruining them?

That is what the federal government is doing with the nation's fleet of used cars.

Imagine if the government bought Maytag, and then announced a program in which you could buy a new Maytag at a reduced price if you destroyed your current one? That's basically the "Cash for Clunkers" program. It is idiotic.

You know what one of the biggest obstacles for the chronically unemployed? John Charles at the Cascade Policy Institute has done a lot of research into this question. The answer is: reliable transportation.

It makes sense. You have to be able to get to a job to have a job. Lots of jobs aren't near enough public transportation to make that feasible. Lots of poor people can't afford to buy a car. So their job prospects are extremely limited.

Charles' research showed that if you provide these folks with a reliable automobile, they can get a job and keep it.

So with unemployment approaching 10% in this great economy, what do we do? Take perfectly funcionable cars permanently off the road, and give the middle class a big subsidy to upgrade to a newer more expensive car.

Great idea. It increases the average cost of the nation's fleet of cars, putting further out of reach that which the poor need to be gainfully employed. It removes from the market millions of low cost cars, which they could otherwise someday perhaps purchase.

All in the name of marginal increases in fuel economy. Screw the poor. Great idea.

"Trees have rights too"

2009-07-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Remember when Commissioner Dan Saltzman uttered these now-famous words when advocating for a Portland tree ordinance?

Yes, the notion of inanimate objects having legal standing is absurd. Yes, to actually believe it requires a rejection of the American concept of "rights" upon which this nation was founded, and which to a large degree is responsible for the success of the American experiment.

But sadly, advocating for such an idiotic idea in Democrat circles won't marginalize a person in the slightest. In fact, not only will it not prevent you from being appointed to the highest tier of national environmental policymakers, but the mainstream media doesn't think a belief in such things is anywhere near as scary for a government official as a belief in ....... Christianity.

President Obama's "Science Csar," John Holdren (the guy who is on record in his 1970's book advocating forced abortion or adoption of illegitimate children, sterilizing women after two kids, and even putting sterilizing chemicals in the drinking water of undesirable populations) also supported the notion of giving trees and other natural objects legal standing:

From a post on NRO Corner:

“One change in (legal) notions that would have a most salubrious effect on the quality of the environment has been proposed by law professor Christopher D. Stone in his celebrated monograph, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’” Holdren said in a 1977 book that he co-wrote with Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich.

“In that tightly reasoned essay, Stone points out the obvious advantages of giving natural objects standing, just as such inanimate objects as corporations, trusts, and ships are now held to have legal rights and duties,” Holdren added.

So Obama's "Science Csar" is a fringe kook. Anyone want to argue otherwise?

But for the New York Times, which has not printed a single news article discussing Holdren's scary and extreme views, this stuff isn't anywhere near as damaging for a public official as the views held by the guy Obama has nominated to head up the National Institute of Health.

This guy, Dr. Francis S. Collins, led the effort to map the human genome. One of the major scientific accomplisments in history. The Times has already printed a news story and an op-ed piece decrying the Collins appointment on the grounds that he is ...... A Christian!

Sacre Bleu!

Apparently, a high level public official in charge of environmental policy being a thoroughgoing eugenicist and wanting to give trees rights doesn't raise any eyebrows at the New York Times. But an official with an avowed belief in God?

That just can't be allowed.

The Beer Summit

2009-07-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

So today is the breaking of the bread between Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. Crowley.

This could actually be interesting. Remember, this meeting was suggested by Crowley when Obama called him - so it wasn't just a damage control idea of the Obama handlers. Obama agreed to it, certainly, because it would help wipe his own gigantic misstep off the front pages, but it wasn't his idea.

My friend and partner Jim Pasero points out that Obama is at some significant risk here. Crowley has been empowered by Obama to essentially represent and speak for the entire nation's law enforcement professionals. Obama insulted them all in his statement last week.

Crowley now goes to a White House meeting with both Obama and Gates. Obama probably figures Crowley will be so intimidated by the surroundings that he will go along with whatever reconciliation narrative his handlers want to portray from the meeting.

But what if Crowley doesn't go along with the narrative?

There will be that moment when Crowley emerges from the White House to a crush of gathered media waiting for his report. What if he uses that "teachable moment" to make a point? Isn't Obama playing a high risk game here, assuming that Crowley will go along with Obama's purpose for the meeting?

What if he doesn't?

What if he emerges, and says: "I really hoped I could get an apology from the President for smearing the good work of a nation's law enforcement officers and from Professor Gates for his ridiculous behavior that resulted in his arrest, but they were more interested in a charade...."

Oh my, that would blow this whole thing into the stratosphere. And Obama has set himself up for it, giving the power to a single man whom he has already insulted.

Chances are, Crowley does play along with Obama's narrative and emerges with all the happy talk about breaking of bread and reconciliation. But there is at least some chance Crowley will use the moment to make a point.

Wouldn't that be fun?

"Birther" mystery solved!

2009-07-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Obama birth certificate controversy has been interesting to watch.

Here's the bottom line: Even if the birthers are correct, and Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be president, what then? The constitution has only a single mechanism for removing a sitting president - impeachment - and that is for "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Is running for President as a non-citizen an impeachable offense? If not, then what exactly would we then do if indeed it were proven that Obama was not a U.S. citizen? There just isn't any constitutional method of removing him. Once the electoral college has voted and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has sworn him in, he is president. Even if he isn't a citizen.

That said, I put almost no stock in the conspiracy theories of the 'birthers." What the controversy HAS done, however, is give the left a good way to ridicule the right. Just look at liberal blogs like BlueOregon. The birther issue gives them a way to pretend that conservatives and Republicans are all harping about this conspiracy (which we aren't) and dismissing us as wing-nuts, even racists.

When I was subbing for Lars Larson a couple weeks ago, we were discussing some other topic and a caller slipped through who brought up the birth certificate issue. My producer said "Uh-oh, I let one through now here they come."

He was right. Immediately the phones lit up, with every single line on hold wanting to add something to the conspiracy. It wasn't even the topic of the day. I actually had to announce I was killing every single call, and would not take any more calls on the topic.

Which is why I say the "mystery" has been solved. The mystery I refer to is the one decent question the birthers are asking: "If Obama does indeed have a long-form birth certificate, why not just release it and make this issue go away?"

For the last couple of weeks I pondered this question. Now I think I know why.

What better way to marginalize the opposition than to draw as many as willingly go down this bunny trail, and then produce the proof.

