The Boot

Pfc. Aaron Collette came home to Bend from Iraq in June to a warm welcome from family and friends. But the welcome from JPMorgan Chase wasn't so friendly: It was taking away the home his father, Tim Collette, bought five years ago.
Tim Collette, a building contractor, put $125,000 down and took out a $230,000 mortgage. He made the payments faithfully for 15 months. But then the real estate market crashed and burned, taking Collette's business with it – and Collette became one of the millions of Americans facing the loss of their homes in the Great Recession.

An estimated 2,600 people die in America each year as a result of drivers being distracted by using cell phones. This summer, 16-year-old Forrest Cepeda of Bend apparently became one of them.
Police say Cepeda and a friend were biking along Reed Market Road on July 25 when he was struck by a pickup truck driven by Erik Conn, 28, of LaPine. According to police, Conn was trying to slow the pickup – which was towing a trailer – to avoid hitting a vehicle in front of him when he lost control and slid across the narrow shoulder into the path of the two boys.
Cepeda's friend managed to leap out of the way. Cepeda wasn't quick enough, or lucky enough. He was dead at the scene.

In ancient times, the legends say, potentates used to execute messengers who dared to bring them bad news. The custom of literally killing the messenger appears to have died out, but they're still metaphorically killing messengers in Deschutes County.
The Deschutes Economic Alliance is a group that's trying to find some way for Deschutes County to claw its way out of the abyss it fell into when the real estate bubble its economy was floating on popped. To aid in that task it's hired some consultants, one of them being Southern California-based Bill Watkins.

When a merchant uses bait-and-switch tactics on customers, it's sleazy. If the government used bait-and-switch tactics on young men and women to entice them to join the armed forces and put their lives at risk, it's so far beyond “sleazy” there's no adjective strong enough to describe it.
Chelsea Wells was a 17-year-old high school senior in Milton Freewater when the National Guard pulled what looks like a bait-and-switch move on her. The bait was the promise of a $20,000 recruitment bonus for agreeing to become an intelligence analyst, a “critical skills” position. Half was to be paid when Chelsea signed up, the other half after three years of service.
Chelsea collected the first $10,000. But when she tried to collect the rest of the bonus in 2010, the National Guard told her she could forget about it. The position she was recruited for “was not on the critical skills list on the date of [her] enlistment,” the Guard's pencil-pushers claimed, so she wasn't going to get the second $10,000.

We swore we were going to resist the temptation to write any light bulb jokes about this topic, but we just couldn't stop ourselves. So here goes:
Q. How many votes does it take to screw the American consumer?
A. Fifty-two more than the Republicans had this week.
On Tuesday, the House defeated the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act – BULB, get it? – the Republican Party's latest offensive in its War on the 21st Century. The BULB Act would have repealed the part of a 2007 law that imposes more stringent energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.

Smoking and chewing tobacco are unhealthy things to do – nobody disagrees with that. And breathing secondhand smoke is unhealthy too – virtually nobody disagrees with that.
Motivated (presumably) by a noble desire to discourage students from smoking or chewing and to protect non-smokers from exposure to secondhand smoke, Central Oregon Community College appears to be on the verge of approving a “tobacco-free campus” policy. Praiseworthy as the motive may be, the policy goes way too far.
COCC already has taken strong measures to make sure non-smokers aren't subjected to unwanted tobacco fumes. Smoking isn't allowed inside any of the campus buildings at any time. People who want to light up have to do it in one of the parking lots or on the street.

A thing can be cheap – or even free – and still be no bargain. That's the case with Rep. Greg Walden's Crooked River bill, and that's why we're giving it THE BOOT.
Walden has dubbed his measure, HB 2060, the “Central Oregon Jobs and Water Security Act.” But it's far from clear that it would create any jobs, and it definitely wouldn't do anything meaningful to enhance the water security of the fish living in the Crooked River.
The reservoir behind Bowman Dam in Prineville is a rather unusual case: It holds 80,000 more acre-feet of water than has been allocated for irrigation and other downstream uses. Putting that water into the river would help fish thrive and multiply, which would improve the fishing and encourage more people to come and fish, which would be a boost to the local economy.