Golden More Likely To Run--Now That He's Out of Work

From the Ashland Tidings, which has to be enjoying the attention, this web item about radio host Jeff Golden's calendar suddenly being totally freed up:

Ron Kramer, executive director of JPR, said after the Daily Tidings first reported that Golden is considering a run for the U.S. Senate, the station and Golden “reached a mutual agreement that it was not feasible for him to continue” hosting “The Jefferson Exchange.”

Kramer said he was “entirely unaware” that Golden, a former Jackson County commissioner, had political aspirations until Tuesday, the day before the Tidings ran its front page story.

Does this sound entirely mutual? I think somebody panicked. But it's true; the smart move is definitely to disassociate with any free media voice you have while acting as a candidate.

Shouldn't someone tell that to ABC in reference to Fred Thompson, who blogs on happily as late as yesterday? Golden was just thinking out loud, for all we know, and may never have decided to run if not for being essentially fired. Thompson has an exploratory committee, and yet he's still an ABC go-to guy. I love our media!

We'll try to get a hold of Jeff and see if this has caused his plans to coalesce. Some choose runs, and some have runs thrust upon them...

BREAKING: Minnis Announces Retirement

The word from Salem is that moments ago, former House Speaker Karen Minnis announced her retirement from the floor, saying this will be her last session. It was expected, rumored, conventional wisdom--but now it's official: it's an open race in HD49! If former Majority Leader Wayne Scott also bows out, the last vestiges of the awful Minnis/Scott cabal that nearly trashed our state will be gone and (hopefully) politically buried.

So who's up for another run? Rob Brading, call on line 1...

Will The O and WWeek Quit While They're Behind on Johnson?

I won't bore you with a long rehash of all the stories we've done the past three weeks on L'affair du Betsy Johnson*, but if you're totally out of the loop you may want to peruse Carla's primer on our coverage before coming back here.

Since the stories first began to appear May 30 in Willamette Week and then The Oregonian, each has done several updates and further references to the controversy, generally expanding the story rather than retrenching on it. WW's Nigel Jaquiss in particular has continued to pump out stories--at least five that we count--that allege conflict of interest and influence peddling for her aviation friends. The O has been slightly less prolific, with what appears to be three more stories since the original one that deal specifically with her, and then another one Sunday discussing the broader question of conflict in the Leg, using Johnson as one example and focusing on her involvement in SB807. (Interestingly, an op-ed on June 10th called attempts to pin SB30 on Johnson's personal interests "cynical"; Jaquiss has been more of the reverse, exploring the SB30 angle in more depth but not burrowing as much into the SB807 part.)

While both outfits have staunchly stood by their stories in our conversations with them, it seems to us that they are no longer as aggressively investigating and reporting on the issue. Neither outlet has either publicly acknowledged LO's findings or criticisms, but after the initial flurry of stories nothing new has emerged in their pages to further support their positions, despite the obvious previous attempts to do so--such as The O's unearthing of a video where Johnson berates Port of St. Helens commissioners on behalf of developer and land-sale partner Ed Freeman, or the "disclosure" that they'd had dealings before, or the news that Johnson had written a letter on behalf of a failed candidate for the Oregon Board of Aviation.

The final straw of embarrassment may have occurred late last week, when Jaquiss attempted to extend the story to Johnson's influence over the Brookings Airport and its potential impact on Bandon Dunes Resort. Adept readers immediately commented that Jaquiss needed a new map of Oregon if he thought the airport was anywhere near Bandon (it's not), and WWeek was forced to pull the piece entirely. It's certainly not often you get to call out a Pulitzer winner for failing to do his homework, and while they did the right thing in yanking the piece (but leaving the comments up) , you know taking that step had to be extremely painful. If I'm Jaquiss' editor, I might say to him privately, "ENOUGH please on Johnson, OK? This shit we clearly do not need."

In fact, although I'm not anyone's editor, I'm willing to wager that among actual, sensible editors this would be the likely response. After all, while they've defended their work in public, they have each tacitly admitted making errors by dint of removing reference to those errors in future copy. As the famous saying goes, "if your mother says she loves you, get a confirmation before you print it"--in other words, nothing's worse than fucking up the facts. And after all the work we've done on this story, there's just no way to phrase it much more delicately without euphemizing...they fucked up the facts.

So, given that context do I think the stories are really over? Well, yes and no. If the genesis of the story was relatively normal, I'd say they are probably finished trying to run the Johnson corruption scandal up their respective flagpoles. They got a tip, they ran it, they got pushback, they defended themselves but subtly started changing their subsequent stories--done.

But what if this isn't any ordinary story tip? What if, as we are coming to believe, this was an orchestrated attempt to bring trouble to Betsy Johnson's doorstep? What if there are those who would either like to a) develop on the Metolius, b) kill Johnson's gubernatorial aspirations before they gestate, or c) both--and they are continuing to push more allegations on the media? In other words, what if their sources aren't taking no for an answer, and WW or the O aren't necessarily predisposed to tell them no?

