Obama as Messiah Rising from the Oregon Waters.

Alas, however, that is recognizably Portland, OR, behind him.

H/t Ace o’ Spades.

Last time I lived downwind. About six hours downwind.

Nowadays I live less than two hours away. We’ll see.

Via AoSHQ.

A happier ending than most of last year.

…in the shape of a toxic fungus killing people stone-dead. Via the Headlines of the Ace of Spades, who tells off the quoted doctor, Paul Cieslak, for taking it lightly:

“You’ve got bigger things to worry about,” he said. “If we start to get more reports and it’s increasing, I’ll sit up and take note.

He’s the manager of the communical diseases program in the state Public Health Division. Thanks for your vigilance and expertise, Dr. Cieslak. I guess that’s why they pay you the government big bucks.

Somebody came to this blog by googling the phrase “how healthy is it to live in oregon.”

Well, it depends. What political persuasion are you, and how high do you like your blood pressure?

Oregon’s civil-union law passed the legislature this year, and a group collecting signatures to put this law on the statewide ballot in 2008 missed the number of valid signatures by a very small margin–96 short of the required 55,179.

Now the law is blocked in federal court pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging the state’s method of verifying signatures. And if the implications of the phrase “random statistical sampling method” are what they seem to be, the challenge isn’t coming any too soon.

Attorneys for the state said that procedures verifying signatures are applied equally to everyone. The state uses a random statistical sampling method to determine whether enough valid signatures are collected.

The Oregonian story is long on personal anecdote, including the old, tiresome tarradiddle about inheritance and medical decisions between gay couples, but short on detail as to how the state goes about verifying the signatures. “Random statistical sampling method” certainly suggests that they take some minority number of signatures and put them through a verification process–and then assume that if two out of ten of those signatures are invalid, then two out of ten of the whole number are invalid. And whether that nutshell I just gave is literally correct or not, this is a document full of math to ascertain that the process is definitely accomplished by estimates and not by verification of the whole number of signatures.

The signature verifications are made in stages. First, a random sample of 1,000 signatures is verified. If the petition does not qualify from the first sample, then the second larger random sample is verified. Qualification of the petition is then based on an estimate of M [where M=number of distinct valid signatures] made from the combined first and second samples. In the event that the petition is not qualified from the combined sample and a second submission is made as permitted by ORS 250.105(3),a random sample of signatures from the second submission is verified. Qualification of the petition after verification of the sample from the second submission is based on an estimate of M made from the samples in the first and second submissions. The methods for determining whether a petition has a sufficient number of valid signatures are described for the following three cases: after verification of the first sample, after verification of the second sample, and, when applicable, after verification of the sample from the second submission. For each of these three cases, examples are given to illustrate the numerical calculations and conclusions.

So in other words, the state “verifies” (unfortunate choice of word, considering how the process is accomplished) a “random statistical sampling” of signatures that are supposed to signify the position of a voter on an actual election question. But instead they’re treating it like a poll–if a random sample is in this proportion, then so must be the whole.

And that’s outrageous. It’s unfortunate in a way that this lawsuit should take place over this particular case–the protests will be wild and vehement, and the motives of anybody who thinks, as I do, that the state’s procedure is a fraud will be questioned to the hilt–but it’s high time this was looked at in detail. I certainly never knew they verified those signatures by poll rather than by count. I’m no statistician, but when I think of 96 short of 55,179, the phrase “not statistically significant” floats to mind.

I wish the judge a stalwart backbone and the plaintiff a good set of mathematicians.

…will soon find it more difficult to get Oregon driver’s licenses without proving they are in the country legally, if an executive order of Democratic Governer Ted Kulongoski goes through.

Naturally there are people who don’t want to see it implemented. After all, without valid licenses, how can these people who “carry the country on their shoulders” keep carrying it?

The people who indulge in this kind of rhetoric have, as somebody said, more nerve than a bum tooth. Go ahead, Gov. Kulongoski.

