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"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door."

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

FDR, 2nd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1937

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Middle East friendship chart

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Corporations enriching shareholders

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Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

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"Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere"

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The GOP - Not One of US.

Wall Street, our new criminal class...       

   Business in the USA is sitting on $2 trillion dollars refusing to invest their own funds in expanding and hiring workers.  

   When one adds to this the reserves that banks, equity firms and hedge funds have - the picture is clear - "capitalism in the USA is on strike." 

   The engine of our economy - the spirit of entrepreneurship is not in evidence today.  So much for business being dynamic and risk taking. 

   They hire K- Street lobbyists and their ilk at the state level because they are averse to risk taking - pleading for tax breaks, tax credits and endless loopholes. 

   The "business of business" in America today is not about job creation, it's about wealth hoarding and redistribution from the middle class to the top 1%. 

   So for those who claim government doesn't create jobs, my response is that business doesn't either until given "corporate welfare" by government.  The fact is that the private and public sector are highly integrated, something the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party types don't understand. 

   Job creation requires public/private partnerships but the benefits of such collaboration should go to the 99% not just the 1%.  

 

RAD'S

WEBSITE PICKS: 


 

  • A Middle East View      

Rami G. Khouri

  • RealClearPolitics:

Realclearpolitics

  • Jim Hightower:   

Jimhightower.com

  • Robert Reich:

Robert Reich

  • Thomas Friedman: 

Friedman Column

  • Nicholas Kristof: 

Kristof Column

Oregon's Motto: 

She flies with her own wings! 


Hard Times in Oregon: 

Hardtimes

The Oregon story - the rich get richer, the poor and middle class lose ground.  Check this front page Oregonian article out. 

Oregon wage gap widens

Homelessness in Oregon - a call to action

Chuck Currie The crisis of homelessness


  

      Oregon's coming 34th out of 41 states in the Obama "Race to the Top" illustrates the failure of leadership from Governor Kitzhaber and his predecessors as they have built an educational bridge to nowhere called high stakes testing.

   Instead of being in a race to the top we seem to be dumpster diving to the bottom despite doing education reform since 1991.  Insanity is termed doing the same thing over and over again.  When can we put a fork in this stupidity? 

   To confuse matters more the Oregonian's editorial board has pontificated that this was a lost opportunity to get federal funding for innovation.  How firing principals and teachers equals innovation is a mystery to me.   

   The way to reform schools is to reduce class sizes, to encourage teacher collaboration and to support their continued education.  High stakes testing and performance based assessment of teachers are NOT the answer!    

   If you want students to succeed you first have to resolve the issues they confront before they come to school.  Children who face poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care issues and family instability require wrap around services for them and their families, 24/7.   

   Every child needs a safe home of their own and parents who know how to be good parents.   

There is only one way to address this impending crisis.  Schools must have a stable source of funding. Until that happens - we will limp from crisis to crisis.   

 

 

    

    Why does the richest nation in the world have the moral blight of homeless people?

Invisible People

http://www.npr.org


 Homelessness

    Connecting the dots between homelessness & hunger in Oregon and Washington County: 

Homelessness:  

•    The faces of the homeless are families with children, single men and women, vets, and many who are impaired. It is estimated that in Washington County up to 56% of homelessness occurs to families.

Hunger:

•    Hunger is highest among single mother households (10%) and poor families (15%) as well as renters, unemployed workers and minority households. 

     In Washington County, Oregon's "economic engine," the divide between the affluent and the working poor continues.  We have a 19,000 unit gap in affordable low income rental housing.  County political and business leaders are indifferent to this crisis...   

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If you want to e-mail me "comments" use my Yahoo back up e-mail address russdondero@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAD Lines

See my FACEBOOK @ Russ

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Trump & The Mob

http-//www.politico.com#13C5A6C


Trump's role models are Vladmir Putin and Benito Mussolini.  He has contempt for our checks and balances system.  He wants to "rule" not govern like a strong man, a despot.  He will shredd the Constitution anytime he feels the urge to do so and like all despots he only listens to his inner circle.  And he is paranoid and narcissistic. 

     

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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Housing Needs in Oregon 

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"There are men who believe that democracy... is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate [and that] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future..." 

FDR, 3rd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1940

  • "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild


  • Miguel de Cervantes, from The Duke - "I accuse you of being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man."  Cervantes' response - "Guilty as charged, I have never had the courage to believe in nothing."   from Man of La Mancha  


Professor Kingfield, from the Paper Chase

   "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you." 

- George Bernard Shaw

 

BLOGS:

From the Left Wing:

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Democracy Now
democracynow.org

The Daily Kos

dailykos.com

Blue Oregon

blueoregon.com

 

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." 

- Emilie Buchwald 

 


    "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." 

- Justice John Paul Stevens, Bush v. Gore, 2001

    The state of our union - check out the map, it's a reality check for those who can't figure out why people are so ticked off... 

americanobserver

 



"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war"

- John Adams

"Loyalty to country always.  Loyalty to government when it deserves it."  

- Mark Twain  

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  

- George Santayana 

"The love of one's country is a natural thing.  But why should love stop at the border?" 

