Bulletin Daily Paper 03/07/10 by Western Communications, Inc.

THE BULLETIN • Sunday, March 7, 2010 A7

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THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010

JOHN COSTA

Office seekers should answer $2.5B question

or those ancient enough to remember the television show “The $64,000 Question,” Oregon challenges have a familiar ring. Do you remember the show? A contestant picked a category in history, science, literature, etc., and answered questions of increasing difficulty. Starting at $64, each correct answer doubled the winnings until the magic $64,000. Once at $8,000, you were escorted into the “Revlon isolation booth,” supposedly to keep you from outside influences, hints, suggestions or noise. The show enjoyed huge ratings until similar quiz shows were shown to be rigged. Its run ended three years later. What a perfect metaphor for the state of Oregon. We constantly place futile bets through a political bookie system in its own Salem isolation booth, removed from any new or challenging thinking, in a wish and a prayer pursuit of the $2.5 billion question. The differences are the stakes and the number of possible losers. The $2.5 billion is the current estimate of the shortfall that the state faces in the next legislative biennium, to be followed by state projected multibillion-dollar deficits in the next two bienniums. At the same time, the state’s own estimated increases in general fund revenue are 13 percent, 14 percent and 16 percent in the next six years. One person loses on the TV show. We all lose in the category of state arithmetic. In November of this year, we will elect a new governor, a new House and 16 of 30 state senators, a historic opportunity in a historically critical time. It’s too early to keep track of all the blustering and promises of those who are now in the race. Yet, I have heard everything from “fully funding” education, whatever that means in a state going belly up, to hoping the Chinese will float cash barges our way as the solution. Some folks simply spent too much time breathing deeply at Woodstock. Others suggest that we can simply cut the government and all its services by the amount of the shortfall. Those folks need to get out of their backyard bomb shelters and join the 21st century. What the solution requires is what we are most short of, even more than money. We are short of a problem-solving, realistic, forward-looking culture. Without that, the state will never get near the combination of real government cuts — not the mirages of simply slowing spending increases — and taxes, particularly tax reform, that will build a better, more opportunity-bound and attractive state. But to get there requires pain on both sides of the political divide. The small-government folks will have to concede that big government is here to stay, and that the real dividing line is not drawn by spending but by efficiency and service delivery. The big-government folks, the inheritors of the status quo, have as much, if not more, to recognize. They will have to help reduce the size of government, its work force and particularly its crippling escalation of pay and benefits. In this, their No. 1 hurdle will be their No. 1 constituency — public workers. They will have to stop the recessionera tax assaults on free enterprise, and, this is critical, their belief in a regulatory regime that has moved beyond the application of public administration to the infliction of theology. What else explains business energy credits that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, renewable energy requirements that drive up power costs substantially in a recession, the ethanol miscalculation, or even the new emission standards that will impede cities like Bend from economic recovery? What explains it? Blind and unreflective orthodoxy. If Oregon is to have a future worth anything, this has to stop. Enough of denying the obvious and shoving our profound problems onto future generations. Enough of giving the most power to the people with the least interest in reforming policies that are outdated and counterproductive. It’s time to change this game. Let’s tear down the Salem isolation booth and force elected contestants to listen and respond to the noise of a disaffected public. John Costa is editor in chief of The Bulletin.

A leading scholar’s policy U-turn on school reform shakes up debate

Back to the

drawing board

New York Times News Service photos

Diane Ravitch, a historian and expert on public schools, visited this history class at St. Joseph’s High School in Brooklyn in 2004. An assistant education secretary in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, Ravitch has changed her position on No Child Left Behind, charter schools and a number of other favorite conservative ideas on reform.

By Sam Dillon New York Times News Service

iane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling. Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups. “School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’” Ravitch said in an interview. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles. See Education / F5

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’” — Diane Ravitch, education historian and former assistant secretary of education

Illustration from The Bulletin file

BOOKS INSIDE “Small Kingdoms”: Expat examines five characters’ vulnerabilities in Kuwait, see Page F4.

Louis Armstrong: Musician/biographer Terry Teachout celebrates the life of an iconic musician, see Page F6.

F2 Sunday, March 7, 2010 • THE BULLETIN

The Bulletin

AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER

BETSY MCCOOL GORDON BLACK JOHN COSTA ERIK LUKENS

Chairwoman Publisher Editor-in-chief Editor of Editorials

Tax credit scheme isn’t just for BETC

regon’s Business Energy Tax Credit may be the Mount

Everest of tax policy madness, but some lesser peaks are well worth exploring. One of these is the money-raising

mechanism for the Oregon Production Investment Fund, which provides incentives for film and video projects. Created by the 2003 Legislature, the OPIF gives qualifying companies rebates for production costs incurred in Oregon. This incentive, proponents argued, would make Oregon more attractive in the fiercely competitive movie world, thereby producing local jobs and boosting state and local tax revenue. It appears to do just that. As proposed, the OPIF would have received $2 million in Lottery funds for the 2003-05 biennium. When that funding source didn’t pan out, proponents were forced to get creative. What they came up with will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the great BETC unravelling: tax credits. The Oregon Film and Video Office was allowed to distribute up to $1 million worth of income tax credits every year to people who contributed to the OPIF. The contribution had to equal at least 90 percent of the tax credit, though the film office was allowed to trim the rate of return. Last year, it sold credits for 95 cents on the dollar. If this is confusing, pretend that you’ve just given the OPIF a “contribution” of $100. That means you’re entitled to a tax credit of about $105, assuming that the new 95 percent rate applies. Because you can knock that $105 right off your tax bill, you’ve made a quick profit by “donating” money to the state. On the down side, the OPIF had to sacrifice money in order to give you an incentive to write a check. The flaws of this tax credit scheme weren’t lost on anybody in 2003. Veronica Rinard, then executive director of the Film and Video Office, pointed out in a committee work session that getting “the money up front is much easier and cleaner and, frankly, the returns to the state would be better” because the tax credits have to be discounted. But some money is better than no money, and the tax credit scheme won the day. Ironically, the effort to save the Lottery fund $2 million simply shifted the cost to the general fund, which pays for education, human services and public safety. That’s because the credits distributed by the Film and Video Office reduce income tax liability, and income taxes provide virtually all of the money in the general fund. Worse, as Rinard noted, the OPIF doesn’t gain all of the money the general fund loses, thanks to the tax credit discount necessary to attract “donors.” The OPIF — surprise! — has raked in some very sizable “donations” over the years, presumably from folks with large tax bills they’d like to reduce. Some people, in fact, have “donated” hundreds of thousands of dollars, year after year. And in 2005, a Florence-based bank “donated” $150,000. The Legislature, meanwhile, keeps giving the Film and Video Office more tax credits to hand out. In 2007, the annual cap was raised to

The Oregon Production Investment Fund has raked in some very sizable “donations” over the years, presumably from folks with large tax bills they’d like to reduce. $5 million. And in 2009, even as lawmakers voted to hike taxes on businesses and high-income Oregonians, it soared to $7.5 million. Though both the credit and the OPIF are scheduled to expire in 2012, Vince Porter, who now heads the Film and Video Office, says, “we do intend to advocate for an extension” during the 2011 session. Providing subsidies for film companies that do business in Oregon might be the right thing to do. And if it is, then lawmakers should continue stocking the OPIF at an appropriate level. But they ought to devise a more transparent and efficient funding mechanism. You know, like a direct appropriation from the general fund, which is where the money comes from anyway. To sell tax credits at 95 cents on the dollar is to sacrifice about $375,000 worth of film subsidies every year, assuming a $7.5 million credit cap. Some lawmakers, to their credit, have misgivings about the tax credit scheme. Sen. Mark Hass, D-Washington County, supported last year’s tax credit expansion but urged his colleagues to look at the funding mechanism “because I believe the state’s leaving a lot of money on the table.” By using tax credits, he said this week, “we are providing incentives to wealthy investors and, in some cases, banks. I don’t think that’s who taxpayers really want to subsidize.” This is the way the BETC’s pass-through program works, he noted, though on a much smaller scale. Hass is right. The OPIF exists to provide film incentives, not to guarantee easy profits for savvy taxpayers. If lawmakers renew the program, they should fund it more openly and efficiently. The money should come directly from the general fund, which is its current source, or the state Lottery, which was created to support economic development.

My Nickel’s Worth Misleading editorials The recent editorials being published about Redmond teachers are misleading and do not contain accurate information. The Redmond Education Association has filed a grievance, supported by 95 percent of our teachers, in an attempt to reconcile differences over sick leave. Our teaching contract states that teachers receive 10 days of sick leave each school year. The contract has never been stated in terms of hours, as previously claimed, and has only been converted to hours in the last few years for bookkeeping reasons in the district office. We are working with the district office on a resolution and should not be attacked or called “brazen” in editorials for having a difference of opinion. Both the union and district office respectfully disagree and both sides look forward to solving this issue. Lastly, it has been reported that this grievance could cost our district more than $200,000. This figure represents if all 365 certified employees took their full 10 days of leave. In reality, last year very few teachers took their full sick leave, so the actual cost to the district is likely quite small. Someone needs to get all of the facts before publishing articles and allow the Redmond Education Association and the Redmond School District to respectfully settle our differences. It is rude to insinuate that Redmond teachers, or any teachers for that matter, are “greedy,” “shameless” and “unconscionable” when we are in a profession built around love of children, professionalism and educating minds to their fullest potential. Erin Matlock Redmond

Yellow journalism Long, long ago, when I was a student of journalism, I learned that placing political advocacy on Page 1 was yellow

journalism. So I was aghast to see on the front page of The Bulletin just such a “story” of how Judy Stiegler voted for something that Deschutes County (and The Bulletin) did not support. I hope for a newspaper that supports what is best for the broader community rather than just what the party of their choice (Republican in this case) likes. The citizens of Central Oregon, regardless of age, should cheer Judy Stiegler on because she has the skill to work with others and was extremely important in saving the OSU campus in Bend from the ax. Remember, the Willamette Valley has no interest in our having a college campus east of the Cascades. If Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson counties are to prosper, then we need that OSU connection. Not only do our young people need the option of enrolling locally, but our business community needs a college that provides training in job skills they need in employees. Furthermore, Central Oregon needs a cultural center for all of us, young and old alike. The Bulletin, like the Republicans, has apparently chosen to “target” Judy Stiegler in the upcoming election. Thinking citizens should instead target her for re-election, for she will serve our broader community well. She has already demonstrated this in her organizing support for our OSU. Marjorie S. Turner Black Butte Ranch

Good work by The Bulletin I read the letter from Darin Stringer (“Haiti coverage,” Feb. 18, 2010) and must register my disagreement with his perspective. John Costa’s column that appeared Feb. 21 (News that belongs on Page 1) sums it up exactly — this is news in print! We get the “latest breaking stories” in real-time on the TV, radio and/or computer. By the time the paper is printed, most of us

have seen the stories. But we do not get local stories anywhere else. And The Bulletin, I think, does an excellent job of giving us national and international information without wasting page after page of paper on what we can get (and probably already have gotten) elsewhere. The writer admits he had already had all the Haiti devastation information. And to insinuate any prejudice on the part of The Bulletin, suggesting an event in France or Great Britain would have been placed on Page 1, is a cheap shot, totally racist and unfounded. I, for one, support The Bulletin’s choices for content and placement and commend the editors for printing Mr. Stringer’s letter in the first place. Keep up the good work. Cynthia Magidson Bend

Tax on consumers I received my ballot for Referendum 9-75, which approves a 3-cent-per-gallon tax on motor vehicle fuel. Boy do I feel stupid … I thought it was a tax on vehicle owners’ gasoline consumption. I didn’t realize it was actually a tax on the motor vehicle fuel vendors. They, of course, won’t pass any of the cost of this tax on to the gasoline customer. They will simply lower their profit per gallon and absorb the tax. Right? Duh … I don’t think so. Who did the spin on the wording of this referendum, and how stupid do they think the voters are? The actual burden of the tax (on the consumer) is explained in the explanatory statement in the voters pamphlet, but the referendum, worded as it is, is an insult to any thinking person. Unfortunately there are fewer and fewer of us out here. Lee Tomlinson Redmond

Letters policy

In My View policy

Submissions

We welcome your letters. Letters should be limited to one issue, contain no more than 250 words and include the writer’s signature, phone number and address for verification. We edit letters for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject poetry, personal attacks, form letters, letters submitted elsewhere and those appropriate for other sections of The Bulletin. Writers are limited to one letter or Op-Ed piece every 30 days.

