This is long but a necessary read for all Oregon voters, especially those who aren't necessarily well versed or knowledgeable of Tina Kotek's way of governing. She was and is a terrible, vindictive person but more so to her own party members. I was a witness to all former Rep. Diego Hernandez writes here. This is a Democrat telling the truth about former Speaker now Governor Kotek. I just wish more of my former colleagues would be so brave. He is an honorable man. #orpol #orleg #orgov I’m not voting for Tina Kotek. I personally know Tina Kotek’s Leadership. I Experienced It. I’ve been watching Tina Kotek’s governorship and the growing frustration with her leadership, the staff turnover, the controversies, and the struggles to deliver on some of Oregon’s most pressing issues. And I can’t help but reflect on my own experience. I served four years in the Oregon House of Representatives under Tina Kotek’s leadership as Speaker. I worked directly with her. I experienced how she treated people who challenged her authority, disagreed with her decisions, or refused to fall in line. I was bullied, harassed, threatened, and politically targeted by Tina Kotek. I don’t say that lightly. I lived it, documented it, provided evidence and witnesses, and eventually testified publicly about it. And what I experienced says a lot about the kind of leadership I believe Oregon has been subjected to. —When Power Becomes a Tool for Control— I still remember one of my first meetings with Tina when I was newly elected. There wasn’t much interest in getting to know me, understanding the communities I represented, or discussing the policies I wanted to champion. Instead, I was told how much money I was expected to raise for the Democratic caucus and how my ability to advance legislation, secure committee assignments, and receive political support would depend on meeting those expectations. That was my introduction to legislative leadership. Now, I understand politics. I understand fundraising, negotiating, coalition building, and the difficult compromises that come with governing. I’ve participated in all of it. But there’s a difference between exercising political leadership and using institutional power to intimidate, punish, and control people. Over time, I came to experience Tina’s leadership as rooted in fear, coercion, manipulation, and political retaliation. The message was clear: Support what she wants, or risk losing what matters to you. And when you represent communities that have historically been excluded from political power, that kind of leverage can be particularly harmful. —The Day She Threatened My Career— In 2019, Tina was trying to pass controversial legislation changing Oregon’s public employee retirement system, commonly known as PERS. I disagreed with the legislation and refused to vote for it. That decision led to repeated pressure and threats. And during one of her escalating confrontations towards me, Tina told me directly: “I will make sure to end your career.” She threatened my legislative priorities, my political future, and bills I had worked hard to advance. In one of her final attempts to get me to change my vote, she said she was going to kill the legislation to restore access to driver’s licenses for undocumented Oregonians if I voted no. Think about that for a moment. A policy affecting thousands of immigrant families, people who needed to drive legally to work, take their children to school, and participate in everyday life, was being used as leverage to force my vote on an entirely unrelated issue. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Immediately after that threat, I called Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon, who was working with me on the driver’s license legislation, and told her what Tina was threatening to do. Teresa was courages and she told Tina that if she killed our driver’s license bill, Teresa would change her vote on PERS from yes to a no. With the vote already extremely close, losing another vote completely threatened Tina’s ability to pass the legislation. That changed the political equation. The PERS bill barely passed, but only after Democrat changed their vote from no to yes. That legislator had been called into Tina’s office and, from what I witnessed, emerged in tears, visibly distressed by the vote they felt compelled to make. Our driver’s license legislation survived thanks to Teresa Alonso Leon and eventually became law. But I never forgot what it took to protect it. What disturbed me most was how easily the needs of an entire community could become bargaining chips in an effort to control another elected official. And this was only one example of what I experienced. —When the System Protects Power— I eventually filed a formal workplace harassment complaint and provided evidence of Tina’s conduct, including contemporaneous messages, witnesses, and documentation of the threats. Tina worked hard to make sure the investigation never concluded or to come out and see the light of day, dragging far beyond the required time required by statute. People witnessed parts of what happened. I told colleagues about the threats immediately after they occurred, long before there was any formal investigation. The investigator even concluded that the evidence more closely supported my version of events. Yet the investigator reasoned that conduct potentially inappropriate in another workplace was different in the Legislature because politics is inherently contentious. Mind you that investigator is under the office controlled by Tina herself. These investigators work like prosecutors for her office. Essentially, the intimidation I experienced was treated as part of politics. The House Conduct Committee ultimately deadlocked 2–2 over whether her conduct violated workplace rules. That vote distinction matters to me. A complaint being dismissed by deadlocked doesn’t mean she didn’t violate the rules, yet that’s what was reported. In my experience, the legislative accountability system was deeply compromised by her political influence, institutional self-protection, and what I witnessed as the targeting of people she considered political enemies. My experience left me with profound concerns about whether those holding the greatest power could ever be meaningfully held accountable by a process operating within the same institutional power structure they could influence and manipulate. These systems were weaponized by Kotek against political opponents, including me and other legislators who challenged her leadership or refused to do what she wanted. Those concerns extend beyond my own experience. She had the power to initiate any investigation she wanted, when she wanted under the mandatory reporting rules, Tina herself initiated investigations through reports she submitted herself, while the process could obscure who had set the investigation in motion. I witnessed first hand the political exploitation of that authority. When political power influences who gets investigated, who gets believed, how conduct is interpreted, and who faces consequences, accountability itself becomes vulnerable to manipulation. And as a man of color, I am especially aware of how racial stereotypes, historical inequities, and systemic racism can make it easier for someone to be targeted, labeled, and presumed culpable. And how much more the consequences that come with such targeting. And that should concern everyone, regardless of political affiliation. —The Long-Term Cost of Leading Through Fear— Here’s what my experience taught me about leadership. You can get a lot accomplished in the short term through intimidation, political threats, transactional relationships, control over fundraising, and and the enormous leverage that comes with controlling legislative assignments and influencing state budgets. People will comply. They will tell you what you want to hear. They may even defend you publicly because their careers, priorities, relationships, or access to resources depend on maintaining your favor. That can look like effective leadership from the outside. But over time, that style of leadership begins to rot the very foundation of her leadership and the institutions, relationships, and trust upon which leadership depends on. Trust deteriorates. People become afraid to disagree. Independent thinking gets punished. Genuine relationships become transactional. Loyalty becomes a measure of usefulness rather than shared values or mutual respect. Eventually, the consequences become harder to contain. Unlike leadership rooted in respect, consistent values and, like that of Morse, Hatfield, Dellenback, McCall, Katz, Paulus, McNary, Courtney, Roberts, Carter, and other Oregon’s great leaders. When I see the turmoil surrounding Tina’s governorship, the departure of senior staff, the controversies over her decision-making and the questions surrounding her wife’s involvement in state government and the use of public resources to support that role,, and the growing frustration over the state’s direction, I recognize aspects of the leadership culture I experienced. I do believe how someone exercises power has consequences, especially when they become responsible for leading an entire state. A governor needs people who feel empowered to speak honestly, challenge decisions, identify mistakes, and offer different perspectives without fearing retaliation. You cannot build that kind of environment through fear. —Oregon Deserves Better Leadership— Yes, Tina Kotek has worked hard on some policies that I support. We have shared political priorities, and there are legislative accomplishments during her time as Speaker that deserve recognition. I can acknowledge those accomplishments while also speaking honestly about how she leads and what I witnessed. Political alignment should never require us to excuse hostile leadership that uses bullying, harassment, manipulation, or abuses of power from people on our own side. I’ve spent 15 years of my life working in communities where leadership is rooted in relationships, collective responsibility, restoritve justice, and the understanding that people deserve dignity, including when we disagree. I’ve also seen how political systems can reproduce the same harmful power dynamics that many of us entered public service hoping to change. Leadership requires making difficult decisions. Sometimes people will disagree with you. Sometimes you’ll lose votes, face criticism, or have to make compromises that disappoint people. That comes with the responsibility of public service. But threatening someone’s livelihood, political future, or the communities they represent because they refuse to surrender their independent judgment should never be normalized as the cost of doing politics. I know how damaging that kind of leadership can be. I live with its consequences long after leaving the Legislature. And while other people may have had different experiences with Tina, this was mine. I believe Oregon deserves leadership that builds trust rather than fear, earns loyalty rather than demands obedience, welcomes disagreement rather than punishes it, and understands that political power is a public responsibility rather than a personal instrument of control. I didn’t enter public service to be loyal to a political leader. I entered it to represent people, advocate for communities, and advance policies that improve lives. And no elected official, regardless of their title, party, or political power, should ever have to choose between their conscience and their career. That’s the kind of political culture I believe we should be challenging, including within our own political circles. And that’s why, based on my own experience, I don’t believe Tina Kotek represents the kind of leadership Oregon deserves and won’t be voting for her because we do need change, we need great leaders like the names I mentioned earlier. -Diego (I wrote this myself and not a.i. so please excuse all my grammatical errors)