Right now it is still just a vocal fringe, but as the Obama folks stonewall, it could grow bigger and louder, drawing a lot more mainstream folks into the mix. And the BLAM! Release the long-form birth certificate, and marginalize large swaths of the opposition.

Could that be what he is doing? Is he that clever?

Could be. Which means we have to be clever enough not to chase down this bunny trail in the first place, and concentrate on killing the ObamAgenda.

Oregon: ObamaCare laboratory

2009-07-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

Want a good preview for what health care would look like under ObamaCare? Well, Oregon is a pretty good petri dish. The Oregon Health Plan (OHP) is basically the equivalent of the "public option" envisioned by Obama.

To be sure, the OHP doesn't go near as far as ObamaCare portends to go. There isn't any mechanism in Oregon to force everyone onto either an "exchange participating" plan or the OHP. And there is no employer tax for companies that don't offer health coverage (despite Gov. Kitzhaber's wishes at the time for exactly such a tax.)

But if we look at how the OHP operates, we can envision the world of ObamaCare. The main difference would be that ObamaCare would eventually cover a far greater percentage of the population than does the OHP in Oregon.

The OHP, remember, has been in financial straits literally since it was started. The original idea was an overt rationing mechanism: the state bureaucrats would prioritize medical procedures in a ranking system, and then they would draw a line based on available resources. Depending on how much money the system has, procedures above the line (this year drawn at procedure #503) would be covered, and below the line, tough luck.

Even if your medical need is above that magic 503rd procedure, it will be paid for only if there is money left after everyone with a higher ranking priority has been served.

This is all decided by the Oregon Health Services Commission. They set the ranking - the most current version of which is this wonderful 143 page document. See any similarities between this commission and the ObamaCare idea of a "panel of experts" who will decide on the relative effectiveness of various health care treatments?

At the very least, one thing the OHP has been honest about from the start was in acknowledging that the publicly funded health services had to be explicity rationed. Obama has tried to deny this reality, even while openly discussing his"panel of expets."

The problem becomes, of course, when any commission, panel of experts, or bureaucrats are given the power to prioritize medical procedures. There are LOTS of perverse examples just in Oregon's list. For instance, as pointed out in a recent article:

"... a person in need of an emergency appendectomy (prioritized 84th by the the state of Oregon) would be denied that treatment before an individual in need of treatment for “tobacco dependence” (ranked 6th)."

And:

"... the state rationing board ranked abortion 41st overall in state-funding priority, meaning the bureaucrats who designed the priority structure in this “public option” program determined that the use of taxpayer funds for abortion is more important (and more medically necessary) than covering injuries to major blood vessels (ranked 86th), surgery to repair injured internal organs (88th), a “deep wound to the neck” or open fracture of the larynx or trachea (91st), or a ruptured aortic aneurysm (306th)."

It gets even worse when bureaucrats have to struggle with the ever-problematic end of life care issue. This is where health care dollars really get used up fast, and there really are no good answers to the problem, at least what I have seen.

But I am pretty sure the "Oregon way" is not the right thing to do. Which is, basically, refuse treatment for some terminal maladies but provide funding for services under the "Death with Dignity Act."

For patients with maladies the Commission has decided have a less than 5% 5-year survival rate, here is what IS covered:

1) Medication for symptom control and/or pain relief;
2) In-home, day care services, and hospice services as defined by DMAP;
3) Medical equipment (such as wheelchairs or walkers) determined to be medically appropriate for completion of basic activities of daily living;
4) Medical supplies (such as bandages and catheters) determined to be medically appropriate for management of symptomatic complications or as required for symptom control; and
5) Services under ORS 127.800-127.897 (Oregon Death with Dignity Act), to include but not be limited to the attending physician visits, consulting physician confirmation, mental health evaluation and counseling, and prescription medications.

And here is what is NOT covered:

1) Chemotherapy or surgical interventions with the primary intent to prolong life or alter disease progression; and
2) Medical equipment or supplies which will not benefit the patient for a reasonable length of time.

Again - these decisions are being made by a Commission, not by doctors or families. You might say "Well, that's what you get when you are on publicly funded health care." Fair enough.

But then why would we want to make that kind of health care universal? Because make no mistake, what Obama is moving toward is precisely this kind of program. It is obvious with every single additional revelation of its details.

The uncomfortable fact of the matter is that one way or another, whether we are talking private insurance or some public program, health care has to be rationed. In a private market it is more or less rationed by price. In a public program, it will be rationed by bureaucrats.

Obama has tried to sell his plan by denying there will be the need for any rationing. He says he will find "cost efficiencies" in the current Medicare and Medicaid programs (which he can only do through rationing!) to pay for expanded coverage in the public option.

The veil is being pretty quickly lifted on ObamaCare, however. Pretty much everyone can see that his plan will necessitate Oregon style rationing. That is why support for it is falling apart.

As imperfect as our system now is, and as uncomfortable as we all are with price-rationing of health care and the skyrocketing costs of private plans, the people of the United States do NOT WANT federal bureaucrats deciding who does and who doesn't get health care.

That is why ObamaCare is going to go down in flames.

Wasting your money on solar panels

2009-07-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

You want to know why I am so reluctant to support any hike in the gas tax? Because I don't trust that ODOT will spend the money wisely. The gas tax increase that passed this summer at least had a list of road projects that the funds would pay for, but I still don't trust them.

And in today's Oregonian, there is a story giving a perfect example of why they don't deserve our trust.

They want to spend $20 million installing up to 17,000 solar panels near the I-205 10th Street exit, in order to produce 3.2 million kilowatt hours of electricity.

Do the math. Assume a 6% annual cost of capital. Even with zero maintenance costs, the cost per KWH is above 37 cents. We buy residential electricty from PGE at about 9 cents a KWH.

Oh, but the state government doesn't think in terms of cost of capital. For them, the money is free. It's you and me who have to go earn it. And they already own the land - another real cost not figured into the equation.

If you read the Oregonian story, which is mostly about the objections raised to the project by residents of Oregon City and West Linn, you will notice something missing: any discussion of the monumental stupidity of wasting taxpayer dollars like this. The reporter obviously didn't even think to ask if this project made economic sense.

I guess in Oregon, things like that don't matter. As long as the energy is "renewable" then it doesn't matter what it costs.

And that is why I don't trust ODOT with more money.

