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It was fright-night for progressives at Liberty Watch’s candidate’s forum Sept 13.  About 70 or 80 people seated in the Home Arts building at the Josephine County Fairgrounds reacted with amens and muffled cheers as the candidates for sheriff and commissioner told how they support Measure 105 calling for the repeal of Oregon’s 30-year-old Sanctuary Statute, how anyone coming to the county to take people’s guns would be met by a “wall of sheriff’s deputies,” how cutting down trees and opening up mining on public lands will restore the county’s budget, and how Pacific Power is trying to invade people’s privacy, fry their brains, catch fire and raise their power bills with Smart Meters.

If you ask someone in a Liberty Watch t-shirt what their organization is they’ll tell you it’s a 501c3 non-profit just doing projects to help people and finding wheelchairs for the needy elderly and children.  However, the Rural Organizing Project pegs this as a right-wing activist group cultivating good relations with elected officials in order to promote their pro-gun and no-new-taxes stands, and trying to win over the public with community service.

In front of this group, candidates tried to out-right each other with fealty to the U.S. Constitution, to guns, property rights, distrust of immigrants, the government, rural vs city resentments, distain for taxes, and conspiracy theories about Smart Meters.  They also competed for who was the longest Josephine County resident and who understands the county’s outback better.

The meeting was moderated by a man in a black suit who said he was from radio station 99.3 which translates to KMED, a favorite of those who like an all-day right-wing talk format. He asked such provocative questions as “what will you do about night patrols using current resources, are you a Constitutional sheriff, what would you do if “they” came after firearms in Josephine County, what are you going to do about the ‘let it burn’ attitude of forest officials, and what can you do to stop Smart Meters?”

Jonathan Knapp, challenging incumbent Dave Daniels, presented rural Josephine County as a lawless place at night, where criminals come out from under rocks to sell drugs and commit mayhem because the county doesn’t have the resources to put “butts in the seat” of patrol vehicles after dark.  Daniels said with his budget everything suffers and priorities have to painfully be made.  Then the candidates turned to the jail, with Knapp saying there is no truth to the rumor he advocated closing the jail, but he did suggest perhaps Grants Pass Police could run it.  Daniels took that on, saying the county does have an obligation to house and provide for the people it arrests.

Both Knapp and Daniels assured the audience they were Constitutional Sheriffs because they believed in upholding the U.S. Constitution.  Knapp emphasized the Constitution is the law of the land which trumps state law and city code.  Both candidates agreed they would stand up to anyone coming to take people’s guns.  Knapp said gun-confiscators would be met with a “line of sheriff’s deputies” while Daniels recited parts of the Second Amendment and said of his department, “we pump out as many gun licenses as we can.”

Commissioner candidates were excited about having an administration in Washington D.C. that Josephine County might benefit from.  Candidate Ron Smith was fired up by his base as he hammered on his favorite theme: Trees, trees, trees. Mining. Trees, trees, trees!  The county’s resources sustained it for 80 years, he said, and can do it for another 80 if we get back to using them.  Smith didn’t mention anything about sustainable harvesting, and touted his involvement in protesting National Monuments in Josephine County forests.

Candidate Darin Fowler, currently Mayor of Grants Pass, said timber isn’t the only asset in the county and thought should be given to getting more out of cannabis and vineyards.  While both candidates had similar long family and community involvement Josephine County, neither got down to any concrete solutions for affordable housing, homelessness, drug addiction, and those pesky Smart Meters.   Somewhere in there, the candidate’s feelings about fires and smoke got lost.

The housing discussion veered into a debate about the city annexing people who didn’t want to be annexed because taxes are so much higher in Grants Pass than in the county, then shut down when accusations of selective annexation surfaced.  But the candidates did find a subject they could agree on: the high cost of housing isn’t the main cause of homelessness.  It’s a nationwide problem caused by meth and heroin, said Smith. Fowler said Grants Pass makes an effort to keep the homeless from being a nuisance downtown by creating a food area around St. Vincent’s on Seventh Street and discouraging them from hanging around businesses.

“But are we really helping by giving them handouts?” he asked.

