There’s much we don’t yet know about what happened inside a south Baker City duplex last week.

What we do know, and are grateful for, is that nobody was hurt.

Considering the basic circumstances that police have confirmed, the situation might easily have turned out otherwise.

Driving Oregon’s roads has never been safer than it is now.

In 2010, the state’s fatality rate in vehicle crashes was .96 per 100 million miles traveled. That’s the lowest rate on record.

And despite threefold or greater increases in the state’s population and number of registered vehicles, you have to go clear back to 1944 to find a year when fewer people died in wrecks than the 325 who were killed in 2010 (the 1944 total was 245).

Yet one specter in particular continues to haunt Oregon’s highways: impaired drivers.

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger has emphasized during his tenure his goal of ensuring that people can keep track of what their government is up to.

It is a noble objective, and one we share.

We are troubled, then, when state lawmakers favor secrecy over transparency.

A recent ruling by a three-judge panel from the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals could give private property owners the same legal power to challenge federal agency decisions that environmental groups have long enjoyed.

The playing field, as it were, seems to be much closer to level as a result — at least in the Ninth Circuit, which spans most of the West, including Oregon.

The ruling involves a case from Northern California, Barnum Timber Co. vs. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).

Barnum contends the EPA wrongly designated a reach of Redwood Creek as polluted, both because it’s too dirty and its water is too warm.

The company further argues that the EPA’s designation has harmed the business by triggering more stringent state land-use rules, which in turn reduced the value of the company’s forest land.

Actually, it’s more accurate to say that the company tried for several years to make those arguments.

Remember a year ago when members of Congress, including Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., complained that the federal healthcare overhaul bill was rushed to a vote before even its proponents had read the whole monstrous thing?

We do, too.

So the Westboro Baptist Church, that cult of homophobic cretins, has had its little victory at the Supreme Court.

Rarely, if ever, has an uglier bunch taken refuge in the beautiful glow of the First Amendment.

But such is the nature of that treatise on freedom, that its benefits must accrue to the evil as well as to the righteous.

This isn’t the year for the Oregon Legislature to ask voters to change the unique income tax “kicker” clause in the state Constitution.

The kicker, passed by the Legislature in 1979, requires the state, when state income tax revenues exceed state projections by more than 2 percent, to refund the excess to people and to corporations.

It looks as though the Oregon Legislature has finally tired of merely talking about the unsustainable cost of fringe benefits for state workers and other public employees.

Lawmakers are now proposing ways to cut that expense.

A $3.5 billion budget shortfall has a way of clarifying matters, apparently.

Oregon’s state budget is pretty transparent as government ledgers go.

But there’s still an occasional streak that obscures the view.

Republicans in the House of Representatives aim to buff out those flaws. Their cleaner, as it were, is House Bill 3360.