- Pablo Casals

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

- William Butler Yeats  

 

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' 

But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"  

- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921) 

"...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..."  

- James Madison, Federalist Papers #11 

"Why … should we have government? Why not each individual take to himself the whole fruit of his labor, without having any of it taxed away?”   

The legitimate object of government, is to do for the people whatever they need to have done, but which they can not do, at all, or can not do, so well, for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities … There are many such things … roads, bridges and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools … the criminal and civil [justice] departments."    

- Abraham Lincoln 

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society  

- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole..." 

- Edmund Burke  

“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions.”  

- Jonathan Swift 

A RAD rhetorical question - Were Madison & Marx "Marxists"?  

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."   

- James Madison

 

FYI:  

Squareapace has closed the "comments" section on my blog as a way around this contact me via my Yahoo e-mail address posted on the left sidebar...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« MASSACRE AT THE MASTERS | Main | FRENCH FRIES OR FREEDOM FRIES? »
Friday
Apr062007

THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD?

By Russell Sadler
    The Oregon legislature’s traditional six month session is half over. This has led to a number of stories about the “Legislature at midterm.” This, in turn, has led to questions like, “They’ve been in session three months. Why don’t we have a budget yet?”
    This is the wrong question. Here’s what’s really going on:
    The legislature’s Democratic leadership has restored the time-honored committee process and abandoned by the Republican leadership in the 1990s. Traditionally the Oregon legislature has relied on its committees to do the serious work of evaluating and drafting the legislation assigned to them -- especially the business of budgets. The work of committees was then sent to the floor to pass or fail on its merits.
    This doesn’t mean the Democrat leadership doesn’t kill bills. It does. For example, the Republicans’ particularly nasty anti-immigration legislation has been sent to committees where there are not enough votes to send it to the floor of either house. The Democratic leadership sees little chance such legislation has enough votes to pass, and  its consideration unproductively inflames political passions. So the bills are buried in committee. That is the function of committees in the Oregon legislature. To avoid abuse, there is a procedure that allows a majority vote of members of either house to demand a bill be discharged from committee for a floor vote.
    The budget process traditionally determines the length of the legislative session and that process takes a full six months to develop. Oregon’s budget process is the work of a rather unique Joint Ways and Means Committee that combines the tasks of authorization and appropriation that are usually the province of two separate committees in Congress and many state legislatures.
    As soon as the Oregon legislature convenes in January, the Ways and Means Committee begins hearings on state agency  budgets. Beginning with the least controversial budgets, there is a small but steady flow to the floor while other committees are evaluating and passing out their substantive legislation. That’s why, early in the session, other lawmakers have time to indulge in resolutions declaring the state flower, the state motto, the state insect and the state animal. While this sort of legislation is considered, the serious work on the state budget grinds on in the background.
    The big ticket items -- appropriations for public schools, community colleges and the state universities -- are traditionally not considered until after April 15. Then the Department of Revenue and the Legislative Revenue staff “get a look at the mailbags” and make a reliable estimate of the actual tax take for 2006 and a reliable estimate for revenue in 2007. This sum becomes the estimated revenue for the next biennial budget period.
    By early May,the Ways and Means Committee decides how much money to appropriate to public schools, community colleges and state universities. The word goes out to the other committees that “the train is leaving the station,” the legislature is “on the road to adjournment,” and if  their substantive legislation is not on the way to the floor and the other house, it is likely to die in committee on adjournment. Traditionally this is where the horse trading, compromising and game-playing gets most intense.
    That does not mean politics won’t be involved. Gov. Ted Kulongoski wants more money to hire state police, for example, and offered an increased tax on auto insurance premiums to pay for it. The Republican minority agrees to increase the number of state police, but wants to pay for it out the the state’s General Fund of income tax revenues which means there will be less income tax money available for public schools, colleges and universities. The Republicans like that because it means less money for their dreaded “teachers’ union” and other ideological devils.
    The legislature’s Democratic leadership believes “politics is the art of the possible.” If it decides to increase the number of state police, it will try to pass Gov. Kulongoski’s insurance tax to pay for it. If they do not have the votes because of arbitrary, initiative-imposed supermajorities, they will consider financing the state police with income tax revenues.
    What the Democrats will not do is imitate House Minority Leader Wayne Scott, R-Canby, when he was in the majority and petulantly refuse to appropriate sufficient money to the state police. Scott displays the adolescent petulance that encouraged Oregon’s crossover voters to make Oregon Republicans the minority party last November. Oregon Democrats have absorbed that lesson. And that’s the real news from the Oregon legislature’s mid-session mark.
    Editor's Note:  The main difference in this session in addition to the Ds being in charge is that the leadership has agreed to June 29th as the sine die date.  It's now early April and many bills on both the Senate and House side have not moved out of committees to the other house and its committees, let alone floor debates.
    And aside from K-12 funding and the rainy day fund, the big ticket budget items still have to be considered not the least of which is the Kids Health Care bill and the big health care initiative sponsored by former Governor Kitzhaber and Senators Ben Westlund and Alan Bates.  The clock is ticking.  Is anyone paying attention?
    We all know who is running this railroad, but will they be on time?  Or will they arrive at an appropriate destination?   

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