"Whatchamacolumn" by Jeb Bladine
The News-Register publisher writes about the community; people; local, state and national affairs; and sometimes whimsey.
Whatchamacolumn: Presidential win predicted; but focus on local
Labor Day weekend led us directly and deeply into election season, with high stakes votes coming on local, regional, statewide and national candidates and issues. Look for spirited campaigns for city ...
Whatchamacolumn: Making sure trust is tempered with wariness
The older I get, the more cautious I become about financial transactions with anyone I don’t personally know and trust. Sometimes, even that isn’t enough protection from fraud. Take Ruben ...
Whatchamacolumn: System development charges replace tax increases
Tax increase proposals, always controversial, can be defeated by voters. Local government tax increases for infrastructure development, also controversial, are being avoided with significant increases ...
Whatchamacolumn: Meeting comments on the record in Carlton, statewide
I did a double-take on our story about Monday’s Planning Commission meeting in Carlton. Concerned citizens attended to raise concerns about possible development of a gas station near a floodplain ...
Whatchamacolumn: Pay or negotiate, but don't ignore small debts
More and more people overspend credit cards, fail to pay various personal debts and incur even greater financial losses from highly organized debt collection systems. Regularly published records, once ...
Whatchamacolumn: Readers skipping E-editions are missing news
Newspaper-related work constantly tethers us to computer and smartphone screens, so browsing our tri-weekly N-R e-editions has become second nature. Not so, unfortunately, for many of our newspaper subscribers. ...
Whatchamacolumn: Discussion of inflation requires a few actual facts
Campaign sound bites often ignore inconvenient facts, and hyperbole dominates political debate. In a time when information searches are supercharged by artificial intelligence, it’s still too common ...
Whatchamacolumn: Ticketmaster and the ravages of cybercrime
Good things, said ancient Greek philosophers and Chinese numerologists, come in threes, and millennia of folklore added “bad things” to belief in that pattern. It has a name – apophenia ...
Whatchamacolumn: At every level, regulatory overreach strangles America
Pure and simple: Government rules, laws, mandates and regulatory overreach have strangled America. Not “are strangling,” as has been lamented nonstop for decades, but “have strangled.” Consider ...
Whatchamacolumn: First and last encounter with a sports legend
We landed in San Diego on Feb. 11, stopped at the gate, and only then saw the hulking figure of a man who sat just behind us the entire flight. I was momentarily speechless, but Michelle quickly blurted ...
Whatchamacolumn: Mostly boring primary election has a local spark of life
Although most federal and statewide races were contested in this week’s Oregon Primary Election, serving in the Oregon justice system or state Legislature appears to have lost its appeal to political ...
Whatchamacolumn: Blanchet Farm treating alcohol disease
There is social response to realities described in a 2023 report by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), headlined: “Risky Alcohol Use: An Epidemic Inside the COVID-19 Pandemic.” One sign ...
Whatchamacolumn: Coming full circle on facility consolidations
Serious discussions about possible consolidation and redevelopment of Yamhill County facilities mostly have fallen on semi-deaf ears among community leaders. That is, until county Commissioner Kit Johnston ...
Challenged to articulate response to protests
It was inevitable, but I wasn’t prepared when a friend casually asked, “What do you think about the college campus protests?” His unspoken question: “What do you think about the ...
