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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, February 19, 2005

PELTING THE BEAVERS

...at first glance the whole idea of Oregon State University being worried about trademark dilution comes across as some kind of joke. To the administration, faculty, students, and parents of the Riverside High School Beavers of Painesville, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, it has been made quite clear that this is no laughing matter. They have been officially told to cease and desist in the use of a mascot logo that looks sufficiently similar to Oregon State's Beaver symbol. The high school has asked permission to continue using the logo after receipt of the University's letter, and has even offered to pay a licensing fee in an effort to avoid needing to create a new logo and replace all evidence of the current model on uniforms, equipment, clothing, stationary, and the gymnasium floor, but to no avail. OSU has no policy allowing such an agreement, nor are they currently interested in exploring any such avenues...

...school officials explain that such actions are vital in the protection of the trademark itself:

``Under federal trademark law, if universities don't actively police it, they can lose their trademark. We're in a position where we have to protect it or risk losing it...'' (according to Oregon State University News Service director Mark Floyd.)

...and that is most certainly true, although they are more than happy to license its reproduction all over the friggin' place for apparel sale in stores and catalogs and on-line. Apparently, however, there is a point at which they have to draw the line. The risk of a high school 2/3rds of a continent away somehow creating confusion and dilution of trademark value for a University that only one out of ten Ohio residents could probably even successfully link with that logo is apparently just too great to bear...

...there is good news for the University as a result of this stalwart defense of trademark infringement. There is now a pretty good-sized chunk of land where they no longer need to spend time recruiting for either athletic or academic purposes. At the same time, it would also be appropriate travel advice (in that "pretend you're Canadian when in the Middle East" vein) to leave all your Beaver-bedecked apparel at home if you are planning a trip to Ohio. Some folks there are pretty grumpy at the approach that OSU has taken, and may not be inclined to be all that terribly cordial. Why anybody in their right mind would think that a high school's sports teams would care to intentionally link themselves in any way to the products of the OSU athletic department is a bit of a mystery also, but as a long-time non-native resident, I've never pretended to understand some of the mysterious ways that things work around these parts...

...there would have been any one of half a dozen ways that OSU could have responded to this issue that wouldn't have reinforced the impression of intense xenophobia that has been a part of Oregon's reputation for decades on end. That wasn't in the cards, however, and we're left with an outcome that attracts little more than unnecessary ridicule for the state and gives one high school's students an unwelcome and premature exposure to an example of the sort of dimwitted, hard-hearted pettiness that they will find out in the real world. Maybe that's a good thing; maybe we can take that as a positive, the idea that OSU was able to provide an educational experience on the hazards of real life to a group of teenagers who otherwise would never even have heard of the Oregon State Beavers...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:01 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 17, 2005

STOMPING ON THE BIPARTISANSHIP FLOWER

...oh, sure, there has been all this happy talk about the Democrats and Republicans in the Oregon State Legislature toiling together in a robust bipartisan fashion, strolling - as it were - hand in hand down that broad soft flower-strewn path toward the warm rising sun of a new, more congenial, cooperative day in the on-going business of running this best of all possible states. Forget that. It's all over. War has been declared in the halls of the Oregon Legislature, there is already a body count, and more blood will probably be let before this drama plays out its string...

...it all started quietly, with an election finance complaint filed by a couple of research-happy Democratic activists against their State Representative, Dan Doyle, Republican of Salem. In the span of a few short days, the complaint went from a news report about some possible election finance irregularities on the part of the House co-chair of the Budget committee to something far more devastating to Mr. Doyle. Over what in retrospect seems to be hours rather than days, Doyle moved from resigning his chair to resigning his House seat to facing criminal investigation and disbarrment from the Oregon State Bar. It was a stunning fall from power; a tsunami comparison would be cheap, now, and meaningless in the larger context, but Doyle might not necessarily disagree with the comparison on review of the breathtakingly rapid change in his personal fortunes. This particular movie might have ended at that point, with the fading shot filled with legislators from both parties scrambling to tighten campaign finance rules to keep this sort of bomb from going off in the midst of a legislative session ever again...

