Now I'm even *less fond of it...

Ok, here in Oregon we had Ballot Measure 92 on the ballot. It was a thing about labeling GMO foods.

I didn't think it was well conceived (one of those things that sounds good, but is actually pushing an agenda and does stuff by appealing to the public's fears and will likely have bad consequences down the road).

We had a number of these over the years in Oregon.

Anyway, the last two days (Sat and now Sunday) I've been aying down asleep because I'm a bit under the weather. The doorbeel rings I scramble out of bed figiring it's a mail delivery of something I didn't know about or maybe Fay had lockedherself ouyt or something.

I have to drag on some clothes and rush to the door, only to find it's somebody wanting to ask me questions about measure 92. (I suspect that this is tied in with the fact that my ballot has been disputed because my signature on the security envelope dopesn't match the one on my (years and years old) registration card. So I bet I show as havoing not voted.

Saturday I just gave the guy a *look* and closed the door.

Today I gave him a piece of my mind. Note that my telling him (very angrily) to get the hell out of here just made him starting asking me questions. But he finally went away.

There's no way the side that was *against* it would be doing these kinds of followups. So I'm fairly ceretain it's the folks who were *for* it trying to find out where they went wrong.

That does *bot* make me think better of the measure. In fact it confirms my suspicions about the folks who were pushing it.

In any case, if it happens again tomorrow, I'm taking the pepper spray down with me. And I'll be rather pointedly *demanding* to know who they are working for and to be marked as "do not *ever* come by again.

I may grab the forms out of the guy's hands while I'm at it and either tear them up or threaten to.

Any group that didn't get the hint from the first time is too pushy. If they didn't get it from today, well, that why I want to find out who they are (my guess is OSPIRG or the like).

bad ballot measures

While politicians can screw things up, ballot initiatives can *really* mess things up.

Examples of a few here in Oregon (no particular order, just ones that spring to mind).

The one that will once again take effect this year. The famous/infamous "kicker tax". Under this one, if the tax revenue the state took in exceeds the expenses by 2%, they money is refunded to the taxpayers as a kicker check.

Sounds like a great idea. Only thing is, it's responsible for a lot of budget problems. It means that the state can't set aside money from a "good" year to cover bad years. A fact that was pointed out by the opponents at the time. But of course the voters went for the "we'll get money back" bit and ignored the fact that it was actually a really bad idea.

One of the *many* measures put forth by the rabid anti-nuke types. This one set a ridiculously low limit for radiation levels to qualify dsomething as a dump for "low level" nuclear wastes. One result of this was a company that extracts rare metals (from things like monazite sand) had it's waste ponds and sludge classified as nuclear waste. The stuff had never been near a reactor or the like. It's just that after you extract all the various rare-earth metals and other things from the stuff they worked with, the *natural* radioactive elements are concentrated in what remains.

The stuff wasn't remotely dangerous, but because of the anti-nuke agenda, they wound up having to relocate an enormous amount of harmless waste materials.

A few that failed were things like not counting pyrolytic breakdown of waste plastics into varuiious things that *can* be used as "recycling" the plastics. Never mind that "proiperly" (by their lights) recycling of some plastics is too expensive because of contamination of the plastics from use.

Basically, a lot of stuff that is pushing a particular sort of political agenda (often moisguided environmentalism, anti-nuke or anti-tech)

The folks pushing these things are quite willing to distort things greatly to get the voters to vote for them. I recall that from when I was out of work and wound up canvassing for them for a few weeks. Their scripts had stiufff I knew was BS. But I needed the money. I got let go because I wasn't getting enough signatures on the polls they were pushing.

Didn't break my heart.

Anyway, the bit in my previous post has all the earmarks of these folks on it.