Over at Blue Oregon, Chuck Sheketoff joins the “spread the wealth” chorus:

Today’s revenue forecast shows that Oregon is in a revenue crisis, not a spending crisis. The Governor and legislators should address it with revenue solutions.

[…]

Oregon should turn first to its reserves, but these reserves will not be adequate… the state would still be far from having enough money to provide the services Oregonians demand and need. [emphasis added]

So… the state is far from having enough money to provide the services it’s promised to citizens, but somehow the problem is not that the state is spending too much, it’s that it’s not taking enough money from taxpayers.

Times are tough, though. The economy’s not doing so well at the moment, so squeezing  the regular guy probably won’t be popular. Thankfully, Oregon has an under-utilized resource that it can exploit: rich people!

The most effective policy for raising revenue in this recessionary context is get revenue from those with the greatest ability to pay — both wealthy individuals and large, profitable corporations. That’s where the money is.

A tax increase on very wealthy individuals, who are best able to ride out the economic storm, would tap money that would more likely be saved rather than spent.

Another good option is to raise revenue from those profitable, large corporations, most of which are located out of state, who today escape paying their fair share of Oregon’s taxes. [emphasis added]

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It’s a story that sounds like it could’ve come from the University of Oregon: a law professor got on the wrong side of a group of minority students and found himself on the receiving end of a bunch of bogus racism charges intended to smear his reputation and drag his name through the dirt.

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With ACORN making sure Mickey Mouse isn’t denied his right to vote and dead goldfish getting voter registration cards, maybe it’s time to stop maintaining that requiring ID to vote isn’t a villainous racist tactic designed to suppress the minority vote by hearkening back to the days of Jim Crow?

Doubly so, in fact, since many of the voter ID laws in question are at this point several years old — more than enough time by any standard to go out and get some legitimate form of identification.

For their part, Obama supporters maintain that there’s nothing to worry about because vote fraud is extraordinarily rare and voter-registration fraud isn’t really a big deal anyways — an interesting about-face from the days when Diebold was stealing elections.*

* Diebold is, in fact, horrible.

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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It looks like there was a happy conclusion to Mark Steyn’s ongoing legal problems in Canada, as the case against him has been dismissed :

VANCOUVER – The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled Friday that a controversial article about Islam in Maclean’s magazine did not violate the province’s hate speech law.

[…]

 The Canadian Islamic Congress, which brought the complaint, has previously failed in two other jurisdictions: Ontario, which said it did not have jurisdiction over printed material; and federally, where the complaint was rejected as without merit.

With the publication of The Jewel of Medina earlier in the week and now the dismissal of the charges against Mark Steyn, this has shaped up to be a pretty good week for anyone who’s tired of seeing zealots using the courts and the threat of violence to stifle speech that is supposedly “offensive” to their religion. You can read more, including a PDF of the actual decision over at Mark Steyn’s website (sorry, no permalinks).

(H/T: Instapundit. I’ve previously written about this here and here.)

Remember how that bailout plan was supposed to shore up a banking system on the verge of collapse? Remember how it was absolutely necessary to pass it in Congress for the sake of the economy?

Well, unsurprisingly, lawmakers used the opportunity to ram through some other legislation. One such law that has absolutely nothing to do with rescuing the financial system is a set of new rules mandating that employers have to provide parity in coverage for treatment of physical and mental illnesses.

Interestingly, the Times article spends most of its article talking about the wonderful, bi-partisan consensus-building that went into passing the law, but spends virtually no ink explaining why this bill didn’t face a vote on its own merits. Instead, it was rather surreptitiously inserted into a bailout plan that the country was assured was absolutely necessary for the health of the economy.

Not that we should be surprised.

ACORN, a “community organizing group” with a history of election fraud problems was another one of the original beneficiaries of the bailout, and one of the major reasons that Congressional Republicans opposed the bailout the first time around. To my knowledge they were removed from the final draft.

In any case, the whole thing looks more and more like a boondoggle for taxpayers and a convenient way for members of Congress to pass legislation that would otherwise probably face more scrutiny.

E. Neil Trautwein, vice president of the “National Retail Federation”, was quoted as saying, “We built the [mental health insurance] bill piece by piece from the ground up. It’s a good harbinger for future efforts on health care reform.”

It’s a harbinger, alright. I’m not sure if it’s a good one.

A few months ago the State Attorney General intervened to put the brakes on RIAA demands that the University of Oregon pass along identifying information about a number of students suspected of engaging in illegal file-sharing. Unfortunately, it looks as if a judge has stepped in and sided with the recording industry, allowing the RIAA to once again try to force the U of O to give up the information.

