Salem Political Snark

Salem's Enlightened Theatrics breaks Covid rules

Last weekend Salem's Enlightened Theatrics reportedly broke the Oregon Health Authority Covid rules by having in-person performances of a student production of Les Miserables that exceeded what is allowed for indoor entertainment.

l've heard that at Saturday night's performance over 70 people were in attendance, food and beverages were sold and consumed, and some people were unmasked.

Here's what is allowed for an Extreme Risk county, which Marion County is.

The Enlightened Theatrics auditorium is over 500 square feet, so they could have only six people at each performance. Food and drink can't be consumed indoors. So it appears that Enlightened Theatrics broke several Covid rules.

Thus it sure looks like Enlightened Theatrics has decided to follow in the footsteps of Courthouse Club Fitness -- risking a fine in order to stay open. 

What's disturbing in both cases goes beyond the danger to patrons by ignoring Oregon Health Authority guidelines that are designed to prevent Covid infections.

When Enlightened Theatrics decided to put on the in-person performances, it essentially said to other theatre companies, movie theaters, and in-door entertainment venues, "Ha-ha, you're closed and we're open! We've got enough money to pay a fine and probably you don't! You're a goody-goody who complies with Covid regulations and we're an outlaw who goes our own way!"

Well, I don't think Enlightened Theatrics should be proud of that attitude, just as I don't think Courthouse Club Fitness should be proud of racking up over $100,000 in fines as it stays open while other gyms in extreme risk counties remain closed.

I've enjoyed quite a few Enlightened Theatrics productions. They offer high quality live performances at a reasonable cost. But I'm bothered by Enlightened Theatrics scoffing at Covid restrictions that other indoor entertainment venues in Salem are complying with.

PGE's storm communications are astoundingly inept

Along with a disturbingly large number of other people, my wife and I have endured a full week of no electricity after the February 12 ice/snow storm devastated much of Oregon.

(Our dog is doing just fine.)

How much longer will our electricity be off? Starting last Monday, Portland General Electric, or PGE, has considered this to be a secret not to be disclosed to their customers. 

Whenever I log into my PGE account, I'm met with a cryptic "not available at this time" in the Estimated Time On part of our outage report.

OK, I can understand that PGE wouldn't be able to provide its customers with a valid estimate of how long their power will be off in the early days of a widespread outage.

But even after a week, PGE still won't tell people how much longer they have to put up with all the inconveniences that come with having no electricity. 

This is causing a lot of frustration. 

I know, because regularly I pick up my iPhone, click on Tweetbot, a Twitter app, and search for tweets matching "@PortlandGeneral."

Maybe a quarter of tweets with this tag praise PGE for restoring the person's power.

The rest run the gamut from mildly critical of PGE to full-on rants about how horrendously awful PGE's response to the storm has been -- both in terms of turning electricity back on and PGE's dreadful communications strategy, which seems focused on keeping customers as much in the dark as possible regarding when their power will return.

This afternoon, though, I noticed a tweet from PGE that seemed promising. 

It didn't take long, though, for me to realize that the new online map not only wasn't useful, it was less than useful. Here's why.

On Thursday, I think it was (yesterday), PGE announced that it expected to have power restored to 90% of its customers by Friday. This is what the Storm Restoration Update page on the PGE web site says.

It's difficult to tell how many customers comprise that 90%, or the remaining 10%, without knowing what "currently" means in the screenshot above.

Regardless of the number, the important thing is that thousands of customers are going to be in the unfortunate 10%, which includes me, since our power is still off. 

On that same web page, PGE described how many customers would lack power after Friday night and where the longest waits to have power restored would be.

This certainly implies -- in fact it basically says it outright -- that the 15,000 customers who haven't had their power turned on by Friday night, tonight, and don't live in the areas listed above, won't have to wait as long as the people who do live in those areas.

UPDATE: I just came across a PGE tweet that said "As of 5pm today, 54,900 customers are still without power." So unless a lot of customers got their power restored between 5 pm and midnight today, PGE underestimated how many customers would lack power on February 19 by 39,900. Sure doesn't make me feel any more confident in PGE's competence.

So, yay, I thought after reading this. My wife and I live in rural south Salem near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge. We're nowhere near the areas hit hardest -- Silverton, Woodburn, West Linn, Canby, etc.

I looked forward, then, to learning from the new map when we'd have electricity again. 

That hope was dashed when I actually looked at the map. The title above the map was a giveaway: Check Your Zone. I didn't want to check a zone. I wanted to check our specific outage area, our local neighborhood which had been showing 503 customers without electricity.

