Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 1670 - 1694 of 3750
All of the things that went wrong in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 appear to have been corrected with Houston's recent Hurricane Harvey. Chalk it up to a series of important lessons learned. By now everyone knows that Harvey came ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, dumped a record 51 inches of rain on 22 million people from Corpus Christi to Port Arthur, TX, and sent thousands to shelters. The hurricane hit Houston, America's fourth largest city and an urban area which accounts for 3 percent of our nation’s GDP. It had the makings o...
Extend medicare In 2009 all Republican and two Democratic senators killed ACA’s (ObamaCare’s) proposed “public option” that likely would have led to national single-payer health care (Medicare-for-all). Although vastly superior in coverage and more equitably affordable than Republicans’ recent draconian bills, ObamaCare may hardly cut overall costs. Fortunately, single-payer Medicare-for-all would both greatly cut costs and markedly increase ObamaCare’s improved coverage, impossible until health insurance companies lose control. Canadian si... Full story
One of the least safe places to be in Berkeley, California, is in the vicinity of someone holding a "No Hate" sign. So-called anti-fascist, or antifa, activists bearing shields emblazoned with those words assaulted any of the handful of beleaguered Trump supporters they could get their hands on at a small political rally over the weekend. All in the cause, mind you, of demonstrating their supposed opposition to hatefulness. Too many people were willing to perfume antifa in the wake of Charlottesville, where it clashed with Nazi thugs who caused...
What I'm about to describe is Fake News -- it hasn't happened, at least so far. However, I think it's just a matter of time. At some Nazi/KKK rally where some of President Donald Trump's "good people" are joining the lunatic-fringe types in hateful demonstrations, they are confronted by angry counterprotestors. Someone pulls a gun and starts firing. The violence escalates, and people die. You say that it has already occurred, in Charlottesville, Virginia? True, that's where an angry right-wing lunatic took his car and slammed into a crowd of... Full story
YYYY Thank God for neighbors – especially Steptoe neighbors who fight fire. #!*! Real farmers spray their thistles and keep the ditches clean, no cattails to plug up the ditches. Send your pet peeves and okeydokes to Whitman County Gazette P.O Box 770, Colfax, WA 99111 or drop them off at the Gazette office...
The Palouse Empire Fair is back on center stage. The fair has been a long-running show for the county at its permanent home outside Colfax at Mockonema, at the intersection of Highway 26 and Endicott Road. Every year improvements are made at the site. The most dramatic ones to greet visitors this year are the additions and improvements to the Community Building. Regardless of the changes and improvements, the fair is really about people. It is one of the greatest meeting places in the county. Rural residents and city residents mingle at the... Full story
Last February, the European Parliament rejected a tax on robots, but took the first steps to regulate their development and deployment. The legislation also aims to establish liability for the actions of robots including self-driving vehicles. Europe’s governing body, while rejecting the tax to be dedicated to worker training, overwhelmingly passed a resolution to study regulating robots. In an interview with Quartz.com, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he believes that the government should tax companies’ use of robots. That would tem...
I had a birthday last week the same day as the eclipse. It was kind of neat that most of America celebrated and looked skyward with anticipation during my birthday. Most of my many birthdays aren’t any big deal. They just come and go without a lot of fanfare. We didn’t celebrate birthdays much when I was a kid. We acknowledged them, but there were so many seats around our dinner table that we would have been celebrating much of the time. There is one, however, that stands out. It was my 28th. I was in Viet Nam flying Shadow Gunships. We had...
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took the highly unusual step over the weekend of publicly explaining why he won't resign. He responded to Yale classmates who had written an impassioned open letter urging him to quit in protest over what they called (ridiculously overstating their case) President Donald Trump's "support of Nazism and white supremacy." There was no reason for Mnuchin -- a busy man and one of the most important economic officials on the planet -- to bother replying unless he feels a little defensive. After Charlottesville, the...
So, we have the "alt-right," the "alt-left" and a president who is clearly not "alt-there." What Donald Trump is fast becoming is alt-isolated, as the accumulated disgust for his constant degradation of the office has boiled over. After days of vacillating, his news conference tantrum -- where he argued that there is a moral equivalence between Nazis, Klansmen and other violent white nationalist haters and those who fight them -- revealed the depths of his immorality, amorality or just plain stupidity. That was the last straw for many who had...
Hurricane Harvey smashed into the Texas Gulf Coast. The predictions were dire. Almost every hurricane computer model predicted the storm would make landfall and then stall out, drenching the coast and Houston in particular. The computers were right, although ‘drenching” is hardly the word for what is happening in Texas. Early on, it was estimated that 11 trillion gallons would fall on Houston. Some places have suffered from approximately 50 inches of rain in just a few days. And, the rains continue. As of this writing, the storm, after lea... Full story
The incident in Charlottesville is a tragedy. Most accounts blame the white supremacists. Their protest has been compared with KKK meetings at the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It was a white supremacist who drove the vehicle into the crowd. A few reporters, however, attribute part of the blame to the counter protesters who expressed their views forcefully and physically. No one, however, has thought to blame the city leaders who decided to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. It was a dumb decision. Lee is a national hero....
