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
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Gassing up in Sisters
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
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
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Going to the dogs
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
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
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Jaw-jaw is better than war-war
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
“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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