TriMet must analyze where it went wrong in contracting
with a now-failed railcar manufacturing company

Next December, the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District, nicknamed TriMet, will celebrate its 40th anniversary. But any celebration may seem anticlimactic.

By then, the agency will have already celebrated three other milestones. In February, it will launch the state's first commuter rail service; in May, open the refurbished downtown transit mall; and in September, add a light-rail line to Clackamas County. To deliver any one of these projects, let alone all three in a single year, would be an extraordinary record of accomplishment for most transit agencies. But sometime this year, TriMet must also deliver something very painful -- what we hope will be an in-depth study of its own failures.

The agency must do some real soul-searching and thoroughly analyze what went wrong in its contractual dealings with a shaky Colorado railcar manufacturer. It's not clear whether TriMet gave its own board of directors all the information it needed to make good decisions.

Late in 2008, Colorado Railcar went belly up, after TriMet had given it a transfusion of public funds -- more than $5 million -- to keep it alive. TriMet hopes to retrieve some of that money.

The presidency of George W. Bush won't be remembered as a particularly green one, but it will certainly boast an admirable shade of blue.

Bush staked his claim as protector of the seas two years ago when he created the 139-square-mile Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwest Hawaiian Islands. Then Tuesday, in the twilight of his presidency, he sealed that legacy by adding such protection to three vast tracts of U.S.-controlled Pacific island chains, reefs and sea bottom.

Federal courts insert themselves in land-use cases
only rarely, and you can see why judging from this case

Late last year, U.S. District Judge Owen M. Panner sowed hope, pain and confusion with his singular interpretation of Oregon's Measure 37.

In what may be the cruelest aspect of the ruling, it has almost singlehandedly revived the hopes of some elderly property owners in our state. Some still believe they're entitled to develop subdivisions on farmland under Measure 37 -- even though voters got rid of that bad law in 2007. They replaced it with a better law, Measure 49.

Panner did not throw out Measure 49, but he did throw it into doubt. He ruled that Measure 49 couldn't be used to invalidate waivers Jackson County granted to property owners under the old law. These waivers are binding contracts, and can't be undone by legislative acts, Panner held -- contradicting most land-use experts.

As land-use attorneys Edward J. Sullivan and Carrie A. Richter wrote recently in the Daily Journal of Commerce, "The determination that a granted Measure 37 claim is a contract right that may not be altered by general legislation is both novel and unsettling."

The Associated PressNancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Harry Reid (background) attend a meeting in Washington Monday

Barack Obama's term as president has, for all intents and purposes, begun.

The swearing-in is still two weeks off, but Obama is governing already, working closely with the leadership of both houses of Congress to develop an immediate, sizable package of measures designed to stimulate the economy.

The incoming president, along with leaders in the House and Senate, recognize that there's no time to lose and no honeymoon to savor. There is, however, a domestic economy that needs to be jolted back toward vigor. The leaders apparently have agreed on the outlines of a plan that would include a broad tax cut, incentives for companies to hire workers or avoid laying them off, an acceleration of tax write-offs for companies, and an increased payment to states for Medicaid.

Ravaged by an economic downturn and snowstorms, retailers seek survival strategies

If there's any financial impact more severe than what's happened to U.S. consumers, it is the one that has hit the people who sell them things. From Manhattan's 57th Street to Portland's Northwest 23rd Avenue, retailers are suffering as shoppers become savers.

In northwestern Oregon, socked by a series of storms during the crucial Christmas shopping season, the problem is extreme. Business observers say more closures in the Portland area are likely -- on the heels of Starbucks, Sharper Image, Mervyns and others -- as national chains continue to cut back on the number of outlets. It's only reasonable to expect many independents, the lifeblood of Oregon's retail sector, to pull the plug as well.

It's a difficult time for everybody, with no sure way to avoid the downdraft that has affected every segment of the economy. Yet it is possible to feel hopeful, both from a competitive opportunity and a virtuous local example.

Student financial aid is anything but an academic question for the scores of Oregonians worried about college costs

Frederick D. Joe/The OregonianThe Hyde family (pictured above) lost about $4,700 of their $40,000 investment in the Oregon 529 College Fund. The loss and specter of future losses complicates their efforts to pay for Owen's education.