...ah, but accepting that outcome means you don't understand the Republican Party. Today, in a virtual press conference in the Capitol press room, Republican Party Vice Chair (why do they need a chairperson to manage vice? Am I supporting the wrong party?) Vance Day, who really doesn't have any cause to be in the Capitol press room, announced that the Republican party - not individuals, mind you, but the state party - had filed 13 election finance complaints against various Democratic legislators and allied interest groups to the tune of 2 million dollars of campaign contributions. While he was at it, Mr. Day added in the extra charge of Democratic money laundering. Suffice it to say, the battle is now fully joined and all the best-laid plans to display a warm glowing bipartisan leadership in an effort to restore public confidence in the ability of the Legislature to actually do the job it was put in place to do are washed down the river toward the coast. The Democrats, not being satisfied to let the sun set with this assault going unchallenged, immediately filed a complaint against a Hillsboro Republican, Derrick Kitt, for using campaign funds to pay for a limo and hotel room for which he was already being recompensed by legislative funds...

...the most annoying aspect of the Republican attack, which is clearly a broad retaliatory strike, is the lying:

"It's unfortunate that it happened at this point in time because it is near the time of Mr. Doyle's allegations. But no, there's no link between the two." Vance Day

...that would probably be an almost acceptable statement, were it not for the fact of the PRESS CONFERENCE. The two Democrats who started this war with their Doyle charges certainly never held a press conference, and no one has provided evidence that they were actually working in league with the state party. On the Republican side, however, this is a party game; the intent is to bring down - or at least cause difficulties for - legislative Democrats as a matter of party policy...

...the gloves are off, kids. The battle has been joined. Common sense has never been a particularly valuable commodity in politics, where playing to the crowd and preaching to the choir, engaging in the Old Testament practice of "an eye for an eye" is more important that actually legislating for the benefit of the people who sent you to office and offer up their tax dollars to pay your way through that legislative process. The last decade has been a dark one for the Oregon legislative process, and the failure of Republican leadership during that time to be able to successfully separate the political from the legislative has played its own dark role in giving the referendum process such an uncomfortably large role in the establishment of state law. This failure and its ramification has threatened at times to turn this state into a virtual direct democracy, which as a model of governance certainly has its antecedent examples, although none that have actually proven to work at such a large scale. This was going to be the year where Democrats and Republicans got it all together and tried to act like adults, seeking common ground beyond normal partisan disagreements. That's all gone now, not so much because of the Dan Doyle episode itself, but because state Republicans, already threatened by the loss of leadership and decline in their influence, felt the need to respond to the efforts of a couple Salem residents with a jihad against the entire Democratic party. It's a shame, really; so many things needed to be done. Few of those things now may be accomplished unless there is sufficient Democratic unity, but it's probably all we can expect from the Oregon Republican party we're stuck with these days...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:43 PM 0 comments
OH, TO BE A DECENT PERSON!

...if I were a decent person, I would be able to generate some feeling of sympathy for those pro-Bush swing-state farmers who are now in the midst of a beat-down by the proposed agricultural subsidy cuts in his 2006 budget proposal. It would be the right, moral, Christian thing to do; failing that, my heart should be flooded with shame and remorse at my disgusting inability to find some of that human compassion...

...SORRY! Nothing there. Just an evil little chuckle echoing around in all that space where the sympathy should be...

...George W. Bush has never established much of a track record in the field of reciprocating loyalty. While I might never be so bold as to toss around the word "duplicity" in this conversation, lots of others would and smile while they were doing it. Gee Dub was once in Oregon at the invitation of Senator Gordon Smith; during the visit they stopped at a program for at-risk urban youth in Portland that Gee Dub heralded as just exactly the sort of program his compassionate conservatism was all about, after which he flew back to D.C. and zeroed out the funding for that very program in the next years budget proposal. This is not an isolated example, and the most sympathetic thing I can think of to say to these concerned farmers is "join the club".

"We wouldn't call it a double-cross or anything like that, but I don't think this is going to sit real well," said Harold Bateson, whose family's grain farm covers 2,300 acres in northwest Ohio near Bowling Green.


