Collision Industry Advocate, Consultant, Writer, Former Multi-shop Owner. Love ballet, skiing, horses, architecture, craftsmanship, and great health outcomes!
Oregon, USA
Joined March 2010
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Camille retweeted
Don't hand over your mind and nerves to the political stress merchants. Nothing would delight them more. They know exactly what to do with basket cases -- empty them completely -- so please make sure not to be one.
Camille retweeted
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Camille retweeted
A stirring, sincere, straightforward piece about despair and disconnection among the men around all us, some of whom we notice, many of whom we don't. Maybe it's about you. If so, hang in there. And try not to hide.
Let's look out for one another.
amgreatness.com/2026/10/31/t…
Camille retweeted
🚨 A 10-year-old girl was abducted from her home in Canby, right here in my Senate District, early this morning. A 12-year-old child was also assaulted during the horrific incident.
I'm asking Oregonians across the state to please help spread the word and bring her home safely.
Violet Hay is approximately 5 feet tall, weighs 125 pounds, and was last seen wearing a green shirt and black shorts.
Law enforcement is actively searching for Violet. If you have ANY information that could help locate her, please contact Oregon State Police at 1-800-442-0776.
Please share this information far and wide. We need as many eyes looking for Violet as possible.
I am praying for Violet's safe return, for the recovery of the child who was assaulted and for the law enforcement officers working tirelessly to bring Violet home.
katu.com/news/local/10-year-…
Camille retweeted
Most Oregonians have no idea how far this proposal which could double income taxes has advanced.
Oregonians deserve answers BEFORE they’re handed the bill.
Oregon’s Universal Health Plan Governance Board missed its September 15 deadline to deliver a comprehensive implementation plan for government-run, single-payer health care.
Meanwhile, its preliminary financing proposal includes an additional 10.1% personal income contribution on affected income, plus a substantial employer payroll tax.
I’ve demanded answers: Why was the deadline missed? Who authorized the delay? Where are the financial projections, and what would this mean for your current health coverage?
A proposal this big deserves full public scrutiny. Taxpayers shouldn’t be left in the dark while the state plans how to spend more of their paycheck.
Camille retweeted
A couple years ago, Mikala Sposito applied for a work ethic scholarship from my foundation. She asked for $2,700.00 to help realize her dream of becoming a welder. (Actually, her first dream was to become an Olympian. As a kid, she excelled at horseback riding, dance, soccer, and track, but not quite at the Olympic level. So, Mikala adjusted her dream and focused on something within her reach. Precisely the kind of commonsense approach to making a living we try to encourage.) Toward that end, Mikala filled out the application, jumped through all the necessary hoops, and signed the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge, as all applicants must.
According to our internal ranking system, which is inherently subjective and relative to each batch of new applicants, Mikala scored a 94, and was awarded $2,100.00, or roughly 80% of what she asked for. This is typical of the average percentage awarded to an excellent applicant. As a rule, we almost never award the entire amount requested. We want our recipients to have some skin in the game, and we encourage all applicants to apply for additional scholarship funds elsewhere, which Mikala did. But in this case, if I had it to do over again, I think I’d have awarded Mikala the full $2,700.00. Why? Because this woman is precisely why I award work ethic scholarships in the first place, as recent headlines prove. Headlines all over the country that identify Mikala Sposito as the sole welder to represent Team USA in the upcoming @WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai.
This is a very big deal. The World Skills competition is often referred to as the Olympics of the skilled trades, so it looks like Mikala’s dream is coming true after all. And it seems to me her journey is worth a brief encapsulation. Before she applied for a scholarship from mikeroweWORKS, Mikala demonstrated an affinity for welding in SkillsUSA. As a senior at Dexter High School, she won 1st Place at the SkillsUSA Michigan high school competition and went on to place 14th nationally. Then, as a freshman at Washtenaw Community College, she repeated her success by taking 1st Place in the Michigan college division. She then advanced to nationals, where she finished 8th in the country. That earned her an invitation to the Team USA pre-trials, which whittled the nation's top 16 young welders down to three. At the final USA Weld Trials at the Robotics Technology Park in Huntsville, Alabama, each competitor was evaluated on precision, safety, technical execution, craftsmanship, and multi-process capabilities under extreme time constraints. Mikala Sposito took the Gold, officially becoming the first woman to represent the United States in welding at WorldSkills. Next week, she’ll face off against the absolute best of the best from all over the world.
I should point out that Mikala would prefer it if the press didn’t make a big deal of her gender, and I completely understand. (She’s a welder – not a “weld-her.”) But today, the industry is in desperate need of proof that women can and do excel in the trades. Nationally, just 4.3% of tradespeople are female. At mikeroweWORKS, our female applicants are closer to 20%, but I assure you that percentage could be much higher. Companies are anxious to recruit talented welders of any gender, and women need to understand and believe the opportunities are real. Mikala prove that in spades, and I want to offer her my sincere congratulations, and invite all of you to do the same. Because Mikala Sposito is exactly what our country needs a lot more of. People who understand that talent is never enough to compensate for laziness.
