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7:50
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Ky Karnecki’s request to be allowed to continue operating his Wild Mountain food stand through the winter creates a quandary for a city that is trying to project a business-friendly image while requiring everybody to play by the same set of rules.
Just based on the facts, the situation’s pretty clear-cut. Karnecki applied for and was granted a temporary operating permit for a seasonal business. That permit is expired. He can apply for a new one. End of story, right?
If the city grants back-to-back-to-back temporary permits, the business is, in effect, permanent — and Karnecki can’t make the property improvements required for permanence. Letting that slide wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the businesses in Sisters that have to play by the rules.
But maybe, some say, food stands like Karnecki’s should be treated as a different class of business and allowed to operate year-round. That would require a development code change, which isn’t going to happen in a day or two. Should Karnecki be able to stay open until the planning commission says yea or nay on making that change?
Karnecki says he’s up against it; can’t keep going at all if he can’t keep going through winter. Sisters hardly wants to see another business fail. But if you start making exceptions to clear-cut regulations, where do you stop? Is it the city’s problem that Karnecki didn’t make enough during his operating season to sustain himself? What about other businesses that are struggling? What should the city do to help them?
The city council should certainly make time for Karnecki to make his case — and it looks like that’s going to happen at their Thursday, January 12, meeting. It might be helpful for the citizenry to weigh in.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:16
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
A high school teacher is under fire in New Jersey for taking to her Facebook page to argue that “homosexuality is a perverted spirit” and complaining about recognition of October as LGBT History Month in school.
A Bronx High School principal posted a Facebook profile picture of herself slathered in chocolate syrup dancing with a half-naked man. (She’s also under fire for allegedly improper crediting of students).
A couple of years ago, a teacher in Georgia was fired because of European vacation pictures that showed her holding beer or wine glasses (she said she was drinking but not intoxicated). Her page also included an unspecified expletive.
A first-grade teacher faces losing her job after posting on Facebook a comment about being “a warden for future criminals.”
Raises some interesting questions. Are educators more constrained than the rest of us when it comes to freedom of expression in their off-work lives? Sisters Schools Superintendent Jim Golden says yes.
“Like it or not, like a judge or a policeman, you’re held to a higher standard,” he told The Nugget.
But what standard, exactly? I can see disciplining or firing a teacher whose comments indicate a serious bias against a group of students he or she is supposed to serve.
“If I say something racist, I’m probably going to get fired,” Golden says. “And I probably deserve to be fired.”
OK, I get that.
But what if you’ve just had a crappy day and pop off about your students being “future criminals”? Is letting off steam something to kill a career over? If the teacher said that to a friend over a stiff drink in a bar (and I’m sure every teacher has said something like it at least once) it wouldn’t have been any kind of big deal. Because it’s on Facebook, it became a big deal.
And raising a pint of Guinness in Dublin and letting your friends see the pix on Facebook? Come on! What’s wrong with that?
Sisters School District does not have a specific policy about teachers’ use of social media. Golden said such uses fall under state standards and practices guidelines — but the standards of an “ethical educator” don’t address this area specifically either.
You could argue a couple of different sides to this question. On one hand, teachers should be able to have lives outside the classroom and away from their students. Those lives might even be R-rated. They should be able to express their opinions and let their hair down.
But Superintendent Golden is right — you’re never NOT a teacher, even when you’re off duty. Comes with the job. And you’re still a teacher on your Facebook page.
Social media is a useful tool, perhaps, though it also seems like a gigantic time-suck and an arena custom-made for preening narcissists. It certainly is not a secure venue in which to vent your spleen or show off your chocolate-covered dance moves. You can’t help wondering with these and some Twitter scandals, “What were they thinking?” Maybe there’s some weird dissociative aspect to the Internet that encourages people to post and say things that they would think twice about showing or saying in mixed company.
Sisters School District may not have a social media policy, but maybe a good one would be: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t show or say at a school board meeting.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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12:44
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
A friend of mine who is actively involved in veterans' affairs sent me a link to the Web site of folk singer/songwriter
Jason Moon. He's an Iraq War veteran who has struggled with PTSD and is using his music to heal himself and for outreach to others with similar problems.
Well worth a listen:
www.jasonmoon.org.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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12:19
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Just listened to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” piece entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”
The premise was that the right has, over a period of decades, come to dominate the political discourse through greater message discipline, building better “movement” infrastructure and the development of bully pulpits including talk radio, the Internet and niche magazines. It was all interesting and the analysis was fine — as far as it went.
But it missed what I consider to be the biggest reason that the left is on its heels, despite putting Barack Obama in the White House in a landslide in 2008. That reason is cultural: the left has allowed itself to be perceived as effete, elitist and anti-patriotic. That’s a caricature, of course, but many on the left seem unable to stop sharpening the pencil that draws it.
Two local cases in point:
Back in 2004, I was having a conversation with a local Democratic Party activist who must have assumed we were of like mind because we both disliked George W. Bush and opposed the Iraq war. This woman fulminated against all the “flag wavers,” essentially depicting patriotic Americans as dupes and rubes. I said, “I hate to tell you this, but I have a flag pole in my front yard and I fly the American flag every day.”
“But… but…” she spluttered, “You read books!”
No kidding. She really said that.
More recently, my friend Jack McGowan gave a beautiful, heartfelt invocation during the Sisters Folk Festival’s community show on Sunday, September 11, remembering the attacks of 10 years before and his experience as a member of Oregon’s Flight for Freedom, which went to New York City to show solidarity with that wounded metropolis. He closed with the third stanza of “America the Beautiful”: Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears.
Later, someone expressed to me some mild discomfort at the patriotic tenor of Jack’s words. Huh?
The American Left has alienated itself from its natural work-for-a-living constituency because it has allowed itself to be portrayed as anti-American. And that, I’m afraid, is because some on the left are anti-American. Too bad, because America needs a genuine progressive voice to continue to ensure that the blessings of liberty are extended to all its citizens, to promote the access to opportunity and the principle of the common weal that are essential to making the pursuit of happiness more than a chimera for the vast bulk of our population.
Back in ’04, Howard Dean said his party needed to be talking to the guy with the Confederate flag on his pickup truck bumper. He was right. Of course he got so much crap for it that he climbed down. By 2008, candidate Obama was talking to a San Francisco fundraising crowd about folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion.
Well, if you’re trying to come across as an elitist snob, that’s a pretty good job of it. That’s how the left has ceded the field to the likes of W — a blueblood born-on-third-base aristocrat posing as some kind of regular guy. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.
I’ve seen this before. I went to college in Santa Cruz and my girlfriend at the time went to Berkeley, so I was exposed to plenty of idiots who claimed to speak for “the people” yet obviously despised them. Until those kinds of voices are marginalized, until the American Left embraces the “American” part of that moniker, there will never again be a successful progressive movement in this country. Who wants to work with people who look down on them?
And until there are real countervailing sources of power, the looters will continue to pillage a once-great nation.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:13
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I laid a bum trip on my brother yesterday, as the stock market plunged 630 points. I called him up and opined that the S&P credit downgrade was just a milepost on the road to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Cheerfully, of course.
Not sure it was appreciated. He’s a small business owner trying to navigate the shoals and buffeting winds of our nasty economic condition. A dose of “we are well-and-truly screwed” isn’t especially helpful.
I do that a lot. Can’t help it; I’m a cultural pessimist. Being a student of history will do that to you. After all, it’s all about picking through the ash heap of nations and civilizations that flourished, flowered and fell. Unfortunately, the U.S. keeps throwing up mileposts on the highway to oblivion.
More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight and more than 20 percent qualify as obese. Before anyone accuses me of “fatism,” let me state right here that I’m not advocating government intervention in people’s lifestyle choices. But criminy, folks! How can you create a vigorous culture when you can’t do a pushup? The burdens of obesity-related health problems on our health care system are, well, huge. We all pay for this, one way or another.
America is merely average in international education rankings, which doesn’t bode well for our potential leadership in an information-based economy. A shocking number of people lack basic communication and mathematical skills. This ain’t good, people.
Then there’s the national debt. Sovereign debt is a huge problem across the developed world; we’re not alone here. But it’s grating (if unsurprising) to see a problem that requires wise policy decisions and concerted effort degenerate into a farcical American partisan political circus. I don’t believe for a minute that the folks we send to congress — most of them at least — don’t recognize that getting out of this debt hole will require genuine entitlement reform (that’s where the big money is) and higher taxes. But both left and right are so wedded to zero-sum ideological positions that a comprehensive tackling of the nation’s finances is impossible.
S&P may have been out of line in basing their downgrade on a political judgment (and what's with a $2 trillion math error in the analysis? See above.) Still, they aren’t wrong. We’re dysfunctional and there is little prospect of that changing. And President Obama has got to stop blaming Bush for everything. Seriously. It doesn’t help.
The pessimist in me teeters on the brink of cynicism — a belief that what’s broken can’t be fixed. We're fat, broke and ignorant and we're gonna stay that way. The patriot in me wants to shout: “Is this the best we can do? No! C’mon, get it together America!” The pragmatist says, just do what you can where you are. That’s my brother’s approach and I think he’s got it right. I’ll try not to throw any more buckets of doom his way.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:13
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Just read that California is going to require the teaching of gay history. Swell.
Not that I have any problem acknowledging that there were gay people doing significant things throughout history, just as there are today (although the concept of “gayness” is a recent development). My problem is with the breaking of history into smaller and smaller subsets, to the point where it’s just a bunch of pieces of tile, not a mosaic.
David McCullough, one of the finest popular historians ever to put pen to paper, had this to say on the subject:
"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."
What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."
In the sixth grade, my daughter spent a lot of time learning about Africa and did a project on Tanzania. She enjoyed it, learned a lot, did well on her project. But she hasn’t learned boo about how her own country works. What she knows, she’s learned from her parents.
I’m all for a broad perspective on the wide and wonderful world, but dammit, it is not xenophobic to expect your child to learn her own history first. Sorry, but it is much more important for her to understand the U.S. Constitution than it is for her to know about Tanzania.
The Department of Education’s 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. That's pathetic.
Most Americans don’t know in which century the Civil War occurred, much less anything about its causes and effects. Even fewer have any grasp of how the American economy developed or how the rights they take for granted were won.
Breaking history free of a fixation on the mainstream triumphalist narrative that dominated for many decades is a good thing. A great thing. But you can’t appreciate “A Renegade History of the United States” (which is wonderful, BTW) if you have no clue about what happened in the first place. If you don’t understand the narrative, a counter narrative or alternative narrative doesn’t have any resonance.
Unless there’s a grasp of the bigger picture, all the pieces of women’s history, African-American history, gay history or whatever, don’t have any context. They are rendered essentially meaningless.
When only 12 percent have a firm grasp of the subject, I’d say that we should stop worrying about teaching gay history and try just teaching history.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:50
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
School board member-elect Andrew Gorayeb’s concerns about Sisters students’ preparation for the SAT exams has sparked an interesting dialogue in Letters to the Editor, with more coming in the June 15 issue.
In a letter last week, Eugene Trahern asked,
“How can students who are near the top of their class in GPA be, to put it bluntly, mediocre at best on the SAT? The answer is that there is such a high emphasis on the arts program in Sisters, that the school district is missing the basics.”
In arguing that “math, science, and good writing skills need to be emphasized at Sisters, not art projects,” I think Mr. Trahern poses a false choice.
Note here that I have a dog in the fight. The Sisters Folk Festival, which I have been involved with for many years, has invested significantly in the creation of a music education outreach program, the Americana Project, and a guitar building program at Sisters High School.
Obviously, I believe in the importance of the arts in education.
I would argue that “math, science, and good writing skills” need to be emphasized at Sisters along with “art projects.” And, properly conducted, those art projects can enhance the learning of those basics.
For centuries the, the ideal of an educated person has been the “Renaissance man,” the scholar-athlete-artist-scientist. What a rich ideal to strive toward. David Crabtree, President of Gutenberg College, told a large assemblage at the proposed Sisters site of the college that he believes that higher education in the U.S. has become synonymous with vocational training and advocated passionately for the value of a liberal arts education. The students I met there impressed me as being very well educated indeed.
The answer to grade-inflation and weak performance on standardized tests is to go after those problems directly, not to tear down aspects of the program that are working well. What is wanted is more rigor in all areas, not a narrowing of focus.
In any case, it is gratifying to see so many people engaging with the question of what education in Sisters schools should be. I encourage them all to turn out to school board meetings, contact their school board members and share their concerns, their passions and their ideas. This district is small enough that, with a high level of engagement, we can make positive changes, despite dwindling resources.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:24
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Looks like President Obama intends to violate the War Powers Act vis a vis U.S. involvement in the NATO action in Libya.
One more brick in the edifice of the Imperial Presidency. I considered President Bush’s war in Iraq to be reckless, misconceived and ultimately dishonest — but Bush did get congressional authorization for his act.
Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway wrote this week in the Washington Post: "If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate war making."
There you have it. From a Nobel Peace Prize honoree, no less.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:56
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Let me first acknowledge for the record that I am insanely jealous.
I mean, despite the handicaps of growing up in the SoCal suburbs, I had a great childhood. I got to be a ridge runner in Wrightwood instead of a suburban mall rat. I was a pretty good baseball player and mostly enjoyed it. I played tennis and had a ball collecting bruises in rollerblade hockey. All good. But I really missed out on something in my athletic endeavors.
WHERE WAS LACROSSE?
I would have loved to play lacrosse — loved it. But from the vantage point of ’70s and ’80s Southern California, lacrosse was an old American Indian game or the obscure sport of elite northeastern colleges. Actually, nobody paid any attention to lacrosse at all.
Now it’s all the rage across the West. I hope the Outlaws know how lucky they are. It seems like they do — the sport sure has caught on.
Lacrosse may be the king of sports — along with hockey, which it resembles. It’s fast, it’s rough, it’s got a true American pedigree. Heck, it even played a tactically significant role in a
major battle in Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763. How cool is that? (Actually, not so cool for the British garrison of Fort Michilimackinac, but c’est la guerre, you know...).
Now lacrosse is a big deal in Sisters. A really big deal. As in bringing more than 1,000 people to town for a tournament, where they eat, sleep and shop, infusing tens of thousands of dollars into a local economy that can really use the shot in the arm.
Hats off to Bill Rexford and Andrew Gorayeb, to Ryan Moffat of the Sisters Parks and Recreation District and all the others who put together last weekend’s Sisters Annual Lacrosse Invitational (SALI).
This is how Sisters’ signature events — from the quilt show to the folk festival to the rodeo — happen. Individuals with a passion for a sport, an art, a way of life, come together manifest something that benefits the broader community.
And for all of us pining away on the sidelines, maybe we can get some novice play for creaky middle-aged guys...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:37
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Justice was a long time coming for Osama bin Laden, but when it came, it came swift and hard, at the hands of elite special operations forces.
It appears that the U.S. put together a nearly perfect operation, following a fragment of intel for years until it paid off with the killing of a mass murderer who sent the world reeling with the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history. (Somehow, it matters a lot that this was done in a toe-to-toe fight, not by an impersonal Hellfire missile strike from a drone. It matters that he knew he was going down.).
As President Obama stated, justice has been served.
It’s probably true that the death of Osama bin Laden is not terribly strategically significant. The strategic picture has shifted over the past decade and most experts doubt that he had much more than a symbolic role to play for most of that decade. Nonetheless, symbols are tremendously important in the psychology of war, especially of the asymmetric kind — and this is a significant symbolic victory, if nothing else.
It’s also true that the execution of a murderer cannot fill the hole left by the deaths he caused. Yet it it is no cold comfort. A thirst for a balancing of the scales, however incomplete, is part of what makes us human. We have an innate, intuitive sense of justice and retribution and there is, for most at any rate, a deep sense of satisfaction in closing the circle, in seeing the man who sowed the wind reap the whirlwind.
The U.S. has taken many a misstep in the war Osama bin Laden declared in 1996, missteps that compromised very real successes in dismantling al Qaeda’s capabilities. We will continue to struggle to extract ourselves from the mire of Iraq and Afghanistan and it is axiomatic that terrorism will always remain a threat.
But in the action of May 1, 2011, the United States — and the civilized world — won a victory worth celebrating. As a friend put it: There’s so many things that we do wrong, so many things that we can do better, but this — this was perfect.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:58
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day, a fellow student of the life of T.E. Lawrence.
We speculated on what Lawrence, a British agent who won lasting fame for his role in the World War I Arab Revolt, would think of the current Arab Revolt. We concluded that Lawrence would be gratified that this Arab Revolt really does belong to the Arabs.
The original Arab Revolt was stoked by the British for their own ends — primarily to defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The British made many promises to support an Arab nation — promises they never intended to keep. And, in the end, they betrayed the revolt, with consequences that echo to this day.
Till the end of his days, Lawrence carried a profound sense of guilt and self-loathing for his collusion in the deception and betrayal of his Arab allies.
The current wave of revolt and revolution sweeping much of the Arab world has tremendous potential to reshape the region. It could all go horribly wrong, too. History doesn’t give much cause for optimism.
But whatever happens, this Arab Revolt must continue to be their own; the peoples of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula must be left to shape their own destiny. Our meddling, even with the best of intentions, will ultimately blow back.
The rebels made that point when Lawrence’s heirs — an MI6 operative under diplomatic cover and several SAS men who arrived in Libya to offer some covert help — were arrested and told “thanks but no thanks.”
No Lawrence of Arabia in this Arab Revolt.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:44
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Watching the Sisters City Council at work is painful. You leave a meeting feeling like you’ve walked a mile through wet concrete. And that’s just watching. I can only imagine how frustrated and tired the councilors themselves must feel.
The council has been high-centered on enacting a water rate increase and new water rate structure for nine months. Around and around and around, no resolution (well, maybe a glimmer of the beginning of a resolution after Thursday’s workshop). This is only the latest in a litany of issues that have bogged the city down over the past couple of years.
Why is it like this? Why is it so hard to get things done?
There are obvious disagreements and personality conflicts on the council, but that kind of thing doesn’t have to create dysfunction — it could make a board more dynamic. There’s something deeper and more fundamental at play here, something that is bigger than Sisters and our particular issues.
I think it’s about trust.
David Asson argued Thursday morning for a five year business plan based on worst-case scenarios — usage (and therefore revenue) declines or stays flat, expenses go up, etc. This approach makes sense — if you trust that if the worst-case scenario doesn’t develop, you won’t spend the money and won’t enact the associated rate increases. That’s where things start falling apart.
Most folks assume that if a government entity has the opportunity to gain revenue through fees or taxes, it will take it, no matter what. Expecting government to refrain from enacting a tax increase or a rate hike is like expecting a lion to refrain from eating a zebra ’cause it had zebra last week and there’s still leftovers in the fridge. And we expect that that government entity will fight tooth and nail to avoid cutting costs, especially personnel costs.
Those assumptions exist regardless of how responsible local government has or has not been in managing its taxpayers’ money. What looks like prudent management to some looks suspicious to many others — because we have become accustomed to thinking that government is an alien, voracious entity that wants to eat our wallet and our groceries.
And we know we’re right to be suspicious, because we’ve seen it happen.
It’s cognitively difficult to separate generalities from specifics when it comes to problems like this. Whenever some reporter gets caught making up a story or a national icon of journalism like Dan Rather lets his agenda make a sucker of him, I cringe. Anything that erodes faith in “the media” affects our work here. None of us are judged solely on our own merits and failings; people’s perceptions are shaped by what they see on the state, national and international level.
Virtually every institution in our society has somewhere at some time given us reason to distrust it — from Wall Street to the White House, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the doors of the church, from the school house to city hall.
But without some level of trust, it’s impossible to get anything done. And we’re seeing the results of that everywhere. I honestly don’t know how we get out of this morass, locally or across the nation.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:22
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
In this week’s syndicated column on page 2 of The Nugget, Joel Brinkley talks about the fortune in American treasure being poured down an aid rat hole in Afghanistan. Specifically, a...
...$760 million program, to strengthen government agencies, was America’s single largest non-military expense in Afghanistan over the last year. All of it was money thrown away.
The mind dulls when confronted with large numbers like that. But $760 million spent another way would allow Washington to give every single public school in the nation’s 25 largest cities almost $200,000 extra this year.
I like Brinkley’s work. He’s got a clear eye and a real passion for exposing corruption. A “crusading journalist” in the best sense of the term. He’s also got a Sisters connection. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cambodian refugee crisis in 1979, an honor he shares with Sisters photographer
Jay Mather.
His juxtaposition of giving money away to corrupt warlords and cleptocrats versus investment in schools is a rhetorical device — but the point is still valid.
We have frittered away billions in aid to corrupt regimes — from Afghanistan to Egypt. We continue to provide aid to Israel as though Israel is the underdog in the Middle East and often get a finger in the eye for thanks.
Meanwhile, we are disinvested in our own country — infrastructure, education, the things that we need to invest in to hold our own in an increasingly competitive global economy.
I do not argue that simply throwing money into education will produce better results. That’s been proven false. But investment that includes the implementation of best practices, financial incentives for improved teaching and outcomes is critical to shore up America’s crumbling education capacity.
Then there’s the sorry state of our transportation infrastructure, and we’re falling behind in our communications infrastructure, too.
This doesn’t have to generate into a left-right, big government vs. private sector brawl. There are a lot of different ways to make the kinds of investments we need. But as long as we’re talking taxpayers’ dollars, I’d rather fix a few potholes than give another cent to the Mubaraks and Karzais of the world...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:18
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
It’s past time to stop using the “N” word.
No, not that one. That one has been pretty thoroughly scrubbed out of our public discourse — and even from the youth version of Huckleberry Finn.
I’m talking about the other insidious “N” word, the one that gets thrown around in politics all the time, by left and right. You know the one: Bush is a Nazi; Obama is a Nazi, blah, blah, blah. It’s become nothing more than a playground insult, unconnected to any real understanding of who the Nazis really were, what National Socialism actually was.
That’s an insult to the memory of the millions of victims of National Socialism. It also obscures any serious inquiry into the nature of its evil. Like the boy who cried wolf, the constant playing of the Nazi card ultimately dulls our sensibilities when actual totalitarian impulses might be identified.
Early in the Iraq war, I listened to an interview the the great World War II historian John Lukacs (“Five Days in London, May 1940;” “The Last European War, September 1939-December 1941”). A caller made a comparison between Saddam Hussein and Hitler and between George Bush and Winston Churchill. In his very gentlemanly way, Lukacs pointed out that Saddam, while an evil tyrant, was no Hitler, and the threat of his fourth-rate military could not be compared to that of the Wehrmacht, c. 1940. Nor could the position of the United States — as the most powerful military force in the history of the world — be compared to that of a beleaguered Britain.
This was clearly lost on the caller, who just wanted his simplistic morality play.
Even serious analysis is tainted by the desire to score contemporary political points.
Lew Rockwell, Jr.’s 2004 essay
“Red State Fascism” was widely touted during the Bush years, often by the left, even though Rockwell is a libertarian. (The “F” word should be held suspect, too). Rockwell’s essay pointed out all the signs of creeping fascism on the right, turning from the libertarian principles of the antigovernment electoral uprising of 1994 toward an authoritarian statism in the Bush era. He wasn’t wrong; there was that kind of shift. But the Tea Party is evidence of a swing of the pendulum back toward cranky libertarianism — so how does that fit the model?
Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” (self-explanatory, right?) is beloved on the right and excoriated on the left. It’s actually a pretty interesting book, despite its polarizing title, cover and hype. But Goldberg has to hedge on his own thesis. See the following from a
Salon.com interview:
What I thought was interesting about your definition of fascism was that nationalism seemed to be missing ... Stanley Payne, whom you quote and say is "considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism," in his definition of fascism, the first thing he says is that it's "a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism." How does that fit with contemporary liberalism, which is often derided as being unpatriotic, anti-American?
That's a perfectly legitimate question. I think classical fascism, the fascism that we all think of when we hear the word "fascism" -- Italy, Germany and to a certain extent Spain, they were ultra-nationalistic, I don't dispute that, I think that is absolutely the case. I just would want to emphasize that that ultra-nationalism comes with an economic program of socialism. There's no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together.
I don't say that contemporary liberalism is the direct heir of Nazism or Italian fascism. I say it's informed by it. It's like its grandniece. It's related, they're in the same family, they share a lot of genetic traits, but they're not the same thing.
OK. It’s got four legs, a tail and a nose. Is it an elephant or a Chihuahua?
An arm’s length list of “yeah, but...” qualifications doesn’t make for good sound bytes. So by the time interesting but limited ideas like Rockwell’s and Goldberg’s hit the mainstream, we end up with labels and fatuous comparisons that create heat but no light.
Maybe by dropping the easy buzzwords, we'll have to come up with more accurate and useful ways of making our arguments. Voluntarily of course. Forcing people to stop using words would be fascist.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters Mayor Lon Kellstrom read a proclamation Thursday night reaffirming the city council’s commitment to civil discourse. The proclamation was in response to the Tucson shootings and the (tenuous) connection with the overheated rhetorical climate in America.
It’s always a good idea to remind ourselves that, as our president is fond of saying, “we can disagree without being disagreeable.” But how realistic is that? In a free society, with a lot of convenient megaphones that amplify our sometimes strident voices, people’s feelings are going to get hurt. And they’re going to get mad. And at a certain point, they’re going to get so mad they can’t think straight.
When our political ideologies are tangled up with our identity, civil discourse is really difficult, maybe impossible.
One of my favorite bloggers is a corrections officer/writer/martial artist/philosopher named
Sgt. Rory Miller. One of his recent
blog entries hits on a phenomenon that I believe explains the tenor of a lot of our national — and even local — political and social discourse.
...Two conversations today, talks where intelligent people lied and math (not fake philosophical math but simple "2x4 is less than 2x8, you realize that, right?" ) was dismissed, and historical documents didn't count. But the most important thing is realizing, whether in criminals or martial artists or debate, that there is an identifier. When the other side gets labeled. When the person says "You are a _________" or "You sound just like___________" Right there the tribal mind is engaged. You are no longer reasoning with a human but trying to reason with a monkey...
With patience and by pretending to not notice dominance games or accepting a label as 'other' I have sometimes given people the space and time to let the monkey brain die down and get back to tangible problems. But rarely, if ever, when the problem was tied directly to their identity.
We’re in a phase where, for many people, politics is tied directly to their identity. People choose sides, and lash their identity to their party, their movement, their tribe. They label those who disagree and perceive them as “other.”
This is by no means a new phenomenon in our history. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more common than periods of broad consensus and “civility.”
No proclamation, no matter how heartfelt, is going to change the climate. Unless... it causes us in that critical moment to pause, to question whether our identity is really under threat, to ask ourselves, “am I a monkey or a man?”
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:27
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This is no way to start a new year and a new city council.
The first act that brand-new city councilor David Asson will take Thursday night will be divisive. It’s not his fault; he’s the presumptive swing vote in a choice between Lon Kellstrom and Sharlene Weed for the mayor’s seat on the council. Asson has already indicated that he will not support Weed in for position, but any way he votes puts him crosswise with somebody right off the bat, despite best intentions to be a unifying force.
By charter, the city council selects the mayor after each election. The idea is that the mayor is merely “first among equals” rather than a separately elected chief. That’s fine for a small city with little politics. But that’s not what Sisters is anymore.
Like it or not, Sisters has politics — strongly held diverging positions on issues ranging from economic development to the manner in which the city should conduct its business. That means the old way of selecting the mayor is outmoded.
Council selection of the mayor sets the body up for infighting and gamesmanship which erodes the body’s ability to work together. Direct election eliminates one divisive element.
The citizens should decide who they want to be the face of the city and a four-year term will give the position built-in continuity. Direct election makes the will of the citizenry clear and gives the mayor a mandate. It also makes the mayor more accountable for the manner and style of his or her conduct of the city’s affairs.
It would take a charter amendment to change the method of the mayor’s election — something that many in the City of Bend are also advocating for the same reasons. It’s an idea whose time has come.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:28
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania was HOT.
Facing forecasts of heavy snow and wind, the NFL postponed the Vikings Eagles Sunday evening game to Tuesday night. Rendell called the decision a joke, saying that legendary Green Bay Packers coach and tough guy Vince Lombardi would be spinning in his grave. He also threw out a bit of cultural commentary:
“My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country,” Rendell said in an interview on 97.5 radio in Philly. “I think we’ve become wussies. ... We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.” — Washington Post
Well, Ed, I was thinking along the same lines a few days ago.
I was reading “War On The Run,” a recent biography of Maj. Robert Rogers, who led what you might consider America’s first special operations force during the French & Indian War (1755-1763).
No wusses there. Just getting through life was damned hard and the odds of simply making it through childhood would make a Vegas oddsmaker blanch. Author John F. Ross describes a diphtheria epidemic that claimed 70 percent of the children in a New England community probably about the size of Sisters in a matter of days. Some parents lost every one of their children, one after another.
Poor nutrition and nearly nonexistent medical understanding meant that wounds and injuries healed slowly or not at all — and getting hurt or wounded was nearly inevitable in the rough life of the New England frontier, especially in wartime.
The toughest, most athletic men, like Rogers himself, were subject to ailments from arthritis to malaria to scurvy. It’s no wonder that many ended up, again like Rogers, broken down alcoholics. Rum and brandy were about all that you could count on to blunt the pain and discomfort of living.
That’s to say nothing of getting captured by pissed off Abenaki who might adopt you if they felt like it — or chew your fingers off, drop a necklace of red-hot tomahawk heads on your shoulders, scalp you and pour hot coals over your bare skull. Or, if they were in hurry, they might just tie you to a tree and chop you to bits.
Closing the book and going online I find stories that tell me “New study finds baby boomers are in a funk,” reporting “less overall life satisfaction during their adulthood than have previous generations.” Hmmmm....
And — sign of the times — a report that psychology guidelines are dropping narcissistic personality disorder from diagnoses. Maybe because narcissism is the “new normal.”
You were saying, Ed?
OK, OK, I understand that it’s easy to wear out the “our ancestors had it so much harder” riff: “Why, in my day, we walked 20 miles to school in the snow. Uphill in both directions. Ate tree bark and thanked god for every bite.”
“Yes, Aunt Susie. We know.”
Sisters songwriter Dennis McGregor spoofs all that business wonderfully in his song “Pioneer Dog” (“A pioneer dog had a haaaard life to live...”)
I know too much about the good ol’ days to get too romantic about ’em. I’m not about to give up antibiotics, modern dentistry or my nice new Columbia snowboots.
But, you know, a little perspective really helps. It’s not fashionable these days to have heroes from history, but I do. And I often have taken courage and inspiration from their travails and their fortitude. Whether it’s simply keeping on when I want to quit — in the woods, the gym, wherever — or facing up to the inevitable blows that life hands to us all, I know I can stay the course, because I know that others have faced up to much tougher plights.
No, I don’t wish I lived in the harsh world of our forefathers. But even less do I want to live in a nation of wusses.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:51
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Gutenberg College, a very small, private, Christian academy, is looking seriously at moving to Sisters.
You’d think this would be regarded as good news by folks in Sisters. Economic Development Manager Mac Hay has been working with the college for months to try to make this happen; it would be an early success for Sisters’ economic development efforts. And it seems that most people do see it that way.
However, some folks don’t like the idea. When Gutenberg first looked into Sisters in 2007, there was a raft of letters to the editor slamming a figurative door in their face because the writers found the college’s doctrine offensive. The same kinds of comments are circulating again.
The objections boil down to “we don’t want your kind here.” Comment on our Facebook page: “wow, I thought we already fought this battle....here we go again :(.”
What battle? Why should there be any hostility? Could it be, perhaps... bigotry?
This is America, folks. “We don’t like your kind” doesn’t fly here. Sometimes it takes us decades or even centuries to recognize that freedom for any means freedom for all, but gradually, often painfully, we do.
People of a certain cultural/political persuasion are adamant about the establishment clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, yet seem to forget that its purpose was not so much to keep religion out of government, but to protect religious sects from being suppressed or dominated by a state-sanctioned denomination as they were in the Mother Country.
Like it or not, the foundation of this country rests largely on the desire of the first settlers to freely exercise their faith — and we must continue to uphold the principles of free exercise in the Constitution’s third century. That goes for mosques in Manhattan or Christian schools in Sisters.
Back in ’07, people were saying that the school would “take over the town.” That’s as absurd and paranoid as believing the Muslims are going to take over America. Have we really lost our faith in ourselves that completely?
Personally, I am as unchurched and non-religious as you could be — and will resolutely defend my right to be so. I carry no brief for Islam, but I want Muslims to be accorded the same religious freedoms our Christian forefathers insisted upon for themselves. And if a Christian school wants to teach a biblically-centered curriculum in Sisters, I have no problem with that, either.
There is something comical — or maybe pathetic — about touting “diversity” and “tolerance” on one hand and limiting to whom they apply on the other.
There’s too much fear and loathing these days. Let’s not add to it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:08
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
We Americans set great store by happiness. Its pursuit is enshrined in our founding manifesto as an inalienable right.
Those who are not by nature and temperament "upbeat and positive" are often looked upon with some suspicion, as though their "negative attitude" might be a contagious disease that will spoil the party.
And yet life really isn't on the side of the upbeat and positive folks. Through the centuries the wise have counseled against clinging to the ephemeral. Triumph is fleeting. In the words of the poet, "...every tower ever built tumbles/No matter how strong, no matter how tall...someday even man's best laid plans/Will lie twisted and covered in rust/When we've done all that we can but it slipped through our hands/And it's ashes to ashes and dust to dust..."
Lately we've had hard times in the land of the free. Living in the richest society in human history hasn't made us especially happy, and many are learning that the riches of our promised land have indeed slipped through our hands.
The hard truth is that we lose what we love. Yet that loss is a profound teacher.
