>Baker City Herald | Baker County Oregon's News Leader

The notion that freedom is on the wane in America seems to have gained widespread currency these past several years. This is an alarming prospect at any time, but it seems to me particularly so as I ponder the matter on this eve of America’s birthday.

On July 4, more than on any other day, we celebrate our shared belief that freedom is not merely desirable but necessary, the granitic foundation which underlies and supports the grand and noble construction that is the United States.

The possibility that the bedrock beneath us might in fact be riddled with cracks after 233 years, which is no great span in the life of a nation, troubles me greatly.

Think before signing petition

To the editor:

I was dismayed when I read the article about the sidewalk graffiti (Baker City Herald, June 19). The person(s) who did this are in the same class as the writers of anonymous letters, hateful, cowardly, vindictive. Do the supporters of Brocato condone this behavior?

Immediately following Brocato’s dismissal the spate of letters praising him and vilifying certain city councilors had all the earmarks of an organized campaign, especially since it was followed by recall petitions against Mayor Dorrah and Councilor Calder. All this will eliminate any possibility of helping Brocato but it might hurt Calder and Dorrah, which appears to be the intent of the campaign.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski wants to clean Oregon’s air.

This is a fine goal, and one we share.

Trouble is, one of the governor’s tactics for achieving that goal puts an unfair burden on places, including Baker City, where the air, according to the state’s environmental watchdogs, is already admirably pure.

That tactic is Senate Bill 102. Kulongoski signed the bill, also known as “Heat Smart,” into law in late June.

The law, the first of its kind in the nation, mandates that if your home has a woodstove that’s not EPA-certified (this includes most stoves built before 1986), you must remove the stove before you sell your home.

But that’s not all you have to do.

Be careful out there on the streets

To the editor:

Now that summer is upon us, it is time to remind bicyclists and motorists about the rules of the road. As I drove down Main Street this evening a teenager on a small child's bicycle glibly rode directly into my path from the opposite side of the street, and then had the gall to swear at me when I yelled at him.

Parents, please tell your children that rules of the road apply to them. If you think it’s OK to interrupt the flow of motor vehicle traffic just because you are under 18, you are seriously mistaken. Read up on your responsibilities at www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/BIKEPED/laws_regs.shtml.

Baker City’s new car dealerships escaped the purge that is supposed to save Chrysler and General Motors.

This is a good thing.

Between them, Chrysler dealer Powder River Motors and GM affiliate Baker Garage employ a couple dozen people and have a combined annual payroll of close to $1 million.

But although it seems that Baker City will emerge unscathed from the near-collapse of two of the nation’s biggest manufacturers, we remain worried about the nationwide ramifications of this debacle.

What we have, mainly, are questions. But the Obama administration, which is supposed to be overseeing this “restructuring” of the bankrupt companies, has offered little in the way of substantive answers.

A report bearing the intriguing title “Economic Impacts of Non-motorized (Quiet) Recreation on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest” reached my desk recently.

It was that little word — “quiet” —which caught my attention. The word itself didn’t interest me especially, as I learned some time back what quiet means.

What piqued my curiosity, rather, were the author’s use of quiet to describe recreation, and his decision to confine quiet to the grammatical quarantine that is the parentheses. This suggests to me that the author, Dr. Kreg Lindberg of Oregon State University’s Cascades Campus in Bend, isn’t confident that either quiet or non-motorized precisely conveys the sort of recreation he studied, so he put them both in the title.

The Oregon Legislature is trying to pull a sort of bait and switch on voters.

Except lawmakers want to keep the bait, at least temporarily. And the switch, well it doesn’t even exist.

The bait was Measure 57. The measure, which requires longer sentences for people convicted of certain drug and property crimes, was touted by the Legislature as a better, and cheaper, alternative to Measure 61, which would have imposed similar, but tougher, sanctions.

We still think students in Baker City schools should attend classes a full five days each week.

But we understand why the Baker School Board decided last week to keep, at least for the coming school year, the slightly shortened schedule that’s been in place the past seven years.

We agree, as Board Chair Ginger Savage put it, that parents deserve at least that measure of “continuity” as they prepare for the myriad changes the board approved this spring.