Night Ranger is a great ‘80s band. They deserved a better venue and sound production for their recent show for the Bend Summer Festival.  Who's ideal was it to have a concert at Troy Field?  Bad choice.

How did they ever expect people to get in and out of a single three-foot. gate? And now crowd control to boot. OMG, who was running the [front of house] mix?

I realize that we live in a MP3 generation but please the mix was a muddled, boomy mess. You have one of the best guitar teams out of the ‘80s with eight-finger tapping techniques, etc. and you couldn't distinguish the guitars until [you moved] two blocks away—let alone the vocals. I am sure the band played great, but who could tell.  I am not one of those who wants to turn down the volume.  I like loud blazing guitars, but I actually want to be able to hear them.

Sadly disappointed.

– Max

Marijuana and methamphetamine are both Schedule I drugs. One destroys synapses in the brain, destroys liver and kidney cells and makes people crazy much faster than whiskey. The other one does less damage than beer. Do you know which one is which? Does this DEA policy confuse teenagers? Why confuse them more than necessary when lifelong health of the brain is at stake? Could it possibly be time for Congress to override the DEA and pharmaceutical interests and finally make marijuana a Schedule III drug?

– John Scatchard

Three months ago, Georgia Republicans proudly passed House Bill 87, an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill that, among other things, requires employers to use E-Verify to confirm the legal status of their employees.

Today, Georgia farmers (most of whom voted for those Republicans) are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields, unable to find the manpower to do the grueling work of harvesting in 100-plus-degree weather. Republican Gov. Nathan Deal has even pushed unemployed criminal probationers out into the fields to little effect: The work is just too difficult.

“Those guys out here weren't out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, 'Bonk this, I ain't with this, I can't do this,” one probationer told The Washington Post. Early reports suggest that just half of probationers even bothered showing up a second day. Farmers aren't happy either. “The plan to put probationers on farms ain't gonna work,” a farmer told the Gainesville Times. “I want to be a farmer; I don't want to be a warden.” Even under the best-case scenario, the 2,000 unemployed probationers in south Georgia are just a fraction of the (at least) 11,000 farmhands who have disappeared from Georgia fields, according to the state's agriculture commissioner.

Maybe Oregon should pass a constitutional amendment requiring the state legislature to be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Judging by what the legislature achieved during its last session in spite of its partisan division, we could do a lot worse.

One of the legislature’s biggest achievements, which we honored with a GLASS SLIPPER three weeks ago, was passing a redistricting plan – something it hadn’t previously managed to do for 30 years. But it racked up a number of other significant accomplishments. Among other things, the legislature: