According to a new survey, the Oregon Senate race has Gordon Smith and Jeff Merkley, who’ve been running two of the most disgusting campaigns I’ve ever seen, running neck and neck (41% and 46%, respectively), “undecided” pulling in 6% of the vote and… David Brownlow of the Constitution Party (?!) polling at 7%.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Constitution Party, whose Presidential candidate won the endorsement of gnomish kingmaker Ron Paul, their motto is “Life. Liberty. Limited Government.” So far, so good. Then you read their platform.

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Via Norm Geras, this interactive map of how the Electoral College has broken down for each election since 1789.

I rather like that in  1868 Oregon’s 3 mighty electoral votes went to Horatio Seymour, who was beaten badly by that old drunk Ulysses S. Grant. “Recreate ’68” indeed.

From the Ancorage Daily News:

Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill — signed into law by Knowles — that banned the practice statewide.

“There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla,” Knowles said

A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla’s newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.

“(But) the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests,” the newspaper reported.

It’s unclear how much Palin personally had to do with the policy, but her appointed police chief objected to its end, and I’m assuming that the mayor of the town could have set a place for it in the budget. However, what’s just as disturbing to me is that the town of Wasilla with its population of 5500 at the time could possible have enough rapes per year to need $14,000 to pay for the exams. That’s possibly 46! Granted the interviewed police chief gives a range of $5,000 to $14,000 and the article says exams cost $300 to $1200, but if you take the mean of both you’re looking at a budget for 12 rapes per year…in a town of 5500. Generally in the US you’re looking at 0.3 rapes per 1000 so in a town of 5500 you’d expect between one and two annually.

Something’s rotten in the town of Wasilla. Damn.

The Obama website has a new feature that allows you to design and upload your own hope-tastic t-shirt designs. Users can then vote on their favorite entries, and the winner will presumably be put in production.

You can download a .zip file from the website with all the necessary logos and t-shirt outlines (Creative Suite required). Hmm, I wonder what kind of monstrosities our faithful Commentator readers could come up with? I’m hereby announcing our own Obama-rama t-shirt contest. Funny entries will be posted on the blog, and creator of the winningest design will get a beer or a sudsy tee … or something. Have at it. (Send your creations to [email protected], and as always, extra points awarded for Big Lebowski references.)

Hat tip to the Eugene Weekly Blog.

Evidently, allocating time for Hillary Clinton to speak at the Democratic Convention in Denver is evidence of “white privilege” in action, at least according to Jo Ann Bowman at Blue Oregon:

Since I have been old enough to vote, the primary winner was the winner period. Of course normally the presidential primary winner was a white, male millionaire.

They were not expected to give airtime to the looser. [sic] They were not expected to have their caucus votes counted on the floor. Why have the rules changed since an African American Man has won the nomination?

It appears that Ms. Bowman, in her fit of sputtering outrage, seems to have forgotten Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention — even though he wasn’t even a candidate at the time. Why, it’s almost like they give special privileges to prominent members of the Party! Oh, the injustice of it all!

(All of which is not to mention, as Kari Chisholm does in the comments section to Bowman’s post, that primary losers often have prominent speaking roles at conventions.)

Oregon Commentator alum and new media strategist William Beutler is on this week’s edition of bloggingheads.tv. You can see him chat it up with Bill Scher about twittering, presidential polls and veep selection. Keep on rocking in the free world, Bill.

After a week or so of below-the-radar furor on the blogs (Mikey Kaus, take a bow), possible future Attorney General and Vice-Presidential contender John Edwards has finally come clean over allegations that he lied about having an extramarital affair. Okay, so Edwards is a lying scumbag. We all knew that. Big deal.

The real story, I think, is that most major media outlets kept a lid on this story — despite the fact that they were well aware of it —  and even going so far as to discourage people from writing about it.

Without taking this into “Team Red vs. Team Blue” territory, the media’s handling of this case should be instructive, at the very least. If the writing of bloggers like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, among others, has brought into question the accuracy of the media’s often-hysterical coverage of Iraq, then the non-coverage of the Edwards story should make consumers even warier about taking what they read in the paper or see on the nightly news at its word.

Until today, if you never read the Enquirer and never looked at blogs, just about the only inkling you might have had that this was even happening at all would’ve been a quip or two during Jay Leno’s monologue, and you probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke.

When ASUO President Dotters-Katz kicked the OSA campus coordinator off campus, you could almost hear the heads exploding at OSA headquarters. Now, like any good lobbying group that has been called out as unnecessary, the OSA is in full-on self-justification mode. And it begins with a story in the Daily Emerald, in which we are introduced to a troubling side effect of Dotters-Katz’ rash move: without OSA there will be no voter registration at the UO. Well, according to the student body president of PSU, anyway.  “I let him know how hard it’s been to not have (a campus organizer) for the last couple of months,” ASPSU President Hannah Fisher confides to the ‘Ol Dirty. “If U of O fails then we all fail,” says Fisher of the OSA’s statewide voter reg effort. “If it’s not broken you don’t fix it.”