The wrong solution to the achievement gap

2009-07-24T10:57:00.001-07:00

There's a front page Metro Section article in today's Oregonian about how the Tualatin-Tigard School District is focusing anew on the achievement gap.

OK, fine. The achievement gap is without question the biggest problem in public schools today. Why is it the most pressing issue? Because if a large gap in achievement persists between kids in low income families (who are disproportionately minority) and middle and higher-income families, it calls into question the very premise of public schooling in the America.

The great promise (indeed, the central premise) of public schools is that it says to the people: "No matter the circumstance of your birth, whether you were born into a family of great wealth or of humble immigrants, the public schools will afford you the opportunity to become part of the great story of America."

But for the last 40 years, the public schools have increasingly failed to live up to this promise. And if it indeed cannot deliver on its very reason for existing, doesn't that beg the question of why we have public schools in the first place?

The fact is, we don't need a system of government-operated schools in order to educate the well off in society. The whole purpose of public schools is their role leveling outcomes. If they fail at that, why indeed have public schools?

Any time you hear an excuse from an educator explaining poor school performance on the socioeconomic status of the students, what you are hearing is an educator implicitly admitting that the very premise that justifies public schools is wrong!

Now, back to Tigard-Tualatin School District's recent effort at tackling their achievement gap. I can confidently predict that what they are doing will have absolutely ZERO effect on the problem. With 100% certainty. I will take any bet.

Read the story - the school district is asking the wrong questions because they are operating from the wrong premise about what is causing the problem. Their assumption is that the problem stems from insufficient racial and ethnic awareness on the part of the teaching staff. Indeed, they are basically saying the teachers are racist because they treat behaviors of different ethnic groups differently. So the solution, they think, involves sensitivity training for the teachers, so they adjust their treatment of minority students to rid themselves of their cultural bias.

In other words, they are basically saying the district's 90% white staff is racist. They point to different disciplinary rates between white and minority kids as evidence of racial bias. So they are having a "conversation about race," which they are pretending will raise the consciousness of the district's staff in a way that the achievement gap will disappear. And now they are all patting themselves on the back for having these "tough" conversations.

Wrong culprit. Wrong solution. Politically correct? Yes. Assuages their white guilt? You bet. Gives them accolades in their professional communities? Absolutely. Going to reduce the achievement gap? Not a chance.

If you want to reduce the achievement gap, you have to attack the cause of the problem. It's not caused by racism of the teaching staff.

One thing you might want to do, if you were really interested in reducing the gap more than you were interested in making some politically correct point on racism, is to find schools that have actually succeeded in eliminating the gap, and see what they do differently.

Nowhere in anything Tigard Tualatin is doing have they asked the question: "Hey, who has actually eliminated the gap? What did they do?"

The good news is that this question HAS been asked and answered. But the answer is one that our school leaders don't much like, because it completely flies in the face of the approach being taken by Tigard-Tualatin and the rest of the education establishment.

Back in 2002, the nation's pre-eminent scholar on racial progress in America wrote a book called "No Excuses - Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." The author is Abigail Thernstrom, who is currently the Vice-Chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

In the book, Thernstrom looked at the academic achievement history of different racial and ethnic groups and drilled down to tease out the reasons for the disparity. Then she actually analyzed schools that have eliminated the achievement gap to see what they did differently from the rest of the public schools. Her findings were an indictment of the Tigard-Tualatin approach to the problem.

Thernstrom's findings were basically rejected by the education establishment because they contradicted their most fervently held attitudes and assumptions on culture and race - assumptions that are reflected in the Tigard-Tualatin effort.

Basically, this line of thinking says that our school kids come from many different races and cultures, and it is up to the educators to adjust their curriculum and teaching methods in order to accomodate the differences among these cultures.

Thernstrom's research showed that this approach will do nothing to raise the achievement of minority children. Why?

OK, brace yourself. Cover your child's ears, because what I am about to relate to you is politically incorrect heresy. I'm warning you. You are about to have your cultural relativism sensibilities trampled upon:

Thernstrom showed, through painstaking research on the academic achievement history of different ethic and racial groups going back through U.S. history, that "When it comes to academic achievement, all cultures are not created equal."

Imagine uttering this sentence in the Tigard-Tualatin "conversations on race." Heresy indeed. Thernstrom goes further. In her study of schools that have actually eliminated the gap, guess how they did it?

They changed the child's culture as it relates to academic achievement.

Imagine suggesting, in these Tigard-Tualatin workshops, that it is the child's cultural attitude that must adjust to the school, not the school's culture that must adjust to the child. I'm guessing a person suggesting such a thing would be reprimanded.

Yet that is exactly what the research shows. It is 180 degrees different than what the prevailing thinking is among educrats in the achievement gap issue. Which is why is not just rejected - it is summarily ignored. The go out of their way to avoid confronting this issue. I would guarantee you that you would be hard pressed to find a single person in the Tigard-Tualatin School District who has ever even heard of Abigail Thernstrom, much less read her book.

And this is not some fringe person - she and her husband Stephen are the nation's pre-eminent scholars on the U.S. racial experience. They co-authored the seminal book on racial progress in America, called America in Black & White, back in the mid 1990's. They are both Harvard based.
The education establishment actively excludes the conclusions and recommendations from their research from being heard, much less considered. I have a personal story to relate on this front.

In 2003, Abigail Thernstrom was coming to Portland to give a speech about her achievement gap book. I had met her some months previous at a conference, having already read both her books, and I struck up a conversation with her. That evolved into a friendship.

It just so happened that her visit was coinciding with a state-wide conference on the achievement gap in Oregon, sponsored by the Oregon Department of Education. What a great opportunity! The conference had no keynote speaker. What a happy coincidence that the very same weekend that Sup't of Public Instruction Susan Castillo was holding a statewide conference on the achievement gap, the nation's most learned person on that issue, who sat on the US Commission on Civil Rights, was not only in town, but was willing to talk to the conference free of charge.

Castillo had no interest whatever. She passed the offer down to an underling, who "offered" Thernstrom a table in the lobby of the conference to hawk her book. What an insult.

But it reflected the typical education establishment's reflexive insularity. They actively exclude any viewpoint that challenges their own dearly held political viewpoint, no matter how rigorous, no matter the stature of the person.

So when I read yet another article about the achievement gap in Oregon, describing yet another attempt at adjusting the schools' cultures to accomodate the various cultures of the student as it pertains to academic achievement, I just want to scream.

