GORDON SMITH IMAGE: chrisryanphoto.com

Winners

1 Relief at last! Three-thousand-plus Portlanders with antiquated sewer hookups can finally get off the pot and replace their creaky pipes. The city is moving ahead with a plan that will make septic retrofits less costly for homeowners. Sometimes shit actually happens.

2 Oregon auto dealers got an early Christmas present from President Bush. The feds won’t let Oregon and other states limit greenhouse gas emissions in cars sold here. More hot air for the global-warming problem.

3 Disabled drivers get a break—for six months, anyway—as the Portland City Council passes on a new state law that revokes certain privileges for people who have disabled parking permits but don’t use wheelchairs (see “Space Odyssey,” WW , Dec. 17, 2007). No luck for any of us, disabled or otherwise, dealing with malfunctioning meters.

Losers

1 The Portland FBI office looked like the Keystone Kops for its arrest of 71-year-old retiree Robert Christie, the so-called “Waddling Bandit.” Suspected of pulling off a string of bank robberies, Christie got the all-clear after his family supplied alibis. The FBI’s motto? If it waddles like a duck, arrest it.

2 U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) may not have a drawl, but he’s still hard to understand. At a retirement party for Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Smith said the media wolfpack had “misconstrued” Lott’s expression of admiration five years ago for former Sen. Strom Thurmond’s onetime support of segregation. That’s after Smith himself denounced Lott for those very remarks in 2002. Now Smith says he’s the one being misconstrued. Y’all come back now, y’heah?

3 School teachers, volunteer firefighters, board volunteers and other public officials must negotiate the thicket of a confusing state ethics law taking effect Jan. 1 (see “Ethics Bomb,” WW , Dec. 19, 2007), thanks to a judge refusing to halt the new rules. Meanwhile, be sure to ask state lawmakers to buy you some holiday cheer. Their ethics “rewrite” still lets them spend their campaign cash on all manner of unrelated expenses.

4 Spelling took a hit last week when two politicos made it known the ABCs were for the hoi polloi—not speshul peepul seeking elected office. First, City Commissioner Sam Adams misspelled the names of three school officials on his list of education endorsers. Then U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) sent an email asking recipients to support former Oregon House Speaker Jeff “Merkely” in his bid for the Democratic Senate nomination.