It's not just Inside Baseball

Jackson County says it's leaving the Association of Oregon Counties. That's never happened before, and the AOC goes back to 1906. They say it's because the Association isn't tough enough protecting county interests against cities and school districts. But that's not the kind of help counties need.

This is a much bigger deal than it looks like. It's also an opportunity to shake some things up and, as I laid out here, to think bigger.

The war against "Class Warfare"

Tired of getting treated like an idiot at election time? Me, too. Mostly it happens with slogans and buzzwords designed purely to trigger you rather than help you think through an issue that needs some thought.

The current example that bugs me enough to deserve its own column is the casual lobbing of the term "Class Warfare," an insultingly manipulative way to bring down tax measures #66 and 67 on the January ballot in Oregon. The next time you hear somebody using the phrase in speech or print, I hope you'll stand up and be clear that it doesn't work with you.

Give it a rest?

There's a feud in Ashland over a decorated tree -- holiday tree, Christmas tree, gift tree -- again. In the struggles of past Decembers, I've held a pretty steady ACLU line: if an emblem of the season feels religious, or if some people feel excluded by it, it doesn't belong in school. Where there can be harm infusing a religious flavor into schools, there's really no harm keeping it out, is there?
As I get older I'm less sure about that. Alongside my ACLU impulses I'm noticing another question: Can we just give it a rest? Breathe a little? Here's how I see it.

A small event that's big. And fun.

This is what our 8th Annual Abundance Swap looked like last Sunday in Ashland. We invented it in the heat of the "Black Friday" buy-buy-buy frenzy in 2002. We're proud of it.

We're proud of the experience people have there -- here's this year's report -- and because of the larger context. We're amazed at how this simple little event moves people. It strikes home more than all our eloquent rants against corporate consumerism.

This idea is about as replicable as they come, which is why we put up a simple website with start-up suggestions. If you are done with the retail madness of the allegedly Holy Days, but still want to be part of a giving tradition, you might want to check this out. Bring a few friends together and and start your own Abundance Swap next year. It's easy. It's fun.

"If only WE were in charge..."

We don't trust practically anything government touches anymore. Left, right, center, we don't see ourselves represented in the decisions government makes or the process they use to make them.

What if some significant decisions were put in the hands of well-informed citizens--call them 'everyday,' 'average,' 'common'-- people with no axe to grind and no self-interest beyond what every one of us has in good government and good community. Could they come up with better decisions, or at least decisions we could trust more? The Citizen Initiative Review process is a way to find out, and here's why I think it matters.

Where's the beef?

In Portland last week I watched Al Gore endorse Bill Bradbury to be Oregon's next governor. (Disclosure: I count Bill as longtime friend, and served as his Chief of Staff when he presided over the Oregon Senate in 1993).

I went in part looking to hear about the transition to green jobs, because both of these guys have the brains and experience to drill deeper than pleasant platitudes, down to the bedrock of economic reality. I didn't hear depth, and with hindsight understand why: this was a launching event to rev up core supporters, not a policy summit on the new economy. And it served its purpose.

But it's time to put more meat on the bones of Green Jobs, and on the larger assertion that what's good for the environment is good for the economy. There's a critical mass of people who want to believe that, but the combination of the scariness of change and propaganda from the fossil-fuel establishment has too many of them stuck. In this week's column I'm suggesting that we're not doing much good as cheerleaders for abstract claims about economic conversion; let's push candidates to glean the best data from the Apollo Project and other sources, and turn on some voters not already in the choir.

You know that overused definition of "insanity"?

OK, with everything else going on, this one's not exactly on the front burner. But one thing I'd like to know from the Guv candidates is how many chips they're ready to spend to reverse the 1990s initiative measure that commits every dime of gas tax and auto registration money to highway construction, or closely-related expenditures.