So watch the papers over the next week or two. If nothing more comes out on this story, The O and WW will have licked their wounds in private and moved on, hoping by their non-acknowledgment of error they can escape with reputations mostly intact. But if they keep bringing her up one way or another like The O did in Sunday's piece on legislative conflict in general, we think there's gotta be some other reason behind it--some other reason being pushed by some other entity. Papers don't print stories they know may get them into trouble unless they have other reasons for doing so. While we can't show them to you because they're behind a firewall, The Bend Bulletin has also gone nearly apoplectic in their editorials about Johnson and SB30; they're wingnutty at the Bulletin but I'm not convinced they got that way on their own.

Will they quit while they're behind? We'll see. And if they don't, ask yourself--"why are they still running these stories? Shouldn't they at least try to close up the holes in the ones they've already run, before they ask us to swallow more?"

Better yet, ask them.














*don't bother correcting my French; I already confess ignorance

Freep the Senate GOP's "Worst Bill of Session" Poll!

Wanna have some fun?

As the final hours of session tick off the clock, the Senate Republican Office wants your thoughts:

What is your vote for the worst bill of the session? There are plenty to choose from whether your pet peeve is increased taxes, more of big brother, or just really stupid ideas.

Please let us know what bill made you roll your eyes and throw something across the room, and we will tally the results for a future Capitol Update. You can contact us either by replying to this e-mail or sending a new one to sr.media@state.or.us.

I guess asking Republicans about really stupid ideas makes sense, since they're the ones pushing most of them this session. Here are some choices, or suggest your own!

• HB 2680, to turn the DMV into the Homeland Security Department in order to check driver's citizenship papers.
  
• HB 2682, which does the same thing to local cops, allowing them to arrest those with "probable cause" of being here illegally. What would the standard of cause be exactly--hanging around a tapas bar?
  
• HB 2684, making English the "official language of Oregon."
  
• HB 3415, requiring a 24-hour waiting period to get an abortion, and changes the record of an abortion from termination to "fetal death."
  
• SB 698, "to repair stairwells in old part of State Capitol."
  
• SB 585, eliminating taxes on capital gains entirely.
  
• HJM 16, asking the federal government to cease "over-regulating
  Oregon's public lands and water."
  

You get the idea. If you want to look through the bills yourself to find some gems, here's a good start page. And here's a hint--if you use the House and Senate tables (both pdf) to see which ones were sponsored by which lawmaker, you can zero in on people like Kim Thatcher, Dennis Richardson and Gene Whisnant and find some doozies. I've barely scratched the surface here...

Get to it! And if you have room in your email, ask them: "Is this REALLY what the Senate Minority Office thinks is important with a week left to go in session? Is this actually how they're spending their time supposedly doing our work?"

Paging Dr. Thatcher, You're Needed on the House Floor

By now you may have heard that the House passed SB 571-C this morning, which furthers the existing indoor smoking ban to include bars, bingo halls and "bowling lanes" (I've never actually seen someone smoking on the bowling lane itself, so I'm guessing they meant the whole alley). The bill now goes back to the Senate so that it may ratify the removal of other exemptions, including Portland's greyhound track.

I had one ear open to the floor debate this morning, and while most of the discussion was fairly predictable--Republicans claiming a huge cost in lost lottery business that they never really tried to substantiate from anyone other than the tobacco companies--I had to chuckle at the most egregious attempt to feign medical knowledge since Bill Frist diagnosed Terry Schiavo via TV magic.

While introducing the bill as the carrier, Democrat Diane Rosenbaum took the time to note the positions of the US Surgeon General and CDC, both of which consider the threat of secondhand smoke a medical fact. That didn't stop Republican Kim Thatcher--not one of our most intellectually rigorous representatives, although competition on that side seems to be stiff--from declaring her independence from pernicious scientific assessment at the highest levels of our goverment.

I knew we were in for a treat when she rose with a stack of papers and said, "I did a little reading on the internet about this..." and proceeded to read snippets of articles she found in such luminary journals as the London Telegraph--not that it's some horrible newspaper, but come on: did she really think a few minutes with Google and the phrase "secondhand smoke" was going to be a winning argument for her? The rest of her speechifying was littered with phrases like these:

• “it is not all conclusive that passive smoking causes these health problems”
  
• “workers should choose where they work”
  
• “we shouldn’t be banning peanuts because people are allergic”
  
• “we could start justifying things based on this that we shouldn’t be, uh…I just think it’s a slippery slope.”

Lest anyone in the House be swayed by that highly convincing oratory, Rosenbaum closed her appeal for passage by reiterating the evidence: the OMA’s floor statement on the subject notes that “according to CDC, nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke show increased chance of heart disease by 25-35%; lung cancer by 20-30%.” Returning to the Surgeon General's statement from 2006, she reiterated: “The debate is over. The science is clear. Secondhand smoke is not a mere annoyance but a serious health hazard.”

On the other hand, I'm not even sure who the Surgeon General IS these days (I stopped following them when they began to get fired for asserting such outlandish ideas like masturbation possibly being normal behavior), so maybe we should just take ol' Doc Thatcher's word for it. She used an algorithm!