Modern culture sells you an illusion of three choices. It tells you that you can choose between God, sin, or yourself. It insists you can reject divine submission, steer clear of destructive vice, and comfortably occupy a safe middle ground. But the Apostle Paul rejects this premise entirely in Romans 6. He argues that only two paths exist, meaning you are either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. The self is not neutral. Since the fall of man in Eden, the human heart has been intrinsically occupied territory. We are not independent operators. Because the self is never neutral, Paul describes human faculties as instruments designed to be wielded by a master. The only open question is whose hands hold the tool. The modern mind recoils at this binary. The average man points to his quiet, comfortable life devoid of obvious vices and asks how he could be a slave to anything. He defines sin by its fruit, looking only for addiction or malice. Paul defines sin by its root. He locates it precisely in Romans 1 as the creature knowing God and refusing to give Him thanks. That root is autonomy. It is the created being deciding to sit on its own throne. Living a self-directed life while politely ignoring the source of your breath is the absolute definition of sin. It is rebellion dressed in a cardigan. What a man says about his independence settles nothing because Paul's test of freedom is obedience. In the subsequent verses of Romans 6, he argues you are a slave to whatever you obey. The man who claims he answers to no one blinds himself to the reality that he answers relentlessly to his appetites, his fears, and his reputation. He serves these unseen masters exhaustingly without asking who put them in charge. Paul has a chilling phrase for this liberty. He says such men are free in regard to righteousness. They have escaped exactly one master, and it happens to be the only One who actually gives life. The consequence of this autonomy is death. We often treat this as an arbitrary threat from an insulted deity, but Paul forces us to view it as a wage. It is an earned judicial payout governed entirely by the unbending laws of spiritual physics. Snap a branch from an oak tree and the leaves will remain stubbornly green for a few days. The branch might even appear to thrive in its newfound independence. Yet the dying began at the exact moment of the break. Similarly, the green leaves of a comfortable life simply mask the reality that the creature is coasting on borrowed sap. Death is not a divine tantrum. It is the ontological certainty and the earned wage of severing yourself from the source of life. Why does the Creator keep air in the lungs of a creature living a lie? He sustains the rebel out of profound mercy. As Paul notes in Romans 2, the kindness of God is meant to lead to repentance. God gives the autonomous man decades to build a kingdom on his own terms, allowing him to feel the exhaustion of his own sovereignty as his empire slowly rusts. This delay is an act of deliberate grace. Every year of that decay is an open invitation to abandon the heavy burden of independence. The only cure for a withering branch is to be grafted back into the vine. True freedom is found in the surrender of autonomy, returning to the source of life to quietly trade a perishable independence for absolute imperishability.

