The Wandering Eye

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The weather might not show it, but the birds know it: Autumn is here, and they’re heading south along the Pacific Flyway, the main migratory route along the West Coast.
The Pacific Flyway runs right over Central Oregon, and the autumn and spring migrations bring entertaining and colorful tourists to my bird feeders – white-crowned sparrows, red-eyed towhees, evening grosbeaks, rufous hummingbirds and more.

The Wall Street Journal has published a first-rate piece on Bend's economic debacle, using it as a microcosm for what's going on nationally.
The story (pretty long, but well worth reading) begins by describing anecdotally how the collapse of Bend's economy has created “slack” – a gap between the economy's productive capacity and what's actually being used:
“A year and a half of recession has left local manufacturer Bright Wood Corp.

Our local daily newspaper offers a great editorial rant this morning about an impending socialist menace, warning ominously of “the specter of a vast and sprawling federal bureaucracy [that] is too horrible to contemplate.”
Is the editorial attacking liberal health care reform ideas like single-payer or the “public option”? Nope – it's attacking federal aid to education, and it came from the paper's archives of 1961.

A freshman senator is expected to defer to his seniors, make no waves, and rise to address the chamber only on such controversial topics as the virtues of motherhood and the flag.
But not Oregon's Jeff Merkley, who came across as a bit of a Milquetoast during his campaigns but has become one of the Senate's firebrands on the subject of health care reform.

Barring something totally unexpected, it looks more and more like John Kitzhaber will be the once and future governor of Oregon.
At a press conference yesterday the former two-term Democratic governor announced he's picked up a slew of endorsements from prominent state Democrats, including Treasury Secretary Ben Westlund, Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo and Attorney General John Kroger as well as 17 of the 54 Democratic state legislators, including Bend's Judy Steigler.

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