If that weren't the law, we might not be on the verge of throwing another hundred million highway dollars at the Sisyphean task of unclogging Highway 62, the major road thrusting north out of Medford towards Crater Lake and Bend. This particular rathole has swallowed more ODOT cash over the years than I can remember. Yet as I write these words 62 resembles a long linear parking lot for more hours of the day than ever. I don't think a thoughtful argument can be made that this new slug of cash will make a difference for more than a very few years. Even local county commissioners are reluctant to accept this particular check, and in the world of cash-strapped local government, that's just weird. Weird enough to deserve its own column.

We're going to hear plenty from 2010 candidates about Oregon's great and glorious Green heritage, and how it's the key to a future worthy of our kids. Working to repealing the car-worshiping mandate on transportation spending would be a good way to show they mean it.

After the election

Last week voters in my town renewed Oregon's only tax on prepared meals and beverages, established 15 years ago to fund major sewage treatment upgrades and an open space program to establish neighborhood parks and trails. We fought over it back then and fought about it again this time.

On Tuesday we re-upped for the tax by a 59-41% margin. Does that end the conversation? It usually does. But what if instead the two sides came together and got creative about dealing with the concerns that divided them during the election? Would that make us a stronger, more resilient community? That's what I asked in this week's column.

Free speech doesn't mean much if you're scared to use it

There's a court battle going on in Washington State over whether your name should be public information if you sign a petition to put a measure on the ballot. The measure that brought this up would reverse a state law that expanded the rights of same-sex partners, and petitioners claimed that gay rights activists are so hostile that they might scare some people away from signing. A lower court judge agreed and said keeping the petition signatures private was a reasonable way to prevent this "chilling effect" on political expression.

You can get caught up in the surface-level arguments in this case. But set those aside and reflect for a moment. Are we really accepting the fact that intimidating people for expressing their opinion is part of our political culture? Why?

This week's column calls for something different. In these times it might sound naive. But where do we end up if we take political intimidation as a fact of modern life?

So how does Kumbaya work for you?

The columns I wrote last week and this week about talking with folks we've taken to be political bad guys has generated more heartburn on the Blue Oregon blog than I expected. Maybe that was naive. Some folks responding think the whole case I'm trying to sell is naive.

You?

The critics have a point...

It could be that the sharpest political wedge that divides Oregonians, and keeps us from finding much more potent agreement than we do, is compensation of public employees. There's plenty to say on this subject. Part of what I want to say in this week's column, triggered by recent news that fund managers in the Treasurer's office are getting big bonuses, is that folks unhappy with some aspects of government salaries have a better point than we progressives like to admit. Ignoring that point just deepens the wedge.

Your comments most welcome...

I am not making this up

A B-level news story this week, really just a sidebar to the First-Monday-in-October ritual that launches the Supreme Court's annual session, brought me to my mental knees. It was more than enough to deserve a column this week.

There's a way of thinking in this country that's easy to overlook when you live in a progressive bubble, and that says a lot about why it's so damn hard to move forward.

Your thoughts?

Confidence in WHAT?

They call it the Consumer Confidence Index, and it is a very, very big deal. In a world where media-manipulated perception becomes reality (and modern financial markets qualify) our collective opinion of whether the economy is good or bad makes the economy good or bad...until our opinion changes.

This is nuts. It becomes more clearly nuts when you ponder a couple of questions, beginning with "Confidence in what?" That was the nub of this week's column.

If you see something I don't here, bring it on....

Wake up and smell the smoke

It's not inevitable, but it's close. If there isn't massive thinning of the underbrush in the Ashland watershed, there will come a day when we look at each other in disbelief that we didn't do what was necessary to protect this town ---what we knew was necessary, beyond a single doubt. So this week I wrote about the obvious.

Will we do what's right while we still can?

More than a Bike Ride

I think there's magic to cycling. In part that belief comes from Cycle Oregon, which just finished its 22nd edition, seems to accomplish something that public leaders and government agencies have been knocking themselves out to do for as long as I've lived in Oregon. CO makes it look easy, and makes a lot of us look good in the process.

