The Wandering Eye

State Sen. Chris Telfer (R-Bend) continues to insist there are hidden billions that the state could tap into to erase its budget deficit without a tax increase – even though the state Department of Administrative Services says, in effect, that she's full of it.

The anti-Measure 67 forces continue to have a real problem finding a bona fide small business in Oregon that actually would be hurt by it.
In early December they mass-mailed a “personal letter” from Tillamook dairy owner Carol Marie Leuthold expressing fear that M67 would “hurt our farm and the families it supports.

The City of Bend is talking about creating a no-destination-resort buffer zone around the city, and the Central Oregon Association of Realtors doesn’t like that idea one bit.
Deschutes County is reviewing and revising its rules for where destination resorts can go, and city staff wants to prohibit them within five miles of the city’s Urban Growth Boundary.

At least one prominent Oregon Republican is going to vote for Measures 66 and 67: former Labor Commissioner Jack Roberts, who gave the tax measures his reluctant endorsement in an op-ed piece in The Oregonian Thursday.
It’s “misleading to label Measures 66 and 67 ‘job-killing tax increases,’” wrote Roberts, who was labor commissioner from 1995 to 2002 and now is executive director of the Lane Metro Partnership, an economic development agency.

Jason Evers, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission official who was removed from his Bend post for being overzealous, has been transferred to lovely Nyssa,  a Malheur County town of 3,000 people that’s about as close to Siberia as you can get and still be in Oregon.
This is the second time in Evers’s OLCC career that he’s been “voluntarily” sent to Nyssa (nickname: “Thunder Egg Capital of the World,” and no, I didn’t make that up) after overstepping his authority.

If you like to walk around naked, don’t try it in Ashland anymore: The city council there has enacted a ban on public nudity.
The council adopted the citywide ban Tuesday night by a 4-2 vote despite a warning from the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union that it violates the Oregon Constitution’s protection of free speech.

As inevitable as death and taxes, and about as welcome, is The Bulletin’s Annual Pothole Story, which appeared on this morning’s front page.
Under the headline “What’s with all the potholes in Bend?” the story, accompanied by a neat little graphic, explained how potholes form and why Bend has so many of them.

USC won’t be in the Rose Bowl this year. Neither will UCLA, UC-Berkeley or Stanford.

Carla Axtman on the BlueOregon blog tears into state Sen. Chris Telfer for peddling some fuzzy numbers in her proposed “solution” to the state’s budget problems.

It's an ancient tradition among columnists (and their Internet Age descendants, the bloggers) to present joke “gifts” to public figures at Christmas. For instance, a heart for Dick Cheney, a brain for Sarah Palin and a pair of cojones for Barack Obama.