In My View submissions should be between 600 and 800 words, signed and include the writer’s phone number and address for verification. We edit submissions for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject those published elsewhere. In My View pieces run routinely in the space below, alternating with national columnists. Writers are limited to one letter or Op-Ed piece every 30 days.

Please address your submission to either My Nickel’s Worth or In My View and send, fax or e-mail them to The Bulletin. WRITE: My Nickel’s Worth OR In My View P.O. Box 6020 Bend, OR 97708 FAX: 541-385-5804 E-MAIL: bulletin@bendbulletin.com

Bulletin editorial about Redmond teachers was shameful By Karen Gray Bulletin guest columnist

n response to Tuesday’s unsigned editorial, yup, Redmond teachers are in fact, “always teaching.” This week I feel the need to express my gratitude to the editorial staff at The Bulletin for offering an excellent opportunity to sharpen the analysis skills of my students with lessons in representative democracy, sensationalized journalism and recognizing bias. “Brazen” doesn’t begin to describe your blatant disrespect for the Redmond Education Association and by extension the teachers who constitute its membership. The opinions expressed in Tuesday’s editorial are shameful at best; slanderous at worst. Coupled with the article in last week’s Sunday paper, this latest round of propaganda leaves me no choice but to respond. I find it fascinating that President

Barack Obama’s economic policy, not so affectionately referred to as “spreading the wealth,” is considered by many to be a socialist conspiracy, yet last week, Mr. Costa was more than eager to embrace a similar campaign to “spread the poverty” right here in Central Oregon. Seriously? Does anyone actually believe our community would be better off if more public-sector jobs were lost? Would an even higher unemployment rate make it any easier for the unemployed to find a job? Would a further reduction in teacher salary help to stop the flood of home foreclosures? Ironically, the front-page story in the same edition of the paper portrayed a young, cancer-surviving mother who, as a consequence of her inability to pay her water bill, is faced with losing her water service. I don’t recall Mr. Costa accusing the water company of exploiting anyone. I don’t recall The Bulletin calling

IN MY VIEW for a 20 percent reduction in water bills. With regard to The Bulletin’s most recent and divisive public condemnation of our local Redmond teachers union and our “shameless attempt to exploit” the Redmond School District, I think a reality check is in order. Yes, we are being paid for 1,520 hours, just like we have been in the past. What you conveniently failed to mention is that we are actually working 1,520 hours, just like we have in the past. Contrary to the opinion that we “work a little longer the rest of the week” to make up for class-free Fridays, we work significantly longer the rest of the week to get done in four days what we used to accomplish in five. I find your interpretation of our working conditions both misleading and offensive. For the record, Redmond teach-

ers are not asking for an increase in sick leave. Eighty hours of sick leave is enough. Either you failed to thoroughly investigate or you were misinformed. Check your facts. What we ask is simply that the district allocate leave time at the same rate they deduct it. Unfortunately, Redmond School District has chosen to allocate sick leave at the rate of 8 hours a day, pay substitute teachers at the rate of eight hours a day, and deduct leave time from teachers at a rate of 9.5 hours per day. Do the math. Under current policy the district allocates 80 hours of sick leave but could in fact take away 95 hours resulting in an involuntary donation of up to 15 hours of unpaid leave per teacher. I fail to comprehend how the district could possibly be considered the victim of exploitation. Additionally, the Redmond Education Association, to which you repeatedly and critically refer, is a model of repre-

sentative democracy. Our union does in fact express the will of its members. Specifically, in the case of this grievance, the REA did not demand anything. Apparently you missed the fact that 95 percent of the teachers in Redmond filed individual grievances? When you criticize the union, you criticize those very same “best teachers” whose “extra effort” and “good work” you claim to appreciate. Finally, as for caring deeply about taxpayer perception, here’s a news flash: We, the members of the Redmond Education Association, are members of this community as well. We are parents and coaches. We are homeowners and in this time of “crippling unemployment,” we are consumers. Think about it … we are the taxpayers. Karen Gray is a Redmond teacher and REA representative.

THE BULLETIN • Sunday, March 7, 2010 F3

O No allies — plenty of enemies By Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services

lmost 30 years after losing a war over the Falkland Islands, Argentina is once again warning Britain that it still wants back what it calls the Malvinas. Argentina is now angry over a British company’s oil exploration off the windswept islands in what it considers its own South Atlantic backyard. Although nominally democratic, the unpopular Kirchner government in Buenos Aires has claimed that the sparsely settled islands are a symbolic matter of Spanish-speaking pride throughout Latin America — and is theirs because the islands once belonged to Spain in the 19th century. In response to all this, the Obama administration announced that it would remain neutral. Aside from the fact that the Falkland Islanders wish to remain British, and our prior support for the Thatcher British government during the 1982 war, there are lots of reasons why our neutrality here is a bad idea. Britain is a longstanding NATO member. It has bled side-by-side America in two world wars, Korea and two conflicts in Iraq, as well as presently in Afghanistan. And the United Kingdom still shares close linguistic, cultural and historical affinities with the United States. We do not support all the British do;

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON nor do they always support us. But our centuries-old friendship should earn Britain special support in its disputes, even in the relatively unimportant Falkland’s mess. If Britain is not considered an ally, then America no longer has real allies. And perhaps that is the point, after all. The Obama administration does not wish to see the world so divided between allies and the rest. The president rather abruptly cancelled missile defense with the allied Czech Republic and Poland in order to woo the antagonistic Russians. Dictatorial Syria and the anti-Western Palestinians gain as much American outreach as does pro-American and democratic Israel. Obama seems more eager to mollify Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez than to strengthen our alliance with a democratic and pro-American Uribe government in neighboring Colombia. The list goes on. Meanwhile, Obama has symbolically tried to downsize the profile of the U.S. by downplaying the

idea of an “exceptional” America, bowing to foreign leaders, and apologizing for supposed past American sins. All that raises the question of what exactly are advantages these days of being a friend of the U.S., when neutrals and enemies garner as much of our sympathies? We have seen such naive attitudes before in the West. After the horrific carnage of the First World War, utopians wrongly swore that rival European alliances had alone caused the war, and so created the League of Nations. Enlightened world citizens would do better legislating peace than prior nationalist politicians who crudely had once sought security through balancing power and forging alliances. Hitler and the far more lethal Second World War followed instead. After 1945, a much wiser United States talked grandly about the new United Nations, but, in reality, its own alliances kept much of Europe and Asia free from an aggressive Soviet Union. Today there are many Falkland-like hot spots throughout the world. Yet the United States, not the International Court at The Hague, keeps North Korea from attacking our ally South Korea. The power of America, not the international community, persuades China not to squeeze our friend Taiwan. Europe is safe because of an American-led

NATO — not due to any concern from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In other words, America and its alliances keep friends safe. And the world is more peaceful and prosperous than at any time in history because dozens of nations count on our support and share our values. So until human nature changes, there are always going to be some nations that are more aggressive than others, seeking to take what they can by force. Groups of like-minded others will resist them both for principle and their own self-protection. And the majority of “neutral” countries will keep quiet, waiting to see who proves the stronger — and then opportunistically joining the eventual winner. An idealistic America may now decide that it does not want or need special allies like Britain. But that diffidence will eventually mean we have more enemies than ever — as the watching world makes the necessary adjustments and joins those who unabashedly promise them support and protection.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

ne of the most bewildering aspects of the current health-care debate is the failure to learn key lessons from health systems abroad. Conservative talk show hosts decry the alleged evils of “socialized medicine” in countries with universal health coverage; they warn grimly of rationed health care. Yet there’s nary a peep from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck — let alone Congress — about countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland, or Japan, where coverage is universal, affordable, and top quality, and patients see private doctors with little or no waiting. And, oh yes, their health costs are a fraction of our bloated numbers: The French spend 10 percent of GDP on health care, the Germans 11 percent, and they cover every citizen. We spend a whopping 17 percent and leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured. If you want a very readable short course how European systems really work — as opposed to the Fox News version — take a look at “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” by T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent. You might also watch a fascinating 2008 Frontline series, available online, in which Reid was an adviser: “Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. Learn Anything From the Rest of the World About How to Run a Health Care System?” So far, the answer seems to be “No,” not because there aren’t valuable lessons, but because politicians won’t re-

TRUDY RUBIN linquish their myths about European health systems. Reid takes up that task. Myth No. 1, he says, is that foreign systems with universal coverage are all “socialized medicine.” In countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, the coverage is universal while doctors and insurers are private. Individuals get their insurance through their workplace, sharing the premium with their employer as we do — and the government picks up the premium if they lose their job. Myth No. 2 — long waits and rationed care — is another whopper. “In many developed countries,” Reid writes, “people have quicker access to care and more choice than Americans do.” In France, Germany, and Japan, you can pick any provider or hospital in the country. Care is speedy and high quality, and no one is turned down. Myth No. 3 really grabs my attention: the delusion that countries with universal care “are wasteful systems run by bloated bureaucracies.” In fact, the opposite is true. America’s for-profit health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs of any developed country. Twenty percent or more of every premium dollar goes to nonmedical costs: paperwork, marketing, profits, etc.