Abigail Thernstrom's message is still being excluded. And that is why I can predict with 100% certainty that this effort, just like the dozens before it, will fail completely. And that failure will be ignored, piled on the ash heap of good intentions and flawed premises.

Subbing for Lars this week

2009-07-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

www.larslarson.com

Tune in, noon til three, the rest of the week. AM 750 or kxl.com

Triple-A All Star Game Home Run Derby

2009-07-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

The Triple-A All Star game is at PGE Park this week, and my son has been asked to do some catching duties during the festivities. During the game Wednesday he will be warming up the pitchers in the bullpen. Tonight he caught during the Home Run Derby.

It was really a fun event. There were two high schoolers in the competition, who qualified by winning a local home run competition. One of them, Kevin Taylor from Sunset, is a great kid and a great hitter - my son has played on teams with and against him for years.

Kevin Taylor went first. Mind you, he is a just graduated high school senior, trying to hit home runs in front of about 10,000 fans, and competing against the best home run hitters in Triple-A ball.

The picture at the right is Kevin batting with my son catching.

All Kevin did was hit eight balls over the fence in the first round. The six professionals went next - the best one of them hit seven! He qualified for the next round, which was the top four. He ended up narrowly missing out on making it to the final two.

My son caught for six batters in the first and second rounds, and then the whole final. There were some great moments. In the final, the big Yankee slugger Shelly Duncan hit a high arching bomb that would have been his second homer, but the ump called it foul.

The picture to the right is my son calling the ball fair, as Shelley Duncan looks back to question the call.

No question about it, says son. Fair ball. The other finalist was Portland Beaver Chad Huffman. My son figured Shelley Duncan just got homered on the call.

No matter, it's just an exhibition anyway. Huffman was a great guy too. It was good to have a local winner.

Every time Shelley Duncan came to the plate, the crowd would boo - Lots of Yankee haters in Portland, I guess!

Here's the winner, Chad Huffman, just about to swing at the winning shot. He had some impressive bombs out to left field, onto 18th street. One even hit the Max train!

Bullseye!

The players were terrific. They treated my son very well, and went out of they way to make him a part of things.

Here's a shot of Jeff commiserating with Duncan afterwards, discussing the bad call as some of the other all-stars who weren't in the home run derby hang out.

Pretty cool night for a soon-to-be college catcher, getting to rub it around with the soon-to-be major leaguers.

And on Wednesday he'll be catching the pitchers in the bullpen. Fun stuff.

Obama doesn't really believe in America

2009-07-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a hiatus from my blog since the session ended. Not that there wasn't plenty to write about over the last two weeks - there most certainly was. But sometimes the muse just doesn't sing to me.

I've been observing President Obama over the last few weeks, especially on his trips and speeches abroad. One thing I suspected during the campaign, which seemed evident by his troubling history of nurturing long time friendships and associations with the most virulent anti-American types, is that Barack Obama really doesn't believe in the America that I do.

He doesn't believe in the IDEA and IDEALS of America. He doesn't believe in America's exceptionalism, in its role in the world as a force of good, nor that it has a moral argument to make against regimes it has opposed like Soviet Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

It is evident in the speeches he makes abroad, where he constantly fails to stand up for our principals.

Lynne Cheney wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today that really encapsulates my discomfort about Obama's apparent disdain for America. Talking about Obama's recent trip to Russia, she wrote:

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful."

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

It is irresponsible for an American president to go to Moscow and tell a room full of young Russians less than the truth about how the Cold War ended. One wonders whether this was just an attempt to push "reset" -- or maybe to curry favor. Perhaps, most concerning of all, Mr. Obama believes what he said.

This isn't just a one-time thing; it's a pattern. As Cheney points out, in Cairo, Obama said there was an equivalence between America's support of the Iran coup in 1953 and the Mullah takeover (and three decades of tyranny) since 1979. He also sat idly by and listened as Daniel Ortega ranted an anti-American screed in Mexico City, refusing to defend America against his attacks, and saying only he was glad Ortega didn't blame him since he was only three years old at the time.

Is anybody else troubled by a commander in chief who doesn't really seem to believe that America is worth defending? If he can't even defend our country rhetorically, why would it be any different when it comes to the far more difficult decision to use arms?

Session over; virtual school bill passes

2009-06-29T23:02:00.000-07:00

The virtual school bill finished its long shameful journey today on the last day of the session, as the house voted 31-29 to adopt the amendments made to the bill in the conference committee.

The bill had a total of 56 amendments, and by the time it got to the final form voted on today, it STILL had drafting errors and unintended consequences that the carrier had to pledge, on the floor prior to voting, to work to fix in the next legislative session.

The amended bill isn't anywhere near as destructive as it started. In its first version, it made it illegal for any K-7 student to attend a virtual school on line. Virtual charter school supporters were very effective in communicating their displeasure to the Democrats who were going along with this travesty.

In the four different floor votes on the bill, there was never a single Republican vote in favor. Democrats had a gun to their head by leadership. We constantly heard, all session long, that people had never seen a bill so many hated yet were voting for. Arm twisting doesn't begin to describe it.

The most shameful moment of all was Saturday's Senate floor session, when the bill passed 16-14. The bill's chief sponsor, Senator Devlin, gave the most insipid and self-aggrandizing floor speech I have ever seen.

He knew he had to explain to his colleagues why it was so important to him to deny virtual education to the thousand plus students who will not be able to enroll this year as a result of the bill. Of course, all of his colleagues KNEW the reason: he is a lap dog of the OEA and they wanted the bill.

But that explanation wouldn't fly on the floor. So he went on and on about how much he cares about education that he thinks about it every waking moment, and then he gave a tearful account of his own struggles in the third grade when bad eyesight made it so he couldn't learn to read. He was all choked up as the told this story - and anyone watching was thinking: "Then why do you want to deny today's third graders from enrolling in the school they want? What does your macabre display of overwrought emotion have to do with this bill, which will only deny kids what you were able to get?

It was amazing. I lost any respect I had for that man. He was nothing more than a shill for the OEA all session long, and he cared not a whit for the very real human cost of his desire to advance his own political career.

Senator Devlin is the worst type of politician. I will call him out every chance I get.

House passes SB767

2009-06-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

It was another weird chapter in a saga that has been fraught with bungling, mishandling, outright lies, and the most cynical political power plays that I have witnessed in almost 15 years of dealing with the legislature.

