Free Republic

CORBETT -- David Annus didn't think twice about size when he decided to build a two-story house in his Columbia River Gorge hometown. After living in a tiny place on his parents' property with his wife and two children, he knew he wanted some breathing room when he designed a home more than eight times bigger at 5,700 square feet, including an attached three-car garage. Looking around the neighborhood, the scale blended right in with the other homes. "It's a four-bedroom house, but I don't think you could make a case for it being a McMansion," he said. But size...

CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. - For 12,000 years or more, Columbia River tribes gathered along the banks near here to do business with distant tribes. Now they want to come back - not to cut deals in fish and baskets, as their ancestors did, but to deal blackjack and poker. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs want to close a small casino on their reservation in remote central Oregon and build one on nontribal land in this town on the banks of the Columbia, much closer to Portland, the state's largest city, and the thousands of gamblers a casino would attract....