“If a profit is to be made, you need an army of underwriters to deny claims and turn down sick people,” says Reid. In developed countries with universal coverage, such as France and Germany, the administrative costs average about 5 percent. That’s because every developed country but ours has decided health insurance should be a nonprofit operation. (We once thought that, too, until private insurance companies began buying up nonprofit health insurers like Blue Cross and Blue Shield and converting them into profit-makers.) In France and Germany, health insurance is sold by private insurers, who can only charge fixed rates in the nonprofit health field, but can sell other forms of insurance for a profit. These countries also hold down costs by making coverage mandatory and by using a unified set of rules and

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — here were people on the White House tour Saturday morning who were probably struck by the yellow paint on the Vermeil Room’s wood paneling. Or impressed by the portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the Blue Room. The group I came with had a different frame of reference to work with. “The chair is hard,” one of the teens said after pressing down on a cushion and comparing it with the pillows that her father had described sleeping on in prison. Another teen, Kristina Richbow, 17, was stunned by all the space the Obama girls must have for their things. She’s about to lose most of her possessions. Baby pictures, yearbooks, stuffed animals — everything Kristina couldn’t fit under her cot at the homeless shelter was placed in a storage unit when her family lost its home in a foreclosure. And now, five months later, the family is behind on storage payments, so everything might be auctioned off. “Look at all that space,” she said quietly to the giant windows high above, silk curtains pulled back to let in the light. Kristina was one of 15 teens from a Washington shelter who went to the White House for a daylong field trip

that included bowling a few sets on the president’s lanes and nibbling on crab cakes at the Occidental Grill next to the Willard hotel. I thought it might be cruel, taking kids whose families are homeless to the grandest home of all. But it turned out to be an uplifting, poignant day. The kids gathered at the shelter in the morning, dressed in their best. Their mothers took pictures and told them how proud they were before sending them down the dirty corridor to visit the most important house in the nation. Among them were honor students, a section leader of a D.C. magnet school band, an aspiring linguist who is studying Chinese, a mother of an infant son and a track sprinter. Some of them, despite being raised in Washington, had never seen the White House. They are members of 192 homeless families living in shelters on D.C. General’s campus, according to the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness. It is over capacity this winter, full beyond anything the city had planned for, and grew by 50 families in the past month alone. The Washington Legal Clinic said it is overwhelmed by complaints about shelter access and violations of city regulations. The 300 or so kids there have little to do. There is no longer a recreation room

— that was filled just last week with three more families. And the cafeteria looks like an evacuation center after a natural disaster, with rows of cots. Last week, some families began sleeping in the hallways. These are mostly families that have lost jobs and homes in the past year. Most of them spent months moving from one relative’s cramped house to another or staying in cheap hotels before they ended up here, in an abandoned hospital, a place that is a bandage but not a cure for their problems. Jamila Larson, the social worker who runs the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project, said she is haunted by the teens, who are far more aware of their plight than their younger siblings. Many wanted to tell me their stories, but not all of their friends at school know they are homeless so few wanted their names in the paper. The trip was organized and funded by the playtime project and its volunteers, who have Washington connections and generous friends. The kids had to write essays explaining how they are similar to three U.S. presidents to get on the tour. Most of them said they can relate to President Obama, but their observations were complex and moving. One boy said it’s not because of “my skin color or anything like that, but that we both strive to what we need and not

By Thomas L. Friedman New York Times News Service

what we want.” Another teen said this about Obama’s message of “change we can believe in”: “I like change a lot, but sometimes it’s hard to get used to all the time.” Kristina, who is waiting to hear whether she has been accepted to Harvard, dashed off her essay in about 10 minutes and included quotes from presidents Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson. “Even though I live in a shelter and might not have the resources of other people,” she wrote, “I am still determined to get into college so that I can become a doctor.” At lunch at the Occidental Grill, they took pictures of the cloakroom and the restrooms. “I’ve never seen a bathroom like that — could you believe that?” said Bianca Root, 18, who also decided that she could never work in the White House. “It’s just too much. It’s so big. And important. Just too much.” She wants to be a nurse. At the fancy restaurant, they unfolded napkins and held up their stemmed water glasses for a toast: “For stepping out of the shelter and into the White House!” I just wish they didn’t have to step back into the shelter. Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Tom Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of “Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.”

payment schedules for all hospitals and doctors. This does NOT mean a single-payer system or a governmentrun health system. But it does sharply cut health costs by eliminating the mishmash of records and charges used by our myriad insurance firms, who use all kinds of gimmicks to shift their costs. A unified system makes it possible for France and Germany to use digital records; every insured person has a smart card that includes all his or her health information, further cutting the number of bureaucrats. U.S. companies oppose such efficiencies, Reid says, “because they spend money on proprietary systems and no one wants to get together on a common system.” Can we afford this stubbornness? For those who think we could never make the switch to such systems, take note that Switzerland shifted from private health insurers to nonprofits in 1994. And it’s hard to see how we can cut costs without reining in our private health insurers. None of these European plans have to be adopted wholesale. Yet there’s no sign we’re even examining them for useful lessons. Some U.S. senators on the Finance Committee bought Reid’s book, but have you heard anyone talk about European health systems? Of course not. It’s easier to embrace our myths and pretend Americans know best about managing health care. But that’s the biggest myth of them all. Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Tour takes teens with no homes to the White House By Petula Dvorak

Word from the wise was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once was modern but has had one too many face-lifts and can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the U.S. of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch. And this contrast is playing out in the worst way — just slowly enough so the crisis never seems acute enough to take urgent action. But, eventually, infrastructure, education and innovation policies matter. Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones. I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Otellini’s views on startups. While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here. “The things that are not conducive to investments here are (corporate) taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from scratch is about $4.5 billion — in the United States. If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion,” because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in. Not surprisingly, the last factory Intel built from scratch was in China. “That comes online in October,” he said. “And it wasn’t because the labor costs are lower. Yeah, the construction costs were a little bit lower, but the cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower and you have local market access.” These local incentives matter, because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today and never hire another American. Asked if his company was being held back by weak education in America’s schools, Otellini explained: “As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on Earth. If I can’t get them out of MIT, I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s MIT. It gets worse. Otellini noted that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — IT infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations. ... When you take a hard look at the things that make any country competitive … we are slipping.” If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.” Does the Obama team get it? Otellini compared the Obama administration to a “diode” — a device that conducts electric current in only one direction. They are very good at listening to Silicon Valley, he said, but not so good at responding. “I’d like to see competitiveness and education take a higher role than they are today,” he said. “Right now, they’re going to try to push this health care thing over the line, and, after that, deal with the next thing. God, I’d just like this (our competitiveness) to be the next thing. Something has to pay for” everything government is doing today. We had to do the bailouts, the buy-ups and the jobs bills to stop the bleeding. But now we need to focus on the policies that spawn new firms and keep our best at the top. “It’s a lot easier to change when you can than when you have to,” said Otellini. “The cost is less. You have more time. I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.”

Lessons from European health systems By Trudy Rubin

THOMAS FRIEDMAN

F4 Sunday, March 7, 2010 • THE BULLETIN

B 1. “Fantasy in Death” by J.D. Robb (Putnam)

Prolific sci-fi author goes ‘Small Kingdoms’ down evolutionary path tests boundaries for

2. “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam/Amy Einhorn)

By Reed Johnson

B E S T- S E L L E R S Publishers Weekly ranks the bestsellers for the week of Feb. 27. HARDCOVER FICTION

3. “Black Magic Sanction” by Kim Harrison (Eos) 4. “Split Image” by Robert B. Parker (Putnam) 5. “Big Girl” by Danielle Steel (Delacorte) 6. “Worst Case” by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge (Little, Brown) 7. “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown (Doubleday) 8. “The Man From Beijing” by Henning Mankell (Knopf) 9. “Winter Garden” by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s) 10. “The Postmistress” by Sarah Blake (Putnam/Amy Einhorn) 11. “Apple Turnover Murder” by Joanne Fluke (Kensington) 12. “Poor Little Bitch Girl” by Jackie Collins (St. Martin’s) 13. “Flirt” by Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley) 14. “The Girl Who Played With Fire” by Stieg Larsson (Knopf) 15. “Horns” by Joe Hill (Morrow)

HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. “Game Change” by John Heilemann & Mark Halperin (Harper) 2. “I Am Ozzy” by Ozzy Osbourne (Grand Central) 3. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot (Crown) 4. “The Politician” by Andrew Young (St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne) 5. “Have a Little Faith” by Mitch Albom (Hyperion) 6. “Switch” by Chip Heath & Dan Heath (Broadway)

DAVIS, Calif. — In science fiction, there’s dystopia and there’s utopia. There are the dark wizards of apocalypse, terrifying us with visions of humanity’s grim comeuppance. And the starry-eyed fantasists, insisting how much better the future will be than the messy, middling present. And then there’s Kim Stanley Robinson: family man, High Sierras pilgrim and prolific author of several of the most influential science-fiction works of the last 25 years. Robinson, 57, doesn’t put much stock in the extremes of Bad New World vs. Bright New Tomorrow. His work restlessly seeks out the third (or fourth, or fifth) possibility, an alternative evolutionary path. With total worldwide sales of around 2.5 million copies, in numerous languages, his perspective plainly has a following. Like Dante, Robinson specializes in triptychs. His Mars trilogy of the 1990s describes 200 years of human colonization and ecological transformation on the Red Planet. His “Three Californias” series of a decade earlier imagines the southern edge of the Golden State overrun by ruthless development and flattened by nuclear disaster, yet resilient, like a hardy mutant plant.

7. “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

‘Galileo’s Dream’

8. “Willie Mays” by James S. Hirsch (Scribner)

His latest novel, “Galileo’s Dream” (Spectra, 544 pgs., $26), deftly lashes together three narratives: a homage to Galileo, a trek to Jupiter’s moons in the year 3020 and a philosophical inquiry into the perpetual tussle between comforting falsehoods and inconvenient truths. “Elegant, charming, funny and profound,” summarized a reviewer for the Guardian of London, marking Robinson as the rare sci-fi writer whose polished prose and intellectual heft equals his inventive plotting. It’s up to the reader, his speculative fiction implies, to determine which future will prevail. “You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out,” Robinson told a high school class here recently. “So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.”

9. “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books) 10. “Committed” by Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking) 11. “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin (Harper) 12. “Stones Into Schools” by Greg Mortenson (Viking) 13. “Making Rounds With Oscar” by David Dosa, M.D. (Hyperion) 14. “The Kind Diet” by Alicia Silverstone (Rodale) 15. “On the Brink” by Henry M. Paulson Jr. (Business Plus)

MASS MARKET 1. “The Last Song” by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central) 2. “Dear John” by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central) 3. “First Family” by David Baldacci (Vision) 4. “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane (Harper) 5. “Moonlight Road” by Robyn Carr (Mira) 6. “Pleasure of a Dark Prince” by Kresley Cole (Pocket) 7. “Long Lost” by Harlan Coben (Signet) 8. “Big Jack” by J.D. Robb (Berkley) 9. “The Summer Hideaway” by Susan Wiggs (Mira) 10. “Corsair” by Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul (Berkley) 11. “Evidence” by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine) 12. “Dark Angel/Lord Carew’s Bride” (Mary Balogh) 13. “The Scarecrow” by Michael Connelly (Grand Central) 14. “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown)

5 characters in Kuwait

Los Angeles Times

Dynamic history This endeavor raises several questions central to Robinson’s outlook. What if the world isn’t fated to end with a bang or whimper, but simply to go on and on? What if utopia and dystopia aren’t static but dynamic terms, “roads of history” leading us through crisscrossing, switchbacked destinies? What if history can be read backward and forward, like a reverse nuclear chain reaction, in which altering a single atom could sway the course of religions, cultures, empires? Most

“Small Kingdoms” by Anastasia Hobbet (The Permanent Press, 344 pgs., $29)

By Darren Sexto McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Robert Durell / Los Angeles Times

Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most influential sci-fi writers of all time, recently published “Galileo’s Dream.” crucially, perhaps: How might the world be different if our literature, to say nothing of our politics, behaved more like a rational, intrepid adult than a hand-wringing adolescent? “Apocalyptic thinking happens on the left as well as on the right, and in environmentalism, that’s a terrible approach to take,” Robinson says over lunch at one of his favorite downtown haunts. “Because it isn’t true. We cannot kill off life on Earth even if we wanted to. Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can’t say, ‘Is it too late?’ That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it’s too late, you don’t need to act; if it’s not too late, you don’t need to act.” Robinson earned his liberalhumanist bona fides the way many California boomers did. He was raised in a conservative Orange County home where he agreed to disagree about politics with his Republican parents. In those days Orange County was a citrus-scented Eden, at least for middle-class suburbanites. But as he grew up, Robinson watched bulldozers plow up the orange and eucalyptus groves. It wasn’t until he started reading Isaac Asimov, and later Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany and Gene Wolfe, that he discovered a genre to express what he’d witnessed.