Here is the scene:

The bill as amended in committee before coming to the floor was still completely screwed up, and the Democrats knew it. The amendments they hurriedly moved into the bill in Revenue Committee were bungled. But instead of sending the bill back to committee to fix it, the Democrats did something a bit strange...

They decided to pass the bill as it is, but promise that it would go into a conference committee to be fixed. So the carrier of the bill on the House floor, Rep. Sarah Gelser, didn't really speak to the bill during her opening, she spoke to how the bill was to be amended in conference committee. And the members were supposed to vote on the bill just on the assurance that the bill would be amended as she said it would.

That is strange enough. But how do we know that the bill would be amended as Gelser said? What assurance does anyone have?

Among other things, Gelser said that the "time-out" for virtual charter schools would cap enrollment in existing virtuals at the levels of May 1st, 2009. That was different than how the bill currently read, which limited enrollment to the existing students on that date. That's a big difference - if enrollment is limited to existing students, then when a kid leaves the school, he can't be replaced, and the school will shrink.

The nature of virtual charters is that they do have a good bit of turnover, because lots of families use them for temporary solutions.

Rep. Matt Wingard asked Rep. Gelser for clarification on this point. He asked:

"Under the anticipated amendments that you were speaking about, will enrollment for Oregon Connections Academy be capped at the May, 2009 level until the moratorium is over, as my understanding of the current, or dash-29 amendments, capped ORCA at sts current students only, so if the student leaves, that spot is gone.?"

Gelser responded:

"My understanding, and we will receive further clarification in the conference committee, is that it is capped at the total number of enrollment on May 1st, 2009, but that all students currently enrolled in the school, are able to continue to attend, as well as are their siblings – brothers and sisters who may not yet be enrolled. So if a brother or sister wished to enroll, and they would cause the enrollment to be greater than what was in place on May 1st, 2009, that the total number capped from May 1st would not apply. Did that make sense?"

OK, there we have it. It is a BIG improvement in the bill. It is the difference between ORCA staying the same size, and perhaps growing a bit with sibling enrollment, to ORCA withering on the vine, unable to replace exiting students.

So after the floor vote (31-28,) Gelser let it be known that we could get from her office the amendments that would be moved into the bill in conference committee. Guess what?

The amendments (the SB767-C36) STILL limits enrollment to the existing students on May 1st, 2009! There is NO CHANGE in the language from the current bill on that point. It is completely contrary to what Gelser stated on the floor, in direct questioning from Wingard.

Unbelieveable.

Now, honestly, I don't think Gelser was lying. I think she was lied to by her leadership, and allowed to go make a fool of herself on the House floor as she carried the water on a bill she never sponsored and from all appearances never very much liked.

And the question now is will they fix this thing to read like Gelser said it would read? Or will the Democrat leaders who have engineered this travesty all along just continue the sham, force a vote on the dash-36 amendments in conference, and try to muscle the thing on the Senate and House floors, just like they have done all along?

If recent history is any guide, they will do the dishonest thing. Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, after all.

THAT"S the problem!

2009-06-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

If you want to understand exactly how much the public employee unions are running things around here, read this story from Willamette Week.

The OEA used the State Department of Education's lawyer to draft its bill to kill virtual charter schools - even though several of the provisions of the bill the ODE lawyer drafted for the teachers union are directly contrary to the State Board's own position on virtual charters.

And the State Board of Education chairman, Duncan Wyse, sees no problem with this!

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, IS THE PROBEM!

So OEA, a private interest group, gets to use public resources to draft legislation that is directly contrary to the public interest as expressed by the State Board chair, and that chair says "no problem!"

No sweat. I always want my employees helping outside entities that are trying to subvert my policies. Especially if I am the government. And especially if that outside entity is the Teachers Union, because, well, they really are the boss around here anyway.

Stay tuned - this story is far from over. SB 767 passed out of the House Revenue Committee on Monday, with some amendments that were so hurriedly drafted that they seem to now want to change the bill again.

On Thursday, the ORCA waiver request is once again on the agenda of the State Board of Education monthly meeting. The subject of the Willamette Week article, Cindy Hunt, has been "advising" the State Board through nine months of inaction on ORCA's waiver, despite the fact that the Board's own rules put in place a 90 day deadline for acting on such requests.

Now, after delaying month after month, if SB767 passes as written by Cindy Hunt, the State Board's authority to grant ORCA a waiver from the 50% provision would be taken away, and if the Board happened to grant ORCA the waiver on Thursday, the bill would revoke it.

No, there is no problem at all here. Things are apparently working just as they are supposed to be.

The Senate did it

2009-06-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

In a 16-14 vote, the Oregon Senate passed SB767. Now, the future of vitual charter schools will likely, quite literally, lie in the hands of their enemies.

Sure, the bill still has to pass the House. But we'd have to get 6 Democrat votes (and keep every Republican on board) to kill it there. That is a long shot.

What is disappointing about the way this played out is that the bill was so dishonest, so disingeneous, and everyone knew it. But enough of them went along because the power player in the building wanted the bill, and the Democrats were going to feed the beast.

It is this type of thing that erodes public respect for the legislature as an institution. When you see this kind of thing railroaded through, so brazenly tossing thousands of kids under the bus as a sop to a powerful interest group, the true motivations of many of the people involved is laid bare.

Most disappointing is those who often cast thoughtful, honest votes who just went in the tank on this one. Sen. Rick Metsger voted in favor of the bill. He saw all the testimony in the Senate Education Committee, and he even saw the railroad job that Sen. Devlin performed in the Rules committee. He knew what this was all about - he even said as much when the bill passed out of Rules. He publicly stated then that he reserved the right to vote no on the floor, because he was unhappy with the way the bill was amended in Rules.

Metsger is a good man, a likeable guy, and usually has at least legitimate reasons for voting the way he does. But today he was a bag man for Devlin. He cast the deciding vote. He sold the kids down the river. It is a shame.

Oh, they will all tell you their reasons. But these are nothing but rationalizations. The fact of the matter is, this bill will seriously cripple virtual charter schools in Oregon.

The bill creates a task force made up almost entirely of education establishment status quo defenders, whose job it will be to decide on a framework for governing online education in Oregon, and propose legislation to the 2010 special legislative session.

Think about that. Not only is the committee stacked with virtual charter opponents, but so will be the 2010 legislature.

So the future of each virtual school beyond the next school year is completely uncertain. What would you do if you had a child enrolled in a school that might be gone the next school year? What would you do if you WORKED at a school whose future was so uncertain?

Yet the Democrats in the Senate apparently don't care about creating this kind of uncertainty fo thousands of kids and hundreds of employees. That pales in comparison, I guess, to the needs of the OEA, COSA, OSEA, and AFT.

After all, these groups elect Democrats. So they must be pandered to.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sen. Vicki Walker and Sen. Joann Verger, both of whom voted against the bill. I don't really know Verger, but Vicki Walker is one of my favorites. She is tough, smart and fair. We of course disagree on plenty, politically. But I have long admired her toughness.

This is a sad day for the integrity of the Oregon legislature.

Union lies to its members about virtual schools

2009-06-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

The OEA publishes a monthly magazine, The OEA Today. The June issue has a blurb about SB 767 in which they blatantly lie about virtual charter schools and what the bill does.

You would think that the OEA could manage to be honest when telling their own members what they are up to, but I guess they know if people - including their own members - were actually well informed about what the OEA actually does, that they would lose support fast.

Here is what the OEA says about virtual charter schools:

"Currently Oregon's virtual school providers are taking money that has been allocated to public school students and spending it instead on subsidizing home school students. This is a backdoor voucher scheme."

There is so much in error here, it isn't funny. All these schools are doing is using money allocated to educate public school students to educate public school students. The OEA doesn't happen to like the public school these kids and their parents have chosen (because the teachers are not unionized,) but these are public schools, NOT home schools.

How could this possibly be a backdoor voucher scheme? A voucher is a way to use public funds to pay tuition at a private school. Virtual charters are public schools. Their teachers are public employees. The students take all the same tests and are held to all the same standards as other public school students. To describe a virtual public charter school as a "backdoor voucher scheme" is just ridiculous.

The OEA knows this full well, but it thinks so little of its tens of thousands of members that it doesn't think they will realize they are being lied to.

But someone has to point it out.

Floor vote tomorrow on bill to kill virtual charters

2009-06-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

The teacher union's bill to kill virtual charter schools in Oregon (SB 767) is scheduled for a vote on the Senate floor tomorrow. We will see once and for all which Senate Democrats are willing to sell the kids down the river at the demand of the union.

It really is that simple. The unions changed the bill in certain ways that might put off for awhile the death of the virtual schools they hate so much, but it is just window dressing. In its current form the bill freezes enrollment of all virtual schools, prevents any new ones from being approved, and then it creates a "workgroup" to figure out how to govern virtual schools.

The workgroup is just stacked with education establishment folks. There isn't even a parent of a virtual school student on it! The workgroup will recommend legislation to the interim session they plan to hold in early 2010.

Sen. Richard Devlin is the sponsor. This fight isn't over. We need three Democrat votes to kill this on the floor. Frankly, the fact that it is scheduled for a vote most probably means that Devlin has been able to twist enough arms to prevent three D's from defecting.

But why would reasonable folks like Rick Metsger go along? Or Martha Schrader? Or Betsy Johnson? if these folks cast a Yes vote on SB767, it will be disappointing indeed.

Brooks on the GM deal

2009-06-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

David Brooks writes in today's New York Times about why the Obama plan for GM is fated to fail.

Here is just one of his many excellent points:

"Fourth, the Obama plan dilutes the company’s focus. Instead of thinking obsessively about profitability and quality, G.M. will also have to meet the administration’s environmental goals. There is no evidence G.M. is good at building the sort of small cars the administration demands. There is no evidence that there is a large American market for these cars. But G.M. now has to serve two masters, the market and the administration’s policy goals."

This is what happens when you nationalize industry. It bastardizes the purpose of business into worrying more about political considerations than business considerations. Which ensures it fails, since it has to compete with companies that have no such dual purpose.

This is so very sad.

Why I love the Bend Bulletin

2009-06-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

Read this all the way to the end. I received it over email, so I assume this is not a copyright violation. If it is, I will take it down. But at least there is one newspaper in Oregon that is calling out the ridiculous job killing policies Oregon is pursuing.

EDITORIAL: WE CAN BE NO. 1 IN JOBLESSNESS

Bend Bulletin
Editorial
June 1, 2009

Let Oregon politicians put any kind of spin they want on the latest state unemployment figures. The truth is, we lost out to Michigan — again.

Try as the Oregon Legislature did, Michigan has kept the crown of the nation’s unemployment king.

Michigan reported a 12.9 percent unemployment rate in April. We Beaver Staters staggered in behind at No. 2, reporting a flat 12 percent. It gets worse. Michigan pulled away. Its rate grew by 0.3 percentage point from March to April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We almost didn’t grow at all, moving up only 0.1 percentage point.

The Legislature can revel with some pride in the No. 2 slot. It has earned it. It has led us this far. But somewhere along the way, Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s strategy of The Oregon Way has lost its way. There may be hundreds of pages of new green requirements, new taxes and new regulations generated by this Legislature. It has not been enough.

Don’t despair. We can leave Michigan in the dust. We can be christened the king. There’s still time left this legislative session.

Brace yourself for what may come. All the Legislature must do is to keep doing what it has been doing: Keep digging the hole from which no job can return.

Let’s review:

• Thank goodness the legislators didn’t tweak the state’s minimum wage law. Oregon’s minimum wage went up by 45 cents per hour on Jan. 1 as the economy plunged in a nosedive. Legislators killed a bill that would have required increases in minimum wage to be suspended if the state unemployment rate was flying high above the national average. That was a close one. Employers may have been able to hire more people.

• There’s still hope for more new taxes. There’s a plan to single out the wealthiest Oregonians for tax increases. If one proposal becomes law, we could tie Hawaii for imposing the highest personal income tax rate. That’s a masterstroke, although you have to wonder if legislators will be satisfied with not being a tax leader. Oh well, maybe that will be enough to get those wealthy folks to leave the state. We don’t need their capital, their knowledge. They can help us get to No. 1 and take their jobs somewhere else.

• The Legislature’s efforts to hold down health care costs have been suitably minimal. That fits right in with making it more expensive to hire anyone. Kulongoski isn’t touching the rich health benefits of full-time state employees. Those workers contribute nothing toward their premiums and have no annual deductible. The plan for statewide health care reform is its own form of legislative genius. The Legislature wants a tax to pay for health care that will raise the cost of health care without any firm commitment to shaving costs. It’s a surefire hit to jobs.