This is a screenshot of the overall area, showing the Legend. Light blue has an estimated restoration time of up to 3 days; yellow, up to five days; brown, up to nine days.

The map looks much different when it is zoomed in on my iPhone. This is Salem.The whole city of Salem appears to be in the yellow "up to 5 days" category. The purple dots show individual outages. I'm assuming the mass of dots obscuring much of Salem is covering up yellow.

How useful is this information? So minimal I'd call it useless.

People want to know when the electricity for their home or business will return, not the maximum amount of time it will take to restore power in all parts of Salem, which could range from one day (Saturday) to five days (Wednesday).

Likewise, here's the screenshot for my area. Our house is a bit north and east of Spring Reservoir, better termed Spring Lake. Our neighborhood is in the brown "up to nine days" zone. Again, though, this information is useless.
Here's a zoomed-out screenshot of the brown area. It's huge. There's no way every customer currently lacking power in this area is going to wait a similar length of time to have their electricity back on.

Thus PGE has produced a map that contains essentially zero useful information. It seems to be a way for PGE to say "we're providing customers with an estimate of when their power will be restored" without actually doing this.

Also, saying "up to nine days" is meaningless. A neighbor talked with a PGE employee today who was inspecting a downed line in our neighborhood. Reportedly the PGE guy said we might have power restored as early as tomorrow.

That's within the "up to nine days," because tomorrow would be one day. But one day is much different from nine days. 

Botton line: PGE is persisting in its screwed-up post-storm communications strategy -- which is aimed at giving customers as little useful information about their specific outage as possible. I sure hope legislators and state officials conduct hearings into how PGE has handled getting electricity back for its customers.

I have many questions about this, as I'm sure others do also.

Lastly, the conflict between this map and the list of hardest hit areas listed on the PGE web site -- Woodburn, Silverton, West Linn, Canby, etc. -- is huge. Most of those "hardest hit" areas are shown in the same color as Salem, yellow, up to five days restoration time.

So PGE is saying one thing at the top of that web page, then it is saying another thing in the map further down the page. Like I've been saying, the PGE communications strategy is so bad, it would be comical if being without electricity weren't so serious.

Ice storm disaster should prompt close look at PGE

Most of us don't pay much attention to our power company until the electricity goes off. Then we realize how important the electrical grid is to daily life.

Well, "important" is an understatement. 

"Absolutely essential" is a better way to put it. Without reliable electricity civilization as we know it can't exist. And this will only become more true as the United States, and the world, steadily moves away from fossil fuels.

Electric cars obviously need electricity to function. So when the ice storm that hit Oregon last Friday cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes in our state, the ability to conveniently charge electric cars became impossible.

The widespread power outages affected most people in Northwest Oregon, though, not just electric car owners. Wells don't run without electricity. Neither do most heating systems. 

I've been critical of how Portland General Electric, Oregon's largest utility, has handled the ice storm crisis from a communications standpoint.

Along with many others, PGE's failure to provide even a rough estimate to customers of when power would be restored struck me as a serious error -- causing anguish, uncertainty, and frustration.

At a time when people were already physically in the dark, it was decidedly unhelpful for PGE to keep people mentally in the dark regarding details of how power would be restored to certain areas.

Tomorrow PGE is going to start holding daily press conferences. That's almost a week too late. PGE management should have been doing this during the entire ice storm aftermath. 

The basic point I'm making here is that while the efforts of PGE employees to restore power as quickly as possible deserve a lot of praise, this shouldn't stop politicians, state/local officials, and others concerned with how public utilities function from asking some tough questions of PGE executives.

When a mass shooting occurs in this country, defenders of the gun status quo say, "It's too early to point fingers at the cause of what just happened." 

That's wrong. Immediately after a disaster is the correct time to seek answers to questions that, when answered, can shed light on how to prevent future similar disasters.

I got to thinking about this more seriously after talking with a couple of people today about PGE.

We'd started off talking about something else, but not surprisingly the conversations edged around to the subject on everybody's mind after the February 12 ice storm hit. When will electricity come back on? 

Which leads to another question. Why did the electricity go off for hundreds of thousands of people? 

The people I talked with both had friends with some inside information about how PGE operates. Obviously I have no way of knowing whether that information is true. It has a certain ring of truth, though, and helped inform the questions that I believe need to be answered in coming months.

These aren't exhaustive. They're just questions that have been on my mind as a PGE customer who, at the moment, has gone five full days without electricity.