“When I started reading science fiction, I thought, ‘This is me. This is about going from a human world to a machine world and becoming a cyborg,’” he has said. “I think of science fiction as the realism of California.”

Vietnam influence When Robinson drove from Orange County to UC San Diego (where he received his B.A. in English), he recalls that “in 90 minutes, I went from 1950 to 1970.” At UCSD, he became radicalized by Vietnam and his exposure to certain faculty thinkers, chief among them his friend Fredric Jameson, the literary critic and Marxist theorist. Their influence remains. But over the years, Robinson has tilted away from the absolutism of the 1960s and tried to “reimagine what revolution” can be. In his novels, he posits a scientific, gradualist, nonviolent view of how progress can occur. “He believes that problems can be solved, and he sees the first step as imagining ways they might be solved,” says his close friend and fellow novelist Karen Joy Fowler. “He is not interested in councils of despair.” Instead of “revolution,” Robinson prefers terms like “better scenario” and “phase change” to express what he sees as humanity’s best hopes for reforming itself.

The finest expatriate novels are less about escape than the embrace of a new homeland, no matter how brief the stopover. “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy,” concludes Ernest Hemingway in his novel-with-realpeople “A Moveable Feast.” In “Prague,” Arthur Phillips dropped Americans into end-of-last-century Budapest and put them to work finding themselves through an appreciation of the exotic. Anastasia Hobbet visits the same expat instincts in her new novel, “Small Kingdoms,” but has relocated her characters to much more frightening territory. This is Kuwait, its citizens still involuntarily flinching from Saddam Hussein’s invasion during the first Gulf War and feeling the inevitability of conflict not yet resolved. Instead of the easy romance of, say, France or Hungary, Hobbet has tasked herself with a nation that on a map looks like a facial profile aggressively thrust into Saudi Arabia and capped by Iraq and Iran. Just try living there. Hobbet, a San Francisco Baybased novelist who was born in Sedalia, Mo., and grew up in Kansas City, knows the territory well. She spent five years living in Kuwait and traveled the Middle East widely during the same vulnerable time she details in her novel. “Small Kingdoms” hums with the wisdom of her firsthand observation. The stories of five primary

characters — each of them drawing the boundaries and safe zones that are the “small kingdoms” of the title — are parceled out with an even hand. Two are Americans. Theo, a San Francisco doctor who arrives with no intention of staying longer than a couple of years, is warned, “The classconsciousness here will shock you. If you’re not Kuwaiti born and bred, you’re no one.” Kit, an Oklahoma housewife on assignment with her ambitious husband — he works for a major American oil company, as did Hobbet’s husband — is gutted by homesickness and a shy struggle with household management in a culture governed by fine-tuned hierarchy. The most arresting narrative is that of Hanaan, an Arab woman introduced as Theo’s language teacher. The relationship turns to romance, which lets us spend more time with her defiant, educated observations of society, class, war and family. “It’s an instrument of threat. Do what your family asks or face its punishment.” “Small Kingdoms” is laudable for filling a niche that is specific but, because Hobbet accomplishes it with such detail, seems vital: the Kuwaiti expat novel. The world she gives us at first is broadly foreign, but we quickly come to understand its limits. It may ultimately be the only novel of its kind.

541-322-CARE

15. “Malice” by Lisa Jackson (Zebra)

TRADE 1. “Little Bee” by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster) 2. “The Last Song” by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central) 3. “A Reliable Wife” by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin) 4. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson (Vintage) 5. “The 8th Confession” by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro (Grand Central) 6. “The Lost City of Z” by David Grann (Vintage) 7. “Food Rules” by Michael Pollan (Penguin) 8. “Shutter Island” by Dennis Lehane (Harper Perennial) 9. “Dear John” by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central) 10. “The Blind Side” by Michael Lewis (Norton) 11. “Look Again” by Lisa Scottoline (St. Martin’s Griffin) 12. “The Shack” by William P. Young (Windblown Media) 13. “Shanghai Girls” by Lisa See (Random House) 14. “Sarah’s Key” by Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s Griffin) 15. “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin (Penguin)

Young adult novel is a thrilling page-turner “Numbers: A Novel” by Rachel Ward (Chicken House/Scholastic, 328 pgs., $17.99)

By Susan Carpenter Los Angeles Times

Whether it’s telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, magic or ESP, otherworldly powers have long captivated young readers, empowering them, through fantasy, to believe that anything is possible. Employed by the likes of William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, one would think that the permutations of psychic abilities had been exhausted. Enter “Numbers,” about a teenage girl in England’s foster care system who is able to see people’s death dates when she looks into their eyes. This burden of a

“gift” is the intriguing premise of an action-packed, emotional roller coaster of a debut young adult novel from British author Rachel Ward. Fifteen-year-old Jem has been able to see these numbers as if “they were stamped on the inside of my skull” since she was a child, she says early on. The first number she saw was that of her mother, who died on cue from a heroin addiction, revealing to Jem what the numbers she was seeing really meant. In Ward’s hands, Jem is entirely believable and relatable, even if the situation in which she finds herself is not. But that’s what makes this book such a page-turner. What starts as a simple extrasensory gimmick grows into an increasingly engrossing plot line involving terrorism, class tensions and youth.

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C OV ER S T ORY

“(Diane Ravitch) has done more than anyone I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing. Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.” — Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Ravitch began her teaching career in the 1970s

Education Continued from F1 “What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution. Among the topics on which Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. Ravitch’s new posture has angered critics. “She has done more than anyone I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

Rising to prominence Admirers say she is returning to her roots as an advocate for public education. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books defending the civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing detractors, who were calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class children. “First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.” Ravitch was born in Texas and graduated from Wellesley. She gained formidable influence during the Republican-dominated 1980s. In her meticulous office on the top floor of a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone hangs a photograph of herself, seated next to Vice President George H.W. Bush during a visit to the White House, directly across from President Ronald Reagan. In 1991, Lamar Alexander, the first President Bush’s secretary of education, made her an assistant secretary, a post she used to lead a federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards. Since leaving government in 1993, Ravitch has been a muchsought-after policy analyst and research scholar, quoted in hundreds of articles on American education. And she has written five books, including “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform” (2001) and “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn” (2003), an influential examination of the censorship of school books by left- and rightwing pressure groups. In her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she describes the bipartisan consensus that took root in the early 1990s, with her support, and has held sway since. “The new thinking saw the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government,” she writes. “I argued that certain managerial and structural changes — that is, choice, charters, merit pay and accountability — would help to reform our schools.”

No Child Left Behind: ‘It sounded terrific’ In January 2001, Ravitch was at the White House to hear President George W. Bush outline his vision for No Child Left Behind, which Congress approved with bipartisan majorities and which became law in 2002. “It sounded terrific,” she recalled in the interview. There were signs soon after, however, that her views were changing. She had endorsed may-

oral control of New York City schools before Mayor Michael Bloomberg obtained it in 2002, but by 2004 she had emerged as a fierce critic. Some said she was nursing a grudge because close friends had lost jobs in the mayor’s shake-up of the schools’ bureaucracy. In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy. She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement. These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself. “Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

Different conclusions She said she began to feel estranged intellectually from close colleagues. One she heard criticize the No Child law was Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education with whom she had written a book and worked at two conservative research groups, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. They were ideological soul mates and just plain chums. Often over the last decade, they were on the phone together or exchanging e-mail messages half a dozen times a day. But although Finn had become critical of the No Child law, he remained an advocate of charter schools and school choice. By 2008, Finn said, “there were more and more issues where the staff and everybody else on the Fordham board would say, ‘Let’s do A,’ and Diane would say, ‘Let’s do B.’” Finally, she recalled, “I told everybody at a dinner meeting at Koret that I was going to resign, and they all said, ‘Come on, stay — we need somebody to argue with us.” Ravitch stayed on for a time, but left both organizations last spring. Finn has done his own rethinking, and he said he shared many of her disappointments. “Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low,” he writes in a coming essay. “‘Accountability’ has turned to testcramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills.” But Finn has reached sharply different conclusions from Ravitch. “Diane says, ‘Let’s return to the old public school system,’” he said. “I say let’s blow it up.” But Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools. “Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.” The superintendents gave Ravitch a standing ovation. “We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

THE BULLETIN • Sunday, March 7, 2010 F5

J.M. Coetzee acts as his own biographer “Summertime” by J.M. Coetzee (Viking, 266 pgs., $25.95)

By Anis Shivani McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Together, “Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life,” “Youth: Scenes From Provincial Life II” and now “Summertime” constitute one of our time’s greatest testaments to the full development of a writer’s consciousness. Little written recently competes with the depth and artistry of these three fictionalized memoirs (or memoiristic fictions) in illuminating the stages of this Nobel Prize-winning and twice Booker Prize-winning author’s maturity. In “Boyhood” — one has to look as far back as the great 19th-century classics of child-

hood or James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” for apt comparisons to this monumental effort — Coetzee identifies his conflicted feelings toward his Afrikaner heritage. When he visits the ancestral farm in the rugged Karoo terrain, an unfamiliar expansiveness opens up in him. He enjoys being mistaken for a Catholic in a puritan Christian school in his native Worcester. His father is a dissolute and disbarred attorney, from whom Coetzee gets his reticence, which can be mistaken for cruelty. “Youth” takes us to Coetzee’s years in England as a failing poet, literary scholar and IBM computer programmer. In the early 1960s, Coetzee goes against the libertine atmosphere by pursuing a writerly

life of extreme restraint and discipline. His great fear is to have to return to South Africa as a failure. “Summertime” deals with the years from 1972 to 1977, when Coetzee had returned to South Africa (after having practiced linguistics in America and having been thrown out of the country for protesting the Vietnam War) to live in the Tokai suburb of Cape Town while taking care of his ailing father. These were years of relative obscurity, when he had written “Dusklands” and “In the Heart of the Country” and was leading up to “Waiting for the Barbarians” while teaching at the University of Cape Town. “Boyhood” and “Youth” are written in objective third-person, but “Summertime” is more formally experimental, remind-

ing us often of Coetzee’s “Diary of a Bad Year.” Vincent, a young English biographer, is interviewing five people who knew the now-deceased Coetzee. They include a married woman named Julia Smith with whom he had a brief affair; his cousin Margot (earlier seen in “Boyhood”), now happily married, whom he visited along with the rest of his family at their ancestral farm; and a Brazilian dancer, Adriana Nascimento, on whom he had an unrequited crush and whose daughter Coetzee taught English. “Summertime” begins and ends with fragments of Coetzee’s diary, as though these were the limits to which Coetzee was willing to go to satisfy his readers’ curiosity about his personal life.

