(Here are the first words in a late March Oregonian editorial)
Time for an annual Legislature 

03/31/03 - After last year's five unproductive and almost unbearable special sessions of the Oregon Legislature, the last thing many voters want to see is more of the Legislature in Salem.  
        
However, the holes that repeatedly opened in the state budget and the Legislature's repeated failure to patch them have strengthened the argument for annual legislative sessions. Since Oregon became a state in 1859, the Legislature has gathered in Salem for regular sessions only during odd-numbered years. Eighteen lawmakers are appointed to an emergency board to make minor budget decisions during even-numbered years. The Oregonian has long resisted a move to annual sessions, primarily because the change has seemed unnecessary. However, the current system no longer seems capable of handling a $10 billion biennial state budget and a complex and volatile Oregon economy. (end of segment)

(OMED: As a big fan of congressional deadlock, I oppose this idea.  What we need is a kind of soil bank subsidy for politicians and bureaucrats so they stop soiling our bank accouints.  You know, pay them to not do their jobs.  Not legislate and not bureaucratize anyting.  They can go in and chat with each other, but if they do anything, they no longer get paid.  Now, read an email from the famed Steve Schopp, talk radio crusader, madman and blunt sage.)

The Oregonian editorial board knows what is going on in this State.  They know who runs this state. However they continue to deliberately deceive the public with their endless rhetoric on funding. 
 

What a typically deliberate effort to mislead the public. "Invest" ??????  The spending on transportation has never been clearer than today.  

Commuter rail

"Washington County along with Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood, gave $13 million for commuter rail from (the) Major Streets Transportation Improvement Project fund.  Legislators committed $35 million.  City/county leaders gave an additional $10 million from the Metro Transportation Improvement Program.  County and city officials have agreed to give an additional $12 million in MSTIP money to operate the rail line for the first six years. 

With tram, trolleys, light rail and commuter rail, transportation planning has failed miserably and risks wasting many millions more in the future. 

Education?

We are supposed to believe the cost of CIM/CAM is "elusive". Yet we are to believe the Quality Education Model numbers for school funding are reliable?  This is a joke. We shouldn't.  Oregon spending on education is high enough. The QEM is as much a fraud as is our school reform. 

(OMED: We don't know what some of these alphabet organizations are, either. Only Steve,Rob Kremer and the liberals, know them all.  "OMED," by the way, stands for Oregon Magazine Editorial Director. ) 

The ODE along with OSBA, COSA, OEA and OBC are obscuring where the money goes while resisting all efforts to abandon what is wasteful and does not work. These groups do not represent parents, students or classrooms and have in effect concluded they can no longer run our system with the available resources. They work together to prevent anyone but themselves from controlling our public schools. Willing to run them into the ground versus relinquishing their control and support for what does not work

It's all about them.  

                                          -- Steve 

OMED: recently, in a letter to a dear friend, I described life as being two colliding typhoons which in certain places cancel each other out, creating a temporary region of balanced forces.  To those in these places, these places are sunny, calm and reasonable.  The problem is that 1) they are temporary enclaves of sanity, and 2) it is very hard to enjoy them, knowing as we do what is coming.

But, as John Steinbeck said in Of Mice and Men, there is no point to dreaming of someday owning a rabbit farm, and then falling into a rage about the future dogs that might come after your future rabbits.

If you happen to run across a moment of sunny sanity, as this journalist did when the idiot Peter Arnett recently got his NBC butt canned by doing a Hanoi Jane with the Arab Terrorist Broadcasting Network, strip down to your swim suit and get a tan while you can.  Life is a sea of troubles.  The crashing waves that damage our docks are all generated by noisesome liberals like Arnett and their fascist tyrant friends like Hussein, along with pick your progressive Portland television or print "journalist."  (Us fine conservatives, like soldiers, have to get our rest where we can.)

Just imagine the beautiful, lovely, perfect weather if, like Arnett, the Oregonian's editorial page buffleheads all joined hands and jumped in equally  hot water up to their progressive necks.  Yes, they would shortly be replaced by people who know exactly how to weaken our military, screw up our schools, run your life and throw away all your money, but for a while, there would be a sunny afternoon without a single blathering, black-feathered, liberal media crow befouling the deep blue Oregon big print sky.

After I finish enjoying the broadcast demise of Arnett, I will dream that lovely dream.  
 

LL

© 2003 Oregon Magazine