Fowler pointed out the city has a sobering center that works.  Smith said a good crackdown on drug dealers now and then might put a dent in the problem.  On the Smart meters, Smith said there are a lot of things commissioners have no control over but they can be a “bully pulpit” for the people’s concerns.  Fowler, an electrical contractor, said the commissioners weren’t paying enough attention to people’s concerns and got “blindsided,” which led to misunderstandings.

Smith closed with his theme of cutting trees for prosperity and said only he has a real understanding of the county because he won’t be yet another city council member on the board of commissioners.  Fowler said his occupation and community work has taken him into the far reaches of the county and his experience has taught him how to get along with all kinds of people.

Jonathan Knapp

“Yes, I am a Constitutional Sheriff because I believe a sheriff has to follow the Constitution,” was Jonathan Knapp’s answer to the first question he got at the Josephine County Democrats’ Sept. 11 meeting in Grants Pass.

Knapp didn’t say he was a member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), however.  CSPOA is a group that believes sheriffs are the highest executive authority in the county and therefore constitutionally empowered to be able to keep federal agents out of the county as a method of saving it from being overrun by the federal government. Much of its philosophy is drawn from the old Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s. But Knapp has been endorsed by a previous Josephine County sheriff who adhered to that philosophy, Gil Gilbertson. Gilbertson was defeated by Dave Daniel, the current incumbent sheriff Knapp is running against. Knapp also worked for the infamous Joe Arpaio in Maracopa County, Arizona, but he says during the 18 years he was there Knapp says he only saw him “eight or ten times.”

“Everyone has had to work for someone they didn’t always agree with,” he said.

Would you enforce Oregon State Law?  Knapp said as sheriff he would take an oath of office to do that.

“My sole responsibility is to uphold the law,” he said.

Knapp introduced himself by saying he grew up in Josephine County, attended Grants Pass and Hidden Valley high schools, graduating from there in 1979.  After that he was a fire department Chaplin in McMinnville, was in the US Air Force 1980-84, moved on to Arizona where he worked for the Salvation Army and Bed Bath and Beyond, then the Maracopa County Sheriff’s department until 2017.

“I always talked about moving home (Josephine County) to retire, but I’m only 57 with a lot of experience so I’m running for sheriff to put that to good use,” he said.

On taxes Knapp said without the passage of the levy the sheriff’s department wouldn’t have any patrol, but acknowledged the levy was for the jail when that was pointed out.  He was thankful the levy for the jail passed although he thinks it was more money than needed.

He said he could run the Josephine County Sheriff’s Department far more efficiently using the “one riot, one ranger” method of sending just one deputy out to handle a crime scene.  The exceptions would be domestic violence calls or “shots fired” calls.  He said much of the routine work taking up deputies’ time could be done by volunteers, answering phones, responding to non-emergency calls, doing vacation watches, helping with traffic accidents, and transporting arrested people to the jail from places like Cave Junction so the deputy there could stay on patrol.  He would also organize a reserve posse.

“In Maracopa we had 2,000 volunteers,” he said.

If O&C funds increase, Knapp said he would ask for $375,000 for three more deputies and put them in the schools for security.

Knapp says it’s hard to tell if the county’s crime rate has gone up or down because the crime rate is based only on reported crimes.  A lot isn’t recorded because no one has time to do it, he said, so crime rates get skewed.

Illinois Valley is currently on contract, paying for services they don’t totally get, and Knapp vowed to fix that.

Answering the last question, Knapp said “yes I did sue Joe Arpaio.” You can find that story on my website http://knappforsheriff.com/frequently-asked-questions/ .

Ron Smith

Logging will save Josephine County, according to Ron Smith, vying for a seat on the Board of Commissioners against Darin Fowler, currently Grants Pass City Council mayor.  Smith spoke at the Sept. 11 meeting of the Josephine County Democrats in Grants Pass.  Introducing himself, Smith, a Republican, said he was glad to be talking to Democrats because there are a lot of things we can collaborate on to make the community better.

Smith reminded about 30 people at the meeting that his “family’s been in Josephine County 100 years.” Smith, a supervisor at Western Signs Systems, organized an effort to defeat the 1.2 million-acre Siskiyou Wild Rivers National Monument and was involved in the Klamath Falls water dispute. He is currently the overseer of the Fruitdale Grange.

“This summer’s smoke really hurt tourism here,” he said, and advocated bringing everyone “to the table” to talk about forest management.