OR #4 and WA #3

More taxes, more rules & regulations, bigger government...she's building something for certain, but nothing that bodes well for business, jobs or citizen liberties

If people want better for themselves, their kids and their businesses, they have to vote for change. As governor, I will restore our quality of life, serve our most vulnerable and make this a place where Oregonians can afford to live and are proud to call home again.

There is no other material on earth that can do what a fleece does, and it grows on an animal that eats grass. It keeps a sheep alive on a Welsh hill in February, in sleet, with no shelter. It keeps a Bedouin cool in the Sahara in August. It keeps a person warm when it is soaked through, which is why mountaineers wore it to the top of Everest. It will not burn. Put a match to it and it chars and goes out, which is why it lines aircraft seats and theatre curtains. It absorbs a third of its weight in sweat and gives off heat while it does it. It blocks the sun. A wool shirt has the ultraviolet rating of a decent sunscreen. It does not smell. The surface stays too dry for the bacteria that make a shirt stink. It stretches a third of its length and springs back, so a sock holds its shape for years. It stops sound. Recording studios and classrooms line the walls with it. It stops cold in a loft as well as fibreglass does, without the itch. It soaks up oil, which is why the mats laid on spills are made of it. It dyes deeper than anything, which is why a Persian rug is still red after 300 years. It felts into a tent that a Mongolian family lives in through a minus 40 winter. And when it finally wears out, it rots into fertiliser, and the next sheep eats the grass it grew. Every one of those jobs now has a synthetic doing it worse. The sheep had all of them covered before the chemist was born, and it does it again every spring for nothing.