As ArsTechnica makes clear, just having an IP that is associated with a given computer’s MAC address is not a sure-fire way of identifying a user:

Only one of the students flagged by MediaSentry for offering files for download lived in a single-occupancy dorm room. Five lived in a double-occupancy room, while nine were on the university’s wireless network.

Nevertheless, it seems likely that the students in question could be paying hefty price for (alleged) copyright infringement, even though the RIAA “says it’s not trying to bully students by jacking up the settlement cost” from $4,000 to $8,000. I know I believe them.

No doubt that by now everyone has heard that Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account(s) were cracked and the contents thereof distributed on the Internet. The whole imbroglio has got both Team Red and Team Blue riled up, and I’ve got a few thoughts on the affair.

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Calling it “a ray of economic sunshine”, Doug Chuck Sheketoff at Blue Oregon heralds Oregon’s impending minimum wage hike from $7.95 to $8.40, marveling over the fact that it will mean “an extra $936 a year for a family with one full-time minimum wage worker.”

As one person in the comments section of his post mentions, this is probably going to have consequences for  small employers who may have to cut hours (or even jobs) to continue to make the bottom line.

Almost comically, another commenter replies that, in order to offset the harm of the wage increase, business owners should… you know… just raise prices a little bit.

And the wheel goes ’round…

[EDIT 09/17]

Apologies to  Chuck Sheketoff for somehow mixing up his first name. Fixed now.

As always with Barr, better late than never:

As both a U.S. Attorney and Member of Congress, I defended drug prohibition. But it has become increasingly clear to me, after much study, that our current strategy has not worked and will not work.

…

 It is obvious that, like Prohibition’s effort to eradicate alcohol usage, drug prohibition has not succeeded. Despite enormous law enforcement efforts — including the dedicated service of many thousands of professional men and women — the government has not halted drug use.

…

Whether we like it or not, tens of millions of Americans have used and will continue to use drugs.

In an era when we can’t stop hearing about food prices rising at the fastest rate on record, useless environmentalists have come up with yet another way to stick it to the poor: embedding computer chips in food packaging to connect consumers to an online “sustainable food guide” via cell phones!

The guides would help consumers navigate their way through the ethical and ecological decisions about what they eat, the proponents argue.

…

Information on socio-economic and environmental criteria could be presented simply through “food flowers” – diagrams where each petal represents a different impact, with the shaded area of a petal showing how highly a food item scores.

The more detailed information could be accessed from a website and uploaded from food packaging to our mobile phones.

I wonder if anyone has bothered to think about how much the price of food is going to go up when the government starts requiring that microchips be embedded in every food package, how much it’s going to cost set up and run the infrastructure necessary to store information about countless kinds of food products and pay for bandwidth and electricity to run servers, or how much silicon and other precious minerals will have to be dug out of the ground in poor African countries, shipped across the world, dipped in all sorts of appalling chemicals at a chip-making facility, and then shipped off to food producers/distributors to make this asinine scheme work.

As with the corn-based biofuel fad, this feel-good green scheme looks like a shockingly bad idea that accomplishes nothing whatsoever, costs a lot of money, and sticks it to poor people while making affluent yuppie types feel good about saving the planet.

Here’s hoping the UK government has enough sense to flatly reject this absurd plan.

Today the Oregonian ran an editorial against the Amethyst Initiative and its proposal to debate lowering the drinking age (which I previously wrote about here). It was bad, failing to produce any real argument or evidence for its claim, but one passage in particular made me really scratch my head:

[C]ollege presidents are really just showing off a trove of conventional wisdom. In essence, they’re repeating the familiar refrain that banning drinking intensifies the allure of alcohol (and thus promotes a “culture of dangerous, clandestine” bingeing on their campuses).

[…]
But how “clandestine” is all this, really? At many colleges and universities, it’s not very. Students are fairly open in violating the law, and the universities either tacitly approve or look away. In effect, they’ve already lowered the drinking age on their campuses — but there’s no sign it’s helped.

Excuse me? I’m not sure what university the Oregonian editorial board attended, but maybe they should visit the UO, where the EPD’s infamous “party patrol” roams free, DPS is ever-vigilant and, besides the occasional burnt-out stoner, RA’s are vicious fiends. The UO “tacitly approves” of underage drinking like maltreated Rottweillers tacitly approve of small, doughy children.

Note to Oregonian editorial board: Removing your head from your ass might result in slightly more logical editorials.

P.S. Et tu, Reason?