Story outline, Randal O’Toole (heh-heh, Toole) story, Oregonian, by Anna Griffin

I. Describe the guy. Lucky here; he looks as though he shops at Old West Undertakers. Hook him up with preachers, that turns people off–

Slap a Bible in his hand and O’Toole could easily pass for a frontier preacher. He has the look, if not the Good Book: a stern, tight-lipped expression, an impressive display of graying facial hair, a wardrobe that tends toward simple black suits and looping Western-style bow ties.

II. Contrast conservative opinion with that of the New York Times–

Click. Here’s a slide showing a big house on a lush, green yard. This is in Houston, a plump 2,300 square feet for $170,000.

Click. Here’s a skinny house in Portland, maybe 1,200 scrunched square feet on a sliver of a yard. Asking price: $260,000.

It’s like looking at a diet company’s before and after photos. The crowd — a room of like-minded libertarians and conservatives — quakes with laughter.

“You’d better hurry. They just dropped the price,” O’Toole says. “It’s got granite countertops and hardwood floors. Who cares if you barely have enough room to turn around in it?”

Times are flush in Portland. Planners and civic leaders from around the world come to see how we do it. The New York Times can’t stop writing about how great we have it, whether we’re sipping tea, buying big vacation homes or biking to work. Although the housing market has cooled, Portland hasn’t suffered the same steep decline as the rest of the country.

III. Make the point that it could be worse,–

Still, O’Toole sees hope. Even after Oregon voters approved the property rights limits of Measure 49, Portland isn’t a lost cause. No, we’re not Houston. But we’re also not San Francisco. At least, not yet.

Snap. Article writes itself.

***

Portland Metro’s current policies will lead to us being as bad off, in terms of what a housing dollar will buy, as San Francisco, as the reporter herself mentions, though she doesn’t make perfectly clear whether this is only one of O’Toole’s crazy positions or if she understands that fact herself. Nevertheless, the point is well made. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday, we will be just as crowded and just as house-poor as the Bay Area. And with any luck I will be out of here long before that happens. For a city that claims to care so much about the poor and working-class, it is nigh on impossible to get a decent house around here for working-class money–especially one that does not share walls with other families–and strict land-use policies are a big driving factor in that. But hey, win-win, right? You get to keep your farmers in perpetual farmity while keeping out lower income strata that might affect our safety rating. Win-win.

H/t: Daddyman.

Confused yet?

A Jackson County Circuit judge ruled Friday that the Medford School District can forbid a teacher from carrying a concealed handgun on school grounds.

English teacher Shirley Katz, 44, argued state law allows her to carry a concealed handgun for protection.

[Judge] Arnold said the issue before him was whether a school district can prohibit employees from carrying weapons by writing an employee policy. State law does not allow local governments to write laws restricting guns, but because the district had not enacted a law, Arnold ruled the district prevailed.

The reasoning here seems to be that Oregon state law does not expressly guarantee the right to concealed carry by preventing local jurisdictions from passing laws against concealed carry. My question for the judge is what other possible purpose could such a law have, other than to prevent local jurisdictions from infringing upon a right guaranteed by the state?

This is a rock and a hard place for the school district, and as a former teacher and a mother, I’m not unsympathetic to that. On the one hand, would I prefer teachers to have guns in case bad guys with guns show up and open fire on students? Yes. On the other hand, the body of public school teachers is not immune to poisonous, insane, and criminal people within their ranks. Teachers are brought up with noticeable frequency on sexual abuse charges regarding their students, for example. All it would take is one instance of a gun-carrying teacher turning out to be a psychopath who opens fire, and the particular school that had hired that person would be completely finished. (Although I frankly doubt that schools, especially in this state, are given to placing any importance at all on the former scenario of armed teachers helping to prevent school shootings.)

