Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 2222 - 2246 of 3750
Dr. Elson Floyd leaves big shoes to fill at Washington State University. He was just 59 when he died of colon cancer on June 20. From the day he stepped onto the WSU campus in 2007 he was determined to make big changes, and he did just that. In his short eight years as WSU president, he pushed higher education along faster than universities are accustomed to moving. He began by taking a page from Gov. Gary Locke’s playbook. In 2003, Gov. Locke (D) turned the state’s budget process upside down by establishing the “priorities of gover...
Everyone knows where the debate over gay marriage is going next. Now that the Supreme Court has imposed its edict on the land, the question is whether religious institutions and people of faith will still be permitted to act on moral beliefs that the court has portrayed as bigoted and deeply wounding. In his long prose-poem about love masquerading as a judicial opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy made a bow to these concerns. He cited the First Amendment for the proposition that religions and those who adhere to them “may continue to advocate w...
Now that the Supremes have handed down what President Barack Obama called the “thunderbolt” ruling allowing gay marriage, it is the law of the land, and it’s kinda fun to watch the various Republican candidates try to suck up to their conservative — make that ultra-conservative — base with varying degrees of intensity. There are those who are thundering their opposition, like Mike Huckabee, who promises not to wave the “white flag” of surrender to the decision. Even more contemptuous are those who try to go both ways, the Scott Walkers and L...
Jerry Jones, editor of the Gazette, just celebrated his 50-year mark at the Gazette. He joined the paper in June, 1965. This is a remarkable milestone. The story announcing his arrival on staff was primarily dedicated to the person he was replacing. It was a short story, on the lower right of the front page. At the end, Jerry was briefly introduced. Apparently, nobody imagined at that time that he would become an institution in the county. Jerry is a well-known figure. He can been seen at high school sporting events, council meetings and...
Some may remember the infamous Seattle billboard: “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?" The billboard appeared in April 1971 after Boeing shed 60,000 jobs at its Puget Sound plants. The collapse spurred the state to diversify its economy. Seattle, in particular, has become one of the world’s hubs for software, health care and life sciences research. One of the key ways to stimulate innovative life sciences research is the Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF). Established in May 2005 to help attract life sciences res...
Bad Road My wife and I have lived here at 401 Draper/Brown Road for twenty nine years, and we don’t remember this road being this bad. I would believe it is from a lack of attention, rather than storm damage. Although I believe that has happened elsewhere. Our road is so washboarded now we have to hold on to our back teeth to keep them in. The problem I see with most Whitman County roads is they have no base except bedrock. Gravel will not stay put. It moves to the barrow pits in no time at all. I hate to think we have to drive over our road a...
Jeb Bush is onto something, and it’s a shame. A book he co-wrote 20 years ago has come to light again, just as he has formally declared that he’s an official presidential candidate — now that’s he’s finished sucking all the money out of being an unannounced one. In the book “Profiles in Character,” he includes a chapter touting the “Restoration of Shame,” his Scarlet Letter prescription for society: “One of the reasons more young women are giving birth out of wedlock and more young men are walking away from their paternal obligations is that...
The last time Jeb Bush ran for office, it was 13 years ago. Barack Obama was serving in the Illinois state Senate. No one had heard of Obamacare or the tea party, and wouldn’t for years. It was before the invasion of Iraq, before Hurricane Katrina, before the financial meltdown. We had just invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. It was a political epoch ago. If timing is everything in politics, Bush has, among other things, a timing problem. He had an exemplary record as a conservative reformer in Florida almost a decade a...
The WSU community was shocked Saturday as news spread of President Elson S. Floyd's death. Though I did not have many interactions with the man deemed a legacy in the past weeks, the times I did have had profound influence and have brought me to where I am today. As a senior deciding where to attend college, I received an invitation from Floyd to attend a Future Cougar's Day in Seattle. I remember clearly as Floyd entered the stands at Safeco Field where the small audience was and personally shook everyone's hand, taking the time to speak with...
Yakima Valley farmers have the same problem as their California counterparts: there just isn’t enough water for crops, migrating fish and people. In California this year, an estimated 564,000 acres of prime cropland will be left unplanted because of the fourth straight year of drought. Economists at the University of California, Davis estimate the drought has caused $2.7 billion in economic losses and cost 18,000 farm workers their jobs. The water shortage is so acute in California that Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent reduction, which has...
Difficult job Before pointing too many fingers at our beleaguered Secret Service agency and its recent foibles, we should consider its success so far in its bottom line responsibility: to keep President Obama and family alive and injury-free. Interviewed during Obama’s 2012 visit to Portland, Oregon, the Secret Service reported that “Obama faces more death threats than any other president. More than 30 a day” (Portland Oregonian, 7/28/12). This is consistent with the big spike in US hate groups, spread quite evenly over all states except Hawai...
A quasi-religious movement now has a genuinely religious leader. The pope’s encyclical on the environment is being hailed for its embrace of science, although it is about as scientific as the Catholic hymnal. Pope Francis writes that Sister Earth “now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Really? Is that what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says? The Catholic Church brings comfort and meaning to the lives of countle...
