MONDAY 3 The headline from TMZ says it all: “Kate Middleton: I’m Royally KNOCKED UP!” (And by “says it all,” we mean TMZ is the worst.) TMZ then terribly continued, “Kate Middleton just announced… she’s got a CRUMPET IN THE OVEN!!!” (Why does TMZ keep screaming at us?) Anyway, Kate Middleton—AKA the Duchess of Cambridge, […]
Editorial
Posted inOpinion
Democrats Ready to Deal
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Oregon's public employees and retirees, from the prison guard keeping peace in a noisy cell block to the weary teacher who spent 30 years grading papers, counseling students and earning a secure retirement.Unfortunately, we also owe them $16 billion more than we have in their retirement fund. […]
Posted inOpinion
Capell Breaks the Taboo
People who want to be mayor of Bend aren’t supposed let anybody know
People who want to be mayor of Bend aren’t supposed let anybody know (publicly, at least) that they’re after the job. Traditionally, they’re supposed to sit with their hands demurely folded in their laps like wallflowers at a 6th-grade dance and wait to be chosen by their fellow city councilors. Councilor Mark Capell boldly broke […]
Posted inOpinion
The Secession Maniacs
Since President Obama won re-election, people all over the country have been submitting petitions to a White House website asking the federal government to let their states secede from the Union. Most of them would make an English teacher weep.
Posted inOpinion
Week in Review
One Day at a Time
MONDAY 12 Ugh! “Young love,” right? All those (ew) “hormones” and “lack of life experience” and “hopefulness for the future”… BLECH! We’re just so glad we’re not that little 20-year-old pop starlet/Disney actress Selena Gomez who’s having a dickens of a time breaking up with that little boy with the hair… oh, what’s his name? […]
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Fighting the Pirates of the Senate
The word “filibuster” derives from the Spanish noun filibustero, which means, basically, a pirate. The origin is appropriate, because for the past six years the Republican minority in the Senate has been using the filibuster to hijack the legislative process. Victims of this piracy have included, among many others, a military appropriations bill, the “Dream […]
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Battered by a Storm of Reality
The hard-core climate change deniers, living inside their comfortable bubble of delusion, will continue to dismiss the evidence as they have for the past 40 years. They’ll say that Sandy was just a freak weather event.
Seeing is believing, they say. If that’s true, there shouldn’t be anybody left in America who doesn’t believe global climate change is for real after seeing what Superstorm Sandy did to the East coast.
Coastlines from New England to Virginia battered. Millions without power. New York City’s subways flooded. More than 110 people dead. Property damage estimated at $30 billion and climbing. All this makes Sandy the second most devastating storm ever to hit the United States, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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Taking a Swipe at SWIP
Judge Aiken gets this week’s Glass Slipper.
“Whiskey’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’,” goes the old Wild West proverb. There’s no better example of that than the political and legal battle raging over Bend’s Surface Water Irrigation Project, aka SWIP, aka the Bridge Creek Project.
It all goes back to the EPA’s determination that Bend’s water supply¬ drawn from Bridge Creek just below Tumalo Falls isn’t clean enough, and that if it keeps getting water from the creek the city will have to install an expensive filtration system by October 2014.
Posted inOpinion
Don’t Buy The Bulletin’s Self-Serving Sob Story
The Bulletin gets this week’s Boot.
This past week, The Bulletin, after months of self-serving reporting about the loss of legal notices, finally laid its cards on the table and unveiled the carefully constructed boogeyman it’s been building in plain sight over the past six months. The paper would be increasing its home delivery rates by more than 50 percent while slashing its staff by 10 percent, with cuts coming across the newsroom and elsewhere.
Publisher Gordon Black and the rest of the leaders at the paper’s parent company Western Communications didn’t blame the economy or the rise of social media and online browsing, declining readership among younger audiences, or even their abysmal record of ad sales in recent years.
Posted inOpinion
Bankster Ethics
The banks get this this week’s Boot.
In its last session, the Oregon Legislature – faced with more than 120,000 Oregon homeowners being “underwater” on their mortgages – came up with a good idea for helping them keep their homes. It passed a bill requiring lenders to enter into mediation with borrowers who were at risk of foreclosure and try to work out a way to avoid it.
There was only one thing wrong with the bill: To get it passed, its supporters had to pull its teeth. Although the law makes it mandatory for a bank to enter into mediation if the homeowner requests it, there’s no penalty if the bank doesn’t.
