From the weird zone: the LTE's for Kampe in the Reflector.

From one:

Kampe is the Director of the Clark County Skills Center. This position has afforded him over 25 years of experience collaborating and/or wrestling with our state legislators, managing and administering a multiple school district supported budget, advocating for career and technical education options and partnering to expand employment opportunities in our community. His vast knowledge of legislative processes allows us the unique opportunity to elect not only an experienced state representative, but one who possesses passion, integrity, and practicality.

From the next:

Dennis has lived in and served the people of the 18th Legislative District for 40 years. He taught machine shop at Prairie High School and Clark College. For the last 19 years he has been the director of the Clark County Skills Center. He led the Skills Center to national honors when the center was named one of the best schools in the U.S. by “Business Week Magazine.”

There's several strange elements to these letters.

First, all they've got is that Kampe has run a vocational school. That, obviously, well, qualifies him to run a vocational school.

That he has ANY knowledge of the legislative process is purely speculative and he has precisely zero experience that anyone else who's walked the halls of the O'Brien building also doesn't have.

In short, in addition to harboring the delusion that allows them to be democrats, the people who wrote these strangely similar letters have no clue what goes on in Oly; how it goes on or how it works.

And Kampe's work in a vocational center doesn't prepare him for a thing that has anything to do with what goes on up there.

Kampe is completely unprepared to be a state representative. Additionally, he supports bridge tolls, a state income tax and opposes privatization or cutting government in any way... or at least in any way he's let us in on.

And, BTW? Those uninformed enough to support Kampe really ought to get their stories straight.

Has he, as the first writer told us, run the center for 25 years? Or 19 as the second letter says?

I hope Kampe is better with numbers then his supporters.

Cross posted to Clark County Politics.

Dennis Kampe has a problem: He wants to pop 65,000 commuters from Clark County with a $1300 per year toll.

No doubt about it, Dennis Kampe is a union man, through and through. The problem with that is he wants to shaft us by supporting bridge tolls.

He wants to slam the working poor with a minimum $1300 per year fee.... just to start with... to go to work on the other side of the river. And he wants to do that to put his union buds to work building a bridge we don't need, don't want and can't afford.

He wants to burden Clark County with an economic black hole that will suck tens of millions of dollars out of our local economy.

He wants to take the food out of our kid's mouths, the clothes off their backs and the roofs from over their heads.

And he's not the only one.

Every democrat running here locally wants the same thing... particularly Steve "Easy Money" Stuart.

But Kampe tells us that if there's going to be tolls, he wants a county-wide vote.

Oh... he dresses it up:

Kampe supports a new bridge over the Columbia River, but he opposes including light rail as part of the project and also opposes tolling Clark County commuters to pay for the bridge unless voters approve tolls in an election.

The problem is this: there will not be a bridge without tolls. And there will be tolls without a vote.

And Kampe knows it.

See, what Kampe is doing is trying to hide his positions... like his support for that absurd, unconstitutional state income tax that he thinks so highly of.

And that seems to be the problem with democrats this year. At the federal level, they seem to be sprinting away from Obama, the stimulus and Obamacare. Locally, they're sprinting away from their positions on the tax initiatives and the state income tax plan.

And Kampe is no exception.

Cross posted at Clark County Politics.

The dichotomy of Dennis Kampe.

On one hand, Kampe said on KLTV:

“We have to start with spending within our means... and that has to be absolute. No taxes. The people have spoken loudly about increases (of) the taxes to use that as a means of balancing the budget… whatever means we have, that’s what we’re going to do."

I BELIEVE that means he doesn't support any tax increases as a means to balance the state budget. Hard to say, exactly.

On the other hand, Kampe admitted to supporting I-1098 (The state income tax initiative), most recently on Sep 28 at the Clark College Association of Higher Education Forum, an obviously unconstitutional effort to engage in class warfare as a way to turn out the vote... an effort to increases taxes that is supposed to increase revenue to the state coffers by $2 billion more... per year... than the state gets now.

It wouldn't, of course. Too many other states don't have an income tax, and if you can earn 200K here, you can probably do it anywhere.

If you pledge not to raise taxes... how can you support an initiative that, well, raises taxes?

One wonders. And as always, Mr. Kampe is welcome to come here and explain it.

Cross posted at Clark County Politics.