For anyone who thought there was the slightest chance of maintaining a sense of personal space, it’s time to get real. Face recognition is here, which means that cameras and sophisticated computers will recognize you even as you, uh, head down the street. Stores will spot you as you pass by; they’ll tap into the minute details of your life and either send enticing emails to your smartphone or alert security if, fairly or unfairly, you’re deemed to be a shoplifting risk or in some other way undesirable. The latest from the puny efforts to regul...
The last few weeks have seen momentous events in the history of the United States. The long battle over the national health care program has been ended by the Supreme Court. Not everybody is delighted with the decision, but it opens the way for some serious, unemotional discussion on how to improve it. That, in itself, may give a chance for constructive bipartisan thinking—something which should have been the goal from the very beginning. The Supreme Court also declared that bans against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. This did not del...
Connecticut is in a deep financial pickle and is in danger of seeing a mass exodus of businesses looking for states where taxes are lower and private sector employers are welcome. Connecticut, a state of 3.6 million people, just passed a two-year $40 billion state budget, which is roughly the amount Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) and lawmakers in Olympia are grappling over. But an accumulation of tax increases has Connecticut taxpayers steaming and looking to leave. This is what happened. Right after Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) assumed office in...
Every time Hillary Clinton makes a left-wing policy pronouncement, it is, in effect, another eulogy marking the death of the coalition and style of politics that twice made her husband president. Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican Party, while holding traditional Democratic voters. He made significant geographic inroads, winning a handful of Southern states both in 1992 and in his 1996 re-election, when he narrowly won the popular vote in the region as a whole. This is all very...
I certainly am not the first to call Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” a “Hog and Hog” event, since we’re talking barbecued pork and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Ernst is a newbie member of the U.S. Senate whose successful campaign was built on a TV ad where she spoke about her youthful farm experience castrating pigs. Therefore, she went on, she’d know how to cut fat in Washington. That, apparently, is what gets you elected in Iowa. And though this kind of campaign might be cause to worry about the state’s outsized influence on who becomes preside...
The state has declared a drought emergency. Snowpack has been at record lows in many areas. In fact, more than 70 percent of the snow monitoring stations have reported record low snowpack. The official state prognosis for the year is not good. Maia Bellon, director of the Department of Ecology, says that as bad as it is now “conditions are likely to get worse.” The drought can jeopardize municipal water supplies, orchards and vineyards could be seriously impacted, crop losses are possible and fish populations face hardship. It is a sta...
In Olympia these days, lawmakers are high centered in a second special session over the budget to operate the state for the next two years. The stalemate has come down to the choice of raising taxes or funding government within the current revenues. Gov. Jay Inslee and fellow Democrats call for a new 5 percent capital gains tax they estimate will generate another $550 million. In addition, Inslee has proposed a new billion dollar tax scheme on carbon emissions. On the other hand, Republicans believe the projected $3.2 billion (9.2 percent)...
Memorial Day Memorial Day number 152 has come and gone. The exact number varies as five different years and many different places claim its origination. They are all connected to the Civil War, freeing slaves, and the horrendous casualties and destruction that resulted. President Johnson was the one who made it a national holiday although not all of the states honor the day. My first recall of Memorial Day was shortly before Pearl Harbor when families went to the cemeteries to honor ancestors in addition to Veterans. Afterwards, we had a...
If you live outside Maryland and happened to notice that Martin O’Malley announced in Baltimore that he is running for president as a Democrat, you might well be asking yourself: “Who is Martin O’Malley, and why is he even bothering, since Hillary Clinton has things sewn up?” For starters, O’Malley is the former governor of that state and former mayor of that city. So now you know the “who,” but what about the “why”? What would possess anyone to waste his time and other people’s money to seek a party nomination that is already a done deal...
President Barack Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn’t seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin’s predation in Ukraine or China’s aggression in the South China Sea. It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation’s security, that brings out his inner Churchill. In remarks to the Coast Guard Academy commencement, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it “one of the most severe threats...
The Transportation and Safety Administration did not pass a series of tests involving airport security. That was bad enough. But, subsequently, it was disclosed that 73 TSA agents have suspected terrorism ties. That is 73 people ensconced in the very process that is designed to root out terrorists. That is 73 people hired to stop people just like them. Not only do these agents screen passengers and luggage, they are charged with screening airline and airport employees and airport vendors. Although the TSA employment checks have been classified...
Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2010. Back in the 1980s, my grandparents, Dick and Emily, moved to Florida because they wanted a better climate to argue in. They had one of those relationships where they fought so much they couldn’t even agree on what they disagreed on. Their little home in Florida was a few dozen yards from a boggy pond that kept trying to evolve into a swamp. Dick liked to go down to the water’s edge and feed marshmallows to the small alligator who lived there, probably hoping that one day i...
Over the last few years, one of the remarkable successes is the record salmon returns to the Columbia River and its tributaries. Conversely, one of the biggest disappointments is low recovery of delta smelt in San Francisco Bay. To protect the smelt, a federal court ordered that water be flushed into the San Francisco Bay – 1.4 trillion gallons since 2008. That was enough water to sustain 6.4 million drought-stricken Californians for six years. Yet a survey of young adult smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta last fall yielded just e...