...and that's the worst part, having to be bravely stoic about it. A fella doesn't really have a lot of options when not only did he vote for the guy proposing to bite chunks out of his family's very livelihood, but he also actively campaigned and recruited for that guy. Midwestern farmers aren't alone in feeling the direct pain in this proposal; Washington State University and the University of Idaho (my alma mater) are scheduled to lose millions of dollars in agricultural research funding, which could have a direct impact on farmers in those two states, the majority of whom voted for Gee Dub. Major industries, big business, and the wealthy have always been the recipients of the Administration's beneficence; smaller concerns and the little people have only made gains,if they're lucky, as a result of incidental proximity, and right now isn't one of those lucky times. It's unfortunate that there are those who are only just now and perhaps a bit too late learning that lesson, but...what the heck...better late than never....
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:25 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

CRAZINESS VS. AFFORDABLE HOUSING

...there was a fascinating article in yesterdays local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin. It is a tale of dark swirling intrigue, accusations of voting irregularities, and the risk of a dangerous permanent angry split amongst the involved citizens. Oddly enough, it has nothing to do with the effort to elect a Washington state Governor. It's all about the local Bend Trap Club, a trap-shooting club that has been in existence for 97 years and has occupied its current site since 1932. The controversy whips around the question of whether to sell that current 40-acre location on the outskirts of Bend to a local developer and use the lavish receipts of that sale to create a veritable Taj Mahal of precision shooting sites on a tract of over six hundred acres between Prineville and Redmond. Pro's and con's abound, ranging from safety issues developing from the relentless encroachment of suburbia to the wisdom and value of the proposed sale, but what really caught my eye was the discussion of land prices...

...this is not to say that I'm not sympathetic to the issues burdening the opposing sides of the debate within the trap club. The whole idea of these sorts of organizations is to draw together people of a similar interest to engage in friendly competition and share friendships over that shared connection. It is never a good thing to introducing anger-inducing controversy into such a setting, especially when each and every participant gathered at the communal setting is packing a loaded firearm. It's suggests the sort of social tensions that can crop up if you were to walk into one of those old-West "The Rifleman" or "Gunsmoke" bars, walked up to the best of all your many friends in the establishment, and called him a useless prissy girly-man; nothing positive is likely to come from this particular social interaction. That, however, is for them to settle. What caught my eye is the - to my primitive rural eye - absolutely breathtaking land prices that are involved. The gun club is tied into a two-year-old "first refusal" agreement of some sort with that local developer to sell the property for 80 thousand dollars an acre. This would strike the average person (at least I hope it would) as a truly impressive land sale, but the absolutely sorry part of this story is that the price is something akin to a virtual theft by the developer. It so happens that bare land values in the Bend area are currently running more to the tune of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars an acre. We are not talking here about land that has water and electricity and phone and cable and sewer in all ready for setting up your 60' by 12' mobile home; we are talking about one acre of otherwise undisturbed high desert central Oregon soil that will require thousands of dollars - if not tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the depth to the always shallow Columbia Basalt bedrock so prevalent in this area - just to get the utilities installed, before even the initial foundation-setting and board-nailing begins...

...this led me to bigger thoughts about affordability. Bend is rapidly using up its utility as a nice place to live. Housing prices, buoyed by the tremendous influx of new residents looking for a piece of that Central Oregon outdoorsy magic that has been the region's draw for decades, have reached the point of being simply out of reach for many service-economy workers who are needed to support the virtual year-round recreational economy that Bend has become. Land prices, when we start talking $200 K-plus for an acre, which all by itself translates to $70 - $100 K for a lot -just for bare, unimproved land, doesn't bode well for solving what has already become a pressing problem in the Bend area. This same price/availability pressure is bearing down on the nearby communities such as Redmond and Sisters...wait, no, that's not correct; Sisters is a community with real estate prices more wildly out of control than Bend. This pressure forces people of lesser means being forced to either live on the edge of catfood land trying to afford the local pricy real estate or looking at longer commutes by living to the northeast in Prineville or to the south in La Pine, my current home. Tradeoff's abound, given that commuting from either of these locations can be laced with all kinds of dangers, from dealing with impatient tailgaters to the ongoing spring-summer-fall threat of personally reducing the local deer populations with one's own vehicle...

