Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
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The Jeffrey Epstein case establishes beyond a doubt that if you're a sexual predator, it pays to be a rich and connected sexual predator. Epstein, now dead of an apparent suicide before his accusers had their day in court, worked the system and benefited from advantages and breaks unimaginable to anyone who didn't jet around with influential friends. The multimillionaire financier who lived in Palm Beach, Fla., and Manhattan, N.Y., used his resources to build a network of sexual predation and then used his resources to escape meaningful legal...
At some point in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI was in charge of the KKK. It conducted an operation that infiltrated, manipulated and ran the group into the ground. With violent white hate again on the rise, we should take some inspiration -- even if the methods can't be replicated -- from the FBI's past grappling with racist extremists. If there were any doubt that the country has a white nationalist problem, the shocking attack on an El Paso, Texas, Walmart should remove it. These self-radicalizing freaks, a...
There was a time when the left considered McCarthyism the worst of all political tactics. That was before it became useful to question Mitch McConnell's loyalty to his country. The Senate majority leader's offense is blocking Democratic-sponsored election security bills, which has occasioned the sort of charges that Democrats have spent the better half of the past 50 years ruling out of bounds. The Washington Post headlined a column, "Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset." It wasn't tongue-in-cheek. "Let's," urged Post columnist Dana Milbank,...
Beto O'Rourke, the losing Texas senator candidate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate, had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole. The former congressman told a roundtable of refugees and immigrants in Nashville, Tenn., "This country was founded on white supremacy. And every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression." Just in case the newcomers were inclined to believe...
The American middle class just got a lot richer. Joe Biden, who invariably and tiresomely refers to himself as "Middle-Class Joe," made $15 million the first two years after the end of the Obama administration. According to one estimate, it takes an annual income of $420,000 to be in the top 1 percent of earners. Biden made 26 times that in 2017. He used to be remarkable among top politicians for not being very wealthy, but even in the old days of straitened circumstances, he and his wife were making about $400,000 a year, enough to make the to...
The women of the U.S. national soccer team are famous for being extraordinary athletes, repeat world champions -- and plaintiffs. The team's lawsuit alleging pay discrimination against the U.S. Soccer Federation has done much to define its identity. A nearly perfect run through the World Cup has been widely interpreted as vindication of the merits of its case, so much so that fans chanted "equal pay" after the U.S. victory in the final over the Netherlands and booed the head of FIFA, the sponsor of the World Cup, during the trophy ceremony....
We live in an era of public ugliness, of architects who deliberately make their forms unsightly and inhuman, and of public art installations that are invariably ridiculous. The most obvious exception is the ballpark, which has gotten more beautiful rather than less is a great example of renewal through a return to tradition. Paul Goldberger, a former architecture writer for The New York Times, traces this journey in his wonderful new book "Ballpark." He rightly calls the ballpark "one of the greatest of all American building types" and argues...
The worry was that the Trump administration was ginning up fake intelligence about Iran blowing up oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz to justify a war against Iran. Then the next week President Donald Trump said the Iranian attacks weren't a big deal. The episode is another indication of the underlying modesty -- not a very Trumpian word -- of the administration. Subtract Trump's taste for nonstop controversy and rhetorical brinkmanship and you're left with an incrementalist center-right government that has pursued an expansionary fiscal...
The more the climate debate changes, the more it stays the same. Polls show that the public is worried about climate change, but that doesn't mean it is ready to bear any burden or pay any price to combat it. If President Donald Trump claws his way to victory again in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go through abortion and climate change, two issues on which the Democrats are most confident in their righteousness and willing to embrace radical policies that appeal to their own voters much more than anyone else. Joe Bide...
Clarity of thought and expression about moral issues is not a core competency of CEOs. If anyone had any doubt, look no further than the "historic" pro-abortion statement by nearly 200 CEOs that ran in a full-page ad in The New York Times. It is a festival of absurdity and euphemism, an exercise in perverse virtue-signaling to a progressive audience that believes that maintaining one of the most permissive pro-abortion regimes in the developed world is a virtue. The CEOs define abortion as "equality" ("Don't Ban Equality") and, of course,...
Breaking news: Some guy posted a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi. But fear not. The website The Daily Beast sprang into action. It tracked down the random, Trump-supporting man who allegedly posted the offending clip, hounded him until he talked, then published his name and other details about his life in a shocking instance of harassment masquerading as journalism. The man whose identity was revealed by The Daily Beast is, by the publication's account, an unemployed African American forklift operator who lives in New York City and runs a...
Donald Trump and Bill de Blasio agree: Joe Biden should be ashamed of his support for the 1994 crime bill. The bipartisan legislation that was long a point of pride for Bill Clinton, who signed it into law, is now in such malodor that CNN the other day identified it in a chyron as the "infamous" crime bill. Trump says that African Americans won't vote for someone who supported the crime bill, which he calls a "dark period in American History" that Biden should apologize for. De Blasio, the no-hope presidential candidate, agrees, deeming the...