(1) It's well known that climate change will lead to more extreme weather events. Did PGE engage in scenario planning that included a polar vortex bringing cold arctic air into the Pacific Northwest that was combined with a moisture-laden storm moving in from the Pacific? (Which is what produced this ice/snow storm.)

(2) If "yes" to #1 above, did PGE plan ahead for how to cope with such a scenario? If "no" to #1 above, why wasn't this done?

(3) Has PGE engaged in adequate preventive maintenance, such as tree trimming/removal, aimed at reducing outages during an extreme weather event?

(4) Regarding that sort of preventive maintenance, has contracting out tree trimming/removal to private companies led to better or worse outcomes as regards storm-related power outages?

(5) PGE has reported significant damage to major transmission lines and substations during the recent storm. Ice storms are common in Northwest Oregon. Why so such damage to important electrical infrastructure from a foreseeable weather event?

(6) It appears that out-of-state utility crews weren't called in by PGE until several days after the ice/snow storm. If this was the case, why the delay when the scope of damage was evident early on?

(7) For several days PGE provided an estimate to customers of when their power would be restored. On the Monday following the storm, these estimates stopped being made. Who made the decision to do this, and why was it done?

(8) Why did PGE fail to hold any press conferences about its response to the electricity outages for six days following the storm? 

(9) What steps will PGE be taking to help assure that hundreds of thousands of its customers won't lose power for such a long time when the next major weather event strikes Oregon? 

(10) In line with #9, does PGE have plans to place electrical lines underground in areas that are prone to extreme events such as wildfires and ice storms?

Controversy erupts over Leung missing out on City Council committees

Mayor Bennett's initial decision to assign Councilor Jackie Leung to only one Salem City Council committee (as an alternate, moreover) struck many people as a big deal about something, whereas I've come to see it as much ado about almost nothing.

Jackie Leung

I learned about what I'm tempted to call CommitteeGate (just gave in to that temptation) after reading several Facebook posts about this on a private progressive Facebook group.

Some city councilors got as many as five, six, or seven committee assignments. My first reaction was that it did seem strange that Leung got such little committee love from the Mayor.

Could this be due to the fact that on some issues she has gone against the prevailing City Council view, including the positions of fellow progressives?

That was one possibility, though it seemed unlikely to me. Sure, that's something Donald Trump would do, but Mayor Bennett is no Trump, thankfully. 

Meaning, Bennett is a politician, along with the other members of the City Council.

However, stiffing a member on committee assignments because he disagreed with her on certain issues seemed most unlikely to me. Bennett isn't adverse to playing hardball, yet this would have been mudball -- too obvious and dirty.

Numerous comments on the Facebook posts accused Mayor Bennett of racism and sexism for not assigning a woman of color to City Council committees. 

This struck me as being both over-the-top and unbelievable. Sure, racism and sexism are very much present in Salem, which includes City Hall. 

Sometimes, though, unfortunate things happen to women of color which have nothing to do with them being a woman, or a person of color.

So jumping to a conspiracy theory just because the initial 2021 Salem City Council Committee Assignments gave Councilor Leung only one alternate slot struck me as unjustified. 

Yesterday I decided to simply ask Mayor Bennett about this via an email.

Chuck, could you explain why at first you didn’t assign Councilor Leung to any City Council committees? That got quite a bit of attention on Facebook, and I was among those who thought this seemed decidedly strange. 

It’s good that after Councilor Andersen raised this issue Leung now is on three committees, if I recall correctly. But it would be good to hear from you why Leung was shut out of any committees on the first go-round.  

 

     -- Brian

This is the response I got on Monday night, following yesterday's City Council meeting.

Hi Brian, Jackie didn’t contact me about committee assignments and had asked last year not to be on one because of time. Last week I sent out the proposed assignments to councilors seeking reaction and heard nothing back til this morning. Over the past couple of months all of the other councilors contacted me about their interest in certain committees. So, I just assumed she was fine with not adding to her load. I was wrong. Tom called and offered two of his assignments and I put in one of mine. She’s on Rules, City Manager Evaluation, Finance and Water/Waste water.  

Chuck

That sounded eminently believable to me. Others might disagree, but in general I lean toward accepting what someone says unless there is good reason to think otherwise. 

It seems like there was a failure to communicate, as the saying goes. Apparently Councilor Leung didn't make her 2021 committee wishes known in a timely fashion, so Mayor Bennett assumed she didn't want to be on any, as was true in 2020.

Sure, Bennett could have made more of an effort to confirm this, just as Leung could have made more of an effort to respond to the Mayor's proposed committee assignments.