New complaint: You are now eligible for a Pell Grant.

College affordability will be a major source of anxiety for Oregon families this year. If state lawmakers and Oregon's congressional delegation want to help, they can make student financial aid a high priority.

Oregon has improved upon its "F" ranking for college affordability, thanks to efforts by Gov. Ted Kulongoski and the state Legislature to expand financial aid and slow tuition hikes. Congress helped in recent years by cutting interest rates for student loans and boosting funding for Pell Grants, the essential federal program created by the late former Sen. Claiborne Pell.

Yet the prospect of paying for college remains daunting for all but the wealthiest Oregon families.

The reasons why are as ugly as an Oppenheimer fund.

Despite the unhappiness over No Child Left Behind, the law's worth saving for students in Oregon

Thomas Boyd/The OregonianLincoln Park Elementary School kindergarten teacher Tess Miller, was named Oregon's 2008 No Child Left Behind American Star of Teaching.

As Congress and President-elect Barack Obama prepare to renew this sweeping federal education law, they must preserve the law's power to help disadvantaged children. These students attend schools everywhere in the United States -- from the sprawling, failing districts in big cities to the lower-profile schools here in Oregon.

The No Child Left Behind law is the lone successful domestic initiative of the Bush administration. This bipartisan legislation requires states to regularly test its students and publish scores by group, such as low-income and special education. Schools with a significant number of failing students in any group face negative publicity, plus sanctions for persistent failure.

What? Can it really be possible that Oregon will celebrate its sesquicentennial this year?

Why, it seems like just yesterday we were strolling among exhibits at the state's centennial exposition in the Kenton neighborhood of Portland, snacking on cotton candy, watching craft demonstrations and --

Wait a minute. It doesn't seem like yesterday at all. It was 1959, which was pretty much in another lifetime.

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W�hatever the Bowl Championship Series may have achieved in its nine years of existence, it has certainly ruined New Year's Day.

Gone are the classic college football matchups in the Orange, Cotton, Fiesta and Sugar bowls. Here is the day of three-, four- and five-loss teams playing games that should be rightfully scheduled in mid-December, if at all.

Gone, in short, are the best excuses for spending an entire waking day planted in front of the television doing nothing but watching. And eating. Oh, and quite possibly drinking.

There's really no kind way to put this: Roland Burris is no Barack Obama, and Caroline Kennedy is no Hillary Clinton.

Neither Burris nor Kennedy is U.S. Senate material, yet both could end up there through reckless appointment.

Our habitat has encouraged weight gain; now,
through small changes, we can help people drop pounds

The fat has crept up on us, as it is wont to do. And for decades, the obesity problem has been sneaking up on Americans, too. We've become adept -- expert even -- at ignoring it.

Mirrors distort, and photographs can be stored away. The best way to grasp the problem perhaps is to watch it spreading across the landscape, and the decades. An animated map, put together by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and similar to a time-lapsed photograph documents the astonishing change between 1985 and 2007.

The map shows that by 2007, only one state, Colorado, ranked as relatively skinny. It has an obesity rate under 20 percent. Thirty states, including Oregon, have obesity rates over 25 percent.

But even that figure doesn't really capture what's wrong, since it doesn't include the percentage of people who are overweight, but not obese.

Not yet, anyway.

There isn't one huge thing we can do to reverse these trendlines. Yet there are a multitude of things that can be done to improve the environment -- or what health advocates increasingly think of as the ecology of obesity.

Our habitat promotes too much eating and too little exercise. Whatever encourages better habits on either front can help. When a state fully funds physical education, as Oregon should do, that can help enormously.

NASA's latest report on the Columbia disaster serves an important purpose

NASA

The 400-page report describes in painful detail the things that contributed to the deaths of the seven members of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003. And it includes a list of recommendations to address the known shortcomings.

It was a somber but necessary task for the space agency to probe in depth the things it must do better to avoid repeating the Columbia disaster, which transfixed the world when the shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry five years ago.

One year ago on New Year's Eve, we offered this gloomy assessment of the legacy of President George W. Bush:

"It has been an enormously eventful seven years for the United States and for the world. By and large, the changes have not been for the better. The United States is deeper in debt, politically polarized, militarily overextended and more deeply distrusted around the world than it was when the president took office."

