Dec. 1 marked the 10-year anniversary of Oregon's cultural tax credit, an extraordinarily effective incentive to contribute to the cultural life of the state's people and visitors. Because the credit, in effect, empowers Oregon arts patrons to earmark some of their tax dollars for the arts and cultural preservation, it predictably comes under fire when […]
Editorial
Posted inOpinion
Swooshed
Nike is planning to expand, and Gov. John Kitzhaber wants Oregon to benefit. He has called a special session of the Legislature on Friday. He’s hoping lawmakers will consider authorizing him to freeze the way the state assesses corporate taxes for the footwear giant if it creates the big job numbers its leaders says it […]
Posted inOpinion
One Day at a Time
The week in review
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, […]
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
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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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
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 […]
Posted inOpinion
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.
Posted inOpinion
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.
