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Mobile/PDA | Print Edition | Text Version VOLUME 38 ISSUE 43 20 NOVEMBER 2002 Front Page Opinion   Previous Issue Archives By Dick Cheney Life can be pretty overwhelming sometimes. The daily stresses of family, friends, and being vice-president of the world's most powerful nation can get your head all twisted up. At those moments, you need a special little place that's all yours, a place where you're safe from the rest of the world. Whether it's a treehouse, a backyard tent, or an underground concrete bunker, everybody needs a place to hide away. When I'm feeling blue, I...

A forest activist accused of torching logging trucks during last year's protests of the Eagle Creek timber sale returned home after the arson with a car reeking of gasoline, his eyebrows singed from a clumsy attempt to light a firebomb, according to FBI papers filed in federal court. Jacob D.B. Sherman, 20, and three other environmental activists stand accused of taking part in the arson on June 1, 2001, which caused $50,000 damage to three trucks belonging to Ray A. Schoppert Logging of Estacada. The government also has charged Sherman with the Easter 2001 firebombing of three cement trucks belonging...

Oregon City, OR, Aug. 23 - Two decades ago, Ward Weaver's father raped and strangled a woman. He then buried the body in his back yard, where it remained for 17 months until one of his sons led police to it. Today, the senior Weaver sits in San Quentin State Prison, sentenced to death for killing the woman and her male friend. There are several disturbing parallels to the situation facing the younger Weaver today. He has been charged with raping and choking his son's girlfriend. The woman survived the attack but told police she thought Weaver was going to...

WARSAW, Ky.- A knife-wielding man attacked a mother and her three children in their home Friday, killing two of the children and injuring the woman and the other child, authorities said. A suspect was captured in West Virginia, police said. The attack happened sometime around 6 a.m., according to state police Sgt. John Bradley. Police identified the slain children as Cody Sharon, 6, and his sister Chelbi, 7. Their mother, Carolyn Marksberry, was in critical but stable condition at the University of Cincinnati Hospital. Ten-year-old Courtney Sharon was in fair condition at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital. Marco Chapman, 30, was taken...

For the past few years, a California business has been a major donor to Oregon Democratic causes, giving about $60,000 since 2000. What the campaigns didn't know, however, is that the money came from one of the largest gay adult video companies in the nation. It arrived through a well-known political activist, so no one thought to question the source of the money. On Tuesday, however, the campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate Ted Kulongoski vowed to return the cash after being told by The Oregonian that they'd accepted profits from adult videos and a related Web site business. But the...

Eight of our, um, favorite celebrities? No, that wouldn't be right. Well, eight people who are, for one reason or another sort of almost famous (or, more likely, infamous -- such as Joey Buttafuoco, shown at right) square off in four boxing mismatches. Who wins? Who loses? And who will hopefully reach the end of their 15 minutes of fame? I'm in a really bad mood right now, which is bad for me but good for you, the readers, because this recap will feature more brutality in my puns then Lorena Bobbit had in her left hand when she whacked...

Several staunch anti-abortion activists, stunned by Ron Saxton's rapid rise in the polls, are raising the threat of a third-party candidacy if he wins the Republican nomination for governor. Saxton, who supports abortion rights and is close to many longtime Republican moderates such as Norma Paulus and Bob Packwood, has come under an increasingly withering attack from the party's right. Saxton said Monday that abortion should not be a big issue in the race and that he considers himself conservative on a wide range of issues. But his two chief rivals in the May 21 primary, Jack Roberts and Kevin...

ROSEBURG -- The 6-year-old daughter of Brian and Ruth Christine took the stand Tuesday afternoon despite a second attempt by the defense to exclude her testimony. Wearing a bright pink shirt and stroking a stuffed rabbit named Rosie, blond-haired Bethany Christine told the jury haltingly that she felt sad and scared after her father "pointed a gun at the people" on her last birthday, the day she and her sisters were taken by their father from two social workers at an Interstate 5 rest area. Bethany looked straight at Rick Wesenberg, the prosecuting attorney, while answering his questions and made...

The History Channel periodically broadcasts an eccentric half-hour show called Secret Passages. It's a tour of hidden chambers of every description: The show's intrepid guides simply crawl through parlor fireplaces, descend into cellar hide-outs, and expose elaborately concealed cabinets. I like it. It's weird. It's a tribute to all those who doubt walls—the Tintin and Nancy Drew-types who tap library panels and/or shove open mahogany "bookshelves" to discover the secret world that lies beyond. Of course, the show is on the History Channel, so its chief aesthetic principle is thrift; it's made of helter-skelter clips from the historic houses' promotional...

I just wanted to get a feel on how Freepers were going to spend Environmental Degradation (Earth)Day. I plan on driving my SUV that gets 8 miles a gallon a lot. Anyone?

‘This isn’t just her story, it’s our story’ Three days after timber sale is canceled, forest activist takes fatal fall from tree BY BEN JACKLET The Tribune Some of Portland’s fiercest forest warriors gathered beneath a huge Douglas fir tree in Mount Tabor Park last Sunday to pay tribute to a fallen comrade. Beth O’Brien died at age 22 on Friday, April 12, after dropping 150 feet from a tree platform in the Mount Hood National Forest. At the candlelight vigil, O’Brien’s comrades remembered her as Horehound, a Dumpster-diving, freight train-hopping, tree-sitting anarchist who died a heroic death in defiance...

BEAVERTON -- A science instructor who told police she wanted to play hooky Thursday tried to cancel her class by phoning two bomb threats to a Beaverton elementary school. "The only excuse was she just wasn't up to teaching a class today -- just didn't feel like it," said Officer Mark Hyde, Beaverton Police Department spokesman. Kimberly F. Haggard, 39, was to teach students kitchen chemistry during an after-school program run by a contractor at Scholls Heights Elementary in the city's Murray Hill area, Hyde said. Haggard, of 3333 S.E. 39th Ave. in Portland, was arrested about 3 p.m. when...

And don't miss our next story, "Casanova: 'I'm a One-Woman Man.' " By Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 2:13 PM PT Larry Klayman has discovered the evils of America's litigation explosion. Klayman is the chairman of Judicial Watch, the conservative ethics-in-government foundation that spent most of the 1990s suing members of the Clinton administration omnidirectionally. (West Wing fans will recognize Klayman as the prototype for Harry Claypool.) Judicial Watch's "Summary of Current Cases" includes a Who's Who of Clinton sex accusers: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Dolly Kyle Browning. More recently,...

In ten years or so we'll leak the truth But by then It's only so much paper" -Dead Kennedys, 1982 DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN-Writing for the website SpinSanity on October 15, Bush apologist Brendan Nyhan ridiculed my "absurd suggestion that the war [in Afghanistan (news - web sites)] is `solely' about an oil deal, trivializing the overriding motive of the attacks-going after Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s terrorist network and the regime that harbors bin Laden." Nyhan's widely-circulated hit piece, commissioned by one of those outfits run by liberals so anxious to seem "non-partisan" that they mostly bash liberals (beware...

Bucking the trend to mail-in ballots, some among us still feel a sense of community that comes with traveling to a flag-draped voting place, trading pleasantries with poll watchers and emerging with a stars-and-stripes sticker saying "I Voted." But the desire to be friendly with people ends in the privacy of the voting booth. Until recently, I was fearful that Democratic state Chairman Paul Berendt, GOP Chairman Chris Vance and term-limits crusader Sherry Bockwinkel would crowd into my voting cubicle and dictate what names could appear on my ballot. What a relief on Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Franklin Burgess...

VANCOUVER - A B.C. judge cited the "artistic or literary merit" of stories describing sadomasochistic sex between men and young boys yesterday in finding a man not guilty on two counts of possessing child porno-graphy. Federal lawmakers were urged yesterday to narrow Canada's definition of artistic merit after the judge ruled John Robin Sharpe's "Kiddie Kink Classics" were not criminal. At the same time, the court found Sharpe guilty of two other child pornography charges for having 400 pictures of young boys in sexual poses. The ruling by Justice Duncan Shaw, of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, relied on...

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - A Munich man suspected of murder after he was seen carrying what a neighbor thought was a dead body into his apartment was cleared after he showed police his collection of rubber sex dolls. A police spokeswoman said Tuesday the neighbor called to say he saw the man carrying a "corpse" into the apartment. Police responding to the call found the suspect to be "surprised and disturbed" by their questions at first. "When the officers then told the man they were investigating a murder he showed them his newly acquired silicon sex doll," the spokeswoman said....

Michael Bortin sits on a well-worn gray sofa in his Southeast Portland living room. He hunches over to pull on white gym socks and lace up his Nikes. He ties double knots. After spending the past two months in a Sacramento County jail, charged in a killing that happened 27 years ago, those actions seem a luxury to the former 1960s radical who said he adopted a monk's attitude to get by in jail And while he might be worrying about legal strategy, Bortin, who arrived back in Portland on Saturday after posting $500,000 bail with the help of friends...

Forget whether they should exist. Lots of people think, mistakenly, they do exist. By Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, March 13, 2002, at 9:20 AM PT Chatterbox is always eager to learn about new trends in tax fraud, especially during the approach of spring. The latest, according to the Internal Revenue Service Web site, is the slavery reparations scam. The term sounds like a strident Horowitzian attack on proposed legislation that African-Americans be granted reparations for the cruelties visited on their ancestors prior to 1863. In fact, the term refers to a more mundane issue: Con men, primarily in the Southeast,...

As everyone knows by now, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia used Thomas Friedman's Feb. 17 New York Times column to outline his vision for Arab-Israeli peace: Arab states would offer full diplomatic relations to Israel if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories to its 1967 boundaries. The proposal—though incredibly vague and though certainly a PR gesture to restore Saudi Arabia's reputation here—has been greeted as the only sign of hope in the ghastly war between Israel and the Palestinians. President Bush welcomed it, other Arab leaders have signaled interest, and even Israeli leaders—who suspect it's pure PR—have sniffed curiously ...