Last week, my wife Marilyn had to put her beloved horse Hotshot down. He was an older horse with a chronic metabolic condition that eventually ruined his feet and once a horse's feet are shot, he's done for. It was clear that he couldn't go on and the decision was not a hard one in the end.
But it was painful.
Hotshot was a horse with an outsized personality. Everybody who knew him, including our non-horsey neighbors, fell in love with him.
Our family treasured our hours in the woods with him and we miss seeing him hang his head over the gate to greet us when we come home - and to remind us that it's 15 minutes past dinner time.
Those moments and the memory of those moments validate all the hard work and expense that go into keeping a horse, all the strain and worry that accompanied his decline.
We are thankful for moments.
Thankful for the glint of the rising sun on a chestnut coat, the steam of a horse's breath on the chilly fall air. Thankful for the lessons in responsibility caring for a horse brings to a young girl. Thankful for the sense of connection you feel when you're out on the trail in the Sisters Country, everyone and everything working in unison.
Those moments are fleeting indeed, and all the more powerful for their poignancy.
Jefferson was right to exalt the pursuit of happiness, for it is in the pursuit that the cherished moments come. Kipling wrote of the need "to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds of distance run." It is the race itself that matters, not whatever prize you might think is waiting at the end.
The exultation of standing on a peak comes not from the view from the top, spectacular though it may be, but from having earned it by the long slog to get there. After all, the brief time at the top must end; you must climb down.
The moments and the memories always seem to come from the long trail, from the struggle, not from the attainment of the goal.
There is a solace and a grace to be found here that cannot be found in trite platitudes about "keeping a positive attitude."
Success and failure are redefined when our eye is turned to our moments. Success lies in the courage to embrace the struggle, the fortitude to accept the inevitable losses. Failure is only possible in turning away from the fear and the pain, failing to engage.
It is good that we set aside a day to give thanks for the good things in our lives. No matter how hard times may be, we all have moments of beauty, moments of grace to mark. We remember them, celebrate them, stoke them like a warming fire.
We must. In the end, they are what we can keep.
Quotes from "Ashes to Ashes" by Steve Earle.
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10:22
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Somewhere in the Pakistan tribal areas, or — more likely — the remote district of Chitral, Osama bin Laden is smiling.
The principles of asymmetric warfare are working like a charm. The United States, the mightiest nation on earth, the most powerful nation in the entirety of human history, is dancing like a marionette on strings pulled by terrorist specters.
The traveling public and the national media are in full frenzy mode over new body scanning technology and, er, thorough patdowns at airports. The outcry has grown to the point where the TSA is pleading with the public not to engage in a boycott that could turn the busy Thanksgiving travel weekend into a total nightmare.
The outrage has spawned its own immortal phrase: “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”
Not exactly “Give me liberty or give me death” or “We would rather die in these ditches than give them up to the enemy” is it?
The threat of a bomb on an airplane is, of course, real. The attempt last Christmas by the “underwear bomber” was a serious one and so was the thwarted cargo plane bombing earlier this month. But the tactical beauty of asymmetric warfare is that attempts don’t have to succeed to create fear and disruption. The ever-present possibility of an attack is enough to set our transportation system on its ear.
A UPI poll indicates that, while people find the patdowns overly invasive, a pretty good-sized majority are OK with the body scans and are willing to let security trump privacy. The likelihood is that the current brouhaha will fade away in a week or two and body scans will become the new normal. Until the next threat or attempted attack ratchets up the tension again.
We have a strange attitude toward risk. The possibility of dying in a terrorist attack in America is infinitesimally small — and always has been, the 9/11 atrocity notwithstanding. You’re at far greater risk of death driving over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house this weekend.
At some point the law of diminishing returns has to kick in — ever greater security measures chasing an ever-smaller threat. Simply put, when it gets too difficult to bomb or hijack a plane, terrorists can always turn to other targets. Trains or subways as in Madrid or London — or a bomb-and-rifle attack on a shopping mall. Imagine the disruption that would ensue from a few coordinated attacks on shopping malls at the height of the Christmas season.
Living in a state of heightened anxiety over such deadly but rare episodes gives terrorism an impact far beyond its material effects. Creating that fear is, at once, the method, the tactics and the strategy of terrorism.
We are, in fact, at war with al-Qaeda and its ilk and we are all targets. Accept that, but don’t fear it. Choking to death on your sandwich is still a greater danger. We need to draw some lines and say enough is enough. We’ve done what we can to reduce our vulnerability to attack. Beyond a certain point lies the realm of “acceptable risk.”
Looks like when TSA employees are required to "touch our junk" we have bumped up against that line.
As Ronald Bailey wrote in
Reason magazine:
...security measures — pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards — increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It's easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place — to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the "tools" they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn't matter — because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.
That’s how you wipe that smirk off of Osama’s face.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:19
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Sisters City Council and EDCO finally addressed concerns raised by citizens and one councilor over the process used to hire Mac Hay as Sisters’ economic development manager.
They did it begrudgingly and with poor grace, but they did it.
EDCO executive director Roger Lee, visibly annoyed at having to be there at all, explained to the council last Thursday EDCO’s candidate search and interview process. Lee wants to put to rest what he called “conspiracy theories in the Sisters community exacerbated by the local press.”
Whatever.
Can’t have those pesky citizens and reporters asking questions about how their local government (and its private, nonprofit agents) work.
A couple of ironies here: First, it wasn’t really EDCO’s feet that were being held to the fire; the fundamental question was whether the Mayor followed the city’s rules. City Attorney Steve Bryant makes a not-entirely-convincing argument that the rules didn’t apply in this case. Nobody’s going to fight it out in court, so the Mayor’s actions stand.
Second — and most importantly — if Lee had explained the process six weeks ago, when questions first arose, instead of saying essentially, “We don’t have to and we ain’t gonna,” this whole issue would have long since blown over. Better yet, the city could have checked in advance on whether they were following their own ordinances and explained to their constituents how things were going to work.
Thursday’s theme was “let’s move on.” That’s all well and good; everybody’s sick of the issue and we do need to pull together and support Hay’s efforts. But it really should be recognized that it wasn’t the people asking the questions but the people who refused to answer them that dragged this little controversy out for SIX WEEKS.
A little due process up front would have saved a lot of headaches at the back end. Failing that, more responsiveness would have cleared the air a lot sooner. That should be a lesson learned, but Lee’s attitude and the attitude of some on the council makes me think the same thing is going to happen again. Too bad.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:20
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
America is going through one of its periodic paroxysms of populism.
It’s a fundamental feature of the political and cultural landscape in a country founded on the principle “that all men are created equal.” We don’t like folks who set themselves above us, as a general thing.
The Tea Party has gone hard after the “elites” — by which they mean the inside-the-Beltway Washington insiders, academics, the media. They’ve been easier on the usual targets of left-wing or “progressive” populism: the financial elites, those that Theodore Roosevelt (a progressive but not a populist) pungently called “malefactors of great wealth.”
I have some sympathy with the disdain for the “elites.” I have fond memories of going toe-to-toe with Marxist academics in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, whose prattling about “the workers” only demonstrated that they didn’t actually know any — and wouldn’t have liked ’em if they did. They certainly wouldn’t have liked “the workers” at the glass company I worked for during the summers. Way too “bourgeois.”
I’ve also spent a little time waging guerrilla warfare against a literary establishment that looks down its nose at genre fiction that, in my estimation, offers more treasures than any navel-gazing exploration of the angst of the northeastern suburban intellectual soul.
There is a long tradition in Anglo-American culture of believing in the wisdom and virtue of “plain folks.” And it’s a valid tradition.
But it has a dark and dangerous side. It can too easily fall into a fetishization of ignorance. Rejection of expert opinion simply because it is expert opinion (and conflicts with our ideological biases) is foolish. The reflexive rejection of the “elite” is part of a psychology that allows us to settle for mediocrity in education and leads our culture to celebrate fame for its own sake above genuine accomplishment.
We demand that our presidential candidates be “the kinda guy I could have a beer with.” We’re less rigorous about attainments that demonstrate wisdom, intellectual acuity and real leadership capabilities. I don’t want political leaders who get elected because Joe Six Pack can relate to them. I want political leaders who are smarter, tougher and more capable than average folks.
Words are tricky things. “Elite” often means something good; “elitism” usually connotes snobbery. We need to separate the two in our thinking so that attacks on illegitimate high-hat snobbery don’t slide into exaltation of simple-mindedness.
When I hear “elite” I think of our most highly-trained and motivated warriors (I’m talkin’ to you, Greg). I think of the geniuses who push our technological capabilities forward in ways the rest of us can barely imagine. I think of artists who have dedicated themselves completely to the perfection of their skills and produce works of timeless value. I think of athletes who perform at a level the rest of us duffers can only dream about.
A genuine populism does not reject authentic elites — it celebrates the possibility that anyone with sufficient talent and drive can attain elite status in their chosen field.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:56
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This from the LA Times:
Weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, oil company BP and subcontractor Halliburton learned that tests had shown the cement mixture designed to seal the well was unstable, but they continued to use it anyway, President Obama's special commission investigating the environmental disaster reported Thursday.
You hear a lot about “accountability” during elections. There are 11 people dead, thousdands of livelihoods disrupted and ongoing environmental damage.
Are we going to see those responsible held accountable? I won’t hold my breath.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:10
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Thursday night’s candidates’ forum at Sisters High School gave a realtively sparse crowd a chance to see the six candidates for city council in action, fielding questions composed from those submitted by the public.
I thought the candidates presented themselves well and I don’t think anyone left the auditorium unsure where they stand on the issues facing the community — the big one being Sisters’ economic health and how to improve it.
The turnout was a little disappointing, but given that the forum was going up against an Outlaws football game, an Outlaws volleyball game, a Duck’s game (if you can call it that — what a slaughter) and a baseball playoff game, I guess the forum really didn’t do too badly.
It’s always tough getting citizens to come out and engage in the way their city/county/state/nation is run. That’s why, in the 19th Century, candidates often offered free beer and whiskey. That’d guarantee a large and lively turnout...
As moderator, I was remiss in not publicly acknowledging the work Bill Mintiens put into organizing the event. From securing the venue and making sure it was set up to vetting the questions and determining the format, Bill put in a lot of work, all on a volunteer basis to allow the community an unscripted look at their candidates.
Hats off to ye, Bill.
My sense of the audience was that it was mostly composed of partisans, so I doubt the candidates changed anybody’s mind. Am I wrong? Did what you saw or heard change your vote?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:08
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I’m still shaking my head over the firing of Juan Williams by National Public Radio (NPR).
Williams told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that he, Williams, “gets nervous” when he sees people in traditional Muslim dress at an airport or on an airplane. NPR apparently found that a bigoted statement and fired Williams accordingly.
Now, as readers of this blog know, I am opposed to lumping all Muslims together into the “they” who attacked us on September 11, 2010. I think the best way to defeat Islamic extremism — which I consider antithetical to everything I hold dear — is to uphold American values and ideals, to hold that torch ever higher to shine a light into the darkness that the fundamentalists would impose.
(Some of you may know that my favored tactic in the War on Terror is to bomb Islamists with Victoria’s Secret catalogs and the SI swimsuit edition. If it doesn’t convert them, it’ll at least drive them nuts. Now THAT is psychological warfare).
Upholding American ideals does not allow for firing somebody for making an honest statement, essentially about fear. Williams’ nervousness may ultimately be misplaced — the 9/11 hijackers wore Western clothes and it seems unlikely that anyone plotting a terrorist attack would deliberately call attention to themselves by wearing traditional Muslim garb. But the survival brain operates on cues from the environment and triggers a response. Simple as that.
(Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com has a great column about this here:
[original.antiwar.com] ).
Williams was talking about how he feels — and, if we’re honest, our fears sometimes make us think things we wouldn’t be too proud to own in the calm environs of work and home. Williams isn’t a bigot; he was just being an honest guy and he got sacked for it. That’s just plain wrong.
And his former boss said something that just blows me away:
According to the Associated Press, NPR President Vivian Schiller appeared at the Atlanta Press Club, where she said that Williams had violated NPR’s guidelines barring its analysts from making personal or controversial statements.
That’s laughable. You’re supposed to be a analyst and you’re not supposed to say anything controversial? Oh, please. What’s the point of you then?
Clearly, NPR was looking for an excuse to sack Williams because they don’t like his association with Fox News. I’m no fan of Fox News — they generate a lot of noise and heat and precious little light. But NPR’s actions are beneath them. It’s pretty sad when NPR — usually a bastion of real discourse in a landscape of noisy infotainment — makes Fox News look like the more ethical and dignified organization.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:57
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Mac Hay has a tough row to hoe.
It’s going to be difficult enough for Sisters’ newly-hired Economic Development manager to work against the economic tide to help the city improve its business climate. Unfortunately, Mac’s starting out dragging the ball-and-chain of a sloppy hiring process that has left many folks angry and suspicious, members of the city council divided and defensive and a large portion of the Sisters community confused.
The clumsy, opaque process that led to Mac’s hiring is a reminder that how things are done can be as important as what is done.
By farming out the hiring process to EDCO (Economic Development for Central Oregon), Mayor Lon Kellstrom hoped to keep the process at “arms length” and avoid the appearance that the council simply kicked the gig to a friend who had been doing economic development work on a volunteer basis through SBART.
It ended up looking that way anyway, with the added taint of EDCO’s unwillingness to give citizens a glimpse into the hiring process, including who sat on the interview panel and whether any were actually from Sisters. Actually, EDCO has legitimate reasons to shield interviewers with anonymity so they won’t be subjected to lobbying and community pressures.
But the Mayor and the council majority might have foreseen that taking this course would lead some people in the community — and not just those active in Sisters politics, either — to think the fix was in.
A considerable constituency is up in arms at the lack of transparency in the hiring process. It won’t be surprising to see some of those who have a dog in the fight in the campaign for city council to show up at City Hall waving the bloody shirt. Already there is a movement afoot to challenge the legitimacy of the Mayor’s actions and therefore the city’s ability to disperse the funds.
I don’t think the Mayor’s actions were taken in bad faith, but it wasn’t very well thought through, even from the standpoint of political self-interest. The council majority has handed their political opponents a stick to beat them over the head with and they’ve saddled their pick with ill will that’s going to take some work to overcome. (Mac is fully aware of that and is already reaching out).
But the hiring process itself isn’t really the biggest problem.
The City of Sisters is investing $30,000 into economic development without any metrics in place for determining if the money is well spent. If Mac lands a company or two in the next year that bring a bunch of jobs, success will be obvious. But even the most optimistic don’t expect that to happen by the time the contract runs out.
Progress is likely to be incremental and hard to define. It’s too much money to treat casually, but not really enough to get serious, long-term work done. This project is likely to take several years to bear fruit, and it’s going to have to have buy-in — in a literal sense — from the private sector. Private parties are going to have to come in with financial support to sustain the project. City taxpayers cannot and should not be expected to foot the bill on their own indefinitely.
Everyone involved needs “deliverables” in order to determine if a particular course is working or if there needs to be a change of direction — or if we need to pull the plug.
Mac is a good man, with a lot of passion for the work. He’s good with people and my last few conversations with him indicate that he is open to a wide-ranging understanding of what economic vitality means and how we might pursue it.
Hopefully he will create his own rigorous performance measurements. It’s in his own interests to do so. Without real metrics, he won’t be able to bring on more support and he’ll never convince skeptics than this project is anything more than a boondoggle pursued so that the council can say “we’re doing something!”
There is no doubt that those who are flat pissed off about the way this all went down will flog the issue through the election. For them, it is a signal example of the problems with the way the council majority operates.
But in the end, Mac Hay will be in place as Economic Development Manager and the $30,000 will be spent. It is in everyone’s interest that the project succeed. Will the “opposition” continue to stand off and throw rocks, or will they bend Mac’s ear and try to shape the direction of the project?
Hopefully, after the dust has settled from the election, Sisters’ new Economic Development Manager can start pulling people together, defining goals and get some real work done.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:29
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Got a letter from a disgruntled reader this morning:
Your page 15 Sheriff’s calls from this week’s paper had a pretty appalling story regarding the “condom.” My wife and I have 3 girls in the Sisters School district, 2 of which are HIGHLY encouraged by the middle school teachers to READ the Nugget every week.
Can you imagine how likely it is we are going to allow them to freely read the Nugget on their own after a story like this is allowed to be published? Of course, we realize the Sheriff Calls are meant to be ironic and poke fun at some of the stuff in the life of a small town. However, will you please consider that kids in this community are reading your newspaper when making a decision about what content to include?
Our hopes are you will cease from publishing any further content of this nature for the sake of all of our children here.
The offending entry:
• A man reported finding a condom hung on his door knob. There are no suspects. The man disposed of the condom - and cleaned his doorknob.
Honestly, folks, this is one of those things I just don’t get. “Sisters sheriff’s calls” also includes people getting jacked up on booze and hitting their wives or girlfriends, and The Nugget also has run stories about local men being arrested for sex abuse, etc., etc.
And the mention of a condom on a doorknob is what someone gets spun up about? I mean, yeah, it’s obnoxious and gross, (so is a bag of burning poop on the porch, which has also been featured in SSC) but are the implications really more “appalling” than somebody beating up his wife?
Whenever something like this comes up, I think of it as another “pixelating Apollonia’s breasts” moment. I came upon “The Godfather complete and uncut” one evening on TNT. I’ll watch “The Godfather” any time, so I tuned in.
Yep, there it was, in all its horse-head-in-the-bed glory. No editing of the brutal slaying of Sonny Corleone on the turnpike. But WAIT! Michael and Apollonia’s wedding night. The shy Sicilian girl demurely lowers her blouse and... her chest is pixelated.
I laughed aloud. Apparently it’s OK to show Sonny being chopped to hamburger by machine guns or a movie producer slimed with blood from the severed head of his prize racehorse, but god forbid that anyone see a female breast.
I'm not trying to get on a high horse about violence in media here; just noting a curious disparity in response. There's an discussion to be had over what constitutes gratuitous, but it's beyond the scope of this particular piece.
I, too, have a daughter in middle school. She reads The Nugget — mostly to hunt for hidden vocabulary words and for stories about horses. She also knows that if she reads or sees something in any media that upsets or bothers her, she can ask about it and her mom or I will talk to her about it.
Of course I recognize that people react differently to the same things and obviously the condom on a doorknob thing bothered the writer to a high enough degree that he took the time to e-mail his displeasure. Fair enough. There’s a constant weighing of where to draw the line in this business and it’s good to know where some of our readers would like to see it drawn.
But I remain flummoxed by the consistent degree to which people react so negatively to anything with any hint of sexual content and yet give the casual violence of everyday life and its media interpretations a pass. And the American media responds: buckets of blood, but no boobs please.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
About a third of the way into Ben Affleck’s heist movie “The Town,” I realized I was watching a chick flick.
I’m okay with that — especially since it also has firefights with ordnance expenditure on the level of a battle on some Pacific atoll and a spectacular car chase on the claustrophobic colonial-era streets of Boston.
It’s also sharply written, with some surprisingly funny bits that grow out of the characters and the story and don’t feel tacked on. In a season of real celluloid stinkers, that’s something to celebrate right there.
So, what makes it a chick flick? The center of the story is the redemptive power of love. Like Chris Knight says in the song: “Love and a .45/One will kill you one will keep you alive.”
The premise is simple: Doug MacRay (Affleck) and his crew of garishly disguised Townie heist experts knock over a Cambridge bank, briefly taking an assistant manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Just to make sure that she can’t tip the crew to the feds, MacRay keeps tabs on her.
And... well, you know what happens.
Affleck is immensely appealing as MacRay — and he has to be to get you rooting for a career criminal to “make it.” MacRay is part of a Charlestown subculture that produces more bank robbers and armored car heisters per capita than any other place in the U.S. He’s good at the job, yet in Claire he sees the possibility of something else, something more.
But everything in Doug’s world — from his floozy sometimes-girlfriend Krista (Blake Lively) and his best friend, the sociopathic Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), to some old-school ex-IRA gangsters — conspire to hold him to the old neighborhood and a way of life that only has one end with two variations: death on the street or death in prison.
That subculture itself is a major character in The Town.
The key to making the whole chick flick aspect work is Hall. Her Claire comes across real and genuine. An easy casting of some flashy A-list actress would have blown the whole thing. The emotional turmoil of her circumstances could easily fall into clichés; Hall’s performance leaves room for inner conflict and ambiguity.
“The Town” is lighter fare than the far superior “The Departed,” which works some similar turf and themes and some of the narrative choices mute its impact. But it’s a solid movie, way better than most of the fare we’ve been subjected to over the past summer. A nice date movie, perhaps... Love and a TEC-9 anyone?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
It’s the political season in Sisters. Six candidates are vying for three seats on the Sisters City Council, which means they will have to distinguish themselves one from the other and sell voters on why they would do a better job as a councilor.
That’s all good. Except that if economic development becomes a political football — or, worse, a chew toy in a culture wars dogfight — Sisters will lose.
Actually, I’d like to jettison the term “economic development” and replace it with “economic vitality.” I think it’s more descriptive of a goal. We don’t just want to develop our economy — we want to make sure all sectors become and remain vital. At least, I assume we do.
We can’t afford to divide into camps, where one group favors one type of economic activity and another favors something else; where “the developers” are painted as somewhat sinister exploiters or proponents of focusing on the downtown core are dismissed as anti-growth obstructionists.
I’ve heard people talking about “economic development” using the term “the other side.” Big mistake. The distinctions are stupid. We’re too small to be stupid.
Whatever economic activity we can generate in Sisters is going to have a symbiotic relationship with all other economic activity. A vital, thriving, prosperous downtown core is vital to attracting the holy grail of “family wage” businesses, which in turn will provide patrons for shops and services.
There’s a legitimate debate to be had over where and how we should expend our energy and resources, but that debate has to be in good faith, not a way to score cheap political points or to poke your finger in the eye of somebody on “the other side.”
My own two cents are these: Any economic vitality plan or program that doesn’t focus first on retention is bogus. Attracting any business is speculative. Not that we shouldn’t try, but we must recognize that our best shot at economic vitality lies in enhancing the climate for the businesses that are here now.
If we can’t keep existing businesses vital, why would others come here? Vitality breeds greater vitality — and the opposite is true as well.
We have to define what we mean by retention. I don’t mean we prop up businesses that simply aren’t viable. The market is supposed to flush out businesses that don’t work; creative destruction is a healthy thing.
But sometimes — and especially in hard times — a business that could make it fails because there’s just not enough margin for error; a mistake or wrong turn is fatal. That’s where educational, financial and “enterprise facilitation” resources could really shine. Make sure that people with dreams have enough resources and savvy to avoid or quickly recover from the inevitable mistakes every entrepreneur makes; help them maximize their chances for success.
Then, of course, business owners themselves need to know what they don’t know and avail themselves of the resources available to them.
I always think of Jean Wells Keenan learning to be a business person through classes at COCC, building a thriving (and now international) business, a keystone of the community, because she knew she needed education, sought it out and found it when she needed it.
There’s a lot of pieces that have to work together to promote economic vitality, but helping the businesses we have to thrive has to be the first piece in the puzzle.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:01
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
My great-grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan back in the “good ol’ days” of the 1920s.
He was a Methodist minister in North Dakota; the focus of the Klan’s ire there was Catholicism, the faith of many central European immigrants who came to the Great Plains to farm.
He came to repent (more or less) of his bigoted zeal; it was the nature of the times, you see. The spreading of Catholicism by a large wave of central and southern European immigrants was seen as a threat to the American way of life — a white and Protestant way of life.
America was undergoing tremendous change in those days. More and more people were leaving the farm to take up jobs in urban centers, whose populations were exploding due to internal migration and external immigration. Then, as now, immigration was a hot topic. Congress passed immigration restrictions in 1921 and 1924 aimed at excluding Asians and restricting those mainly-Catholic immigrants from southern Europe.
Americans of northern European, Protestant descent feared being swamped by “alien” races and religious faiths.
If all that sounds familiar, it should. We are undergoing massive demographic and socioeconomic change again. That, to me, is at the root of the controversy over the so-called “ground zero mosque” (which is neither at “ground zero” nor a mosque). Our cultural anxieties have pushed the issue to the forefront of the national discourse.
On one level, it is easy to understand the reaction of those who oppose the Park 51 project. The World Trade Center site will always have profound symbolic meaning to Americans, like Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor. People are sensitive — and should be — about such sites.
But an Islamic community center near (not at) the site is only an affront if you believe that Islam itself perpetrated the criminal acts of war that occurred there and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
That is fundamentally false. Islam did not attack America; 19 men, mostly Saudis, poisoned by hatred and a vicious perversion of Islam, attacked America, backed by a terrorist network that has also attacked and killed thousands of other Muslims in violation of the tenets of their own faith.
Do not forget that Muslim Americans were murdered in the September 11 attacks, too.
We must allow “the better angels of our nature” (to borrow Lincoln’s phrase from another time of bitter division and anxiety) to come to the fore on this issue. As my friend Andrew Gorayeb argues in an opinion piece in next week’s Nugget, our Constitution guarantees the right of worship (I would add the protection of the right not to worship as well) to everyone. The religious freedom clauses of the first amendment are a pillar of our national faith. This is a chance to live up to our highest ideals, rather than succumbing to our lowest passions.
There will always be those who profit from stoking our fears and resentments. The 20th century was rife with demagogues who focused that fear on the “other” in order to enhance their own power. It’s happening now.
But America is great enough to change — even at the price of excrutiating pain — and be better for it. We’ve done it many times before. By the 1940s, those Catholic immigrants my great-grandfather feared were an integral part of the fabric of the nation.
The cliched platoon from countless World War II movies revealed a truth: America was, indeed, made up of the tough Italian kid from New Jersey (John Basilone anyone?), the cocky Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen, the Pole from Chicago, the slow-talkin’, straight-shootin’ Georgia boy, the clean-cut college boy from New England.
Within a couple of decades, the black kid from Alabama was there, too, along with Latinos, Asians — even women.
The Park51 community center debate is a great opportunity to remind ourselves and the world of American exceptionalism. We made a choice more than two centuries ago to be a beacon of liberty in a dark world. We haven’t always lived up to our own standards, but always, eventually, those “better angels of our nature” have won out.
We set aside our fear and adapt to change and welcome people of all creeds and cultures to enjoy the blessings of liberty.
That’s how we roll.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:57
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
We’re a nation of junkies, mainlining continual electronic stimulation from smart phones, computers television screens and iPads — sometimes all at once.
Over the past couple of years there has been a slew of stories about the effects of constant stimulation on our brains. Basically, we’re addicts and our brains show it.
We get that little dopamine squirt every time we check our e-mail on our phone. Something “new” might be on there and boy do our brains like “new.” If we’re forced to withdraw from technological stimulation, we get agitated, irritable.
Dopamine is responsible for the euphoria that addicts chase, whether they get it from methamphetamine, alcohol, or Internet gambling. The addict becomes conditioned to compulsively seek, crave and recreate the sense of elation while off-line or off-drug. Whether it’s knocking back a few whiskeys or betting on the horses, dopamine transmits messages to the brain’s pleasure centers causing addicts to want to repeat those actions — over and over again, even if the addict is no longer experiencing the original pleasure and is aware of negative consequences...
The mental reward stimulation of the dopamine system is a powerful pull that non-addicts feel as well. ... Even checking email can become a compulsive behavior that’s hard to stop.
— Psychology Today magazine
That helps explain why people will text while driving, even though they really know that it’s insanely dangerous — more dangerous than driving drunk. (Car and Driver Magazine).
Now, I’m no Luddite. Computer technology, e-mail, smart phones all have made it easier to do my job — and do it better. I can gather information more quickly and have it up on The Nugget Web site in seconds if need be. No question, technology has made me more productive and that’s true for many, many people. That’s pretty cool.
In my off-work life, I love having fingertip access to obscure historical information and documents. The lyrics and chords for that song you’re trying to learn are right there and if you can’t figure out a guitar lick, chances are somebody has put a demo up on Youtube.
All that is great: really enhances the quality of life.
But it’s also all to easy to go down the rabbit hole of the Internet, forgetting the purpose of that original Google query, wasting an hour, two hours clicking off into some cyber maze, distracted, unproductive and actually fatigued.
And that temptation to pull out the smart phone to fill any second of downtime is pernicious.
From The New York Times:
“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”
At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.
Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.
“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.
I think my brain is fighting back. Lately, I’ve taken to “forgetting” my cell phone when I go out after work. I take that as a healthy sign.
I’ve always been good about getting away from the noise. I get out to the woods with the phone off (still have it; it can be a lifesaving survival tool) and I prefer to workout with no distractions. But I’m thinking seriously about expanding those “tech-free zones” — hours where the cell phone is put away, the computer is off, the TV is off.
Tech rehab: an idea whose time has come.
* Apologies to Steve Earle
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:21
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I grew up at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. Those chapparal hills and forested canyons shaped my life, giving a kid who preferred the woods to the concrete a place to roam and dream. I came to Sisters seeking what I found there — without the sprawling metropolis next door.
Now much of that wonderland is destroyed, burnt literally to cinders by the horrific Station Fire last year. The hillsides above my brother’s home are barren and won’t recover in our lifetime. And many people lost their homes and some their very lives in a conflagration that was biblical in its intensity.
Perhaps it was inevitable. The area is a tinderbox; I’ve seen it burn before, though never this badly. But a story in the
L.A. Times indicates that this catastrophe might have been averted if resources had been brought to bear early, before a fire everyone knew had deadly potential really got going.
Capt. Perri Hall, a veteran air attack officer for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who was over the blaze minutes before 7 a.m. on Aug. 27, radioed the U.S. Forest Service with the intention of bringing in the tankers, a lead plane and helicopters.
There was no answer.
"I made several attempts to contact someone on the ground … with no luck," Hall recounts in a report. "I then attempted to make contact with [the Angeles National Forest] on the command frequencies."
The minutes were passing.
"I finally was able to make contact … and ask for the lead plane to be started ASAP," he says. "They advise the lead plane would not be available until 0900 hours.
"I then ask to start any air tankers they had and again I was told nothing available until 0900-0930 hours. "I then ask if there were any heli-tankers available and if so get them started. Again I was told nothing available until 0930 hours.
"I gave them a quick report on conditions of 3-4 acres [burning] … with potential of a major fire."
That potential began turning into reality about an hour later. The fire jumped a critical defense line along Angeles Crest Highway and raced through the dried-out scrub and trees, becoming the biggest conflagration in Los Angeles County history. Two county firefighters were killed.
The scenario seems awfully familiar to folks in the Sisters Country. Hearken back to August 2006 — the Black Crater Fire
(from The Nugget, August 8, 2006):
As firefighters are mopping up and reinforcing firelines, many in Sisters have begun asking why the fire wasn't stopped when it was 50 to 100 acres in size, before it became a threat to residential communities.
The answer is simple, but it's not straightforward: There weren't enough resources available.
Other fires in the region were given higher priority — until Black Crater stormed down the mountain and threatened Crossroads. Then it became the top priority in the nation and tankers, helicopters and ground crews poured in to battle the conflagration.
Everybody in the Sisters Country knew from the beginning that the lightning-sparked fire had serious potential.
"It's a terrible balancing act that has to be played," (Sisters District Ranger Bill) Anthony said (back in 2006). "We knew the situation — that if this fire was not stopped small, it was going to get big."
The local authorities quickly put in the request for resources. But, as Anthony explained:
Fighting fires is based on a complex prioritization system that weighs the threat from fires across the nation. Other than initial attack, resources are allocated on a regional and national basis. When there are a lot of fires burning, the resources available are often already committed and not available for other fires.
Obviously, there has to be some system of prioritization. But with repeated instances of fires of known potential growing from small and stoppable to massive and devastating, it seems the system is out of whack. Hindsight is 20/20, but we have enough history to have pretty good foresight, too. Nobody wants another Station Fire. What can we do to make sure that firefighters can maximize that narrow window of opportunity to catch a fire that has grown beyond a single tree and an acre of brush but has not yet taken off?
The temperatures are heating up and the grasses that thrived on our cool, wet spring are curing into fire fuel. There are thunderstorms in the forecast this week. If a strike turns into a blaze with the potential to grow into a major fire, will our local firefighters be able to access the resources to “stop it when it’s small” or will we have to wait — again — until we’re in real danger?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:28
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The hullabaloo over the rescue of 16-year-old Abby Sunderland during her failed attempt to sail solo around the world tells a lot about our current culture.
I’m amazed at the number of people who have condemned this family for allowing the girl to make the attempt. Personally, I salute them for inculcating the spirit of adventure in their children.
Abby and her circumnavigating brother obviously grew up sailors and as teenagers are more capable than the vast majority of adult sailors. Yes, they don’t have a lot of experience. Or, they didn’t. They do now.
Teenagers have been embarking on arduous adventures since time immemorial. Why shut that off now, when technology and equipment actually make such endeavors safer than ever?
Of course she was at risk; she could have died. The ocean is an uncaring and sometimes cruel mistress. But youth is made for adventure. Sometimes it goes awry and a young person dies. Of course that’s terribly sad. But it’s not irresponsible in the way it might be for a family man who has responsibilities to a wife and child to risk his life for thrills.
We need more can-do spirit, not more hand-wringing, risk-averse ninnies, more people pursuing their passions and fewer sitting on the couch. Hats of to the Sunderlands. Long may they sail!
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:24
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Watching the nightmarish news from the Gulf of Mexico day in and day out, I am struck by how fitting a metaphor the massive oil spill is for the budgetary hemorrhage that is afflicting the Sisters School District and districts all across Oregon.
It’s abundantly clear by now that nobody really has any idea how to fix the problem in the gulf. Try this, try that, hope something works. Meanwhile, the oil keeps flowing and the worst-case scenario keeps getting worse.
