The number of dollars that Bank of America has agreed to pay the SEC to settle claims that the banking behemoth failed to disclose to its own shareholders the massive bonuses and mounting debt at Merrill Lynch when B of A acquired its rival. The revelations of Merrill’s debt in the wake of the deal sent B of A stock tumbling and the company scrambling for a $20 billion dollar bailout.

 

 

 

 

Did you hear? A pack of polar bears escaped from the Greater Vancouver Zoo and have put the city, which is packed with tourists and foreign heads of state for the Olympic Games, on a code red bear watch? No, this didn’t actually happen (not yet, at least) but this is the sort of news we expect to hear coming down from Vancouver, given how things have gone thus far. With rain and spring-like temperatures looming over the nearby mountains, snow has deteriorated at several of the event sites, leaving freestyle mogul races pushing through slush before hitting an artificially refrigerated jump, flipping about like a drunken Harry Potter, then landing on even slushier slush. But slush aside, the Vancouver games have had some other slip ups, including a malfunctioning torch tower at the opening ceremony, which thankfully didn’t affect a performance by Canada’s slam poet laureate, but did leave Steve Nash, Wayne Gretzky and two women you’ve never heard of standing there like morons. Oh yeah, and a luger died before the damned games even began. Who knew that global warming was such a buzz kill? Man, WTF?

 

It’s no secret that Oregon’s prison spending has been spiraling out of control. Now comes the latest evidence that Oregon has its priorities backward at a time when it’s slashing spending on education, healthcare and other social safety net programs. A report from a national group of state budget officers places Oregon at nearly the top of the list of states that are spending freely on prisons and corrections. According to the report, Oregon spends almost double what most other states do for prisons on a per capita basis. Overall, we came in second in the nation on prison spending as a percentage of our state budget. Contrast this news with another non-partisan report that gave Oregon an F on teacher evaluations. That report found that Oregon was doing little, if anything, to ensure that teachers are being effective in the classroom. So WTF Oregon where are our priorities?

 

 

We saw you, sir. You in your black Hummer, us leaning against a mighty Mt. Bachelor snow bank watching in embarrassed silence as you spent more than twenty minutes sending your majestic tank into semi-controlled spins – tires rotating ferociously like grounded jet turbines atop the recently fallen snow. You cared not for the safety of the other vehicles in the lot nor did you obey the newly instated cell phone law as you seemed to be on said phone for several of the 167 donuts you so courageously and high-octanely performed. You have a Hummer and that’s all that really matters. But WTF, man?

 

There are no astrological indications that 2010 is the Year of the Destructive Moron, but here in Oregon this week we made a damn good case for such a declaration. Only a destructive moron would be ripe with sort of Voldemort-like evilness required to leave a pug puppy in a plastic garbage bag on the side of a rural road north of Bend. The shockingly cute puppy was rescued, but veterinarians said it had nearly suffocated in the bag. Then, out in the cheese-laden coastal town of Tillamook, equally destructive morons shot out the windows of the town’s historic lighthouse. In the process, the wackadoos destroyed the more than 100-year-old French lens of the lighthouse’s beacon. Wow, WTF?

 

While the final report is still pending, the Department of Land Conservation and Development has indicated that it is getting ready to throw the city of Bend’s growth boundary expansion back in Bend’s lap after finding what appear to be numerous fatal flaws with the document. Most notably the expansion is totally overblown. You can hardly blame the staff who were given their marching orders by a stubborn city council determined to push the limits of Oregon’s urban planning laws. But what’s really befuddling is the city’s, at least preliminary, indication that it’s ready to go to the matt over a fatally flawed growth plan, girding itself for an expensive legal battle with state land use cops. The city has already spent years gerrymandering the UGB to appease all the special interests, even as DLCD staff gave strong indications that it wouldn’t fly. Now the already broke city is refusing to admit defeat, which is not only stubborn but stupid. We haven’t seen this kind of self-delusion since Rummy was running the show in Iraq. WTF?

 

Unless you’re stranded in a woodstove-heated cabin outside Sisters you’ve probably had the chance to gather that the only acceptable topic of conversation over the past few days in Bend is the weather, or specifically the temperature. (It got really cold, dontcha know?) This is more evidence that, despite our traction tires and abundant mountain snowfall, Bend is still not a winter town. We drive around in blinding snowstorms without our lights on. (Hey, I can see fine!) We don’t change the summer diesel out of our school bus fleet, stranding students on street corners.

Hey there. How was your Thanksgiving weekend? Eat a lot of turkey? Get some football in? Good to hear. Oh, and by chance did you drive away from your mansion in a luxury SUV at two in the morning as your wife “courageously” chased you down the street, smashing out the windows of said SUV with a golf club until you crashed into a fire hydrant, coming to a stop in your neighbor’s lawn before crawling out into the middle of the road where police found you passing in and out of consciousness? Then did you blast the media for daring to question the bizarre circumstances surrounding your low-speed, one-vehicle, non-alcohol-related crash? Yeah, neither did we. WTF, Tiger?

 

Most news savvy Oregonians saw the recent dramatic footage of the Marysville school fire that featured flames leaping out of the top of the school building. What most people didn’t see is Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard donning a fire suit and scrambling onto the roof of the still-burning building to “assess” the situation. The incident which earned the fire bureau a rebuke from OSHA, was pure flight suited Bush on the USS Lincoln. A former fire fighter, Leonard apparently just couldn’t resist the opportunity to jump into the fray with the camera’s rolling. The stunt earned him four hours of mandatory annual training in fire zone safety protocol and a guarantee that he will be baby sat on future fire scenes by an incident commander. If you were looking to make an ass out of yourself Randy, let us be the first to say: Mission Accomplished.

