The Boot

On Monday, longtime Sisters City Manager Eileen Stein resigned (read: was removed by a new city council elected last November). According to former Sisters city councilors, this wasn’t the first time the city council there had considered ousting her for issues of trustworthiness and competency. What is baffling, though, is that the terms of her […]

Deschutes County wants voters to reauthorize the 911 district's temporary local option property tax of 23 cents per $1,000 assessed valuation. Its campaign message is simple: It's what you pay now, and if we don't get it, we'll have to reduce our services and require public safety agencies to take up the slack. That's not […]

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.

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.

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.