Business parnters with the 'scone. Yuck. This tilts me more towards Bonamici and this is my district.

Not a stopper - I thought Merkley had the same issues with being a less-than-good landlord and he got elected.

Don't forget this is OR and it is the 1st District - Just look at history.

The guy is a phony and a hypocrite. But like Steve says, this is Oregon and the 1st district. If he waves the "I'm a liberal" flag, he'll be fine.

"Avakian chaired the Senate Environment Committee and led the passage of Oregon’s nationally recognized renewable energy standard, which calls for 25 percent of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025."

And this standard does not recognize hydro-power as renewable. Where do they find these geniuses??

Come on. If Avakian was in anybody’s big pockets, he wouldn’t have neglected to pay a few small, triple-digit debts over the years. His salary was in the Oregon legislature was ridiculously small; he obviously wasn’t soliciting the uberrich for money, and he got into the same position that many householders do. He let a few comparatively small bills slide and then paid them, and paid several taxes late.

In all cases, he paid every debt, sometimes paying a penalty for late payment.

As for hydro-power, it already is Oregon’s main electricity source. To count that would simply mean maintaining the status quo.

I am in Bonamici’s district. I have spoken with both Bonamici and Avakian. Avakian listened attentively. Bonamici blew me off in a way that was arrogant and insulting.

Why is he running for Congress? This is just the level of personal financial responsibility we look for in the Mayor's office!

Asking lobbyists about a job doesn't bother me much. We pay our legislators $21k a year -- they obviously have to have other employment outside the session, and sending an email from your personal account to people you know asking for work seems, well, pretty normal.

The unpaid bills, though, are another matter. One or two is understandable, but this is a clear pattern. And many have gone to collections agencies. And the unpaid tax bills -- that's pretty appalling.

But my vote was already for Bonamici anyway.

Yes - by all means just vote like good sheeple as long as he has a (D) after his name on the ballot...

As for hydro-power, it already is Oregon’s main electricity source.

Perhaps PPL's servive area, but certainly not PGE's - they don't buy much hydro (slide 6). Bottom line - hydro is third at 21%, behind natural gas 26%)% and coal (24%), but ahead of wind and renewables (9%) and open market purchases (20%).

That is not the most disturbing thing about him from my perspective. I worked with him many years ago. My clear impression, and that of others we worked with, was nice guy, very dim bulb.

To John Rettig:

As for hydro-power, it already is Oregon’s main electricity source.

That will teach me-- or at least it ought to teach one of us!-- not to rely on only one source for statistics. I got that information from the USGS website, Water Science for Schools, which was last updated in February of 2011:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wuhy.html

To quote directly:

"But some states, such as Idaho, Washington, and Oregon use hydroelectricity as their main power source. in 1995, all of Idaho's power came from hydroelectric plants."

And sure enough, there is a chart showing 90% of Oregon’s electricity comes from hydroelectricity.

I can’t try to reconcile PGE’s figures with USGS’s. But if 21% of the state’s electrical power currently comes from hydropower, and 9% from renewables, wouldn’t it mean, if you count hydro as a renewable, that we currently get 30% of our electricity from renewal sources, meaning that the state would have to do nothing to meet a 25% renewable deadline-- that it could in fact increase resource-depleting energy production by 4%?