Sometimes mistakes are just that. Well, usually mistakes are just mistakes. However, in the realm of politics, even local politics, there is a tendency to read more into a mishap than is actually there.

I've been guilty of that. Most of us have. We want to categorize actions, and people, into good and bad categories -- whereas much or most of the time this is making a morality play out of a simple screw-up.

Anyway, Councilor Leung now is on four committees, albeit as an alternate for two of them.

Filibuster is a racist Republican relic. It needs to go.

Today I finished reading "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy," by Adam Jentleson -- who was the former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid.

The kill switch is the Senate filibuster. It allows a minority of senators, 41, to block legislation, since 60 votes are needed to end a filibuster in the 100-member Senate.

No longer is it necessary for someone filibustering to stand on the Senate floor and keep talking until their voice (or bladder) gives out. Now, Jentleson says, all a Senator has to do is indicate that they intend to oppose a bill and, bingo, the majority no longer is in control, a minority is.

Kill Switch is full of fascinating detail about how the filibuster came to be, who has wielded it, and what issues have been targeted for filibusters. But the gist of the book for those, like me, who favor Democrats doing away with the filibuster, is in the opening and closing chapters.

Here's excerpts from those chapters. First, the Introduction.

The filibuster has never been the exclusive property of southern reactionaries; as we will see, it has sometimes been deployed by liberals and progressives, and occasionally to historic effect.

But from its inception to today, the filibuster has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered, blocking progress that thteatened their power, their way of life, and the priorities of their wealthy benefactors, from the slaveholders of the nineteenth century to the conservative billionaires of today.

From John Calhoun, the antebellum father of nullification who argued, on the Senate floor, that slavery was a "positive good," to Richard Russell, the post-World War II puppet master of the Senate who swore that "any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy," to Mitch McConnell in our own time, who declared that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," southern senators invented the filibuster, strengthened it, and developed alternative histories to justify it.

Over two centuries, they were able to shape the Senate and thereby the nation, retrofitting the Framers' vision to give themselves, a factional minority, veto power over every law the nation passes. 

Speaking in grave stentorian tones, and making frequent reference to a tendentious account of the Framers and Senate history, they convinced us that this was the way it was meant to be.

But it was not. The Framers would have abhorred the filibuster. Their vision for the Senate was of a chamber that was thoughtful and deliberative, but where the majority rules. For half a century after the founding of the nation, the Senate operated according to their plan.

Here's the final paragraph of the book in the Conclusion chapter.

To fix the Senate, we must keep in mind that restoring an institution capable of producing intelligent solutions is the goal -- the Framers' vision is a corrective to "traditionalists" today, not the goal itself.

We do not elect senators to bask in pundits' praise for upholding Senate tradition; as this book has shown, most of what passes for "tradition" is in fact myth, invented by people seeking to protect their power from the march of change that has so often threatened it.

Calhoun and his modern acolytes, from Russell to McConnell, destroyed the best things about the Senate -- its deliberative nature, the forum it provided for free and open debate -- and replaced them with gridlock, all while telling us it was for the good of the institution.

The Senate needs to be rescued from its own self-indulgent myths, saved from the twisted, damaging Calhounian thing that it has become, and restored to Madison's model -- a model in which the minority is protected, the majority rules, and the business of the nation moves forward.

I'll end by noting that one surprise in the book for me was Jentleson's debunking of the oft-heard statement that the reason Republicans are favored to have control of the Senate is because small states have the same number of Senators, two, as large states.

Not true. Here's what Jentleson says about this.

Looking at seats by state population, there is no significant small-state bias toward Republicans. To the contrary, it's dead even.

The twenty Senate seats representing the ten smallest states are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with each party holding ten. Wyoming, the smallest state, is deep red, but if you zoom out a little on the list of smallest states, a bunch of blue states are among them, including Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Hawaii.

If you expand the group to the fifteen smallest states, the pattern is the same, with their thirty Senate seats equally divided between the parties at fifteen each. The same pattern holds at the other end of the spectrum: among the ten most populous states, their twenty Senate seats are evenly split between the parties at ten each.

...The fact that small and big states are evenly represented by Democrats and Republicans shows that the dysfunction in the modern Senate does not lie in its built-in bias toward small states. 

Instead, as this half of the book will show, it lies in the way its rules have evolved to give certain groups of people -- as opposed to states -- more power. (There is a sliver lining here, since it would be much easier to change the Senate's rules that to break California into multiple states or carry out other proposals currently circulating -- more of that in the Conclusion.)

