The Oregonian opposed 36: http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1096545561274370.xml

I am so mad at the Chicago Tribune!!!

hmm, i'm really surprised by the Mail Tribune...hella conservative area.

Wait... the ROSEBURG! paper endorsed it...wtf

hehe, Roseburg is no Eugene...

The Grants Pass Daily Courier also endorsed Bush last week. It's dead tree-only, so no link...and no opinion thus far on 36.

Roseburg's paper was indeed for Measure 36 (http://newsreview.info/article/20041013/EDITORIALS/110130053&SearchID=73187467353703).

Medford is a hella-conservative area?? If you'd said that about some of the surrounding areas, I might go for it. Yes, Jackson County is more Republican than Democratic, but not by tons (after all, it's home to liberal Ashland). Look at the recent polls there where Bush is leading by 3 percent in the county (http://www.ktvl.com/poll.shtml).

As a pretty moderate place, I'm sure Medford looks hella-conservative to a number of folks living in Multco and hella-liberal to people living in LaGrande. Medford's paper is moderate overall as well.

Is there any statistical relevancy to newspaper endorsements and winning the presidency?

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Hasso Hering editorial in the Albany Democrat-Herald endorsed Bush today.

This has a personal touch associated with emails Hasso and I have traded in recent years. Always at loggerheads politically, and deriving from that, it almost seems, everything else. But since Abu Ghraib it seemed like he softened his confidence in Bush. If I had thought about it I might have expected him to withdraw his enthusiasm for Bush, and maybe he did personally, but he has heavy heavy pressure on him from the military industrial dependent businesses in his market, (that lil ol' world class land mine maker -- Wah Chang), and that pressure there could stop Hasso in every respect except if he held a convinced personal opinion. Which he doesn't, or keeps it guarded vis a vis Kerry or Bush.

Surely not a surprise endorsement, however it feels hard come by, with reservations. And I could be completely wrong in this characterization; I am going more by vibes than any knowlege shared with Hering.

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A course change: The Virginian-Pilot endorses John Kerry The Virginian-Pilot © October 21, 2004 brings it all back home. Virginia to Oregon. Would you have imagined? The relevance here is that this is the masthead that The Oregonian hired Editor Sandy Rowe from. What's it been, ten years now?

The masthead and the salience, and it's a stout salt who steps fore there. The tradition and strength and quality of it rise like fireworks over Sumpter out of this editorial. With Kerry it is a parting of the ways in Virginia -- the swamp damps and sotweed sufferers in their snake-handler ways, from the telegraph and railroad policy employees. With this Bush-betrayal endorsement, the Virginian-Pilot has forgone her birthright and is no longer a local. And does it with the grandest eloquence and style. Long may she wave, Lady Liberty, (little French lingo there).

Free at last, free to sea, I wish I might the Pilot's bearing can help direct Rowe's storm-tossed thoughts in riding a tide of enlightenment out of Monticello's Jefferson's Lewis and Clark ahead of an armada of prarie schooners and fleet captains who sail behind, watching the gull, she flies with her own wings.

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My first fish for it flopped up this from The Oregonian archives: search of "date=( 01/01/1990 - 01/01/2000 ) and (Wah Chang AND mines AND salesman AND indicted)"

found 1 listings

Article 1 of 1 March 21, 1992 IRAQI WEAPONS PROBE LEADS INVESTIGATORS TO WAH CHANG Summary: Customs agents are looking into the way weapons-grade zirconium, which the Albany plant produces and sells, may have gotten to Iraq, possibly through a former Chilean customer

Federal agents searched the Teledyne Wah Chang Albany plant Thursday as part of a bicoastal investigation of illegal exports of weapons-grade zirconium to Iraq, possibly via Chile or Peru.

Agents were looking for ties between the company and one of its former customers, Carlos Cardoen, 49, who operates

• -]boink[ deposit $5.00 for Full article: 849 words ---

---- I didn't have the five bucks so I didn't go farther. But you get the essence in this much, and key search words to follow up with. The 1992 date and storyline here sounds like when the affair first broke. Some of the impetus for the federal investigation entailed in this arms brokering of regulated exports came at the end of following the money out of Sen. Kerry's BCCI investigation, '87-'92, and there's depth detail of that readily available these days.

Bush Old admin was trying to stop the investigation, Clinton wasn't in yet, and -- imagine -- there was no internet. As it unfolded, two Wah Chang salesmen's names were named, as I recall one was sacrificed, convicted and sentenced in Florida, about 1997 plus or minus, to two years or such a matter, and served federal time. This is off the top of my head, but if research finds it is substantially different I can stand corrected and give retraction.

It's good to reality check to keep me honest, and I am mistaken from time to time, (more frequently as time goes on, perhaps). In turnabout, I feel a bit peevish to challenge back how it is that you didn't know or didn't remember about this federal ("natinal security") Oregon scandal, we get so few of them. I say this softly, though, realizing people have preoccupying lives and don't dote so much on the news as I seem to.

In general, Wah Chang handles exotic and rare metallurgies. "Unobtainium" is their black-humor patois for it. Whoever buys that stuff, it's not your local atheletic shoe maker, no doubt. Lightweight high-tensile metal alloys have features like 'armor-piercing,' if that gives you any clues. And, whoever buys it, the sales revenues annually gross in the billion$ coming into Oregon's economy. Whatever ethical questions it stirs is a different subject. It just surprises me that it is not widely well-known what exotic metallurgy means they're doing -- selling tractors to farmers, you think? Swords into plowshares? Not widely well-known if for no other reason than people aren't making the effort to get to know each other, which isn't right and it isn't normal; I happen to have a couple of friends who work there and we talk. They make land mines. I disapprove. We buy each other beer and cancel each other's vote. There is no "evidence," thank you.

As for the economy of Albany, maybe the paper mill (I don't recall whose it is, L-P? is it Weyerhauser now?) there and the H-P complex in Corvallis are bigger influences, in the area's wages and the newspaper's editorial positions, that I should have mentioned. But Wah Chang is not penny-ante nor innocent, and it is fair and true to connect its plump from Bush's military extravagances with Albany's civic saturation of Republican guns. (Similarly as the, above, Virginia-Pilot's subscriber base was invested over the years in the sprawling massive naval bases and shipbuilding commerce there, and iron-clad Republican. Until Bush.)

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