Ballot endorsements
Now that I've got the time (and now that I've filled out my ballot), these are my endorsements for the various things on the ballot in my corner of Multnomah county.
For the partisan offices, my endorsement is to vote for all the Democratic Party candidates, because voting for everyone else is casting a vote for the Evil Party. And, even if I wasn't voting a strict party line, John Kerry, since he's an intelligent liberal, would be worth voting for (despite his terrible stand against same-sex marriage.)
I don't have any preference for the Portland mayoral race. I used to support Tom Potter, but he's been drinking the anti-trolley coolaid and I'm really tired of living in a part of town that doesn't have a trolley line. I'm going to call the Potter campaign tomorrow to get some clarification on his New! Improved! anti-trolley stance, but until then I'm planning on endorsing anyone. (And our house had a Potter campaign sign in our front yard until this morning.)
I have no preference for commissioner seat #1, so I'm not going to vote for either Nick Fish or Sam Adams; they both seem like good choices, so I'm going to leave the decision to the people who have a preference.
Randy Leonard is running unopposed, so endorsing him seems kind of silly, but I'll endorse him anyway.
As for this year's crop of state initiatives:
| 31 (postposting elections on death of candidate) | YES | Why not? |
|---|---|---|
| 32 (changing the tax status on mobile homes) | YES | If a mobile home is being used as a home, it's kind of stupid to use the taxes on it to pay for the highways. |
| 33 (tweaking the medical marijuana bill) | NO | I'm not exactly sure what this will do, aside from further enrage the bigot wing of the Justice Department. I'd rather enrage the bigot wing of the Justice Department by kicking them out on their collective butts, so, no. |
| 34 (Balancing timber production with conservation in state forests) | NO | After getting a smarmy little mailing warning me of the eeeevil plans that foreign liberal conservationists were planning to put in, overriding the scientific™ plans that the state logging office set up, I thought I would vote for this one. After seeing some of the whoppingly deceptive ads the No on 34 people were putting on the television, I was more convinced, but then when I did just a little bit of looking into the existing laws, I realized that the logging companies would be able to get around measure 34 without much effort, and the end result would be to drive rural voters into the lair of the Evil Party. But we'd have this spiffy! new! law!, even if it didn't actually do anything. |
| 35 (yet another stupid "liability reform" law) | NO! | I remain unconvinced that lawsuits are the problem that healthcare executives claim they are. |
| 36 (the hate amendment) | HELL, NO! | This piece of offal is the old racial purity laws, with NEGRO scratched out and FAGGOT scribbled in. And they're lying nonstop about it, with the chiiiilren being their #1 lie. Remember that gay parents don't need to be married to raise children, and will continue to raise children even if this piece of filth is wedged into the Oregon Constitution. |
| 37 (abolishes zoning for rentiers) | NO! | There are plenty of local ordinances that make it difficult to farm, log, mine, or otherwise exploit the land you own. Measure 37 won't help with these; it will merely make it easier for wealthy landowners to develop their rental properties while getting the middle class to pay for the damage that development will cause. |
| 38 (Liberty Northwest doesn't want to compete against SAIF) | NO | I do have a lot of sympathy for private companies trying to compete against government entities, because the government can do the job more efficiently than they can, plus it doesn't need to make a profit. But this measure is just a sneaky way to transfer the monopoly over to Liberty. A better solution would be to regulate the insurance business by regulating the rates that insurance companies and SAIF can charge. |
There are some Multnomah County measures I need to endorse, but I'll do them later this afternoon.