It was harsh judgment, couched in considerable relief that only one year remained of the Bush presidency.

As it turned out, though, even that one final year of Bush and his policies brought additional turmoil for the nation and the world.

The military can't -- and shouldn't -- be the primary way that the U.S. deals with the world

Associated PressGen. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq prepare to testify to Congress last spring. Despite appearances, the two men had deeply dissimilar resources at their disposal.

A season when America is focused on difficult problems in Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Afghan istan and Pakistan is a good time to reconsider this country's heavy reliance on the military to do its diplomatic work. In fact, the U.S. civilian diplomatic corps and foreign aid agencies have been drastically undersupplied and undervalued this decade. The incoming Obama administration can and should correct this imbalance.

It's not that the military hasn't done everything that's been asked of it and, by and large, done it well. But soft power delivered by armed soldiers riding in armored vehicles isn't the same as soft power delivered by civilian diplomats who are well-versed in local cultural, legal and economic issues. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has renewed emphasis on negotiations as well as warfare. In the war on terror, he has said, "the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory."

Despite its experiment with a short workweek,
Clackamas County must record transactions on Fridays

This year, skyrocketing fuel prices have pushed some state and local governments to think outside the eight-hour workday. They're experimenting with longer days, and shorter weeks.

Fuel prices, of course, have since declined. Still, these experiments should not be scrapped, because they hold valuable lessons. Case in point: Clackamas County just embarked on a compressed workweek two months ago, and it has already learned a painful lesson: The recorder's office must stay open on Friday.

It's not "nonessential." It's vital.

On Nov. 3, Clackamas County stretched the workday to 10 hours, reduced the workweek to four days and closed what it regarded as "non-essential" services on Fridays. During this yearlong pilot project, being tracked and analyzed by Portland State University, Clackamas County expects to save energy and money, as well as employees' commuting time and fuel costs. The county also expects to reduce its carbon footprint.

Unfortunately, a big problem has already emerged -- one that Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall, to her credit, anticipated. Hall understands that you just can't shut down the recorder's office on Friday without damaging the real estate industry -- and messing up people's lives.

President-elect Obama can improve the lives of women by focusing on their health, jobs and opportunities

Here are three actions that Obama could take in his first term that would make a significant difference to women at home and abroad.

End the global gag rule. Bush's first official act as president was to reinstate the so-called global gag rule, a Reagan-era policy that was lifted during the Clinton administration.

This rule cuts off U.S funding to any health clinic that offers abortion services -- or merely mentions abortion while giving referrals or counseling. The effect has been to shutter clinics in countries like Kenya, where there is a desperate shortage of family planning services.

The city's soon-to-be-sworn-in mayor has a strength that could turn into a weakness, if he isn't careful

The OregonianSam Adams

Sam Adams, a self-described wonk who'll be sworn in this week as Portland's 51st mayor, has a thing about numbers.

It's a very good thing, on the whole, auguring well for his success as mayor. The hard-charging Adams is likely to be driven by data, measurable results and numbers more than any mayor in the city's history.

And he will drive the city in this direction, too. He's already pressing the city staff to mine for new data, which he'll use to take a read on the city's progress and herd his council colleagues, not just vaguely but numerically, in the direction of the same goals. Adams fully expects, as well, that Portlanders will judge him on the basis of the numbers he delivers as mayor.

President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seek to exit in triumph

It's understandable that members of the outgoing administration want the world to believe that for the past eight years they were wise, capable and right, which is why, in these waning weeks of the Bush era, we're seeing all those valedictory interviews with the president and the secretary of state. Over the past week, they've each reflected on the choices that led the United States to invade Iraq.

And here's the president, explaining himself last week to ABC's Martha Raddatz: "Saddam Hussein was the sworn enemy of the United States. He had been enriched by oil revenues. He was a sponsor of terror. I have never claimed like some said that he -- you know, oh, that he was directly involved with the attacks on 9/11, but he did support terrorists. And Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction."

It's hard to know where to begin.

Portland's Great Christmas Storm of 2008 has ended, thank goodness, but the mounds of snow and ice it delivered appear intent on hanging around for a while.

