In Sunday’s paper, the inexplicably still employed Jeff Mapes, evidently sitting on Phil Knight’s lap, typed up a front-page teabaggerish “news” story that predicted, yet again, a Republican landslide in the state legislature in 2010, owing to the “anger” in the “business community” over the passage of 66 and 67, which didn’t affect 97% of citizens, but nonetheless is somehow going to overturn the current 3/5 Democratic supermajority and maybe even bring us our first Republican governor in 23 years.  Please, Jeff, load me up some of what you’re smoking.  Near the end of the article, Mapes woefully admits that Republicans might have a shot at THREE of the 36 seats they would need to pull off such an absurdly improbable coup, after having interviewed a half dozen righty true believers who clearly aren’t even waiting for the eggs to start counting their chickens.

In every case Mapes cites, Republicans have no actual candidate on offer, just a Democratic incumbent with less than a 50% approval rating, but yet they all see a bright new conservative dawn ahead.  Trouble is, Oregon Republicans, unburdened as they’ve been with any actual governing position for nearly a quarter century, aren’t exactly what you’d call saleable;  they tend to have Sarah Palin’s brains and James Inhofe’s looks, and in a state where the populated parts are 70-30% Democratic, and the uninhabited parts 50-50, well, forgive me my skepticism.

Of course, Mapes resorts to sinister tales of union bosses, characterized as a malevolent “machine,”  outspending our beleaguered  plutocrats ($7.5 million vs. $5 million) to “ram through” commie ideas like not closing schools and laying off state police with the recent tax bills.  As further evidence of liberal perfidy, Mapes excoriates the bills the obviously overconfident legislature passed after 66 and 67, which, egads, make it easier to prosecute fraudulent lenders, bars employers from snooping at the credit histories of job applicants, and allows public agencies to shift deposits from banks to credit unions.   Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her grave as such flagrant communism sweeps the great Northwest, as the irrelevant and bonkers Republicans Mapes interviews assure us.

Fortunately, no one who still reads the Oregonian takes much of this, uh, “reporting” seriously.  The righties they so slavishly court with such balderdash think they’re the Daily Worker already, and the liberal majority they flail at at every turn just yawns and reads something else on the toilet in the morning.  Back when the Oregonian was first trying to turn itself into a freeze dried version of FOX News, its  slogan was, “If it Matters to Oregonians, It’s in the Oregonian.”  That got dumped after the paper missed the story, for twenty years,  of Sen. Bob Packwood’s sexual fumblings that broke in the Washington Post, and stickers started showing up around town that said, “If it Matters to Oregonians, It’s in the Washington Post.”  They tried to recover from that little boner (pun intended, natch…) by meekly rebranding themselves “Practically Indispensable,”   a presciently halfhearted gesture that was about 300 reporters, and heaven knows how many subscribers, ago.  I wonder what their next slogan will be.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

UPDATED BELOW:

Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently.  First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good on their threats to leave.  Yay!  I know Phil Knight will just love living in Washougal, Washington, since I once wanted to live there myself, when I was a kid and noticed that they get a whole lot of snow days.  FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and the whole clown car of national anti-tax people converged on little old Oregon to clobber the modest tax increases on corporations and the rich, and still came up snake eyes.  In addition to writing what was quite possibly the most illiterate and unpersuasive op/ed the Oregonian has ever run, (and that’s saying something…) Nike gazillionaire Phil Knight pissed away over $300,000 of his own ill-gotten gains, or roughly 5000% of what the taxes would have cost him from now until death, and lost.  I find myself questioning my atheism, all of a sudden.

The best part of this is that Multnomah County, the most reliably liberal county in Oregon that includes central Portland, had very poor turnout, and the soundness of the teabagger defeat was therefore secured by the ambivalence of the conservative areas of the state, where the measure failed to gain the usual almost unanimous opposition.  The swing counties were overwhelmingly in favor of the measures, despite the Oregonian’s jihad against them, and their opponents were forced to whine about being outspent by “the unions,” for a change.  This time, nobody believed the righty trope that rich people and corporations are the fountain of prosperity, perhaps because they aren’t, and better yet either didn’t care or didn’t believe that they would really up and leave.   If I were FreedomWorks, I’d be as nervous as a whore in church.  This kind of thing could catch on, and if it did, where would the rich go?  Somalia?  Let ‘em.  Send me a postcard.

