Category: Local

I, unfortunately, won’t be able to make it, but there’s a Central Oregon blogger meetup tonight at 6:00PM at the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company Lodge on the West Side of Bend, just down the street from the Bulletin‘s building. Rumor has it they have some pretty dang good grub and beer there, as well as a few pool tables. I know Simone, Jon, Dane, and Kasey will be there, at the very least, but, as you can see, there are a pile of bloggers now on my Central Oregon blogroll (right column) so, really, you all should be coming, too (heck, even some LiveJournal folks might make things entertaining).

If there are any Central Oregon bloggers out there who want to keep up on stuff like this via e-mail, we generally will discuss these kinds of things on our mailing list, so feel free to sign up (but understand I reserve the right to boot your sorry butt off the list if you don’t actually run a blog).

Not only do we have a sheriff’s deputy who has been arraigned on 143 sex abuse and drug charges, but now we have another sheriff’s employee who’s been arrested on 11 counts of sex abuse and giving drugs to a minor.

And we have this weirdo who was arrested facing seven counts of public indecency after he was trying to entice some youngsters into his car — and he was doing it about two blocks from my house.

Lovely.

Speaking of jerks, I was harassed on my nightly walk last night by a group of punk high school kids. If it were just one of them, I wouldn’t have been worried, but there were about five or six of them talking bad at me. I just ignored them, but it still spooked me as I seriously doubt my ability to defend myself right now because of my back surgery (back in the day, I would’ve been fine). Anybody have a Taser I can borrow?

Almost 600 marijuana plants and “clones” worth an estimated $375,000 at maturity were seized in a raid on a Powell Butte greenhouse late last week. Full Story.

Sadly, when/if these old ladies are thrown in jail, they’ll probably spend more time in prison than our child-molesting cop (who is now out on bail, by the way).

Thanks to Jon for pointing this tid-bit out. Jon and I posted links to the story about the local sheriffs deputy that was arrested on child molestation and drug charges. He was later arraigned on 143 sex abuse and drug charges, and after I read more about this guy, I want him to go to jail for as long as frickin’ possible. If he’s sentenced the maximum for each of those counts, he won’t get released in my lifetime, which is the way I hope things go.

Personally, I’d like to see the guy fry, but that’s something, as a parent, all child molesters do. What makes this even more disturbing is that the officer was a DARE officer and a School Resource Officer, meaning he was interacting with kids on a daily basis. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more charges coming out of this now that things have gone public (more victims coming forward, etc… ).

The part that I found entertaining, that I wouldn’t have seen had it not been for Jon pointing it out, was a story that somebody shared at the arraignment that just screams as to the type of folks that live in certain areas of Central Oregon, and the type of person this guy was:

“I know that he was a good police officer,” said Bend-area resident Janet Wickersham. But she also said that five years ago, after the officer came to her Spring River home to take a domestic-violence complaint (involving one of her four children’s fathers), Malloy, not in uniform asked if he could date her daughter — who was then 16 years old. (He would have been about 33 at the time.)

“I told him, ‘Not until she’s 18 — then you can come and get her,'” Wickersham said. “He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He never did anything with my daughter. … He lived down the road from us.” She said the family moved to Newport for a couple years, and that her daughter, now 21, still lives there.

Acknowledging she was “a little drunk” at the time, Wickersham said she responded to Malloy’s request by putting her own arm around him and lifting her leg to do the same. “I said, ‘What do you want with a near-virgin with no experience, when you can have a mature woman like me?’ But guys like younger women.”

At one point during the court proceeding, as the judge set the new bail amount, Wickersham exclaimed: “He’s in deep!”

Understand that the Spring River area is just a few miles from where I work and, by and large, quite a few of the folks that live there are just like that. If that doesn’t scream white trash, I don’t know what does.

The local Deschutes County Republican Party is holding a big ol’ event at the Les Schwab amphitheater that is apparently going to be broadcast on CSPAN (does anybody actually watch that channel?). The Republican National Convention will be broadcast on a big screen, and a concert will follow.

Anybody know how to kill the power to that area of Bend quickly and easily? Just curious.

Update on 8/17: Kasey sent me a link to a story that says that, more than likely, if you’re going to attend this rally, or any other Republican National Committee-sponsored rally, you’ll have to sign a form pledging your allegiance to Bush. Sick and wrong.

The San Diego Union-Tribune has a report on how the influx of Californians, Retirees, and twenty-somethings is changing the politics of Bend.

The influx of new residents is changing just about everything in this central Oregon city, including its politics. And nowhere is that more evident than in the recent heated debate over gay rights.

An ordinance, unanimously approved in May by the City Council, prohibits discrimination in housing, employment or public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation or transgenderism. The proposal gained steam after an attack last August on a gay man in a downtown dance club.

Heck, I know I’m a moderate. A flaming moderate, I don’t know, but I do tend to leave my mind open on things a bit more than folks on one side or another.

Link via Rob.

First, despite winning the vote for the tax levy, the Deschutes County Sheriff finds extra money and inmates still go free. Then, the Sheriff decides to implement “performance standards” (also known as quotas to the rest of the world). Then, he denies they’re quotas.

All this after the last Sheriff got sent to jail for a massive embezzlement scheme, using County dollars.

And now, probably the most disturbing news of all is that a Deschutes County sheriff’s patrol deputy was arrested by Oregon State Police last night on 180 child sex abuse and drug-related counts. Michael Patrick Malloy of LaPine (just south of Bend) was a deputy for 10-years.

And these are the people we have on our tax-payer-paid police force? Granted, this is probably an isolated incident, but it doesn’t speak well for the folks they hire (and keep) there, and I hope they’re scrutinizing their other deputies appropriately.