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Being shocked with a Taser is no joke. Nearly 300 cases of people dying after being Tased by police have been documented.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the old joke says. Apparently it runs through Salem too.
I've lost track of who authors "The BOOT" column, but it matters not. The column titled "Civil Union Victory" on Page 7 of the Feb. 7 issue states that Judge Mosman's ruling related to "an initiative to repeal Oregon's civil union law for the ballot." There are two things wrong with that: 1) It was a petition for a referendum to kill HB2007 before it became law, and 2) you cannot repeal an act (HB2007) before it becomes law!!
The Taser is the ideal law enforcement tool - a weapon that can bring an unruly, maybe dangerous suspect down at a safe distance without causing death or any lasting harm.
Justice delayed is justice denied, says the old maxim. But we believe hundreds of gay and lesbian couples in Oregon would disagree. For them justice was still something to celebrate, even though it had been delayed a little while.
This is what heaven looks like to your typical overactive Bendite.Sir Edmond Hillary
dies at 88
On May 29, 1953, Sir Edmond Hillary
and Tenzing Norgay became the first mountain climbers to stand on top
of the tallest peak on Earth. "Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation
- these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first man to
stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others have failed.
But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise," reported Hillary,
attempting to sum up his climb. Hillary always considered himself and
his accomplishments as ordinary.
After reaching the summit of
Mt. Everest, Hillary conquered more difficult missions in Nepal. This
country houses Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the Land, which Tibetan
speakers refer to as Mt. Everest. In 1962 he founded the Himalayan
Trust, a humanitarian nonprofit that raised $250,000 a year to help
build hospitals, health clinics, airfields, and schools.
Imagine a public school system in which parents have to pay extra if they want their kids to have up-to-date textbooks instead of 20-year-old ones. Or if they want them to learn algebra and geometry instead of stopping with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
For a town that gets a good amount of snow on a pretty predictable basis, Bend is singularly inept at dealing with the stuff. If you live on a side street, in most winters you stand a better chance of seeing a polar bear going past your house than a plow.
Oregonians have a long and proud tradition of being ahead of the curve when it comes to social and political reforms. One of the most important of those reforms was the creation of the initiative process back in 1902. The idea was that if the legislature was too stupid, cowardly or corrupt to pass laws that the people wanted, the people could do it themselves through the ballot box.
It was a good idea at the time, and it was quickly copied by more than 20 other states. But over the past century - and especially in the last 20 years or so - the initiative process has been perverted into something its progressive creators would hardly recognize.
The queen of meanLeona Helmsley, the developer and hotel owner who became an icon of the greed-is-good '80s, died Monday, not as the result of having a house dropped on her by a tornado but of natural causes. She was 87.
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