The Boot

Legal scholars have a saying that hard cases make bad law. Political scientists should have a version that says hard times make bad policies.

Bend, like the rest of the country, is in the midst of some hard times and they're likely to get even harder. To help them figure out how to help the local economy, three of Bend's city councilors-elect - Jeff Eager, Tom Greene and Kathie Eckman - decided to hold a "forum" last week with local business leaders.
Their motive might have been noble, but their method wasn't.
To begin with, it doesn't appear that any worthwhile new ideas emerged from the 40 or so businesspersons who attended. According to news accounts, the meeting seems to have been mostly a bitch session at which the business leaders voiced standard and familiar themes: "All our problems are the fault of Big Bad Government" and "Whatever you do to help the economy, don't ask us to pay for it."

There's something for nearly every Oregonian to not like about Gov. Ted
Kulongoski's proposed budget for the next biennium. Faced with sagging
tax revenues, Kulongoski wants to raise state fees on a whole passel of
people and activities.

Hunting licenses and fishing licenses will
cost a lot more. Nurses and psychologists will pay more for their
professional registration. Campers who stay in state parks will see
their nightly fees nearly double. The cost of a death certificate will
almost triple.
Even falconers will see the cost of their licenses (yes, you need a license to hunt with a bird in Oregon) jump by 125%.
The
most onerous and odious of the increases Kulongoski is proposing,
though, is raising the fee to register a motor vehicle. It's now $54
for two years; Kulongoski wants to triple it to $162.

Everybody - well, almost - loves green energy. It holds the promise of cutting our reliance on imported oil, making our environment cleaner and reducing global warming.
But all colors of green are not the same, and a wind energy project being pushed in southeastern Oregon near Steens Mountain is a rather noxious shade.
Actually, to be technical, it's three wind energy projects, not one. Under state law, any project that will generate 105 megawatts of power or more has to be reviewed by the state Energy Facility Siting Committee. So the developers of the Steens project, a Washington-based outfit called Columbia Energy Partners, have set up three dummy corporations and are presenting proposals for three separate "wind farms," each producing 104 megawatts.

Bend’s Manifest DestinyThe Bend real estate market is in the crapper. What would you do about it? Well, how about putting 9,000 more acres of developable land into the local inventory by bringing it inside the city's Urban Growth Boundary?
Sound a little nuts to you? Yeah, us too. But that's what the Bend Planning Commission has recommended, and what the city council will be debating later this month.

As late as last summer the commission was contemplating bringing a far more modest expanse - about 4,900 acres - inside the UGB. But then the real estate / development / builder lobby spoke up - including some real heavy hitters like Brooks Resources, the Day family (Hooker Creek) and the Miller family (Miller Tree Farm).

Where’s the moat?A Wikipedia search for the origins of the Electoral College yields the following interesting factoid:
"Germanic law stated that the German king led only with the support of his nobles. Thus, Pelayo needed to be elected by his Visigothic nobles before becoming king of Asturias, and so did Pepin the Short by Frankish nobles in order to become the first Carolingian king. While most other Germanic nations went to a strictly hereditary system by the first millennium, the Holy Roman Empire could not, and the King of the Romans, who would become Holy Roman Emperor or at least Emperor-elect, was selected by the college of prince-electors from the late Middle Ages until 1806 (the last election actually took place in 1792)."

Somebody - we think it might have been Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - said that freedom of speech means freedom not just for the speech we like but, more importantly, freedom for the speech we don't like.
In this frenzied presidential election campaign, hysteria is mounting on both sides and people are showing their dislike for other people's exercise of freedom of speech in some rather alarming ways.