Jeff's blog

Please come to Salem and join the Oregon Citizen Lobby in standing up for limited government during the remaining few days of the short legislative session. We are already making a difference and you can join us today starting at 8am in Room 350 in the State Capitol building. We will have coffee, cookies and muffins waiting for you!

Just ask the information desk in the Capitol rotunda how to get up to Room 350.

The Oregon Citizen Lobby is a loose confederation of several limited government groups around the state who have joined together to take political activism to a higher level. We even have a website that reviews each bill introduced in this legislative session based on 5 criteria where we offer our recommendation to support or oppose. You can search for individual bills at www.tracktheirvote.org  and can also see bills that individual legislators introduced

A 5^th generation Oregon farmer, radio talk show host and retired legislator’s view of the world.

It is pretty simple really. They have no cojones!

Today I woke up in a foul mood as the rain has returned to western Oregon, (hurting yields of my ready to harvest grass seed crop laying on the ground) in addition to nearly universal analysis that Congressional Republicans had lost the debt limit debate.

I asked myself why they lost. Well, after thinking about and getting increasingly frustrated because of my conclusions, I decided I had had enough and had to say something. So, I went on the air today and on this blog to let loose at the Republican leaders who lost this PR battle.

Now before you ruling class types dismiss me as just another uniformed tea party type, I fully understand the situation in Congress. I served 8 years in the Oregon House of Representatives enduring Rinos, divided Senate and Democrat Governors grappling with the 9/11 recession and it’s aftermath. I get the seriousness of the debt limit issue and the necessity to find compromise.

Why Oregon’s plastic bag ban will fail.

Yesterday the Plastic Bag Ban bill had its first hearing in the Oregon Senate, which took most of the afternoon and into the evening to complete. Several AFP OR members stayed late to be able to testify and took the principled stand about how this limits consumer choice and freedom. However, no one pointed out the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, which is this:

Human nature is the root cause of the littering problem that the plastic bag ban seeks to solve and this legislation does not change human nature.

I pointed this out in my testimony before the committee at the very end of the hearing (The chair held me to be the second to last as she knows me so well) and it was met with stunned silence, because none of the committee members had thought of it before and had no comeback.

Basically I made this point: what makes anyone think that someone who is a litterbug today throwing away plastic bags is not going to throw away a larger, reusable polypropylene bag made in China tomorrow? (I pointed at an example of a large reusable bag on the dias).

My words were greeted with silence and blank looks.

You gotta love the limousine, latte, leftist liberals in Portland who demand that we all return to the stone age by forcing fraudulent Global Warming rules down our throats yet are unwilling to step up and pay more out of their own pockets for “Green Power”. What pathetic hypocrites! Here’s the story in the O today: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/12/oregon_city_of_portland_dont_m.html

The Eco Freaks strike again!

So apparently transporting huge, heavy oil field processing equipment by big rig on state highways is bad, but doing the same thing with huge, heavy wind power equipment is good? So says the “stop all progress at any cost by making stupid arguments” crowd, otherwise affectionately known by some as the “eco freaks”. You know these folks, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council ect,  who try to find any excuse to stop anything that might smack of fossil fuels, such as those quoted in the Oregonian story on this issue yesterday. http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/12/giant_oil_field_equipment_crea.html.

Never mind that man made global warming is a fraud being rammed down our throats by the left, but rather it is the specious, transparent arguments they advance that are so laughable and hypocritical.

Michael Medved has a great article on Townhall.com to day about this newly elected group of conservative House/Senate members being younger, vibrant, more female, ethnically diverse and in stark contrast to the Democrat retreads that were re elected. His point being that this could be the future of the GOP for years to come as their election clearly demonstrates that the Republican party is not dominated by grumpy old white men. He is correct only if the GOP makes them the face of the Republican and conservatism in the next two years, prior to the 2012 elections, for two reasons.

Hispanics and women.

I asked this question on my radio show today and the answer is yes. It may not be the job you want, but you can find one to keep working, paying taxes into the system and help your self esteem. Thousands of Americans move from job to job daily as people retire, quit or are fired, so the jobs are out there.

Yet we constantly hear that workers cant find jobs and need more government welfare. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I love it when I am right (no pun intended) as I am with my predictions on the effects of MZ 66/67. The Oregonian story today http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/measure_66_tax_revenue_coming.html about MZ 66 revenue tax collections not reaching what they said it would is precisely what myself and many others predicted would happen. However, not for the reasons the article states.

It is because of human nature.

You see the taxpayers that are targeted by this Marxist, class warfare tax increase are angry and upset that they are being demonized by the oppressive socialists in charge of Oregon government. These are entrepreneurs that risk their own capital by starting or expanding a business that creates jobs and frankly, they feel they are being punished for success.

So what do they do?  What most humans do when they feel they are being unfairly treated by others and government. They rebel from this heavy handed tactic and take steps to protect what they have worked for.

While it may be a bit premature, there is a general acknowledgment amongst political pundits that the November elections this year are going demonstrate a powerful and perhaps never seen political shift in American politics. The Tea Party movement is the major reason this is happening, leading to the curious question mused by Chip Hanlon at Red County today http://www.redcounty.com/tea-partiers-beware-perpetual-jihad/36843?taxonomy=26 entitled “Tea Partiers: Beware Perpetual Jihad” asking “what are you going to do when elected officials start doing what you ask of them?

Well the answer is simple, continually hold their feet to the fire!

While digesting the results of the election in which Oregon voters believed the deceptively simple messaging of the union led “Yes” campaign (not to mention the ineffective “No” messages), I realized that Oregon’s economy is going to have to get much worse before the voters wake up.

Deschutes County’s election results make that point clearly.

Here’s why: Deschutes County’s economy is really hurting with an official unemployment rate of 14% and Bend’s economy (the big dog in the county) may not have hit bottom yet as the Oregonian article today http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/01/bend_wondering_when_it_will_hi.html describes. Voters there defeated the tax increase measures by 17% and 19%, which means a lot of Democrats voted against them, as R’s only have an 8% voter registration advantage (2,700) in the county. Democrats have been steadily gaining ground and has been voting more liberally as more Californians have moved into the area.