The villain behind the scenes is Dick Wendt of Jeld-Wen. He's bankrolling the right wing machine, including Bill Sizemore. From my home in K. Falls. He's also got Ron Saxton on his payroll.

The secret to defeating Sizemore is when ordinary people get fed up.

He had so many measures in 2000! And then one day a friend who is not at all political said he wanted to vote against all the Sizemore measures after having determined "he is only in it for himself" but wasn't sure how to identify Sizemore measures. I said it was easy--in the Voters Pamphlet, if Sizemore signed an argument in favor just vote no, if he signed an argument against vote yes.

And of course all the Sizemore measures in 2000 lost.

Has Sizemore paid off his court ordered payments yet? If not, how is he allowed to operate?

Now, if only there was a way to get people to see that "Sizemore only in this for himself" point of view when the petitions were being circulated, no amount of money could change those people's minds.

You need to look at their cynical motives. They are NOT in it to win. They run these ballot measures mostly to force Democratic-oriented interests to spend money defeating the measures, and thereby reduce money available to be spent electing Democratic candidates. The won-loss record of the measures is beside the point for them. And, for Sizemore, it's a paycheck win or lose.

Explain to me again, why the virulent fear of Sizemore?

If he keeps putting up losing measures then his backers will give up and we can abandon control of the state to the legislature without any checks like you all want.

"Explain to me again, why the virulent fear of Sizemore?"

Could be that SDS is the local version of BDS.

Bill is like Lon. Pretty soon people will be asking 'Bill who?' just like some of you are are now asking "Lon who?"?

People will be asking "Bill who?" once he is in prison being gang raped like Lon was. That is when people will forget. It will also be when justice will be served.

Bill Sizemore is an Oregon hero for his efforts in passing Measure 5, the property tax limitation. Had that not passed, Oregon's local governments would be gouging taxpayers for more money while providing the same shoddy services.

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Bill Sizemore is a big turd, not a hero. I'm glad he's out there wasting his backers money. It's my fondest hope to see him go to prison someday.

Years and years back, before we'd begun to have such a proliferation of initiatives each and every election, and before I knew what Sizemore was all about, I thought it was quite a breakthrough for Sizemore to have used the initiative process to limit taxes. In that vein, it seemed like a big win for ordinary people that big shot politicians didn't want to listen to.

In successive elections, even I rather quickly began to see what a clown Sizemore was, driven by his own rigid, self-absorbed mission to impose his personal moral values on everyone. I remember last year when Sizemore piped up on this weblog in response to some comments to a post about...gay marriage, I think it was. Well, he certainly was fairly eloquent at first, but then his words quickly began to reveal themselves as drawn heavily from apparently rote learned bible lessons. Any remaining respect I could ever have had for him as a positive force for social change is probably gone now.

Reinhard? I'm not sure he is really much different than Sizemore. They're both good with words, and they're both clever tacticians. Just as Sizemore seems capable of turning out poorly formulated initiatives one after another, Reinhard seems to consistently pour out nearly the same hard line conservative justifying position, column after column, whether or not it makes any sense to do in reality what either of them says.

Does Reinhard's turning against Sizemore offer a sign of hope for a more effective non-partisan effort to address significant issues facing Oregonians today? I don't see Reinhard's gesture to represent that. These two are not examples of the kind of people that are able to help find viable, constructive solutions to problems we all face today. These guys are a big part of the problem.

Bill is quickly devolving into irrelevance. If you don't look, maybe he'll go away? Please explain how a hypocrite like Wendt even gets his damn phone calls returned- regardless of how much money he has? I am starting to look northward in my search for sanity.

I think these guys are just parasites, making a living off contributions from ignorant people who blindly support their initiatives. Whenever they want to drum up the cash machine, they launch an initiative and then wait for the contributions to start pouring in from the ignorant people,

They are parasites, the same as bacteria eating the flesh.

jim writes:

"Bill Sizemore is an Oregon hero for his efforts in passing Measure 5, the property tax limitation. Had that not passed, Oregon's local governments would be gouging taxpayers for more money while providing the same shoddy service"

I don't think that Sizemore had any direct relationship to the sponsors of Ballot Measure 5. That was Don McIntire and another, now deceased, libertarian civilian. Sizemore may have been involved with signature gathering, but he wasn't responsible for writing the measure, drumming up the support for it (except possibly by being a petition circulator), or funding it.

That doesn't make him a better person, much less a hero. Bill Sizemore is just another American huckster trying to earn a buck off the axiom "there's a sucker born every minute".

Some here have it right - Sizemore's initiatives act as political Rolaids: absorbs 47 times its own weight in excess union political funds.

How much will be spent to defeat the merit pay initiative? How about the bilingual ed initiative? How about the tax cut? How about the paycheck protection initiative?

There are plenty of conservatives who wish he would stop, who don't find it helpful that Sizemore more or less crowds out more sober conservative political efforts. But tactically, the point is to direct the union $$$ to chasing an endless series of hobgoblins, and it is very effective at doing this.

I know he is a guy the left loves to hate. But for every ballot initiative his donors spend $300K to get on the ballot, at least 10 times that is spent to defeat.

Who's the sucker?

And everyone wonders why I vote "NO" on everything. Thanks to ol Billy Boy, it's the only real recourse (sp) left to clean up the initiative process.

"Some here have it right - Sizemore's initiatives act as political Rolaids: absorbs 47 times its own weight in excess union political funds."

So, that is the answer--if "excess union funds" are absorb by Sizemore measures, that makes this state better because....?

Please notice that underfunded Mike Huckabee is doing rather well even though he isn't the anti-union Republican so many others are.

I am not a union member, but someone who has worked very hard in jobs like retail where Sizemore or anyone else unable to be polite to everyone and answer specific questions would not last a day.

Didn't Sizemore have a court decision against him? Has he paid that off? Or do the anti-union folks think he doesn't owe that because being anti-union allows one to go against a court decision?

The Oregonian still printing "Cut and Paste" Davey?

I guess so, alongside Jonah Goldberg, the first Jewish author in American history to put a cartoon of Hitler on the cover of his book to make money to feed his poor family.

How sad, for civilization.

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