B OOK S

F6 Sunday, March 7, 2010 • THE BULLETIN

Harold Evans: proud to be a publishing crusader By Zinta Lundborg

Harold Evans, 81, author of the memoir “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times,” discusses his childhood and publishing career. Evans launched the crusade against the manufacturers of the drug thalidomide in the 1960s, during his 14-year stint as editor of London’s Sunday Times.

Bloomberg News

New book explores Armstrong the icon “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” by Terry Teachout (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 496 pgs., $30)

By Jeremy Gerard Bloomberg News

NEW YORK — Woody Allen and the Smithsonian Institution immortalized Louis Armstrong’s 1927 landmark recording of “Potato Head Blues.” Now we have Terry Teachout to explain why the recording not only matters, but why it still has the power to thrill. The number, which the young cornetist wrote for his “Hot Seven” ensemble, climaxes with the band going silent but for a few staccato chords, Teachout explains in “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.” “Against this sparse background Armstrong flings a tune that links the chords together,” he writes. Armstrong “gradually lengthens his phrases until he is leaping boldly across the band’s chords ... ” Treasure that choice of the verb “fling,” which is exactly what comes to mind as you listen to the tune on the Smithsonian’s definitive “Collection of Classic Jazz,” and which Allen, in “Manhattan,” ranks with Mozart and Flaubert among the things that make life “worth living.”

An insider To this fine, exhaustively researched and only occasionally pedantic biography, Teachout brings an insider’s knowledge — he was a professional jazz musician before launching a career as cultural critic and biographer. Teachout tells us how the early recordings made Armstrong an icon. They were far more important than his later best-selling recordings of “Hello, Dolly!” and other standards. In addition to the technique and improvisational gift that blew other musicians away, “Armstrong’s music, like his personality, was fundamentally optimistic,” Teachout writes. “Armstrong was a major-key artist who would always be disinclined to lament the woes of the world, aware of them though he was.”

Rough beginning Louis Armstrong would claim he was born in New Orleans on Independence Day in 1900. In fact, he was born one year and a month later, on Aug. 4, 1901, the son of a skirt-chaser and a devoted mother who Teachout says was almost certainly a Storyville prostitute. As a teen, Armstrong hauled coal 10 hours a day and then played his cornet (only later would he switch to the more elegant trumpet) in bars for tips from the whores. Armstrong apprenticed with, but quickly surpassed, Joe “King” Oliver, whom he idolized, and made a name for himself first in Chicago, then New York. He became a creature of the television age, appearing regularly on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” among others. His tidy home in Queens is a museum. Teachout quotes be-bop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie: “If it weren’t for Louis, there wouldn’t be any of us.” It’s a simple but truthful testament.

“Armstrong’s music, like his personality, was fundamentally optimistic.” — Terry Teachout, author

NEW YORK — Clad in a jogging outfit and accompanied by a big orange cat, Harold Evans showed me into the handsome drawing room of the Sutton Place duplex he shares with Tina Brown in Manhattan. Now 81, Evans had just finished his exercise routine in the cluttered office where he wrote his memoir, “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times” (Little, Brown). As we talk about his childhood and publishing career, it’s clear he remains passionate about causes. That the British government finally has acknowledged its moral and legal debt to thalidomide victims fills him with pride — and anger. Evans launched the crusade against the drugmakers in the 1960s, during his 14-year stint as editor of London’s Sunday Times.

Q: A:

Was your time in newspapers the golden age? In some ways, yes. I love craftsmanship of any kind, a job well done either by my chiropractor or carpenter, and I am addicted to print, the type, the ink. But my basic passion is journalism, and now I can’t live without being online.

Q: A:

Who will pay for online content? Ultimately, we’ll have some combination of free and paid sites. The key question is: What’s the value in the product that I’m being asked to pay for online? How unique is the information? I won’t pay for anything I can find for free.

Little, Brown

You said that when Rush Limbaugh claims there’s no global warming, the journalist’s job is to say “that’s false.” That’s not what Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network does, does it? Fox is succeeding by riding the anti-administration, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual wing-nut movement. What I’d like to see is evidence that it’s crept into the news coverage.

Q: A:

Advocacy is OK?

I don’t fall into the American journalism school that impartiality is the thing: On one hand, Jesus Christ did some great things, on the other, he did some not-so-great things. I don’t mind reading an argued presentation of the facts, such as what we did with the thalidomide campaign.

Q: A:

Who could do an investigation like that today? There’s no appetite today in any part of the American press for investigation and campaigning. You have to be obsessive, and everything on the Web is so fleeting. We are in a difficult period. Maybe the Financial Times, but it doesn’t go in for beating its breast. Maybe Rolling Stone.

Q: A:

Where does your desire to fix things come from? I couldn’t bear to see various injustices. That goes back to when I was growing up in Manchester and could hear my father coughing in the next room. We were breathing the most poisonous air possible. From our house, we could see 20 mill chimneys, black smoke, and outside you couldn’t see your

hand in front of you. People were dying 10 years earlier than they should have, and the complacency of the government really angered me.

You defeated such luminaries as Martin Amis, Dudley Moore and Auberon Waugh for the hand of Tina Brown. How did you manage that? I wrote better prose. Actually, Auberon Waugh was a good writer, but a very disagreeable person, Martin Amis, not particularly charming but brilliant. She loved Dudley, though. I was very torn about it, but I was passionately in love with Tina. She’s a great writer, with incredible comic ability — she should never have left the New Yorker. And she’s an adept mimic, like Tina Fey, and can

do everyone: Margaret Thatcher, the Queen and Prince Charles.

When you were the head of Random House, you published Barack Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father.” What attracted you to it? The literary luminosity is unbelievable: The language and the concepts are marvelous, and it’s so full of humor.

Q: A: Q: A:

Perhaps he missed his true calling? He may have done. He’s a literary man.

What’s the future of books? What do we need to keep in mind as we go digital? Protect copyright at all costs. Don’t do cheap deals with Google and these other cybermonsters. Recognize that the creative artist has to be maintained. Theft has been made easy. What’s the difference between someone robbing me of my life’s work and a mugging?

Q: A:

What’s the biggest danger we face now? One problem is the education system, the way the kids are being flung through the schools. The other is the extreme nothingness that’s taken over American politics. We have this vast increase in communication and what are we shoving down these fiber channels? A lot of it is total gibberish and toxic to boot.

Sunday Driver Meet the 2010 GMC Terrain crossover, see Page G6

www.bendbulletin.com/business

THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010

STOC K S R E P O R T For a listing of stocks, including mutual funds, see Pages G4-5

When attracting new companies, it’s more than location, location, location Work force, tax incentives also help draw businesses like Facebook to Central Oregon

B U S I N E SS IN BRIEF Local businesses can get computer tips A class at Central Oregon Community College on Friday intends to show business owners how to save money and be more efficient by using computers. The training will cover two types of businesses: those with zero to four employees and those with five or more. It describes to people how to access technology, such as e-mail, when they’re away from the office; how to potentially save money by renting out server space, rather than buying a server for a business; and how to protect information about a business that is shared over the Internet; among other tips. The classes will take place simultaneously, from 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and cost $29. Preregistration is required. For more information, or to register, call the COCC Community Learning program at 541-383-7270.

Hormel Foods seeks expansion in China NEW YORK — Hormel Foods, the maker of Spam luncheon meat, wants to expand in China with an acquisition or a joint venture, Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Ettinger said. “We are at the higher end of the Chinese market, with more ex-pat appeal,” Ettinger, 51, said in an interview Thursday in New York. “We would like to get more into the midtier markets.” Austin, Minn.-based Hormel has had joint ventures in China since 1994 and now generates $47 million in annual sales there. Non-U.S. revenue was $334.9 million in fiscal 2009, about 5 percent of the company’s total. “Our preference would be to get involved in a joint venture or through an acquisition, as we question our ability to create a brand on our own that will be seen as local,” Ettinger said.

By David Holley The Bulletin

From concept to construction, the process of locating a plot of land for a company to build on — better known as site selection — is lengthy and intricate, often taking companies months to decide on a specific location. It’s also secretive, a necessity primar-

ily for competitive reasons, according to those involved. Leading up to Facebook’s announcement in January that it would build a data center in Prineville, little was known about the company that was planning to build there — or how it came to choose Prineville. Permits, planning documents and other material related to the data cen-

Caught in Chrysler’s crash

ter identified the company as Vitesse LLC to protect Facebook’s identity. Economic Development for Central Oregon held a members-only event during the last week of February in which EDCO Executive Director Roger Lee and David Aaroe, an owner of Portland-based Fortis Construction Inc. and the primary site selector for Facebook’s site search, discussed the process of aiding large businesses in the quest to find a spot to build. Neither Lee nor Aaroe — both still under nondisclosure agreements with Facebook — could discuss any details of their work with the company. See Location / G5

“Losing a threegeneration business is just like having a death in the family.” — Matt Thomas, co-owner of Thomas Sales and Service

Mortgage rates dip The interest rate for 30year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 4.97 percent for the week ending March 4, with an average 0.7 point, down from 5.05 percent the prior week, Freddie Mac reported Thursday. Last year at this time, the 30-year fixed rate averaged 5.15 percent. “… Monthly principal and interest mortgage payments for a typical family buying a median-priced home of $163,800 were just $709 in January, the lowest amount since February 1998, according to the National Association of Realtors,” Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac vice president and chief economist, said in a press release. “For first-time homebuyers, the fourth quarter of 2009 was the third most affordable quarter since 1981 behind the first and second quarter of 2009.” — From staff and wire reports

Home sales drop Pending home sales fell in January as severe weather impacted the market. Pending U.S. home sales index

Rob Kerr / The Bulletin

Matt Thomas, co-owner of Thomas Sales and Service on U.S. Highway 20 in Bend, moved Subaru of Bend into the lot where the company sold Dodge and Chrysler models before Chrysler took those product lines, costing his company millions of dollars.

