The Wandering Eye

If you wonder why some Central Oregonians think the word “developer” is a synonym for “parasite,” check out the news stories about Pronghorn that appeared Monday.
Seems the developers of the ritzy “resort” (I’m putting the word in quotation marks because it’s not really a resort but an ultra-high-end housing tract with a couple of golf courses) stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plants – live ones and dead ones – from the adjacent BLM land.

Bend led the nation in declining home prices in the third quarter of 2009, besting (if that’s the right word) even Las Vegas, according to the IHS Global Insight index.
Oregonian real estate blogger Ryan Frank writes that IHS’s latest “House Prices in America” report shows home prices in Bend dropping 5.

An Oregon State University economist has come out with a report pretty much demolishing the conservative propaganda that Oregon is Tax Hell and two measures on the January ballot will make it much worse.
William Jaeger compared tax rates in Oregon with those of other states over a period of 17 years and found that, as a percentage of personal income, the nationwide average state tax rate has remained a fairly steady 6.

After several weeks of non-suspense, former Portland Trail Blazer Chris Dudley dropped the other sneaker this morning and announced that he’s seeking the Republican nomination for governor.
Dudley made the announcement in an auditorium at Self Enhancement Inc.

Could earthquakes in Switzerland throw a geothermal energy project in Central Oregon’s Newberry Crater area off the rails?
About a month ago AltaRock Energy got a $25 million grant (on top of an earlier $36 million) from the US Department of Energy toward development of a plant that will produce power by tapping natural heat deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
AltaRock’s process, called “enhanced geothermal,” involves drilling wells up to 10,000 feet deep, pumping cold water down them to create small cracks in the bedrock, then withdrawing heated water from these fissures to turn turbines.

Senate Democrats are hopeful they have a filibuster-proof majority in favor of a health care reform package that would offer Medicare to people as young as 55 – but Jeff Merkley could throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Oregon's junior senator told Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein that the bill in its present form would worsen Oregon's health care problems because doctors in the state are woefully underpaid for Medicare patients and are increasingly unwilling to treat them.

The Wandering Eye is as liberal as the next guy – probably more so – but when liberals get on their self-righteous political correctness kick, they frankly give me a pain in the ass.
Down in Ashland, also known as the Berkeley of Southern Oregon, a fracas erupted this holiday season over whether an evergreen tree (actually, a fake evergreen tree) in a public school was a Christmas tree or a “giving tree.

Props to Kari Chisholm of Blue Oregon for making a point that progressives should make a lot more often: Contrary to conservative dogma, money the government takes in from taxes does not vanish from the economy and disappear into some black hole.
“Let’s be absolutely clear about this: Every single dollar that the state ‘sucks out’ of the private economy will be pumped right back into the private economy,” Chisholm writes.

Oregonians are weird. And the longer I live here (almost 25 years now) the weirder they seem.

It looks like the opponents of Measures 66 and 67 have found their Dorothy English. Her name is Carol Marie Leuthold, and she and her husband Dan have a dairy farm in Tillamook.