On a cloudy, gray afternoon, Amy Baker sits in her North Portland home, surrounded by an immense collection of vibrant, colorful Latin American art. Her street is quiet,  as she prepares hot water for tea, a lop-eared bunny named Lulu hops from room to room.

By all rights, Amy Baker could be an angry and bitter about the past two years of her life. But amazingly, she’s not.

Baker is facing the challenge of paying down her tax and credit card debts. But the path that lead her to that  challenge is a harrowing tale of her year-long fight to clean up a meth lab next to her home. Taxes seem like a relatively easy challenge in comparison.

It’s tax day! Conservatives hate taxes and liberals love them, or so the stereotypes go.

Activists in the Tea Party movement are launching a national day of protest and rallies, including one here in North Portland [see Breaking News] to kick up dust and take your mind off that pesky Schedule E.  

Meanwhile, here in liberal Oregon, folks cast a historic vote in January to raise their own – or maybe someone else’s – taxes. Some viewed both the Tea Party movement and the Oregon tax vote as campaigns that were less about “right” and “left” and more about  populism.

That’s nice.

But whether you think you get taxed too much, not enough, or just want to tell them all to kiss off, here’s what can happen if you don’t pay up:

“The Oregon Department of Revenue used to be heartless, irrational and even sadistic,” says Michael Redden, a Northeast Portland tax attorney with 30 years experience in local and federal tax law.

The ODR proved so difficult, in fact, that Redden will no longer take on clients with state income tax problems. Part of the reason is that he and others claim the IRS is easier to deal with than the state of Oregon.

As April 15 rolls around again, Oregonians who can't pay their taxes are facing an agency that's more feared than the IRS. Unlike it's federal counterpart, Oregon uses private collection agencies, does not forgive debt and can send a distraint warrant (see sidebar story Distraining to Pay your Taxes) and a sheriff to your house when you owe big bucks.

"So the idea of closing libraries instead of jails never came up?"

"We're not closing libraries," County Commissioner Serena Cruz says with exasperation. She is perhaps tired of endlessly arecent decision not to provide additional funding for jail beds this fiscal year.

Currently, suspects arrested by city police officers for crimes such as burglary are taken to county jails and then released back onto the street within hours.  The system of releasing suspects based on jail space availability is referred to as the matrix.

In this edition of the nPodcast, Sentinel film critic Alex Peterson and (former filmmaker and) Managing Editor Cornelius Swart discuss the film A Serious Man. Peterson and Swart share their very different views on the film's message about the meaning of life, suffering and whether the Coen brothers are mean-spirited. They do agree, however, that A Serious Man is a smart 'crossword puzzle' of a film.  Spoiler alert- the specifics of the end of the film are discussed in general terms.