I’m beginning to doubt that anybody knows how to fix public education funding, either — or at least there is no consensus and no will to do so. Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of our “rainy day,” we’ve already “fallen off the cliff” — whatever image you want to conjure to get across the point that things are bad and getting worse.
In the wake of the state economic forecast last month, the Sisters School District is faced with cutting something like $1.2 million from its budget for next year. That’s on top of about $600,000 in cuts that were made this year. And next year there will be more, to tune of another $1.5 million or so.
This year’s cuts probably should be even deeper than they are, if only to reduce the degree of next year’s cuts. But the point is sort of moot; we’re going to have to keep slashing away over the next two or three years. Mitigate the pain a little now, you’ll just feel it later.
Teachers still want to be well compensated for what they do — and believe me, they deserve it. I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to gladly doff my hat to their dedication and skill. I really don’t know how they manage their classrooms and keep their sanity, much less provide good education. I cringe at the thought of making them manage ever-larger classrooms.
So, yes, they deserve good compensation, good benefits. But where does the money come from to pay them? When the cost of labor keeps going up through raises and increased costs of benefits and revenue keeps going down, you’ve got yourself what they call an unsustainable situation.
So, you either freeze or cut compensation or you cut staff. (Cutting days is also a cut to compensation since labor agreements are based on contract days). In Sisters’ case (and everybody else’s) it’s going to end up being some combination of both.
The reality is that our kids will be getting less schooling next year and in the years following, with fewer teachers to teach them in larger classes. It’s going to be really hard to deliver “excellent” education under those conditions.
And nobody really knows what to do about it.
It’s tempting to think that this is a temporary situation that will get better when the economy turns around. But economic turnaround is expected to be slow and laborious and restoring cuts is a long and arduous process. Things aren’t going to look rosy for public schools for a long time — and maybe never, at least under the model we’ve got now.
And that’s where that helpless feeling we get from watching the endless spew from the oil well in the gulf kicks in.
We’ve got a mess and nobody has a fix — at least not one that has broad consensus and an impetus to move forward.
The fix will not lie in increased state funding. While an eventual return to prosperity will take some pressure off, the fundamental structure of education funding can’t get the job done. And there is no political or social will for significant tax increases to adequately fund K-College education. And it’s not clear that increased expenditures equate to better outcomes anyway.
What is needed is radical reform in the very nature of public education, redefining what it is and what it does.
Here are some basic and general ideas that I believe must be seriously considered:
• Public schools should focus on core competencies. Those must be narrowly and rigorously defined — not necessarily readin,’ writin’ and ’rithmatic, but some clearly laid out program of fundamentals that can be delivered in a cost-efficient manner.
• Public-private partnerships should be formed to deliver other high-value educational components, from sports to arts to career-related experience.
Schools are eventually going to have to offload sports into some sort of club structure that may affiliate in spirit with a school, but which carries its own infrastructure. Arts, drama, music and other programs might be delivered in school, but not by school-funded personnel. To be effective, this would require some means of allowing non-credentialed mentors/instructors to teach in fields of expertise.
By saying this, I am not downplaying the value of qualified teachers in these areas. Jody Henderson and Mike Baynes have to be at the top of any list of teachers who have touched students’ lives in profound ways. You have to keep people like these in play. The question is, how can you fund their positions? Perhaps they work for a foundation, not for a school district.
Non-profits with interest in development in the arts or in business or science and technology can access funding streams outside the state school funding matrix.
• Maximize the delivery of Web-based instruction. The failure of the Sisters Web Academy should not tarnish the image of Web-based education — the families who used the curriculum universally loved it. Home schooling and Web-based education has demonstrated that learning at a high level can be conducted with much greater efficiency through the use of technology.
• Merit pay. Nobody calls it that anymore because it’s such a hot button issue, but whatever you call it, you have to pay for quality, not seniority.
• I really don’t know how you efficiently manage special education and other special needs. Each situation is so individualized that it’s hard to generalize a “policy” for allocation of resources. My family was immersed in this issue for decades and there are no easy answers.
I believe that it is important to maximize the potential of every child, whether its a high-achieving high flier or a child who struggles to overcome disabilities or just an average kid. The question is, in a streamlined public education format that acknowledges limited resources, where are special needs children best served?
I don’t have that answer, but the question must be asked.
Change of any kind is scary and nobody wants their own ox gored. But it’s evident to me that public education is in a terminal crisis. We must either choose to be bold enough to change or watch public education bleed away like a dark cloud of oil flowing into the sea.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:12
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
CNN’s Jack Cafferty is exercised about a poll that shows that Americans think our level of moral rectitude is lousy and getting worse:
The U.S. isn't only headed for bankruptcy when it comes to our finances... it looks like we could be going morally bankrupt too.
A new Gallup poll paints a depressing picture of the state of our moral values in the U.S.
45 percent of those surveyed describe morality in this country as "poor"... only 15 percent -- fewer than one in five -- say "excellent or good."
These numbers rank among the worst in this poll over the last decade.
The survey also shows 76 percent of Americans say moral values in the U.S. are getting worse... only 14 percent say they're getting better.
So what's wrong with us?
Read full story
here.
Oh, come on. In the first place, this is a poll that measures what people think about morality; it doesn’t actually query behaviors. And every generation thinks that the younger generation is going to hell in a hand basket. Why, in MY day...
I’m with commentator Sarah, who reminds us “that 150 years ago we kept human beings as slaves, 100 years ago American workers worked in terrible conditions for low wages with no safety net, and 50 years ago African Americans were still being lynched. I think we've come a long way and I'd much rather live into today's society than the world of the past.”
As a passionate lover of history, there are lots of historical periods I’d love to visit, but it’s really foolish to believe that things were better in the good ol’ days.
It’s only recently that Western Civilization has accorded women equal status with men. I know that some people see that as an element of moral decay, but I don’t think you’d convince many women, even the most conservative ones, that they would be better off if it was still okay for their husband to rape them and no problem at all if they have few if any independent legal rights.
I think a lot of people confuse manners with morality. You can make a pretty good case that our manners have declined — people in general are much less polite to each other than they used to be and the celebrity media culture that is now so ubiquitous rewards atrocious behavior. And people’s communication on the Internet can be really ugly.
It is now common to hear F-bombs in public, but people frown on smoking cigarettes. Sixty years ago, even 20 years ago or less, that equation was reversed.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are less “moral.”
Some think that you can traces the “decline in morality” to the loss of “sir and “ma’am” in the language. But plenty of good boys grew up saying sir and ma’am and still visited Madame Flossie’s whorehouse.
I don’t believe for a minute that more people cheat on their wives now than at any other time in history. It’s all just that much more public. Was John F. Kennedy’s White House a greater moral beacon than Barak Obama’s?
It’s tempting to think that people were better back in the old days, but the historical record just doesn’t show it. Political corruption was much more rife in the century spanning 1870s-1970s than it is now. (Not saying it’s disappeared by any means).
Another factor is that what some people see as “immorality” others see as greater freedom and justice. Some might see the acceptance of homosexuality as a sign of moral decay; others might see it as increased tolerance and thus a virtue.
There’s plenty of room for improvement in the nature of humankind — and all gains in virtue are fragile and easily lost in the face of war, economic strain resource scarcity. As Aldo Leopold once observed, “ethics start after breakfast.”
But self-flagellation over our supposed moral decline is just a fretful waste of energy. It’s probably a sign of a decadent civilization.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:32
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
We all know them: They not only help their child with her homework, they actually do it for her. They have no qualms about telling the teacher how to teach and the coach how to coach. If things go wrong for junior, they swoop in and save the day.
Helicopter parents. Always hovering, ready to intervene in any situation, whether it’s warranted or not.
They drive everybody nuts — teachers, coaches, cops, other parents, their own children.
Recently, the Sisters Sports Mentoring Aliance brought in nationally-recognized motivational speaker and coach Bruce Brown to talk to coaches, student athletes and parents about “proactive coaching” — ways to make sure that the experience of athletics is positive and meaningful for kids.
I covered the parents’ session for The Nugget and I was impressed with the simple, straightforward message Brown offered: Parents need to "release their child to the game." Parents need to be there for their child to support and encourage, but when the game is more important to the parent than to the athlete, there’s a problem.
The idea of releasing your child to the game should apply to the rest of life, too. If a kid has a problem with a teacher, the kid should learn to cope with it. Someday, they may have a difficult boss or co-worker. They need to learn to deal with it.
Calling in the cops because somebody pushes your kid on the playground isn’t preparing them for the world. At some point, adult intervention is necessary and appropriate, but not the first time your kid gets into a minor scrape. And sometimes it’s best to let other adults do the intervening.
It’s painful to watch the ones you love more than anything in the world make mistakes. But we all blow it — and learn from the experience. Sometimes it’s good to let your kid fail. They learn that actions (or failure to act) have consequences. They learn that failure isn’t fun.
Youth is all about scrapped knees, hurt feelings, broken hearts. It’s also about triumphs and achievements. They both belong to the kid who’s living them, not to their parents.
Release your child to the game. It’s a profound gift.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:17
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Coast Guard is burning off an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to prevent it from reaching fragile wetlands along the gulf coast.
The BP oil platform explosion, collapse and leak is shaping up to be one of the largest and most costly oil spills in U.S. history. Drill, baby, drill!
That blithe, happy battle cry rings pretty hollow in the wake of this disaster. We’re told how safe offshore drilling has become (and it is much safer than it used to be) — look at how the rigs weathered Katrina!
Now this.
This disaster should be a hard slap in the face of the drill, baby, drill crowd; a cold shower; a dozen cups of strong coffee. Maybe it’ll help them sober up. For even if they don’t care for its own sake about the environmental damage such spills create, you’d think they’d care about the economic damage. After all, that’s what drill, baby, drill is all about — keeping that economic engine revving.
A spill like this threatens the fishing industry, commercial and sport, along the entire gulf coast. As one fisherman noted, if they can’t fish, everybody’s business is screwed, including the grocery store up the road. Tourism suffers, the economic consequences go on and on.
Safer isn’t safe enough and being patted on our heads and told to just relax, everything will be okay just won’t cut it. Moving rigs closer to shore and opening drilling sensitive areas is risky. A spill and leak like the one in the gulf would be devastating if it was closer to shore.
This poses a big problem, for we are, indeed, dependent on oil and that’s not going to change any time soon. Civilization as we know it runs on oil — and not just in our cars. I’m typing on a petroleum-based keyboard right now. My world, your world, our world, can’t get along without the stuff, not for one day.
There is reason to doubt that we will be able to innovate beyond oil. Certainly alternative energy can pick up some of the load, but that’s primarily in power generation, replacing coal, not oil. (Not saying that’s a bad thing by any means, but it doesn’t cure the addiction).
There is a school of thought that argues that the explosively creative, productive civilization of the 20th/21st Century — the Age of Oil — is a one-time event in human history, that we can’t sustain it. The collapse of that civilization won’t be pretty.
So, what’s to be done?
We could drill, baby, drill, party like tomorrow will never come and damn the consequences. A major spill now and then is just the cost of doing business.
We could go all-out on alternative energy and fuel sources, and alternate modes of transportation but that would require major policy initiatives — including tax incentives on one end and heavy gasoline taxes on the other end — that are politically unacceptable.
And we have to accept that the returns on that investment may not be as great as we hope.
Essentially, the only way to wean ourselves off of our oil addiction is to radically alter our way of life. That’s downright blasphemous to a large segment of our social and political culture and really hard to do for the vast majority of us. Most of us don’t have the time, money or capability to mothball the car(s) or severely cut back on our vehicle use — especially over here in the wide high desert. How many of us can avoid buying products shipped halfway around the world in a just-in-time global economy?
I make no special pleading of superiority to anyone else here. I’m as hooked on oil as anyone else. My way of life is completely wrapped up in the civilization wrought by oil. I don’t see a way out.
We can be marginally more efficient, but that has little impact in a world where China and India with their vast populations are trying to catch up to our standard of living.
I think there’s a strong likelihood that the predictions of James Howard Kunstler in The Long Emergency will come to pass — a radical, dislocation brought on by the collapse of an oil-based civilization. We will change our way of living, but by force rather than by choice, and it won’t be easy, safe or pretty.
Gloom and doom, eh? So why not drill, baby, drill and postpone the crisis as long as possible? Because I want to preserve as much of what we have left of a beautiful and bountiful world we have left for as long as we can — and yes, I’m willing to pay for that.
I’m not opposed to all drilling all the time everywhere, but I am opposed to drilling anywhere, everywhere, all the time. Conservation may be only marginally effective, but it’s a better way to try to slow the slide into a dark post-oil future than allowing our world to be fouled to the chant of drill, baby, drill.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The outpouring of community welcome and support shown to returning National Guard troops earlier this month was heartwarming to say the least.
Many of us along that spontaneously-created parade route found a tear in the eye and a lump in the throat. It was a wonderful thing.
But not all stories of returning veterans are so wonderful. A friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times story that reveals that the Warrior Transition Units set up in the wake of the Walter Reed Veterans Administration scandal are proving to be a horrific “warehouse” for soldiers with deep psychological and physical trauma.
My friend, who is in a position to know, tells me that the story is “true to the bone” — and only the tip of the iceberg.
Read the story
here.
No matter what your position on the wars our country has been embroiled in for nearly a decade, we can all agree that our handling of returning veterans has not measured up to what should be the highest of standards.
We should all do anything we can to help fix this. Write your legislative representatives, contribute to your local veterans’ outreach groups. This kind of thing is unacceptable.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:16
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Apparently, the U.S. military is signing on with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.
I heard just a snippet of a news story on NPR this morning about an effort spearheaed by some retired military men to push for legislation that would force better health standards for school cafeteria meals.
The military establishment, it seems, is concerned that 74 percent of 17-24 year olds are considered unfit for military service. 27 percent are medically ineligible and most of that is due to obesity.
I’m not sure that “whipping America’s kids into fighting shape” will sell, but I think we need to recruit every ally we can in the campaign to fight youth obesity.
That’s a pathetic statistic and a threatening one. No matter what your political/ideological position on health care reform, you have to recognize that a nation of fat 18 year olds is going to be a nation of major health care burdens as they get older.
And that’s to say nothing about the limitations on a fulfilling life that obesity brings.
Man, we really need to change our way of living.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:06
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I got to use one of my favorite quotes in a story a couple of weeks back: “Whiskey’s for drinking; water’s for fighting over.”
It’s usually attributed to Mark Twain, but that may be apocryphal. Doesn’t matter. It’s a great line and as true now as when it was coined in the 19th Century.
The dustup out in the McKenzie Canyon Canal has been fascinating to report on. It pits two relentless personalities against each other: irrigation district director Marc Thalacker and property owner Jan Daggett. They’ve been sparring on and off for years over this project. Now Daggett has sued the district and the irrigation district has forced its pipeline across her property in the face of protests that included blocking the ditch with equipment.
Fortunately, the Showdown at McKenzie Canal played out as farce rather than tragedy. It’s easy to see how people got shot over water fights in the Old West. People get mad, people get their back up and pretty soon it’s war.
Most people I talk to are on the side of the irrigation district in this one — mainly because of the benefits of returning water to Whychus Creek. On the other hand, many of those same people think that the irrigation district has been high-handed and they didn’t like seeing the sheriff’s office portray the protesters as alcohol-fueled. Many people think that was an uncalled-for shot at delegitimizing the protesters, whether they’re right or wrong on the issue.
A friend of mine, an irrigator himself, but not in this district, says he finds people trying to retain their open ditches as a pleasant water feature “incredibly selfish.”
But those water features are important to people. When the ditches dried up in town years ago as Ted Eady returned his water rights into Whychus Creek, there was a great outcry of dismay. As one forester told me, people were more connected to those ditches than they were to the creek.
I grew up in the L.A. area and often went backpacking in the Sierra Nevada out of the Owens Valley. The locals there were still mad about L.A. stealing their water in the early 20th Century — and they weren’t shy about telling you so.
Daggett’s suit against the district will play out in court this summer. Meanwhile the ditch is piped and the water flows. Probably someday soon, there will be steelhead in Whychus Creek, which will be a cause for celebration.
But don’t count on everybody gathering together to sing hymns to flowing water. There’ll still be reason to fight over it.
And if folks can’t find a reason to fight over water, they’ll fight over land, the other great Western tradition. Right now there’s a pretty good brawl going on over the Cyrus family’s desire to convert Aspen Lakes into a destination resort.
Many neighbors are not pleased. Some think it’s a fine idea. Opponents see their way of life threatened and the Cyruses, as always, are relentless in pushing for what they perceive as their rights and prerogatives. It’s a recipe for a long-term, expensive and acrimonious donnybrook.
I think these things invoke such passion because they are so fundamental. It’s not just a pocketbook issue — it’s not “greed” per se, either for money or to retain a perceived right. Land and water become sacred to people and they are often willing to spend their treasure and even spill their blood to defend them. I think that eons of social and cultural values have wired us to take a stand on land and water. For most of human history, they have been life itself.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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19:55
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
There may be no more thankless job in Sisters than being on the Sisters School Board.
Members have volunteered to spend hours and hours trying to steer the school district through the shoals of charter school controversies, the search for a new superintendent, and perhaps the worst financial crisis the district has faced in the past two decades.
Of late, board members have taken some heat for terminating charter schools in the district, sacrificing state funding in the face of a serious budget shortfall.
The recent developments with AllPrep charter schools have vindicated the board's hard line. Seemingly each week brings word of new concerns from the Oregon Department of Education about the practices of the organization that runs the Sisters Web Academy, early college programs and the Sisters Charter Academy of Fine Arts (SCAFA).
The board terminated the web academy charter primarily because it couldn't get reliable financial information to perform oversight duties. The concerns raised at the state level, including a legislative hearing on AllPrep, demonstrate that those concerns were well-placed.
The board terminated SCAFA because members didn't think the school was financially viable. The school's eviction from its school house and the closure announced Tuesday morning show that the board was right there, too. Nobody is happy about it; the board tried to allow the school to operate through the school year, but the school just couldn't make it.
The early departure of Superintendent Elaine Drakulich resolves any tension between board and superintendent, which was evident in the mixed messages recently put out to the public about how to handle the ongoing budget crisis.
But the rough sailing is far from over. The board's most challenging work is yet to come. The issues surrounding AllPrep continue to demand the district's time and attention. The district must find a new leader who can rally the community to pull through hard times. Most importantly, the board is faced with cutting hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a relatively modest $12 million budget over the next two or three years without degrading the quality of education in Sisters.
We'd all like to think that we can pursue an ever-greater level of excellence in Sisters schools. Board members are committed to try.
Nobody wants to state it baldly, but staff, parents, students and board members all know the truth: rising costs and declining revenues make that an impossible task. What our school board is forced to do now is find ways to do the least damage possible as it carves away at a quality school system.
Who really wants that job?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:37
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This has been a particularly fun Olympics to watch.
Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller fulfill expectations and win gold. Ryan Miller withstands 45 shots on gold from Team Canada to lead Team USA to hockey victory.
Evan Lysacek skates a perfect program for gold, then takes the high road when the Russian Bear grumbles, growls and pouts and whines.
But perhaps my favorite moment came during the women’s hockey game between Canada and Finland. Supposedly there’s no body checking in women’s hockey, but somebody forgot to tell Canada’s Gillian Apps. She laid a bonejarring check on Finland's Jenni Hiirikoski that put the Finn on ice for a good minute and a half.
No penalty was called, even though the Finn was obviously hearing little birdies and wondering how she wandered into an NHL game.
The Candadian papers are calling it a “collision,” but it was a check. A perfect, clean, powerful check. And notice that women’s hockey is the real deal.
I also got to watch two biathlon races, which was really cool. Personally, I’d like to see ALL Winter Olympic Sports incorporate shooting. Ski jumping and sporting clays. Curling and 10m air pistol. Just imagine bobsled mounted twin .50s...
Don’t give Gillian Apps a gun though. Her shoulder already packs more punch than a 12 gauge.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:09
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Evan Bayh quit the Senate because he considers our government dysfunctional. That’s a conclusion most of us reached a long time ago. Dysfunction is endemic at the state level, too. John Kitzhaber famously said that Oregon is “ungovernable.” He still wants to take another shot at it though...
On the local level, things seem to be functioning pretty well at the City of Sisters. They are certainly getting some work done on the public works front and the financial house is in order. The city has approved a Transportation System Plan and a housing plan, both a long, long time in the works.
Now, they need to get the elements of those plans underway. THAT would be a truly functional government.
I still think the city needs to convince us that a gas tax is necessary before the March vote. Maybe next week...
The recent public hearing on the development code is a heartening display of democracy in action. Those with skin in the game have offered up some incisive criticism of the code and the planning commission and planning staff seem to be paying attention.
Planners walk a fine line with codes. Too tight and they run the risk of scaring off potential businesses and residents. Too loose and they risk erosion of the quality of environment that attracts businesses and residents to a backwater like Sisters.
The public cry is for “flexibility” in the code. That’s all well and good — we all want decisions governed by common sense. But flexibility always runs the risk of creating a climate for arbitrary decisions and an arbitrary government is a dangerous government.
Like I said, a balancing act — and it ain’t as easy as it looks.
Things look pretty dysfunctional right now in the school district — at least at the governance level. The school board wants to prioritize student achievement, but they are going to be bogged down for months in a superintendent search (yes, I understand that a good superintendent is vital to student achievement) and, apparently, in a recall drive.
The board has spent a huge amount of time dealing with a charter school situation that had to be resolved but soaked up an awful lot of time and energy for the number of students involved. The recall effort grew from that issue.
Hopefully, the board won’t take too long to do its due diligence and launch the proposed biomass boiler project. It would be great to get a project like that done — no cash outlay and significant savings down the road.
It’s easy to fall into “get government out of our lives” rhetoric, and when it is conspicuously dysfunctional, it seems that it wouldn’t be missed. But what we really need is government that works, that is limited in scope and has core missions and competencies, government that delivers. Good roads, good schools, cops and firefighters there when you need them — that sort of thing.
At least on the local level we can help make that happen. All it takes is doing a little homework and showing up...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:52
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Pundits are fond of tracing the fault lines between the West and the Islamic world back to the Crusades, often in the context that Islamic extremists dwell on that past as if the perceived wrongs of that long-ago age were still fresh.
That perspective isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s mostly off the mark.
The historical roots of the West’s modern conflict with Islam really lie in the Great War, what we call World War I.
The dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled over the Middle East for 400 years, led to the creation of the nations of Iraq and Syria, and the formation of a political entity known as Palestine, with a promise from the British for the area to become a national home for the Jewish people.
The British promised much to the Arabs to entice them into the Arab Revolt (famous as the guerilla warfare arena of Lawrence of Arabia) and mostly welshed on their promises.
Historian David Fromkin calls the postwar settlement of the Middle East as “the peace to end all peace.”
This is all brilliantly laid out in a DVD titled “Blood & Oil” (available from the Deschutes Public Library). The “blood” in the title is obvious; while the war was not as gruesome as the trenches of the Western Front, it was plenty bloody. The “oil” refers to the growing recognition of the strategic value of the resources in the Middle East.
When the war started, oil was not widely recognized as a significant issue except by visionaries like Winston Churchill. By war’s end, it was, and it would ensure that the Middle East, far from fading back into obscurity in western minds, would remain at the forefront of the world’s concerns.
This is history most Americans don’t know, and it’s very well done. Check it out.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:35
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Looks like Sisters Charter Academy of Fine Arts (SCAFA) is winding down its days.
The school will be able to stay open while it appeals to the Oregon Department of Education the Sisters School District’s decision to terminate its contract, so it’ll probably hold on through most of the rest of the school year.
The charter school board has already decided they won’t attempt to renew the charter when it expires this summer.
It’s hard to see how things could have played out another way. The charter school never had enough students to meet minimum state requirements and never showed the sponsoring Sisters School District that it could be financially viable.
Frankly, the proposals the charter school offered to demonstrate the potential for financial viability were rudimentary at best. They offered vague ideas, not a concrete course of action.
Under those circumstances, the Sisters School Board really didn’t have a choice but to terminate. They would not have been doing their duty to let things continue as they were.
But the outcome is terribly unfortunate for the families who used the school. SCAFA turned out to be a kind of alternative learning environment for many kids who didn’t — and won’t — thrive in the standard public school setting. Several parents have told me how much better things are for their child at SCAFA; they don’t know what they’ll do with it gone.
How can you not sympathize with their plight?
SCAFA got off to a rocky start. There were serious problems there, beyond the financial viability question. But after two years of floundering, SCAFA seemed to have righted the ship educationally, if not economically. As one parent put it, it was creating square holes to accommodate the square pegs — and that means everything to the parent of a square peg.
It’s too bad that it took too long and that it appears that it’s too late.
Real educational choice is important in every community, large or small. Sisters Christian Academy has provided that for some parents; homeschooling works for some families.
It’s not easy to provide. Charter schools and private academies alike have a tough row to hoe and they really need a solid business and educational plan going in to have a hope of success.
The school board did the right thing in terminating SCAFA — from an institutional standpoint, it was the only thing they could responsibly do. I know that board members regret the impact it will have on the children and teachers involved.
Sisters is poorer for the loss of the charter school, especially that small group of families whose children were thriving and now have no place to go. Nobody is better off here.
We like to think that we can make something work for everybody and sometimes we can’t. The pencil is tough and sometimes it leaves everybody whipped.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:18
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
• Mark McGwire admits to using steroids. Now there’s some breaking news...
“I wish I had never touched steroids,” McGwire said. “It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”
Well, at least we’ll never hear Keith Richards say “I wish I’d never played rock-and-roll during the heroin era.”
• Sarah Palin joins Fox News as a contributor. Didn’t see that one coming...
• From the L.A. Times: “Peter Robinson, Northern Irelands first minister, said he was giving up his post for six weeks in order to concentrate on clearing his name and on caring for his wife, Iris, (60) an influential lawmaker whose spectacular fall from grace has rocked the province’s political scene.
The revelation last week of her affair with a 19-year-old youth and allegations that she solicited secret loans to help him open a coffeehouse have left her career in ruins and put her in need of “acute psychiatric treatment,” Peter Robinson said.
She may have Tiger Woods beat...
• Never mind unemployment, terrorism, home foreclosures...
(CNN) — James Cameron’s completely immersive spectacle “Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.
Oooookaaaayyy...
• Harry Reid has retired from the Senate and will take a job as a spokesman for the NAACP.
(I just made that last one up. I think...)
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:19
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
David Brooks once again puts his finger on the cultural pulse (read his column in this week’s Nugget, page 2).
Brooks examines the nation’s reaction to the foiled attempt to set off explosives on a transatlantic flight over Christmas.
Brooks notes that we’ve plowed a lot of money and technology into preventing terrorist attacks, and it seems to have worked. But we want perfection and that just ain’t possible.
... the system is bound to fail sometimes.... Brooks writes.
Resilient societies have a levelheaded understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.
“But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.
In a mature nation, President Barack Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny.
When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said.
I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has to be seen doing something, so it added another layer to its stage play, “Security Theater” — more baggage regulations, more in-flight restrictions.
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, PA., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
That last bit is a critical point. I’ve just started rereading Allan W. Eckert’s “That Dark and Bloody River,” a chronicle of the half century of savage warfare that won the Ohio Valley for the new United States.
The people who struggled to make homes in that watershed lived lives of constant insecurity. Just making a living was dangerous enough — you might fell a tree on yourself, get kicked in the head by a horse or succumb to the myriad diseases for which there was nothing but folk remedies.
Add to that the militant hostility of the region’s native peoples — some of the most formidable wilderness fighters ever bred, fighting to preserve their way of life. Any day could bring terror down on a settler or a hunter and his family.
The government wasn’t much help. It was weak, distant and distracted by other things, like trying to win independence from Great Britain and then forge some kind of union. Formal military expeditions against the Ohio tribes tended to end in farce or disaster.
It was independent ranging companies led by the likes of Captain Samuel Brady or Simon Kenton that secured the frontier. That and countless unheralded individual acts of courage and fortitude.
Brooks, wordsmith that he is, calls it “decentralized citizen action.” Those frontiersmen would have likely called it gumption. Gumption might not get you through, but you sure as hell weren’t going to make it without it.
The world is a hell of a lot more complex than it was in the 1780s, and maybe that complexity — and a life of heretofore unimaginable wealth, convenience and ease — has leached a lot of the gumption out of the American bloodline. But not all of it.
There’s still plenty of room for “nonexpert civilians” with “the spirit to take the initiative” to make good things happen and to stop bad things from happening.
We see it a lot in Sisters, actually. We built our own elementary school classrooms, we help our neighbors, we band together to weather storms both physical and economic.
That’s gratifying evidence that the pioneer spirit is still alive. Let’s hope we never lose it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:46
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Another one of those stories — from the Associated Press: “A Nevada couple letting their SUV’s navigation system guide them through high desert of Eastern Oregon got stuck in snow for three days when the GPS unit sent them down a remote forest road.”
Fortunately, they were prepared for being stranded — food, water, warm clothes — and they made it okay, with a memorable Christmas under their belts.
We’ve heard this one before. Several people have got stuck on the McKenzie Highway here in the Sisters Country because the GPS told them that was the route to take — never mind the signs that say “Road Closed.”
There’s a story about a couple of guys in Poland who drove into a lake because the GPS pointed them at it. But that couldn’t be true, right?
Stories like this play right into my suspicions about technology. GPS is pretty cool. I like having all the information even a basic unit provides.
However... the technology is seductive. Ah, how easy to grow complacent. Let’s cut through here. We can always follow the bread crumbs back to camp, right?
Relying on your GPS instead of low-tech techniques like map-and-compass and common sense (know your route before you take it, etc.) is a good way to get yourself in trouble.
Then again...
The couple was rescued after they finally got a weak signal on their — GPS enabled — cell phone and rescuers were able to locate them.
“GPS almost did ’em in and GPS saved ’em,” said Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger.
A perfect illustration of a double-edged sword. Writ large, it’s a metaphor for the role of technology in our lives. Do we run it, or does it run us?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:15
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, a strange thing happened in several sectors of the trench line that cut across Belgium and France.
The allied English, Scottish and French soldiers, and the German troops facing them across a recently-established No Man’s Land, spontaneously laid down their arms, stood up in their trenches and walked out into that beaten, corpse-strewn zone of death. They greeted each other in a cautious, then friendly, expression of the season’s spirit.
They exchanged chocolate and cigarettes, showed each other pictures of wives and girlfriends, drank together and even engaged in impromptu religious observances and at least one informal soccer match.
In some sectors, the informal truce lasted only part of a day. In others, it is said to have lasted, more or less, until New Year’s.
It was a brief — and for many participants profoundly moving — moment in that maddest of wars, the one they called The Great War until a still greater one that it set in motion eclipsed its unique horrors a generation later.
The High Commands on both sides took a very dim view of such fraternization with the enemy and steps were taken to ensure that no repeat of the spontaneous Christmas Truce occurred again. Years of savage, industrial slaughter also seared away the vestiges of fellow-feeling that still existed in that first Christmas of the war.
But ever since that night in 1914, the Christmas Truce has loomed large as a moment of humanity amidst a numbingly inhuman conflict, a flash of sanity in a world gone suddenly and perhaps irrevocably insane.
Each Christmas season, my family watches the beautiful 2005 French film about the Christmas Truce, “Joyeux Noel.”
It is as powerful a Christmas story as you can find, a hopeful, yet tragic, reminder of the true value of the season: a moment to celebrate the fellowship of man.
A Joyeux Noel to all of you and yours.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:46
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Central Electric Cooperative has had its nose bloodied in court — and in the court of public opinion — in recent months.
Some of the utility’s actions haven’t been too popular, especially in the Sisters Country. Tall steel power poles and massive new substations in the back yard are bound to raise the ire of neighbors.
But whatever you might think of CEC’s recent projects, you can’t fault the dedication and hard work of the crews that responded to last week’s power emergency.
While those of us who lost power due to a catastrophic equipment failure got up, shivered, cussed, and tried to figure out how to get the house warm and cook some breakfast, those crews were already out in brutal cold, figuring out just what had gone wrong and getting repairs underway.
Some of those crews were out for 24 hours in subzero cold, nursing the system back to life a little at a time.
We’d all rather the power didn’t go out in the first place. We’d all like to see it come back faster once repairs are made. But we should all be grateful for the will to work through the problem, despite bone-chilling cold and long hours on the part of line crews and the support staff that helped keep them in the field.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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12:49
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
“Who knows what any of us would be like after 30 years with no one ever telling you ‘No.’”
A fellow I was working with last weekend said that. He wasn’t talking about Tiger Woods, although we both laughed and agreed he might has well have been.
The sordid Tiger Woods scandal is different only in degree, not in kind, from dozens of other scandals involving athletes, actors, politicians, preachers — all men of power and prestige, who are too often coddled and enabled by Yes Men (and apparently lots of Yes Women as well).
So, there’s obviously something to what my friend says. Fame, fortune and power obviously contribute to narcissism.
But my creed is that character is fate. The seeds of narcissism have to be there in the first place to grow into the giant weed that is Tiger Woods’ character.
Of course there are enormous temptations placed in the path of the wealthy, the powerful, the talented, the beautiful and the famous. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing inherently wrong with indulging yourself in those temptations. Unless you’re living a lie, preaching or displaying one set of public values and virtues while privately practicing ... something else.
Until you make a promise to another person.
Private matter? You go out of your way to make yourself a public figure, you flash your dazzling smile across TV screens across the world and reap the enormous financial rewards of creating a public persona then complain when your own actions crack the facade and give your public a glimpse behind the curtain? Come on. That’s just one more layer of hypocrisy.
Honesty, integrity, authenticity — these are marks of character. As humans, we sometimes fall short of our best character. We make mistakes. The heart — or the mind and the body — strays.