Recently, family, friends and dignitaries gathered at Hurricane Ridge near Port Angeles to celebrate the designation of the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness at Olympic National Park honoring Washington’s distinguished three-term governor and U.S. senator. Today, America needs a calming voice of reason – a steady and measured leader with the strength, experience and ability to unify our nation. Daniel J. Evans fits that mold. At 91, Evans is still spry and fit. His legacy is that he worked with Democrats as well as Republicans to get things done. The...
Inventory Have you ever looked at the buildings along Main Street in downtown Colfax and wondered about their history, their design, who built them and why? Maybe you own one of these buildings, work there, or shop there and would like answers. On Aug. 30, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Center next to the county library, you can find out. The Colfax Historic Preservation Commission, in association with AHA!, an architectural history and archaeology firm, has conducted an inventory of the historic buildings in the Colfax business core and will be... Full story
Robert E. Lee wasn't a Nazi, and surely would have had no sympathy for the white supremacist goons who made his statue a rallying point in Charlottesville, Virginia. That doesn't change the fact that his statue is now associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The statue of Lee was already slated for removal by the city, but the Battle of Charlottesville should be an inflection point in the broader debate over Confederate statuary. The monuments should... Full story
Finally President Donald Trump acknowledged in a statement that "Racism is evil," and described the "KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups" as "criminals and thugs." Put that in the "too little too late" file. It had taken two days before he could denounce the extremist bigots responsible for the deaths in Charlottesville, Virginia. Still, his immediate response was the one that matters, because it reveals what a toxic force he is. Originally he had condemned "this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many...
The rush is on. Governments and public institutions are scrambling to remove Confederate war statues and memorials. It has been coming for a long time. Most recently, Confederate flags were removed from some public property in the south. The move has picked up dramatically as a result of the protests and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. That is where racial hate groups and counter-protestors clashed. One young woman was killed when a white supremacist ran her over with a car. The uproar only increased when President Trump first failed to... Full story
Massive forest fires in western parts of Canada and the U.S. are not only choking us with layers of smoke, but are cutting off lumber supplies around our country. The result is the cost of a new home is rising because of the growing shortage of framing lumber and laminated decking. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported combination of the wildfires and the 30 percent tariff President Trump slapped on Canadian lumber producers are causing lumber shortages and drove up the average prices on new single-family homes nationwide to $406,400 in May....
Qualified? Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers said at her Aug. 10 Town Hall meeting, “I support Donald Trump because, because, because he’s a disrupter and we need to change DC. I continue to support him.” When a later question about Donald Trump was asked, she said, “Donald Trump was elected POTUS. He won the election and I’ve already told you why I support him.” So, being a disrupter is McMorris Rodgers qualification for POTUS? Another woman recently disagreed with her when she said she thought the POTUS should be: “Someone who knows his...
The first thing to know about the instantly infamous "anti-diversity screed" written by a Google software engineer is that it isn't anti-diversity or a screed. The loaded description, widely used in the press and on social media, is symptomatic of the pearl-clutching over the memo, which questions the premises and effectiveness of Google's diversity policies. The document was meant -- before getting splashed on the internet -- as an internal conversation-starter. The author posits that innate differences between the sexes may account for the... Full story
At the beginning of my reporting career, I covered a federal judge hearing a civil suit against National Guardsmen several years after the Kent State killings. The judge refused to allow transcripts of grand jury testimony from earlier criminal proceedings into evidence. Grand juries are supposed to be secret, he ruled, and allowing their deliberations into the record would mean they'd become public. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on one's perspective -- I had gotten my hands on the transcripts from sources I won't identify to this... Full story
On Monday, a total eclipse of the sun will darken parts of the country. The “path of totality” will be just south of us. It will cross onto the continent north of Newport, Ore., and will continue across the country to South Carolina with a 70-mile wide swath. The “path of totality” will pass over 14 states. In Whitman County, we will see a partial eclipse. The eclipse here will be more than 90 percent of a total eclipse. Interest in the event is high. Some airline flight plans have been changed to give passengers a glimpse. A special Amtrak tra...
Over the years my old body has been misused to the point of abuse. Although I am no stranger to operating rooms, I have put off having a foot repaired until I could no longer wear a shoe. I finally allowed the surgeons to do their magic early this week. As I lay there waiting for the anesthesiologist who was caught up in morning traffic, I pondered the issue of health care in America. Over the last eight or nine years, the news has been full of plans and counter plans to fix the medical care problem. Having nothing else to do but think, I...
So far this year, a trio of unexpected deaths has shocked Washington business and agriculture. Melanie Dressel, Ron Reimann and Jeff Brotman leave behind large shoes to fill. They came from vastly different backgrounds and political perspectives, yet it was their diversity, ingenuity and drive which makes our state and nation great. Last February, Melanie Dressel, president and CEO of Tacoma-based Columbia Bank, suddenly died of heart disease. She was 64. She was born and raised in Colville, a small farm and timber town, but stayed in Seattle... Full story
Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can't be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism. People are now literally starving -- about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year -- in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution. The phrase is the... Full story