Presidents from 100 colleges nation-wide are agitating for Congress to lower the legal drinking age to 18, saying the current law is not only ignored but leads to dangerous binge-drinking among college students. Well, sort of (not really). They all signed a petition by the Amethyst Initiative to start a debate on the issue, but close enough for jazz, right?

The Amethyst Initiative’s official statement is actually quite good. In it, the organization calls upon elected officials to:

• Support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year-old drinking age.
• Consider whether the 10% highway fund “incentive” encourages or inhibits that debate.
• Invite new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.

Can you guess what teetotaling organization is NOT happy about the news?

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD.

Yes, of course, because admitting a law is flawed is the moral equivalent of breaking said law. Good call, MADD. Of course, this wouldn’t be the organization’s first foray into flights of hyperbole. MADD now occupies the same, rarified heights of fanaticism as PETA and those pro-life activists who set up “holocaust displays” on college campuses. For example, check out this classy move by MADD.

P.S. In case you wondering, Frohnmayer did not sign on.

Writing about the quickly-retracted idea for a new law requiring adult cyclists to wear helmets, Carla Axtman plays at being a libertarian:

 I use that label to infer the idea of the “leave me alone” ethos that tends to be an intregal part of what we’re about in the west. As a rule, the western U.S. seems to be a region whose citizens have a strong preference for government to remain out of their personal decisions… we tend to cast a jaundiced eye at any law which would give the government power over the way we choose to live our lives.

Alright. So far, so good…

We’re not opposed to government taxation and spending per se. In fact, we’ll be the first to embrace it in many cases. [emphasis added]

Hm. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure she gets it. One of her commenters does, though:

I’m not sure from where this ethos began. Perhaps it was from all of those independent-minded pioneers who ventured from parts east on the continent

I’m guessing the ethos began right at about the time a bunch of bicycle riding Portland liberals came to understand that their ox would now be gored by Prozanzki and the rest of his legislative nannycrat buddies.

Heh.

Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon is expressing shock! and indignation! at a new plan floated by Oregon Republicans: selling water to water-starved states like Nevada and California (though interestingly, his link to the Republicans’ “Leadership Fund” doesn’t mention the plan at all). He quotes Jeff Mapes at the OregonLive blogs:

David Nelson, R-Pendleton, who convinced the Senate R caucus to take up this idea, insists that times have changed and that Oregon could be a Saudi Arabia of water. “We wouldn’t allow them to take it,” he says of other regions. “We would sell it to them.” And he adds that it could make the kind of profits that will help support a level of state services that the taxpayers aren’t willing to fund.

Mapes points out that there are several problems with the plan, not the least of which is that Oregon is already embroiled in all sorts of water-rights litigation involving Native tribes, farmers, and fishermen. Such criticisms are certainly fair and, as the continuing controversies surrounding the Columbia and Klamath flows illustrate, the issues involved are delicate and often intractable.

Chisholm, on the other hand, seems to feel that the idea itself is beyond comprehension, having little to add aside from

Seriously.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps Kari Chisholm is unaware that the Bonneville Power Administration already sells massive amounts of hydroelectric power from the Columbia to neighboring states and that California already gets huge amounts of water from sources like the Colorado River, which has experienced increasingly smaller flows as places like Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico (which is legally entitled to part of the Colorado River flow), to say nothing of California itself, require increasingly large amounts of water to sustain growth.

Or perhaps he does know that electricity generated by the BPA is consumed in other parts of the country and is simply under the same misapprehension as one of the people posting in his comments section and believes that BPA power is simply given away free to people outside the Pacific Northwest rather than being put to good use near where the power is generated.

Either way, and admitting that there are some real potential issues that arise if we start selling water to California and elsewhere, why does Chisholm think that the plan is so utterly beyond the pale? If the water can be spared without endangering fish runs and Tribal fishing rights, etc., one fails to see how making up for budget shortfalls by selling water is supposedly so outrageous.

After all, we all know that the budget isn’t going to shrink itself since taxpayers aren’t terribly excited about taking even more money out of their pockets and the government isn’t willing to alienate interest groups by cutting programs. It’s clear we can’t rely forever on Band-Aid measures like Federal timber payments, so if a profit can be made using some of Oregon’s natural resources, and it can be done without endangering other interests that Oregonians have decided are important (fish runs, etc.), it seems incredibly short-sighted to pass up that opportunity.

[EDIT]

Then again, maybe Kari Chisholm was too caught up in basically calling Gordon Smith a fatty poo-poo head to be bothered to write anything more substantial about potential plans to exploit Oregon’s natural resources.