Longtime dealer, blindsided by franchise reshuffle, heading to arbitration By Tim Doran • The Bulletin

end car dealer Matt Thomas was eating breakfast at Cheerleaders Grill & Sports Pub in May, when he learned Chrysler had decided to snatch away the Dodge franchise his family had operated for 73 years. The news came from a friend and fellow auto dealer, who called from the Midwest to offer condolences. “Losing a three-generation business is just like having a death in the family,” said Thomas, who co-owns Thomas Sales and Service with his brother, Bill. “My brother and I never in our lives thought we would not be Dodge dealers.” Compounding the loss, Chrysler decided to give Thomas Sales and Service’s Dodge and Chrysler franchises to Jim

Smolich Motors, the car dealer located across U.S. Highway 20 — for free. And all of it was sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Bankruptcy is ugly, said Chrysler spokeswoman Kathy Graham. Chrysler’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructured a Big Three automaker that employed 55,000 people worldwide and had $48 billion in revenue in 2008, its statements show. The company had to cut 25 percent of its dealers, who joined hundreds of other businesses and individuals that lost when Chrysler went bankrupt, Graham said. Dave Hamilton Chevrolet-Jeep of Redmond also lost its product lines from both automakers and eventually had to go out of business. See Thomas / G5

Seasonally adjusted annual rate 115

Instant gratification via insta-mansions

90.4 105

Modular homes, long looked down upon, are springing up in prestigious places

By Lisa Rein The Washington Post

75 2009

’10

Source: National Association of Realtors AP

WASHINGTON — One day in February, it was an empty, snow-covered suburban lot. In 32 hours, the property held a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath French country mansion with a walkout basement. The 7,200-square-footer that appeared

14 days ago in Bethesda, Md., is not yet a finished house. But it sure looks like one, with its gleaming windows, four sets of patio doors and symmetrical roof dormers. The heat, electricity and sewer went in last week. A prefabricated, modular mansion, dropped in from the jib of a crane and set in place like a layer cake. For about

$2.5 million. Modular homes have been around since the first trailers sheltered migrant workers in the 1920s. But the stigma of double-wides and flimsy suburban boxes is being blown away for members of the money-conscious Lexus set. See Modular / G3

JOHN STEARNS

Sometimes, a guy just has to ... shop

he opening of Kohl’s department store last week provided the perfect excuse to take a break from columns on bankruptcies, tax hikes, depressed real estate and joblessness. After all, we don’t get new department stores in these parts very often — and the last one that opened in Bend, Gottschalks, operated about three months before its parent company filed for bankruptcy reorganization in January 2009. It liquidated a few months later. Kohl’s would appear to be on much healthier footing. Kohl’s earned $991 million in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 30, up from $885 million the year before, two very rough years for retailers, and is a much larger company, at more than 1,000 stores, than Gottschalks ever was. Gottschalks, a regional chain that had 62 stores before it filed for bankruptcy, reported a $12.4 million loss in fiscal 2007. In its last report from 2008, through its fiscal nine months ended Nov. 1, it had lost $19.7 million. Let me be clear: I’m no department store expert. The only time I visit one is when I need a pair of pants, a shirt, or other necessity. I’m more comfortable in The Home Depot (love that place), The Duck Store (’84 Oregon alumnus) or Safeway (a guy has to eat). But my family needed a new toaster and Kohl’s had recently mailed $10-off coupons for anything in the store during its grand-opening period. Combine need, financial incentive, convenience (I pass it every day) and, I admit, a bit of curiosity, and I stepped foot for the first time in a Kohl’s on Wednesday. I’ll probably offend all savvy shoppers out there by saying that it looks like most other midtier department stores and the prices — from a very untrained male eye — seemed comparable to other big-box retailers. I walked in expecting it to be more appealing for women than men. After all, a district manager said in a story last weekend in The Bulletin, “(We have) anything she might need — anything besides milk, I guess.” For many men, shopping’s hard enough without a comment like that... But Kohl’s has plenty of things for men, including jeans, slacks, shorts, ties, blazers, athletic clothes and sport and dress shoes. Of course, it’s loaded with stuff for her — clothes, jewelry, makeup, etc. — and there are toys, greeting cards, housewares and more. It seemed well organized to me, but a woman I know didn’t think so. Nonetheless, employees were helpful and friendly as they dealt with the stream of customers exploiting the grand-opening deals Wednesday. At 9 a.m., the store’s south parking lot was nearly full. No matter its products or prices, the store, which is clean and bright, can be credited for putting 120 people to work, albeit mostly part time, which is better than no time these days. It also has to benefit Bend River Promenade as another anchor store drawing traffic. The Bend store is among nine the company is opening this spring, which will bring its store count to 1,067. On a related note, curiosity and convenience (and a son who has wanted to visit since the foundation was poured) also spurred a trip last weekend to Bend’s new Olive Garden restaurant. While I’m no shopper, eating is another matter. I can work my way around unlimited breadsticks with the best of ’em. Like Kohl’s, no matter what your opinion of Olive Garden, its opening put 166 people to work like our waitress, who had worked in real estate. She and the hostess were friendly, the food was good, the place was clean and the service was efficient, which it had to be to handle the crowds. Olive Garden has a following. In a Bulletin “retail wish list” survey in January 2007, it was locals’ No. 2 most desired business, trailing only Trader Joe’s, which Bend got in March 2008. Chain stores and restaurants raise some people’s hackles, but they wouldn’t exist if consumers didn’t demand their products. Kohl’s and Olive Garden provide two more choices for people to spend their money. And isn’t that the American way, choice? I’ve got another place to shop and another place to eat, which I appreciate. In fact, I might return to Kohl’s when those breadsticks necessitate another pair of pants. John Stearns, business editor, can be reached at 541-617-7822 or at jstearns@bendbulletin.com.

G2 Sunday, March 7, 2010 • THE BULLETIN

USI N ESS

If you have Marketplace events you would like to submit, please contact Kimberly Bowker at 541-617-7815, e-mail business@bendbulletin.com, or click on “Submit an Event” on our Web site at bendbulletin.com.

Small-business owners struggle to benefit from recovery loans By Sheryl Jean The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — Paperwork has overwhelmed Jimmie Hughes, who received an $8,100 American Recovery Capital loan for his Richardson, Texas-based telemarketing firm, Grand America. Sales at his Grand America telemarketing firm in Richardson are growing, and he’d like to add more people. But a record amount of money owed to the company and a heavy debt load are leaving it starved for cash. Last summer, Hughes applied for a $35,000 American Recovery Capital loan, part of the federal government’s stimulus plan to help small businesses. Six months later — after delays and mountains of paperwork — he received approval for $8,100. “I was so disappointed,” said Hughes, who keeps a three-inchthick file of loan paperwork on his desk. “It has been an intensely frustrating and time-consuming process.” A year ago, the Obama administration said it would provide $255 million in emergency loans for “viable” small businesses facing immediate financial hardship. The deferred-payment loans of up to $35,000 would be interest-free for five years. The program was delayed until mid-June as the U.S. Small Business Administration devised guidelines. The SBA set strict criteria for qualifying businesses and what counts as existing debt, a “viable” business and a financial hardship. Small-business owners, such as Hughes, say the program has too few lenders and too much red tape. Lenders say a new SBA loan program with separate criteria, regulations and processing is unnecessary, and they don’t have the staff to justify making such low-profit micro-loans. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, helped start the ARC loan program, but late last year she pushed a bill to end it because of its ineffectiveness. The loan funding runs through Sept. 30. “I don’t think it has worked very well because there are not many lenders participating in it,” said John Hart, president of the North Texas Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders. “Lenders don’t have much incen-

tive to make very small loans like that.” In North Texas, only about 20 lenders have made recovery loans, but nearly 140 typically make other SBA loans. Nationally, the SBA guaranteed $184.8 million in 5,726 ARC loans in that period. SBA spokesman Mike Stamler said the program has been successful, with more than half the money distributed already. Others disagree. “By no means am I satisfied,” Herbert Austin, director of the SBA’s D-FW office, said about recovery lending. ARC loans compete with existing SBA loans: Many lenders have shunned the loan program in favor of increasing “bread and butter” SBA loans by up to 15 percent this year, Austin said. Small-business owner Hughes calls himself the poster child for ARC loans. His company sells businesses everything from paper clips to traffic cones to body bags. He worked alone at home until last year, when he added about a dozen people and rented an office. Grand America’s annual sales nearly quadrupled to $581,000, but credit card and other debt used to finance the expansion grew to $157,185. New customers were slow to pay their bills, amounting to a record $88,000 owed. Hughes applied for an ARC loan to help make payments on six credit cards, a vendor loan and two bank lines of credit.

Red tape He said he applied for a loan at Chase Bank in July but never heard from his banker. After contacting Chase, he began the process anew in October. Chase spokesman Greg Hassell attributed the lag to the bank’s request for missing information. Hughes said the paperwork was overwhelming: monthly statements for each credit card, receipts for all credit card charges in the last year, the purpose of each charge, loan invoices and other documents. The biggest obstacle was when Chase requested copies of Hughes’ original promissory notes on his credit

About ARC loans What: Interest-free, fiveyear loan with a 100 percent guarantee by the Small Business Administration. Amount: Up to $35,000. Who: Small firms facing immediate financial hardship. Use: Help make up to six months of principal and interest payments on existing debt. Requirements: Financial statements must show a profit or positive cash flow in one of the last two years and sufficient projected cash flow to meet loan payments for two years. Existing debt: Includes business credit card debt, capital leases, vendor notes and SBA stimulus loans. Excluded: Businesses less than 2 years old; borrowers whose loans are “severely delinquent or whose past performance or future cash flow” indicates an unviable business; and certain businesses such as casinos. Web site: www.sba.gov/ recovery/arcloanprogram lines, but he only had documents called “terms and conditions.” Chase ended up lending Hughes $8,100, or $1,350 a month, to cover payments on his vendor loan and two credit cards for six months. Hughes, a former sheriff’s deputy and narcotics agent in Detroit, was never told why he received less than a fourth of what he requested. Chase’s Hassell said the loan program “can be helpful, but there are many federal requirements a borrower must satisfy.” Chase is the top ARC lender in the nation, with 461 loans as of Jan. 29. Lenders are wary of a program that’s vague and carries many regulations and a high projected default rate, said Tony Wilkinson, chief executive of the National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders. They’re also worried about how bank regulators will rate the loans. Bank regulators have required some lenders to put all loans held by that customer on a watch list, which means the lender must increase its reserves to cover potential loan losses, he said.