...it's a vexing problem. Trying to establish a baseline of housing that can be afforded by people who aren't well-heeled retirees from other high-rent districts but are in fact the people who provide them with all of their local services is a tremendous challenge. In my community, which is 30 miles to the south of Bend, subdivisions are going in that are being advertised as an alterative to the high housing costs of Bend, but they come with costs of their own, given that La Pine is possibly the largest unincorporated community in the entire world (the service area encompassed by the La Pine K-12 school boundaries has approximately 10 thousand residents), not the least of which is the daily commuting cost and the wear and tear on vehicle, mind, and body that this entails, especially in the winter. The shock of housing and land prices in Bend is, no doubt, my problem; a lifetime of living in small remote Pacific Northwest communities has given me a sense of real estate prices that local circumstances absolutely stomp into a mudhole. Still, there is a reality here that exists beyond my struggles to adjust to the breathtaking numbers. New land for new home construction in the Bend area is at a premium and the sorts of prices being bandied about in this Trap Club story suggest that local affordable housing isn't going to be a problem that goes away until the dramatic influx of new residents begins somehow to taper off. Hopefully we will live so long to see that day....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:08 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 14, 2005

LIPSTICK ON A PIG

...finally, after a lengthy vote-counting episode, the Bush Administration's long sought first election in Iraq has yielded results and that odd buzzing whine that can be faintly detected coming from somewhere to the east of here is the sound of Administration talking points being rammed through the shredders while a new set is being twisted out of the new unfortunate reality those brave freedom-fighting nation-builders in charge around here are having to face. After 2 1/2 years of chatter from the Bush Monkeys and assorted hangers'-on about WMD, freedom, peace, stability, a new friend for Israel, and a bulwark against the rising threat of Iranian theocratic mischief, the Iraqis have spoken (excluding the Sunni Muslims, of course) by selecting a majority with close ties to Iran, no particular feelings of good will toward Israel, and a stated desire to incorporate an underpinning of Islamic law into the Constitution that this group of elected officials are tasked with producing. While it is considered unlikely that these election results will result in anything even remotely resembling a carbon copy of Iran, and while feelings of nationalism may stem any likelihood of a close alliance between the two nations, the underlying failure in Gee Dub's hoped-for outcome is best exemplified by the rather dismal showing by the U. S.'s favorite son candidate, hand-picked interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. He is forced to be satisfied that his candidate slate even gets to have chairs at the party, never mind actually being some sort of player in the upcoming government-building process. Had the Sunni's actually turned out in any meaningful numbers, Allawi and his slate might have faced that odd sort of notoriety normally reserved for the National Football League's "Mr. Irrelevant", the very last player picked in the NFL draft...

...so here is where we find ourselves, deep into an expensive ongoing armed conflict that we were promised would be quick, easy, and cheap, facing a population that is much more ambivalent - if not downright hostile - about our military presence than we were led to expect and looking at the prospect of a Constitution that may underpaid the development of a society that, for instance, will accord far fewer rights to women that they had during Saddam's brutal regime. In accordance with the dictates of Iraqi talking points Ver. 2.0, Gee Dub and his underlings are almost bursting with effusive praise for the elections results, even though a casual review of past administration statements gives clear indication that these results are almost the perfect antithesis of the outcome that they had in mind...

...but that's not all; it never is with these guys. The Kurdish victory in Kirkuk has raised the specter of violent confrontation between the dominant Kurds and minority Turkomen and Arab residents, especially if an effort is made to draw Kirkuk into the Kurdish semiautonomous zone in Northern Iraq. Such a hypothetical has already drawn threats of civil war from the Turkomen and Arabs and could, if everybody played their cards perfectly wrong, result in Turkey making unfortunate decisions about military involvement to protect their ethnic brethren...

...maybe things will work out. It is to be profoundly hoped for the sake of our troops who are stuck there, as well as for the sake of at least keeping a lid on tensions in the Middle East, that they do. As things go right now, however, this worthless band of half-bright self-congratulatory waterheads that led us down this road have been wrong, frequently spectacularly so, every step of the way. If we get out of this without Iraq simply bursting into flames, it will be in spite of the efforts of Gee Dub and his gang, not because of them....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:42 AM 0 comments

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