The same can be said for questions raised about the official response. Were public agencies a match for the arctic blast?

Of course they weren't. The storm hit the Portland area with a punch that comes only once in decades; there's no way agencies could or should invest in all the equipment and manpower that would be required to keep schools and everything running smoothly in such an event.

This isn't to suggest that the government at every level couldn't have done a better job of minimizing the near-paralysis that gripped the metropolitan area for day after day. Before the last dirty slush melts, city, county, state and regional agencies will already be assessing their respective performances, and any honest assessment will show room for improvement.

Last week, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire proposed an austere state budget for 2009-11 that included severe cuts and no new taxes. Her budget sets a grimmer tone than the budget proposed by Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski earlier this month. Read why in this editorial.

Washington governor's austere budget gives a glimpse of some possible hard frost ahead for Oregon in 2009

Unless people in Washington bought many billions of dollars' worth of snow tires this week, their state budget appears to be in worse shape than Oregon's.

This is hard to fathom, since Washington normally fares better than Oregon on most measures related to the economy and state government. Oregon should pay attention to Washington's budget woes, because they could repeat themselves here.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire unveiled her budget plan for 2009-011 late last week to a Northwest preoccupied with snow and ice. The numbing news floated down and settled in: The state will have roughly $33.5 billion for the next biennium, which is about equal to the current budget -- but it's about $5.7 billion less than the state needs to keep up with population growth, the cost of living, various voter mandates and the demand for state services.

It was one of those perfectly rational decisions. We'd gotten married over Labor Day weekend, piled our presents into my husband's station wagon and taken off for California, where my husband was about to start graduate school.

Aside from one bad omen -- our black cat hopping out at a Wyoming rest stop, never to be seen again -- it had been a good trip. A honeymoon, sort of.

But my little yellow Chevette was still waiting back in Kansas. At some point, it, too, had to be driven to California.

I wanted to return to Kansas, anyway, to spend Christmas with my family. So the holidays seemed like the perfect time to pick up my car. There was just one complication: A few days after Christmas, my husband's brother was getting married on the East Coast. The other three brothers were going, and my husband had to be there. He couldn't be the only brother of the five to miss the wedding.

The OregonianTrucks stacked up in Troutdale waiting for Interstate 84 to open.

It may be the city's most crippling blast in four decades, but let's not get carried away and call it a Chicago winter

Recent repetitive behavior in the Portland area must have been inspired by the movie Groundhog Day.

Every day last week began exactly the same. Each morning the TV set went at the same hour, with the same shivering weather reporter standing out by the same freeway in the same predawn darkness at Troutdale, telling you the same thing as yesterday: A storm's coming. A really nasty one.

But after five straight days of these frenzied forecasts, nothing resembling a nasty storm showed up. By Friday the weather was no longer the big story that had people talking. The big story became those hyperventilating news crews scaring everybody off the road and out of the shopping malls.

Vindication finally arrived, though. Over the weekend, with Christmas just days away, Portland found itself at the epicenter of a snow and ice storm that paralyzed much of the Northwest.

The innovative public-private partnership in Oregon has become an essential engine for the creative economy

Toward the end of 2003, after the first full year of fundraising by what was then the newly created Oregon Cultural Trust, we saluted it as "one of the best programs to come along in Oregon in decades."

Today, it's a pleasure to be able to declare we were right. The innovative program, unique in the nation, has proven itself to be an unqualified success.

In each of those five years since our "best in decades" declaration, the trust has grown exponentially. Participation has shot up every year as more and more Oregonians learn about the trust, and so have program revenues and grants to cultural enterprises in every county in the state.

There are no happy options in the case of a 13-year-old Oregon boy with a drug-addicted mother, an imprisoned brother and a father who is jailed on accusations of raping teenage girls.

Russell Paul Hamblen, 50, is accused of raping and sodomized teenage girls. An Oregon judge would like to reunite him with his 13-year-old son.

Still, the Oregon Department of Human Services made the right call in resisting a Clackamas County judge's ill-considered wish to reunite the boy with his father before the January trial. DHS should not be in the business of bailing suspects out of jail, and it is preposterous for Circuit Judge Deanne Darling to suggest so.

