On the mornings of every fourth Tuesday of the month, I’ve gone to the Albany Senior Center to chat with a small group there. We talk about the news or anything else anybody wants to talk about. One of the regulars over the past year or so wasn’t there on the fourth Tuesday in February. […]
It’s not obvious to me why Republicans are opposed to making the owners of so-called green vehicles pay their fair share of the cost of keeping up Oregon roads. Owners of all-electric and hybrid cars now pay little or nothing toward the highway fund, even while all other motorists buying fuel in Oregon pay 30 […]
Albany’s city council, to its credit, is not on record today against coal trains. On Wednesday night the council voted to table a resolution “to oppose the transport of coal through Albany.” Councilor Bessie Johnson’s motion to table called for the measure to come up again in two weeks, on April 10. She said she […]
If the Supreme Court is smart — and the justices certainly are — it will decline to outlaw as unconstitutional state laws against same-sex marriage. The court will instead leave this issue to be decided in the states, where in some cases the decision in favor of this change has already been made. All the media reports […]
Oregon’s public meetings law, adopted 40 years ago, allows some meetings of public bodies to be closed to the public. But it has a weird provision requiring that news media representatives must be allowed in, with only two exceptions. The law does not, however, say what it means by news media. Forty years ago the […]
It took a while — a month, actually — but Congressman Kurt Schrader has given me a response to questions about what kind of gun control measures he would support. In short, he seems to agree with Congressman Peter DeFazio, who said in a letter in February he doubted the U.S. House would consider bans on […]
Driving: Never look down
If you’re driving a truck down the interstate, how do you fail to notice another big truck and trailer right in front of you? You might miss seeing it and then run right into the back of it if you’ve been looking down at your cell phone instead of straight ahead through the windshield. At least that’s […]
Tags: Distracted driving, OSP