Editorial

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.

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.

A travesty. An atrocity. An abomination. A disgrace. A debacle. A fiasco.
Those were just a few of the more printable descriptions applied to Monday night’s NFL contest between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers, destined hereafter to be known as The Game That Will Live in Infamy.
In case you didn’t catch the shabby spectacle live or on video, here’s what happened:
Green Bay 12, Seattle 7. Seahawks have the ball on the Packer 24 with eight ticks left on the game clock. Seattle QB Russell Wilson heaves a Hail Mary pass into the end zone, where a mob of Seahawks and Packers are waiting. Green Bay defender M.D. Jennings and Seattle receiver Golden Tate leap up in the crowd to make the catch. Jennings grabs it with both hands, but Tate manages to get one hand on it.

Kerry and Deborah Downs have a nice little spread out in Powell Butte, growing 80 acres of hay. Kerry Downs says the farm grosses about $20,000 a year.
But Downs, who pitches stocks in Bend when he’s not wearing overalls and pitching hay down on the farm, would like to make more. He wants permission from Deschutes County to host as many as six weddings a year in his barn, for about $2,000 per.
It won’t be the first time Downs has tried that route for making a bit of cash on the side. County staff have been working with Downs for several years to bring them into compliance with the county and state land use laws that prohibit mass gatherings on land that has been zoned for exclusively for farming.

Central Oregonians like to brag about their clean air, and most of the time the bragging is justified. Last week, though, somebody driving into Bend might have thought he’d taken a wrong turn on I-5 and ended up in Los Angeles.
A yellowish-brown pall hung over town, so thick at times that you could barely make out Pilot Butte through the gunk, much less the Three Sisters and Mount Bachelor. Things got so bad on Sunday morning that the state Department of Environmental Quality briefly listed Bend’s air quality as “unhealthy” – the worst rating. And incredibly, the smoke in Prineville was almost six times as heavy.

Karl Christian Rove oozed into Bend last week. You probably didn’t hear about it because—even though Rove, as architect of the lamentable political career of George W. Bush, is a pretty important figure in 21st century history—his visit didn’t draw any media attention. He made no public appearances, gave no speeches, kissed no babies—luckily for the babies.
Turdblossom (to borrow Bush’s affectionate nickname for him) did, however, find time to have a cozy chat with certain local and regional Republican politicians at the Oxford Hotel downtown.

In the parlance of politics, a “gimmick” is a sneaky ploy your opponent resorts to. When you do it, it’s called “taking a statesmanlike position.”
Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown, a Democrat, and Knute Buehler, the Bend Republican who’s trying to get her job, have been trading jabs over each other’s alleged gimmickry recently. It started with the Brown campaign calling on Buehler to accept a voluntary $1 million campaign spending limit. It’s understandable why Brown would welcome that; despite her advantage of incumbency, Buehler already has raked in almost twice as much as she has.