But it should not be a difficult issue for the state law. Either make an exception for school districts under the law, or enforce the law–that the right to carry arms shall not be infringed. Here’s what the law actually says:

166.173 Authority of city or county to regulate possession of loaded firearms in public places. (1) A city or county may adopt ordinances to regulate, restrict or prohibit the possession of loaded firearms in public places as defined in ORS 161.015.

(2) Ordinances adopted under subsection (1) of this section do not apply to or affect:

(a) A law enforcement officer in the performance of official duty.

(b) A member of the military in the performance of official duty.

(c) A person licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

(d) A person authorized to possess a loaded firearm while in or on a public building or court facility under ORS 166.370. [1995 s.s. c.1 §4; 1999 c.782 §8]

A city or county may not adopt ordinances to infringe upon the rights of a person licensed to carry a concealed handgun. A school district is not a legislative body, but it is a governmental one, as has been tested numerous times in free speech cases. In addition, the law also says:

166.170 State preemption. (1) Except as expressly authorized by state statute, the authority to regulate in any matter whatsoever the sale, acquisition, transfer, ownership, possession, storage, transportation or use of firearms or any element relating to firearms and components thereof, including ammunition, is vested solely in the Legislative Assembly.

(2) Except as expressly authorized by state statute, no county, city or other municipal corporation or district may enact civil or criminal ordinances, including but not limited to zoning ordinances, to regulate, restrict or prohibit the sale, acquisition, transfer, ownership, possession, storage, transportation or use of firearms or any element relating to firearms and components thereof, including ammunition. Ordinances that are contrary to this subsection are void. [1995 s.s. c.1 §1]

Oregon school districts are called, well, districts. If they are going to issue directives that have the force of law on their campuses, then they are making law in effect and most assuredly usurping the power of the state legislature. In addition, their directive does not apply to parents or visitors–why? Because they know they could never make it stick on people over whom they don’t have direct employment power. The net effect is, give up your concealed carry right or find another job. And as I say, I’m not unsympathetic to this position–all things being equal, “around your young children” is not where you want guns as a matter of routine. But all things aren’t equal when it comes to school shootings. The teacher in this case wants the gun for her personal safety and not as a test case for teachers prepared to fight back against potential shooters, but the implications of the precedent will presumably be the same. I hope this is overturned on appeal.

Update: Survey of the two school resource officers at Citizens’ Academy says: Teachers carrying would deter would-be shooters.

Or, This is My Legislature on Drugs.

This fall I’ve been attending Citizens’ Academy, the class put on by the police to show us how they do things. It’s highly informative and entertaining. Last night we got an introduction to narcotics and some of the issues surrounding them. While it was all interesting, the most eye-opening part was not about meth or any other of the big nasties, but about good ol’ marijuana. Oregon has a medical marijuana program in place, voted in by the good ol’ citizens of the state in 1998. The loopholes in this law are big enough to drive army trucks through.

Want to know what it takes to get a medical marijuana card? It takes, basically, going to the right doctor and telling him/her you have a lot of chronic pain with no specific findable cause. Look at these statistics the police showed us. The numbers aren’t current-year but are illuminating as to the overall program.

Patient Condition Resulting in MM Card ……………………………………. # of Patients

HIV/AIDS ……………………………………………………………………….. 289
Cancer ………………………………………………………………………….. 381
Nausea ………………………………………………………………………….. 2637
Seizures …………………………………………………………………………. 427
Pain ……………………………………………………………………………… 12,000 (approx.)
Glaucoma ……………………………………………………………………….. 237
Muscle spasms …………………………………………………………………. 2796

One of these things is not like the others. Actually, about three of them are not like the others. The numbers are overwhelmingly disproportionate to unspecific conditions like “pain,” “muscle spasms,” and “nausea.”