Then, the “teabuggers,” about whom I wrote yesterday, started dragging down Andrew Breitbart, FOX News, and every other righty who kissed their pimply asses in Macy’s window for months, not by anything they said or did, but merely by exposing the cravenness and stupidity of their media enablers for the whole world to see.  On the supposedly “safe” venue of Hugh Hewitt’s righty talk show, Breitbart accidentally let slip that head-teabugger O’Keefe was on his payroll; the opposition from David “diapers” Vitter to Sen. Mary Landrieu’s pick for a new Louisiana US Attorney started to collapse in a wave of revelations about a typical Republican coverup; and ACORN is now probably O’Keefe’s only hope to be able to vote again when he gets out of jail, since they have worked so hard in the past for the re-enfranchisement of ex-felons.

Anyway, these rather delightful and interesting developments ought to take the edge off whatever infuriating nonsense comes out of our Commander in Chief this evening, at least for me, even though I have little doubt that he will fail to mention either of them, since they both point to the criminality and unpopularity of the opponents to whom he plans to capitulate.  Thus the drinking game is still on.

But here in Oregon, and down in Louisiana, it’s looking like Obama is the only one who believes that the teabaggers run the country.

UPDATE: Phil Knight, in an interview with fellow anti 66 and 67 activist rag the Oregonian, backtracked on his threats to move to Wyoming, or somesuch. He said “Nike is too big”  (not like his firecrotch penis) to leave the state, and even he himself wasn’t planning to move to Washougal, much to the delight of Clark County residents, no doubt.  Not wanting to admit what a lying sack of sh*t he was so soon after the election, he merely said he was “keeping my options open.”  Please, Phil, keep them open.  You could use a few more snow days.

In comments on the last post, Steven Rockford asked after reading there, seemingly in disbelief, if righties in Oregon were that dumb, and after going through several pages of their pithy contributions, I can confidently tell him, “Yes.”  As a reader of the print version of the Oregonian, I’m usually only subjected to formal letter writers, and since about a dozen of them repeat endlessly, I was given to believe that they were neither numerous or especially scary.  They spout the standard talking points without fail, but they generally do so fairly reasonably, and in proper English, even if their “facts” are made up.

Not so over at OregonLive.  Each and every one of them not only doesn’t grasp the basic facts of the case, which I’ll get to later, but all are as vitriolic as they are grammar-challenged.  Caps are used in abundance.  Every commenter has a Sarah Palin-like disdain for everything reported in the media (that they don’t like), all swallow the Randian idea that that the rich are inherently better than the rest of us, and all have a visceral loathing for anything “liberal,” whether or not their opinions agree with it.  None has ever read a book.

You see, they talk about “jobs,” not realizing that Knight’s company pioneered removing production to the third world to escape paying a living wage; most appeared to believe that Nike actually had “plants,” when all it has is sweatshops abroad and yuppie “marketers” here, all of whom would be appalled to live somewhere there wasn’t good skiing, bike trails, and lattes, and are actually a big part of the “liberal elite” here.  None understood that the supposed  exodus of Fortune 500 companies that had occurred since Nike’s founding were a product of globalization and deregulation of banks, as much as the barely literate Phil would argue otherwise.  Many had fake statistics, and all dismissed government statistics out of hand.  Hardly any could actually afford Nike’s products, either, a fact which must have old Henry Ford kicking himself in shame from the grave for wasting his money so on wages.

What we have here in Oregon, just as we have across the country, is a sizable minority who, thanks to a relentless and coordinated propaganda campaign from the right, are both dumb and crazy, and more than ready to man the battlements of the other side as they are being mowed down.  It’s a little embarrassing.