The Joe Biden polling surge has raised the frightful specter of Democratic rationality. What if Donald Trump hasn't driven Democrats insane, sending them into a spiral of self-defeating radicalism, but instead made them shockingly pragmatic? Biden's early strength suggests it may be the latter, that the reaction to Trump is so intense that it has crossed some sort of event horizon from fevered fantasy of his leaving office early via resignation or impeachment to a cold-eyed, win-at-any-cost practicality. If this is true, one of the exogenous...
The surprise about the big New York Times story on Donald Trump's tax returns is that there are no real surprises. Trump's taxes have been an obsession of the left since he, in violation of a long-standing norm, reneged on his promise to release his returns during the 2016 campaign. Democrats counted as one of the advantages of taking the House that they could demand Trump's returns. The dispute resulting from the administration's refusal to turn them over is now probably headed to the Supreme Court. All the while, the expectation, or at least...
The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller's commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing. It's not as though we don't already have the special counsel's version of events. He mustered enormous investigate resources and took two years to write a 400-page report that is available to the public and presumably carefully written (although not necessarily carefully thought through). That should be enough for Mueller to stand on, and enough for Congress to make a decision to impeach or not impeach,...
No one enjoys getting impeached, and if it happens to him, Donald J. Trump will be no exception. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine any potential target of impeachment in Anglo-American history relishing the fight more than Trump. He'd rather be done with the Mueller investigation in all its permutations, but there's no one better suited to being at the center of a harshly partisan, deeply personal political and legal donnybrook that will ultimately be just for show. Trump famously told top aides at the beginning of his administration...
There was Bernie Sanders at a Fox News Channel town hall, not giving an inch in a forum every Democratic presidential candidate has shunned. His reward was a cataract of good reviews, and monster ratings. Sanders had a solid hour to try to reach people not favorably inclined to his worldview, at the very least demonstrating that he's willing to show up outside his political silo. Why hadn't any of the other Democrats done it before? Because they lacked the verve and ideological self-confidence of Sanders, as well as the independent streak to...
"I believe that this church offers the carefully discerning such cause for admiration," the 14th-century French philosopher Jean de Jandun wrote of Notre Dame, "that its inspection can scarcely sate the soul." A cultural calamity played out on live TV when the Paris cathedral that has been a focal point of Christendom for so long was apparently gutted by a raging fire, destroying a significant part of an inheritance built up over hundreds of years in a few hours. Notre Dame stands for so many qualities that we now lack -- patience and staying...
The fast-food chain Chick-fil-A is wanted on suspicion of aiding and abetting Christian organizations. The home of the "original chicken sandwich" was banned from its second airport in two weeks for the offense of contributing to Christian groups deemed anti-gay by its critics. The San Antonio City Council voted to exclude the restaurant from its airport, and Buffalo, New York, soon followed suit, thus denying travelers the option of juicy chicken sandwiches and waffle fries in the cause of social justice. This is about punishing the...
When historians look back to this era, they will wonder why we insisted on outsourcing our border control to a foreign country. President Donald Trump's threat to close down the southern border with Mexico isn't a sign of strength, but of frustration fading into desperation. He is reacting with understandable alarm at a spiraling migrant crisis on the border, and is looking to Mexico to address it because we are unwilling to do it on our own -- not unable, unwilling. There were more than 100,000 apprehensions at the border in March, an...
The release of Robert Mueller's finding that Donald Trump didn't collude with Russia should settle a question his critics -- and, quietly, some of his allies -- have asked repeatedly over the past two years: Why was he acting so guilty? It turns out that he was acting innocent, only in a typically combative, over-the-top Trump fashion. The left and the media were never willing to credit the idea that Trump sincerely believed that he was being treated unfairly – because he was. When Trump said in his infamous Lester Holt interview that the T...
The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated itself an organization hostile to women and people of color. It fired its co-founder Morris Dees for unexplained reasons and removed his bio from its website at the same time it pledged to train its management in "racial equity, inclusion and results." Simultaneous with the cashiering of Dees after nearly 50 years at the SPLC, roughly two dozen employees wrote a letter warning "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this...
We interrupt the talk of the president "manufacturing" a crisis at the border with this hair-raising report about the crisis at the border. Alarming new numbers about border apprehensions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection should puncture the lazy conventional wisdom about the border being under control, except in the lurid imagination of President Donald Trump. More than 76,000 migrants were apprehended crossing the southern border last month, the highest February in more than 10 years and the highest month of the Trump administration. Th...
The race for 2020 is taking shape, although there are still significant unknowns, including whether Donald Trump will get a serious primary challenge. His fiercest Republican critics say, "Yes -- please, please, yes." They are probably wrong, and it's certainly nothing to root for. Trump's dominance of the party begins with his lockdown support of the right, forcing any primary challenger to the left. This isn't fertile territory. Self-identified moderates and liberals are only a fraction of the party, and it is grass-roots conservative...
Robert Kraft's name will now long be associated with one of the most despicable scourges of modern life, and rightly so. The New England Patriots owner is charged with soliciting prostitution at a Florida massage parlor busted as part of a sex-trafficking ring. Kraft denies it, although the police in Jupiter, Florida, say they have video evidence. The charges against him, and two other high-flying men from the financial world, represent an important front in the fight against sex trafficking. Authorities should be doing everything they can to...
