Well, they went and did it again.

Two years ago, following the calamitous bust of the real estate bubble, the Bend City Council voted to give local builders and developers a break on their SDCs. SDCs – Systems Development Charges – are fees paid to help cover the cost of improvements to roads, sewer systems and other stuff made necessary by development.

Under the resolution the council passed, a builder doesn’t have to pay SDCs up front. Instead he can wait nine months or until an occupancy permit for the new structure is issued, whichever comes first. The city gets a lien on the property in case the builder doesn’t pay up. The deal essentially amounts to a nine-month, interest-free loan for the builder.

There are few symbols—save Old Glory and maybe a slice of apple pie—more symbolic of mainstream American culture than McDonald’s sweeping yellow arches.

While there is nothing wrong with McDonald’s per se — we enjoy a basket of fries and Big Mac as much as the next person, maybe more—there is a big problem with America’s dietary relationship with McDonald’s and the rest of the fast food industry that McDonald’s has rightly or wrongly come to represent. That relationship is more like dealer and junkie than that of restaurant and customer, something that Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock noted a few years back when he reported that McDonald’s refers to its frequent customers, as “heavy users.” It’s a relationship that McDonald’s courts with its aggressive marketing toward children (McDonald’s distributes more toys than the nation’s biggest toy retailers in any given year) and its oversized portions.

If you’re an American worker or taxpayer, the headline at the top of The Bulletin’s front page on Sunday made your blood boil – or should have.

“Stimulus jobs go to foreign workers,” it said. Underneath it, a subhead elaborated: “Oregon contractors hiring for forest work, say qualified locals unavailable.”

In politics, going along to get along is often the easiest and safest course. Nowhere is that more true than within the cozy confines of the Deschutes County Commission, where there are only three members and anybody who doesn’t go along is a conspicuous minority of one.

Last week Commissioner Tammy Baney refused to go along with her colleagues, Alan Unger and Dennis Luke, in speeding the approval of the county’s new destination resort map. The obstacle, in Baney’s mind, was a special provision involving the Cyrus family’s Aspen Lakes development.

This probably is a historic first: This week’s edition of THE BOOT was inspired by a bit of imbecility involving Oregon’s liquor laws, but we’re not giving it to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.

The OLCC, it seems, is just an innocent pawn in this story, which involves the regulation of home brewers. Oregon’s liquor control law – enacted shortly after the end of Prohibition some 70 years ago – forbids anyone not licensed by the OLCC to make alcoholic beverages but carves out an exception for “the making or keeping of naturally fermented wines and fruit juices or beer in the home, for home consumption and not for sale.”