...The minority of voters putting Republican senators in office are not representative of a rapidly diversifying America riven by income inequality and stagnant wages. They are predominantly white, anti-choice conservatives serving wealthy interests, whom I will call WWAC's for efficiency's sake.

They are out of step with the direction of the country, and they spend year after year watching their status and power erode. But because the modern Senate empowers them far beyond their numbers, they are consistently able to impose their will on the majority.

Almost 3/4 of downtown Salem trash receptacles to be removed

Sheri Wahrgren, the Downtown Revitalization manager for the City of Salem, wants to get rid of most trash receptacles in the downtown area -- 44 of the 61 currently in use. See:

Download Downtown Trash Receptacle Staff Report

Before we dive deeper into this messy move, let's agree on this: the current trash receptacles are ugly, hard to use, and deserve to be featured in The Museum of Dysfunctional Trash Receptacles -- which I dearly hope exists.

Carole Smith, a downtown resident and property owner, brought my attention to what Smith considers a trash travesty. Never one to mince words, here's how she described this issue to me in an email.

I was looking through the DAB [Downtown Advisory Board] agenda and found a staff report that they want to remove 44 of our 61 downtown garbage cans to save money. More trash on the sidewalk will not save downtown money, it will just make it look worse. No word on other cost savings they can make - like letting staff go. We don’t need all those garbage cans but WE DO need all those staff.

If restaurants customers are the main trash can users, why don’t they increase Parking Tax on restaurants with take out? This just seems like another bone they are throwing to restaurants.  

Janet Taylor hated that merchants refused to maintain the city’s plants in the city’s planters so she had the City give away all our planters (planted and blooming) to Keizer. She replaced them with the most hideous garbage cans and planters she could find. She took away over 80 planters and replaced them with 20 planters.

Now staff wants to do the same with garbage cans. Why should downtown be punished because Janet Taylor picked a dumb, dysfunctional design?

Ugh, this just feels like another nail in downtowns mostly-built coffin. One more nail amongst several. Staff still get their paychecks but what about services for the public who pay their wages, don’t we count?  Why do we need so many staff when they continually cut programs?

To add insult to injury, I told Chuck Bennett years ago that most cities negotiate free downtown garbage pick-up with their haulers when they renew their contract. They get their downtown garbage picked up free. Our city just charges the Parking District.

Hope this riles you up like it did me.

Well, I'm always eager to get riled up by stupid stuff done by the City of Salem. I wouldn't have called this blog Salem Political Snark if I'd wanted it to be a warm and fuzzy paean to what city staff are doing right. 

I agree with Smith that removing almost 3/4 of downtown trash receptacles doesn't mesh with what I've observed about human behavior. Namely, that most people want to do the right thing, but only if it isn't too difficult. 

Having several trash receptacles on every block makes it more likely that someone with something that needs to be thrown away will hang onto it for the short distance to a receptacle. This is the current downtown Salem trash receptacle status, as shown in the staff report.

By contrast, this is the proposed layout.

The map above seems trash receptacle-skimpy, but since this is my first foray into trash receptacle analysis of a downtown, I will admit that my intuitive impression of skimpiness may not reflect the intensive quantitative and qualitative assessment that a problem of this importance deserves. 

I have, however, just devoted five minutes of my steadily declining remaining life time to a Google Images search of "downtown trash receptacles" in hopes this will bolster my campaign for an investigative blogging award.

That search led to me a Buyer's Guide for Trash Receptacles which contains this bit of advice that Sheri Wahrgren obviously hasn't taken to heart.

Bottom line: the more trash receptacles you provide, the less trash you will encounter.

Wow. That makes so much sense. As does the following pieces of advice.

Planning trash collection might not be your favorite topic, but proper organization can make your community clean and safe, leaving a positive first impression on guests. Facilitate successful trash collection with: - Placing the right amount of commercial trash receptacles strategically - Installing eye-catching, colorful decorative trash cans that guests can easily find - Encouraging green habits with recycling receptacles that sort recyclable materials

Eye-catching. Colorful. Decorative. Three words that definitely don't describe the trash receptacles currently in downtown. But it does describe the trash receptacles in Washington D.C.'s Chinatown. 

Republicans should support Rep. Kinzinger's Country First movement

Are you a Republican or a conservative-leaning independent?

If so, are you fed up with how the GOP has become so closely tied to Trump, it has lost its way to such an extent it now embraces crazy conspiracy theories such as that Biden's victory didn't happen via a free and fair election?

A "yes" answer, or even a "maybe," should cause you to check out Representative Adam Kinzinger's newly unveiled web site, Country First. 

