Change: Lots of talk, little action

To the editor:

The way I see it, so much for change.

The last presidential election was billed as we are going to change the way Washington operates. I am still waiting for that to happen.

There may still be time to save our country if the Tea Party or some other group gets serious about real change. There is a group of people in positions of authority that are playing musical chairs in Washington and it has been going on since Carter’s time, or before.

Thanks for a great letter, Mark

To the editor:

Congratulations to Mr. Mark J. Steele for sharing a great letter on his personal values, learned as a child  practiced as an adult. Right on, Mark! We shared the sentiments expressed in your letter, wholeheartedly, and say thank you for putting the thoughts into very appropriate words!

Hold the thoughts, and continue the family teachings!

Richard and Cheryl Gushman

Baker City

Were I asked to name my favorite animal — and I’m still waiting patiently for that particular query — the list of candidates would certainly include the American pika.

Whether this diminutive mammal — it’s about the size of a squirrel, only more adorable — would win, I can’t say.

I’m rather partial to the mountain goat, to name one competitor.

Also I have long harbored a peculiar fondness for the fisher.

I say peculiar because I’ve never actually seen a fisher, which is a sort of weasel, in the wild. It might well be that if I ever do see one I will come away feeling rather cheated, like a man who is told again and again about a certain charming woman and then, when he finally meets her, is chagrined to realize she has the personality of a bobcat that has one foot caught in a trap.

And she has bad teeth besides.

Of course it’s conceivable that I wouldn’t impress a fisher, either, were one to ever catch sight of me.

Not that I care what a fisher thinks.

Red Cross flags go missing

To the editor:

The Red Cross Bloodmobile will visit Baker City again on March 29 and 30. Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives, and it is very important for us to contribute our share by making our quota of 160 units for the two days. Baker City usually comes through, but extra blood is always needed.

I urge you to give up just one hour of your time to help save those three lives.

Unfortunately, we have had two incidents happen during the last two drives, one in November and the other in January.

Pardon us for our lack of conformity, but we feel compelled to pose this question: Is it possible that the healthcare law is not quite as significant a piece of legislation as is being touted so far and wide?

Perhaps we’re naive, but it seems to us likely that the law is neither the savior its proponents contend, nor the disaster its opponents believe it to be.

The legislation certainly has prompted rhetoric, on both sides, that epitomizes hyperbole.

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina called the law “the civil rights act of the 21st century.”

Health insurance is a nice  benefit, to be sure.

But it hardly compares with being able to register to vote without fear of intimidation, and to sit wherever you want to on a bus.

Republican Rep. John Boehner, meanwhile, deemed the bill’s passage as, simply, “armageddon.”

Seems to us that ranchers would brand as a near miracle anything that increases their water supply and helps out the ailing, but not yet federally protected, sage grouse.

Oh, and the federal government will pay part of the cost.

It turns out there is just such a program.

Its target is the western juniper. That’s the tree that has taken advantage of the relative scarcity of wildfires during the past century or so to proliferate in the sagebrush steppe of Central and Eastern Oregon.

The spread of juniper spells trouble for sage grouse and rancher alike.

That’s because the juniper, besides having a powerful thirst, is better equipped than most of its floral competitors to slake that thirst.

When it comes to green energy, there’s never anything so simple as black and white.

There is, however, a lot of gray.

Like fog. Thick stuff, too, the sort of pea-souper that keeps the fleet in port until the sun burns through.

The latest example of a renewable energy source coming under fire, so to speak, involves biomass.

That’s another word for what we used to call logging slash.

The traditional way to get rid of slash was to stack it in piles and then burn it.

Trouble is, slash fires produce smoke that contains carbon dioxide, soot and other pollutants.

But then some bright people realized that there’s another byproduct of slash burning, only this one is beneficial and valuable: electricity.

An Oregon company is building a plant now that’s designed to burn slash — or biomass if you prefer — and generate enough electricity to power 13,000 homes.

Living within our means

To the editor:

I reviewed the article last week about $9.5 million Baker is getting from the seemingly bottomless pit of magical government grant money. This  is close to $1,000 for every Baker resident. I suppose in these times of economic stress someone somewhere really needs parks and road improvements. It seems to me everyone from the businessman taking grant money to pay for windmills that can’t generate enough electricity to pay for themselves, to the landowner taking money to cut down juniper trees on his government-rented CRP land, to Baker taking money to improve parks or straighten one curve of many on the road to Phillips Lake, are all part of a huge economic problem.

I heard Lars Larson deliver quite the verbal lashing to a couple of Census Bureau workers on his radio program the other afternoon.

I was amused, but also a trifle disappointed.

Not that he’s likely to ever seek my counsel, but I’d prefer that Lars focus his prodigious persuasive abilities and piercing sarcasm on matters rather more malignant than the federal government’s once-every-decade head count.

The increasingly deft way Congress has of getting through a trillion of our dollars, for instance — a task which takes lawmakers considerably less than 10 years.

By comparison, the government asking me how many people live in my house seems an innocuous, and comparatively cheap, exercise.