Month: May 2008

As someone who's been a disenchanted employee, and also a whistle-blower of sorts, I don't get how White House defenders are trying to discredit former press secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all book. They're saying that McClellan is "disgruntled," as if this defuses his explosive criticisms of the Bush administration. Well, yeah, of course he's disgruntled. He feels like he was lied to. Along with most of the rest of the country. It's been framed as a choice between being (1) a great American, or (2) disgruntled. How about changing the "or" to "and"? Scott McClellan is a great American and disgruntled.…

Way to go, Oregon pagans, freethinkers, humanists, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics, atheists, and sundry other spiritual iconoclasts. You did a lot to give Obama a big win. From CNN: Obama also won big in another category: among those voters who say they do not have a religion, or have another religion outside of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. Nearly 30 percent of Oregon Democrats said they were not religious and those voters went for Obama by 21 percentage points, 60 percent to 39 percent. And among those voters who listed "other" as their religion, a group that made up 10 percent of…

Thanks to Blue Oregon, I now better understand how my state can be so politically contradictory. We've voted for the option of assisted dying if we're terminally ill. That sounds progressive. We also handily approved a ban on gay marriage. That sounds conservative. A nifty analysis of the state's voters ("Oregon: Swing State or latte-drinking Prius-driving lesbian commune?") casts light on how we can swing both ways. [Personal note: this Salem resident does drink lattes and drive a Prius. However, I'm not a lesbian.] It turns out that liberal Oregonians are really liberal, and conservative Oregonians are really conservative. Based…

Yesterday the TV truth hit home as it never had before. CNN, Fox, MSNBC – they aren't really news organizations, because what they peddle is mostly subjective fluff, not facts. The West Virginia Democratic primary election is what drew me to this conclusion. It was something I already knew, but which hadn't sunk deeply into my consciousness until I spent most of the afternoon working on some windows with the television tuned to CNN. It was unbelievable how an endless stream of pundits, reporters, political hacks, and elected officials could take a few crumbs of new information and turn them…

I figure I'd better write this now, a few minutes before the Indiana and North Carolina polls begin to close, because later on I might be too depressed. I'm a grumpy new Democrat, having changed my registration to "D" from non-affiliated a few months ago so I could vote for Obama in the Oregon primary. I felt good back then. Now Obama v. Clinton is a game that's feeling way tired, way repetitive, way past its prime. The Democrats need to get it on against McCain, not themselves. Clinton is really starting to irritate me, though at first (briefly) I…

Like making sausage, if people knew more about how many newspaper editorial boards go about deciding on endorsements, they'd be disgusted. Today Salem's Statesman Journal, the newspaper in Oregon's capital, endorsed Hillary Clinton. That's no big deal. Here's why. I have a better understanding than most of how this paper's editorial board works, because last fall I got hot and heavy into investigating how the Statesman Journal was able to justify endorsing a "no" vote on Measure 49 – a fix for Measure 37, which the newspaper opposed in 2004. Go figure. My wife and I sure couldn't. Back in…