Russell Paul Hamblen, 50, was arrested in April on dozens of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse charges involving teenage girls. His 19-year-old son also was arrested in connection with the crimes. The son plead guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. But now, Judge Darling wants DHS to help the father bail himself out of jail so that he can be reunited with his other son, 13. As Darling said, the charges against Hamblen "make no nevermind ... because his rights are still the same."

Say what?

The school board in that tony district votes to destroy a historic school building

Riverdale School DistrictRiverdale School

Doyle is the architect who apprenticed with the prominent Portland firm of Whidden & Lewis before opening his own firm in 1907. He designed some of the most significant buildings and features in the area, from Multnomah Falls Lodge to the "Benson Bubblers," the public drinking fountains in the central city. He had a hand in designing Timberline Lodge and he created the design for the Reed College campus and designed its initial buildings.

Hotelplanner.comDoyle's Benson Hotel

Sam Reed, secretary of state for Oregon's northern neighbor, has good reason to be exuberant about the record-smashing level of voter participation in Washington's fall election.

More Washington voters cast ballots than ever before, breaking the 3million mark for the first time ever. The turnout exceeded 84.6 percent, toppling a state record that had stood since World War II.

Those numbers grabbed most of the headlines, but another important record also fell. Assisted by the state's first-ever use of online voter registration, more than 3.63million Washingtonians are now registered, cracking the previous record by about 120,000.

Those are enviable numbers. Much of the credit goes to intense interest in the presidential race, particularly among younger voters, but Washington aided this tide by initiating convenient online registration.

Counties must work harder to fund animal control and enforce laws regarding dangerous dogs

UnknownIf your neighbor has a magnificent Great Dane like this one, you surely hope it is well-trained and well-supervised.

More than 375,000 dogs live in Multomah, Washington and Clackamas counties, or roughly one dog for every four people. Most are good dogs, cared for by responsible owners.

Then there's Debbie Dutton and her Great Danes. A small fraction of dog owners put their neighbors at risk because they fail to properly train or supervise their dogs. Counties must find the money and backbone to take the problem more seriously.

Dutton and her dogs live in Clackamas County, as The Oregonian's Peter Zuckerman wrote in a recent article about dangerous dogs in the tri-county area. Though Dutton says her dogs are friendly, the animals escaped the yard and attacked a neighbor, who walks her dachshund and picks up trash for an adopt-a-road program.

Oregon State UniversityIn marine biology, Jane Lubchenco is an academic superstar. Or maybe we should say a starfish.

We don't toss around the words "brilliant" and "genius" lightly or too often. But they're exactly the right words to describe President-elect Barack Obama's choice to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That Jane Lubchenco teaches marine biology and zoology at Oregon State University is also a nice plus for our state. But her world-renowned research on climate change, the nation's fisheries and ocean dead zones (including those off the Oregon Coast) makes her the perfect person to run a critical agency.

Actually, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a $4 billion constellation of federal agencies, including the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The research they do, together, will drive any Obama effort to address global warming.

And the fact that Obama picked Lubchenco to oversee them shows he's serious about addressing it. Now. In his first term. It can't be put off.

No one is better qualified than Lubchenco, either, to lead a national effort to restore ocean health. A member of the Pew Oceans Commission, Lubchenco understands the quadruple whammy of overfishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change -- and the steps we need to take to reverse the oceans' decline.

The 61-year-old professor is also ideally suited to help resurrect the dead zones that the Bush administration is leaving behind in a different sense, scattered across federal agencies. Across many areas of research, the administration has systematically suffocated science, when it was at odds with Bush policy.

A funeral, a fight, a hail of bullets, a killing in a church and, throughout Portland, a collective shrug of indifference

How loud it must have sounded, the boom, boom, boom, boom of gunshots shattering the solemn quiet of Sharon Kemp's funeral service inside the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in North Portland.

How shocking to see a fight break out in the back of the main sanctuary, the flash of a borrowed gun, a man fall bleeding to the carpeted floor, dying in a holy place at midday on a Friday in Portland.

Yet a week later, it is remarkable, and awful, to learn how few people have told police what they saw, and how few people in this city have heard anything about the slaying of Darshawn Cross, whose life ended, at age 31, inside a church named New Hope.