Smith said it is a waste to let our forests burn up when we could be harvesting the timber and using the money to fully fund the sheriff’s department.  We can be good stewards of the forest and still use its resources to provide for the county.  More taxes just burden property owners who only occupy about 8.7 percent of the land in the county, he said, so the only other solution to county money problems is to develop its resources.

Questions about using timber harvesting for fire suppression and as a solution to Josephine County’s monetary problems bubbled up from listeners.  One woman said she heard nothing about the ravages of climate change and how our forests have changed because of a torrential rain/drought cycle.  Replanting burned areas is difficult because of this, and simply harvesting smaller trees won’t work without a lot of prescribed burning as well.

Smith said we have to take care of the forests as if they were our own gardens, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t use the timber.  Better than letting it burn, he said.

Smith acknowledged housing is a big problem in Josephine County.  He spoke of one Grants Pass apartment complex that was bought by a California development corporation.  Overnight the rents went from $750 to $1400 a month, he said.  According to Smith more apartments would provide more competition so this wouldn’t happen but too many state and local regulations inhibit this.

Homelessness is not necessarily caused by a lack of housing, however.  He said meth and heroin addiction that cause mental health problems are the root cause.  He was asked if he was for locking up addicts as opposed to providing resources for treatment. He said he favored treatment and would “gladly” fund that, but pushers and drug dealers should be locked up.

On jobs, again Smith said Josephine County’s timber and minerals could be accessed more to provide work for people and tax revenue for the county.  He said right now we get most of our minerals for cell phones from the Congo under slave labor.  We have minerals here so we should be using those instead, he said.

“Shame on us, we should be mining our own minerals.  We can go to the moon and to the bottom of the ocean but we can’t mine our own minerals,” he said.  “Write down everything that doesn’t start with a hole in the ground – we need our resources.”

Kevin Marr, who is on the Three Rivers School Board, asked Smith why he hasn’t said anything about school funding.  Good schools should be a priority, he said, because they help mitigate poverty and homelessness.  Schools can be the key to a thriving community, yet the “no new taxes” mantra has hurt schools to the point where they had to close three days last year for lack of funding.

“We want services here but don’t want to pay for them,” Flynn said. “We need to support public education.”

Smith didn’t appear have an answer to the schools question but was saved by the “time’s up” signal.

Who is Samuel Patten?

Eugene, Oregon–Art Robinson’s deeper connections to illegal activity were revealed in a photo of political operative W. Samuel Patten and Robinson at his home in Cave Junction, Oregon in 2014.

As part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Samuel Patten pled guilty on Friday to working as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine and funneling $50,000 of illegal foreign money to Donald Trump’s presidential inaugural committee. Additionally, prosecutors argue that Patten’s business partner, a Russian national, has ties to Russian intelligence.

Patten worked in Oregon in 2014 for Cambridge Analytica, the corrupt political data company that illegally harvested data from 50 million Facebook users and interfered with elections around the world. The company admitted to, “effectively managing Robinson’s (2014) campaign in its entirety” and Robinson was Cambridge Analytica’s first federal political client.

Patten posted a photo on his personal Facebook page with Art Robinson in 2014 at Robinson’s home in Cave Junction, Oregon.

In March 2018, The Washington Post and Willamette Week interviewed Robinson about his engagement with Cambridge Analytica. Robinson did not disclose his relationship to Samuel Patten.

Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by hedge fund billionaire and right-wing political extremist Robert Mercer. Mercer first began meddling in Oregon elections in 2010 when he funded a super PAC aimed at electing Art Robinson and attacking Congressman Peter DeFazio. DeFazio was the first Member of Congress to be attacked by a Wall Street-backed super PAC. Since then, the Mercer family has spent $1.7 million on Robinson’s failed congressional campaigns.

Mercer also funds Robinson’s institute, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which Robinson runs from his sheep farm in Cave Junction, Oregon. Since 2005, Mercer has given Robinson’s institute $1.77 million dollars including a $150,000 donation at the start of 2018.

Robinson is making a fifth attempt at Oregon’s 4th Congressional District. Oregon voters deserve to know the extent of Robinson’s relationship to Samuel Patten, Robert Mercer, and work with Cambridge Analytica.

Date and Time needed to be changed. Current is: October 14, 5:30-7:30 P.M. Hope to see you there!

See original post for more information. Stay tuned to our web site for more calendared information.