Kinzinger is an Illinois Congressman who was one of ten Republicans to vote for Trump's impeachment in the House of Representatives. I've seen him several times on TV, including his appearance today on Meet The Press.

I like his style. Kinzinger comes across as straightforward, honest, and committed to traditional Republican principles.

He's deeply disturbed by what the Republican Party has become in its seemingly never-ending quest to kiss up to Donald Trump, no matter how far this misplaced affection causes the GOP to stray from the values it used to hold.

There's a six-minute video on Country First that explains why Kinzinger is starting this counterweight to Trumpism. Time will tell whether many conservatives jump on board the Country First movement.

I suspect most Republicans will stick with Trump, but I admire Kinzinger for trying to get the GOP back on track.

My mother was a fervent lifelong Republican who would be aghast at how deep the party has sunk into the muck of lies, sedition, and loyalty to an ex-president who richly deserves his two impeachments.

I haven't leaned Republican since I went to college and left behind the conservatism that my highly political mother imbued in me. However, I'm supporting what Kinzinger is doing because it isn't healthy for our country to have a major political party dominated by, to put it bluntly, crazy people. 

The United States is the only advanced democracy where one party has become so extreme, basically there is no way for the Democratic Party to engage with it on pressing policy issues like Covid relief, voting rights, and climate change. That's an unhealthy state of affairs.

Here's excerpts from a Washington Post story, "GOP Rep. Kinzinger starts PAC to challenge party's embrace of Trump." 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump earlier this month, has launched a new political action committee that is designed to become a financial engine to challenge the former president’s wing of the GOP caucus and stand up against a leadership team still aligned with him.

Kinzinger, 42, a former star of the 2010 tea party class, said the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol served as a final breaking point for the direction of the Republican Party, providing a stark divide between those who want to continue a path toward autocracy and those who want to return to traditional conservative values.

In an interview Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Kinzinger formally unveiled his Country 1st PAC and a six-minute campaign-style video launching what he hopes will become a movement.

“The reality is this: This is a time to choose. . . . And my goal in launching Country1st.com. . . is just to say, ‘Look, let’s take a look at the last four years, how far we have come in a bad way, how backwards-looking we are, how much we peddle darkness and division,’ ” Kinzinger said on the program. “And that’s not the party I ever signed up for. And I think most Republicans didn’t sign up for that.”

...Kinzinger said he does not want to play any leading role in the GOP and has no ambition to run for higher office, but said too many Republicans were remaining quiet and just hoping Trumpism would fade away without being fully confronted.

He said that his push is not really about ideology so much as driving conspiracy theorists and racists out of the GOP.

“We don’t embrace conspiracy theories to win anymore,” he said. “Would we lose the Proud Boys? Maybe. I’m fine with that.”

Freedom Celebration won't include Salem Police Department

KSLM's right-wing radio talk show host Jeff Kropf has been plugging a Freedom Celebration to be held this Sunday, January 31. I've heard that Trevor Womack, the Salem Police Department chief, won't be attending even though he was invited. 

UPDATE: I've heard that 400 people have registered for this event. Oregon's COVID rules for an Extreme Risk area (where this event will be held) say that a maximum of 50 people can attend an outdoor entertainment event. So it looks like the Freedom Celebration will be in violation of that rule. And it could be a super spreader event, given that most of the right-wingers who attend won't be wearing masks or practicing social distancing.

FURTHER UPDATE: A commenter reminded me that this event is to be held in an airplane hanger, so it is indoors. That means six is the maximum number of people who could attend under current Covid rules. I stand corrected. However, that rule seems a bit unfair if everyone is wearing masks, which admittedly almost certainly won't happen. Grocery stores can let in people to the extent of 50% of capacity, I believe it is, if everyone has a mask on. The problem is that most of those going to the Freedom Celebration wrongly think "freedom" means going maskless.

Wise decision, Chief Womack. 

While your officers are free to attend on their own time, it would have been a bad idea to give credibility to this event -- given that it was Biden-hating Republican extremists like Kropf who sowed the seed of the insurrection at the nation's Capitol that cost the lives of three police officers (one was murdered by the Trump rioters and two have committed suicide following the attack).

If you want to endure a You Tube video where Kropf speaks his mind at a January 1, 2021 rally at the state Capitol in opposition to Governor Brown's Covid "tyranny," here it is.

I watched enough of the video to learn that, among other things, Kropf is against wearing masks to fight the pandemic and that he believes a wacko accusation of Brown having ties to the Chinese Communist Party needs to be investigated.  