NEWS OF RECORD DEEDS Crook County

Dane and Jvon Danforth to Trace and Lisa Robison, T 14, R 16, Section 34, $233,000 Bennie L. and Diane G. Hayes to Christina D. Lilienthal, T 14, R 15, Section 27, $225,000 First Horizon Home Loans to Bruce and Deborah Core, Lost Lake Estates Subdivision Phase 2, Lot 15, $175,000 Larry and Patricia Lenin, trustees to Travis S. and Heather G. Lovejoy, trustees, Brasada Ranch 2, Lot 272, $350,000 Michael and Loni Shields to Britton L. and Charlotta C. Coffer, T 15, R 16, Section 35, $203,200.39 Myrna M. and Albert M. Long to Paul F. Solitz, Barbara J. Renison, Stone Ridge Phase 1, Lot 8, $168,900 Wells Fargo Bank NA to The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Rivers Edge Cluster Development, Lot 3, $163,731.60 Christopher and Kayla Dupont, Crystal Springs Subdivision Phase 2, Lot 43, $157,000 Wells Fargo Bank NA to The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, T 14, R 16, Section 34, $225,395.68 Eugene C. Jr. and Anne W. Prehoda to Golda Condron, Third Add. to Prineville, Lots 5-6, Block 6, $189,000 M. Ray and Bonnie J. Sessler, Bobby Kennedy II to Harold R. Angell, Buena Villa Estates, Lot 6, $240,216 Deschutes County

S.A. Group Properties Inc. to John C. Altman, Eagles Landing, Lot 4, $255,000 Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., trustee to Tyler C. and Catherina Simones and Fred and Janet Baxter, Shevlin Crest, Lot 40, $457,500 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal National Mortgage Association, Fairhaven, Phase 6, Lot 2, $208,244.13 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Wells Fargo Bank NA, Grandridge, Lot 9, $1,015,746.35 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal National Mortgage Association, Laurel

Springs, Lot 18, $278,146,31 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to HSBC Bank USA NA, trustee, Lower Bridge Estates, Lot 7, Block 4, $365,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Wells Fargo Bank NA, Dana Butler, Lot 8, Block A, $172,638.56 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., Deschutes River Recreation Homesites, Unit 9, Part 1 and 2, Lot 23, Block 42, $200,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Bank of America NA, Crosswater Phases 1 and 2, Lot 4, $270,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal National Mortgage Association, Pine Tree Meadows Phase 1, Lot 13, $210,145.21 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to U.S. Bank NA, Sandalwood Phase 2, Lot 40, $204,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Kondaur Capital Corp., Partition Plat 200564, Parcel 2, $650,000 Elaine L. Clark, trustee to Robin A. Popp, Orion Estates, Lot 19, Block 1, $225,000 Columbia Community Bank Corp. to Richard M. Inukai, trustee, Partition Plat 2006-50, Parcel 2, $177,000 Mark W. and Patricia R. Cordell, trustees, James W. Jr. and Faye L. Brayson to Jeffrey S. and Sarah E. Lillesve, T 18, R 13, Section 11, $300,000 First Horizon Home Loans to David J. and Jessica A. Kaiser, T 17, R 12, Section 36, $550,000 Bank of New York Mellon, trustee to Harold E. and Joy K. Wegner, trustees, Awbrey Glen Homesites Phase 4, Lot 65, $469,000 First American Title Insurance Co., trustee to SunTrust Mortgage Inc., Village at Cold Springs, Lot 6, $407,287.68 LSI Title Co. of Oregon LLC, trustee to Federal National Mortgage Association, Ranch Village, Lot 11, Block 6, $170,000 Recontrust Co. NA, trustee to Bank of New York Mellon, trustee, Oak

Tree Phase 1, Lot 33, $202,500 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Jason A. Mendell, Jennifer Abernathy, Sagewood, Lot 69, $220,001 Federal National Mortgage Association to Eric Rotarius, Meredith, Lot 3, $175,000 Jason Mendell to Judith Rowe, River Terrace Add. to Bend, Lot 11, Block 3, $285,000 Brian E. and Kimberly C. Smith to Roy D. and Mary E. Crossman, Rimrock West Estates Replat, Lot 3, Block 1, $200,050 Todd and Shari McKay to Donn G. and Mary C. Veenhuis, Forest Park 2, Lot 6, Block 5, $205,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., Abbot House, Unit 9, $151,616 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., Deschutes River Woods, Lot 196, Block PP, $179,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., trustee, Skyliner Summit at Broken Top Phase 3, Lot 7, $860,441.39 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Wells Fargo Bank NA, Larkspur Village Phases 3-4, Lot 55, $300,831.09 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to Federal National Mortgage Association, Jack Pine Meadows, Lot 9, $204,569.58 First American Title Insurance Co., trustee to U.S. Bank NA, trustee, Empire Village Phases 1-3, Lot 43, $343,331.97 Vergent LLC to Donald L. and Linda F. Benson, Ridge at Eagle Crest 24, Lot 1, $353,000 Westmar Properties LLC to Edmund D. and Aleta A. Nissen, Westmar Business Center Condominiums, Unit 1080-130, $177,000 Northwest Trustee Services Inc., trustee to U.S. Bank NA, trustee, Deschutes River Woods, Lot 109, Block PP, $156,242.31 Peaks at Eagle Ridge LLC to Richard A. and Sally A. Sauer, Ridge at Eagle Crest 56, Lot 126, $230,000

Dallas-based Southwest Securities Federal Savings Bank isn’t making ARC loans because of limited staff and the SBA’s projected default rate of about 65 percent on the loans, said Dave Green, president of SBA lending. “You have to dot your i’s and cross your t’s to prove to the SBA that these people were temporarily in a downturn,” he said. “If 65 percent will fail, is that temporarily impaired?” The Office of Management and Budget projected a lifetime default rate for ARC loans of 62 percent for fiscal year 2010, or eight times higher than the rate for conventional SBA 7a loans. SBA’s Stamler recently said the recovery loan default rate could be lower. ARC lender Wells Fargo has seen strong demand. After setting up a toll-free hot line last year, the bank stopped counting after it received more than 12,000 applications by December. “We’ve participated in many of the provisions of the Recovery Act, and we knew that if we helped some customers out with this that it would be beneficial to us and them,” said Tom Burke, senior vice president of Wells Fargo’s SBA lending. The bank is the nation’s No. 1 SBA lender. As of Feb. 9, Wells Fargo made $5.4 million in 183 ARC loans nationally. The government recently proposed more financial help for small businesses, but Grand America’s Hughes probably won’t line up again. “The problem is I have such a bad taste in my mouth to struggle so much through the first program that I’m extremely reluctant to get another loan,” he said. Hughes received his first government check earlier this month — seven months after he started the process.

David Woo / Dallas Morning News

Jimmie Hughes, president of the telemarketing firm Grand America, is seen with more than 4 pounds of paper work he has collected over a year while he was applying for an American Recovery Capital loan. After many delays and endless questions, the SBA funded only $8,100 of the $35,000 he requested.

FOR CENTRAL OREGON’S BEST PET!

THE CHOICE IS YOURS, IT’S TIME TO

VOTE 2010 pet pals PHOTO CONTEST

promoting pets and literacy in Central Oregon ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE LOCAL NEWSPAPERS IN EDUCATION PROGRAM

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Name ______________________________________________________________________ Mailing address ________________________________________________________________ City __________________________________ State _______________ Zip _______________ PET’S NAME • NUMBER OF VOTES X 25¢ EACH = AMOUNT (Example: Sparky • 50 x 25¢ each = $12.50)

YOUR FIRST 2 VOTES ARE FREE! PET’S NAME

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___________ Enter my vote for the pet(s) indicated and accept my fee to fund NIE ___________ Enter my vote(s) for the pet(s) indicated. Vote to support newspapers in your schools! All proceeds go to Newspapers in Education. Vote as many times as you like, but only 50 votes per form. Mail form to - The Bulletin, P.O. Box 6020, Bend, OR 97708-6020. All votes for the Pet Pals Contest must be received by March 15. The final twelve pets will be published on March 17, 2010. Rules: First 2 votes are free, additional votes must be purchased. More voting forms are available at The Bulletin reception desk at 1777 SW Chandler Ave., Bend between 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM or in The Bulletin or vote online at www.bendbulletin.com/petpals Make checks payable to NIE. Vote as many times as you like, but the maximum number of votes per newsprint form is 50. The Bulletin employees and their immediate families are not eligible to win. Ties will be decided by random drawing.

C OV ER S T ORY

THE BULLETIN • Sunday, March 7, 2010 G3

Modular

How modular stacks up

Continued from G1 Now they can order their dream homes off the shelf with coffered ceilings, geothermal heat pumps and even a shaft for an elevator for at least 15 percent less money and in less than half the time it takes to build a traditional custom house. To some, this is the future of home building. To others who have watched in horror as McMansions replace postwar bungalows, it’s another blot on the landscape threatening to multiply. “We’re instant-gratification people,” said Bob McCarrick, 39, an investment banker, as he and his wife, Kristen, 39, walked the floors and touched the drywall of their insta-mansion the first night. The McCarricks’ house was built in two weeks on an assembly line in State College, Pa. It was trucked 205 miles in 21 boxes stacked on a fleet of semis, past handcrafted English country homes built in the 1930s, to its site on York Lane. As soon as the first box was set, an e-mail popped up on Kristen’s BlackBerry with a photograph from the foreman for Haven Homes, the manufacturer: “One down, 20 to go.” At 8 the next morning, she saw her kitchen pantry dangling in the air. The McCarricks had designed a custom home 18 months ago but backed out when the banking industry melted down. Now, after three months of finish work, they’ll move into a place with a distressed stucco exterior, a cedar shake roof, and exercise, media and mud rooms, made to order for them and their three children. Compared with the house going up from scratch next door, which is all wood beams and empty window frames three months into construction, the McCarricks’ appeared in a nanosecond. And Sandy Spring Classic Homes in Bethesda, which is building both, says the house next door won’t be done until late November.

A new perspective Custom modular — it sounds like an oxymoron. But elite architects who’ve seen their business drop in the recession are teaming up with manufacturers nationwide, designing lines of Georgians, Federals, Mediterraneans and more. Computerdriven drafting is mapping out prefab rooms with the ease of a Lego game. “Without the recession, nobody would be paying attention,” said Russell Versaci, a Middleburg, Va., architect specializing in farmhouses for wealthy clients who partnered with Haven Homes, of Linthicum, Md., in 2008. A custom home built from studs can take 18 months or longer. “When I can cut that in half, that’s a thrill for people,” Versaci said. Sixty to 90 percent of the most sophisticated modular homes are built on the assembly line, depending on whether buyers choose a stock design or commission something special. Walls can be moved around, but the options are finite. With so much of the construction in a factory, buyers must make almost every decision up front, which saves money. Finish work, from facades to painting to building staircases, is done on-site. “Green” features are a big selling point: Modular walls are precisely cut and are not exposed during construction to the weather, which can cause mold and mildew, industry experts say. The modular home market has had a small high end since the

Modular home construction involves stacking pre-fabricated units of the home with a crane. “Stick-built” construction involves assembling wooden framing by hammer and nail. Here are some differences between two types of high-end custom homes: Stick-built: More options for floor PRICE plans and other custom features. Modular: At least 15 percent cheaper than stick-built ‘GREEN BUILDING’ construction. Modular: Precisely cuts walls and Stick-built: Longer construction no exposure to weather during time leads to higher cost. construction. Stick-built: Green and energyWEATHER Modular: Fabrication of modules in efficient features are unlimited. climate-controlled buildings limits PERCEPTION exposure to weather. Modular: Lingering stigma of a Stick-built: Lower threshold for trailer home; lower-quality finished construction delays because of product; financing can be difficult in weather. places unfamiliar with construction method. DESIGN Stick-built: Tried-and-true method. Modular: Multiple styles, but floor Source: Sandy Spring Classic Homes plans are limited.

