BI Serenade

Despite what looks like at least ten initiatives/referenda soon to be weighing down Oregon ballots, the Eugene Register-Guard says it's really difficult to collect signatures these days.

Apparently signers have to fill out all their personal information for themselves, and apparently the signature-gatherer has to watch each and every signature be signed. Apparently that's bad.

It's gonna be a great run, this time, btw: anti-immigrant insanity, obscene crime bills, the shifting of lottery revenues away from schools towards public safety, Tort reform, incentive pay for teachers, paycheck deception and further anti-union diddling, etc.

What a horror show. I know Uncle is susceptible to "direct democracy" - particularly cuz it's influenced his Sun River tactics - but I look at this process and wonder, uh, really?!? Just this year alone, there's a slate of initiatives that could turn our greentastic I-5 corridor into Hatebag Alley.

I'll have a lot more to say about this weirdness, obviously - just thought I'd break the ice. Note that the legislature passed the strictures that make the initiative process more difficult. More than being just a left-right, issue-based zone of electoral struggle, the initiative process is a challenge and/or a threat to the statutory authority of the legislative process. Some would say it's a challenge to deliberative democracy in general, but Jurgen Habermas I'm not. In my admittedly dim, crusty but not hungover view, "Deliberative Democracy" can only be fetishized by someone ignorant of liberalism's complicity with capitalist penetration, slavery, patriarchy, etc. I don't think "rational discourse" is an end in itself, so my analysis of the initiative process , hopefully, will always be more than liberal.