 

Right-wing Christians have never been comfortable with secularization of Christmas. Nor have they liked the answer that schools and the rest of society came up with in rolling all the Jewish, Christian and secular holidays together and coming up with the more generic and inclusive, a.k.a. The Holiday Season. We have a brother-in-law, for instance, who after a religious transformation refuses to let his two children read write or watch anything that deals with the story of Santa Claus because of such concerns.

We were out sipping a beer this weekend at one of our local haunts, chatting with friends, keeping a tangential interest on a football game or two and generally enjoying ourselves as music played in the background when some dude, who apparently thought he ran the place, told the bartender, quite loudly, “It wouldn’t kill you to turn down the music.” No, as far as we know, no one has ever been killed by music, loud or otherwise. But also, no one has ever died from keeping their damn mouth shut and just listening to the completely appropriately leveled and mostly easy-going music playing in a public place. Does this guy go also to swimming pools and tell people to put their shirts on? Come on, pal, you don’t run the place, OK? Jeez, WTF?

Halloween served up a hefty plate of WTFs – ass-bearing costumes, football beatdowns – but there was one that out WTFed the others and that was when we heard that H1N1 fears had canceled certain Halloween festivities. OK, we understand health concerns and the whole gotta-do-what-ya-gotta-do approach to public safety, but then we heard the alternative to a few shopping center and public building door-to-door trick or treating events –just give the kids a pre-packged bag of goodies. Yes, the children get the candy. And yes, the candy is delivered in a more expedient manner, but that’s not trick or treating. That’s sugar socialism. If you want the damn candy, the kids should be out there – dressed cute as hell, mind you – pounding the pavement, knocking on doors and working for their sweets. Jeez, WTF happened to a hard day’s work?

 

By now everyone has heard the story of the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot Upfront’s hometown by 150 miles. The flight reportedly turned around only after a stewardess alerted pilots that they appeared to have missed their approach to Minneapolis and by that point they were probably closer to Milwaukee than MSP. This week the FAA announced that is was suspending the license of the two pilots, one of whom was from Salem, pending an investigation into the mishap. While people initially speculated that the pair had dozed off at the controls, a new explanation surfaced this week. The pair was reportedly working on a laptop – multitasking if you will.

A story in a recent edition of the Bend Bulletin detailed the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergey Blashchishen, the 16-year-old Portland boy who collapsed on a day-long hike with one of the area’s increasingly infamous “hoods in the woods” intervention programs. Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than his final hours in which he reportedly faltered, vomited, collapsed and died while his councilors looked but did little to intervene was the circumstances around his “admission” to Redmond-based SageWalk Wilderness Schools. According to an official affidavit quoted in the piece, Blashchishen was unknowingly enrolled in the school for, among other teen ailments, being “uninterested in studying or thinking about his future.” The school contracted with a pair of “transporters” to yank the teen from his bedroom while he slept. After being dragged blindfolded across the state with no information as to where he was headed, he was sent out with little to eat, but a 40-lb pack on his back, for a grueling hike from which he would never return. It’s not an isolated case. Another “student” died at a now-defunct Bend wilderness school in 2000 after being pinned to the ground by a staff member.

Here’s a clue, because you obviously missed all the other ones. If you look down and see small horizontal lines across the pavement, if everyone around you is on foot, if you see store fronts on one side and cars on the other, you may be on a sidewalk. This is a portion of public right of way between the street and the adjacent private property. God put it here so that folks can walk around unmolested by cars, trains, plans, and, yes, bikes. Don’t worry though, he didn’t forget out you; he made bike lanes—right next to the sidewalk. So take your cruiser  down to the street where the good lord intended. If you need to cross the sidewalk, get off your bike and walk like the rest of us. Either that or let me know when you’re going for a jog so I can get on my bike and ride your ass for four miles around town. You wouldn’t mind that right?

Imagine a world where the only network television news came via FOX, or the New York Post was the only national newspaper. Kind of frightening. Yet that’s how I too often feel when I pick up my local daily newspaper of record. Take this past week.

Editor In Chief John Costa kicked things off with a Sunday column that accused local homeless advocates of skewing the area’s homeless numbers by including families and individuals that are so destitute that they’ve been forced to take up with friends or seek temporary shelter in cut-rate motels around town. I won’t go into the argument that Costa makes to accuse advocates involved in the count of doing more harm than good for the local homeless who now number in the thousands. But the notion that people living off the goodwill of family and neighbors or relying on the whim of a motel manager are on solid footing is patently absurd.

Not to be outdone, I opened up the paper today to find the editorial board (of which Costa is a member) railing against the smoking ban that finally cleared the air in local restaurants and taverns where non-smoking patrons and more importantly workers are no longer exposed to potentially lethal second-hand smoke.

And when it’s not advocating for a destination resort free for all in the Metolius basin, it’s championing a questionable wind power project around the Steens Mountain Wilderness.

It’s time for a reality check on Chandler Ave. WTF?!

Another key issue and another key concession from Obama. No we’re not talking about the backpedaling on gay marriage or universal health care. This time it’s Northwest salmon and steelhead that are getting the high hat from the Obama administration, which released its long-awaited Columbia River management plan on Tuesday. Turns out the new boss is the same as the old boss when it comes to balancing endangered fish runs and power production on the Columbia, where runs of ocean going fish are about 20 percent of their historical average and just a fraction of that when hatchery fish—scientifically proven to be genetically inferior and legally determined to be ineligible toward recovery efforts— are excluded.
While dams remain the biggest obstacle to the fish’s recovery, the administration has all but shelved the possibility of breaching the dams. Instead the “new” plan relies on a mix of habitat restoration and intelligent management of the dams to bolster recovery. Sound familiar? It’s essentially the same plan that Dubya put forth numerous times under pressure from those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
This, folks, is change we shouldn’t believe in.