But Tiger Woods didn’t make a “mistake.” He made choices, tried to cover them up and projected an image of a devoted son, husband and father, an incredibly gifted athlete with a charmed life.
That’s not having your character twisted by years of nobody telling you “No” and too many women saying “Yes.” It’s not “sex addiction” or some other form of psychological disorder. That’s just hypocrisy, self-indulgence and bad character.
The guy’s a bum. We didn’t know it, but he always was.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:49
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Fifteen below is cold enough, I reckon.
The power outage caused by the extreme cold overnight on Monday is causing folks some discomfort. Imagine if a cold snap like this lasted a few days with no power.
An inconvenience quickly turns into an emergency.
Last night’s events are a strong argument for a wood stove and alternative means of cooking food and heating water. And for a backup supply of water if the well pump goes out. And a supply of extra food if the grocery store is closed.
Sure, you can go to the local Red Cross center, but isn’t it better to be prepared to shelter in place? This morning we stoked up the wood stove, fired up the propane burner and boiled some water for coffee, cooked some soup and all was well.
It’ll still be well if there’s no power tonight and the temperature sinks below zero.
Modern conveniences based on electrical power sure are nice, but it doesn’t pay to be totally dependent on them.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:44
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Nugget writer Jeff Spry lent me the first season of the HBO series Carnivale last week and I became an instant addict.
The show is set in 1934 in the Dustbowl and in California, involving two apparently converging story arcs following a traveling carnival and a pastor in California.
It is weird, mythic, dark and compelling viewing and I highly recommend it.
The 1930s were a strange, mad time. The world was going to hell in a bucket and there is something surreal and bizarre about what W.H. Auden called “that low, dishonest decade” that makes it the perfect setting for a tale of strange, mystical, mysterious happenings.
I wonder if people will look back on the current epoch — with the war on terrorism and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — with the same sense that the world was strangely off-kilter. Moreso than “normal,” I mean.
There’s certainly enough material to populate a good freak show.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:18
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
As President Obama deliberates over his Afghanistan strategy (thought he had one during the campaign — guess that was just rhetoric), some Democrats are proposing the imposition of a “war tax” to cover the costs of escalating what is sure to be a long-term commitment with uncertain goals and exit strategy.
Of course, this is political posturing, but I’d prefer to take it seriously.
There should have been a war tax from the beginning. Putting billions of dollars of war spending on our credit card is bankrupt in every sense of the term.
Sen. Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee wants a tax on the wealthy to cover the costs of escalation. Bah. Should be across the board. All of us should bear the burden. Or decide we don’t want to.
That, of course, is why we don’t do the war tax thing. Wars that start showing up in a clear and unmistakable way on our tab run the risk of getting really unpopular really fast.
If the mission is worth pursuing, it’s worth shared, national sacrifice. Why should military families be the only ones feeling a direct impact? If the whole nation is not on board with the mission, maybe we should reconsider the mission.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:55
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
It’s all over in 2012. So says the ancient Mayan prophecy and last weekend’s box office champion movie. Pretty soon we’ll be treated to the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s horrific Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel “The Road.”
This is the kind of story we tell ourselves when we’re looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, convinced it’s an inbound train. Anxiety about the future seems to have the American consciousness in its grip — when we can tear ourselves away from John and Kate and Carrie Prejean’s sex tape(s) that is.
Only about a third of Americans think the country is on the right track. For a future-oriented, optimistic culture like ours, that equates to a bout of depression. People are surly and angry and there seems to be little faith that we can get anything done.
In his latest column (The Nugget, November 18, page 2), David Brooks addresses this anxiety as it relates to the growing power of China (aka, our banker):
“....moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.
“This eschatological faith in the future has motivated generations of Americans, just as religious faith motivates a missionary. Pioneers and immigrants endured hardship in the present because of their confidence in future plenty. Entrepreneurs start up companies with an exaggerated sense of their chances of success. The faith is the molten core of the country’s dynamism.”
Right now, that faith is deeply shaken — and China seems to have taken it over.
Brooks again: “The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.”
I’ve personally never had that manic faith. I grew up knowing that things can go very wrong and that the outlook wasn’t going to improve. A lifelong immersion in history-geekdom reinforced an innate pessimism.
But it’s an optimistic kind of pessimism. Or maybe a pessimistic form of optimism. Acceptance.
In the words of Steve Earle:
Now, nobody lives forever
Nothin' stands the test of time
Oh, you heard 'em say "never say never"
But it's always best to keep it in mind
That every tower ever built tumbles
No matter how strong, no matter how tall
Someday even great walls will crumble
And every idol ever raised falls
And someday even man's best laid plans
Will lie twisted and covered in rust
When we've done all that we can but it slipped through our hands
And it's ashes to ashes and dust to dust
Yep. That’s pretty much how I see things. May seem weird, but it’s a cheerful, or at least comfortable, thought. We’re all part of gigantic long-term processes and the way things are is the way they must be.
I certainly don’t believe in being passive. Work and struggle are worthy — for their own sake. It doesn’t matter that it all turns to rust and ash in the end. The point is to fight the good fight. I get up and do my best every day. It doesn’t matter what the future may hold.
That outlook relieves a lot of anxiety. I do think that, in the grand sweep of things, America is in relative decline. It’ll be a long one, and hopefully not an abrupt, catastrophic crash. Every tower ever built tumbles/No matter how strong, no matter how tall.
A new world is rising right before our eyes. We’re in an age of profound change. There are too many contingencies to hazard predictions (unless that’s your racket) but it’s a safe bet that another century will see a profound realignment of power structures, ecology and life-ways.
“History is never coming back,” says my fifth-grader. She’s right. Cling to nothing temporary, say the stoics. And if it’s material, it’s all temporary.
Don’t sweat it. See you in 2012. Maybe.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The proposed annexation of the 30-acre McKenzie Meadows property for the site of a senior living community has become a hot issue in Sisters.
The public rhetoric has, so far, been pretty civil (though I’ve heard some complain otherwise). The private comments I’ve heard are another story. People are fired up about this.
That’s a little weird to me. Seems like an issue that could be addressed pretty dispassionately. I can easily lawyer both sides.
Pro: Sisters needs to accommodate an aging population. This is the piece of land that had the right price to make a project pencil. It was already approved for annexation by voters. It’s not sprawl; it’s bordered by schools and a shopping center.
If the project doesn’t fly, it’s just a bare piece of ground paying taxes into the city.
It’ll provide vital construction jobs and ongoing service jobs.
Con:
The jobs are speculative; we don’t know if this project is viable.
Sisters needs to focus on keeping a vital downtown core. We’ve already pushed development and economic activity out on the margins (Outlaw Station at one end, Five Pine at the other).
We already have too much inactive developable space and too much inventory; we shouldn’t add too it now.
Neither side is all right or all wrong here. There are competing visions, sure, and differing views on viability, but I don’t think any honest assessment couldn’t concede points to the other side.
But that’s not how we do things anymore. And that’s what interests me.
Sisters, like the rest of the nation, has fallen into a very divisive, hardball kind of politics. In the city council election last November PACs contributed significant amounts of money to campaigns, for the first time in Sisters’ history.
The school local option campaign drew in a lot of cultural baggage from well outside the school district — attitudes toward public education in general and toward taxes and government in general — that shaped peoples’ attitude toward a strictly local measure.
This annexation issue has brought out some pretty strong language regarding various peoples’ integrity, character and motives. Again, that’s all been private and/or anonymous so far, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it go public during and after the city council’s decision on Thursday night.
What it shows me is that Sisters is not much different than anywhere else in the USA right now. People are quick to take sides, quick to think the worst of each other and feel increasingly threatened by people who think differently than they do.
I guess this is nothing new. Certainly the fight over the sewer system got pretty nasty.
But there seems to be something meaner in the air these days, an ill wind that pushes into the cracks between people and drives them farther and farther apart until disagreements are irreconcilable differences.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Jeff Spry did a nice piece in this week’s Nugget profiling Harold Mulligan, a former Sisters resident who is still active in Sisters veterans groups. Mulligan is a Pearl Harbor survivor and he saw a lot more action in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
Jeff’s story closes with a quote that I found very striking:
“Mostly at night when sun goes down is when it bothers you most. The older you get, the worse it gets. There's a lot of nights lying awake.”
That sounds a lot like my uncle, now 91 and living in Arizona. He was an infantry captain in Italy during the war. I know little of his service because when I was young and we lived in Southern California, he never talked about the war.
I do know that he saw a lot of heavy combat in very rough terrain and that it was a bad experience for him.
My dad visits him a lot and now, he says, after decades of almost complete silence on the subject, the war is almost all my uncle talks about.
What particularly preys on his mind is the young 18-year-old replacements sent into the lines at night. Many times, the Germans would mortar the Americans’ position overnight and these kids would be wounded or killed before they ever fired a shot. Before anybody even knew their name.
My uncle keeps coming back to that. He’s lived a long life. Those kids had theirs cut short. That kind of thing gets to you.
Those memories reaching their long fingers across decades of time are not uncommon, I’m told. “The older you get the worse it gets” is common. It’s not unusual for decades of silence to be broken by an intense focus on wartime experiences.
“Stereotypically normal,” says a friend who works with veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
That’s why groups like those that have recently come into being in Sisters where veterans assist one another are so important. Veterans who have a hard time dealing with their memories need to be around people who have shared similar experiences, who know how it feels.
And my friend in the field will tell you, there’s a whole new generation of men and women who are going to struggle with “a lot of nights lying awake.”
Hopefully, we are better now at helping folks get through those long nights than we used to be.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:01
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I hate my cell phone.
I don’t like the feeling that I can be tracked down at any time, anywhere. Sometimes I feel like the damn thing is like one of those electronic surveillance devices they slap around your ankle when you’re under house arrest.
But I don’t know how I got along without one. It makes my job so much easier. Journalism is about 80 percent phone calls, and I don’t have to be chained to a desk to make them. My cell phone makes me more productive.
Come January, I’ll have to get a hands-free device to use it in the truck. Oregon, like other states is trying to crack down on cell phone distractions while driving. This may be a cosmetic effort. There’s evidence that it’s the talking itself that is the big distraction, not holding the phone (though dropping your cell phone in the car prompts an almost instinctive move to grab it instead of paying attention to the road. That’s a crash waiting to happen).
Somehow I doubt that the new Oregon law will be stringently enforced, which makes it kind of moot. The urge to use the phone is too strong unless the consequences are huge.
Maybe they should be, especially for texting while driving. In Britain, texting while driving is a serious crime and if you hurt somebody, you will go to prison. It’s treated more or less like drunk driving.
Cell phones are here to stay until they are supplanted by some more sophisticated technology. That means we’ll have to put up with people yakking on their phone in the grocery line and other annoyances.
Texting habits will cnt 2 dstry wrtn eng lng LOL.
But maybe it’s a good idea to make the roads communications free zones. At least ban texting and enforce the ban with strict penalties. Nobody can argue that texting while driving isn’t a big public safety concern (can they?).
As for cell phone use, I try to be good about that, but I’m probably bad as everybody else. After all, I have a GOOD REASON to be using the phone in the car.
I’ll do the hands free thing in January, though I’d rather take that damn thing (and yours, too) and chuck it out the truck window at 80 mph.
Wait. That’s illegal.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:19
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Last Saturday, a young woman from Bend left Devil’s Lake Trailhead at 1 p.m. intending to summit both South and Middle Sister.
She was totally unprepared for being out after dark, even though she left with only about 5-1/2 hours of good daylight left. She had no emergency blanket or rations.
The 20-year-old is a runner and obviously very fit; she did something like 25 miles in rough terrain in the dark to get to Three Creek Road, where a woodcutter found her the next morning and gave her and her dog a lift into town.
A few months back, an experienced ultra runner got lost in the canyons and chapparal of San Diego County on a “short” training run. She was missing for days and nearly died. She copped to the fact that she had been in a hurry to get her training in and violated her own pre-run routine and emergency preparation.
Why do capable people do such dumb things, things that risk their lives and the lives of those who turn out to rescue them?
A book I read recently has some great insights into this phenomenon, which happens over and over and over again. It’s called “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why” by Laurence Gonzales.
There’s a lot to this book and any thumbnail necessarily gives it short shrift, but one of the basic points is this: The mind creates “emotional bookmarks” based on strong positive or negative experiences. Our mind goes to those when we make decisions and the emotional feedback we get overrides our rational mind, our good sense.
In the case of highly trained and capable athletes, the emotional bookmark flags the great feeling they get from their training, which can be downright addictive (in the chemical as well as the emotional sense). The desire to get out there and do the run, the trek, the climb, overrides the rational caution flags: it’s too late to start; I don’t have my emergency kit together; I’m not sure of the route.
We are all susceptible to this phenomenon; people whose skill and fitness have got them out of trouble in the past even more so than the average bear. We all like to think “Man, I’d never do anything that STUPID,” but the truth is, you just might, if the emotional bookmark grabs you hard enough.
There’s a lot in the book about the kind of mindset that gets people through survival situations, but the most important lesson in “Deep Survival” is to be aware of the tricks we play on ourselves that get us into those situations in the first place.
Slow down. Recognize when your desires — to just get out there, to make it to that peak, to try to beat the dark to get past that one last drainage — are letting you slide into a dangerous situation.
It’s important to understand that it’s not about smart/stupid. “I’m too smart to do that” is the kind of hubris that leads to unexpected trouble.
Great book; recommend it highly. Combine it with Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and you get a much better understanding of the interplay between thought and emotion that can literally mean the difference between life and death.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:56
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I was saddened to hear that Sisters’ former fire chief Don Mouser has died.
Chief Mouser had been running the fire service here for almost 20 years when I got to town and started reporting on fire department issues.
I always enjoyed interviewing him — interviews that often turned into conversations, salted with stories of the old days in the Sisters fire service.
Chief Mouser was definitely what you’d call Old School — but he laid the groundwork for what has become a very up-to-date fire and medical service.
He started out as a logger — which I think most of the volunteer fire crew in the early days were. They did what they needed to do in the way that seemed best to them — and some of those ways would curl the hair and melt the eyeballs of a modern-day OSHA type.
It wasn’t that they were deliberately unsafe — they just had to make do with what they had and the techniques and tools at hand at the time. Heck, they don’t even let firefighters ride hanging on to the outside of engines any more.
Chief Mouser was riding a significant wave of change. For much of his 25 year tenure, Sisters remained a small and pretty sleepy town, but change was in the wind. Modernization was a must. The Sisters-Camp Sherman RFPD acquired new equipment and enhanced its training and professionalism.
Chief Mouser was one of the leaders of the charge to bring Sisters up to speed with an ambulance service and EMTs, believing that the fire district had to care for the medical needs of residents and visitors as well as protecting them from fire.
I always got the impression that the Chief was progressive in his thinking when it came to the kinds of services and skills Sisters needed in its fire department. But I don’t think he much cared for the added administrative burden that seems inevitably to come along with modernization.
Maybe that’s why our conversations toward the end of his tenure so often turned to the old days and the old way of doing things. That’s the way it is with pioneers. They can look with pride on what has come from their labors, but nothing has quite the tang of being in the thick of it, when the tasks were simple but difficult, when the world was young and so much needed to be done.
Hats off to you, Chief. You were a good man and you did a good job.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:26
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This from CBS News:
Last week, House Republican Leader John Boehner objected to House passage of a bill that would expand hate crime laws and make it a federal crime to assault people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
"All violent crimes should be prosecuted vigorously, no matter what the circumstance," he said. "The Democrats' 'thought crimes' legislation, however, places a higher value on some lives than others. Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance."
Based on that statement, CBSNews.com contacted Boehner's office to find out if the minority leader opposes all hate crimes legislation. The law as it now stands offers protections based on race, color, religion and national origin.
In an email, Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Boehner "supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc.) based on immutable characteristics."
I’m actually with Boehner on this one — until it comes to his rationale.
I’ve always thought “hate crime” enhancement was a crock. Motive is an element of guilt, but it shouldn’t be an element of punishment. A man who kills another man because he hates him personally has commited a crime every bit as heinous as a man who kills someone for racial or religious reasons. Hate is hate, murder is murder.
But Boehner’s rationale here is troubling. Mainly because he’s either a fool or a bigot (or both). Religion apparently is an “immutable characteristic” even though people can and do change their religion, sometimes several times. But being gay is not?
Personally, I’d rather see the whole idea of “hate crimes” scrapped.” But if you’re going to have such definitions, sexual orientation should certainly be on the list. And Boehner and his ilk need to get a clue.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
For a minute there this morning, I thought that the Saturday Night Live crew had taken over the Nobel Prize committee. It seemed like a pretty good extended riff on last weekend’s skit. You know the one. The one where President Obama cops to NOT GETTING ANYTHING DONE!!
Pretty funny. The Nobel Peace Prize. For talking nice.
CNN reports that “The announcement caught the White House off guard. One senior administration official said ‘we were quite surprised.’”
Well, yeah, I bet.
Because the president has NOT DONE ANYTHING to deserve such an award.
The nominations were closed 12 days after he took office. Talk about the triumph of style over substance.
This year’s science prizes went to men whose work transformed our lives, producing fiber optic technology and the basis for digital photography. I guess next year they should just award the prize to someone who can articulate an idea nicely. Why bother with actually producing a breakthrough?
For that matter, I'm working on a novel. It's not done, much less published. It's a really great idea. I think they oughta give me the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I don’t care what your politics are, anybody ought to be able to smell B.S. when they step in it. This is a travesty that should be rejected by everyone — starting with President Obama himself.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:06
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Had an interesting reaction yesterday to a story that we ran in The Nugget about Cache Mountain Traders and the “prepper” culture.
A fellow I ran into at the gym was a little freaked out by the premise, as though there was something off-kilter, weird about the whole idea.
“What are we supposed to be preparing for?” he asked. “Armageddon?”
My response was, “Anything.” The idea is to be prepared for any kind of trouble that rolls down the pike.
David Brooks’ column in this week’s Nugget points out some of the trouble that we face — the financial kind. (You can read it here, too:
[www.nytimes.com] .
Brooks argues for a return to the kind of fiscal self-restraint that produced “sound economic values” that served as a counterweight to the “notorious materialism” of American culture.
Without those sound economic values, we face the inevitable result of affluence and luxury: “decadence, corruption and decline.”
Brooks’ argument is a moral one. I’d argue that the whole idea of self-reliance and preparedness should be considered a moral issue, too.
Ideally, each of us should strive to be physically fit and capable, financially fit and secure and emotionally and spiritually strong to take on the inevitable challenges that life flings at us. We should have the knowledge base and the material preparedness to weather storms, natural or man made.
You can come at these virtues through a variety of spiritual and cultural traditions. There is no need to attach a political agenda.
It is a mistake, I think, to scoff at those who take heed of the storm clouds on the horizon. It seems a strange reaction, given how bad things are and how much worse they could get.
But maybe it’s not so strange. “Fitness” of all kinds takes hard work and discipline. What Brooks argues for in his column would take a massive cultural shift from a sense of entitlement to a sense of responsibility — and political decisions that are unlikely to be made in the animal farm of the public arena.
Maybe it’s just easier to dismiss the calls for a return to old virtues as quaint at best, weird at worst. But I know who the people are that I will want in my camp when Big Trouble comes.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
From Fan Nation:
Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount, suspended for the season after his postgame tirade at Boise State on Sept. 3, could be reinstated after all. Ducks coach Chip Kelly will discuss Blount's status after today's practice, and a release Thursday night from the school said Kelly's plan "could include Blount's potential reinstatement prior to the conclusion of the 2009 season.'' Blount has practiced regularly with the team for the past three weeks, mostly on the scout team. He has attended all the games. On Thursday, a letter of apology signed by Blount appeared in the campus newspaper.
Apparently, talent does mean a free pass...
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8:24
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Small wonder so many people think Hollywood is out of touch with “mainstream” American values.
You have to be pretty far out of anything resembling the mainstream of culture to advocate that a man who admitted forcing himself on a 13-year-old girl should get a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Yet that’s what a lot of Hollywood luminaries are doing when it comes to Roman Polanski.
Polanski is unquestionably a brilliant director. “Chinatown” is one of the great movies of all time and his “MacBeth” left a searing impression on me in high school.
But he also did something very bad way back in 1978, and he skipped the country to avoid facing the music. He needs to come back to the U.S. and place himself before the court. If there was prosecutorial misconduct, as has been credibly alleged, that needs to be addressed — by the courts.
The fact that the victim, now in her 40s, does not want prosecution is irrelevant. It’s not her call.
The outcry to free Polanski is a reflection of the double standards at play when the rich and talented run afoul of the law. Nobody would be pleading for immediate release of some Joe who did what Polanski admitted doing.
The rich, powerful and talented cannot be above the law, or we have no justice at all.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Forest Service is getting set to touch off a series of prescribed burns.
They’re gun shy after last year’s escape, which caused the 1,800-acre Wizard Fire. I think they’re worried about public response.
Well, this member of the public is in full support of the fall burning program. I don’t love smoke on crisp, clear fall days and I don’t love brown pine needles in my woods — but I’m willing to live with them for the sake of the long-term health of the forests I love.
The forest is more than a pretty view — it’s a vital ecosystem. For some of us it is a downright sacred world. We’ve done a lot to make it sick and fire is the cure.
It’s the only cure, too. Mechanical thinning doesn’t replace fire. Nothing does. It is nature’s cleansing agent and this is its time of year.
There’s no excuse for the lapses that led to the Wizard Fire. I understand why people are angry about that. But there’s another truth that needs to be told here: the Wizard Fire was a beautiful thing from the standpoint of forest health. Almost all low-intensity — a nice, cleansing fire.
We need to treat more of the forest with fire — and at this time of year — not less. Of course we need for it to happen on purpose, in a controlled, non-threatening manner.
The Forest Service blew it on the RNA burn last year — and learned from it.
We can’t let the risks associated with prescribed burning make us too fearful to reap its benefits.
We need to put up with the smoke and the “ugly” immediate aftermath, because it is the only thing that can protect the forest from much uglier disease and from catastrophic fire.
About 1/4 of the Angeles National Forest where I roamed incessantly as a kid and as a young man has been ruined, burned to a literal crisp by an arson-caused wildfire of catastrophic proportions.
It was inevitable; the only thing that could have prevented the dire consequences is if those slopes had burned over lightly many times in preceding years.
If you love the forests of the Sisters Country, learn to love fire. The forest cannot live without it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:17
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I got an earful from my brother this morning regarding “what passes for news these days.”
He was peeved about the new focus of the remarkable story of Melanie Oudin, the 17-year-old phenom who knocked over, one after another, a murderers row of Russian aces on her way to the U.S. Open Tennis quarterfinals, where she fell to 19-year-old Caroline Wozniacki.
Someone dug up court filings on divorce proceedings between Oudin’s parents and aired the whole sorry tale, which was dutifully reported by media from the sports world and beyond. Tabloid fodder from heaven, right?
“Here’s the good news,” my brother said. “You’ve become a celebrity because of an exceptional tennis performance. Here’s the bad news: You’re a celebrity; and this is how we treat celebrities.”
As is often the case, my brother and I were thinking the same thought. My reaction to seeing this story splashed all over the Internet was, why does this girl deserve to have her family’s dirty laundry hung out for everyone in the world to pick over?
The answer is, she doesn’t. I realize that this is spitting into the ocean, but there is no reason that any of us need to know about this. It’s mere titillation.
Family problems — divorce, infidelity, illness — are well within a zone of privacy that should be respected. Politicians and some other public figures should be exempted because there is an issue of public trust involved, but even there some circumspection is in order. We don’t need the feeding frenzy that accompanies these things, from Bill Clinton to Mark Sanford to John Edwards.
Thinking about the Oudin situation led me back to another, more significant, question of drawing lines that I’ve been thinking a lot about for the past few days: the publishing of an AP photo of the dying of Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard in Afghanistan (after his family had asked AP not to distribute the photo).
That decision by AP drew stinging rebukes for insensitivity.
I’m of two minds about this. I don’t think AP should have distributed this particular photo, especially in the face of an express request from the family not to do so. Showing the young man in his last, dying agony caused too much pain to his loved ones.
But by the same token, we are too inclined to sanitize ugly realities. We don’t need to know about someone’s messy marital situation. But we do need to face up to the reality of warfare that is being carried out in our name and on our dime.
If we don’t have to look, we don’t have to face up. (That’s not a political statement, by the way. Whether you support a policy or not, it’s important to grapple with the consequences, especially when they are literally life-and-death).
“Just tell us about it; we don’t need to see it.”
I’ve heard that fairly often in response to photos of accidents and the like. I don’t buy it. Much as it pains a word guy to say it, images are more powerful than words at conveying stark realities.
I’ve seen (and shot) my share of bad accidents. Seeing what I have seen has made a significant impact on my driving habits. Not the rational understanding of the dangers of the highway — an emotional response to seeing what happens when a couple of tons of steel hits something at speed.
That’s got value. That’s a need-to-know thing. We all know that that damned Barclay Drive/Highway 20 intersection is dangerous. Seeing twisted steel all over the road makes you actually slow down and look when. Does me, anyway. Every time.
Sensitivity to victims and family members is important. You don’t necessarily need to show the face of fear and pain to get the point across. How graphic is too graphic? Is it the ability to put a name to a face the tipping point?
There is an iconic photograph of a terrified young Vietnamese girl running down a road from a napalm attack on her village that brought home powerfully the impact of that conflict on civilians. Why is it OK to run that and not a shot of a dying U.S. Marine?
How about the famous shot of the South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong guerrilla during Tet?
I think AP stepped over the line, but I can't say in a hard-and-fast way where the line lies.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
If you’re tired of the shouting and the superficial sound bytes passing for discussion of health care reform in the United States, you might want to check out the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine.
David Goldhill writes a piece titled “How American Health Care Killed My Father.”
It’s too long and detailed an exploration of the flaws and potentials of American health care to summarize here. The gist is this.: Goldhill argues that the only way that costs can be tamed and quality ensured is by converting to a consumer-driven model for health care.
Right now, patients and their families are not the customers — insurance companies and the government are. Goldhill argues that any reform that does not address that fundamental distortion is bound to fail.
It’s a refreshingly nonpartisan, non-ideological approach — Health Savings Account; government-pooled catastrophic insurance; greater transparency.
No shouting, no spinning. It's long, it's detailed, it's dense with ideas and information. Worth a read.
[www.theatlantic.com] Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Okay all you Duck fans out there: What do you do about LeGarrette Blount?
For those of you who have been completely incommunicado since Thursday night, a Boise State player bumped Blount and said something (presumably impolite) to him after Boise State’s 19-8 victory.
Blount decked him with a beautiful right handed sucker punch. Then he started to go after some fans and had to be wrestled to the ground by a Ducks assistant coach.
Blount later apologized, saying he lost his head. We noticed. And it’s apparently not the first incident with him this season.
So what do you do with him? If I’m the coach, I suspend him indefinitely — until I know for sure that he can control himself. I don’t care how important a player is to a team, that kind of lack of self-control can’t be tolerated.
What’s the appropriate sanction?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:30
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I was in Cache Mountain Traders in Sisters last week to interview Steve Wilson about the new focus of his store.
He’s gone from a consignment store to a depot for “preppers.”
What is a prepper? I didn’t know either. Hadn’t heard the term.
Turns out prepper is a new term for what we used to call “survivalists” before that term got loaded up with bad connotations and images of potbellied guys in camo fatigues running (waddling?) around in the woods playing soldier.
It’s a good idea to try to lose that image. ’Cause being a prepper is not a bad idea; not at all.
We live in a wondrous era of abundant supply, literally at our finger tips. the local store carries every kind of everything or can get it for you in a couple of days. Actually, you don’t even need to leave the house. You can order up most anything you need or desire from the Internet.
But as Steve points out, it’s all as complex — and as fragile — as a spider web. We don’t like to think about how easily it could all break down.
And what do you do then?
That’s what being a prepper is all about. Being prepared. Like a good Boy Scout.
Do you have enough clean water and food to last you a while if things get hairy? How about an alternative heat source and a means of cooking food if the electric stove is out?
These are good things to think about, especially in a place like Sisters, which is, in truth, relatively isolated.
A lot of preppers are concerned about major socioeconomic collapse and that turns some people off from the whole subculture. It’s almost as if they are hopeful that the worst happens so they can put all their preparation into action. Remember all the doomsday preaching about Y2K?
Total socioeconomic collapse is a remote possibility, but it’s not completely implausible. And preparing for the worst gives you a lot of head space to deal with less catastrophic but still dangerous scenarios.
Hurricane Katrina provided searing images of people helpless in the face of natural disaster, without supplies, without a plan. Why be one of those people?
Here in Sisters, a major winter storm, a wildfire, could easily create the need to activate an emergency plan. A stockpile of food and water makes sense; so does some emergency communication device like a crank-up radio.
And, yes, some means of protecting what you have is always a good idea. Doesn’t have to be an AR-15; a good shotgun will do and your hunting rifle or even your .22 plinker will serve.
This doesn’t have to be a huge dollar investment and most everything you need can be readily found at surplus stores, hardware stores or places like Cache Mountain.
Most gear that you might put up as a prepper can double as camping/backpacking/hunting gear anyway, so it’s insurance you can actually use for fun.
The library is full of good books and there’s all kinds of interesting “prepper” Web sites out there. Many of them are full of recipes and homesteading advice — not what you associate with “survivalism.”
It’s really about self-reliance and in my book that’s always a good thing. I’ve been looking at my stuff and getting set to fill in gaps (mostly an insufficient supply of imperishable foodstuffs). It’s been an interesting exercise, one that has reminded me to think “what would we do if?”
If you’re not a prepper, maybe you oughta be.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:17
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I recently re-ignited my interest in the American Civil War, which had lain dormant for about 15 years.
In that intervening decade-and-a-half, the landscape of Civil War study changed radically — because of the Internet. There are scores and scores of Civil War sites and blogs, from scholars’ pages to reenactor group sites to partisan blogs.
Oh, yes, partisan blogs.
You see, the Civil War isn’t over; the past isn’t past.
The origins and causes of the great conflict are argued in the blogosphere as vigorously, if not (quite) as violently as they were argued in the middle of the 19th Century.
This is no mere academic debate. It remains at the center of our identity as a nation.
Southern Partisans, neo-Confederates, argue that the war was a second War of Independence, a defense of liberty against an overreaching Federal government. Sound familiar? Not surprisingly, the blogs of Southern Partisans tend to be arch-conservative and antigovernment. They’re consistent, too.
While their attention right now is on battling health care reform as conceived by the current administration, many blog archives reveal a strong anti-Iraq War tendency — a rejection of what they regard as an imperialist U.S. that violates the original spirit of the Republic.
Where they go off the rails is in their minimization of slavery as a causal factor. Most reject slavery as a cause of war at all. That’s twaddle. You only have to look at the declaration of secession of South Carolina or the Constitution of the Confederate States of America to see that defense of the institution of slavery was fundamental to the Southern cause, even if it was not a paramount motive of many of the men who fought bravely and skillfully in the defense of hearth and home.
Other bloggers see the meaning of the war very differently.
Some bloggers are deeply committed to the understanding that the war that began over the preservation of the Union ended up being about the extension of the promise of American society — one where all men are created equal.
This exalted view of the meaning of the war can lead to some real hostility toward those who see that interpretation as a gloss. And some smearing with a broad brush.
In another post I referred to a Civil War blogger — very hostile to the outlook of the neo-Confederates — who slagged off the entire homeschool movement because he sees so many homeschoolers in Virginia getting a positive spin on the Confederacy in their history study.
The pieties of teh Southern Partisans can get a little thick — and their denial of the centrality of slavery doesn't pass any kind of historical muster. On the other hand, many of the “anti-Confederate” bloggers can be incredibly snarky, lending credence to the Southron’s belief that the “Yankees” have an incurably holier-than-thou outlook that must impose its worldview on others who don’t want it.
To those who don’t know much about the Civil War (and maybe don’t care) this may all seem vaguely ridiculous. But it’s as serious as a charge of grapeshot.
Interpretations of the meaning of the Civil War matter a great deal to many people as a way of defining who they are culturally and politically. Recently, a large group of scholars (including the notorious William Ayers) called upon President Obama to forego the long-standing tradition of laying a wreath at the memorial to the Confederate dead at Arlington.
Obama upheld the tradition and laid the wreath.
This stuff matters. In many ways, fundamental issues of the War continue to gnaw at us today, whether we recognize where they come from or not. What is the definition of liberty? Is the federal government a guarantor of liberty, extending the torch of freedom, or is it in itself a threat to liberty?
Are we defined as Americans by our race? Is the original sin of slavery an indelible stain or was it washed out by the blood of 640,000 Americans and the passage of 140 years?
These questions remain unanswered — and maybe unanswerable. If the war didn’t decide them, what could?
When we see the passion the rage, the alienation between Americans and (dare I say it) the hatred that marks the bleeding edge of the partisan divide in this country, it is plain to see that the Civil War is not over.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:08
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The current proposals for health care reform are probably dead.
That doesn’t mean health care reform isn’t possible. It sure is necessary. I know of at least one Sisters business that just eliminate its insurance benefits for employees because they can’t afford it. That’s going to become a common litany over the next few years if something isn’t done.
Don’t like the current House bill or the plans being bandied about in the Senate? Let’s hear some alternatives.
A Steve Lopez column in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago outlined a California surgeon’s ideas. They won’t “fix” health care, but they sure make sense and it seems like perhaps some common sense changes might do some good.
Above all, they might be politically achievable, assuming that our legislators are not completely in thrall to the insurance companies. Perhaps a foolish assumption, but let’s pretend they aren’t just for the sake of argument.
Read the whole column here:
[www.latimes.com] The gist is this:
• Dump the "50-state patchwork" of private insurance programs that can't cross state borders and switch to competing national plans that would be required to take all comers, with no exemptions for preexisting conditions.
