If you are in Michigan and have foreclosed on your house, then you better have a new address ready to provide at the polls.

Complaints about the coverage of political campaigns are rife this time of year. Many pundits decry the lack of serious discussion of the important issues facing the nation, though they quickly return to speculating about whether a candidate’s latest attack ad will hurt his or her opponent. What never gets discussed is why reporting is so focused on trivia and attack.

The reason is that such reporting is profitable. All of the media covering the current election have one desire in common: they want a large audience. There is a collective benefit to the political media to have controversy because controversy and a close election result in a bigger audience.
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“The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story. The article makes clear that Google’s news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.”

The amount of waste and financial carelessness in Washington D.C. is taken to new heights when we see how a wife of a lobbyist wraps her gifts.

Alan Grosso, another frequent conservative initiative pusher, sponsored Measure 63, which prohibits State and Local governments from requiring building permits for residential or farm projects under $35,000 (with annual increases for inflation). The $35,000 limit renews every calendar year, potentially allowing for “bridging” projects over two years to reach a $70,000 maximum. The Measure does require compliance with height and setback limitations, does not allow for the addition of a new story to a house, and requires the use of a licensed electrical contractor. The Measure would reduce local government revenue by $4 million to $8 million per year and $450,000 to $750,000 for state revenue, largely from lost permit fees. It would also require disclosure of unpermitted additions to the buyer upon a sale of the property.
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Measure 62, backed by long-time Republican politician Kevin Mannix, seeks to amend the Oregon Constitution to allocate 15% of lottery funds to public safety funding. Currently, lottery funds go 44% to parks, bond payments and educational reserve funds, while 56% goes to a variety of programs, including K-12 education and economic development. Absent new revenue for these programs, they would receive a reduction in the amount of funds they receive.
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Yet another Sizemore attempt to make the world safe for the rich and reduce the size of State government to a point at which it could be drowned in a bathtub, Measure 59 would eliminate the cap on the deduction of federal taxes from state income taxes. Let’s say you’re a single person who is lucky enough to make $100,000 per year. You’d expect to pay in the 28% tax bracket for federal taxes and in the 9% tax bracket for your state taxes. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have $15,000 in federal tax liabilities. You’re actually then only being taxed on $94,500 for your state taxes, since the first $5,500 of federal taxes is deductible on your state taxes. If Measure 59 passes, you would only pay state taxes on $85,000 of your income.
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Measures 57 and 61 are competing measures designed to reform sentencing for property crimes. The measure with the most votes will become law. If neither receives more yes votes than no votes, neither will become law. The measures both increase sentences for property crime offenders, but differ in their approaches in that Measure 57 supports increased sentencing primarily for repeat offenders and provides funding for rehabilitation programs, while Measure 61 takes a purely punitive approach.
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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about transportation.  Not just for Arcimoto (which aims to make a difference on the individual level), but also for mass transit.  Buses are nice and all, but all the cool cities have good light rail too.

So I thought I’d put out a proposal for how Eugene could solve many of its people transit issues (initially in west Eugene), fuel infill in the center of the city, remove the need for additional parking at the new UO arena, and collaborate with other local municipalities to remove the need for extra vehicle miles.

I call this proposal “Southern Willamette Intercity Fast Transit” or SWIFT.  Last night I put together a google map of the proposal… check it!

The first key to the proposal would be to utilize existing ununsed or underused rail- initially the line from Coos Bay to Eugene (and particularly the stretch from Veneta to Eugene) that is currently in the process of being abandoned by its owner, Rail America.

Right before this line hits the main rail line through Eugene, it could be diverted to run down Blair Blvd, and from there through downtown and to the university.  It’s possible (though not likely) that the rail lines currently buried under Blair could be reused.  See, Eugene used to have a street rail system back in the day:

Eugene on rails!

The next phase of the project would extend the rail service line to Springfield along either the EMX line, existing rail or otherwise.

Phase 2 of the SWIFT plan would call for a second line running from Oregon State University in Corvallis, down the existing rail along Hwy 99, adding a new stretch of rail between Junction City and Monroe, and linking up with the first SWIFT line.  An extension to this line would run from Glenwood to Cottage Grove.

This idea also calls for the creation of the Oregon Transit Research Center, a collaboration between UO, OSU and federal, state and local governments.  Sited at the rail junction in west Eugene, this would be a hub for engineers from OSU and designers and planners from the UO to craft forward-looking solutions to Oregon’s transportation needs.

Anyone who has an interest in getting involved in seeing what’s involved in developing an idea like this can drop me a line.

Here is some funny political news. I can’t wait to see the new show “In Da Office Zone!”