Current Listing

Heidi Stacks (pka Heidi Siglin) has lived here for almost 50 years, serving seven of those on Council. She is very well networked with other public servants in nearby cities, and has served us with extraordinary dedication and wisdom. She’s a respectful team player who listens to every view and can be counted on to do whatever is best for the town she loves.

Mary Leverette is newer to Wheeler, but has already proven herself as a devoted, consistent, constructive volunteer. She has regularly attended Council meetings for several years. She knows our issues quite well.

I’ve worked closely with both candidates on Wheeler’s Emergency Preparedness Committee and with Emergency Volunteer Corps of Nehalem Bay. They both display great creativity, commitment, and integrity. They are both hard workers who do what they say they will.

These two public servants bring the combination of experience and fresh vision that Wheeler needs. Please join me in electing both to Wheeler City Council!

Once upon a time, I took for granted that Oregon law protected reproductive freedom. When Roe was overturned in June of 2022, giving states the ability to restrict abortion, I certainly worried. But not about Oregon.

In March of 2024, the fairy dust fell from my eyes. That’s when Cyrus Javadi co-sponsored Oregon Senate Bill 1536, along with his other Republican colleagues.

You’re likely unfamiliar with SB1536 because it quickly failed. And for now, that’s an enormous relief. But it’s worth noting exactly what Representative Javadi co-sponsored, even if it’s difficult to pin him down on what he actually believes.

SB1536 is designed to restrict access to abortion after a 15-week gestational period with exceptions due to an urgent health need, rape or incest.

(If you’re following the plight of women in anti-abortion states, you will know that “exceptions” allowing for pregnancy termination are at best dubious and at worst, lethal).

SB1536 also states that all abortions involving a health care provider must be reported to the Oregon Health Authority. In other words, should you be able to get an abortion after 15 weeks, your health care decision is on the record.

(It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand how such information might be used since it’s already happening: the punitive treatment of women seeking or having abortions).

At the recent Oct 9th Candidates Forum sponsored by the Tillamook branch of the American Association of University Women, Representative Javadi was asked if he supported a woman’s right to make her own reproductive healthcare decisions. He spoke with great compassion about young girls betrayed by the men they trusted; expressed horror that women in 12 states were facing criminal charges related to their pregnancies; and assured his audience that abortion was still legal in Oregon.

He also neglected to say that he co-sponsored SB 1536.

In a Facebook conversation that same evening, a constituent from Manzanita asked Representative Javadi a similar question. She wrote, “What’s your position on women’s reproductive rights?”

He answered that Oregon has a lot of work to do concerning women’s reproductive rights. “Too often,” he wrote, “the conversation focuses solely on access to abortion, without addressing why a woman may feel like she can’t have the child”.

Perplexed, his constituent pushed harder for clarification, writing that the bill he co-sponsored would indicate he did not support a woman’s right to choose. His response: “I did sponsor a bill limiting abortion. I didn’t realize that your definition of women’s reproductive rights is so narrowly defined”.

Cyrus Javadi defines women’s reproductive freedom as the right to have a child. What transparently evasive nonsense from such a very clever man.

The other day, I received an email from Representative Javadi responding to a piece I’d written in support of Andy Davis’s resoundingly clear support for reproductive freedom. I appreciated his comments, his corrections and his consistent championing of the needs of pregnant women before and after they give birth.

But let’s be clear. Cyrus Javadi only supports SOME pregnant women’s rights to make their own medical decisions. Planned Parenthood agrees, and lists him by name on its 2024 Abortion Ban Watch List.

If you’re looking for a State Representative who trusts ALL women, vote for Andy Davis. He is serious about reproductive rights and knows precisely how to define them.

October 21, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 22

On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.

In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycleexplored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.

Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.

She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.

When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.

In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”

Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”

Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”

I received a pre-addressed and stamped postcard in the U.S. mail this week, requesting I choose to respond to various pre-selected sentences about Manzanita’s water allocations and send the postcard to a Manzanita resident.

The Manzanita resident, a Mr. Kugler, who has exhibited a bizarre ongoing obsession with Manzanita water issues, continues to advance ill-advised, poorly-informed and malicious attacks directed at our City Council, our Mayor and our City Manager. These attacks also continue to exhibit either astounding ignorance about Oregon municipal budgetary rules and procedures, or deliberate obfuscation of these rules and procedures.

It is unclear why Manzanita residents would funnel any of their views through an individual with a demonstrated long-standing animus towards our city, its elected/appointed leaders and city staff (he is currently a party to a lawsuit against Manzanita as well). Between this lawsuit and the referendum, he has cost the City (and all of us) over $30,000 in legal fees just since July.

To better understand our city budget, it is probably best to go straight to those who know most about it: our Budget Committee representatives, our City Council/Mayor and/or our City Manager. Specific meetings of the Budget Committee that cover all aspects of planning and recommendations for each fiscal year can be located at:

ci.manzanita.or.us/budget-committee/ The January to May meetings cover most issues, with a final meeting with City Council where they vote to approve the new fiscal year budget, usually in May/June.

The above information is important to examine and to understand, since the Budget Committee and our City Council are responsible by State Law to assure that Manzanita’s budget is accurate, balanced and fiscally stable. They can’t just present opinions as facts and get away with it or they’ll get in trouble with the State of Oregon.

The Budget Committee examines, questions, analyzes and then forwards its recommendations for annual budgetary approval by the city council every year, by Oregon law. Each year, this includes all aspects of Manzanita’s budget, including issues related to its Water Fund as well as indirect cost allocations.

For many years, the Budget Committee has been bombarded with complaints from resident Kugler that there are parts of the indirect cost allocation methodology, and/or the Manzanita Water Fund that are wrong. Each year, the Budget Committee makes sure that this is not true. And each year, they are correct. And each year, resident Kugler is proven incorrect.

Please communicate with trustworthy, knowledgeable friends, and then double-check your information with our city government.
Happy sleuthing!
Mark Kuestner
Manzanita resident

I know and have worked with Andy and have great respect for him as a person of Integrity, a trait much needed especially these days.

Andy is a longtime community leader and volunteer. He’s a Democrat and a city councilor in Astoria. He served on the Clatsop County budget committee and comprehensive plan update committees, dealing with finances, agencies and challenging problems. He’s focused on affordable housing, healthcare for everyone and more.

Andy is responsible, responsive, reliable and honest. He will make an outstanding legislator who will serve all Oregonians.

For more details on Andy’s campaign: www.davis4oregon.com/

The seat is currently held by Republican Cyrus Javadi. Javadi is anti-choice, and signed a letter supporting Texas Gov. Abbott’s extreme anti-immigrant policies. He also failed to show up for a number of votes in the last legislative session. He is not a moderate and does not represent me or many of you I suspect.

We need a smart, thoughtful, hard working, accessible Representative – ELECT ANDY DAVIS. Vote EARLY and Spread the word.

Let’s take back our Oregon House Seat and make a difference.
carol

Thank you.
Patricia.
cedarhaven33@gmail.com