• Reinstate federal regulations abandoned in the 1980s that limited insurance companies’ fees.
• Move away from employment-based healthcare, with companies paying higher salaries, instead, so employees can shop for a suitable plan and carry it with them from one job to the next.
• Cap malpractice suits.
Obviously this would require more government regulation, but it would not be a “government takeover of health care” as feared by activists opposing so-called “Obama care.” It would also require tort reform, so often resisted by the Democrats who are too influenced by lawyers’ lobbies.
These ideas make sense and seem like they are in the realm of the possible, even in a climate now poisoned by deep rancor.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The City of Sisters has a dilemma on its hands.
Its analysis of its street maintenance requirements shows a need for about $140,000 per year in maintenance. The street fund is funded to about $90,000, with additional funds subsidized by transfers from the general fund.
That’s not sustainable over the long haul.
Everybody knows that deferred maintenance creates greater costs in the long run and when it comes to street repairs, the costs accelerate tremendously as road conditions worsen.
So, the city is proposing a 3 cents per gallon gas tax. They figure it would cost the average driver who buys all their gas in Sisters about $21 per year. It’s acting now, because come September there will be a four year moratorium on local fuel taxes.
The idea isn’t real popular among the fuel dealers in Sisters and among some other local folks. They argue that such a tax unfairly burdens five local businesses, making them less competitive with stations in Bend and Redmond (Redmond, too, is reportedly considering a gas tax).
They believe that an extra 3 cents per gallon will lead people to fill up in Bend when they’re running errands in the big town.
The city council says it looked at other funding mechanisms — specifically a utility bill surcharge — but they say it’s too burdensome on city residents and property owners. They say a gas tax is more broadly distributed and captures money from people — outlying residents and tourists — who use city streets but don’t pay city taxes.
This isn’t the best time to add to anyone’s tax burden. But then again, it’s not good stewardship to defer maintenance and incur greater costs down the road.
So, what should the city do? Pass the tax? Wait four years and put it to a vote? Presumably the city would continue to subsidize the street fund out of the general fund for those four years. Should they go ahead with a utility bill surcharge — about $114 per year for each account? Do nothing?
If the answer is “take it from somewhere else in city government,” where should it come from?
We all want our streets to be decent to drive on. How do we pay for them?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:49
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
President Obama was way out of line in Wednesday night’s press conference when he said that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Obama’s friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct.
The facts of the case as we know them seem to support the belief that the officer acted according to appropriate protocol. A cop has to be abundantly cautious when responding to a report of a break-in — and Gates forced the front door of his home. Cop didn’t know it was his house.
If the officer was responding to my home he’d have done the same thing. In fact, I’ve been checked out when closing up The Nugget after delivering papers on a dark winter night. I appreciate that the cops are paying attention.
It certainly does not appear to be a “black in America thing.” Whether The officer had to arrest Gates for disorderly conduct or not is questionable, but the man was railing at him loud and long and was warned twice. Again, seems like a behavior thing, not a race thing.
What is really out of line here is the President of the United States weighing in on the issue in a nationally televised press conference. The president should not be second-guessing a local cop in a local matter on national TV, especially in an unfortunately and unnecessarily racially charged incident. Especially when he prefaces his comments by saying he doesn’t have all the facts.
Irresponsible behavior.
If anyone is owed an apology here, it’s Sgt. Jim Crowley, who did his job and now has to deal with second guessing from City Hall and Monday morning quarterbacking from the Oval Office.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:09
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Health care is in the hands of politicians and pundits. That means you can’t trust anything you hear. The spin machine, left and right, is in high gear.
I don’t know how best to ensure the best health care for the largest number of people at an acceptable cost. I don’t know that anyone does.
But there are a few things I do know — and I’m sick of hearing these points spun by ideologues who would rather win an argument than get anything done.
• American health care is not very good overall. Yes, we have the best health care in the world — if you can access it; if you can afford it. But overall we spend more than other developed countries for poorer outcomes.
That has to change. How?
• Americans have to change our lifestyles. We’re too fat, our diets are poor and we don’t get enough exercise. We get drunk and high too much and end up in emergency rooms.
Those of us who don’t do all those things — who live active lifestyles and eat well and avoid the pitfalls of drugs and alcohol are subsidizing the rest.
• Medical intervention often comes late and in the most expensive stages of illness. Surgery rather than preventive medicine.
• We spend gobs of money extending people’s lives at the very end of them. When my mother was dying of cancer, she stopped chemotherapy that could have extended her life another six months or a year. Keeping a dying person alive is not the same thing as saving a life. We need to learn the difference.
The crisis in American health care is real — and it’s close to home, if not right on our doorstep or in the living room.
Every year, small businesses like those in Sisters struggle to insure their employees — if they can at all. Every year, they are faced with paying more for less.
It’s not hard to find people right here in Sisters who delay seeing a doctor because they don’t have coverage or their coverage is inadequate. Everyone knows someone who need medical help who has to fight to get it — if they get it at all. People in those straits often get sicker and their care costs more than if they had just been able to see the doctor when they first got sick — or had intervention before a problem turned into a nightmare.
One bugaboo that comes up in any discussion of a public health care option is “rationing” of health care.
We ration health care now. Anyone who has ever dealt with an HMO has experienced rationed health care. Anyone who has delayed seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it has rationed their own health care.
“Some bureaucrat” is managing your health care when your insurance company drops you or doesn’t cover what you thought was covered.
Any health care reform is going to be imperfect. The Obama administration’s current plan has significant flaws and it needs to be rethought. What is needed is a genuine, bipartisan, good faith effort to create a system that controls costs better, covers more people and encourages cultural shifts that empower people to take control of their own health through their lifestyle, and less through the pharmacy and the hospital.
That’s not likely to happen. There’s too much ideological baggage being dragged around in this discussion, too many people with a stake in political success or failure rather than in creation of good public policy.
My bet is that health care reform fails — again — and the status quo continues. And the continued status quo means things get worse.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:42
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Exploring some Civil War blogs, I came upon a pretty bald statement about homeschooling. It gave me pause, because it runs strongly counter to my observations of homeschooled children in Sisters and elsewhere.
Kevin Levin, on his Civil War Memory blog, said:
The real tragedy is to see the children who are the product of homeschooling. Yes, there is evidence to suggest that some homeschooled kids out perform their public school peers, but I’ve taught a number of these kids over the past eight years and it isn’t pretty.
Most of the kids I’ve taught with this background find it very difficult to adjust to a school community. Many haven’t spent enough time learning how to interact with their peers, but the biggest disappointment is to watch them in the classroom.
The kids I’ve taught are very obedient and well-behaved, but try to get them to question what they read or what the teacher says and you will end up pulling your hair out. They were never taught to formulate their own ideas or to see school as an opportunity to develop their own views about things.
It’s very sad. I’ve seen up close what happens to kids who are taught to see US History as “God’s plan”. In a previous comment someone said that it reminds them of child abuse and I couldn’t agree more.
Wow.
He later qualified some of his statements in the face of comments to the contrary, but... wow.
My own impression of homeschooled kids has been overwhelmingly positive. They seem mature and comfortable interacting with adults. Well-behaved, indeed, but not automatons.
The homeschooled kids I know, including a couple of family members, have not had problems adjusting to a school environment — in fact, they seem to continue to excel. They seem to be independent thinkers who know how to find information on their own — and are willing to question it.
In my experience, most homeschoolers — not all — are coming from a Christian perspective and there is some inherent ideological bias. But it is ridiculous to think that there is no ideological bias in public education — or in any group of people talking about ideas and issues. The most ideologically rigid people I've ever encountered were at the "free-thinking" University of California, Santa Cruz.
I don't believe homeschooled kids are any less capable of challenging their own perceptions than public school kids.
Personally, I’ve always believed that most education occurs in the home anyway, whether it’s “homeschool” or not. I didn’t get my passion for history — or much of my education in it — from school. I got it from reading and talking about it with my parents. I learned more about the Civil War from sharing books and discussions (sometimes arguments) with my dad than I did from any classroom, up to and including a university degree in history.
I believe in public education and want to see the best we can get in Sisters. But for those for whom it makes sense to opt out in favor of homeschooling, it seems to work.
I’d be interested in hearing other people’s experience with homeschooling — as participants or critics.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I love the ’30s.
It was, in so many ways a terrible time. The rise of fascism and National Socialism, Stalin’s purges, the Great Depression. W.H. Auden called it a “low, dishonest decade” and there’s no arguing with that. So what’s to love?
Man, they had had style.
Men dressed — including the omnipresent fedora. None of this going out to dinner in a tank top and flip flops. Women went for whatever glamour they could afford and their style has never been matched.
Has there ever been a meaner piece of machinery than a Thompson submachine-gun? And the pistol hit the extent of its necessary development with the Colt 1911 .45 automatic — it’s all decadence from there.
A big American car in basic black — what else could you possibly desire?
People traveled on trains and there are no more romantic words than “the night train to...”
American music was going through one of its periods of massive creativity, with the jazz age effortlessly moving into the age of swing, and the movies were entering a golden era. Hemingway was at the peak of his powers, with no signs of his decline into a drunken parody of himself.
Michael Mann’s vision of the 1930s comes alive on the screen in “Public Enemies.” Maybe it’s weird to feel nostalgic for times long gone before your own, but it’s not an uncommon malady among history geeks.
All I know is that I sat in front of the Sisters Movie House screen last night and wished I could crawl right through it and straight into 1933, hard times and all.
See a review of "Public Enemies" at
[www.nuggetnews.com] .
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:50
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Every once in a while I see a movie that really sticks with me. I think this one is worth passing on.
Defiance (out on DVD) is the story of the Bielski Partisans, a group of Jews who escaped into the forests of what is now Belarus during WW II.
I remember visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC about 15 years ago and being overwhelmed by a sense of frustration at the passivity of the Jews in the face of destruction. Why didn’t they fight back — die on their feet instead of on their knees?
Looking at it rationally, there’s a lot of reasons it went down as it did. The bald fact is that not many were in any position to fight back — and many thought that if they could just survive and buy time, they cold weather this great pogrom as they had weathered them for centuries.
They could not yet understand the ferocity of the Nazi’s intent: extermination. It’s still almost incomprehensible today.
But some did fight, escaping from ghettos and camps to the forests to join partisan bands, many of them Soviets who had been cut off in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The Bielski Brothers founded their own partisan band. Their focus, at elder brother Tuvia’s insistence, was on saving Jews rather than fighting the Germans, but fight they did, and effectively.
Watching the movie led me to read a history of the partisans titled The Bielski Brothers, available at the Deschutes Public Library.
It’s a story worth knowing. The movie is well-done, with a fine character study of the brothers and the strains of leadership. Choices were often brutal.
There’s plenty of action, but it is markedly different from the usual Hollywood fare. The violence is not exhilarating; it is frightening and nerve-wracking.
Through their determination to live like human beings, even if it was only for a short time, the Bielskis saved 1,200 Jews. After the war, the brothers faded into obscurity.
They deserve to be remembered and Defiance does them justice.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:50
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Let me start right off by saying that I’m not advocating banning ATVs. I don’t like the things, at least as recreational vehicles, but I’m not big on advocating bans for things I don’t like.
But they damned sure need to be taken seriously as a dangerous toy.
My brother wrecked an ATV back when I was a sophomore in high school and he was a wild man of 26. Rode it off a 15 foot cliff one night. He managed to push the machine off of himself before he landed with it on top of him and by luck he landed between a couple of boulders that would have broken him like a match stick.
He could well have been killed or massively injured. As it was, he got away with wrenching his knee, biting a hole through his tongue and turning into a full-body bruise. A couple of days in bed and he was back up and at ’em.
Not everybody is so lucky.
And it’s not just the ATV riders themselves at risk. They come up on horses and spook them, putting horsemen in the dangerous position of dealing with a spooked horse and fast-moving machines.
That’s saying nothing of the damage they do to trails.
An ATV is a great farm and ranch tool, useful to hunters packing out their game and, I’m sure, a blast to ride fast and free in the woods. All those things have their place.
I’m not opposed to risky activities — far from it. But I know that you don’t just climb on a hot horse and ride with no training. It’s too easy to climb on an ATV and go, quickly exceeding your capabilities and the machine’s and get yourself into deadly trouble, like my brother did years ago.
His wreck and a few close encounters in the woods have built a visceral dislike of those machines in me. I don’t want to knock anybody else’s fun, but I don’t want them anywhere around me — and I hope anybody who climbs on one takes the time to learn how to handle it — and to learn the courtesy to stay away from the horses.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:28
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
In 1989, the world watched as students and others protested their lack of freedom in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. The protest left an iconic image seared into the collective consciousness of the world: a lone unarmed youth, facing down a column of tanks.
We are seeing something similar happening in Iran. The iconic image from this convulsion is the Youtube video of a beautiful young woman dying on the street in Teheran, shot through the chest.
The Chinese Communist regime did not fall as a result of Tiananmen, but it was forced to change. China is not free, but it much more free than it was in 1989, and it is much more prosperous. It is part of the community of nations.
The Iranian regime may not fall because of the protests sparked by the election controversy, but there is no way it can escape change. A bell has been rung that the mullahs cannot unring. The legitimacy of the regime has been fatally undermined by its own actions.
We are witnessing a historic whirlwind and it is exhilarating. Salute the courage of the protesters in Tehran; they are putting their lives on the line for freedom.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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7:46
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
When I was in my 20s, a high school buddy of mine was killed in a car wreck in Pasadena, California. At his funeral, his father, an Englishman, read Kipling’s poem, “If”:
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
It was the first time I’d heard the poem and — given the emotionally charged circumstances — it’s not surprising that it stuck in my head and heart ever afterward.
“Filling the unforgiving minute” has become a daily mission. Some days you do it better than others.
Yesterday was such a day. My daughter and my wife hit the arena early for a lesson with Jessica Yankey, who is an excellent equestrian trainer. Ceili, who had up until a couple of weeks ago, said she did not want to jump, was cantering over small jumps with a world-beating smile on her face.
My wife, who has recovered nicely from knee surgery this spring, is back in the saddle and riding without pain or fear.
Her brother and his sons are visiting from, up from California. We took them shooting and boys who had never fired a shotgun were blasting flying clays out of the sky. They loved being able to shoot their rifles at reactive targets at unknown distances instead of just punching paper on a range. Then it was off to their campsite along the Metolius to cast a fly line, roast marshmellows and sing Ian Tyson songs around the campfire.
Brother Dave is an avid birder and he was beside himself at the paradise he had found in Camp Sherman.
I write all this not to journal the day — I still think nothing’s better than a pen and a notebook for that.
It’s just that, as we drove out to Camp Sherman, Marilyn and I were talking about what an enormous privilege it is to live here, a place where people come to experience things that are just not available to them at home — a natural world, a world that is still, compared to other places, relatively free and still rich and beautiful.
It’s all too easy to take for granted that the Sisters Country is one of the very best places on earth to fill your unforgiving minute with 60 seconds of distance run.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:24
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Sisters School District is initiating a free summer lunch program for kids under 18 (see this week’s issue of The Nugget).
It’s a federally-funded program, with no local dollars spent, designed to provide a nutritious lunch for kids whose families are in tough financial circumstances. Sisters’ census data shows that there are enough families in such straits for the area to qualify for the program.
You can see that for yourself in the numbers being served at the Kiwanis Food Bank.
I have no problem with feeding kids who need help to get a good lunch. The problem is, the program is not means-tested; there is no application process. Anybody under 18 can show up and get a free lunch.
There’s no means-testing or qualification because the program can’t “discriminate” or stigmatize by identifying kids who need help and only serving them.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. We can’t serve the kids who need it and exclude those who don’t because it might hurt somebody’s feelings to be singled out?
I understand the rationale — “stigma” might discourage people who need the program from using it — but I don’t like it. It invites abuse. You could argue that it involves a small amount of money and it’s only federal dollars anyway, so what’s the big deal...
But it’s this kind of thing that sours people on programs that their tax dollars fund, that gives what should be a beneficial helping hand a bad name.
This isn’t the school district’s fault; they have to work within the rules as they are handed down. And, especially right now, it’s a worthwhile program.
I guess we should just hope that teens and families who can afford lunch do the right thing and buy it in town and leave the free lunch program for those who really need it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:58
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The pressure cooker that is the Middle East looks to be bleeding off some of the head of anti-Western steam it’s built up over the past 20 years (or 100 years, depending on your historical perspective).
A moderate, US-backed coalition took the parliamentary elections in Lebanon, where a year or two ago it looked like Hezbollah was building strength.
In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is under threat from moderate challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi in what could be a watershed election.
The Pakistani army has roused itself and rolled back the Taliban in the Swat Valley.
All of these gains are modest and reversible. Most analysts think Ahmadinejad will still win and that Iran will continue its nuclear program regardless. Lebanon is always fragile and the Pakistani Taliban are nothing if not resilient.
But things are looking better than they have for some time. Obama’s speech in in Cairo was a good one and well received. It seems possible to get off on a different foot with Middle East diplomacy. As always with Obama, it remains to be seen if soaring rhetoric can be matched by real action on the ground.
So much will depend upon what happens in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. If real progress can be made there, if Muslim populations that are sick of living in fear of extremists among them say, “Enough!” if Iraq can remain stable and Afghanistan become at least a semi-functional state — perhaps we’ll be looking at a new era of relative peace, stability and prosperity in this volatile region.
That’s a lot of ifs, but there’s reason enough to be cautiously optimistic.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:46
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
We received a press release today announcing that Bob Thomas Car Company in Bend is losing its Chevrolet franchise.
Bob Thomas Car Company announced today that the appeal filed with General Motors to allow Bob Thomas to retain the Chevrolet and Cadillac franchises has been denied. To the best of company’s knowledge, no appeals submitted by dealers in the region have been successful.
The Bend dealership is reviewing the Wind-Down Agreement the company received from GM yesterday, which would allow the dealership to sell their remaining Chevrolet and Cadillac inventory over the course of the next seven (7) to fifteen (15) months.
I talked to the Bob Thomas service department this morning, asking about service on my extended warranty on my Chevrolet Silverado. The word: Once they’ve sold their inventory, I’ll have to go to Madras or Portland for warranty service.
That’s a shame. I always got good service there. I don’t know what the impact will be on jobs, but there’s sure to be one.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:30
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I got home Tuesday night and found my wife and daughter transfixed by the show Earth 2100.
The theme of the speculative documentary is that a “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion, climate change and the attendant conflicts spell big trouble for civilization — up to and including collapse.
The animated doomsday scenario was riveting, intercut with interviews with a range of scientists, arachaeologists and historians.
Of course, as a history nut, I was gratified to see that the notion of civilizational collapse was treated in historical context. It’s happened before. The Maya. Rome. The Byzantine Empire; Easter Island. The key here is that, with a “global” civilization, where do we go when the walls come tumbling down?
Through it all, I could hear an echo of the dark vision of my favorite fantasy author, Robert E. Howard, best expressed in his finest story of Conan the Cimmerian, “Beyond the Black River.”
“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”
That hasn’t seemed true for the past millenium. Nations and empires have risen and fallen, sure, but civilization itself has thrived. The past thousand years have been a record of the inexorable rise of civilization, particularly Western Civilization, and the apparent “conquest” of nature.
But you have to wonder, was that a thousand-year whim of circumstance? Are we on the cusp of the ultimate barbaric triumph?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:20
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters’ room tax revenues are down 13.3 percent compared to to the first quarter of 2008.
Another round of grim economic news, right? Not so fast.
Sisters is down all right, but not down anywhere near as much as Bend and the rest of Deschutes County. Bend’s room-tax revenues are off by 28.2 percent for March; Deschutes County as a whole by 22.7 percent. That tracks with the rest of the state, where room tax revenues are down by 20 to 30 percent from last year.
(Room taxes are levies imposed upon each night’s stay in a motel or hotel. They are a way of paying for the impacts of tourism on municipal services and a significant portion of revenues are usually plowed back into promoting tourism).
So Sisters is down, but not as much as elsewhere. Further, revenues are still up 15.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. That’s in large part because FivePine Lodge come online later in 2007, adding a bunch more rooms. But those rooms still need to be filled to have an impact, so the number remains a valid gauge of where we sit.
We may not be sitting pretty, but we’re hanging in there. Sisters’ main industry is still and will always be tourism, so it’s good to see that people are still coming in decent numbers in the slow time of year. It bodes well for summer.
Actually, there’s a great opportunity here to take advantage of people’s need to stick closer to home. Sisters is a heck of a lot closer and cheaper for a Portland family than Disneyland or Mexico or Hawaii. There’s a good chance that, with good promotion, Sisters’ tourism industry could weather the economic storm in pretty good shape.
The housing market and broad sectors of the labor market are still hurting and recovery is not on the near horizon, but if tourism hangs on, so does Sisters. Recovery in other sectors will come, eventually.
Erin Borla, Executive Director of the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce, gets it. “Never waste a recession” is her current watchword. The Chamber is aggressively marketing Sisters as a high-value destination for budget-conscious travelers. Lots to do and see, not too much travel expense.
Raising Sisters’ regional and national profile will stand us in good stead years down the road when this recession is an ugly memory — and Sisters is still dependent on tourist dollars.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:39
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
David MacKay, a University of Cambridge physics professor, is a straight shooter and he hits the bullseye with a commentary on cnn.com.
We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.
We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.
Our failure to talk straight about the numbers is allowing people to persist in wishful thinking, inspired by inane sayings such as "every little bit helps."
Read the whole thing here: www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/13/mackay.energy/index.html (Sorry, hotlink isn't showing up).
Alternative energy has become a front in the Culture War instead of a scientific/economic quest for the next paradigm. People identify their "side" in the war with symbolic icons like the cars they drive: Hummer vs. Prius.
Fortunately, it seems that thinking like MacKay's is becoming more widespread. More and more people are seeing that environmental and economic interests are not necessarily in conflict when it comes to alternative energy. That maybe it's in all our interests to pursue clean, diverse sources of energy in addition to fossil fuels, which aren't going to go away any time soon.
MacKay is right; we need an honest discussion about costs and benefits and the scale of the questions we're facing.
Nothing inhibits that kind of dialogue more than a holier-than-thou attitude, which attaches as much value to marginal symbolic actions as to substantial ones. We need to lose the cultural baggage that too often attaches itself to environmental and energy issues and start talking about what it would take to sustain the American way of life as it currently stands.
Then, when we have a real assessment of costs, we can talk — without preaching — about ways we should change for the better.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:34
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This from CNN:
Authorities do not plan to file charges against a Florida orange grove owner who fatally shot a 21-year-old woman, saying he is protected under the state’s controversial “no retreat” law.
Bullet holes pocked the windshield of the crashed SUV, and blood stained the passenger seat.
But the woman’s boyfriend faces second-degree murder charges in her death, because the woman was shot to death during an alleged felony — the theft of an SUV.
Tony Curtis Phillips, 29, didn’t fire a single shot. He didn’t even know his girlfriend, Nikki McCormick, was dead until police showed him an online news story.
Police said McCormick accompanied Phillips as he attempted to steal the SUV from a barn in an orange grove near Wahneta, Florida, before daylight Tuesday.
Grove owner Ladon “Jamie” Jones opened fire as the SUV approached him, according to an affidavit released by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Phillips fled; McCormick was shot in the head and later died.
Authorities said Jones is protected by Florida’s “no retreat” law, which gives him the right to use lethal force if he reasonably believes his life is in danger. Phillips, however, faces charges because police allege he was committing felony grand theft auto at the time of McCormick’s death.
This is nearly perfect justice. People have the absolute right — and should have the capability — to defend themselves against criminal acts that threaten their safety, wherever such acts occur. “No retreat” means that self-defense is a legitimate first response, not a last resort.
This should be a first principle of law everywhere.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:05
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Swine flu may be the most overblown story of 2009 so far. It’s my bet that it’ll take the title come year’s end.
Maybe it’s a kind of crisis hypersensitivity. We all got conditioned to the economic news getting worse and worse — continually exceeding expectations for bad news.
So as soon as the swine flu story broke, everybody seemed to immediately go to the worst case scenario. Every hypochondriac nerve in the population started jangling. Wait... I’m getting a sore throat. I’M GONNA DIE!!!
Well, no. Turns out that swine flu, though it has claimed lives in Mexico, isn’t all that deadly. It’s not the 1918 flu. It’s probably not even an average year’s flu.
Why do we do this? Every year thousands of people die from complications of seasonal flu (36,000 in the U.S. is the number currently being reported. So far, swine flu has claimed one life in the U.S. — of a little boy who came here from Mexico and had underlying health conditions).
Influenza can be deadly, especially if you have underlying medical problems. I’ve had the real-deal flu a couple of times and I can see how it could kill you. I’ve got a pretty stout constitution and it wiped me out.
But the flu is a normal part of life and most years, most people don’t get it. Those that do mostly suffer and recover. Some die.
Eventually there will be another 1918-style pandemic and boy that is scary. A lot of people died in that one and, perversely, it disproportionately affected the young and healthy.
Those kinds of pandemics happen very rarely. It makes sense to plan ahead and for public health and emergency agencies to coordinate a response. I don’t fault the CDC and the World Health Organization for tracking a new mutation of a virus and informing the public. That’s their job.
But I do fault the national media for climbing all over the story with a maximum of hype and bombast and a credulous public for reacting as if the sky was falling.
I guess there’s something extra scary about the idea of a virus spreading silently, deadly, like a conscious malign force. It’s the stuff of Stephen King novels; in fact he wrote the story in The Stand.
But c’mon folks, let’s keep things in proportion here. Take the usual flu season precautions — you’re gonna be okay.
...Until SKYNET becomes self aware and launches a nuclear strike, destroying most of mankind and launching a war between humankind and cyborgs. Where are you John Connor????...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:49
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
We’ve got big trouble in Pakistan and there’s very little we can do about it.
The Pakistani Taliban are making significant territorial advances in the wake of a peace deal that basically turned over big swaths of territory in the Swat Valley and elsewhere to the black turbans.
This is a huge problem for the Obama Administration, which has linked Afghanistan and Pakistan strategically.
In the immediate sense, it means an ever-larger sanctuary for Taliban fighters engaged in Afghanistan.
The 20th Century history of insurgency and guerrilla warfare from Rhodesia to Vietnam shows that insurgencies that have sanctuaries are almost impossible to defeat, no matter how successful counterinsurgency forces are in the area of operations.
In the larger sense, Pakistan is well on its way to becoming a failed state — nuclear-armed failed state. For years the real nightmare scenario of Islamic terrorism has been the possibility of fanatics getting their hands on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
That raises the specter for which we went to war in Iraq: the possibility of a state regime handing over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. It must also be making India very nervous...
Pakistan is near economic ruin and the massive aid packages planned by the Obama administration may just be poured down a rat hole. We can’t afford to prop them up, but we can’t allow them to fall down.
All this may seem very far from Sisters and very distant from the daily concerns of keeping afloat in a dire economy. But we’ve got community members going into harm’s way in Afghanistan. They will be directly affected by what goes down in Pakistan.
And if Pakistan itself goes down, we will be living in a much more dangerous, much more unstable world. If Southern Asia goes up in flames, don’t think it won’t have an effect on us.
There’s nothing you or I can do about Pakistan, obviously. But it makes sense to get ready for the aftershocks as it totters toward a fall.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:57
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Last week, Sisters schools were looking at a $970,000 shortfall. Superintendent Elaine Drakulich told the board she could deliver a balanced budget on that number by not renewing temporary contracts, using up most of the district’s budget carryover and through savings from various efficiencies.
This week, the district is looking at a $1.5 million shortfall, thanks to a revised budget forecast from the state.
That means the district is going to have to look at cutting school days, freezing salaries and benefits, or cutting staff — or a combination of these moves and more.
This could open up some interesting questions for debate in the schools and community.
How many days can be cut before there is real damage done to students? (Hey, we’ll get the two week spring break back!)
Should cut in-service days to preserve as many teaching days as possible?
What about using merit rather than seniority as the criterion for a Reduction in Force (RIF)? Mike Morgan raised the question with the Budget Reduction Committee and with Board Chair Chris Jones. He tells me he’s planning to push the issue and he says he’s got a lot of folks in his corner.
“Merit” is a big sticky wicket in education. Everybody believes in rewarding merit, but nobody wants to implement “merit pay” or use it — at least not formally — to determine who stays and who goes in a RIF.
Undertstandably, there doesn’t seem to be much stomach for a RIF. Cutting staff could well mean cutting valuable programs and nobody wants that to happen.
We could cut days rather than staff, which both parents and staff seem to favor. That keeps class sizes smaller, but less time in the classroom can’t be considered a good deal. It’s not at all clear whether a salary/benefit freeze combined with other cuts would save enough money to stave off cuts.
It all comes down to finding another $530,000. Cutting days may seem like the easy route, but 10 days to two weeks is not compatible with quality education.
This crisis calls for creativity and courage. Day cuts? Pay cuts? Staff cuts? Program cuts? None of it is appetizing, but the district has to make the tough calls with one mission in mind: delivering the best quality education possible with the resources available.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:02
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Excellent outcome.
This is one area where the historical record gives clear guidance on the path to take. Piracy, unlike drug trafficking, can be curtailed by stepped up paramilitary law enforcement that makes the risk/benefit calculus to heavy for the pirates to bear.
Aggressive attacks on pirates has squashed piracy outbreaks across the Seven Seas, from Pompey Magnus in the Roman Mediterranean to Brooke in the South Seas to the Shores of Tripoli.
Good for us, good for the French. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life... sucks.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
A bunch of citizens rebuilt a Hawaiian road that was washed out by flooding. Their own initiative. Gotta love that.
"Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government help, so business owners and residents on Hawaii's Kauai island pulled together and completed a $4 million repair job to a state park -- for free."
— CNN.com
Reminds me of Curt Kallberg standing up in a school board meeting when Sisters couldn't pass a bond to build new classrooms at Sisters Elementary School. "Why don't we just build em?" he asked. And Curt and a bunch of buddies in the trades and volunteers did it. Donated labor, donated cash/materials and a quick turnaround on a project that has benefited hundreds of local kids.
We need that can-do spirit right here, right now.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:00
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I never got Obamamania.
I never understood the hope invested in the man, the nearly messianic expectations. I have friends who got completely swept up, who are believers.
I saw the same thing with George W. Bush: people who should have known better believing utterly that this son of privilege was just like them — and a great leader to boot.
I know people — my dad for one — for whom Ronald Reagan is a hero. (I have to say I’ve never personally met anyone who hero-worships Bill Clinton. Good thing.)
There’s something distasteful to me about elevating politicians to heroic status. It’s anti-republican (that’s small “r,” for the record). In our system of government, we hire these people to do a job and we owe it to ourselves to view their performance with skepticism, to hold them accountable.
Too much faith — I would say much faith at all — in a leader is misplaced and unhealthy for the Republic. The cult of personality is better suited to monarchies and authoritarian regimes. Americans should never have a “Dear Leader.”
Maybe I’m just being a crank. But I don’t think politicians should be treated like rock stars. (I don’t think rock stars should be treated like rock stars, either, but that’s another story.) I get uneasy when I see giant crowds going nuts over Obama.
Didn’t like the George W. Bush action-figure landing on the aircraft carrier, either.
Obama seems like good guy — personable in interviews, lovely family. I like his “cool.” I think his rep as an orator is overblown, but he does communicate well (though not as well as The Great Communicator).
But we hired the man to do a tough job and all that matters is what he gets done.
I suppose it’s natural to project our hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, aspirations and demonic visions onto leaders. But the American form of government assumes that we can get past that kind of irrationalism and see with clear eyes.
If we’ve forgotten how, we need to relearn how to do that — now more than ever.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:59
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Last week I went down to LA to visit family and to see the special exhibit on the Mexican Revolution running at the Autry National Center of the American West.
The exhibit was a fascinating, colorful depiction of the social and cultural impact — on both sides of the border — of the 1910-1920 revolution that convulsed Mexico, killing more than a million people and displacing millions of others (the first wave of massive Mexican immigration into the U.S.).
As my family walked among the George Yepes paintings and film clips of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, it was impossible to avoid linking the tumult of the Revolution to the drug civil war ravaging the country today.
I have fond memories of camping with my brother in the hills of Baja California, heading down at dawn into a little fishing village, heading out in pangas to fish the reefs. My wife and I would love to do the Copper Canyon tour.
But right now, I just can’t justify the risk of going to Mexico. I know that the violence is mainly confined to certain zones and that other areas remain relatively safe. But the violence is getting worse and Americans make good kidnapping targets. I won’t put my family at that risk.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go there again. Sad.
If you’re interested in reading about the drug trade in Mexico and on the border, Charles Bowden is brilliant, both on the reporting end and as a vivid, almost poetic writer. Sometimes a novel provides as much education about a subject as history or journalism. Don Winslow’s “The Power of the Dog” is a harrowing but absolutely engrossing thriller set during the ’70s and ’80s when the Mexican cartels were setting up their pipeline for Columbian cocaine.
When the Caribbean route into Florida started getting dicey (all that Miami Vice attention), the route into the U.S. shifted to Mexico and a bunch of smalltimers got big really fast.
Now they’re in a death struggle with the Mexican army and among themselves. Mexico is bleeding and on fire and the flames are licking at the U.S.
Just like the bad old days.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:22
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
— Woody Guthrie
True in 1939; true today.
We’ve been pencil-whipped half to death by a bunch of cons. Armed robbery is honest work compared to the financial machinations that have left us shoveling our good money after bad.
Over the past two weeks I’ve heard over and over that we just need to get over the AIG bonus flap. Sure it stinks, the argument goes, but the principle of contract is more important than sticking it to greedy bums.
I don’t buy it. Yes, in the great scheme of things, it’s a small amount of money. But we should be angry — angry at what this represents.
