Kotek’s cowboy hat stunt betrays rural Oregon values

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

Wearing a cowboy hat is common among candidates, but Oregon Governor candidate, Tina Kotek, wearing the whole western outfit as she rides in The Pendleton rodeo is a stark metaphor of everything wrong with Kotek and her anti-rural Oregon policies.  (Rumor has it that she only rode a few blocks before making an early exit).

 

• Historic rural Oregon rebuke. Kotek is waving to a rural Oregon crowd where nine counties voted to leave the state and join Idaho because things have become so dire.

 

 

• Historic family exodus: For the first time in History, Oregon natural deaths have exceeded births.  This is happening because families with children are leaving the state.  Nearly a decade of Speaker Kotek and Gov. Brown leadership have made Oregon unlivable for children.

 

 

• Billion dollar blow to rural Oregon: As Kotek is waving to the rural Oregon crowd, the Oregon Supreme Court dealt Kotek a favor last week but a costly blow to rural Oregon.  The Court let die a case where rural Oregon counties were trying to recover a billion dollars in lost timber revenue due to Oregon’s failed and “freeze-it-all” forest policy.

 

 

• Voiding the rural Oregon vote: Kotek’s redistricting plan over political boundaries was criticized as among the most biased in the nation.  Even lawmakers of her own political party engaged in a lawsuit to stop it.  Rural Oregonian lawmakers were shut out of the process and therefore new political boundaries gave disproportionate voting power to big cities over rural Oregon and voting power to a single political party over every other political party.

 

 

• Destroying an entire pharmacy chain.  Kotek pushed through the largest tax in Oregon history (Corporate Activities tax) which forced NW grown Bi-Mart to close all of its pharmacy stores.  They even took a full page newspaper ad blaming the tax (see below).  Rural Oregonians loved their Bi-Mart pharmacies, and now they have lost it, thanks to Kotek.

 

• Let them eat cocaine.  When Measure 110 passed to decriminalize hard drugs (meth, heroin, cocaine), Oregon’s liberal political leaders were quick to effectively legalize the hard drugs but delay the actual $200+ million drug treatment portion.   This only further wrecked rural Oregon’s drug crisis.

 

• No voice in their own education.  Kotek voted to drop graduation standards for a diploma and then refused to lift the highly-restrictive cap on charter schools in case parents wanted to go to a charter school with proper graduation standards.  If that wasn’t enough, Kotek voted to block local school boards from firing their school superintendent if their superintendent was failing them.   Kotek made decisions from Salem that blocked rural parents from having a say in their own school board, having a say in their own graduation requirements, and having a say in their own charter school (even if the charter school wanted them, they had to turn them away).

 

• Doubled the budget while wrecking the state.  Since Kotek became House Speaker, the size of the Oregon biennial budget has roughly doubled in size and at the same time Oregon became the nation’s 4th biggest homeless state, 8th biggest welfare state, 13th worst home ownership state and as previously mentioned — a state with an exodus of families with children.   After doubling the size of State Government couldn’t anything get better?

Candidate Tina Kotek has done oversize damage to rural Oregon as few politicians will ever be able to do.  In this light, Kotek’s cowboy hat and western outfit looks like hypocrisy.

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