Someone sent me a recording of Kropf claiming on his radio show that the Salem Police Department would be attending the Freedom Celebration along with the National Guard, Marion County Sheriff's Office, and other groups. Hopefully none of them will show up in an official capacity.

Jeff Kropf obviously doesn't understand that freedom is defended by many others than the sorts of people invited to the Freedom Celebration: law enforcement, military, first responders. 

Trump's failed attempt to overthrown our democracy by having the results of the free and fair 2020 presidential election overturned shows that judges, election officials, Secretaries of State, advocates for voting rights, lawyers, journalists, and many others who don't carry a gun deserve to be praised at their own Freedom Celebration. 

Those people also have been "fighting the good fight for our freedom," as the Freedom Celebration puts it. But right-wingers like Kropf don't acknowledge this, which is why I'm a proud progressive.

We on the left side of the political spectrum have a much more expansive view of freedom than conservatives do these days, even though genuine conservatives also believe that democracy is protected by assuring that as many people are able to vote as possible, which means making it as easy to vote as possible.

Rep. Mike Nearman and Oregon GOP are dangerous crazies

Feel sorry for me.

My wife and I have the unfortunate distinction of living in the Oregon House District held by Republican Mike Nearman -- the guy who held a door open at the state Capitol on December 21, allowing 50 militant protesters to stream into the building, setting off a battle with police that led to a dozen officers being pepper-sprayed by the intruders.

Oregon, of course, was a rehearsal of sorts for the January 6 insurrection at the nation's Capitol in Washington D.C..

It's fortunate that Nearman isn't a member of Congress, or he would have been helping the Trump mob break into the Senate and House chambers, perhaps with murderous results far greater than the single police officer killed by the insurrectionists. 

Pleasingly, the Statesman Journal reports that a coalition of state leaders is calling on the Oregon Legislature to expel Nearman. 

A coalition of local and regional leaders, business owners and organization directors are calling on the Oregon Legislature to expel Republican Rep. Mike Nearman for allowing violent demonstrators into the Capitol building in December.

The growing group includes three Salem city councilors; the executive director of the Eugene/Springfield NAACP; the executive director of the Northwest Accountability Project; union leaders; and environmental activists.

The Salem city councilors are Chris Hoy, Vanessa Nordyke, and Trevor Phillips. Hopefully the three other progressive councilors will join them.

Laurel, my wife, reads the constituent newsletters emailed to us by Nearman. So far I've held off on reading them out of a fear that my head would explode from the craziness they contain. {Laurel tells me about some of the lies in the newsletter, which are astounding to those of us who embrace reality rather than conspiracy theories.)

Speaking of conspiracy theories, the Oregon GOP has covered itself in lying grime after its executive committee issued a resolution calling the January 6 insurrection a "false flag" event. Meaning, supposedly the thousands of demonstrators carrying Trump flags and wearing Trumpian clothing actually were antifa masquerading as Trump supporters.

Of course, there is no evidence of this, but little details like facts don't stop today's Republican Party from spewing out the latest QAnon bullshit. 

It's embarrassing that news of Oregon's GOP craziness made its way to Great Britain, where The Guardian ran a story, "Oregon Republican party falsely suggests Capitol attack was a 'false flag.'"

The Oregon Republican party has falsely claimed in a resolution that there is “growing evidence” that the 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was “a ‘false flag’ operation”.

The resolution, which was published on 19 January and was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican party, suggested that the storming of the capitol by Trump supporters was an orchestrated conspiracy “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans” and to create a “sham motivation” to impeach the former president.

To back up these false claims, the resolution cited links to rightwing websites, including the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump outlet that has frequently published rightwing misinformation, as well as the Wikipedia entry for “Reichstag Fire.”

On the plus side, the craziness of the Oregon Republican Party isn't going to win over the voters they need to become competitive in statewide races. So says an Oregonian story about the GOP conspiracy theory resolution. 

“It is a really curious strategy for a political party that is so weak in the state right now to try to find a way back,” said John Horvick, a pollster with DHM Research. “Republicans haven’t won the governor’s mansion since Vic Atiyeh. They’ve won two statewide races in the last two decades. They’re in the wilderness in the Legislature and they spent the summer trying to recall Kate Brown.

“Maybe this represents their base to some extent, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as a short-, medium-, or long-term strategy.”

Do away with the filibuster, or democracy will crumble

I'm happy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were inaugurated three days ago. I'm pleased that Biden is signing a bunch of executive orders that undo the crap Trump inflicted on our nation.