An awful lot of people are sick of playing by one set of rules while fat cats and politicians seem to play by a whole other set of “rules” that make sense only on the other side of the looking glass.
People are outraged because the idea of people getting bonuses when they’ve run their company into the ground is outrageous. Who agreed to these contracts? Why did Treasury release bailout funds knowing that they were in place?
There’s also a major-league double-standard at play here. The same folks who say we have to get over the AIG (and other) bonuses will tell you that the auto industry simply has to get rid of its (contractual) labor burden.
That may well be true, but it kinda makes the “a contract is a contract” argument stink like week-old fish.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:47
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters is shooting to attach itself to Redmond’s enterprise zone.
This is probably a better deal for Redmond than it is for Sisters; they get to add a severely economically distressed area to their application, making it more likely that they’ll be renewed by the state.
Not that I think a Sisters enterprise zone is a bad idea; I just don’t think it will have much impact, at least not by itself.
As we’ve discussed before, there aren’t a lot of sound business reasons for a light industrial enterprise to locate in Sisters instead of Redmond. Reasons have to be “irrational”; a business owner would have to override bottom line considerations for lifestyle considerations.
To that end, I put more faith in the current downtown renewal effort being pursued by the new Sisters Village Association (see The Nugget, March 18, page 1).
Here’s how I think this roles: Sisters maintains and enhances its quality as a tourist destination, with a vibrant community full of worthy cultural events — a thriving arts and music scene, rich outdoor recreation opportunities. Sisters maintains good schools (no guarantee, even with the passage of local option).
People come here to vacation, fall in love, decide they simply must live here and locate their business here. The incentives of an enterprise zone make it a little easier to justify and send a signal that, yes, Sisters welcomes you.
Perhaps Sisters actively goes out and courts the sort of people and businesses we want here, utilizes the Baker City “enterprise facilitation” model Chuck Humphreys touted to the council (story in The Nugget, March 18, page 1).
An enterprise zone is the least of our tools. Fighting off downtown decay, enhancing the vitality of our core and of our fundamental industry — tourism — is the critical mission. Next (actually, in tandem) comes a coherent, focused marketing campaign that shows off the best of Sisters and seeks to bring the best quality cultural tourism (geotourism is the current buzz word) to our doors.
Only when we create an overwhelming desire to be here, one that trumps pure business considerations, will enterprise incentives and facilitation kick in.
What’s needed now is synchronization of efforts, a clear understanding of where the horse and the cart go in the equation and a clear line of responsibility for making things happen.
The Sisters Village Association is a good sign. So, in its limited way is the possibility of an enterprise zone. But we can encourage enterprise with or without one if we first focus on polishing Sisters like the gem it is.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:51
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Economist has an excellent leader this week arguing for international legislative action to legalize narcotics.
The argument is nothing new, of course, but it is given fresh impetus by a meeting next week of a variety of government ministers in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. The last such meeting in 1998 sought a drug-free world and committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.”
Didn’t work.
The Economist argues that legalization is the “least bad” option, acknowledging that it is not good. Some drug users will suffer. It’s probably a better deal for producer nations than for consumer nations. Harm reduction sounds like weak concession.
But in the face of manifest failure, The Economist argues, it’s worth a try.
It’s a tough sell, not least because law enforcement agencies have become addicted to the budgets they get for fighting the “War on Drugs.” And even those who are disposed to accept the legalization of pot might blanch at legalizing methamphetamine. I know I do.
But Afghanistan and Mexico are failed or failing states because of the narco trade and it’s going to keep costing us billions we can’t afford to swim against the tide of corruption and mayhem generated by drug prohibition.
The most commonly abused drug — alcohol — is perfectly legal, because prohibition didn’t work. Not only did it fail, it basically created major league organized crime. Just as the War on Drugs has “fostered gangsterism on a scale the world has never seen before.”
The argument of drug warriors that the drug market has stabilized — in other words, it’s about the same as it was a decade ago — isn’t sufficient justification for continuing the war. In the current recession, we no longer have the resources to keep up a full-court press and the financially stressed have both more reason to take drugs and to peddle them.
People will always want to alter their senses and they’ll always be willing to pay a pretty penny to do it. And somebody is always going to be willing to supply that demand — and they’ll corrupt governments and kill anybody they need to to keep those profits rolling.
It’d be better if everyone would take Johnny Cash’s advice: “Come all you rounders and listen up to me/ Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.”
But they won’t. We need to come down to reality and accept that. Legalize it? I’ll hold my nose and say yes.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Yep. The recession, a tanking stock market — it’s the media’s fault.
Heard that twice in the past couple of days — and many times before. You see, the relentlessly negative coverage of the current economic crisis panics people, drives the stock market down... you get the picture.
More than a year ago, when we started reporting that the Sisters real estate market was softening and looked like it was headed for a major slowdown, we were chastised for being “so negative” and told that our reporting could hurt the market. Like we were ahead of the trend...
Some people didn’t like the fact that we reported Sisters’ designation as an economically distressed community.
Now a stockbroker I know wants Obama to put a gag order on the press to stop the negative coverage that is driving the market down. This was a serious proposal. I dunno, but I think maybe the word would get out anyway when the market sheds another 300 points.
Sorry folks... Sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting lalalalalala isn’t going to make this big ol’ bear go away.
The banks are a mess because the banks are a mess, not because anybody is reporting that fact. Subprime mortgage lending imploded because it was unsustainable, not because somebody pointed that fact out (well after the house of cards started collapsing, I might add).
Of course any economic crisis has a psychological component. People get nervous, rein in their spending and the economy contracts. But people are nervous and scared for a damned good reason. There’s plenty to be nervous and scared about.
Don’t get mad at the oil light for coming on on your dashboard. Fix the oil leak.
But I wish they’d quit running those gloomy weather reports. If they’d just shut up, maybe it would warm up and stop snowing...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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12:37
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Some ATV riders chewed up a section of the Peterson Ridge Trail last weekend. Bet that was fun.
Conditions were perfect for cutting some nice ruts into the forest floor. The ground was soft from snow and rain and the big tires must have churned up a truly sensuous sludge of mud.
And to add to the satisfaction, they obliterated expensive and painstaking work of a bunch of Sisters folks who spent the spring, summer and fall working on creating bike and equestrian trails out south of town.
The fun didn’t last, too long. It never does. But what the heck, the marks’ll be there a long time.
Cool, ain’t it?
No. It’s not. I’m all for sharing the forest and I don’t mind ATVs and dirt bikes in areas where riding is appropriate. I know dirt bikers and ATV riders who are conscientious and careful and I have no beef with them.
But those who wantonly tear up the forest and obliterate trails used by others become the image of their sport — and it’s not a good one. It’ll be their fault when the day comes when ATVs are banned from the forest.
So if you’re a rider and wonder why people treat you like you’re a vandal, don’t blame the mountain bikers and the hikers and the horseback riders. Blame the clowns who get their kicks wrecking the woods and trails that they never put a drop of sweat into creating and maintaining.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:13
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I love it when two important competing values run into each other at full throttle. It forces me to take a stand.
The Oregon legislature, with encouragement from sheriff’s across the state, is moving to close records of who has a concealed handgun carry permit. Journalists and other advocates of open records are crying foul.
They argue that such records should be open, that the public has a right to know who has a permit to carry.
Privacy rights advocates and gun owner lobbies say it’s nobody’s business and opening the records could actually detract from the security of the people who get carry permits for protection.
I am philosophically and professionally inclined to side with the open records folks. I believe in sunshine, that actions of public agencies should be transparent to public scrutiny.
Yet I am also a believer in a broad private sphere, that individuals should have the widest possible latitude to conduct their lives as they see fit.
On this one, I come down on the side of privacy. The issuing agencies — sheriff’s departments — are obligated to issue a carry permit as long as a person qualifies. The government action here is merely affirming a right presumed to exist.
The right to carry belongs to the individual and is his or her choice in the private conduct of his or her life. Such an action doesn’t require the kind of scrutiny that, say, the actions of the city council or school board might.
What they do is our business because they work for us. Not so in the case of the carry permit holder.
Arguments that say you should have a right to know whether or not your strange-acting neighbor is armed are just bogus. If your neighbor is whacky enough to consider him dangerous, you should consider him dangerous regardless. It’s also doubtful that he’s gone to the trouble to obtain a carry permit.
Concealed carry is a private act, lawful and appropriate for those who choose it and they should be left alone, without prying eyes of those with axes to grind.
Public officials and agencies should have their actions subject to public scrutiny; private individuals should not.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:47
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Michael Phelps takes a bong hit at a college party and pretty soon everybody in the world knows it.
It’s symbolic of the world we’re now living in, where the zone of privacy has shrunk down to nearly nothing. With cellphone cameras, cheap, small digital recorders and videocams, anything anybody does or says just about anywhere can be instantly disseminated via Youtube and other such media literally across the world.
Now, folks who live in small towns like Sisters already kinda know what that’s like. It doesn’t take long for news to travel in Sisters — and sometimes to get distorted out of all recognition as it goes.
A friend once told me that it was a real pain to be a single woman in Sisters because you can’t just have a cup of coffee with someone without the whole town knowing about it — and asking the inevitable questions.
Of course, it has ever been thus. The coconut telegraph has existed since there were coconuts and that’s a long, long time. Only a couple of generations ago, big cities were made up of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else and their business.
But new technology has amplified the small town effect beyond anything we’ve ever known.
What’s strange to me is that more and more people seem to be inviting the loss of their own privacy. Revealing intimate details of their lives to the whole world on Facebook and other social networking sites. Chattering about the minute details of their day-to-day on Twitter (why?).
Maybe it’s all just about making a connection. Maybe it’s just an attempt to assert the very fact of existence.
I am fully aware of the irony of bringing this up on a blog, by the way. A blog that I’ve spent way more time on this week than usual — and more than I’m comfortable with.
It all seems a little oppressive to me, even as I get caught up in it, mostly through my work. Much as I love my small town, I like to get away from it from time to time — kind of an anti-Cheers. I want to go where nobody knows my name and they couldn’t care less whether I’m there or not. The woods or some strange city. Nothing feels better to me than being out of cell phone or e-mail contact, just to disappear for a while.
But the rising culture seems to be fundamentally opposed to that, to be driven to 24/7 plugged in status. In a wired world, it’s hard to find a hideout.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The budget ax is on the neck of Sisters schools.
With a cut in state funding looming due to the economic recession and a projected decline in enrollment, the Sisters School District is looking at a shortfall in the neighborhood of $300,000. It could be worse than that; it’s not a good bet to hope it will be better.
If local option goes down at the polls, that shortfall balloons to $1.3 million in what school board chair Chris Jones describes as “a perfect storm.”
Wielding the budget ax is a trickier business than it seems on the surface.
It’s not easy to size public education to fit a declining student population at a given time, at least not while maintaining viable class sizes. You can’t cut enough teaching positions to backfill a hole created by a significant decline in enrollment — you’re still left with a big deficit in per-student funding (we delve into the numbers in a page 1 story on this subject in this week’s Nugget).
The schools are also saddled with almost $1 million in educational mandates, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandated food and transportation services.
Mandated means you can’t cut ’em, even though the money to pay for them is shrinking.
It makes for a complicated and unpleasant job for the school board. The board will start prioritizing cuts next month and they are looking for public input. Start here. What would you cut to make up $300,000? More?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Maybe it’s a sign of the times.
There seems to be a lot of fightin’ words being flung around out there.
Yesterday, a man called The Nugget and was verbally — unpleasant, I guess I’ll say — to the woman who runs the front desk. Of course he wouldn’t identify himself. He’s upset about local option and he doesn’t like me. Fine on both counts. But to lay it on somebody who has nothing to do with either issue? Not cool.
A couple of times recently I’ve heard people I like and respect let their passion curdle into nasty and unfair attacks on people they disagree with.
Then we’ve been treated to the audio of actor Christian Bale going off on a Director of Photography on the set of the new Terminator movie. His foul-mouthed tirade wasn’t about correcting a problem, it was about humiliating a colleague. I doubt my wife is the only one to vow: “I’ll never see one of that guy’s movies again. That’s totally uncalled for.”
Most seriously, last Friday a 16-year-old youth’s “mouthing off” led to a punch to the head and a fall to the concrete that put the 16-year-old in the hospital and on restricted activity for weeks and left his 14-year-old assailant in deep trouble.
Words are powerful and words that are meant to wound, belittle, humiliate can lead to big trouble. No, you can’t bludgeon somebody in the head because his words cut you — especially in school. But who would have blamed the guy at the receiving end of Christian Bale’s tirade if he’d laid the actor out on the floor?
We live in a culture that shields people from accountability for their words. Everybody on the Internet is 10 feet tall and bulletproof. They can lurk in cyberspace and spew invective with no consequences.
(I realize that we’re indulging the same sort of thing on this blog — it’s the nature of the Internet. That’s why the comments are moderated).
There’s a lot of really angry people out there, feeling powerless as the world seems to spin out of control. Maybe it feels good to lash out, maybe it makes some people feel big for a moment to make someone else feel small.
But I suspect that ain’t really so, at least not for long. I’ve never felt good afterward when I’ve let my temper get the better of me and used my skill with words as a weapon. It’s not right and it’s not healthy for anybody.
Some people seem to just live that way and I hate to imagine what it must be like. It can’t feel good stewing in your own bile.
Maybe Christian Bale could tell us, but I’m not interested in anything that guy has to say.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:58
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
There was a major spike in suicides in the Army in the month of January (see story here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/05/army.suicides/index.html).
We may be looking at the jagged tip of a very big iceberg here. Soldiers are dealing with multiple deployments and the stresses that causes. PTSD is a serious issue for many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Add to that severely reduced prospects coming out of the service due to a tanking economy and there’s a recipe for trouble.
The folks I know who work with veterans say the coming years are going to be tough ones and whatever help can be given is welcome.
If you are interested in getting involved locally, contact Central Oregon Veterans Outreach at centraloregonveteransoutreach@yahoo.com. Visit
[mypeoplepc.com] .
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9:01
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
My good buddy forwarded me a column by Ralph Peters that appeared in the January 27 New York Post, drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam.
It’s a caution to the Obama administration to avoid LBJ’s mistake of thinking that pouring in money and troops will pacify the country.
You can read the whole thing here:
[http:] www.nypost.com/seven/01272009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/afghan_nam_blues_152197.htm.
The essence is captured in a few paragraphs:
If our goal is to turn Afghanistan into a rule-of-law democracy, forget it. Iraq has an outside shot - it’s a semi-modern society - although success is far from guaranteed. But a modernized Afghan state whose authority extends into every remote valley is an impossibility.
If, however, our goal is only to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a massive terrorist mother-ship, we can do that - and at a lower cost. But we’d have to have the guts to choose sides among factions and stop pretending that we’re honest brokers...
Inherently, this one’s a special-operations war. A sounder long-term approach would be fewer troops on the ground - and far less reliance on vulnerable supply routes through Pakistan. Regular combat units have a role to play, but as punitive strike forces, not a vast neighborhood watch (this is not Iraq).
Ditch the claptrap that we can’t kill our way out of this: Well-focused killing, for decades, is our only chance - and Afghanistan’s. And dump the feel-good platitudes. In the real world off-campus, good marksmanship trumps good will.
I think this guy’s right. We need to focus solely on “prevent(ing) Afghanistan from again becoming a massive terrorist mother-ship” and do it smart and on the cheap. If that means backing some unsavory characters, fine. As long as they’re our unsavory characters.
Back to real politick, please.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:46
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Erin Borla has taken the helm at the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce. She’s got a lot of rake and shovel work ahead of her.
Having worked with Erin for six years when she was the director of the Sisters Folk Festival, I can vouch for her abilities as an organizer, for her capacity to get things done. She’s just what the Chamber needs if it is going to be relevant — or even continue to exist.
That is an issue that is still in doubt. Todd Dow’s request to have the City cut off room tax funding to the Chamber is a swipe at the jugular. The City Council isn’t going to act precipitously on the request; they’ll give the Chamber the chance to pull it together.
But Dow’s move and the support it is garnering in the community (see Letters in The Nugget this week) should be sufficient warning to the Chamber: hiring Erin is the organization’s last, best chance. Credibility is hanging by a thread and if the Chamber doesn’t show some direction and movement, it will be cast upon the ash heap of history.
I have confidence in Erin Borla’s abilities. It seems that the board does, too. The key now will be for the Chamber Board of Directors to give her room to move, support to take action and time to make the organization work as it’s supposed to.
We should see some real progress in the next 90 days. If not, Erin should look elsewhere and the community should, too.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:29
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Things are not good over at the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce.
The board announced last Friday that Executive Director Cherie Ferguson had resigned after nine months on the job. Ferguson told me last Sunday that she didn’t resign.
It’s unclear what this all means at this point, whether Ferguson will attempt to stay in the position with new board members coming on or if the board is firing her or what, exactly.
What is clear is that the Chamber needs to reevaluate what it’s doing. Sisters is looking at several years of tough economic times. Now more than ever we need an organization that is firing on all cylinders, attracting visitors to town and providing them the resources to get the most out of their time here.
The Chamber needs to take a hard, honest look at itself — what it can do well and what it cannot do. There seems to be an impetus for creating an economic development director position in Sisters. What will be the Chamber’s role?
Marketing Sisters to the rest of the state, the nation, the world, is going to be critical in the coming years as Sisters falls back on its main industry: tourism. If marketing Sisters effectively is beyond the financial and organizational capacity of the Chamber, it needs to acknowledge that this is so and make room for some other organization or coalition to do the work.
There are many fine people involved with the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce and the failure of the organization to set a productive direction or gain any traction is not a reflection upon them as individuals. But the organization as a whole is not functioning the way it should and it needs to be fixed, revamped or scrapped — and right now.
Sisters needs and deserves more.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:36
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I grew up fascinated by the Wild West. My first heroes were frontiersmen and the history of the mountain men, the scouts, the buffalo hunters shaped my whole life. They led me to Sisters, wanting to live among woods, streams and mountains in a vestige of the bygone frontier.
My explorations of frontiers took me to other lands that experienced similar conditions — South Africa, Australia, the British Northwest Frontier in what is now Pakistan.
But of late I’ve become obsessed with another frontier — one that remained “wild” for centuries and saw the greatest scale of human conflict in human history: The Wild East. Russia, Ukraine, Poland.
What an incredible history. My family just finished watching “With Fire and Sword,” a 1999 filming of a classic Polish historical novel recounting the 1647-48 uprising of the Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish-Lithuanian nobles. Poland was then the most powerful nation in Central Europe. A decade of strife would fatally weaken her. Great movie, even better book.
I’ve been reading about the Russo-Polish War in 1921 and how the Poles stopped the Red Army from conquering Warsaw, which could have opened the floodgates to the Bolsheviks, allowing them to penetrate into Germany.
Wendy Holzman of Sisters put me in touch with her daughter, who is studying for a PhD, focusing on the Soviet Partisan movement during World War II. I'm looking forward to some lively e-mail discussions on this rich topic. How I envy her discovering all this at a young age! There's a lifetime's worth of history to mine!
This is some of the most dramatic stuff I’ve ever encountered, played out on a scale that almost dwarfs the imagination. Over vast geographic distances, over steppe, river and mountain, cultures clashed for centuries, now fighting, now trading, intermingling, conquering and receding. And it continued to play out into the 20th Century. You can still see it playing out right now, as Russia rises again and reasserts its "Eurasian" identity.
It’s heady stuff and it’s history few in the West know. The Wild East. Much wilder than anything I knew of before, for much longer. For me, a new frontier to explore.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Times have gotten really tough for a lot of folks in Sisters. Jobs lost, hours cut, retirement incomes shrunk or gone up in smoke.
We’re not in the hurt locker yet, but we need to be careful to stay out of it. My wife’s hours have been cut back and we need to watch the dollars pretty closely. Our situation is by no means really tough and we’re thankful that the cuts we need to make are not vital ones.
As an irrepressibly optimistic pessimist (or is that a pessimistic optimist?), I’m trying to find ways to make getting lean beneficial and maybe even fun.
I don’t have a book budget anymore. But I have a stack of books I still want to read and there’s always the library. We’ve given up movie rentals in favor of read-aloud sessions with our nine-year-old, Ceili. We start “Inkheart” tonight. I’ll miss watching my obscure Eastern European historical epics (see “The Wild East”), but I’m really excited about the reading sessions. There’s something timeless and satisfying about reading a well-wrought tale aloud together.
My Brazilian Jujitsu class has been cut back to once a week. A small savings and it will let me focus with more intensity on my conditioning, which I need to ramp up to keep improving on the mat.
My wife, Marilyn, will use some of her extra time to make more home cooked meals, which is good for the pocketbook and good for the body. We’ll still sometimes bring home Oryisa’s phenomenal soups from Ali’s and hit Coyote Creek and Soji for takeout. We want to support the local businesses that support us. But it will be more of a special occasion thing.
Even though gas prices have plummeted in a way I thought I’d never see, we’re still paying close attention to our driving, especially with my gas pig truck.
Restraining impulse purchases and watching utility use are also habits we need to reinforce. Non-essential expenditures on the horse are out (at least we can keep him fed!)
And I can reduce my weekly quota of ammunition... I can. I will. Really.
Making music with friends remains cheap — and there’s no price tag you can put on the value.
Fortunately we’re not in the position of making drastic moves — and hopefully we’ll stay out of that kind of trouble. There’s plenty of people who have to make much tougher choices every day and I feel for them and salute them for their fortitude. I also salute all of those in Sisters who work hard to help those in real need.
I can honestly say that the changes we need to make are beneficial, making for a better way of life. We’ve always lived pretty modestly, but some enforced conservatism will help us live more frugally and with more intent, better focus on our genuine priorities, on what “prosperity” really means to us.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:47
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Here’s an economic development idea: Fill up some of our empty space with a rock climbing wall and an indoor paintball arena.
Sisters could use a few more attractions like that — the kind that would draw both locals and visitors without a lot of negative impact. Maybe a public-private partnership between some entrepreneur and the Sisters Park & Rec District?
No, these faqcilities don’t promote family wage jobs. But maybe there’s a knock-on effect; just a few more amenities that make Sisters a destination for fine, healthy fun might make a difference in attracting that small manufacturing firm.
It’s just a notion, but hey, wouldn’t it be fun on a cold winter night to go out and climb a rock wall or blast away with your friends?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:17
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
There was an interesting piece in the news recently about a guy who ran a for-profit outfit that staged charity events. His company raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charities — and the company profited handsomely.
Win-win, right? Nope. In the minds of purists, the entrepreneur was “profiteering” and he was ultimately chased off.
The charities subsequently took on their own fund-raising — and the totals plunged. Brilliant.
We should take care that we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot in the same way in Sisters. You often hear rhetoric that portrays anybody in the development business as “greedy,” just out to make a buck. Well, that’s no sin. Too many people resent everybody else’s money but their own (which is, of course, well-earned).
We need a lot of work in our forests, and somebody’s gonna have to make a buck to make it happen. It’s okay to cut down trees for profit. It really is. It is possible for forest health and economic health to be compatible.
Destination resorts are a hot-button topic around here. But each should be individually evaluated on its merits and impacts, not on the fact that somebody is going to make a lot of money.
Some resorts may have a negative impact, some may be positive, some may be pretty much neutral. We should weigh impacts on resources and traffic and on neighborhoods along with potential economic and resource benefits without getting all stirred up about the “greed” of developers.
Sure, there are greedy people out there. Others may have visions that are too grandiose for Sisters. We must be vigilant and rigorous in applying standards, whether it’s logging protocols or development guidelines. But those who are willing to invest in Sisters on the prospect of adding value to the community and making a profit for themselves should be applauded, not demonized.
Jim Cornelius
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12:49
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Merry Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) to all of you out in the blogosphere.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:41
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
George W. Bush greatly — and typically — “misunderestimates” the depth of contempt and hatred he has stirred in the Arab world.
When an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the lame duck president, Bush dismissed the gesture as a way to get attention.
Typical smirking smugness.
In Iraqi culture, throwing your shoes at someone is the gravest form of insult. It’s like spitting in the president’s face, only moreso. The fact that Bush doesn’t get that speaks volumes.
Bush never understood what he was getting us into in Iraq and he still doesn’t. He will go to his grave unreflective and unenlightened.
The Arabs as a culture have a long memory. It will take decades to overcome the damage this president has done. Let us hope that never again will we be led into the mire by a president who considers stubborn, arrogant ignorance a virtue.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
P.S. You do have to hand it to Bush, though. His reactions were good. And I thought that Bill Clinton was the guy used to ducking things thrown at his head.
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8:44
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I was talking with a friend recently about the state of our forests and it occurred to me that one word is a symptom (and maybe a cause) of a lot of wrongheaded thinking.
That word is “pristine.”
You hear it a lot in reference to the Sisters Country, often in commentary from “Environmentalists” opposing cutting trees or developing some part of the forest.
Especially if there’s the possibility of making a dollar involved. Dirty money versus “pristine” forests.
There’s nothing pristine about the forests of the Sisters Country. They’ve been meddled with for over a century, with logging, fire suppression, road-building, riding, hiking, pot growing — virtually every kind of human activity.
Pretending that the forests are “pristine” only makes it more difficult to enact the kind of human intervention that is needed now to restore the health of those forests.
The forests need massive intervention. Thinning, burning, cleanup — aggressive management, this time focused on forest health as the top priority.
And somebody has to make money somehow so that the work can be sustained over the long haul.
The old paradigm of conflict between “lock it up” and “get the cut out” is no longer valid. We need new paradigms. First, we have to retire the word “pristine.” Pristine ended long ago. Human industrial civilization is here in force; the choice is whether our impact is negative or positive.
I care a lot more about whether the forest is healthy than if it is “pristine.” And healthy is going to take a lot of work.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:43
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Unless something untoward happens, it looks like Sisters will have a Bi-Mart store in a few months.
The company filed an application for a minor modification on the former Ray’s site last week (see this week’s Nugget page 1 or www.nuggetnews.com).
It’s going to be interesting to see what the reaction is. Bi-Mart is a chain and some folks really don’t like the idea of chain stores in Sisters. Of course, Ray’s is a chain, too, and nobody seems to mind having a supermarket...
I think that Bi-Mart is the best thing that could happen at ThreeWind Shopping Center. It’s a Northwest company, employee-owned and a contributor to its communities. It carries goods that we’d otherwise be going to Bend for.
It’ll compete with some of our existing stores, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though the thought of going up against a big player surely makes some folks in town nervous. Competition usually makes everyone better.
The worst thing that could happen out there is blight — a dead or dying shopping center right along Highway 20 wouldn’t do anybody a lick of good.
A solid store with an updated and improved Western facade will look good, stimulate business for Radio Shack and Coyote Creek and fill a need in Sisters. Sounds good to me.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:26
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Forest Service blew it and they know it.
Failure to discuss mop up in detail, lack of clarity about who was responsible for what, maybe a little complacency, led to an escape of a prescribed burn in the Metolius Natural Research Unit this fall. The Wizard Fire ended up covering 1,840 acres and costing $4 million.
That’s a big mistake.
But this mistake can’t be allowed to send a valuable program up in smoke. We need prescribed fire in Sisters’ forests. Prescribed fire has protected local communities from destruction by wildfire. The GW Fire west of Black Butte Ranch hit a treated area and dropped down like it had been hit by a left hook. The evidence is clear on the ground.
Beyond the safety considerations, fire is a necessary natural element of the health of our forests. The more we mimic natural fire patterns, the healthier our forests will be.
Hike through any area of Sisters’ forests and you’ll find acres of land choked with vast stands of small, unhealthy trees. Those acres won’t be healthy until they burn.
Sure, you can cut trees and mow underbrush, but that’s not efficient and it’s not natural. Fire is nature’s tool and it must be ours.
Nobody likes dealing with the smoke and brown needles and blackened trunks don’t look like the picturesque forests we tout to visitors. But they’re worth putting up with for the benefits, which aren’t so long in coming.
There’s no excuse for lapses in patrols on a burn and the Wizard Fire is a violation of public trust the Sisters Ranger District has worked hard for the past decade to earn. They must do better and they owe it to us to demonstrate that they will do better.
But we need to give them the chance. Our forests need the fire.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:02
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
So New York Giants football star Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg accidentally while fumbling for his Glock in a Manhattan nightclub. Seems he was carrying the .40 pistol in his waistband in what’s known as “Mexican Carry.” No holster.
The gun slid down his pant leg and he grabbed at it with his free hand (the other one had a drink in it).
The Glock has no “safety.” It has a little tongue in the trigger that serves as a kind of fire control device, but it’s a military/police pistol. It’s supposed to be carried in a holster and if it is properly handled it’s perfectly safe. (Still hate Glock’s but that’s another issue).
The gun ain’t idiot-proof, however, and Plaxico proved it.
New York has draconian handgun-possession laws and Plaxico is facing three to five in jail. Mayor Bloomberg wants maximum prosecution. He’d better get it. No special deals for superstar athletes.
Once again, we see the problem of guns in the hands of idiots. It’s not something we can solve, but I hate to see responsible firearms owners penalized with laws and ridiculous safety measures to make up for the Plaxico Burresses of the world.
Maybe we just have to hope for Darwinian action to take effect. Think about it. A little to the left and he wouldn’t reproduce.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:55
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Would you kill someone to get a bargain?
Apparently a bunch of Wal-Mart shoppers in Long Island were willing to do just that. They trampled a 34-year-old temp as he unlocked the doors to let in a ravening horde of bargain-hunters who had lined up the night before for a wee-hours opening.
They didn't do it with intent, but they sure didn't seem to care what got in their way. And, after the death was announced and the store was closed down, they basically said, "Screw you. We came to shop." And kept right on going.
A guy died so that people could get a few bucks off on Christmas presents? Wow. That's in keeping with the spirit of the season.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:03
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
There is something about troubled times — especially troubled times in the economy — that focuses the mind.
Somehow, it’s easier to appreciate what you’ve got when getting more is a little harder. There are signs of this all over Sisters. People seem to be taking a little more time to appreciate how rich we really are.
It’s hard to be thankful when you’ve just lost your job and I’m not waxing sentimental about poverty, which is rearing its ugly, diminishing head in Sisters as the crunch comes down.
There are some hurting people in our community.
But we can all be thankful that there are some who take on the difficult task of helping these folks, from the dedicated advocates at Sisters Family Access Network to the volunteers at the Sister Kiwanis Food Bank to the many churches whose congregations have stepped up to help the indigent with purchases of hygiene products, wood cutting and other assistance.
We have a community that works, where neighbors take care of each other. That is riches beyond price.
Folks in Sisters are rallying to support their local businesses, the businesses that sponsor events, contribute to schools and add to the vibrancy of the community. Individual holiday “shop local” vows are catching on — and it makes a difference.
Most everybody I know is cutting back this holiday season — but not in ways that cheap out on their friends and loved ones. People are simply being a little more thoughtful, seeking to give in ways that have lasting value, both materially and spiritually.
That notion seems to be gaining traction around the country.
I would never wish hard times upon my countrymen. There is no inherent nobility in want; I prefer prosperity. But it is gratifying to see that our community and our country seems to respond to hard times with a return to more substantial values.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
When I was a young feller I was fascinated by the Mountain Men. Obsessed is probably more accurate.
A life of buckskins, beaver trapping and black powder seemed to my 12 or 13-year-old mind to be the real life for a man. I felt a powerful nostalgia for things I’d never see. I didn’t even like to read about the decline of the Fur Trade. I wanted it to be forever 1832.
But of course, that’s not the way life works. The heyday of the Mountain Men lasted 20 years or so. The market for beaver fur crashed as fashion switched from beaver top hats to silk top hats. The voracious trappers had pretty well trapped out the great fur country by then anyway.
Something akin to my youthful nostalgia is at work in the halls of power right now. There’s a movement afoot to bail out the Big Three automakers. As David Brooks says, it may make sense to keep them afloat as a jobs program and then let them go bankrupt, but bailing them out just props up decrepit companies.
The beaver hat has been supplanted by the silk topper. That started decades ago. And the Big Three have “trapped out” the country with low-mileage SUVs and trucks (yes, I own one). Their “brigades” are bloated with ridiculous union-backed legacy programs that pay people for not working.
But the idea of letting the Big Three go — to innovate or die — tears at the very fabric of America. I submit that it’s not just about the jobs, though that is obviously a big deal. It’s the same sense that made me want it to be 1832 again and forever.
We want it to be forever ’55 when we were makin’ Thunderbirds (apologies to Mr. Seger).
Last night I saw Chris Matthews get downright weepy about the idea of American carmakers who could build such a cool car that it meant everything to have one. He can’t believe that those days are gone, never to return.
The Mountain Men couldn’t believe their way of life was ending either. They gathered at a rendezvous on Green River in 1839 — the last of its kind — to bemoan the low price of beaver and its scarcity.
Never mind, they told each other. There’s beaver country yet to be discovered. Beaver’s bound to rise.
But it would never be 1832 again. 1955 and the Thunderbird are gone, too. No bailout is ever gonna bring ’ em back.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Lon Kellstrom, Pat Thompson and Jerry Bogart are in on the Sisters City Council. Mayor Brad Boyd is out.
Too bad about Boyd. He had his negatives, mostly involving style, but he had a strong grasp of the job and was diligent in doing the work. Some good things happened in the City of Sisters under his impetus and I think the citizens who voted him out will miss his efforts, whether they realize it or not.
It's always hard to put a finger on what exactly sways the electorate, but let's assume that the Kellstrom, Thompson, Bogart argument that Sisters needed a change in leadership and attitude, especially in the area of economic development, resonated with voters.
