The Wandering Eye

When Abe Lincoln talked about “government of the people, by the people and for the people” at the Gettysburg battlefield in November 1863, it’s a pretty safe bet he wasn’t including corporations in his definition of “people.”
But in January 2010, a bitterly divided US Supreme Court decided  that corporations have the same free-speech rights as people – meaning they can pour unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns.

The front page of the Local section of today’s Bulletin brought more proof (not that any was needed) that the bubble years are over for Central Oregon: Enrollment dropped in all of the region’s school districts over the past year.
Bend-LaPine enrollment this school year is down 0.

The conservation group Greenpeace has criticized Facebook for using coal-derived power at its planned Prineville data center instead of more Earth-friendly alternatives. This week The Bulletin fired back with a defense of Facebook, noting that Greenpeace’s power isn’t 100% green either.

Bad news for anybody betting on a quick real estate rebound: The Commerce Department announced yesterday that new home sales fell to a 50-year low in January.
In news that surprised the so-called experts, purchases of new homes dropped 11.

The circus might be coming to town in John Day, and people in John Day don’t like it.
According to reports in the local weekly paper, the Blue Mountain Eagle, the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations group is looking to relocate from Athol in northern Idaho and has been scoping out John Day as a likely new home base.

One of the main tenets of journalistic ethics is that while a newspaper is free to express opinions on politics in its editorials, it shouldn’t let its political agenda drive its news coverage. There’s supposed to be a firm, clear line between the editorial page and the news columns.

In between telecasts of the Winter Olympics, I spent much of the past week following the fascinating saga of Matt Wingard's plagiarism.
Wingard, a Republican state representative from Wilsonville, rose to his feet in the House last Friday to deliver some remarks casting doubt on the reality of global warming.

The Federal Reserve has released a report that seems to show Bend home prices have moved more or less back in line with those in other Oregon cities.
The report, titled “Trends in Delinquencies and Foreclosures in Oregon,” includes a bunch of interesting graphs, including one that tracks the rise and (in Bend’s case) precipitous fall in home prices from 2000 through the end of 2009 in the cities of Portland, Salem, Medford and Bend.

In the poker game of life, young Brady Hardin drew a lousy hand.
Born in St.

New York Times columnist Tim Egan has written a piece that should be read – no, memorized – by every city councilor and other public official in Bend.
Egan looks at Northern California’s San Joaquin Valley – a region he calls “Slumburbia” – and paints an ugly picture of the economic and human debris left behind by the receding tide of the real estate boom.