I still pay for the newspaper, I have always read the newspaper. Even when I was in grade school, I would look forward to the afternoon delivery. In college, I subscribed to the daily newspaper. When I was living in South Carolina, I was getting two newspapers because the local one only came twice a week. I wanted to see what was happening, I like the feel, I like the coalition of advertisements and I particularly think it is the best aggregator of local news.

That being said, when I woke up on Tuesday, I saw two headlines. The first one was “GOP senators walk out again” and the second one was “Trump piñata draws ire of far-right”. I read the articles and I did a lot of thinking yesterday – which is partly why I didn’t get a post in. I was thinking that this might warrant a more proper essay than a blog post.

I took a lot of notes and did quite a bit of research yesterday, but I think that this post will be a bit more succinct. Let me try to explain the situation of the walk-out first. Oregon requires a quorum in the senate to be able to vote on bills. Our senate has one short of a super-majority of democrats which means that legislation tends to pass in block form by party line. Oregon is also a part-time legislature, which means that there is a year session and there is a one month session the second year.

What is happening is that there is a set of bills that the democrat party is trying to pass which is related to ‘Cap and Trade’. This means that each entity (business, person or otherwise) is allowed by law some sort of carbon emissions maximum. If that is exceeded then you are taxed in an excise fashion for the overage and there is an offset where you can pay to plant trees to mitigate your excessive carbon.

The republicans have literally left the state (enforceable jurisdiction) to prevent a quorum from occurring and thus passing the legislation. This tactic was also used at the end of the full year session in 2019. There was a lot of name calling, threats of arrest etc, to the point where one local senator was barred from entering the capitol and he subsequently apologized. He was dismissed from this particular vote by the senate president.

There has been a lot of sword rattling from the governor Kate Brown stating “The Senate Republicans who walked out of the house are not against climate policy, they are against the democratic process”. Which to some degree is true, I suspect that this tactic will be used again given now that this is the second time this has been done in the last year.

The Statesman Journal states Democrats “have been given a mandate by a majority of voters to pursue climate change”. Here is where I think things are going off the rails and where history, demographics, geography all intersect.

The second headline was about a local bar setting up a piñata of Trump on Presidents day and running a theme entitled ‘Not My President’s Day’. Once local conservatives found out they started writing fake reviews in order to tank the overall rating of the bar and now both sides are mad about the situation.

The history lesson and deeper conclusions needs to wait for another post. For now, lets talk about a couple issues. One is that since the 1990’s Oregon is now a state where politics are completely controlled by the Democratic party. So, no matter how you vote, it doesn’t matter. The majority is becoming increasingly emboldened and radicalized. The riots over a Wallstreet, the dually elected president, the destiny comments, etc. are telltale signs of the future direction of the state.

There is a theory that getting caught up in the political dichotomy by picking one side or the other fuels the rise of extremism. By spending your time defending one sides actions over the other allows both sides to manipulate the population as a whole.

The use of the term Fascist gets thrown around all to often. The term has been propagandized and applied far beyond what is reasonable. We have the tools to change our government, but we don’t have the will or the desire because we live in the political dichotomy.

By far and large, we probably agree on more items than we disagree. Within my circle of associates, I am sure that we would disagree vehemently on political items. Heck, even my wife are opposites. But, there is very little I can do to change what is happening in Salem or Washington DC. And truthfully, there is very little the president or the governor have done to change my life.

One things for sure, this government does not reflect my values and we sure aren’t getting closer to more freedom. Those are the things that are important to me. So, I will move on to bigger and better things.