There's some merit to the idea that attitude alone is important; certainly it can be argued that Sisters has over the years (before as well as during Boyd's tenure) alienated some players who could have an impact on economic development. Perhaps that can be fixed to our benefit. Perhaps the idea of creating a position of Economic Development Director is a good one and perhaps a new council can deliver on it (I'm still not sold on that, but I'm willing to be convinced).
Regardless, I think the "economic development slate" is going to find it hard going; that the gap between desire and achievability on their ideas for economic development is wider than they realize.
All three are good men and have the best interests of the whole community at heart. The idea that they represent "Californication" is misplaced. Sisters has not sold its soul to "The Developers." Quality economic development, filling the industrial park with clean, innovative enterprises with good-paying jobs would be a very good thing for Sisters. Hopefully, the new council can preside over that very scenario.
But ask the owners of industrial park properties; that's easier said than done.
I hope the new councilors and the re-elected Kellstrom recognize that they have created expectations in the community that are going to be hard to meet.
They've signed on for a big job.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:07
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
A victory for teh "Economic Developers"
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7:27
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters' Local Option levy for schools got hammered at the polls yesterday, going down by a 52-48 margin. (UPDATE: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 12:30 P.M.: Not hammered exactly. The numbers posted by the county clerk after midnight last night were not final; the margin narrowed down to 26 votes. TWENTY-SIX).
It's not a disaster for the school district — yet. The school board can go out again next spring, but they'll have to do a better job of convincing voters like this one:
"I will be voting NO on the local option tax. No more money being thrown towards the system that blantantly and consistantly mishandled and mismanaged money. Education is moving towards the internet.Why are we being asked to buy more books ? The current hi-school is poorly designed and heat bills soaring..we live on a limited income and need that money for our fuel costs." (blog comment received 11/3 re: "Off to the races," September 16).
There you have it — the two major problems facing the district. They've lost taxpayers' trust with the $1.2 million debacle of the payback to ODE and with administrative turmoil over the past several years.
And people are so nervous about the economy that they are willing to see severe cuts to education in order to hold on to what they've got. Some feel they've got no choice.
UPDATE: If the district has to shift only a couple of dozen votes, that economic argument can be overcome. The trust problem will still require some work.
Both of those problems will not go away by spring and the board is going to have to fight to overcome them. And they must overcome them. Local Option funds make the difference between quality and mediocrity.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:11
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Apparently election rhetoric penetrates down into middle school.
Talking to my brother this morning, he told me that his 12-year-old daughter was quizzing him about socialism. “Are Democrats socialists, Dad? I need to know this.”
The kids are talking about this stuff, which is good. Of course, they’re also obsessing about Sarah Palin’s makeup artist, but who can blame them? The media is, too.
My brother couldn’t give her the answer she wanted before her ride to school came. Too long and complicated.
Nah. It’s actually quite simple. Yes, Democrats are socialists. So are Republicans. Democrats favor socialism for the poor: “Spreading the wealth around.” Republicans favor socialism for the rich: Spread the wealth to defense contractors on no-bid contracts and bail out investment bankers.
The productive middle class foots the bill. Simple. Take your pick.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:01
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
It’s a quiet day today; the phones aren’t ringing much and the election-season flood of letters has ceased.
It’s a strange kind of quiet, accentuated by the gloomy skies. It feels like people are holding their breath, waiting to see what happens next Tuesday.
We’ll have the local election results posted at www.nuggetnews.com as soon as they are available on Tuesday night. The print edition will, as always, lag a week behind. So it goes as a Wednesday weekly with a Tuesday press time.
The local option question and the city council election are the main points of local interest. I think the local option will pass, but not by a comfortable margin. Too many people are feeling pinched by the economy to expect a mandate for local school funding.
My guess is that Mayor Brad Boyd will hold on to his council seat, and so will Lon Kellstrom. I think that Jerry Bogart will take the third seat, but that’s just a guess based on what I hear on the street and that’s mostly a self-selecting sample.
A couple of people have taken exception to the fact that The Nugget did not mention Wendy Holzman at all in our endorsement a couple of weeks ago. It has long been our practice to offer our reasons for endorsing those we choose and not to discuss reasons for not endorsing a candidate.
It’s an effort to be positive, but I can see how it could be taken amiss.
One online commentator wonders if it’s “a problem with women.” Sigh. Well, someone’s always going to impute sinister motives... Sorry. It ain’t nearly so dramatic. That’s the kind of thing that makes me love politics so much.
Endorsements are just another opinion. An informed and educated opinion, but only that. I hope the opinion is valued, but it should only be a part of the mosaic good citizens put together for their voting decisions.
One thing I try never to lose sight of in this job — or in life — is that no matter how much research you do, how much thought you put into making a decision, no matter how passionately you believe in your position, you could be wrong.
Examples I’ll never live down: I voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he was the lesser of two evils. Wrong. We endorsed Greg Brown for Sheriff. Twice. Wroooong!
I’ve made my picks, made my call on ballot measures, put my ballot in the slot at City Hall. I hope I made the right choices, but I’m not sure. I did my due diligence and I think I’m right. But, you know, I could be wrong.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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12:52
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
In a week and a few hours, this long and grueling presidential race will be over — and one of these two poor saps will be declared the ... winner (?).
The next president will inherit two wars, an economy farther in the tank than it’s been in my lifetime and a nation that remains fractured along culture war fault lines.
This is like running a marathon and climbing to the podium where a tree-limbed hulk in an executioner’s hood hits you over the head with a sledgehammer.
Ain’t you glad you won?
Let’s assume the trend holds and Obama is the winner. An historic moment. Congratulations. Now, get to work.
He’ll have to assemble a transition team that immediately starts to work in concert with the Bush Administration on administering the trillion dollars in bailouts and he’ll have to participate in the pending decision whether to extend the bailout to the wheezing U.S. auto industry.
A decision will have to be made as to what to do with the dead-letter status of forces agreement in Iraq.
And on and on...
There is no time for a relaxed transition, no time for a victory lap. Obama will have to be the most active and engaged President-elect in U.S. history.
Love him, hate him, remain ambivalent, we’d all better wish the man well. I’m glad I’m not him right now.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
As we watch the surreal spectacle of a “conservative” Bush Administration preside over the socialization of the nation’s financial institutions, Sisters has its own economic questions to wrestle with.
Economic development has become the centerpiece of the City Council election.
“Economic development” is one of those mom-and-apple-pie things: Nobody is against it. Everybody wants family-wage jobs and clean industry that is compatible with Sisters’ quality of life. The tricky part is how you get them.
The Chamber of Commerce and the City look at each other like a pair of outfielders who are waiting for there other to call the pop fly: “You got it!” “No, you got it!”
The current pop fly is the idea of creating an economic development director position. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. What would such a person do? We have two business parks ready for development; it seems to me that the developers themselves are best placed to try to attract clients.
What could a quasi-governmental economic development director do that the private developers can’t do better?
The fact that the two business parks remain empty testifies to the challenges Sisters faces in attracting family-wage jobs and clean, compatible industry. Land costs are comparatively high. Sisters is off the beaten path for quick transportation. Redmond has an enterprise zone. There is a lack of workforce housing.
And, right now, the national economy is working against us.
The City could do more to attract business — reducing development fees, offering tax incentives. But actions like that are not as simple as they seem. Reducing SDCs would require a charter amendment and would reduce the city’s ability to offset the impacts of development. Tax breaks don’t always translate into successful business locations.
Sisters does need to get all its agencies and interest groups on the same page regarding economic development, but we should not fool ourselves. There is not easy formula for getting what we say we want here and even if we all agree, it may not be possible.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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19:26
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Seems that executives from AIG, in gratitude for being bailed out by the American taxpayer, went on a $440,000 Caribbean junket.
Breathtaking arrogance. Abysmal judgment. Total ethical bankruptcy.
Perhaps the next time the term bailout is used it should involve bail bondsmen.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:31
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Tired of a national political campaign that sometimes seems like Dancing With the Stars (without the pizazz)? Want to grapple with the actual issues instead of the superficialities that dominate the news and the canned responses that pass for “debates”?
This week’s issue of The Economist contains an excellent special section on the election, featuring analysis of the issues and the candidates’ positions on them. It covers the economy; regulation and trade; foreign policy; Iraq and Afghanistan; health care; immigration; energy and the environment; education; crime; and values.
This is the kind of analysis the rest of the media owes us — and never gives us. It’s not talk radio partisan bloviating; it’s not TV news infotainment — this is real substance, put together in a package that is easily read in an evening.
The Economist is available at Barnes & Noble and online. It’s well worth tracking down, whether you’ve made up your mind or not.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:41
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The recent flurry of multi-billion-dollar federal bailouts of major corporations rips the mask off one of the great American myths — the one that proclaims our belief in the free market.
Bull. We believe in a free market when the going is good. When poor business practices and greed on a scale that would make Midas blush create chaos, the titans of the free market cry out for Uncle Sam to come to the rescue.
When people seek subsidy for health care, that’s called Socialism. When giant corporations are subsidized, that’s economic necessity.
If the Right has any decency, there will be a moratorium on using the “S” word when debating any policy that calls for government intervention. With the Bush Administration presiding over the most expensive government intervention in history, even the most shameless paladins of the Right ought to blanch at the hypocrisy of complaining of creeping Socialism.
True libertarians, consistent in their beliefs, have every right to shout their anger from the rooftops — and they should be heard. It has to be admitted, however, that their American ideal is long gone.
Liberals (as the term is used now) don’t believe in the free market; they do seek a form of Socialism. So-called conservatives don’t believe in a free market either — they believe in managing the game for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
Who pays? We do. Who benefits? Not us.
I have slowly come to the conclusion that we need to stop deluding ourselves. We are no longer a Republic; we are an Empire. We are no longer the children of Adam Smith, we are the scion of Midas.
What is a citizen to do? I honestly don’t know. We’re riding the tiger. We can’t stay on and we can’t let go.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:12
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters has a real, live political race on its hands, complete with five candidates vying for three seats on the Sisters City Council and a Political Action Committee backing a slate of candidates with ties to the building industry.
We also have a decision to make about renewing local option tax support for Sisters schools. While there doesn’t seem to be an organized opposition to local option, there is likely to be some resistance from people who aren’t happy about the way the district has handled issues such as the state penalty for the disallowed home schooling program at a local Christian school.
The economy plays into both of these races in different ways.
Taxpayers may be eager to save a few dollars on their tax bill as money tightens up, leaving the school district vulnerable on local option. Voters in the city council election may be motivated in one direction or another by how they perceive the business climate in Sisters.
We’ve been watching the longest political season in American history lumber to its climax. Now Sisters has its own season. It’s (thankfully) much shorter, but it may be just as intense.
Stay tuned.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:59
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I hate politics.
I don’t find anything uplifting in it at all. Music, sports, nature — these things lift my spirit, give me a sense of the the vast beauty of the universe and the potential of humankind. Politics is just depressing, the lowest form of human endeavor.
Yet it’s important. Politics is how we choose who makes the policies that affect all of our lives. Policy determines whether we’re safe enough and prosperous enough to enjoy music and sports, whether there will be the means to venture into nature or whether there will be any nature left.
I have friends who are passionately engaged on both ends of the political spectrum. Funny thing is, though they have mighty different bumper stickers, they pretty much have the same values. They want their kids to grow up free, safe and happy, healthy and fulfilled. They want wide open spaces and the means to enjoy them. They like the same kinds of music and probably root for the same teams.
But put them together in a room and start talking politics, they’ll fight like a couple of cats tied up in a sack.
Politics is a form of tribal identity. As soon as you push those political and cultural hot buttons, people who share so much in common start focusing on their differences. Those differences become divides; divides become chasms. People who disagree become adversaries; adversaries become enemies.
Debate becomes conflict, conflict degenerates into a kind of political/cultural civil war.
This is nothing new. Politics in the U.S. (and everywhere else that’s free enough to have any) has always been nasty.
I don’t have a solution to this; I don’t think one exists. But I have made a determination for myself and I stick with it: I’ll never judge a person by his politics — though I might judge him by the way he pursues his politics — (that's him or her for you gender-neutral-language cops) and I’ll never lose a friend over a political disagreement.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:54
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
My family just finished watching the excellent PBS documentary “The War That Made America,” about the French & Indian War of the 1750s.
That epic struggle determined who would control North America — and drove in the wedge that would soon split the American colonies from Great Britain. It’s a brilliantly produced, well-paced film, done entirely with top-quality reenactments. No dry history here. This is the kind of history you can reach out and touch.
One of the things that struck me in watching “The War That Made America” is how universally applicable the principles of counterinsurgency are. The British suffered humiliating defeat after defeat at the hands of the French and their Indian allies until they initiated something very like The Surge that has succeeded in largely stabilizing Iraq (at least for now).
For one thing, the British finally put sufficient troops in theater and built the American Provincial forces to sufficient strength to do the job. More importantly, they broke some key allies away from the French.
A group of strange bedfellows, including Quaker and Moravian missionaries and British General John Forbes initiated peace overtures to the Delaware and other Ohio Country Indians to clear the path for Forbes effort to take French Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) in 1758. The French and Indians had destroyed a previous expedition to take the fort in 1755 and Forbes didn’t want the same thing to happen again.
The British essentially bribed the Indians away from the French with trade goods, liquor and promises (later to prove false) to leave their lands alone.
The key figure in the drama was a Delaware leader named Teedyuskung, who had converted to Christianity, then renounced Christianity and took up the hatchet against the British American settlers and who now sought peace for his beleaguered and starving people.
The man had plenty of blood on his hands, but the British cut a deal with him anyway and he used his influence to peel the Delaware and Shawnee away from the French at a crucial moment. Unable to hold Fort Duquesne without the protection of the Indians, the French retreated into Canada, where General James Wolfe would soon conquer them at Quebec.
So, what’s the point of this history lesson?
Roughly the same thing has worked in Iraq. The U.S. has cut deals with tribal leaders who have American blood on their hands (at least indirectly) and has succeeded in breaking a coalition of resistance groups. The most intransigent foes are increasingly isolated and placed under pressure. al Qaeda in Iraq seems to be fleeing to Pakistan (which is not entirely a good thing, but still...).
Anbar Province, once the worst place in Iraq, is being handed over to Iraqi security forces.
No matter what you think about the war in Iraq, The Surge — as a tactical approach more than a simple increase in numbers — is an excellent piece of counterinsurgency work.
It’s distasteful to some, inside the military and out, to cut deals and essentially buy the loyalty (or at least non-hostility) of former enemies. But that’s what works.
It’s a dirty war, just as the French & Indian War was a dirty war. That’s how you win it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:22
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The United States of America is unique among nations in that it was founded on an idea — not on blood and soil.
The idea is encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence — that mankind comes into the world with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rights exist naturally; they are not granted by a sovereign. Rational man will act in enlightened self-interest in a way that will benefit all.
This idea was the product of Enlightenment thinking and it prevailed in part because the British culture from which we grew and from which we violently broke away half believed it, too.
The trouble is, it’s hard to sustain emotional attachment to an idea. patriotism is so much easier to engender out of blood and soil, a tribal sense of identity.
You have to work at holding tight to an idea. And only an educated citizenry has the tools for that work.
I wonder if our schools (I’m speaking nationally now) are teaching the idea. It doesn’t seem like it. In my darker moments, I sometimes think that the founding principles of America are but a ghost now.
We have grown comfortable with a massive state and orient our lives by its leave. That is dangerous to liberty and an abdication of our own pursuit of happiness.
That goes for both “liberal” who want the state to do more for the welfare of its citizens (ignoring the unintended consequences) and for “conservatives” who want to state to do more for their security and to regulate behavior.
So, here’s the question: How do we hold onto the founding idea in the 21st Century?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:55
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The post on Steve Swisher quickly veered off into an interesting debate over anonymity on the blog.
Much as I respect Todd Dow’s point of view (and, I’m sure, as he expected), we’re not going to change our policy on anonymity on the blog. We have two forums — Letters to the Editor in the print edition and Article comments on-line — that require verifiable identification.
This forum offers something different.
Part of the origin of the blog was the belief that there is a well of opinion in the Sisters community that isn’t given voice for precisely the reasons that many of the anonymous commenters cite: fear of retaliation in various forms in their off-line lives.
It is our belief that these opinions should be aired.
I have to say, however, that I regret the need for anonymity, both real and perceived. People should own their beliefs and be willing to stand behind them. On the flip side, people should respect others’ opinions and beliefs and not retaliate against them in business or socially because of them.
There’s tremendous power in standing up for something. I’ve aired an unpopular opinion or two in my day — with my name attached — and have been threatened with every kind of retaliation, including violence. That’s not much fun, but at the end of the day, there’s some satisfaction in facing it down.
I can’t opt for anonymity and wouldn’t if I could.
But everyone has to make such decisions for themselves. The choice is there on this blog — identify yourself or don’t. I don’t think anybody has abused their anonymity or been inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory.
So far, I’ve only had to reject one comment — not because of the opinion, but because it was expressed in scatological terms that we don’t want to encourage.
Would I like to know who’s talking? Sure. Do I think the opinions expressed have no value if I don’t? No. I think it’s good to know what folks are thinking out there, even if I can’t put a face with a name or a name with a thought.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:23
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Nothing like a little salacious detail to get the political press excited.
State Senator Ben Westlund has been taking a pounding in The Bulletin over the past few days over new details given an underhanded release about an incident that occurred 11 years ago.
A sealed letter was leaked to the Associated Press by Westlund’s political opposition. It included embarrassing details that neither Westlund nor the woman involved chose to reveal when the incident broke over a decade ago.
There was no real news here. Westlund had already acknowledged his inappropriate behavior and the woman involved and Westlund put the incident behind them years ago and have become friends. Yes, there’s a gap between an “unwanted hug” and what was described in the letter. So what? The woman involved didn’t want to go any further than what they originally described and was satisfied with the outcome. There was no crime; there was bad behavior, for which Westlund apologized profusely.
The matter has been closed for a decade.
Trot out any pious excuse you want to: this is just dirty election year politics with the political media piling on.
Earlier in this election season, the political media got all atwitter about a story linking John McCain to a lobbyist. An attractive, blonde lobbyist who looked smashing in an evening gown.
Nobody believes that the story was about McCain’s cozy relationship with lobbyists. It was about sex, or the hint of it. McCain’s opponents seized on it because sex sells and sex scandals can damage or destroy a candidate.
This is nothing new. American politics has indulged in sex-scandal mongering since Thomas Jefferson’s opponents first broke the story about his “relationship” with a slave. European politics is rife with scandal, too.
Let’s be honest. This isn’t about moral rectitude. It’s about gotcha and titillation. It’ll never stop, but nobody covers themselves with honor by indulging in it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:20
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Steve Swisher has been pushed out of his job in Crook County.
As is the norm in such cases, specifics are hard to come by; the people involved will keep mum publicly and say only that it was "time for a change."
But it's a safe bet that what ran Swisher's tenure onto the rocks in Crook County is the same stuff that caused problems in Sisters during his tenure.
A person intimately involved in the workings of the school district told me yesterday that Swisher is a " better to ask forgiveness than ask permission kind of guy." That seems spot on.
That can be a dynamic leadership style. A person who is willing to push the envelope gets things done. And Swisher got things done. We have a thriving Sisters Schools Foundation largely because of him. Swisher navigated the school district through a potentially disastrous budget crisis. Sisters School District hasn't had a strong sense of leadership in the superintendent's office since he left.
But character is fate and Swisher's style eventually brought grief. Swisher's relationship with his school board soured when several board members put him under heavier scrutiny than he liked during the process of building Sisters High School. He bristled at what he considered micromanagement — at what was really board oversight that was long overdue.
Oversight does not appeal to a " better to ask forgiveness than ask permission kind of guy."
The classic example of the pitfalls of Swisher's style is the debacle that ensued from the Sonrise Christian School "homeschool" program. Sisters is paying a $1.2 million debt to the state for that disallowed program.
Swisher has never taken any real accountability for this mess. Turns out he asked neither permission nor forgiveness.
Swisher must have known he'd worn out his welcome when he left Sisters and when the board could have asked his to come back, they didn't. Too much baggage.
He moved on, eventually winding up in Crook County. He took some of Sisters' best administrators with him: Jim Golden, Lora Nordquist...
Apparently, it wasn't a happy tenure. A lot got done, but the " better to ask forgiveness than ask permission kind of guy" eventually ran out of rope.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:08
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Two discouraging items of news today. They’re related and point to an aching need to refocus our priorities.
Item 1 (from CNN): “It would cost at least $140 billion to repair all the nation’s bridges if work began immediately, a nationwide safety organization said in a comprehensive report Monday.”
Item 2 (from CNN): “The White House on Monday predicted a record deficit of $490 billion for the 2009 budget year.” (That’s off the $128 billion surplus inherited by the Bush administration).
So, our transportation net needs of fixing — and we’re broke.
Now, the bridge situation isn’t quite as dire as the above statement makes it sound. We don’t have to fix all of the nation’s bridges right now. Just about one in four of them.
My personal manifesto is that to live up to our cherished self-image as the greatest nation on earth, we have to have the best educated populace, the best health care system and the best transportation system.
We don’t.
“Nearly one in four bridges needs repairs, and the average age of America’s bridges is 43 years — seven years shy of the maximum age for which most are designed, according to the report, titled ‘Bridging the Gap.’”
“One in five U.S. bridges is more than 50 years old, the report says. ‘Almost one in four bridges, while safe to travel, is either structurally deficient, in need of repair, or … too narrow for today’s traffic volumes.’ the report from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials said.”
We really need to refocus our priorities. We cannot afford trillions of dollars spent on foreign adventures. We cannot afford any more porkbarrel legislation (we should never build, let alone have to repair a “bridge to nowhere”).
The bridge report cites “’a frustrating contradiction’ — better engineering, materials and construction techniques are available, but ‘without a national commitment to bridge investment,’ states cannot afford the improvements.”
That says it, right there. A national commitment. Calling all patriots — make America truly the greatest nation: with the finest schools, the best helath care, top quality roads. Let’s make that national commitment now.
Just as soon as we figure out how to pay that debt...
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:24
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
One of the benefits of parenthood is the opportunity to see the world through fresh eyes, to rediscover the magic in things you’ve explored before.
My nine-year-old daughter Ceili recently discovered that she loves fishing. She loves everything about it, from organizing her tackle to making a cast to hooking a rainbow trout. She even likes to gut and clean a fish.
Given her new enthusiasm, I thought she might like to watch a movie that centers around fishing. We went to Sunbuster Video and rented “A River Runs Through It.”
Wow. I hadn’t seen the movie in about a decade. I remembered liking it a lot, but I was astounded at how wonderful a film it really is. Certainly Redford’s best, without the clanking failures in tone of his more recent work.
The movie was a star-making turn for Brad Pitt and it’s easy to see why. He was born to play the luminous but doomed Paul Maclean. He truly lived up to the Maclean patriarch’s assessment that Paul was “more than just a fine fisherman. He was beautiful.”
The Montana setting is magnificently portrayed in it’s rugged beauty, its isolation, its raw, elemental power. The juxtaposition of the vestigial raw frontier (whores and poker games at the hot springs) with the bedrock Scots Presbyterianism of the Maclean home and church, the mixture of tough, rough logging communities with modern Roaring 20s “flapperism” is charming in a way that is hard to describe.
I love that era — love the clothes, the cars, the sense of possibility — so maybe seeing it so lovingly portrayed hit me harder than it might strike another. But there was a charm and magnificence to that way of life in that place and time that is all but lost to us now.
We here in Sisters are lucky to have much of the beauty of that world — without some of the uglier aspects like racial prejudice and thoughtless resource exploitation.
A River Runs Through It here, too, and a magnificent river it is.
Last weekend I took Ceili to Camp Sherman’s fly fishing fair. (After seeing the fly fishing in the movie, she said “I want to do that!”). She tied a wooly booger, took a casting lesson and learned all about bugs from Laurie Adams.
I was almost overcome with gratitude that I am able to offer such opportunities to a lively, inquisitive child. A child who has never pushed a button on a video game, who thinks “old-fashioned” cars are the coolest, who likes Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift — and Frank Sinatra.
A child who, like Norman Maclean, will be haunted by waters.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:21
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show has grown over more than two decades into an international event, one that has put Sisters on the map. The event provides a massive shot in the arm to Sisters’ economy every summer.
For many merchants, it is the single most lucrative day of the year. It’s no stretch to say that the show and the week leading up to it keep many businesses afloat in Sisters’ seasonal economy.
Trouble is, it’s been going on for so long with such success that many people who should know better take it for granted.
Visitors comment on buildings that are bare of quilts and wonder whether there are fewer quilts this year, if perhaps the show is diminishing. In fact, the only reason a building is bare during quilt show is because the building owner or a business proprietor doesn’t want quilts on the building.
Why would anyone not want quilts on their building? Maybe the show doesn’t directly boost their particular business. Maybe they want quilt show visitors to see their window displays.
Such thinking is shortsighted and selfish. Everybody in Sisters benefits from the quilt show (and other Sisters events) because they make Sisters’ name and reputation — the reputation that brings visitors year-round and provides the lifeblood of what remains and will probably always remain a tourist-based economy.
Some merchants make money by hosting vendors. But if those vendors detract from the show, they are ultimately harming the entity that gives them the opportunity to make their year in a day. Again, selfish and shortsighted.
Some quilters don’t like the rules of the show and set up on their own in unsanctioned displays. Big deal, right? Well, yeah, it is.
The quilt show works hard to maintain the character and quality of the display, which is uniquely based on celebration rather than commerce. The commercial benefits are incidental and accrue mostly to the established merchants of downtown Sisters.
Drafting on the commercial benefits the show brings to Sisters without giving back is freeloading. It’s rude and unseemly behavior. Merchants and quilters alike should dance with the one that brought them. Heck, they’re the ones who put on the dance.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:34
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The partnership that is developing the Lundgren Mill property at the northwestern end of Sisters wants more time to make the final $700,000 payment on its $3.3 million purchase from the Sisters School District.
These aren't the best of times for anybody trying to sell real estate, residential or commercial, and it's perfectly understandable that the developer should want to come to some kind of accommodation. But the school district needs to hold firm. They have a contract with this developer that sets out clear penalties if the developer fails to meet his obligations.
Being a good neighbor is great; being a nice guy is nice. But the school board represents the taxpayers of the school district and it is in their interest the board must act.
That means taking a firm line. No nice guy deals.
So far, the board, or at least the majority of the board, gets it. They realize that they can't ask the voters to support local option taxes if they aren't meeting their fiduciary duties in exercising a contract with a developer.
The board should be fair, but they need to hold firm. A developer's problems are not the school district's problems. Funding programs, teachers, facilities are. We are the district's shareholders and stakeholders. The board owes us their best efforts.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:48
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The new trash cans in downtown Sisters are an improvement over the old ones in a couple of ways: they hold more trash and they're presumably easier to dump.
But they are UGLY. Squat, gray blobs of plastic dotting the sidewalks of Sisters.
Maybe it's not a big deal in the big scheme of things, but they detract from the aesthetic appeal of downtown Sisters. Details are important, especially when you are trying to create a pleasing atmosphere for visitors. Volunteers and city staff work hard to maintain beautiful public spaces. We shouldn't be detracting from their efforts.
Surely there are trash cans that function well, are durable and at least blend in unobtrusively. Let's find some and get rid of the gray plastic blobs.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:33
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This weekend I got to enjoy a big, thick slice of Americana.
My band, The Anvil Blasters, was invited to open the Wheeler County Bluegrass Festival out in Fossil. It was a beautiful setting on the lawn of the venerable Wheeler County Courthouse (1901) and the small-town charm was palpable. We played our brand of Americana folk music (pretty well, if I do say so myself) and earned a warm ovation.
My dad wore his red-white-and-blue rodeo shirt and a red-white-and-blue ball cap and he grinned like a little kid as we drove through the corridor of flags in Redmond.
It was a day when it felt good to be an American.
Some of my leftward-leaning friends are uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism. They feel bludgeoned by the flag, force-fed a diet of simplistic "my country, right or wrong" mentality. I can understand that. I don't take too well to "love it or leave it" patriotism that brooks no criticism or dissent.
But that's no reason to reject the symbol. It's all the greater reason to hoist the banner high.
It's our flag — all of us, right, left, center, whatever our color, whatever our creed. It is a beautiful symbol and it stands for genuinely magnificent principles of justice and liberty.
It stands for a nation that has contributed mightily to the betterment of mankind in every field of endeavor — medicine, jurisprudence, art, sport, science...
To get to Fossil, we drove through magnificent American countryside, so beautiful it made us gasp with wonder. We met some fine folks and enjoyed music that is America's gift to the world, grown out of seeds imported from the British Isles, grown into something vibrant and new in America.
Back in Sisters, folks were playing the blues, another American art form with roots stretching from Africa through a painful journey from the American South through Chicago and branching out into the world as one of our most powerful cultural exports. Volunteers were preparing to celebrate the American folk art tradition of quilting and folks were hunting for treasures at the Gem Show — treasures found in the American landscape.
We were celebrating all that is this magnificent, turbulent nation. America the Beautiful. you make me proud.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:19
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Supreme Court’s decision last week striking down the District of Columbia’s comprehensive handgun ban is a major victory for individual rights.
The law prevented citizens from keeping a handgun in their own home for self-defense. That’s wrong. A law-abiding person ought to have the means of self-defense in the sanctuary of their home. Period.
Whether a handgun is the best means is open to debate. A shotgun loaded with #4 shot is a better bet — easier to use in a crisis, less penetration, etc. But law-abiding American citizens should be able to make the choice.
Striking down that draconian restriction is one victory. The other, broader one is that the Court finally made a judgment on the key question of the Second Amendment, arguing that the amendment acknowledges an individual — not a collective — right to keep and bear arms.
That’s a significant moment in the 40-year debate over gun control in this country and it’s a big win for firearms owners.
The decision does not, as alarmists have argued, mean all gun restrictions will go out the window. The Court was very explicit about this. Reasonable restrictions on who is able to purchase a gun are not open for challenge due to this ruling.
And those restrictions are important.
While it is absolutely right that citizens should have the right to arm themselves for self-defense, it is also absolutely right — and very tricky — for the government to regulate who gets their hands on a gun.
As I have argued before in this space, we need to figure out how to do a better job at preventing madmen and criminals from getting guns. Some ability to demonstrate basic competence and safety isn’t a bad idea, either.
Keeping a firearm for self-defense is an awesome responsibility — literally the power of life and death. It must be taken seriously. But the right to self-defense and the means to enforce it are fundamental rights of citizenship. And now those rights are more secure.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:47
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Economist this week published an interesting piece on the increasing self-segregation of American society.
It seems that Americans are increasingly sealing themselves off in communities made up almost exclusively of people just like them in a phenomenon one sociologists dubbed The Big Sort.
We’re not talking about racial segregation here, though that’s a part of it. The phenomenon is one of social and political self-segregation.
“Because Americans are so mobile,” The Economist notes, “even a mild preference for living with like-minded neighbors leads over time to severe segregation.”
The problem with this is that “Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views.” It’s not just living in enclaves where everybody has pretty much the same outlook; they tune into TV and radio that suits their beliefs, read only what they already agree with and nobody around them challenges it. Views in an echo chamber become more and more extreme.
That’s no way to live, no matter what your values. That kind of “safety” is a slow death.
We’re lucky in Sisters. This community, while it is not ethnically diverse, has a broad cross-section of people with a variety of backgrounds, beliefs, and values. And we rub up against each other at community events, in restaurants and at the Post Office. We argue with each other in Letters to the Editor.
I know several people who are close friends, despite being polar opposites in politics and in many of their social attitudes.
That vibrancy is at risk, though. I talk to many people on both ends of the political spectrum, on either side of the cultural divide, who are increasingly intolerant of hearing from people on the other side.
Monocultures aren’t healthy in forests or in human communities. We are blessed to have a vibrant town here. Let’s make sure it stays that way.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:12
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination earlier this month brought forth a lot of remembrances from people who knew RFK, people who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night Sirhan Sirhan pumped three .22 caliber bullets into the Senator at close range.
The most compelling and poignant interview I heard was with Pete Hamill, a writer whom I admire deeply. He noted that in America, a disturbed man with a grievance can always get a gun with which to take out his anger on a human target.
That got my attention. See, I was out shooting while I listened to the interview on OPB.
I've been an avid shooter since I was about 10 years old. There were no guns in my household; it wasn't something I learned from my dad. I was drawn to firearms all on my own, partly from an interest in history and partly from the sheer enjoyment of the art and skill of shooting well.
I've worked in the firearms industry. Now, I shoot probably three or four times a week — mostly small-caliber rifle and clays with a shotgun. I do a little bird hunting, but I'm more a shooter than a hunter. I have a couple of revolvers and shoot them well, but they play a distant third fiddle to the rifle and shotgun.
The shooting sports have brought me hours of enjoyment — enjoyment that I am now sharing with my nine-year-old daughter who is turning out to be a fine shot with both a rifle and a bow.
Firearms have also brought me a modicum of protection. I have been in two armed confrontations with dangerous men, both of which ended without shots being fired. I was glad to have been armed.
And yet...
And yet...
Hamill is right. We've seen it in political assassinations, we've seen it in school shootings, we've seen it in rampages at the mall. A madman can always get a gun with which to enact his madness.
I support the Second Amendment and believe in the individual right to keep and bear arms. But we've got to do a better job of restricting access of those who are menaces to the innocent.
I'm going to buy a new rifle next week. It'll be an easy process. Maybe it's too easy.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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17:42
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The California Supreme Court just stuck its thumb down on one of the hottest hot buttons on the American cultural landscape. By declaring a referendum banning gay marriage unconstitutional, the court opened a floodgate and today hundreds if not thousands of gay couples surged through it.
A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage will almost certainly be on the November ballot in California, just in time to add a culture war twist to what will already be a contentious presidential election. It will probably pass, too, inaugurating yet another round of wrangling over this issue, which arouses strange passions.