True story: In 1962, doctors in Massachusetts looked at a newborn boy named Rick Hoyt and told his parents to lock him away in an institution. His umbilical cord had twisted around his neck during birth, cutting off oxygen to his brain and leaving him a quadriplegic with severe cerebral palsy. "He will be a vegetable for the rest of his life," the physicians said. His father, Dick Hoyt, looked at the way Rick’s eyes tracked movement across the room and refused to believe the diagnosis. He and his wife brought Rick home, read to him, taught him the alphabet, and treated him like any other boy. When Rick turned eleven, a group of engineers at Tufts University built a specialized computer that allowed him to select letters on a screen by tapping the side of his head against a metal switch. Skeptics doubted he would understand how to use it. Everyone crowded around the monitor, waiting for his first words—expecting "Hi Mom" or "Hi Dad." Instead, Rick tapped out two words: "Go Bruins." It was the year the Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Rick had understood every word spoken around him for eleven years. Four years later, a local five-mile charity run was organized for a classmate who had been paralyzed in a sporting accident. Using his computer, Rick typed a message to his father: "Dad, I want to do that." Dick Hoyt was thirty-seven years old, out of shape, and had never run more than a mile at a time. Still, the next morning, he gripped the handles of Rick’s heavy, clunky wheelchair and pushed his son across all five miles, wheezing across the finish line next to last. That night, Dick was iced down and aching when Rick called him over to the computer screen and tapped out the sentence that altered the trajectory of both their lives: "Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not handicapped." Dick Hoyt made a silent vow in that room: if speed made his son feel free, he would lend Rick his own body for as long as his heart could beat. Dick began training before dawn every day, strapping a hundred-pound bag of cement into the wheelchair while Rick was at school just to build his lungs. Over the next four decades, father and son completed 1,130 endurance races together—including 32 Boston Marathons, a 3,735-mile run and bike across the United States in 45 days, and six grueling Ironman Triathlons. During an Ironman, Dick would swim 2.4 miles in open water while towing Rick behind him in a small rubber boat tied to his waist, immediately transition to a custom two-seater bicycle to pedal both of them 112 miles, and then strap on running shoes to push Rick 26.2 miles to the finish line. At the height of their racing years, elite marathoners asked Dick why he never entered a single race alone just to see how many trophies he could win without pushing over a hundred pounds of extra weight. Dick didn't hesitate. "I have zero desire to take a single step out there by myself," he said. "I am only lending Rick my arms and legs. He is the one lending me his heart." Most people hit a wall in life because they are only fighting for their own comfort. Self-interest is a fragile fuel; the moment pain, exhaustion, or failure sets in, the mind looks for an exit because it is easy to negotiate with your own excuses. True endurance is unlocked the moment your discipline becomes the vessel for someone else’s survival, dignity, or freedom. When the people you love depend on your strength, exhaustion loses its vote. Find a mission larger than your own comfort, and you become nearly impossible to break.

A 92-year-old North Carolina man got so bored 2 months into retirement that he applied to work at Chick-fil-A... ...his smile, kindness, and passion for Jesus became so contagious that when he got sick and missed 3 days of work, an ENTIRE TOWN began asking where he was. His name is Gilbert Martin. Everybody calls him "Mr. Gil." Mr. Gil is 92 years old, and works at the Chick-fil-A on Oleander Drive in Wilmington, NC. He spent decades working in the natural gas industry and when he retired, he greeted people at Sam's Club for 12 MORE years, until they eliminated his position. Most people would call that a sign to finally rest, but not Mr. Gil! Two months into retirement, he got bored... so he walked into Chick-fil-A and put in an application. He was 86 years old at the time. He's been there ever since. Not one or two shifts a week either. Monday through Friday. He says the full schedule gives him more chances to be there for people who need him. His official job is dining host. Clean tables. Clean floors. But Mr Gil doesn't see it that way... as he describes it, his real job is: "I get a lot of people that are coming in, just been to the doctor, and got bad news... I'm able to be an encourager; the Lord gave me that." A 92-year-old man who could be resting at home... chooses to stand in a dining room five days a week... so strangers on the worst day of their lives don't have to be alone. And Wilmington noticed. When Mr. Gil caught a cold and missed a couple of days, the owner said he was FLOODED with HUNDREDS of customers who were panicked about him. Mr. Gil has zero plans to retire. He says if you ever see him working, come say hi. "I don't know what 92 is supposed to feel like, but I feel great. Serving others has always brought me joy because I believe that a smile and a kind word can make someone's day a little brighter.” We need more of this!!!!!

Governor Kotek and Democrat leaders broke the law to hide their government-run healthcare takeover until after you vote. The Universal Health Plan Governance Board was required to release its report on September 15. They didn’t. Kotek and the committee chairs approved the delay anyway. Legislative Counsel says they had no authority to do it. They buried it because voters would reject it. What is already known from the draft: • Seniors lose traditional Medicare and get forced into the state system • Your tax dollars pay for full coverage for people here illegally • A new income tax hits AGI, before deductions, so working families pay more A report that takes away Medicare and raises taxes does not get shelved by accident three weeks before an election. That is a cover-up. The board just called an emergency meeting for Thursday, October 8. Open the records. Release the plan. Let Oregonians see it before November 3.

“Because the Lord Jesus died on the Cross, I have received forgiveness of sins; because the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, I have received new life; because the Lord Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of the Father, I have received the outpoured Spirit. All is because of Him; nothing is because of me.” —Watchman Nee

I’m voting this as one of the best, feel good videos you’ll see on X today. This fawn is very young. They lose their spots when they are 3 to 4 months old! Curiously adorable ☺️

People sometimes ask, “Will we remember one another in Heaven?” The answer is YES! You will know more in Heaven than you know on Earth—not less. Heaven is not a place where our memories are erased; it is where our memories are perfected. We will know and be known, reunited with those we love, and most importantly, we will know Jesus as we have never known Him before. Heaven is not the end of relationships—it is the beginning of eternity together.

Abortion is EVIL!