Police say as many as 150 people were inside the main sanctuary of the church at the funeral when a fight broke out between Cross and a rival gang member named Latwan Brown. As of Thursday afternoon, police were still searching for Brown, whom they described as armed and dangerous.

An economist's prescription hits home as Oregon sees jobs evaporate and use of food stamps rise

You can see how recessions reinforce themselves. The headlines speak of layoffs and bailouts, so naturally people become cautious. They delay major purchases, meaning that the housing market stalls and car sales fall off a cliff.

Meanwhile, as unemployment rises and people seek food stamps and other assistance, state government takes in less tax revenue, running short of money exactly when it needs to spend more on health and human services. In households and in the Capitol, things get worse instead of better.

APKen Salazar

Here in the West, where the federal government owns three-quarters of the land, there's a lot riding on the experience, the beliefs and most important, the integrity, of the nation's Interior Secretary.

Thus, it was heartening Wednesday to see President-elect Barack Obama standing with Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, introducing the man wearing a cowboy hat and bolo tie as the nation's next Interior Secretary. The hat and the bolo were nice touches, but what really matters is that this country soon will have an Interior Secretary who understands the political and social landscape of the West and has a long record as an honest broker of the many competing interests on public lands.

That will be a refreshing, long-overdue change from the dishonest, politicized oversight that the Bush administration allowed to pollute Interior over the past eight years. If you want a measure of how bad things got at Interior, you should read the 147-page inspector general's report, released this week, describing how one Bush political appointee, Julie MacDonald, an assistant secretary at Interior, crudely manipulated scientific reports for dozens of species, including spotted owls, marbled murrelets and bull trout. The report describes how MacDonald created a culture of fear within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bullying scientists until they were afraid for their jobs and then weakening species protections.

Bomb disposal experts across the country have been quick -- and maybe just a bit too quick -- to fault Oregon State Police Senior Trooper William Hakim for his role in the deadly blast at a Woodburn bank last week.

Yes, Hakim, a highly trained bomb technician, appears to have made mistakes that led to his death and that of a Woodburn police officer while the city's police chief was critically injured. Once the criminal investigation of the explosion is completed, FBI specialists will look into the police response in an independent inquiry requested by the state police.

In the meantime, the hubbub over Hakim's apparent errors should be tempered a little. Bomb disposal is among the most dangerous technical jobs on earth, and those of us who don't do it for a living should try to understand how an officer with superb training, as he had received, could meet such a fate.

Oregon law enforcement moved with impressive speed last weekend after a bomb blast at a Woodburn bank Friday killed two police officers and critically injured a third.

The wheels of justice, however, won't move nearly so swiftly. It may be weeks or longer before a stunned public gets answers to many of the questions enshrouding this baffling crime.

Mayor-elect Sam Adams has come up with a new way
to keep the four city commissioners aligned with the mayor

A former mayoral aide once explained that it takes a while for Portland mayors to figure out which powers they have. "Not every power you have is written down," the aide said. "And not every power that's written down you've got."

On Tuesday, mayor-elect Sam Adams showed he's past paying much attention to which is which. In the seven months since he won the primary, Adams has developed a strategy to make the sorting moot.

Ostensibly, on Tuesday, Adams "just" unveiled his bureau assignments. But this is often the point where inertia takes hold. The four city commissioners take over their bureaus and spin into their own orbits. Adams made it clear that he has no intention of letting that happen.

The two main powers of the mayor, at least in writing, are distributing bureaus and producing the mayor's budget. But to those two, Adams has now added a third unwritten power of setting goals for the bureaus he distributes.

The bureau assignments, from now on, will come with goals attached.

As of February, the bureaus (and their respective city commissioners) must produce baseline reports that will be used to develop performance standards. Their budgets must also reflect those standards. And implicit in all of these metrics is a threat.

Whether commissioners keep their bureau assignments depends on whether they meet their goals. And that means the city's goals. But it also means Adams' goals. Beyond that, he also seems to have done a good job of aligning bureaus and commissioners' talents.

Randy Leonard, known for his insistence on customer service, will develop one-stop shopping for building permits, bringing together seven different city agencies. It's been talked about for years, but no one's done it.

