Current affairs

This was a good way to start the first weekend of summer. First, my political soul, rubbed raw by seven plus years of brushing up against Bushian irritations, was soothed with the balm of fall election anticipation. My visit to the intriguing FiveThirtyEight site (that's the number of electors in the electoral college) was spurred by a Newsweek article about its founder, Nate Silver, a baseball statistics geek. Having honed his skills in successfully predicting baseball outcomes, Silver has turned his attention to politics. Currently he's projecting that Obama will win 334 of those 538 electoral votes. The betting line…

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…

There's been a whole lot of misdirected talk about bitterness lately. You want to meet someone who's really bitter? Glad to meet you. My name is Brian. I just mailed my tax payments today. Speak to me, Barack. Let me know you feel my pain, Hillary. Are you on my side, John? Not just mine. Ours. All the individuals who are paying a bigger share of the tax burden, while corporations are paying much less. Yesterday's article in Parade magazine ("Are You Paying for Corporate Fat Cats?") was beautifully timed for maximizing tax-day bitterness. A 2004 U.S. Government Accountability Office…

I love it when Stephen Colbert humorously casts light on a serious topic. That makes all the hours I spend watching The Colbert Report, rather than, say, reading the New York Times, seem a lot more productive. Recently Colbert had a great riff on Hillary Clinton's claim that she should get the superdelegate vote because she's more electable – having won the big important states that are crucial to winning the presidency. Here's some of his right-on observations, as I recollect them (maybe mixed in with my own notions): --Clinton says she can win the presidency because she won California,…

By and large, excellent news for progressives on the sin front today. The Vatican says that social and economic injustices are fresh areas of sinful behavior. Pollution also. I can only hope that the jerks who have been leaving lots of litter on the road we take into Salem are Catholics who keep up on their faith's sin list. Apparently polluting is a venial sin that can be forgiven by confession. However, I can still issue my non-papal proclamation: litterers, go to hell. I don't often praise the Catholic Church (or any church). But this is a positive step on…

I was kind of depressed last night, since I'd hoped that Obama would win decisively in Ohio and Texas. But perusing the new delegate totals on Obama's web site, I'm feeling better. it looks like Clinton will pick up four after all of her "We're back!" hullabaloo. Big deal. Obama is still 156 pledged delegates ahead with 571 remaining to be chosen. So Clinton needs to win the final twelve races by about 64% - 36% to catch up to Obama. And that isn't going to happen. She needs the not-so-super superdelegates to hand her the nomination, or have the…

Oh, yeah. Ohio is going to go for Obama now. Former Ohio State basketball star Greg Oden is saying, "Vote for Barack." This also should guarantee that Oregon ends up adding to Obama's substantial delegate lead, since rookie (and injured) Oden is the change that fans are expecting will return the Trail Blazers to playoff glory (or at least, just the playoffs). And Obama is the best bet to do the same for the United States. Not a slam dunk, but the point spread is way in his favor.

So what does it mean when 23 progressive Oregon women, feminists all, say they're supporting Barack Obama – 22 to 1? Pretty clearly, Hillary Clinton's campaign is sinking. If she doesn't have the support of female middle-aged Democratic activists, I think she's done for. Since I'm for Obama, last night it was music to my ears when a friend told me about this informal poll of a group of women who get together regularly to talk about politics and whatever. She was surprised that Obama was the almost unanimous candidate of choice, since these women had been looking forward to…

Finally! The man who pretended to be Oregon's state climatologist, even though no such position existed, is retiring. Now George Taylor can pretend to be a fake something else, rather than deceiving the public about both global climate change and his qualifications to speak about it. I've never met George. Likely he's a nice guy. But he's gotten under my skin for some time, along with the folks at Blue Oregon, who have also given him a good bye and good riddance sendoff. What's amazing is that my local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, called him a winner in an…

The Democratic Party of Oregon is about to get a new member. But party leaders shouldn't get too excited about my shift from "not a member of a party." Here's why. I'm sending in my changed voter registration form tomorrow because I want to vote for Barack Obama in the primary on May 20. That's pretty much the only reason. So if the Democratic Party superdelegates, who aren't so super, screw Obama out of the nomination even though he ends up with more pledged delegates, I'm back to unaffiliated. Pronto. A side benefit of registering as a Democrat is that…

Tucked into a story about a bill to let Oregon voters decide whether health care is a right was a stupendously ill-informed assertion by a Republican legislator that rights are god-given: The vote was a victory for Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, the chairman of the House Health Care Committee who has trying for three years to help the uninsured. During debate, Greenlick described how he would have lost his battle with lymphoma, now in remission, if he had not had health insurance. That so many suffer for lack of health care is unjust, he said. "Rights are the products of…

Politics always is crazy. But the way the Democratic Party is choosing it's presidential candidate – that's beyond crazy. I know, because I'm being driven insane trying to figure out what the delegate count is between Obama and Clinton. Obama's my man, so I'm pumped by how well he's done in the most recent primary contests. But when I check CNN's Election Center just now, oh no!, I see in a big bold-face font that Clinton is still leading Obama, 1148 to 1121. (This even includes today's Maine results.) Then I read the fine print breakdown. And see that actually…

I'm pleased to see that Oregonian columnist Steve Duin is still firing bulls eyes at an admittedly easy target: how the Oregon DEQ looks the other way when well-heeled permit violators run afoul of environmental rules. In his "Permitting and protecting the polluters," Duin describes a situation that's distressingly similar to what happened in our neighborhood when a Measure 37 subdivision said "rules, what rules?" and the Department of Environmental Quality meekly replied "whatever…we don't care." Back in November Duin wrote a column about my frustrating fight to get DEQ to do the right thing, "At DEQ, the refs swallow…

All of the Republican presidential candidates are competing to see who can spout a big lie about tax policy most convincingly: tax cuts pay for themselves. Common sense says that's absurd. So does economic research. But that doesn't stop the Republican know-nothings, some of whom also disbelieve in evolution, from ignoring the facts. What got me going on this was hearing disgraced former Rep. Tom DeLay holding forth on conservative talk radio today. He claimed that tax cuts generate increased revenue for government. I thought, hogwash. But I hadn't done much research on this, so fired up Google this evening…

I was in a communist country when Martin Luther King died on April 4, 1968 – Yugoslavia. Back then it was called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Tito was in power. Along with a couple of dozen of other San Jose State College students, and a few professors, I was spending my second sophomore semester taking classes in Zadar, a picturesque town on the Adriatic sea. As you can imagine, it was quite a culture shock. For both us and the locals. Into a regimented traditional society comes a bunch of hang-loose long-haired hippie college students from the epicenter…