There are three classifications of people in the medical marijuana program: Patients, caregivers, and growers. A patient can be in possession of up to 24 growing plants–six mature, 18 immature, and 1.5 pounds of processed marijuana at any given time. Do you know how much weed 1.5 pounds is? Because I didn’t. Apparently if you smoke two joints per day for a year, you might use up a pound. So a patient can possess a cache of MJ big enough to last a regular recreational user at least a year at any one time.

It gets better. Growers are permitted to grow plants for up to four patients at once, meaning they can be in legal possession of up to 96 plants and/or six pounds of processed stash at any given time. Caregivers, who, as far as I can tell, do not have to be medical personnel in any form (though a doctor does have to sign off on the initial card application), can “treat” unlimited patients, which in theory means they can be in possession of an unlimited amount of weed at any given time. And people can hold dual citizenship, so to speak, as both growers and caregivers.

The patients are not charged for the marijuana. Which is to say, it is illegal for the grower to bill the patient for the substance, because that would then actually be drug trafficking of an FDA Schedule 1 drug (Schedule 1 substances officially have “no medicinal value.”) The grower can ask the patient to “reimburse” his expenses–and growing weed indoors is phenomally expensive, due to the special lights and rivers of electricity it requires. Let me ask you: Outside this “reimbursement,” what possible incentive would anybody have to grow free marijuana for patients? None at all. Unless he thought he could get a little action on the side. That’s where the army truck loophole comes in. Street price of a pound of marijuana? According to our instructing officers, about $3,000.

Somebody in our class wanted to know how this law squares with applicable federal laws applying to controlled subustances. The answer is “it doesn’t.”

“The (state) Act neither protects marijuana plants from seizure nor individuals from prosecution if the federal government chooses to take action against patients or caregivers under the federal Controlled Substances Act.”

The whole thing strikes me as covert legalization right under the nose of the federal governent, which has far more pressing concerns even in the drug department–such as huge outdoor grows and the flow of drugs over both borders–to bother with home-grown guys operating under the scant legal cover of the Oregon law.

I don’t even have to take a position on the premise of the law to know that the law itself, as written, is moronic BS. If somebody calls the county’s drug-enforcement team and tells them they think somebody in their neighborhood is growing Mary Jane because they smell it or something like that, the police can’t call the MM program and find out if there is a legal grow in that area. If they have a specific address they can find out whether that house is registered as a grow site or not, but even if they end up with a warrant to check out a legal grow site and find the law being broken, they can only seize the number of plants by which the grower is over the limit. Our detective told us, “We’re nice! We even let them pick the plants they want to keep!” And once the bust is made, the public cannot be told that this was a “legal” grower patently abusing the law the voters granted him–privacy rules apply.

Message to Salem: Quit smoking the stuff and start regulating it. Get Oregon’s reps and senators to introduce a federal legalization bill. Stop subverting federal law.

Turns out publicly posted names and addresses cut both ways.

The groups gathering signatures to put Oregon’s domestic partnership law on next year’s ballot failed by 116 signatures. The second referendum failed shortly thereafter.

Know They Neighbor Oregon, the group that threatened to post all signers’ names and addresses for “protection” or maybe to know where they needed to do more “education and work,” they’re not sure, will not publish the signers now that the referendum has failed, “as [they] have said,” though I didn’t spot exactly where they’ve said it before, “above all [because] it would provide opposition groups with a database of contacts for a repeal attempt that they have been discussing.”

A nice lady at the office of the Secretary of State tells me that petitions, whether successful or not at putting their measure on the ballot, stay on file for six years and that anybody can go down to Salem and look at them. Those motivated enough will still be able to go back to the well for next year’s signatures. But at least those motivated to triangulate their “neighbors” over political disagreement (but it’s about the FAMILY!!!) won’t have a handy electronic database with which to do so. Eah. Maybe it was that $3,000 Know Thy Neighbor said they needed to make copies of the signatures that was the deal breaker.

