This is a rare affliction in our valley, which is sheltered by not one by two rain shadows and as a result is a pretty sunny place.

The Cascade Mountains, the more imposing of these topographic barriers, siphon much of the moisture from the storms that ride the jet stream inland from the Pacific.

Then the Elkhorns wring out most of what’s left.

It’s quite common, then, for the Elkhorn peaks to be shrouded in cloud while sunshine brightens the valley below.

Which is nice if you enjoy skiing in the mountains but are less enthusiastic about shoveling your driveway.

These pleasant circumstances prevail, generally speaking, even during the depths of winter, a season renowned in less beneficent climates for conjuring skies of various slaty shades for weeks on end.

The typical winter sequence here, by contrast, begins with a day or less of storm followed by two or more days of clear.

Here’s the bad news: Even some doctors, whose title confers automatic legitimacy to their opinions, went in for the conspiracy theories linking child vaccinations to autism and other ailments.

Here’s the good news: Hardly any parents in the United States paid attention.

And there’s more news of the good variety: The 1998 research that spawned the specious connection between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism has been not merely discredited.

It has at last been disowned, as it were, by the medical journal that published the shamefully shoddy work in 1998.

The Lancet, which is basically the British equivalent of America’s New England Journal of Medicine, last week retracted the 1998 paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

A panel of British doctors concluded that Wakefield showed “callous disregard” for the children he studied.

Wakefield was guilty of a couple other ethical lapses besides.

For one, among those who bankrolled his research were lawyers representing families that intended to sue vaccine makers.

For another, the year before he published his findings, Wakefield patented a measles vaccine that could have replaced the measles-mumps-rubella inoculation which he linked to autism.

Moving power line not a solution

To the editor:

We are concerned about the growing perception that simply moving the Boardman-to-Hemingway high voltage line to public land is the answer.  Even on public land, the line is sure to run close to private property because that is where the access roads are. These are often dusty single-lane roads like the one serving our small farm near Durkee. The construction phase will be three years of misery, and after that we will have the permanent visual and environmental intrusion of the towers and lines.

The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center seems to be enjoying a minor revival of sorts.

We hope this is the case.

The BLM center on Flagstaff Hill, about five miles east of Baker City, immediately joined the region’s roster of top visitor attractions upon its opening, May 23, 1992.

Deservedly so.

The Interpretive Center expertly blends entertainment and education. If you don’t own oxen and a prairie schooner, spending a few hours strolling through the Interpretive Center will give you as vivid a view of life on the Oregon Trail as you’re likely to get.

During its first 4fi months of operation, the Center attracted 201,000 visitors.

In its second full year (BLM visitor counts are by federal fiscal year, Oct. 1-Sept. 30, not by calendar year), the Center lured 348,000 people to Baker County.

The increase is not surprising: The Center was still almost new in 1993, and that year was the 150th anniversary of the first great migration along the Oregon Trail.

Whether Oregon voters will agree to tinker with the state’s nearly sacred income tax “kicker” in the November election depends largely on whether they trust the Legislature.

Their recent passage of two tax increases suggests voters have a certain level of faith in their lawmakers.

But we’re withholding judgment, and here’s why:

We don’t yet have all the information we need to answer the fundamental question: Can the Legislature be trusted to keep even more tax dollars, even when the state is not mired in one of its periodic budget crises?

Unfortunately, we don’t know whether this most recent crisis, which precipitated Measures 66 and 67, was as dire as the measures’ proponents claimed.

Worse still, the Legislature doesn’t know either.

At the heart of this uncertainty are the “ending fund balances” scattered about the state’s $50 billion budget.

Die, for instance.

Fortunately we’re dying in our cars far less often in Oregon than we used to.

Last year 381 people were killed in crashes in Oregon.

A terrible toll, to be sure.

But that’s also the fewest traffic deaths in the state in any year since 1949, when 356 motorists were killed.

This hopeful trend has continued into the first month of 2010, as well.

A dozen people died on Oregon roads in January.

That’s the fewest in any month since the state started keeping track in the 1930s, said Troy Costales, Safety Division administrator for the Oregon Department of Transportation.

The average for January is about 33.

January was also just the third month in which fewer than 20 people died in Oregon wrecks. The two others are February 2009, when 16 motorists were killed; and February 1999, when 18 died.

The Baker City Council can take a collective breath and relax.

That, at least, is something we hope they can agree about.

The Council has dealt with the most pressing matter on its agenda by hiring Steve Bogart as city manager for at least the next year.

This was a wise decision.

It’s budget-planning season for the city, and overseeing that process is one of the manager’s main duties.

Bogart knows how to do that. He worked on the city budget during his 2004-05 stint as manager while Jerry Gillham was serving with the National Guard in Iraq.

In any case the Council had to get a commitment from somebody.