Amanda Fritz, an environmentalist and neighborhood activist, who takes office in January, will head up a new office focused on the health of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and renovate the Office of Neighborhood Involvement.

It appears that the Westside Express Service will open
in February, but only because TriMet cut corners

There are really only two possible explanations for TriMet's high-risk involvement with a rail car manufacturing firm -- and neither one is reassuring.

Either TriMet failed to thoroughly investigate Colorado Railcar Manufacturing, or the agency performed its due diligence, knew about the owner's previous high-profile failures, and sealed a deal, anyway.

Eleven years ago, after spending $70 million, cigarette maker Philip Morris canceled its order for a luxury train from a Tom Rader company, because it was behind schedule and over budget. Another Rader company failed to finish rail cars for a Florida tour train.

In 2005, when TriMet began negotiating with Rader's Colorado Railcar Manufacturing, the agency initially insisted on an $8.5 million performance bond. Unfortunately, the agency backed down and settled instead for a $3 million letter of credit.

Eventually to get its rail cars completed, TriMet had to intervene aggressively and, many would say, inappropriately, in the nearly bankrupt company's day-to-day operation. It shored up the company by paying interest on a loan made to it, paying its bills, including rent, and even paying the owner's $37,000-per-month salary. In all, as The Oregonian's Les Zaitz reported Sunday, TriMet has handed over $5.5 million to Colorado Railcar.

A draft report details massive failures as an Iraqi journalist delivers 'a farewell kiss'

Associated PressReconstruction projects, like this dam near Mosul, usually ran late and over budget, and were afflicted by corruption. They usually were inadequately overseen.

The report, reported by ProPublica and The New York Times, describes a series of military and political policy choices based on, at best, misjudgments. The Bush administration consistently underestimated challenges and overstated progress to try to maintain support for the war. It makes poignant reading today, as the president wraps up his unannounced tour of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries where no U.S. troops were stationed when he took office, but where almost 5,000 have died since.

U.S. taxpayers have spent about $50 billion on the reconstruction of Iraq so far, but the country has barely been restored to its condition under Saddam Hussein. Still unfinished are the electrical grid and a clean water system. Oil production remains below prewar levels.

It's hard to think big in a contracting economy, but it would be unwise for Portland to do anything else

Portlanders have a bad habit of thinking small even when times are terrific. And right now, the dismal economy is a perfect backdrop for a particularly Portland brand of pessimism. Thinking small, at the moment, seems like the only game in town.

But that's shortsighted. The city can't afford to shrink its ambitions. When the economy rebounds, as it almost certainly will, Portland could miss out on a huge opportunity -- Major League Soccer.

The league is looking to expand by two teams, plans to make the decision next spring and is looking very favorably at Portland. This is good news.

Meanwhile, in Merritt Paulson, the city has someone who doesn't come along every day, a potential major league owner. Paulson, who owns the Beavers Triple A baseball team, is willing to put up $40million to bring a Major League Soccer franchise here.

In exchange, he wants the city to put up about $85million in municipal bonds. Roughly half would go toward renovating PGE Park with ideal sightlines for soccer, the other half to relocating the Beavers to another minor league venue, possibly in Lents in Southeast Portland.

Adding a small, new stadium to Lents could be a huge boost for that area. That's one reason Commissioner Randy Leonard has been avidly pursuing this double-header dream. There are other possible locations, as well, including where Memorial Coliseum is now. But where a baseball stadium lands can't really drive this debate.

The governor won support for Measure 49 with a vow to deliver fast
service; now he must do so û

I�t was an inspired metaphor. Problem is, it's also starting to look like a gross exaggeration. Or worse.

In 2007, Gov. Ted Kulongoski helped to win voter support for a land-use compromise, Measure 49, by promising it would speed up examination of
small claims. Mom and Pop would be able to move into an
"express lane," they were told.

That's an awfully appealing place to be when you're schlepping through a bureaucracy -- and voters empathized. They overwhelmingly approved Measure 49.

The new law replaced the property-rights monster Measure 37, which was intended to boost the fairness of the land-use system. (We never saw it that way. In our view, it gave property owners the license to break the law, which made it patently
unfair. But voters weighing Measure