Adjust your tin foil hat accordingly

Yesterday, our blogging friend Brian Hines dropped us an email with a fabulously possible conspiracy theory.

The early paper edition of the Sunday Oregonian has an editorial entitled "Find the guts to fix Measure 37". The piece is somewhat scathing. An excerpt:

The battle over property-rights Measure 37 has turned into a tug of war over who inherits Oregon. In the future, will it be "mine" or "ours"?

On one side are 7,500 property owners who have filed private claims under Measure 37 seeking more than $12.6 billion in compensation. They know there's no money, but they want houses, subdivisions, strip malls and other developments on hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland and forestland. Many claimants would tell you its not for themselves, of course, but for "my grandchildren".

On the other side are their neighbors and the rest of us, a group that could be loosely described as the Oregon public. This includes thousands of farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by Measure 37-spawned developments, along with millions of other Oregonians who depend on the state's $4.3 billion ag industry.

Yet when Brian (and myself) looked for this editorial in the online edition, its nowhere to be found. I even typed the title of the piece into the paper's search engine and came up dry.

The piece strongly suggests that the legislature needs to get something in place immediately--as time is running out and once these M37 developments get underway, there's no stopping them.

So what gives? Did some big shot Oregonian editor get a call from a pro-37 backer, pushing the editorial from the online edition? Was someone in power at the paper who likes M37 pissed off enough to scrub the editorial? Does the O generally have a splashy editorial in the Sunday paper edition that they omit from the internets tubes?

Enquiring tin foil hat denizens want to know.