13 Comments
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Allan W's avatar

“achievement is most often limited to the press release heralding the spending, as though the spending, and not the cleaning, was the point “

Exactly. I live in Ashland true of our city government as well.

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Jeff Zekas's avatar

Perfectly stated

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David Gulickson's avatar

Review the definition of insanity…

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Kent's avatar

Even the dismal facts about the failures of progressivism seem to do little to change the voters minds in Portland and Salem. Cognitive dissonance is the fifth force in the universe next to the weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravitational and electromagnetic. Cognitive dissonance as an operating force holds sway over human minds. I liken the human condition to a needed paradigm shift by analogy of the quantum revolution over Newtonian mechanics. Progressivism is that baked in. Sad.

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James Lyon's avatar

deserves to be reiterated often, hang in there.

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Ken Barber's avatar

This is something that those of us East of the Mountains have been doing for some time now, yet you diss our efforts to leave Oregon and join the State of Idaho.

Words without deeds are empty.

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A. Hairyhanded Gent's avatar

No. It's understandable. Please don't put everyone west of the mountains into the same Kotek bag. If you did manage to get out, I'd only regret that I'm bound by financial interests to stay.

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john bishop's avatar

The practice of public employee unions using dues to finance campaigns to elect legislators and judges friendly to the unions resulting in increased dues is the root of the problem. The new law allowing unemployment insurance to subsidize striking public employees might be twhere this has been pushed so far that the taxpayers fight back. If this has a chance of happening it will take an unpopular strike to get people to pay attention.

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Rob Schläpfer's avatar

I’d put the blame squarely on Oregon Republicans — who are much too stupid and incompetent to devise an effective strategy for success. And lazy.

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Rachel Hawk's avatar

They're getting better. Watch the new chair, Connie Welchel. we all became pcp's in 2020 and worked our asses off. it ain't easy, esp when most R's don't engage. but with support she is changing all that.

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Rob Schläpfer's avatar

They need an *effective* strategy that is grounded in *reality*. The root of the political imbalance in Oregon is a massive demographic shift that has occured in the last 25 years. That cannot be reversed. And because it is profoundly *psycholgical* at its roots, it can't be changed easily, if at all. Notions of "flipping Oregon red" or doubling down on MAGA defy rational deliberation. They are as unrealistic as the progressive vision that is destroying us now. Cheers

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timothy James Robinson's avatar

lost me at .. titularly...17 paragraphs...killing readership ...have a college freshman read before release-puhleeze

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A. Hairyhanded Gent's avatar

So it's come to subjective nit-picking, has it?

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