Photos by Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post

The 7,200-square-foot home in Bethesda, Md., was assembled in little more than a day. The home at left is being built in a more traditional manner and is not as far along even though construction on it started earlier. Bob and Kristen McCarrick, with 6-year-old son Dylan, explore their new $2.5 million home, which was built in two weeks on an assembly line in State College, Pa., and rapidly erected in Bethesda.

mid-1980s. But manufacturers can do a lot more now to satisfy luxury buyers: more-open floor plans, higher-grade windows and doors, better moldings. Luxury prefabs mean fixed schedules and shorter construction loans with lower carrying costs. Cheaper labor and economies of scale translate into lower costs — almost $400,000 on a house such as the McCarricks’. Modular homes account for just 3 percent of the national homebuilding market, and the highend market is a small but growing slice of that. “We’re selling houses in a bad economy,” said Phil Leibovitz, a partner in Sandy Spring Classic Homes. “The void is there.” Added Jerry Smalley, president of Haven Homes, “The goal is more volume.”

Not without concern Volume is just what worries some of the McCarricks’ neighbors-to-be, who cherished a lush woodland garden around the property’s original house for 70 years. Leibovitz bought the oneacre plot, tore down the house and most of the garden, and carved the land into three lots, another of which is also set to hold a modular house. Leibovitz is “such a rapacious developer,” said Donald Spero, a venture capitalist who lives across the street. His wife, Nancy Chasen, asked, “Why would I want to see a slapped-together (modular) house when what was there was so special?” Yet Spero couldn’t help but marvel at what he saw. “I hate to say I like anything he’s doing,” he said of Leibovitz as he stopped his car to watch the attic insulation go in. “But I think

that’s neat.” The placement of another modular last fall in Bethesda was such a novelty that most neighbors gathered to watch. When John and Julie Garel and their two children moved in Jan. 1, one neighbor brought over a DVD of their house being built as a housewarming present. “She photographed it every step of the way,” Julie Garel said. The 4,000-square-foot shinglestyle looks just like the “stickbuilt” one next door. “Off-the-shelf” was a dirty word, though, when Sandy Spring bought a lot last year for a $2.9 million modular in Phillips Park, an exclusive subdivision of 46 estates under construction in Washington. Other builders putting up custom homes on the 17 acres owned by the late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri said Leibovitz would bring down the neighborhood. Phillips Park finally agreed to the deal, but “we tried to stay away from calling it a modular building,” said Kelly Gordon, the developer’s property manager. Marketed as a green home instead, the house with a curved roof, elevator shaft and portico made in the factory was placed five days before Christmas. “I can honestly tell you, I haven’t heard one complaint,” Gordon said. Maybe not from residents. But Jim Gibson is still fuming. The custom builder’s pebble-dash stucco and brick house two doors down is under contract for $2.8 million, but he has no offers on his $3.8 million European stucco villa across the hill. “You’re telling me it’s OK for people in this neighborhood to see homes coming in on boxes?” he asked. Another modular is on the

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way. Lee Alexander and his wife closed on a lot last week and designed a 5,500-square-foot modular with cathedral ceilings and three underground garages for about $2.5 million. They looked at Gibson’s homes. “I asked Jim, ‘You tell me what’s better about your house,’ “ said Alexander, a lawyer. “He said he couldn’t build us a house for that price.” Over on York Lane, the final structural assembly took place Friday. On Monday, workers were measuring ductwork for air conditioning. It’s impossible to tell where the foyer that arrived in a box starts and ends, where the den next to it was lowered in. “So, babe, what do you think?” Bob McCarrick asked his wife as he stood in the foyer the night that last box came off the truck. “Babe, so what do you think?” Kristen called back from the kitchen. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” her husband replied. “People get this stigma of modular. But we designed our home like we wanted it designed.”

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G6 Sunday, March 7, 2010 • THE BULLETIN

S D Noise isn’t always sign of brake trouble By Paul Brand (Minneapolis) Star Tribune

The brakes on my 2003 Ford Expedition make a rubbing or grabbing noise when I use them. The dealer found nothing wrong. Does this sound like a problem? Noise from the contact between brake pads and brake rotors/discs is not abnormal. If the components aren’t worn to the point of needing replacement, have the dealer or a shop deglaze the pads and scuff the rotors with a nondirectional finish pattern, then break in or “bed” the brakes to mate the pads to the rotors. This should reduce if not eliminate the noise. If the symptom is more of a shudder than just a noise, have the dealer check service bulletin 06-3-16, dated February 2006, that suggests an updated brake rotor matched to low-dust brake pads.

GM via The Washington Post

The car industry is on a quest to build smaller, lighter gasoline engines without sacrificing power. The compromise that requires is represented here by the 2010 GMC Terrain SLT-2 crossover wagon, left, and the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox LT.

Success fueled by compromise By Warren Brown Special to The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Electricity and other alternative fuels will play a big role in the automobile industry by 2025. But “big” does not mean anything resembling dominance. Radically changing our motor fuels regimen requires a political will and foresight not yet evident in the United R E V I E W States. It demands new fueling and safety infrastructures, a difficult public and private pursuit fraught with winners, losers and inevitable political struggle. That means gasoline will be around for a while, especially in America, as long as car companies continue building smaller, lighter gasoline engines without sacrificing power. Welcome to the age of appealing compromise, represented by the 2010 GMC Terrain SLT-2 crossover wagon. It matters not that we’ve seen this one before in the discernibly different body of the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox LT. There’s a story about compromise there, too. Car manufacturers call it “badge engineering.” It’s a strategy to reduce vehicle development and manufacturing costs while appealing to different market niches, usually at variable prices. It works like this: A manufacturer uses the same basic vehicle structure or “platform.” Computer-assisted design is employed to change the look and feel of the end product. All major car manufacturers do it, or

2010 GMC Terrain/ Chevrolet Equinox Base price for Terrain: $24,250-$31,300 Base price for Equinox: $22,615-$29,970 Type: The Terrain and Equinox are based on the same light-truck platform. They are identical in structure and components; both are available with front-wheel drive or allwheel-drive. Engine: The 2.4-liter inline four-cylinder engine (182 horsepower/172 foot-pounds of torque) is standard in the Terrain and Equinox. All models have a six-speed automatic transmission that also can be shifted manually. Mileage: 26 mpg city/highway on front-wheel-drive, 4-cylinder vehicles something similar to it. What matters today is satisfying consumers’ contradictory needs and desires: power with fuel economy; maximum safety with speed and handling; SUV utility and ruggedness with sedan ride and even sports car appearance (the Acura ZDX and Honda Crosstour, for example); station wagon practicality with a rugged SUV look, though lacking the ability for truly tough off-road runs (the Terrain); and a mom-mobile with the persona of Sarah Palin (the Equinox). Would you like proof that this world of compromise is work-

ing? Go to any Chevrolet or GMC dealership that survived GM’s blitzkrieg reorganization under bankruptcy. The remaining Chevrolet dealers are begging for as many Equinoxes as they can get. Buick-GMC dealers (formerly Buick-Pontiac-GMC) are doing the same thing in pursuit of the Terrain. Both models are runaway hits — for different reasons. My wife, Mary Anne, and I discovered as much in driving both models. Equinox buyers wanted a stylish family vehicle — as opposed to a “real” SUV, a minivan or a station wagon. They also wanted what they considered “fair” fuel economy, which means good mileage for the vehicle’s size and intended use. Most Equinox buyers we spoke to were more interested in hauling family, groceries and light loads. They went for GM’s 2.4-liter, inline four-cylinder engine with 182-horsepower and 172-foot-pounds torque. It satisfied their power needs and wants, and kept them reasonably happy at the gas pump, with an estimated 16 to 24 mpg in city traffic and 24 to 34 mpg on the highway. We chose the same engine for our time in the Terrain, which turned out to be an unpopular choice for other Terrain drivers/ owners, or people who wanted the rugged looks, bigger engine and the occasional function of an SUV without an SUV’s gasguzzling nature. Terrain people wanted the power of a V-8 with the fuel

economy of a V-6, or the fueleconomy of a 4-cylinder engine as long as it could deliver 200 horsepower or more. They were unabashed in their pursuit of contrary desires. More Terrain people also mentioned their preference for all-wheel drive, which is available on the Terrain and the Equinox. Maybe that’s because we drove an all-wheel-drive Terrain in the East Coast’s brutal snowstorms, during which it performed beautifully. By comparison, we drove the Equinox, including a frontwheel-drive model, in the balmy days of summer, when it served us well, too. Still, Terrain drivers and owners tended to lean more toward GM’s line of direct fuel-injected V-6 engines that come with 264-horsepower and all the chutzpah of a V-8. It had a combined 23 city-highway mileage. Techno-compromises, such as getting more power out of smaller gasoline engines, will remain a reality as long as car companies keep giving buyers what GM is giving them in the Terrain and Equinox — excellent fit and finish, differentiated design and feel, comfort, safety and utility — all at an affordable price. Performance is there. But it’s for real-world drivers who understand that when hauling family and stuff, “performance” means more than zipping around corners at high speeds. That also will hold true for alternatively fueled vehicles, when they finally arrive in meaningful numbers.

Paul Brand, author of “How to Repair Your Car,” is an automotive troubleshooter, driving instructor and former race car driver. E-mail questions to paulbrand@startribune.com. Please explain the problem in detail and include a daytime phone number.

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If you’re someone who likes to maintain a car in mint condition — washed and waxed and polished to perfection — then perhaps you already know that no matter how sparkling clean you may scrub a set of wheels, the shine won’t last longer than the first time disc brakes are used. That’s because when brakes go to work, the action of padded brake calipers squeezing against metal brake G I Z M O S discs wear away the pads in the form of black, rubber dust that coats the wheel and can build up on painted fenders by the wheel well. Those unsightly deposits of brake-pad dust can mar an otherwise clean car and, if allowed to remain on wheels and fenders, eat at the delicate paint or pricey wheels. But here’s a way to eliminate that ugly dust: Block it from reaching the wheels and fenders by simply installing a set of Kleen Wheels. These round discs snap into place on the inner side of each wheel and prevent brake dust from splattering on the wheel or fender. The shields fit like hubcaps, but since they attach to the inner side of a wheel they cannot be seen. Also, they won’t affect the wheel balance when mounted properly because the discs are self-centering. Mounting is easy: Simply remove a wheel, snap the disc into place on the inside of the wheel, then bolt the wheel back in place. Kleen Wheels come from California Car Cover Company priced at $74.99 for a set of four (item #KLE100). Order a set at 800-423-

I have a 2006 Buick LaCrosse. Ever since it was new, I have had problems with the dashboard lights. Early in the morning

Dr. Coutin has over 15 years expertise in... • Asthma • Allergens • Sinus Disease • Bronchitis • Food Allergies • Recurrent Wheezing Recurring Ear Infections • Hives & Hay Fever

Keep your wheels Kleen By Bob Plunkett

if I am driving west away from the sun, and in the evening when I am driving east, the dashboard lights including the clock and radio dial do not work. Once the sun comes up high enough, they work. Two different dealerships could not fix it. I called the Buick hot line, and they said there was no fix. There is now. My Alldata automotive database pulled up service bulletin 0808-42-001B dated May 2008 that describes this situation perfectly. The body control module (BCM) is commanding the headlights to turn on in low-light conditions, which reduces the brightness of the instruments, radio and clock. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Have your dealer reprogram the BCM with updated calibration files.

Bob Plunkett is a veteran automotive reporter whose articles have appeared in industry and consumer magazines for 25 years.

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