In her application, she wrote, “Hard work beats talent any day of the week, and nobody is going to outwork me. Period.”
She also connected with every point of the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge but said the final tenet resonated with her the most. “Some people choose to be lazy. Some people choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.”
My favorite quote, however, is Mikala’s response to seasoned professionals who see her wield a torch and call her a “natural.”
“I’m not a natural,” she says. Far from it. And none of this came easy. I worked and trained 60-80 hours a week for two years to get here.”
Regardless of what happens in Shanghai, the job offers are already piling up, including the most recent from SpaceX. She hasn’t graduated yet, but the future looks bright, and I for one would not bet against her.
PS. I never do this, but since my name is in the title of the foundation, I suppose I can. Mikala – please accept the additional $600 you requested from mikeroweWORKS two years ago. Shanghai is expensive, and since you’re representing all of us, we’d like to provide you with a little walking around money. The check is in the mail.
Now…go get the gold!
This is awesome!
Be like Parker!
#dirtyjobs #MikeRowe #thetrades #bluecolorjobs #mikerowescholorships
Attached is a video of a kid named Parker Lupher, who set the bar for submitting the kind of videos we’re looking for from every applicant. It’s difficult (impossible, really), to look into the soul of an applicant and determine his or her work ethic, but since these are “work ethic” scholarships, we have to try, and this is what a good video looks like. There is no set format, just a mandate to make a persuasive case for yourself, which young Parker clearly does (You’ll find Parker on the list of recipients. He was awarded $5,400 to pursue his training to become a firefighter. Go get ‘em, Parker!).
Camille retweeted
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
I encourage everyone listen to this update on @jordanbpeterson by his daughter @MikhailaFuller. She covers many health issues as well.
We figured out that dad has a psych med induced neurological injury, and has been suffering from akathisia. It’s been 6 years since any psych medications. Last summer his symptoms started, after a flare up likely induced by mold (CIRS) and stress. It was complicated by pneumonia and associated sepsis a month later. It’s been horrible. Neurological injuries from psych meds are far more common than people know. I made this video to explain what they are and what akathisia is because they’re not talked about enough, they’re misdiagnosed, nearly impossible to treat, and hidden by the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t plan on making another update about my dad, it stresses my family out, and myself, and there’s nothing more to say about it until things get better. I will be jumping up and down about psych med injury awareness from now on as it’s impacted my health as well, and is devastating. Prayers are appreciated still.
There is no reasonable excuse for our dire student success rates except for who is at the helm. Corporate Activity Tax has brought in billions since 2021 solely for Student Success!! And my niece says next year Civics class will be wholly online at Sandy HS. WTF.
Democrats blaming Trump for $5.30 gas in Oregon are being hypocritical. Oregon already hits us with high income taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, & a range of “sin” taxes & local fees with Dems pushing for more. Yet, their tax‑and-spend agenda is pushing Oregonians over the edge.
And another one!
Portland City Council, how may more are you gonna let fade away?
You did this to north Portland - Mississippi cooridor- in the late 70s and early 80s - cost my family a ton.
Could this be Democrat Demolition Derby?
eastpdxnews.com/violence-and…
Camille retweeted
Oregon’s new health program paid millions to ineligible patients, audit finds oregonlive.com/health/2026/0…
Camille retweeted
Consumer-owned utilities including electric co-ops ran ads in major newspapers across Oregon yesterday calling out Gov Tina Kotek for undermining hydro power and hiking utility rates while claiming focus on “affordability.” These are not right-leaning or political outfits.
Since 2021, Oregon kids skip proving reading/math skills; suspended thru 2028. CAT tax dumped billions into “Student Success,” yet we’re near bottom on NAEP: 2nd-worst math, 3rd-worst reading. Kotek’s “accountability”? Job-saving, not kid-saving. Actions > words.
Portland wants to nickle & dime every household with streaming service(s).
“We have a robust legal department of really skilled attorneys … fighting lawsuits every day. The city gets sued hundreds of times every year. One additional lawsuit … would not be particularly bad …”
The president of the Portland City Council is proposing a modest fee on streaming services to help fund the arts in the city. katu.com/news/local/portland…
Camille retweeted
A Portland business is expanding a recall over possible broken glass to nearly 37 million pounds of its frozen chicken food products.
The products are under the Ajinomoto brand, as well as Kroger (Fred Meyer), Ling Ling, Tai Pei and Trader Joe’s branding. bit.ly/4uik2Z8
Oregon, Portland, Tri-county areas are, and have been for decades, under the leadership control of Democrats and Socialists.
MO: Policy changes, higher fees and taxes.
It’s not going well.
Remember this when it’s time to vote!
portlandmetrochamber.com/res…