But Dotters-Katz doesn’t seem too concerned about the dire warnings from Portland. In fact, his executive has publicly committed to registering 10,000 students at the U of O. Dotters-Katz tells the ODE: “there’s going to be a huge presence on campus, and we expect that we will met our goal due to the effective planning of my team and the work of a huge corps of volunteers.” From classrooms to club sports to the Athletic Department, Dotters-Katz plan seems to have left nowhere to hide from hordes of voter registrators. And yes, he does somehow expect to do this with help only from Building Votes, a Bus Project-affiliated initiative.

And what of the criticism from Fisher that “not having a vote organizer on campus is going to make it a lot harder to meet his voter registration goal?” Well, if we look back to the last election year, we can see that the OSA (via then-Legislative Affairs Honcho Emily McLain) registered “only” 6,876 students. Now that’s quite an accomplishment, but it also means that if Dotters-Katz only achieves half of his goal he’ll still nearly match the OSA’s last election year result. And he’ll have saved students $30k, or over one dollar per student per year in the process. So when you inevitably get hassled to register to vote this fall, please just do so. It’s an easy way to reward leadership that takes on challenges to save students money, instead of outsourcing a simple job to a cynical lobbying group.

So this is Gordon Smith’s new logo:

Notice anything familiar? How about that “O”? No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you; that’s the same font the U of O athletic department uses. Is Smith trying to get in on the Phil Knight gravy train, or does he just bleed yellow and green?

A shake of the fist to those d-bags at Blue Oregon.

UPDATE: The font is not only copyrighted by the U of O, but it’s top secret. Smith must have pulled a Mission Impossible to get his hands on it. The Duck Sports News Blog has more details.

Former President Clinton will give a speech at the UO EMU Ballroom tomorrow night at 8:30. Be sure to thank him for helping torpedo his wife’s campaign and his party’s chances in the general election! Good work, big fella. Just remember to stay away from those girls at the soft serve in Carson.

And if you have $1,000 to $33,100 to spend on a man who voted for campaign finance reform, why not attend the John McCain “Portland Finance Reception” tomorrow night at the beautiful airport Sheraton? Because nothing defines a straight talkin’ man of the people better than holding a closed door $33,100/head dinner at a crappy airport hotel.

Update: More on McCain’s speech here.

You can send Hillary Clinton an e-card wishing her a happy Mother’s Day. But what to say? There’s so many possibilities. I was thinking maybe: “Congratulations on fulfilling one of the seven phenomena of life. Only six more to go to prove you’re not a satan-robot!”

Hat tip to the always classy gals at Wonkette.

Apparently, Obama is returning to campus to speak tomorrow in the Memorial Quad outside Knight Library. Doors (?) open at 5:45 p.m. The only source I have for this is a Facebook Event, but it appears to be hosted by Students for Obama. I’ll keep you updated. If it’s true, you’ll be able to watch the whole thing (sans sound) through the old Obelisk Cam.

UPDATE: Yep, it’s confirmed on Obama’s website.

According to the Huffington Post’s nifty little campaign donation tracker, people who identified themselves as employees of the University of Oregon have so far donated $24,962 to political campaigns in the ’08 election cycle. It doesn’t look like the first quarter reports have been added yet, so the real number is most likely much higher by now. How does it break down?

Of that $24,962, only two contributions went to Republicans, totalling $956. Actually, I should say Republican because both of those went to … Ron Paul. The majority of the Dem donations went to Obama with only one donation to Hillary Clinton. No contributions were listed from Frohnmayer, although his pals Melinda Grier and John Moseley both donated to Obama.

Tony Marino, a Tigard Republican running for the Oregon House, issued a letter to several newspapers that extensively describes his myriad failures in life, including bankruptcy, divorces, IRS trouble and a fake degree. Marino is spinning it as a “honesty is the best policy” move, but you can bet the Democrats were going to dig all this up anyways.

According to the Oregonian, Marino earned a doctorate in Marketing in under three months from Ashwood University, which gives its students credit for their “life experiences.” Later he discovered the shocking truth that the “university” wasn’t accredited in the state of Oregon.

Marino did leave out a few other tidbits, though. From the Oregonian:

A background check unearthed other financial run-ins, including a $12,300 civil judgment from 2001 that he contests and that he says he didn’t know about until Thursday. He’s also making monthly installments on a $4,900 judgment from 2002, filed by Ford Motor Co.

Whoops! It will be interesting to see if Marino’s “only human” strategy works. I for one would like to see more detailed confessions from politicians. Imagine the letters coming out of DC: “This one time Arlen Specter got drunk and passed out on my couch, so I drew penises all over his face with a Sharpie. He woke up the next morning and rushed straight to the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. Everyone laughed at him, and I felt really guilty.”

Yesterday OC Ed-in-Chief Ossie and I drove up to Kell’s Irish Pub in Portland to hear Gene Healy of the Cato Institute talk about his new book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power. The good folks at the America’s Future Foundation hosted the event.

Healy is a smart, funny guy, and we enjoyed throwing back some Guinness with him. I haven’t read the book yet, but everything he said last night was spot-on. In short, voters and politicians on both sides of the aisle need to get rid of the idea that the President is the daddy or mommy who will fix all their problems. I did have to disagree with Healy when he started bagging on Teddy Roosevelt, though. Ugly views on manifest destiny aside, Roosevelt was pretty awesome; he gave a 90-minute speech after being shot in the chest. C’mon, Hillary Clinton isn’t even that hardcore in her fantasies.