In S. Renee Mitchell’s Oregonian column a week ago, she strongly disapproved Mayor Bloomberg’s “Opportunity NYC” program, which will pay poor adults to do things like attend parent-teacher conferences and hold down full-time jobs and poor teenagers to pass their school certification tests. The bulk of her column is overflowing with unintended irony–she sees and remarks on the incentives and motives that keep some poor people poor, sometimes for generations, and objects strongly to fostering a “gimme” mentality, but reverts right back, like a rubber band relaxing back into place, to the major bugaboos of the liberal attitude toward the poor as victims of a corrupt “education, banking and government systems that stubbornly keep people under poverty’s thumb.”

We can’t throw money at the poor here and magically expect those whose lives are the hardest to more closely resemble those whose lives are the easiest. Giving cash incentives won’t automatically end high-interest loans, reduce their vulnerability to crime, or jolt them out of the depression that often comes with living life every day on the edge.

Tell it to LBJ. If money is the difference between the poor and middle class and wealthy, then how is it that throwing money at the poor won’t change that gap? Obviously, what Ms. Mitchell comes so close to here but never quite hits on it is that it isn’t just money–it’s working for that money, understanding that nobody will give you money if you don’t work for it, and spending the money on appropriate necessities and luxuries for yourself and your family. And by her own statement, then why shouldn’t welfare systems heavily involved in “throwing money” be abolished? Ms. Mitchell speaks of her children as “not entitled to be lazy” as long as they’re under her roof. There is no more effective incentive for adult citizens not to be lazy than to have to work to eat because nobody “throws” money at them, and arguably none that will work at all if that one doesn’t.

And Ms. Mitchell clearly knows this. After describing her own childhood poverty, she states:

Eventually, my parents educated themselves out of abject poverty, but I’ll never forget the experience of never having enough. You can’t buy the kind of inner fire that stems from trying to escape a cycle of constant lack.

Incentive. And yet with her very next sentence Ms. Mitchell demolishes the idea she was so blithely tripping toward in the previous:

Productivity and self-reliance increased my self-respect. But over the years, I’ve encountered some low-income parents who share those values and some who don’t.

So now earning your own way is a value that can either be espoused or discarded. Tell me, Ms. Mitchell, what is a societal solution to the problem of those who choose to discard it?

While in Orlando, I wrote about an innovative — and expensive — Walt Disney World pilot program to get rid of all of the excuses that multigenerational welfare mothers had about why they didn’t work. Disney offered decent-paying jobs, as well as classes on budgeting, parenting and goal-setting. The participants received free rides to and from work, free child care and a chance to save for retirement.

An excellent experiment in incentivizing. Take away the excuses of those people who may not even recognize them as excuses, and see what incentive comes out ahead:

After a few weeks, I revisited one of the mothers I had interviewed for my article. She told me that she had quit her Disney job — and the opportunity to give her four children a better life — because she missed watching her afternoon soaps.

Implicit in this pathetic and disgusting story is the certainty that whatever assistance this person was receiving from sources that did not require her to work was sufficient to allow her to 1) feed herself and her children some amount of food and 2) watch television, which apparently are all she wants out of life. How can there be anything appropriate to do for that person other than to give her the incentive to work that her current source of subsistence does not? While I doubt that Mayor Bloomberg’s program will do the trick, certainly the current welfare system doesn’t either.

Poverty starved that mother of her productivity, integrity and self-respect. A hustler at heart, she wanted the most money for the least amount of effort. So, a job opportunity wasn’t appreciated in her household, where children were considered as excuses not to work.

Exactly backwards. She didn’t become a hustler because she lost her self-respect to poverty. She is a lazy sort of hustler who found out how to get something for not much and decided her self-respect and poorer lives for her children were a reasonable price to pay for the opportunity to go through life lazy and idle. Whatever sort of subsistence she’s on, and I have to assume it’s welfare, possibly supplemented by things like church food pantries and assistance programs, it’s been enough to incentivize her hustler mentality to remain on top, as well as setting a bad example for her children that one hopes they will find enough education to counteract.