• The Legislature hasn’t been just noodling around on green leadership. There’s a firm commitment to driving up the cost of energy, so Oregonians will have to pay more green for power than people in other states. That’ll make employers considering relocating to Oregon think twice. In a related move, the Legislature has done its best to restrict construction of new destination resorts. Resorts could have meant construction jobs and new homes for people who were likely to throw us off track by having jobs.

Fear not, there’s more than that in store. But sometimes it takes more than swarms of clever schemes to shoo away jobs. Every campaign needs a focus, a rallying point. For that purpose, we unveil below a humble suggestion for a new state flag. Behold:

Obama Car Dealer Scandal?

2009-05-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

It's very early in this story, but as the numbers start to come in, it sure does look suspicious.

NWRepublican has a post that is a pretty good portal to follow this story. Did the Obama administration engineer the Chrysler dealership closures to benefit political supporters?

The great thing about this story is it is just MADE for the blogosphere. One thing the atomistic nature of the blogosphere makes possible is applying large numbers of people to large sets of data. Most of the necessary information is out there - the closed dealerships, who owns them, where they are in relation to the surviving dealerships, who contributed money to Obama and who didn't, income levels of the geographic areas, the service records of the dealerships, and maybe even the sales figures.

So give the blogosphere a week to tear into this data, and if Obama actually was stupid enough to let this happen, it will be proven.

The mainstream media would take months to investigate something with this much data to nail down and crunch, if indeed it was inclined to do it, which it isn't.

If this thing pans out, it will be one of the biggest Presidential scandals ever.

This will be interesting!

Japanese scientist government advisory panel rebukes global warming theorists

2009-05-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

A panel of Japanese scientists which also acts as an advisory panel to the government released a report last month that is highly critical of the IPCC's theory that human activity caused the warming apparent from 1970 -2000.

The Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) represents scientists from the energy and resource fields, and also acts as a government advisory panel. The report was a harshly worded rebuke of the IPCC's alarmism on global warming.

The report was recently translated, but it still has received almost no attention by the mainstream media. Go figure. Could it be that the report is "off message?"

As the Cap (American jobs) & Trade (away our prosperity) legislation powers its way through Congress, I'm sure we will hear time and again how universal the "consensus" on global warming is.

You know it will be a great day when...

2009-05-26T09:14:00.001-07:00

You wake up, check the traps you set yesterday, and find:

When the government runs the auto industry

2009-05-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

So President Obama proposed his new CAFE standards and tailpipe CO2 emission limits to nary a whisper of dissent from the auto industry. Why the silence?

Duh.

What amazes me is that people actually think its a good idea for the federal government to run the car industry. It's one thing when government regulates an industry that is trying to maintain profitability within the constraints of that regulation. But when politicians run an entire industry, profitability becomes entirely irrelevant in the face of political considerations of all types.

These new CAFE and emissions standards are a great example. Are they doable? Probably. Just like it would be "doable" to require that no new home could have more than 1500 square feet.

You'd probably get support for such a regulation in some circles. People who would tell us how much energy we'd save, how much cheaper it would be.

But a lot of people don't want that kind of house, just as a lot of people, would prefer a larger, heavier vehicle and will happily pay the extra $1500 a year in fuel expense.

President Obama is basically saying that people will no longer have this option. I don't think this is the appropriate role for government. Where will it stop? How about the meat industry? You know how much CO2 is created by that?

Back to autos - the government wants to mandate a vehicle fleet that would not be the preference of consumers if left to make their own choices. That is inherently bad for profitability. But now government is on both sides of the equation - regulator and owner.

Look forward to many more bailouts of the auto industry.

Are they really that small minded?

2009-05-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

Over at Bojack.org, there's a post saying that the Sam Adams recall effort is doomed because conservative talk show host Victoria Taft was "front and center" last night at the recall effort's kick-off party.

Bojack says that having conservatives involved will turn off all those groups that are needed to get rid of Adams - unions, Bus Project folks, greenies, etc.

Here is my question: I know that Jack Bogdanski himself is without question sufficiently small minded to actually not support a valid cause just because he politically disagrees with others who do support it. He has displayed his small mindedness time and again on his blog by banning commenters who do nothing more than make points he has trouble contesting.

But are Portland liberals as small minded as Bogdanski? Will they really think to themselves: "Oh I was going to sign the recall petition, but Victoria Taft and Lars Larson are supporting it, so maybe I won't. Are people really so limited in their sophistication and world-view that they automatically reject anything that is supported by people with different ideologies?

I doubt it.

Bogdanski works in the ivory tower. Lewis & Clark law school is famously extreme liberal. Conservative viewpoints at that place are simply not considered to be credible. It is a skewed view of the world that can only exist in cloistered halls like academia.

Bogdanski is a very clear thinker on many issues, but he has a barely concealed visceral hatred of conservatives that is actually standard-faire in academia. I don't think the majority of Portland liberals are similarly small minded.

But guess what? I actually hope Sam Adams survives this effort. I want the recall to make the ballot, but I don't want Sam out. It is important for the future of Portland that Sam Adams fulfill his term as mayor.

The recall, and the campaign (if the recall gets enough signatures) will be a very entertaining circus. I admit I will enjoy this. But I really think Sam should stay on as mayor because Portland really needs to hurry up and let the crash hit with the full force that Sam Adams will inevitably bring upon it.

Why delay the crash? Portland won't realize the lunacy of its many wrongheaded policies until the full effect of the ideology Sam Adams represents is allowed to take its course.

So that's why I support Sam Adams!

Another huge technology overrun at City of Portland

2009-05-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

Story today at KATU about yet another mishandled technology project.

Portland is trying to join the late 20th century in terms of financial management systems. The new system was supposed to cost about $28 million. Current cost: $50 million and counting. The city is paying consultants on the project an average of $273 an hour.

Portland's CFO, Jennifer Sims, says these rates are commonplace for projects such as this. Oh really? The story quotes my friend Dave Lister, who ran for city council a few years ago. Dave runs a software company that writes and installs this same kind of software. He'll tell you that $273 an hour isn't typical at all.

So as Portland gets deeper and deeper into what is clearly going to be the next costly failure, what does the CFO have to say?

