April 18, 2023
When the U.S. Senate passed my Clean Energy for America Act last year as the centerpiece of the Inflation Reduction Act, I had to pinch myself after the floor vote. After all, Big Oil and other powerful special interests zealously guarding their precious and outmoded privileges don’t get defeated so resoundingly and deservedly every day back in Washington, […]
April 07, 2023
How did progressive Oregon, and the country, get to stasis on climate change? Other countries have not locked up on the issue. Even the Brexit-inflected and flustered United Kingdom has a coherent and determined if stumbling-toward-solutions policy approach. Even China, as dependent as it is on coal, acknowledges its obligation to exit that fuel and […]
January 13, 2023
The Law that Enabled the Print Makers A remarkable thing happened in Oregon in 1973. At the urging of then-Governor Tom McCall and state Senator Hector Macpherson, both Republicans, the Oregon Legislature enacted the bi-partisan Senate Bill 100, establishing the nation’s first statewide land use planning program (1973). Governments and professional planning organizations were wonder-struck. […]
October 11, 2022
Pollsters report that a significant number of Americans name political polarization as a major issue. Voices keep shouting out from TV and computer screens to clocks that wake us in the morning to car radios that scream at us as we gingerly try to make our way through traffic. The question reverberates: Are we who […]
They said Auriel (Aury) Lugner was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he always demurred. Silver was never good enough. In this as well as other respects he was, like most children, a product of parental presence and absence, although in his family that absence often took the form of mental as […]
July 20, 2020
“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” –Abraham Lincoln UPDATE: With the coronavirus affecting voters’ ability to vote in person, and restrictions slowing down the US Postal Service, it’s important […]
February 19, 2019
We at Open Spaces asked Senator Ron Wyden to share his thoughts on principled bipartisanship with us and our readers. We appreciate his willingness to do so. They are presented here. A phrase that Oregonians attending my town halls in each of our state’s 36 counties each year will often hear is “principled bipartisanship.” As I […]
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