Why should bosses pay?

If you wanted to keep the American people too divided to effectively demand real health care reform, try this: lay the lion's share of the health insurance burden on employers. There are millions of them, and they're not about to partner with people who sound like they want businesses to pay even more of the bill.

Thus piece of the puzzle sorely needs some fresh thinking, and I'm not hearing any. So here I'm trying to crack some loose.

Open Doors

In the wake of a Dark Age in open government (and the jury's out on how much really changed last January 20), I hear some say that government decision makers should never mull over policy behind closed doors. As in NEVER.

I don't think that's right. But I do think we're in a time that leaders better have a damn good, and damn clear, reason for closing the doors of public meeting rooms to the public, and spent this column saying exactly why. Ashland city government fell short of that mark last week, but I understand they changed their direction to open the doors back up. Good for them.

Uh, yeah, looks like we do...

...have to argue this one. I don't think the argument's a rational one, because anyone capable of a moment's thought would agree that the manufacture and distribution of shopping bags is probably not one of the places we want to allocate petroleum and other valuable energy sources, not when reusable bags are virtually as convenient. But the fact that the argument isn't rational doesn't mean that it's not serious or heartfelt. One reader who responded to last week's column (see the previous post) revealed a lot of what's going on here:

"This [a proposed .20 fee for disposable shopping bags] is just the latest fad for people that want to walk around feeling they're better than everyone else...So, instead of simply doing what you think is right, stick that chest way out and tell people that aren't as smart you how they have to live their lives. Better yet, get a bunch of politicians, who are also better than everyone else, to pass laws that punish people who aren't as smart as you. Because if you stop and think about it, if these people are so stupid they don't realize how much smarter you are than everyone else, they have no right to even be in this country ... Sometimes I wonder if I could make it through life, if it wasn't for all of you wonderful, caring people telling me what I'm doing wrong."

I shared this comment and a few others in this week's column.

All of a sudden we're not talking about shopping bags anymore.

Do we have to fight about GROCERY bags?

If we can agree that as a society and economy we have to reduce our resource consumption, with wiser oil use and reduced greenhouse emissions at the top of the list (and, what, 75%, 90%, 95% of us can?) we're naturally going to look first for the most painless ways to cut down, right? Seems to me some minor adjustment of the container we use to bring stuff home from the grocery or drug store would be about as painless as it gets, so I threw the idea out in this column.

If we really have to fight this one out as a test case for personal freedom, what happens when we get to the tough changes? You gotta be pretty damn stubborn to hold onto optimism...

One more time...

...on these jaw-dropping Town Halls on health care. There's a pretty simple question here. We're apparently not going to agree on how to fix this mess, but can we agree that we have to have a public environment where it's safe to talk about it? If the answer to that is anything but "yes," then where the hell are we?

Can we even do democracy?

The Town Halls that members of Congress have been holding across the country make it clear that what's at stake is more than the supposed topic: health care reform. As if that weren't important enough on its own.

All that's at stake here, I'm arguing here, is whether we can possibly govern ourselves. If we can't, how good an idea is it really to "take our country back"?

Looking for work? Your government wants YOU.

I don't think I rank high on the contemporary Paranoia Scale. But I have my moments. One came just a little while back at LAX, one of hundreds of airports where a smooth recorded voice reminds you every 10 minutes that the Terror Alert Level has been raised to orange, so look out.

Check this out and let me know: Is it me? or Them?

Except when it's about me...

What does a $97 seatbelt ticket have to do with the passing of a pillar of my town's community? There's no chance in hell you can answer that question, because it came out of a dark niche of my memory bank and ended up like this.

And for the first post to this new blog...

...let's get real about the self-talk that immediately follows getting a traffic ticket. Amazing how fast that can tweak your earnest world view. Here's what I mean.