I look forward to the actual letters section that emerges from this “discussion,” especially because the Oregonian representative’s only response so far has been to denounce the “name calling,” from the few lefties, of course.  But I no longer wonder why the Oregonian, like many other newspapers, publishes so many letters from people who are both stupid and obnoxious….  for all their faults, these people are engaged, and dying newspapers like the Oregonian are too timid and desperate to call them on their BS, even when giving them space makes the paper and the community it “serves” look like Dogpatch.

Maybe that’s the real reason we have such a poor “business climate.”

As CHNN reported several months ago, (“Lipstick on a Pig,” Aug. 2, 2009) our always-busy anti-tax initiative “entrepreneurs” love it when this happens, because it draws in money from all over to defeat any tax increase, and keeps a lot of otherwise unemployable Republicans working at something they love.  This time the front group made up of the usual suspects has been named, I kid you not, “Oregonians Against Job-Killing Taxes,” and as their name suggests, they are running the most manipulative and lie-filled campaign since Bush’s reelection in 2004, and have even enlisted the sleazy PR firm that shilled for Proposition 8 in California and helped to defeat marriage equality in Maine, too, with similar tactics.  They’ve blanketed the airwaves with ads featuring scary music, misleading and outright false claims about spending, and actors posing as beleaguered soccer moms (who evidently make six figures) being brutalized by other actors playing heartless and officious bureaucrats.  Apparently real rich people were too shy, and real state employees disinclined, to lend a hand to their noble efforts.

The Oregonian, not surprisingly, has taken a stand against the job killers, despite the fact that long before the recession, that proud organization got into the job-killing thing in a big way, and now tumbleweeds roll through the empty cubicles at 1320 SW Broadway.  They scoldingly insisted that the legislature should have been more “cooperative” with the “business community,” meaning that they should have taxed everyone but the rich and upped class sizes from the curent 40 or so to, say, 100.  That, and the tax should have been temporary, so we could have all this fun again next session.  And as is its habit when it gets its dander up, the Oregonian hammers these points home relentlessly, bringing in every washed-up Republican they can find to write op-eds supporting their position.

Well, today they pulled out all the stops and brought in Nike founder and gazillionaire Phil Knight to whine about the hardships of the rich.  Yes, that Phil Knight.  He of the sweatshops and $200 tennis shoes, known more for bullying the University of Oregon with his many strings-attached “gifts” than for caring about Oregon’s future, and he doesn’t disappoint.  It seems that ol’ Phil, who writes like an eight grader,  has turned into something of a teabagger these days, addled by Rush Limbaugh and FOX News, and doesn’t care who knows it.  Why would he, since  no one has ever been allowed to disagree with him in his presence since the late 70′s?

His narrative, and I use that term loosely, opens with his humble beginnings, 46 years ago, when Oregon was evidently a much better place to do business, and brags, as all righties do, about valiantly rising above his hardscrabble past to emerge as a “major employer,” with, naturally, a major chip on his shoulder   This little bit from Phil is particularly rich:  (no pun intended)

Measures 66 and 67 should be labeled Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II.

They will allow us to watch a state slowly killing itself.

They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian (!), and most ironically, in the long run, they will deprive the state of revenue, not increase it.

The current state tax codes are all those things as well.  Measures 66 and 67 will just take it up and over the top.

The state of Washington has no income tax.  Its unemployment rate is 20% lower than Oregon’s– before measures 66 and 67.  These measures will give Oregon the highest income tax rates in the country.

He then goes on to threaten to leave Oregon, along with “thousands” of other “successful” people, and take his company with him, which he helpfully points out is the only Fortune Global 500 company in the state, if the measures pass.  I could quote him further, but probably not without vomiting.

If ever there were a reason to tax rich people more, not modestly as the measures propose, but heavily and ruthlessly, Phil Knight has provided it.  Money seems to turn people into domineering egomaniacs, and dare I say, clueless assholes.  Thanks, Phil, for making Leona Helmsley look like Mother Theresa, and giving the tax measures just the boost they needed at crunch time.