President Obama wants to boost the income tax rate for wealthy Americans.

The president’s proposal has provoked the predictable platitudes, as stale and as devoid of nutrition as last week’s doughnuts.

The phrases “pay their fair share” and “class warfare,” among others, ring with their usual hollowness across our fair land.

(Although that pair makes for a nice rhyme. I should mention this to my 4-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has recently taken to rhyming in a big way.)

We’ve begun to reconsider our optimism about the prospect that wolves will return to some of their former habitat in Oregon in anything resembling a peaceful manner.

Based on the exploits this year of the Imnaha wolf pack — until recently the biggest of Oregon’s three packs — our earlier sense of hope is being replaced by skepticism.

Last week the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), which manages wolves in far Eastern Oregon, announced that its agents would kill two of the four remaining Imnaha wolves. One of the targeted wolves is the pack’s alpha, or breeding, male.

ODFW killed two other Imnaha wolves in May.

There’s no way to sugarcoat the rate hikes that Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative announced last week.

But though we can’t sweeten the reality that, starting Saturday, we’ll pay more for a product none of us can do without, we can say this: OTEC’s board of directors made this ordeal less sour, for many of us, than it could have been.

Before we explain how, let’s deal with one major issue.

OTEC had to charge its customers more.

We’ve heard a lot of stories over the years about Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System (PERS).

PERS provides pensions to most local, county, state and public school employees in Oregon.

Pedaling a mountain bike on a trail blazed by deer seems like a perfectly reasonable pastime until you see the boulder that had been hidden by a tuft of elk sedge.

It is then, in that awful instant before impact, that you come to understand the essential truth of your situation.

Which is that a deer, equipped with four legs and a sense of balance that would embarrass one of those tiny Olympic gymnasts who leap about like sprites, is far more capable than you are of avoiding obscured rocks.

Or visible rocks, come to that.

We don’t question that the the Baker School Board, should it choose to do so, can enact a policy that prohibits its employees who have a license to carry a concealed handgun from bringing a pistol to work.

The district’s legal authority to impose such a restriction is clearly established in a 2009 case involving a Medford high school teacher.

Trouble is, the policy the Baker School Board is considering adopting goes well beyond that authority.