Sadly, I doubt there’s any amount of money this program could afford to pay that would make people already not inclined to hold down full-time jobs do otherwise. But Ms. Mitchell’s closing comments about “the system” fall right back into the mindset that people have no choices or cannot be motivated by things that are implicitly important to them. Implicitly important to the mother in the story was her desire not to work, and whatever system she’s on is feeding it. At the worst, Mayor Bloomberg’s system will probably be indifferent in its effects, since if people are “getting by” on welfare they will not be inclined to get off their butts for a couple thousand more. At best, it might actually give some struggling families a leg up. Regardless, the contradictions inherent in Ms. Mitchell’s own mindset are the contradictions inherent in welfare systems nationwide. Returning to a right understanding about human nature and the factors that work to influence and incentivize it, rather than blaming a system that, surprisingly enough, works perfectly well for a vast majority in this country, is the only way we will stop “throwing money” and throw out the most insidiously enabling aspects of the welfare system instead.

I live in Portland, where we have an insidious governmental interference called the Urban Growth Boundary. It’s a line drawn around the city to prevent urban development outside its borders. When it was first drawn, there was much land inside it still undeveloped, so that development could continue on a pretty ordinary schedule without running up against the line. But now the suburbs are pushed slap up against the boundary. I can literally drive down the line and observe the “house farms” on one side and the actual farms, open land, on the other.

It’s no surprise, then, that the house I live in is built on a development plan of about seven houses to the acre. There is a plot of grass the size of a postage stamp that, surprise, doesn’t entice any of us to hang out outside, though I do maintain some rosebushes and herbs in the half-postage-stamp front yard. The price of houses with yards rises exponentially to the amount of land they sit on, and these houses are likely to be much older and thus require a larger investment in renovation and repair. And because most of us live on the postage-stamp patches, going outside for any amount of time requires us to … drive somewhere, often upwards of 20 minutes, to find a nice outdoor area. That’s right–in a city that prides itself on its greenness and its obnoxious mania for outdoor sports and demonizes auto traffic to the point where our traffic congestion rivals that of much bigger cities because the highway system is not big enough to support the population properly, we have to drive to play outside comfortably.

The UGB is frequently touted as helpful to farmers–you know, so they won’t have to make those hard choices when the dirty developers come knocking on their doors with their fistfuls of cash, because the poor dears just couldn’t handle such a thing. But if they find farming unprofitable, woe to them since they can’t even pay developers to take the land off their hands, since most rural land is zoned in such a way that it can’t be divided into lots smaller than five acres. Even worse, some owners find that when the UGB is moved back, as it periodically is, Metro will thoughtfully tell them their land will be “preserved” instead of rezoned “suburban” with the rest of their neighbors, meaning it will still be worthless to developers.

Today I walked down a street I’ve walked many times before. I’ve always admired how the homeowners there have managed to hang on to their acre-plus plots with houses in the middle, surrounded by a sea of seven-to-the-acres. There was one house in particular that sat in the middle of an acre–a barren acre. Nobody was doing anything with it; it wasn’t even lawn. I used to daydream about what I’d put in there if I could live there. No chance of that–the going price was close to a million the last time it was sold–and though the house looks nice and probably a bit bigger than mine, it’s not a million-dollar house. Today when I walked by, however, the house was jacked off its foundations. A woman I met in the course of the walk told me she heard that the house was to be moved to the back of the lot and eight more would be built on the acre. Oh, did I forget to mention that some of suburbia is zoned nine houses to the acre?

Portland is reaching the point where the density is so high that people will not want to live here. I’m reaching the point myself of wanting to find, um, greener pastures. Metro will not take it into its head that for people who don’t live the hiker/biker lifestyle, a little bit of green to call their own is more important than the finest scenery in the world–especially when Metro doesn’t even want them to drive to see it.