Glass Slipper

Two weeks ago, in a fit of irony overload, we gave Chris Telfer a mock glass slipper instead of the real one that we reserve for those folks in the community who continue to unravel the mess that former OLCC Regional Manager Jason Evers left in his wake. Initially disappointed by Telfer's seeming lack of accomplishment this legislative period, we overlooked that her willingness to meet with licensees helped to form the collective basis and network of trust that aided in the DOJ investigation that removed Evers.

John Day is a pretty little Eastern Oregon town that up until last month was known mostly for the good fishing in the John Day River and good fossil-hunting in the nearby John Day Fossil Beds.
But in mid-February, a group that embraces fossilized political and racial ideas cast an unwelcome spotlight on John Day. Paul R. Mullet, who calls himself the national director of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations group, breezed into town in a swastika-bedecked shirt and let it be known that he was looking at some real estate. The group is planning to relocate from northern Idaho, he said, and John Day looks like the perfect place to establish its new headquarters.
Aryan Nations is a virulently racist white supremacist organization founded in the 1970s and originally headquartered in northern Idaho. It's anti-black, anti-Semitic and anti-Hispanic, and dreams of creating a “Fourth Reich,” a whites-only “Aryan” nation within the United States.

Many people think the Catholic Church's position on contraception is Medieval. They're wrong – it's several centuries older than that.
“Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted,” wrote Clement of Alexandria in 195 AD.
The church's thinking has changed very little in the roughly 19 centuries since then, so we have no doubt Clement of Alexandria would have approved of the decision announced this week by Robert Vasa, bishop of the Diocese of Baker, to end the church's 92-year relationship with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend.

To a chemist, pseudoephedrine is “a sympathomimetic drug of the phenethylamine and amphetamine classes.” To a cold or allergy sufferer, it's the stuff in Sudafed and similar remedies that unstuffs his stuffy nose.
But to somebody who wants to cook up some methamphetamine, pseudoephedrine is a main ingredient. And that's a problem.
Small-scale meth manufacturers are a menace, and not just because they make meth. The meth-making process involves a stew of chemicals – phosphorus, ether, mercury, hidrotic acid – that's potentially explosive and creates a hazard for anybody who goes near it. Cleaning up this toxic gunk after a meth lab is busted costs thousands of dollars.

It really must be the season of peace and goodwill if timber company executives like John Shelk are posing for photo ops with environmentalists like Andy Kerr, the longtime nemesis of Oregon loggers.
That's what happened last week when Kerr and other environmentalists joined with representatives of the timber industry to announce agreement on a plan to resolve their differences and start bringing logs back into Eastern Oregon mills. Maybe the spirit of the season deserves some of the credit, but the bulk of it goes to Sen. Ron Wyden.

It's a rare thing in human affairs to put together a complicated deal that makes everybody happy. But the Oregon Natural Desert Association, Young Life and the BLM seem to have pulled it off.
Young Life is an organization that runs a non-denominational Christian camp for young people. The camp is located near the remote town of Antelope not far from the John Day River. The site probably is most famous (or notorious) as the former home of the Rajneeshee cult commune.