Playing catch-up

I'm slowly getting back up to speed after a few days of being everywhere but here at p3.

So let me lump a handful of not-quite-fleshed-out items from my notes and to-do list into one post, herewith:


Belated Saturday toons

First of all, is it me, or is Non Sequitur flying some surprisingly subversive stuff under the radar? Like the arc last month about the little girl who founded her own religion--and if boys wanted to join they had to wear a bag over their heads so that the girls wouldn't have to look at them? Surprising stuff from the syndicators of Garfield. Well, in any case, long-time p3 reader James the Elder and I couldn't send each other this one fast enough last week.

Tom Toles reminds us that all this "shake-up" at the White House doesn't have a whole lot of "shake" to it, and very little "up," either.

(And just for the record, replacing "Flopsweat" McClellan with someone whose middle name isn't "Snow Job," but might as well be, should probably be called the Late Night Comedy Writers Relief Act of 2006: The joke writers for Letterman, Stewart, Maher, and Leno can all take off early for a few days after his appointment is announced.)


Campaign finance reform--on its way down, or up?

Portland's voter owned election regs took a pie in the face already--or two, depending on how you slice it. I still stand by it, and hope they can get the bugs out of it before the big corporate donors of yore manage to get it overturned, thus restoring bidness as usual.

But if I'm still optimistic--even hoping that public financing will eventually catch on (much like vote-by-mail) around the Beaver State after it's run a few cycles in Portland and the rest of the state can see that the sky didn't fall--that is as nothing compared to the mood of Dan Meek, who's ready to take clean money statewide right now.

Money quote:

Consider the numbers: Corporations pushed up the total reported spending on candidate races in Oregon from $4.2 million in 1996 to $42 million in 2002. Candidates for seats in the Oregon Legislature spent $3.5 million in 1996, but $18 million in 2004. And 75 percent of that money came from only 1 percent of the contributors. It now typically costs more than $500,000 to win a contested seat in the Oregon Senate and more than $250,000 to win such a seat in the Oregon House of Representatives.

And while we're on state politics:

Let me just reiterate my long-held theory that term limits in Salem have, on the whole, made things worse, not better.

As Janie Har described last week's 6-hour special session of the Legislature in the Big O, the astonishing part of the story may not be that they managed to slow the fiscal power-dive of our public schools and even make a dent in the racket that is the payday loan industry--it's that Repubs and Dems managed to work together to do it.

Term limits throw fuel on the fire of partisan bickering by minimizing the payoff for building relations across the aisle. By the time you succeed, they're out of office and so are you. The rewards go to those who throw red-meat to their supporters so that they'll have a war chest to run for something else when their term limits expire.

The whole term-limits movement was tinkering with the wrong side of the supply/demand equation: If you want to get rid of bought and paid for hacks, don't force everyone out after a set time, reduce the power of incumbency (see above, re: voter owned elections).


And continuing on the same thread:

It's good that the legislature put some limits on the payday loan industry, but because it was a fig leaf of political expediency, the next stiff wind could blow it away, exposing what's underneath. (Quick--someone call the Metaphor Abuse Hotline.)

Gov. Ted Kulongoski is expected to sign new limits on payday loan rates into law next week, but supporters of the limits acknowledge that Oregon's battle over short-term loans isn't over.

The reason is the new limits on interest rates that legislators approved Thursday won't take effect until July 2007. And that leaves plenty of time for payday lenders and their lobbyists to try to weaken the law.

The lenders say the new limits would be too restrictive and could put them out of business. Some lawmakers echoed those remarks during this week's one-day special session and said the Legislature should revisit the issue during next year's regular session.

"Revisit" indeed. They'll "revisit" it in much the same way that German, British, and American armies "revisited" all those little towns and villages in Belgium in the early 1940s.

By the way: Here's a shout-out to all the "community charter" credit unions who are offering an alternative to the predatory payday loansharks. The short-term (and loss-leader) loans are at credit-card rates, not the usurious rates of the payday sharks, and they're structured so that you can't get in trouble by constantly rolling them over (the heart of the sharks' business plan). We like credit unions.