One by one, Democratic presidential hopefuls are releasing their tax returns. Years of them. Longtime holdout Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) revealed 10 years of returns at the tail end of Tax Day, which arrived on Monday this year. Later that evening, former Texas representative Beto O’Rourke …
Oregon’s initiative process allows the people to enact laws directly when the Legislature cannot or will not do so. On Tuesday, the Senate voted to change Ballot Measure 11 to be more lenient …
Attorney General Bill Barr will release a redacted version of the Mueller report this week. It will consume the political conversation for days, but even now it is clear that as much as the re…
A first draft of this column was written before flames engulfed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, before its spire fell in one of the most dreadful live images since Sept. 11, 2001, before…
I had never heard of Charles Van Doren until, in college, I saw the movie “Quiz Show,” and I probably never thought of him again until I read his obituary this week in The Times. Van Doren, if…
A Sense of Place. That’s the theme of next week’s BMCC Arts and Culture Festival, a week of music, writing, film, and community discussion. It’s also the theme of Yamhill County’s Terroir Arts…
The Oregon Senate last week took a step toward ending our generally pointless (and potentially harmful) twice-annual ritual of changing our clocks, joining a resistance that seems to be gainin…
Congress has landed on one of those rare ideas that commands support from both Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, it’s a bad one.
Suppose one night there is a knock on your door. You open it to find 100 bedraggled families shivering in your yard — exhausted, filthy, terrified. The first cry of your heart would be to take…
There has been a spate of recent articles and analysis about the challenges facing today’s rural America. Building up to the 2020 election cycle, East Coast pundits are busy attempting to get …
A kick in the pants to revisionist historians who rely on the public’s poor understanding of the past to try to score political points. And an equal kick to those in power who gobble up the mi…
ON THE VENEZUELA-COLOMBIA BORDER — She is 15 years old, pregnant, hungry and alone. Deisimar sat on a bench in a park in Maicao, just inside Colombia, and wept as she told her story — the stor…
Whatever their differences, the two front-runners in the Democratic presidential race, Joe Biden, born Nov. 20, 1942, and Bernie Sanders, born Sept. 8, 1941, share one common trait: They are t…
When Cass Sunstein was a young law professor, he happened to come across an older male professor talking to a young female student in a hallway. To Sunstein’s astonishment, the professor was s…
Jesus said the poor will always be among us, but there are a lot of people in Canada testing that proposition.
A career in education offers a truly unique opportunity to positively impact the future of our state. Working with our youth is a rewarding experience. It is particularly satisfying to help yo…
President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China will probably soon reach a trade agreement, but that won’t solve the biggest problems.
This should have been one of the best weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency — a week when the shadow of impeachment lifted, when his fiercest critics were dramatically wrong-footed, when the NO C…
Out in the way beyond, the open land on the far side of the Mueller report and cable news obsessives, is a vast kingdom now being used to hasten the demise of the planet.
There’s an old saying in politics: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
As the first warm days of spring arrive, most homeowners turn their attention to their yards. We see all sorts of potential in our lawns, flower beds, and dormant vegetable gardens and we have…
Among the first conversations I had with Chris Rush after he became publisher of the East Oregonian in May 2018 was about the nature of self-obsessed journalists.
While wallowing through the Supermarket of Too Many Choices I halted in the produce aisle and stood transfixed by four varieties of tomatoes: the beefsteak, the grape, the cherry, and the plum…
The capture of the last territory controlled by the Islamic State on Saturday was far from a final victory over the movement, as U.S. commanders and diplomats were careful to emphasize. The ji…
Of all the political issues that divide us, health care is the one with the greatest impact on ordinary Americans’ lives. If Democrats hadn’t managed to pass the Affordable Care Act, around 20…
The U.S. Supreme Court last week said it will consider overturning a criminal conviction by a 10-2 jury vote in Louisiana — potentially a big step toward eliminating the use of nonunanimous ve…
Many Trump opponents were shocked and disappointed by Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign cons…
Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the…
Last year, Portland State University police shot and killed a man who was trying to break up a fight outside a bar. Now a state lawmaker wants to take guns away from some university police off…
Things clump together; the periphery cannot hold.
Everybody says rural America is collapsing. But I keep going to places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas. These visits prompt the same questio…
An important milestone of sorts was reached at our place this past Tuesday — the last chunk of ice slid off the roof near our back porch. In my three decades as a farmer, this is the latest we…
When a terrorist massacred 50 people at two New Zealand mosques last week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately grasped the nettle. “I can tell you one thing right now,” she told a news c…
Sometimes stories are simpler than they’re made out to be. That appears to be the case with Jeff Bezos.
NEW YORK — In a homeless shelter in Manhattan, an 8-year-old boy is walking to his room, carrying an awkward load in his arms, unfazed by screams from a troubled resident. The boy is a Nigeria…
To recklessly throw around claims of voting fraud is to play a dangerous game that could cause lasting harm to our democracy.
For going on three years now, Britain has taken a holiday from sanity. A tiny island kingdom whose people once ruled nearly a fourth of the world’s land area squabbles over the terms of its se…
Agnes McKeen lives in Klamath Falls. About three years ago, at 16, Agnes’ son Harrison took his own life.
March 8 was International Women’s Day. Did you celebrate?
This is a dispiriting epoch of strongmen and bullies, yet side by side with the worst you find the best. So today let’s find inspiration in two heroes.
The sharp rise in the number of unauthorized migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in February seemed to confirm one of President Trump’s loudest claims — that the nation faces a full…
The news stories and photos from a Berrien County, Georgia, puppy mill are half past maddening: In recent days, authorities have removed more than 700 dogs from the wretched facility. Rescuers…
One of the funniest stories I ever heard about the college admissions madness came from a consultant who was paid handsomely to guide families through it and increase the odds that Harvard or …
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision changed how public-sector unions can operate, those unions and their allies have been working to change laws to their advantage.
President Trump often complains that he is the victim of “presidential harassment” — or, as he sometimes puts it, “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!”
From the beginning the presidency of Donald Trump has inspired analogies to the years of Jimmy Carter. Though personally the two men are ever so slightly different, they seem to occupy a simil…
Across our country, approximately 23 million Americans living in rural areas lack sufficient access to the internet. Many of these people are our friends and neighbors right here in Eastern Or…
When it comes to hurting businesses, schools and families in rural Oregon, the Federal Communications Commission decision to pull the plug last year on net neutrality really hurts.
Public records are documents made by a government agency which are required to be kept and maintained.
Gary Martin was exactly the kind of person that gun control background checks — a federal system now 25 years old — was designed to catch.
I could feel it coming. The air began to change and the clouds seemed to take a shape of their own. My bones started to ache. A storm had been lingering on the horizon, and there was no longer…
Here’s an item from Salem that you might have missed last week: The state’s economists are predicting that legislators will have a record amount of revenue with which to work as they craft a s…
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says there is no doubt President Trump has obstructed justice.
Since at least the middle of the Obama era, all the energy and activity and creativity in the Democratic coalition has been with people pushing the party away from any kind of centrism — with …
Most Americans live in states where marijuana is legal, either for recreational use or only for medical purposes. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is refreshingly candid about whether Congress will event…