Oh, I should also mention that I am a unit representative for AAUP. I didn't speak to anyone in the union before posting this and speak only for myself.

But even if I wasn't a union member, I'd urge you to vote no!

As a legislator, I soon learned that the best way to judge a bill was to look at it sponsor. With ballot measures, this becomes even more true. At least bills are drafted by Legislative Counsel- a group of lawyers hired by the legislature as professional drafters. I have never see a Bill Sizemore measure that didn't have huge drafting problems in the lack of definitions, ambiguities in wording, unintended consequences, effects beyond the purposes of the drafter, etc.
You can ascertain motives and make judgments in a measure by looking at the sponsor. In Bill Sizemore's case, his philosophy is well known, and he offers no surprises. Actually Bill's real motivation is only to get measures on the ballot, as he gets paid to do this, and his funders want to see progessive organizations spend money to defeat them. He doesn't really care if they pass or fail. His lack of followup campaigning is evidence of this.

per mp97303

I have never seen an election where the singular opposition to so many ballot measures is WHO wrote them.

I don't think this is true. The "who" question is an element in opposition to most of them because most of them are put up by the same person who operates running initiatives as a cottage industry, a repeated pattern which has bad effects on the system, apart from the fact that he's also been convicted of racketeering around some earlier iterations.

But in no case of Jeff's analyses and comments has "who" been the exclusive or main focus. Nor has it been in most of the reader comments has this been the only issue; even giving due honors to Eric Parker's simplifying strategies, I think the Bill Sizemore "who" is just the whipped cream and cherry on his basic "vote no on all them" views.

A good measure is a good measure no matter who wrote it.(I am not implying any of the measures mentioned are good or bad.)

Quite true, but these are all bad measures.

And the fact of the matter is that one reason they are bad measures is because of who wrote them. Because Bill Sizemore doesn't care about writing good measures. He cares about measures that are written to push hot buttons ("dogwhistle politics" in the phrase I recently learned from Kari), absorb resources necessary to fight them because they are bad measures, and if they pass and start to mess things up, tangle up the legislature or the courts to try to clean it up, obstructing government, of which he has an unreasonable and unreasoning knee-jerk ideological hatred.

And the further fact of the matter is that he has been doing this long enough that if Sizemore is behind it, there is a strong, reasonable expectation based on an extended pattern that it will prove to be a bad bill, when I look at it. It might not be on a bad issue, but in fact that becomes a problem because he is so unserious and poor at his efforts that what he comes up with is often a bad way to address a reasonable issue.

Honestly, I wish it were otherwise. I wish that Sizemore were somebody who used the initiative process to bring well-thought out, well drafted measures to address issues he thinks neglected to the public attention, ones that challenged me to at least think about whether I should rethink something. In their own ways both Measure 57 and Measure 65 have done that this year. But Sizemore doesn't do that. He brings a raft of poorly thought, poorly drafted, often apparently hastily thrown together measures that often seem to have main aims different from their content, usually bad ones, and that show disregard if not contempt for the public good in their obvious lack of care for unintended consequences.

Would you vote against a good bill just because a R proposed it?

Of course not.

I do have to point out that exactly this mode of action in the other direction characterized a great deal of Republican behavior, especially their leadership's, in the last legislative session.

And, to repeat, not one, not a single one, of the many measures that happen to be put on the ballot by Sizemore would be a good law.

So this question is as irrelevant to the case as your imputations about why I voted know are spurious and your characterizations of discussion here overdrawn at best.

And you talk about the Right being the party of stupid people.

No I don't. Speak for yourself. Nor do I think this is a remotely fair characterization of most of what gets written on BlueOregon, and even less so of Jeff Allworth's writings.

I don't generalize about Republicans at all, especially at the level of voters.

Republican means something different in Oregon, where I've spent most of my adult life, than it did in Boston when I was growing up nearby and the history of Italian-American vs. Irish-American machine ethnic politics plus Yankee "brahmin"/ plutocrat admixture made the party an entirely different beast (similar effects for Ds of course). It doesn't mean the same thing even within either of those places, not to mention many others. Republicans vary infinitely, if to some extent in general patterns regarding philosophies and policy preferences.

I don't even generalize about conservative or Republican activists or officeholders, many of whom are perfectly nice, decent people with whom I have differences of philosophy or outlook or opinion on many matters, not all, that I can understand even if we don't agree, and think neither stupid nor unreasonable, given certain assumptions I don't share.

There is a subset of rightwing ideologues and operatives and officials who I think are one or more of a number of things including mean-spirited, anti-democratic, arrogant, self-serving, lying, intellectually dishonest in debate, and reckless in their disregard for the common and public good in pursuing private interests. Unfortunately relatively few of them are stupid, which means their bad qualities become that much more dangerous.

I think some policy outlooks on the right qualify as stupid in their determination to ignore reasonably obvious bad consequences, a favor which many conservatives regarding their judgment of my outlooks.

Sometimes some of them say so much more crudely and dishonestly in comments here or elsewhere than anything I ever say about them.

Your false accusation about regarding the Right as the party of stupid people actually is a decent example, though far from the most extreme. Also I don't have the impression that you come from "the Right" exactly anyway.

I do think that the politics that result from such degraded discourse become stupid politics. Boiling that down to the shorthand "what a stupid comment" might be something I'd do sometimes.

What a nicely-considered response, Chris. And thanks for the kind words--

My pleasure Jeff, same to you, and thanks for your whole serious labor of crafting these well-considered analyses and reflections on the measures, which provoked a good deal of discussion I found interesting and in some cases helpful in deciding, along with the original columns.