Note the indented text, below. It shows what we have to deal with here in JoCo.

At their July 25 business meeting, County Commissioners Dan DeYoung and Simon Hare voted to approve a Josephine County firearms ordinance that will support gun rights, potentially in conflict with state law. Commissioner Lily Morgan was not in attendance, and reportedly had already planned to recuse herself due to a conflict of interest.

At the first reading of the ordinance on July 3, several residents spoke against it, and a petition with 158 signatures in opposition to the ordinance was entered into the public record. However at the second reading on July 25, 35 to 40 residents spoke in favor of the ordinance, according to Board of Commissioners Administrator Wendy Watkins.

Essentially the ordinance will prevent the sheriff or any county official from “investigating, detecting, apprehending or incarcerating” persons whose only violation of law relates to firearm possession or transference of ownership or failure to properly secure or register or report the theft of a firearm.

The exact language of the ordinance is available from the office of the Board of Commissioners.

The ordinance will have Josephine County join the “gun sanctuary” movement that swept through a number of rural counties in the state of Illinois and is now receiving attention nationwide. In Oregon, the movement began to gather steam in response to proposed Oregon Initiative Petition 43 (IP 43), which would have regulated possession of certain semi-automatic weapons and magazines of over ten rounds.  Gun sanctuary proponents in five Oregon counties (Deschutes, Klamath, Baker, Douglas, Columbia) have succeeded in placing so-called Second Amendment protection initiatives on their local ballots, while citizens in a sixth county (Umatilla) are still in the process of collecting signatures.  If the initiatives win voter approval, these  counties will join at least four others in Oregon (Coos, Curry, Wallowa, Wheeler) that had already approved similar ordinances in 2013 through 2016.

However IP 43 will not be on the state ballot in November, as court challenges to its language did not leave enough time to collect the necessary number of signatures.

In an interview with the Illinois Valley News, Commissioner DeYoung spoke in support of the proposed ordinance: “It basically shores up our [county] charter. Our charter has a Second Amendment element to it. So does the state constitution and so does the federal Constitution. It sends a message that basically we are going to honor the Second Amendment.”

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“That’s what we swore to do,” he [DeYoung] added, “to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Oregon.”

However a public records request from the Illinois Valley News revealed that, in taking the Oath of Office as county commissioner, he crossed out certain words that are standard in the oath. The standard text reads, “I, [insert name], do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of Oregon and the laws thereof.”DeYoung crossed out the words “and the laws thereof.”

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“I know that coming down from the state they pass their stuff and then it’s handed down and they say that’s what you’re going to do,” DeYoung continued in his interview. “But I think it’s just kind of a message that we do recognize the Second Amendment to the Constitution and we are going to abide by it.”

During his interview with the Illinois Valley News, DeYoung spoke without stop for close to 20 minutes and with evident great passion in favor of the ordinance and the Second Amendment.

However Willamette University Law School Professor Paul Diller, who specializes in legal structures that constrain or empower local policymaking, gave his opinion on whether or not a county ordinance can contravene state law.

“If the state law is clear that it intends to apply throughout the state, then the state has the authority to trump an ordinance enacted by the county. And the general presumption is that a state law intends to apply throughout the state.”

Diller added that, generally, legal standing to test an ordinance in court would depend upon whom the ordinance applied to. But in the case of  this ordinance, which stipulates a lack of action as opposed to an affirmative action, unless there’s a private party who feels that they are at risk from a specific person, it would be up to the Oregon District Attorney and state Department of Justice to step in and sue the county.

However Diller did clarify that, in his opinion, the ordinance would not contravene Oregon Senate Bill 719, signed into law this year. That bill allows law enforcement to take guns away from someone who presents imminent risk, or risk in the foreseeable future, of suicide or causing injury to other persons.

Take a look at this photo of my moving bulletin board. There’s one on each side of my car. From previous experience I expect to get a lot of thumbs up and honks of approval. PLUS it let’s people know that we Dems are active in JoCo and how they can contact us to get involved. Cost: Only $28 for two from VistaPrint!

Another reason for turning Congress blue in November: Republicans do not care about endangered wildlife.  Even our country’s symbol, the bald eagle is in jeopardy.  Call your representative and tell them not to sacrifice our woodland species to oil and mining interests.