A large majority Americans oppose gay marriage, though a sizable plurality are okay with civil unions. This seems very strange to me. You're okay with gays having the same rights as married couples, as long as you don't call it marriage.
Uh... okay. Why?
I've never understood the visceral reaction of so many people to the notion of gay marriage. It strikes me as a very definite "none of my business" situation.
I've heard all the arguments. It undermines the institution of marriage. How? Will my marriage be affected by Steve and Dave getting married? Not as far as I can tell. And it's pretty clear that heterosexuals have done just fine on their own undermining the sanctity of the institution. About half of marriages end in divorce, so it's not like the institution is in great shape anyway.
Marriage is about procreation and protecting children. Really? So childless couples shouldn't be married?
Homosexuality is a sin. Nope. Sorry. Off limits. We don't base laws on theological concepts of sin, otherwise we'd be arresting gluttons at the ice cream parlor and stoning adulterers (heterosexual underminers of the institution).
It legitimizes a "deviant lifestyle." It's already broadly legitimized — otherwise the possibility of marriage would be as remote as it was in 1950. Mores change.
It opens the door to all alternative lifestyles — plural marriage or incest. This argument actually has some rhetorical force. If we extend rights to include some must we include any and all? Yet incest is taboo and illegal for compelling reasons of biology (which of course did not stop the legally and regally married of Europe from staying too close to the trunk of the family tree). Polygamy was common ages before the notion of homosexual marriage even existed; it fell out of favor for reasons of contract and inheritance, not on moral grounds.
Marriage defined as being between a man and a woman is not a bulwark against polygamy; polygamy is illegal because marriage is a contract between two persons.
And that's what this all comes down to, for me. The state should be out of the marriage business entirely. All marriages should be civil unions between two persons. Churches may define "marriage" however they choose and if it is unsound doctrine to marry homosexuals, they should not do so.
And then, instead of worrying about Steve and Dave's relationship, we can mind our own.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:35
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Some analysts think $4-per-gallon gasoline may be a classic “tipping point,” a moment when market forces quickly and irrevocably change people’s behavior.
Maybe.
I think in the case of gasoline a better analog is the addiction model. Have we “hit bottom?” Are we ready to admit that we are powerless over our addiction to cheap gasoline and can no longer live this way?
I’m not so sure.
Certainly, big changes are afoot. GM is moving with unusual speed for a giant corporation to jettison its fleet of gas-guzzlers — it may completely deep-six the iconic Hummer — on the belief that the increase in gas prices is permanent and may go considerably higher.
I drive a truck that gets 12.8 miles to the gallon, so I am no paragon of virtuous, upright living when it comes to gasoline consumption. I wouldn’t give it up; I need it to tow a horse trailer and it serves me well in other adventures. However, I am walking a lot more. That’s great when the weather is like it is today, a little less pleasant in wintertime. I think I’m going to have to get used to it.
It’s hard to break the addiction to cheap gas because it has brought so much to us. Yeah, yeah, traffic is a mess and pollution is a problem (though we’ve managed to reduce it by a massive amount since I was a kid growing up with stage-three smog alerts in the LA area).
But the ability for people to move freely has added immeasurably to the richness of our lives. It’s easy to forget that just a couple of generations ago, travel was out of the question for most Americans. They never ventured far from home.
When my grandfather was a kid, he took a train trip from the ranch in South Dakota to the stockyards in Chicago — and it was a major event in his young life.
Two decades later he was in a car driving from South Dakota to Southern California, part of the great exodus from the Great Plains during the Great Depression.
In just the past few decades, world travel has become accessible to ordinary people, not just the super-rich.
We don’t want to give up the freedom given by the automobile and the airplane — and we shouldn’t. But as prices keep climbing we’re going to have to. If a hurricane knocks out a refinery, if the Middle East explodes, we’re looking at $7-$8 per gallon gasoline.
I sure won’t be driving that truck much.
Drilling for more oil domestically, refining more oil, may be necessary. Oil is the lifeblood of our civilization and if we try to cold turkey it, we’ll probably die. But more drilling only postpones the day of reckoning, of which $4.50/gallon gas is but a harbinger.
It’s time to put our best minds to work on viable solutions — alternative energy sources from solar to wind, to nuclear, to geothermal to hydrogen fuel cells. We need to develop flex-fuel.
It’s no bad thing to park the car and walk or ride a bike — America as a whole could stand to get off and on. But we shouldn’t forsake the wide world granted to us by the ability to move.
We need to wean ourselves off oil, never forgetting that the black gold gave us the freedom of the road.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:31
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
America is the greatest country in the world.
You hear that a lot. Unfortunately, that sense of America’s greatness is often defined by political partisans and used as a weapon in political and cultural battles.
That sort of abuse of the notion obscures its truth: We are indeed a great nation, founded on principles that have made the world a better place.
Over strife-filled centuries we have expanded the principle that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to include more and more people. Those inalienable rights no longer apply only to white men of property.
Yet our greatness is under threat. Not from radical Islamic terrorism; while dangerous and murderous, Islamic terrorism cannot destroy the United States.
No, the threat to our greatness comes from our own complacency. We can, and must, do better.
America should be the best in all things. We should have the best transportation system in the world. We should have the finest health care in the world available to all our citizens. We should have the best-educated citizenry in the world.
With all of those things in place, our economic preeminence would be unchallengeable.
But we are not the world’s best. Our transportation system is suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. Our health care system, while still the best in terms of research and innovation, is failing in terms of reaching the citizenry.
While we still produce some of the best and the brightest in the world, our citizenry is falling behind the rest of the developed world in most measures of education.
Infrastructure, health care, education — these are key investments in the future greatness of our nation. I’d add energy independence to the list — requiring investment both in fossil fuels and alternative fuels to achieve.
We are failing our children and their children if we do not buckle down to the job and make these investments now.
There is plenty of room for debate on the best path to get there. It’s going to require a mixture of market forces and government investment to make any of this happen. We cannot afford to spend years quibbling and sniping at each other, spending more than we can afford and neglecting the long-term for short-term pleasure and gain.
If we do not act now, we may lose the greatness that makes America, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of man on Earth.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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13:57
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I cringe when the sirens go off, when I get the report of an accident on the highways around Sisters.
It means someone is likely hurt, possibly critically. And in this small town, it’s all too possible that it’s someone I know. (Like it or not, we are all touched more immediately when tragedy befalls someone close).
Last Monday, I came upon the wreck at the intersection of Highway 20 and Barclay Drive as I was driving my daughter to school. I pulled off the side of the road, grabbed my camera, got out of the truck and started taking pictures.
That’s my job.
A man at the scene — a man I know — approached me and berated me for being there and taking pictures. He said it was “sick” to do so, that he knew the people, that they weren’t even out of their cars.
I understood where he was coming from. I’ve been in his shoes. And I told him so. I also told him that the accident was news and it was my job to cover it and that I was going to do so. I also assured him that The Nugget wasn’t going to run photos that exploited the pain and fear of his friends.
A short time later, the man apologized for his angry reaction and we had a good conversation about the dangers of that intersection and what might be done to fix it.
That kind of thing goes with being in “the media.” You learn not to take it personally. And it keeps you on your toes. Where is the line between legitimate reporting and exploitation?
A good friend and I had a conversation some years back about coverage of accidents. She asked why we couldn’t just write about it, why there had to be pictures, images that were upsetting and painful to see. (She also admitted that they were only upsetting and painful when she knew the people in the wreck — an important point).
It’s a valid question. The answer is close to a cliché; an image has a lot more impact than a written description.
But still, is it necessary? Does it serve some valid public purpose?
What I told my friend, and what I continue to believe, is that such images brand themselves on our consciousness in ways prose descriptions cannot. And they can change what we do.
I have seen somewhere around a dozen traffic deaths and many injuries. I drive differently because of them. I approach the Aspen Lakes curve and the Suttle Lake curve with great caution because I’ve seen death there. I approach that nasty intersection assuming someone is going to pull in front of me because I’ve seen the results of just that action.
Even photos taken by other reporters have that effect. I can still see the wreckage of Steve Swisher’s pickup truck in a photo taken by another reporter. And I won’t pass a turning vehicle on the right because I remember what happened to Swisher.
I have drummed into my wife and constantly remind myself that if you drift off the right side of the highway, keep going. Overcorrect and you’ll roll or shoot into the oncoming lane.
I know this because I’ve seen it, over and over again.
My job is to let you see it, too. It’s not pretty and it’s not fun, but maybe it does a little bit of good.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:35
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Someone is going to die at the intersection of Barclay Drive and Highway 20.
What has happened there already is bad enough. there have been four major accidents, three in two years, with more than a dozen people injured, several seriously or critically. People from Sisters, our friends and neighbors, have suffered permanent, life-changing injuries.
We cannot wait two, three, four more years — or more — for the City of Sisters and the Oregon Department of Transportation to do something to improve safety at this intersection. We’re told that a plan must be completed, that funding must be found.
That kind of bureaucratic response tastes like ashes to the families and friends of the injured. Imagine telling that to the next person who is hurt there, or to a family mourning a loved one killed there.
We have known there was going to be a signal at that intersection for a decade, before the road was even completed. If there are other, better options, great. Let’s hear them.
ODOT wasted no time, effort or money putting in a passing lane on Highway 20, allegedly for safety reasons, even though no accident has been recorded on that section of highway.
The agency can certainly fast-track a project where lives are actually at stake.
Every time there is an accident at that intersection, there is an outcry for action. Then it dies down — until the next pileup sends someone to the hospital.
It is time to act. Write to Mayor Brad Boyd at bboyd@ci.sisters.or.us and to ODOT planner Jim Bryant at James.R.BRYANT@odot.state.or.us. Be respectful and courteous; these men have jobs to do and many priorities to balance and anger won’t help.
But let them know how important it is that action be taken NOW, before someone dies and the community of Sisters is left to ask why.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The recent spike in gas prices has put the hurt on everybody. It costs me around $80 to fill the tank on my pickup truck. Thankfully, I don’t commute far and I can park it and walk when I get to work.
We also own a Subaru Forester, which does pretty well on mileage. So by being mindful about our driving, consolidating trips and driving conservatively, we’re managing okay.
But man, it hurts to pour that much money down the gas tank. Everybody is thinking that way. And that makes people feel insecure about the economic outlook.
High energy costs always drive inflation and that combined with a slow housing market will have a negative impact on Sisters’ economy. But tourism may actually be helped by high gas prices.
Sisters is a tank of gas away from the region’s major metro areas — a relatively inexpensive getaway. Local business that cater to tourism, the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce, the lodging industry need to put the pedal to the metal on an advertising campaign to convince people that it makes more sense to drive to Sisters than to fly to Disneyland this summer.
If we can do that, our major industry may come out of a long summer of pain at the pump feeling a lot better than some folks out there, who are going to see a steep decline in travel.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:14
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Nugget received a letter from a woman who is fed up with barking dogs disturbing her peace. She wants us to do a story about shock collars for barking dogs and we probably will.
Dogs are a constant problem in Sisters. Barking dogs, loose dogs, aggressive dogs. The local sheriff’s deputies spend an awful lot of their time dealing with animal complaints.
It’s not the dogs’ fault. they’re just doing what comes naturally: wandering around peeing on everything, talking to each other and defending their turf.
It’s the owners who aren’t doing their job.
My wife spent most of Monday morning reuniting an old lab that showed up in our driveway with her family. A little girl was most relieved and it was all very touching. but it was clear that Daisy would need to be rescued again. Dad was pretty cavalier. “Yeah, she runs off.”
Well... control the dog!
Incessant barking is maddening; if your dog is a barker, keep it indoors so it doesn’t bother the neighbors.
Don’t let your dog run loose in the neighborhood. If your dog bites a kid, you’ve got a big problem. Leash the critter when you’re on a walk. Yeah, I know your dog responds to voice commands — except when he doesn’t.
I don’t want my dogs tangling with yours. Neither do you.
I hate the idea of using a shock collar to stop a dog from barking. I don’t much care for cops handing out reams of citations for nuisances and dogs at large. But that’s the kind of step people start insisting on when dog owners won’t just do the right thing because it’s the right thing.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:11
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
President George W. Bush waded into the presidential campaign last week with a speech in Israel that compared Barack Obama’s proposals to negotiate with Iran and Syria and other U.S. enemies to the “appeasement” of Nazi Germany in the run up to World War II.
“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them that they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before...
“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement.”
(White House spokesperson Dana Perino blandly denied that the comments were directed at Obama. Right. And there’s no recession and Iraq has weapons of mass destruction).
We’ll leave aside for the moment the complicated history of the policy of appeasement, Britain’s war guarantee to Poland and the blunders (including Hitler’s) that led to a war that nobody wanted in 1939. (Hitler had sought to avoid a repeat of a two front war, then guaranteed it with the attack on Poland).
What is most infuriating about Bush’s comments — calculated as they were to touch the hottest button available — is the false equation of negotiation with appeasement.
One of Bush’s alleged heroes, Winston Churchill, said in 1954 that “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
The history of the 20th Century shows that this is true.
Reagan, the icon of the conservative movement, negotiated with the Soviet Union, the “Evil Empire,” even as the U.S. supplied a proxy war in Afghanistan. Those negotiations helped end the Cold War.
In the midst of that existential struggle, when the annihilation of the United States and most of the rest of the world was a real threat, Richard Nixon sat down and negotiated with Mao Tse Tung, the bloodiest mass murderer in history, a psychopath that makes Iran’s mullahs look like Rotarians. The result was the “opening of China” and another step toward ending the Cold War.
The Kennedy brothers negotiated our way out of the most volatile trigger point of the Cold War, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis through quiet back-channel dealmaking.
Jaw-jaw was better than war-war.
Negotiation=Appeasement only for men like Bush, who perceive any kind of dialogue as weakness, who cannot conceive that even the most ardent of our adversaries can act pragmatically, who prefer to rely on the hollow strength of the bully.
They had their chance and it’s proved disastrous. It remains to be seen whether John McCain or Barack Obama will be best equipped to do the hard work of negotiation with enemies. Right now, McCain seems to be parroting the Bush line. Hopefully that’s just politics. He used to be smarter than that.
Obama’s got the right idea, but he may not be tough enough.
We’ll see. But whoever sits in the Oval Office will need to take the real lessons of history to heart: Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:58
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
The Sisters School Board is going to seek public input before deciding whether to ask voters to approve a local option tax to fund schools in the 2009-10 school year and beyond.
There’s not much to discuss. Sisters schools won’t be excellent without local option. They won’t even be good. Local option is 9 percent of the budget; about $1 million a year.
The schools can’t do their job without it.
There are rumblings in the community about organized opposition to local option, from people who are angry about the school district’s handling of the disallowed “homeschool” program at the Christian school, or about the district’s approval of bond funding for elementary school projects, or about the firing of a biology teacher last year — or any number of things.
Shooting down local option would be a pyrhhic victory, an act of pure destruction that achieves nothing and harms much, including those who perpetrate it.
Whatever the faults of the school district and its leadership, the community must rally as it has in the past to provide the local financial support required to make the schools function, to educate the children of our community.
There may be tactical considerations — whether to seek a vote in November or next spring; how much to ask for for how long — but the district needs to communicate one thing loud and clear. Community support through local option is critical; as a community, we cannot afford not to provide it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:00
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of “Expelled” at Sisters Movie House. Nothing stirs up the cultural debate like the battle over teaching “Intelligent Design” or “Evolution” or Creationism” in schools.
It’s not truly a scientific debate. Wait now... I’m not arguing whether or not it’s a settled scientific question. I’m saying that science is merely the weapon here. The battle is over the soul of the culture. That’s why the battle is so savage, why passions are so quickly and intensely aroused.
The Christian faithful feel threatened by a militant science that questions — or rejects — a role for God in nature. Secularists fear that any scientific admission of the possibility of a Creator treads out onto the slippery slope that leads to the imposition of particular religious beliefs upon students.
People’s sense of identity and meaning are wrapped up in this debate. It strikes at the core of many people’s being and invokes Fear, the mother of Anger.
We continue discover more and more about the intricate and wondrous workings of the universe through astronomy, DNA, neuroscience. And none of those who stand on opposite sides of the cultural chasm will find much comfort in what is discovered.
David Brooks, a conservative columnist, tackled this subject in a recent column, which you can find on page 2 of the May 14 issue of The Nugget.
Brooks argues that hard-core materialists are undermined by more complete understanding of the science of the mind:
“The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings... Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain. The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.”
On the other hand, orthodox believers are going to be challenged by “people (scientists) who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”
It is going to become harder to defend particular theologies that claim a monopoly on Truth, even as it becomes more difficult to deny the sacred that underpins the legitimacy of any theology.
It’s a great time to be alive, a great time to be a seeker.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:59
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Amidst all the hullabaloo over Barack Obama’s whack job pastor and Hillary Clinton’s bitter-ender strategy, the public is missing an actual policy matter — one that is a good illustration of how the three candidates might behave as president.
Clinton and John McCain are touting a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, which runs 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. Sounds great, right? A little relief from rising prices at the pump would be wonderful, especially for those of us who drive a gas hog pickup truck.
Except that it’s not so great — and both McCain and Clinton know it. No honest economist will tell you they think this is a good idea. The savings for the typical driver are around $30 per gallon, yet it would cost millions in aggregate. These are funds that are used for highway infrastructure, which needs an infusion of cash, not a reduction.
And it is estimated that the tax holiday would cost up to 300,000 highway construction jobs. For Hillary Clinton to tout jobs on one hand while proposing a tax holiday that will eliminate them is... embarrassing.
Actually, the whole thing is embarrassing. Both Clinton and McCain know this is nothing but pandering, trying to show that they feel our pain at the pump.
It’s bad policy. Politicians offer feel-good band-aid solutions that actually make things worse. Leaders eschew cheap political points and cleave to good policy decisions. Score one for Obama.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:31
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I've just started what promises to be a great book: It's titled Moroland — 1899-1906.
It's the story of the American conflict in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th Century — as the author describes it, "America's first attempt to transform an Islamic society."
This one of those stories you don't learn about in school, though the conflict was arduous and bloody — much more intense than the famous Indian Wars. It presaged American experiences in Vietnam and has obvious resonance with our current situation in the Middle East, confronting Islamic terrorism.
The really cool thing, which I didn't realize until I'd already gotten into the book, is that it is written by a local man, Robert A. Fulton of Bend. It's published by Tumalo Creek Press (www.tumalocreekpress.com). It's available at Paulina Springs Books.
Fulton has done a first-rate job in this, the first of two volumes on this fascinating, little-known subject. The book is clearly exhaustively researched by a man who knows the territory. He was a foreign service officer in the Philippines in the 1960s and walked the country he describes.
The best part is, it is extraordinarily well-written; clear, engaging, readable — qualities not often found in monographs on obscure historical subjects.
I don't know Mr. Fulton, but I intend to track him down. After I've finished this wonderful book.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:33
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Imagine looking out your back door toward the forests and mountains of the Sisters country — and seeing a steel structure the size of a football field and 30 feet tall.
That’s the nightmare facing some Tollgate residents as Central Electric Cooperative gets set to upgrade its Tollgate substation to handle 115 kv power. They’re looking at a significant loss of property values as well as a diminished quality of life. The decline in property values will affect everyone in Tollgate, because their homes will be comparables in any appraisal.
The price of progress? Well...
Nobody really disputes the need for a power upgrade. The more wired our society becomes, the more juice we use and there’s really no arguing that. Enhanced reliability is a benefit.
But it isn’t pretty to see neighbors get royally screwed.
The shame of it is that this facility could be pushed 300 yards to the west, into the forest, and nobody’d even know it was there. A wildfire buffer could be easily created while still retaining a screen that would preserve the neighbors’ quality of life.
The Forest Service won’t allow it, because the rules say the agency can’t sell or trade public lands for such facilities unless there’s no other option. CEC owns land for the substation; an option exists and must be used.
The rules are not irrational. They exist to protect public lands and that’s certainly what most of us want. Precedent can be a real bear — bend the rules for some residents in Tollgate and sure as shootin’ somebody will want the same treatment in Idaho or New Mexico.
But “them’s the rules; tough luck” is hard to swallow when a solution seems so easy at hand. Some flexibility seems in order here.
It probably won’t happen — almost certainly won’t happen. The substation will win county approval, it will be built over the next year and the neighbors will try to screen their view as much as they can with their own landscaping. Their homes will never feel quite the same.
Maybe they’ll get used to it, but I doubt it.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:51
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I have a problem with the "visioning thing."
Call me a cynic. I prefer skeptic. I don't put much faith in "visioning" and community gatherings to plan our future.
That makes some people really angry and I feel kinda bad about that. Believe me, it would be easier to shut up and go along and get along. But I think planning processes like the one that went through another iteration on Saturday are a largely waste of time and resources.
Most of the good things that have happened in Sisters happened because someone or a small group of people had an idea — a vision — and the passion, grit, determination (naiveté?) to push it through, sometimes in the face of outright resistance. The Quilt Show, the Sisters Folk Festival; the new Sisters Brand; the FivePine Campus — all examples of individuals or small groups pursuing a vision and making it happen. There are many more. Yes, I understand that the Community Garden came out of this process. That's a good thing. Yet, I'd argue that the gardeners would have found a way with or without the process.
In my experience, personal initiative is how things get done.
The issue of an economic development plan and an economic development director point to the flaws of the planning model that is currently being pursued. I understand the rationale behind having an economic development leader in Sisters — but what's this person going to do? We've recently seen two major projects that offered the kind of economic development the community says it wants founder and stall against planning delays and changes at City Hall and a suddenly chilly market climate.
When people with a passion and a vision and a vested interest in making it fly can't make something happen in Sisters, what is an economic development director going to do to change things? And if we really need one, why can't a re-energized Chamber of Commerce play the role.
I'm all for people getting involved. But they need to get involved where the rubber meets the road — at City Hall, at the school board, before the planning commission. Or volunteer with one of the multitude of great organizations in the community. Help put on an event or join a service club.
I don't think we need more plans or new layers of bureaucracy. We just need to get out of the way of the people who make things happen.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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14:21
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
“Art gives us back what our living takes away.” Don’t remember who said it first. I’m stealing it from Tom Russell.
For some people maybe art is just decoration to hang on the wall. For some people music is just background noise. I don’t understand that. For me, art and music are food and drink; without them I’d starve and waste away.
Good thing I live in Sisters.
Art of all kinds is all around us here. Thanks to the vision of people like Kathy Deggendorfer, art is becoming an economic engine for the community. The schools nurture art and art supports the schools — literally.
Just this month alone artists and musicians will inject tens of thousands of dollars into the school system through My Own Two Hands and Starry Nights.
Art soothes and uplifts; art challenges and disturbs. Art mends your heart and breaks it. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Sometimes it’s perfect and right to simply entertain.
The more you respond to art, the more alive you become.
The well is deep in Sisters and getting deeper and richer all the time. That’s a lot of life given back.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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15:04
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
If somebody ever decides to create a Mt. Rushmore for great American songwriters, Rodney Crowell is going to up there. Right there next to his mentors Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, just over to the right of Steve Earle (everybody is to the right of Steve Earle), a couple of spots over from Bob Dylan. No kidding.
Rodney Crowell is one of the great ones, the real deal, the rare breed of cat who has had both great commercial success and profound artistic integrity. A singer and songwriter who can make hits and make art, who can sell but not sell out.
He’s coming to Sisters for a Starry Nights Concert on Saturday, April 26. If you hurry, you can still get a ticket.
Seeing an artist of this caliber in an intimate acoustic setting is an unbelievable privilege (especially considering that Crowell, along with all the other Starry Nights artists is donating his time). Once again, Sisters is providing an opportunity out of all proportion to its size.
I first discovered Rodney Crowell when I was about 15 years old, when I heard Emmylou Harris’ version of his “Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.” Crowell was the leader of Emmylou’s Hot Band and she did a bunch of his songs.
I thought “Leavin’ Louisiana” was such a cool song, it may have been the first time I looked at a songwriter credit. I had to know who wrote that thing. My band, The Anvil Blasters, keeps that song in our set list, so I’ve been playing it for, what, 27 years.
Virtually every one of my favorite artists has covered a Rodney Crowell song for the simple reason that he’s produced a huge body of great work, song after song that makes you laugh, makes you stomp your foot, makes you think or just rips your heart right out of your chest.
He made it big as a performer in his own right in 1985 with a record called “Diamonds & Dirt,” which produced five number-one hits on country radio. This was during what Steve Earle calls the Great Nashville Credibility Scare of the mid-’80s during which labels were signing real songwriters who were producing songs of lasting value that also happened to turn into radio hits.
Rodney Crowell is still turning out hit songs for other artists, some of the rare gems to be found on heavily-formatted country radio today. More importantly, he’s still creating fine records of his own.
The autobiographical “The Houston Kid, the social commentary and wrestling with creative and personal growth on “The Outsider” and “Fate’s Right Hand,” stand up with his best work and showcase an artist who, far from resting on his laurels, keeps pushing, taking rhyme, rhythm and melody into new territory with torrents of wild but knife-sharp imagery.
The guy can write — and he’s also a soulful and engaging performer.
Get over to Leavitt’s and get a ticket for this show. The fact that you’re helping keep arts and music programs in Sisters schools is gravy.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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17:15
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
This endless presidential campaign has worn me out. I tuned out weeks ago — or at least tried to. It’s hard to avoid.
The cable news channels are busily picking lint out of their navels and examining it under a microscope, filling their voracious 24-hour news cycle with any bit of political trivia they can conjure, desperately waiting for some real action in Pennsylvania.
Hillary Clinton keeps “misspeaking” (“did I say ‘under sniper fire?’ I meant ‘in a country where snipers have fired’”). McCain keeps offering “straight” talk (“I don’t understand the economy.” “I never said that”). Obama keeps delivering masterful speeches. Tastes great, less filling.
And yet people latch onto a candidate with enviable passion and commitment. For some, Obama is a kind of savior. Clinton partisans will do anything for Hillary. McCain... well, McCain doesn’t seem to inspire much passion. The right can’t stand him. That may mean trouble for him in November.
But anyway...
We want so badly to believe in real leadership .... and we are so consistently disappointed.
Gregory Rodriguez wrote a great column in the LA Times about all this. Here’s a sample: “...the practice of idealizing politicians, of putting presidents or any other elected official on a pedestal, is a little like repeatedly nominating a used-car salesman to the Better Business Bureau. How many Eliot Spitzers does it take before we stop being even a little bit surprised that these people are not only human, they’re wildly ambitious, which makes them especially prone to the big fall?” (Read the column here:
[www.latimes.com] ).
We’ve given the President massive power — too much. And we expect the President to bring “change” to cure what ails us, to remake the world. It ain’t gonna happen folks. The candidates are politicians, with all the human frailties and then some.
We don’t need a hero; we need somebody with smarts and common sense who won’t make too many big mistakes.
The President won’t lead us to the Promised Land. That’s up to us.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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8:16
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I have always hated labels. I have never wanted to be put in somebody's little box, defined by categories and caricatures.
Political labels particularly get under my skin. Over the years I've been called a right-winger, a left-winger, everything in between. Maybe that's because I don't toe an ideological line. I've always subscribed to the belief that both ends of the political spectum threaten freedom. The left wants to control your money and your guns; the right wants to police your bedroom. I've been told more than once that I have to choose a side. No, I don't. Neither side represents me.
Philosophically, I' guess I'd define myself as a libertarian (although I like the term Romantic Anarchist). I want to be left alone.
On the other hand... I am a member of a community and I have to think about a "greater good" beyond my own personal "don't tread on me" attitude. That has created some throny questions about policies — how we should make things work better.
And labels like "liberal" or "conservative" don't help.
I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning because I believe that attacking a nation that has not attacked us violates a fundamental principle of the Republic. I believe in the American Republic, not in an American Empire. But I'm no pacifist. Sometimes, we have to fight and I believe in being good at it. Liberal? Conservative?
I believe strongly in public education. A well-educated and engaged public is the safeguard of the Republic. We should pay teachers enough to attract the best into the field. But I also believe that we need to inject more accountability and competition into the system. Liberal? Conservative?
I believe in universal healthcare. Every person in the richest nation in the world should have access to quality healthcare that doesn't break the bank. But I don't much like the idea of subsidizing people who eat McDonald's three meals a day and smoke three packs a day. Liberal? Conservative?
The labels are useless. We've got a lot of work to do and if the rednecks and the bluenecks don't quit calling each other names and get down to it, it'll never get done.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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9:47
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
I got a call from a local man last week who was beside himself with anger over the litter he’s been finding in the forests around Sisters.
I can relate. There’s something about finding trash strewn around our woods that sparks a visceral rage in me. It feels like a desecration. It is a desecration. We live in one of the most beautiful places on earth. What kind of person willfully trashes it up?
Last week I pulled into Tollgate on my way to feed our horse. There in the turnout just off Highway 20 was a pile of cups and McDonald’s wrappers. Somebody had clearly sat in their car, ate their lunch, then dumped their trash out the window.
My anger was out of all proportion to the crime, fueled by disgust at a mentality so self-absorbed. Then I saw all the figurative fingers pointing back at me. I don’t throw my trash out the car window, but I’m not exactly simon-pure.
Littering is only the most visually evident form of trashing the planet. We all do it. Most everybody buys water in plastic bottles that either end up in landfills or take energy and effort to recycle. Almost every American consumes at a huge rate — and I am no different. It’s embarrassing to think how much trash my family of three generates.
It makes me mad to see litter in our woods. Always will. But I am resolved to stop shaking my finger at everybody else and stop making so much trash myself. It’s hard to climb down off the high horse and set aside the self-righteous anger, but I can’t stand to be the pot that calls the kettle black.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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11:35
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
A good friend of mine — a Special Forces soldier and combat veteran — said something powerful to me about the flag controversy in Sisters.
He's recently gone back to school with an eye to a second career helping veterans. His campus veterans group suggested proposing a memorial. He suggested that the group, the school and the veterans would be better served by creating a "transitions" class for young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq who are returning to a school environment.
The idea took root and a 1.5 hour-per-week course has been set up with help from VA transition counselors, career counselors and a range of other professionals and guest speakers who will help the veterans make a smooth transition back into civilian life.
My friend has dedicted a memorial or two in his time, but he believes that right now there are more substantive and important ways to show support of veterans, better ways to expend energy than challenging other peoples' patriotism.
"We need more programs," he told me, "not more memorial stones."
Maybe we should think of ways to turn the energy devoted to this argument over a flagpole toward helping veterans in the Central Oregon area. Just a thought.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:34
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Growth. It’s a big deal everywhere. If the economy stops growing, we’re in trouble — recession. We like it when our income grows. Everybody seems to be seeking personal growth.
Growth is good, right? Well, not to everybody, not all the time.
Folks in Sisters have an ambivalent attitude toward growth. Many people would like to see a stronger, more diverse economy here, with better-paying jobs. That means economic development. Growth.
We got a pretty strong dose of growth after the sewer was constructed in the late ’90s. Some folks don’t care for the denser more “urban” feel of some of the housing in town, but most people will admit that it’s pretty nice to have a laundromat, a movie theater, some new restaurants. We still haven’t seen a whole lot of economic development and diversification, but there has been some.
For the most part, growth has been pretty good to Sisters. So far.
But how much is enough? We received several angry letters to the editor this week from people didn’t like a story we ran about planning for an “eco-destination resort” in the Metolius Basin. They thought the story was way too kind to “development interests,” that the paper is “siding with unrestrained growth.”
Well, no. The story had a narrow focus on what developers plan to do with a specific development. It wasn’t about the controversy over such developments or their environmental implications.
But the response is indicative of something important. People are worried about what growth will do to the qualities that make Sisters Sisters — natural beauty; untrammeled access to acres and acres of woods, streams and mountains; a small-town sense of community.
Everybody is concerned about that — including most developers, who recognize the Sisters Country’s qualities as critical selling points for their projects.
Where and how to draw the line on growth — how to manage it while protecting individual property rights, how to mediate between competing goals and desires — is a maddeningly difficult chore. It’s easy to deal in absolutes — development good; development bad. But that’s not the real world. Development brings both benefits and costs and weighing those out is the trick.
I don’t have any silver bullets. How about you?
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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10:59
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
Sisters schools superintendent Elaine Drakulich said something very strange at a press conference on Tuesday, March 18.
The press conference was called to announce that Dusty Macauley has been named the Sisters Outlaws’ head football coach. Bob Macauley’s departure from that post has been the focus of ongoing controversy and drew a significant crowd to the last school board meeting, where several community members demanded answers on a range of questions from the school board.
Drakulich apparently took exception to this action and let her feelings be known at the press conference.
“I am extremely disappointed that as a community we continue to use board meetings for that kind of a forum,” she said. “That just divides our community, and we’re a really, really good school system that wants to be the best, but if we continue to do at board meetings things like that where we go back over prior mistakes, prior issues and beat them again and again and again that’s not what’s out there about Sisters School District.
“What’s out there are these negatives; it’s not that we’re a very, very good school system, and we want to be the best, so I’m disappointed in that meeting... I hope we don’t have board meetings like that again.”
Huh?
Where is the public supposed to go to petition for redress of grievances — or simply to tell the school board what they think? Of course the dialogue should be kept civil and respectful and The Nugget has been the first to call foul when we think people are hitting below the belt.
But vigorous, passionate public participation is a good thing, not something to be avoided. If the superintendent thinks vigorous public debate divides a community, what does she think the impact is of shutting off the public’s voice, of basically telling them to shut up and go away?
That’s not the way America works and it sure isn’t the way Sisters works.
I hope we have a lot more meetings like that last one.
Jim Cornelius, Editor
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16:29
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Nugget Newspaper Blog
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Jim Cornelius, editor
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