Holy moly, boys and girls, this is an editorial appearing in The Oregonian, Oregon's largest circulation and safely Liberal newspaper.

I haven't said much about Kitzhaber's troubles because it's somewhat of a local affair, but this indicates the situation is getting serious.

At issue is the behavior of Kitzhaber's fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

"No doubt, the governor does intend to do the job Oregonians gave him, which, simply put, is to pursue the interests of his constituents. That intention, however, is no match for an ugly reality of his own making, whose sordid elements keep surfacing with dispiriting regularity, most recently this week thanks to the work of Nick Budnick and Laura Gunderson of The Oregonian/OregonLive. Two people involved in Kitzhaber's 2010 campaign helped Hayes find paid work with groups interested in Oregon policy, Budnick and Gunderson reported. Both have landed in Kitzhaber's administration...

To recite every reported instance in which Hayes, ostensibly under Kitzhaber's watchful eye, has used public resources, including public employee time and her "first lady" title, in pursuit of professional gain would require far more space than we have here and, besides, repeat what most readers already know. Suffice it to say there's a pattern, and the person who bears the responsibility for allowing it to form and persist is Kitzhaber, who should know better. After all, as he pointed out during Friday's press conference, he's been serving in public office on and off since the 1970s.

Consider, instead, what Oregonians have learned during only the last couple of weeks. First, Hayes received a combined $118,000 in 2011 and 2012 through the Washington, D.C.-based Clean Economy Development Center even as she served as an unpaid energy adviser to Kitzhaber. This income is not fully accounted for on tax forms Hayes provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive. Neither has the governor fully accounted for the money in ethics filings.

A big chunk of Hayes' fellowship money, $75,000, came from the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation, a nonprofit that funds clean-energy initiatives such as the low carbon fuel standard. Implementing a low carbon fuel standard is a priority for both Kitzhaber and Democratic leaders in the Legislature. The session's first public hearing on a bill to that end happened on Monday.

How did Hayes end up with a fellowship funded by an organization with an interest in clean-energy policy in Oregon? A Kitzhaber campaign adviser, Dan Carol, helped arrange the funding following Kitzhaber's election in 2010, Budnick and Gunderson reported. Carol subsequently landed a position within the Kitzhaber administration. That position, Willamette Week has reported, pays more than $165,000, making Carol Kitzhaber's highest-paid aide."

For his part Kitzhaber refuses to resign and OR being OR he may get away with it all. Or more correctly she will. Nonetheless the whole imbroglio shows what happens when a state allows one party rule for too long, especially when the one party is the Democrats.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index....resign_edi.html

It grows worse for Johnny.

"[Democrat] Oregon's attorney general has labeled as "troubling" allegations against the state's Democratic governor and his fiancée linked to a potential conflict of interest over his future wife's consulting work and her role as an unpaid adviser.

Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum's remarks late on Thursday added to woes facing Governor John Kitzhaber, who was re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term last year but has faced months of criticism over a string of revelations surrounding his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

"Recent allegations relating to Governor Kitzhaber and Ms. Hayes are very serious - and troubling. My office is considering all of our legal options to ensure that we are best serving the state,” Rosenblum said in a statement.

Her office declined to comment beyond the statement. Kitzhaber, who said last week that Hayes would no longer have any policy role in his office, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The attorney general's comments come after the region's flagship newspaper, The Oregonian, this week called on Kitzhaber, whom it had endorsed for re-election last year, to resign. Kitzhaber says he has no plans to step down.

Oregon's state ethics commission is investigating complaints, including by the Republican Party, about possible conflicts of interest involving Hayes and whether her acceptance of consulting contracts may have violated ethics rules."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/0...me=politicsNews

I heard something about this a while ago, sounds like that Cylvia Hayes is a real piece of work.....


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"John Kitzhaber, who is currently serving his fourth term as governor of Oregon, is the most popular politician in that state’s modern history. I knew John as a college student. He was a few years older than me, and I admired him greatly. He was a good student, not brilliant but tremendously charismatic. At that time, he had no interest in politics and was anything but a liberal. He was consumed with getting into medical school at the University of Oregon, where his father was the dean. He made it, and became an emergency room physician, a role for which he was well suited. John had, as they say, brass balls.

