Op Ed: Take the Money and Run TestsOregon`s Courage,Conscience, Convictions

(SALEM) - `Take the money and run" is a sorry film featuring Woody Allen, whose misadventures are so tragic they become comic. It`s a peculiarly revealing reflection from the realities of the world today. Are we in Oregon about to live out the same kind of revealing --and, some will insist, revolting-- reality? Some still see the state`s future in the same distorting light that the Allen epic denotes, via ostensible old `political principles." All the components --and the characters are surely there and determined to perform -- precisely as in the damaged past, if so allowed. The same misadventure-pieces are right at hand: `The Kicker" is, of course, the chief character. Will it conquer all else in the Oregon conscience? Will parents settle for small-dollars, abandoning any hope of permanent and proper educational advantages for those future Oregonians already here? Will `the Court" commit further consequential hara-kiri on the Constitutional suit now under way -- given the controversy presented by this `meaningful new-circumstance"? Will health-care bedside confrontations and child-hunger convulsions continue in every county? Will corpulent corporate lobbyists last that much longer, lavishing `campaign contributions" on arena-participants in Salem, from the now/faster-fattening fiscal files of even/more-corpulent corporations? Then there is `The Legislature", led loosely by `Minimal" Minnis in the House and `Courtly" Courtney in the Senate. Will they now, under maximum temptation, join hands in what cannot but become a misanthropic political misadventure? What can possibly result this time? Ironically, there is now still-`normal gestation-time", taking us right up till when they all come back to the arena in Salem for further rounds in 2007. Like any other painful misadventure --reflecting the fatalities found in the Woody Allen opus, it should be noted-- we`ll never find out until this foolish fable runs its course. Meanwhile many other states, faced with precisely the same changing economic situations; are making their own hay while the economic sun doth shine. Forty-four states, in fact. Most are led by more-cooperative legislators and governors who apparently never encountered characters in the Woody Allen fable, and are thus not familiar with these "political principles". SO they are investing the dollar-harvest shaken by chance off the economic tree --before the harvest-time once more passed away: North Carolina: $1 billion surplus; education up 13 percent. Maryland: $262 million more for education. Hawaii: $235 million; renovating 95 school buildings. California: $2 billion more into schools. But not in Oregon: Here we are already readying to give back $200 million to out-of-state corporations, mostly, and another $883 million to the original ratepayer persons. Did they ever see that Woody Allen opus, one must wonder? Those other states are, in very large part, `putting the money where their mouths have been" for so long. They have always been `in favor of supporting education" `Convinced we must manage more for that program"; and of course, `Acting in the full public interest, despite that campaign contribution-matter" Sound familiar? That political protective-action can only be defined as `equivocation". We see it demonstrated almost daily here in Oregon, in this highly illuminating governor`s-chair climate still perverted by constant confrontation. The immediate reaction-statement from Ron Saxton, reflecting his peculiar qualifications being considered for high office, make very clear where he -- and many others on his side of the aisle-- continue to stand. They are all for `Take the money and run" -- one-way or another. Can they re-season the same sorry stew --and re-sell it as if it were new? They want to manipulate that-many-more Oregonians --in the same way that the past too-many Legislatures have been manipulated: With the same decades-dead, long-worn/out, tried-and-failed money management methods; Already resulting in resounding, repeated policy-destroying debacles for more years than should ever have been allowed. That is what is, inevitably, irrefutably, their continuing radical-action guidance, from those to whom far too many must be PLEDGED or otherwise-promised. That is Oregon reality-today. Wonder if `they" will now dare to re-run that Woody Allen fable, ostensibly for US, right here in Salem, all too soon?