"I'd rather be talking to you this way about the success and how diligent we are being to make it right than have you sitting here asking me questions about how it went wrong,"

Uh, so would we, Ms. Sims. What does this even mean? Is she defending the obvious incompetence, saying that the almost two-fold cost overrun is just because she is being extra "diligent?" Apparently - the story went on to say:

"But Sims said in the long run, spending the money to make sure the job is done correctly is the right thing to do."

With the track record of city hall on these types of projects, does anybody honestly believe that spending all this money will ensure the system is done right? Or that it was actually necessary to spend $50 million (and counting) in the first place?

The city's credibility on such things is absolutely zero. But that doesn't keep them from spending tens of millions of dollars more than it should cost.

Why won't they just let Lister do the project? I've spoken to him at length about the Water Bureau billing system disaster. That project was doomed to fail from the get go, and when it did fail, the RFP the city put out for the replacement system pretty much ensured that the new attempt would be far more expensive than necessary also.

The rarest commodity at City Hall appears to be competence.

Shrinking our way to prosperity

2009-05-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

I am sorry for the disrespectful language, but is our governor really this much of a dumbass?

He's in New York City the other day, telling the Times that we have to produce less. That's right, Governor. We can solve our problems by producing fewer consumers goods. That will make us better off!

Of course he doesn't understand that for something to be consumed, it has to first be produced. So when he sits down for his moral preening session with the New York Times (who also don't understand simple economic principles) he tells them how hard it is for him to lecture us hick Oregonians about being too materialistic, unwilling to cut back on consumption to save the planet.

He is on a higher moral plane that can only be appreciated in the offices of the nearly bankrupt New York Times.

I guess Governor Kulongoski must think that he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. With unemployment at 12.1%, obviously his policies are already making sure we are producing and consuming less!

A stunning success! The planet feels better already!

'Hey dude, your fly is down, and your pants are unbuttoned!

2009-05-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

It just gets wierder. Portland style.

So it turns out, when Sam Adams crashed into the Subaru, pushed it across a curbed garden bed and into another car, then continued spinning the car's wheels for another 75 feet, he got out of the car and was told by the first witness on the scene:

"Hey dude, your fly is down, and your pants are unbuttoned."

Why is the mayor of Portland driving around town with his pants down?

Chrysler - The Obama kleptocracy

2009-05-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

The more I learn about the Chrysler "bankruptcy," the angrier I get. This is not a bankruptcy, it is a looting of a troubled business for the benefit of organized labor. Pure and simple.

The secured bondholders are getting screwed by Obama. They own almost $7 billion in secured debt in Chrysler. Obama asked them to take a 70% hit in the restructuring, and get nothing in equity. When they refused, Obama attacked them, called them "speculators, and now he is trying to cram them down even further and give to the unions the lions share of the equity (55%) in return for forgiving 57% of its unsecured health care and pension obligations.

It is so incredibly damaging to our financial markets for a President to intervene by changing the rules of the economic game in mid stream, and looting the assets of the company for the benefit of his political supporters.

What happens the next time a group of hedge fund managers are asked to provide financing to a troubled company? Who in their right mind would make the investment, knowing the President might just step in and steal your money?

Guess what? They are not going to play this game. They won't invest here when the rules can change in the middle of the game. Capital will dry up - the US isn't the only place on the planet to invest.

Sam Adams car wreck

2009-05-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Reading about the Sam Adams car wreck, the only thing that is obvious is that the story and its explanation just don't add up.

He T-boned the passenger door of a Subaru which was making a right turn into the Car Toys lot. OK - that in and of itself isn't that suspicous. He could have thought the guy was going to turn left after getting into the lot, and took the stupid chance of trying to whiz by him on the right.

But that is when this gets interesting. Imagine yourself in such a circumstance. You'd speed up to pass the car on the right, but he turns right instead of left. Crash. You'd take your foot off the gas and stop.

But that isn't what Sam Adams did. Read the eyewitness account in today's paper:

He said he saw the pickup strike the side of the Subaru and push it over hedges and into a parked Honda. "And then the Honda and the Subaru kind of parted, and the mayor's pickup was powering through both of them. He was still on the gas pedal," Schweitz said. "After he broke free of the collision, he kept driving. He kept peeling out, and finally came to a stop about 100 feet away, near the Plaid Pantry lot."

So after he hit the side of the Subaru, he obviously GUNNED his car. That is the ONLY way you can push another vehicle across a curb and hedges into another car. Then, after his car disengaged from the Subaru, he was still gunning it! He was still "peeling out" for another 100 feet!

How does this happen? He said that he mistook the gas pedal for the brake. I don't get that - he was already on the gas pedal. And if he DID mistake the two, we would be forced to believe that he didn't realize he was standing on the gas rather than the brake the whole time he was pushing the Subaru over a curbed bed, across the lot, into another car, then for another 100 feet?

It doesn't make sense.

Nor does the police's behavior. No sobriety test? You'd think they would do that just for appearances. After all, guess who the police commissioner is: Sam Adams. There might be just a tiny appearance of a conflict of interest when a cop is handling a very strange incident involving the mayor and fails to even write a ticket.

He obliterated three cars in a parking lot, and sent one passenger to the emergency room, and no citation given or investigation of any kind was conducted?

Favorable treatment? Sure looks like it.

Obama doublespeak on his Supreme Court Justice criteria

2009-05-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Obama said the following about the kind of person he would appoint to fill David Souter's seat on the SCOTUS:

"I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes," he said. "I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role."

The amazing thing about this statement is that the two parts of it are wholly contradictory. Judges should specifically NOT take into account whether or not they "identify with people's hopes and struggles" when they make a legal ruling.

So having told us what attributes he considers essential in a judge, he then goes on to give a vignette of a supreme court judge that could have been written by Clarence Thomas!

This guy just seems to always want it both ways. And he seems to think that we are such dunces we won't recognize even his most obvious contradictions.

Obama in his own words: "Electricity rates skyrocket"

2009-05-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

He couldn't be much more clear. President Obama knows that Cap & Trade will dramatically raise energy prices. He admits in a very forthright way in an interview in January 2008 with the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

Interesting that the city of San Francisco seems to be Obama's truth serum. Remember his statement about "clinging to guns and religion?" That was in San Fran. He apparently feels very comfortable being around fellow travelers, so he lets his guard down and is unusually honest.

What a great plan. Let's intentionally cause electricity rates to skyrocket.

Obama to low income Americans: "So sorry!"