Remember a year ago when Parent of the Year candidates across this great land put down their Diet Cokes
Call It Indoctrination
Posted inOpinion
Corralling the Downtown Parking Problem
Never mind Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shiites, Bosnians and Serbs – the longstanding war between bicycle partisans and automobile loyalists can get as nasty as any of them, though fortunately it's rarely as violent.
Posted inOpinion
Freedom Ain't Free, FOX goes gray, Resort Rules and Your SAT results
Freedom!
The United Organization of Angry Rural Old People, also known as the “Tea Party,” gathered in Redmond last weekend for something called the American Freedom Festival. The event featured music from the ironically named band One Hot Mess and “patriotic speeches” about how America as a whole needs to hop in the DeLorean with Doc Brown and head back to the founding of our great nation when everything was perfect because, you know, people followed the Constitution… and had wooden teeth and slaves. The event drew what appeared to be about 100 people, or using the Glenn Beck Scale of Crowd Estimation, roughly 28,000 people.
Posted inOpinion
Letter of the Week: GOP Is Slowing the Recovery
This week's letter comes from Nathan Glover of Central Oregon Jobs with Justice. Thanks for the letter, Nathan. You can pick up your winnings, a pint of cask-aged Mirror Mirror at our office, 704 NW Georgia.
It's been two years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a global financial meltdown. The big Wall Street banks were bailed out and are now making record profits and major corporations are sitting on $8 trillion, the biggest pile of cash reserves since 1963. For working families, the crisis did not start in 2008. They've been getting what Steven Greenhouse called “the Big Squeeze” for decades, as the income gap between the rich and the rest of us tripled. These families are continuing to bear the brunt of the economic crisis.
Posted inOpinion
Kozak Is The Man For 54
Do we want to be led down that same path that we seem to go each and every election year? We are bombarded by the media telling us whom the right candidate is for our best interests. I believe it is time for us as a community to stop and really think about the best candidate that would look out for our interests and not the party line's interests. Judy Stiegler has proven time and again that the only vote that she knows how to cast is a “YEA” vote when it comes to raising the taxes on her constituents. It is clear that we cannot afford another term of Steigler economics.
Posted inNews
Built to Spill Coming to Bend
For the past couple of months, whenever I’ve checked the Random Presents website, I’ve been bummed to see that indie rock heroes Built to Spill were playing in Ashland in November, but not in Bend. But guess what happened when I checked the site today?
Yup, I saw that Built to Spill is, indeed, playing in Bend on November 11 at the Domino Room.
Posted inMusic
Midwest Invasion: Atmosphere brings all their friends to Bend
Atmosphere, the indie hip-hop super group coming to Midtown on Tuesday, is one of those groups whose fans are just as cool as they are. More of a College Radio Top 10 chart topper than Top 40, Atmosphere is about as introspective as hip-hop can be without getting all emo. That hipster girl who you've seen studying race and pop culture at Thump? She's an Atmosphere fan. So is her professor, probably.
The group, which includes frontman Slug, producer Ant, Erick Anderson on keys and Nate Collis on guitar, has been making waves on the underground rap scene since 1994 and is a major reason you should head to Midtown on Tuesday. Their new album, a double EP titled To All My Friends, Blood Makes the Blade Holy, will only be for sale digitally on iTunes and Amazon, with CDs sold exclusively during the tour and through Fifth Element (fifthelementonline.com).
Posted inNews
Folk Fest 2010: back in the groove in Sisters
A year ago the annual Sisters Folk Festival (SFF) appeared to veer off mission in its pursuit of a younger audience (the current audience average age has to be in the late fifties) booking indie music bands and one group that sounded like they'd be more at home playing a frat party at OSU than at a folk festival.
Of course, there were some great folk singing staples mixed in and plenty of not overly amped music, but the trend to new music grated and didn't bode well for the venerable festival.
Posted inNews
Chelm-on-the-Deschutes Revisited: The Curb Ramp Fiasco
The humor writer Sholem Aleichem set many of his funny tales in Chelm, an Eastern European village whose inhabitants, according to folklore, were all complete idiots.
For instance, here’s a Chelm joke:
Two men from Chelm got jobs on a construction site.
Posted inNews
A Troubling Rise in Oregon Suicides
Oregon is ahead of the nation in at least one category, but it isn’t anything to rejoice over: The state’s suicide rate is more than one-third higher than the national rate, according to a report released yesterday by Oregon Public Health.
The report, titled ”Suicides in Oregon: Trends and Risk Factors,” found that in the period from 2000 to 2006 the suicide rate in Oregon was 15.