But a big loud flashing warning signal is going off in my brain:

"Alert! Alert! Code Red! If the Democrats don't do away with the Senate filibuster, not only will Biden's presidency be severely hobbled, the foundation of our democracy will crumble into ruins."

In no way is this an original idea. 

Progressive political analysts who are much more knowledgeable than I am about goings-on in Congress have clued me in to the urgent need to ditch the filibuster -- that outmoded rule requiring 60 votes in the 100 person Senate to pass legislation.

Not to confirm judges, though. Senate Republicans took advantage of that giant loophole to ram through the confirmation of Supreme Court and other federal judges during Trump's four years. 

Yet now that Democrats narrowly control the Senate, with Vice-President Harris breaking ties in the current 50-50 makeup of that body, Republicans are crying that, boo-hoo, eliminating the filibuster would be too disruptive, too revolutionary, too bold.

They don't mention that our Founding Fathers didn't envision the filibuster. They don't mention that for many years the filibuster was used to support Jim Crow laws in southern states that kept Blacks downtrodden. They don't mention that it is undemocratic to allow a minority to thwart the will of a majority.

Right now red states are busily plotting to change their election laws to make it much more difficult for Democrats to win elections. They want to restrict mail-in and absentee voting, solidlfy gerrymandering, require burdensome IDs to vote, and other nasty measures.

There's a Voting Rights Act ready to go that would go a long way toward protecting our democracy. Here's key provisions of what's being called the For The People Act.

* Automatic voter registration at an array of state agencies

* Same-day voter registration

* Online voter registration

* Allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register so they’ll be on the rolls when they turn 18

* Allowing state colleges and universities to serve as registration agencies

* Banning states from purging eligible voters’ registration simply for infrequent voting

* Two weeks of in-person early voting, including availability on Sundays and outside of normal business hours

* Standardized hours within states for opening and closing polling places on Election Day, with exceptions to let cities set longer hours in municipal races

* Prepaid postage on mail ballots

* Allowing voters to turn in their mail ballot in person if they choose

* Requiring states to establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions for congressional redistricting

* Ending prison gerrymandering by counting prisoners at their last address (rather than where they’re incarcerated) for the purposes of redistricting

* Ending felony disenfranchisement for those on parole, probation, or post-sentence, and requiring such citizens to be supplied with registration forms and informed their voting rights have been restored

* Expressing support for D.C. statehood (which is the subject of a separate bill)

* Public financing for House campaigns in the form of matching small donations at a six-for-one rate

* Expanded campaign finance disclosure requirements to mitigate Citizens United

* Banning corporations from spending on campaign purposes unless the corporation has established a process for determining the political will of its shareholders

* Making it a crime to mislead voters with the intention of preventing them from voting

But the chance of this bill getting 60 votes in the Senate is essentially zero. As is the chance of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico achieving statehood, or Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid relief package becoming law, or a host of other laws being passed that would improve the lives of Americans immensely.

All because of the filibuster. Well, not quite "all," because Senate Democrats still would need to find 50 votes. But 50 votes are a lot easier to come by than 60 votes. 

So if every Senate Democrat were to get on board with abolishing the filibuster, that would open the door to tremendous legislative accomplishments in the next two years. 

Ezra Klein makes a great case for doing away with the filibuster in his New York Times opinion piece, "Democrats, Here's How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It." It's well worth a read. Here's some excerpts.

President Biden takes office with a ticking clock. The Democrats’ margin in the House and Senate couldn’t be thinner, and midterms typically raze the governing party. That gives Democrats two years to govern. Two years to prove that the American political system can work. Two years to show Trumpism was an experiment that need not be repeated.

Two years.

This is the responsibility the Democratic majority must bear: If they fail or falter, they will open the door for Trumpism or something like it to return, and there is every reason to believe it will be far worse next time. To stop it, Democrats need to reimagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.

...The “For the People Act,” which House Democrats passed in 2019 and Senate Democrats have said will be their first bill in the new session, would do more to protect and expand the right to vote than any legislation passed since the Great Society, and it would go a long way toward building a fairer and more transparent campaign financing system.

In June, House Democrats passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., which would end one of the most appalling cases of systematic disenfranchisement in the country.

But none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question Democrats face.

They have plenty of ideas that could improve people’s lives and strengthen democracy. But they have, repeatedly, proved themselves more committed to preserving the status quo of the political system than fulfilling their promises to voters.

They have preferred the false peace of decorum to the true progress of democracy. If they choose that path again, they will lose their majority in 2022, and they will deserve it.