On election night 1994, I was astonished to learn that John had been elected governor of Oregon. This was my first inkling that he was interested in politics. I was doubly surprised that he was a Democrat. No one who knew him in the late 1960s would have expected that. The press described him as one of a small number of avowedly liberal Democrats who won in that big Republican year.

The people of Oregon loved him, and he was re-elected easily in 1998. After sitting out for a while as required by Oregon’s constitution, he ran for governor again, and won. In the meantime, President Obama reportedly wanted to appoint him Secretary of the Interior, but John didn’t want to leave Oregon. He was re-elected last November, despite serious issues that arose during his third term, most notably the disastrous rollout of Oregon’s Obamacare system.

But now it has all come crashing down. Both Democrats and Republicans are calling on Kitzhaber to resign, and the state’s largest newspaper, the Portland Oregonian, a Democratic Party organ, has also said that he must go. What has caused this appalling downfall? As Scott says, Cherchez la femme! No one who knew John in the old days would be surprised that he was brought down by a woman: John loved women, and women loved John. Which, of course, is why we freshmen admired him so much.

In this case, the woman is Kitzhaber’s fiancee, Cylvia Hayes. The problem is that Ms. Hayes is a wheeler-dealer in her own right, in the field of green energy. To make a long story short, she has traded on her unique access to Oregon’s governor by earning consultant’s fees from various “green” energy organizations who stand to benefit from the state’s support. To make matters worse, she apparently failed to report some of those consulting fees on her tax returns. There are other embarrassments, too: she once accepted $5,000 to enter into a sham marriage with an African who needed a legal basis to stay in the U.S.–a marriage that she forgot to mention to the governor. Also, she bought, or tried to buy, Oregon real estate for the purpose of running a marijuana farm. Before it was legal.

Ms. Hayes has been Oregon’s “first lady” for some time now, and has profited, materially and otherwise, from that status. Was Governor Kitzhaber blinded by love? He denies it, but the facts don’t look good. John was always a romantic, of a certain kind. Sadly, his behavior in the current crisis is becoming erratic. He apparently told staff members that he intended to resign, and then summoned Oregon’s Secretary of State home from Washington. Presumably this was to tell her that upon his resignation, she would be governor, according to Oregon law. But when she arrived in Oregon, he reportedly was confused as to why she was there:


Brown said the governor had asked her to fly back to Oregon from a conference in Washington, D.C., but when she arrived, he asked why she had returned.

“This is clearly a bizarre and unprecedented situation,” Brown said in a statement.

She said Kitzhaber told her he’s not resigning, but then began a discussion about a transition.

It seems pretty clear that we are on a death watch, and Kitzhaber’s days as governor are numbered. I take no pleasure in the downfall of an old friend. Was he blinded by love? Well, yeah, it seems obvious that he was. But one more observation is in order: the whole “green energy” industry is a massive scam.

Green energy cannot compete on a level playing field with fossil fuels, so it depends on government subsidies and mandates. This leads to endless corruption. It happens at the federal level, as we have documented dozens of times, and Oregon’s experience shows that it happens at the state level, too. John Kitzhaber is a great guy and, I am sure, a fine doctor, but I doubt that he knows much about the economics of energy. Most likely, he joins in his party’s unthinking assumption that “green” energy must be good, and therefore should be favored by government policy.

His fiancee–at last word, their relationship continues–was, perhaps, more sophisticated. She understood, it seems, that “green” energy only survives by government fiat. Therefore, those who are in a position to command government’s support–like, for example, the “first lady” of Oregon–occupy a valuable position which can be turned into cold cash. The entire “green energy” movement is hopelessly corrupt, and the Oregon example lifts just a corner of the curtain that allows us to see the corruption that lies behind feel-good talk about solar and wind energy.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/20...-a-governor.php

The good news is this story of corruption involves a decidedly Liberal Democrat governor even if it doesn't get the national attention it deserves. That would be quite different if Kitzhaber was a Republican, of course. The bad news is that his replacement, OR SoS Kate Brown, is even more Liberal than he is.

The drama continues.

John Kitzhaber Resigns: Oregon Governor Quits Over Conflict-of-Interest Scandal

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/john-kitz...ory?id=28945978

And now the media is 'celebrating' the country's first openly bi-sexual governor.

Real life has become a reality-show...

Quote: GourmetDan wrote in post #7

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And now the media is 'celebrating' the country's first openly bi-sexual governor.

Real life has become a reality-show...

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