Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
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The always fashion conscious University of Oregon Ducks will play for the National Championship in the first College Football Playoffs Monday. Their opponent is Ohio State University. These teams have legitimately won their berths. Their upcoming appearance in the big game was not decided by a bunch of sloppily dressed coaches or rumpled sports reporters as in the past. The now-idle BCS computers had nothing to do with the selection. Four teams were named to the playoffs based on performance, results, strength of schedule and other...
In 2001, Boeing announced it would move its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. Today, you wonder if Boeing is having buyer’s remorse. Illinois has become one of the nation’s most unfriendly states for business. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, 850,000 people have left the state over the past 15 years, headed for other states like Texas, Florida and neighboring Indiana. If you are bleeding one person every 10 minutes, something is deeply wrong with the way the state is being run. For example, Forbes ranks Texas as the...
Candidate Barack Obama said that, as president, he would talk to anti-American dictators without precondition. He didn’t mention that he would also give them historic policy concessions without precondition. His surprise unilateral change in the U.S. posture toward the Castro dictatorship came without even the pretense of serious promises by the Cubans to reform their kleptocratic, totalitarian rule. The trade of Alan Gross, the American aid worker jailed in Cuba for the offense of trying to help Jewish Cubans get on the Internet, for three C...
What a shame that President Barack Obama finds it so much easier to negotiate with the Castros than with the Congress. Of course, he did have help with the Cuban breakthrough, what with Pope Francis leading the way. But it’s doubtful the pope would want to get in the middle of White House-Capitol Hill talks, mainly because he’d consider it a waste of time. To make the point, some members of Congress were having their heads explode at the very first word of this preliminary Cuba deal, particularly those who had built their careers with the hel...
For the first time in years, more than 50 percent of Americans think the country is doing better. They have a positive attitude about the economy and the future. Economic indicators are good. The number of jobs lost during the Great Recession have been made up. The performance of the stock market, declining deficits and the drop in gas prices all make for a positive outlook. Even so, the year was marked with unending unrest and conflicts, disasters both natural and man made and the continuing unwillingness of political leaders to compromise....
Seasons Greetings To All My Democrat Friends: Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish y...
It’s that time of year when we count our blessings. In America, they are abundant, especially this year. For starters, the unemployment rate is down from 7 percent last December to 5.8 percent. Washington State mirrors the national average. Housing starts, retail sales and our gross domestic product are all up from last year, signs of an improving economy. Since consumer spending drives economic growth, low interest rates have helped. Home mortgages and auto loans hover in the 3 to 4 percent range. Contrast that to Russia, where interest r...
More than a hundred years ago, a young girl wanted to know if Santa really existed. Her friends were telling her Santa Claus was not real. So, she wrote her newspaper to get the truth. This is the famous reply from the editor, Francis Church. Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been afflicted by skepticism in a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are little. In this great uni...
The Senate Intelligence Committee spent roughly $50 million on its investigation into the CIA and apparently couldn’t find Michael Hayden’s phone number. The committee portrays Gen. Hayden, the former CIA director, as a liar who deceived Congress about the agency’s interrogation program, yet the committee couldn’t be bothered to interview him. That’s because the committee, led by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, didn’t bother to interview anyone. The committee didn’t want to include anything that might significantly complicate it...
Enhanced interrogation techniques, or even worse, EITs — why can’t they just say “torture” as the apologists try to pretend that the CIA and our post-9/11 leaders didn’t shame America? Instead, they come up with sterile terms to describe their monstrous policies. Another one is the term that two psychologists created to describe the state of mind they wanted from U.S. captives subjected to that torture: “learned helplessness.” The intent of their brutal interrogation tactics was to create a belief by prisoners that it was pointless to...
Christmas is a difficult time for anyone grieving for a lost loved one. It is especially painful for America’s military families whose son, daughter, spouse or parent was killed in action this year. Normally, the fallen are remembered on Memorial Day in late May, but thanks to a Maine family and thousands of donors and volunteers, nearly half a million wreaths are laid on the tombstones of our fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen during the Christmas holidays. The panoramic view of Arlington’s Cemetery’s rolling hills with the white grave marke...
Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2010. I taught my daughter everything I know about volleyball, which is, in essence, how to identify a volleyball. Thus prepared, she has gone on to play the sport in high school and college, and her club team came in first place at nationals a few years ago — in other words, I did a great job. My daughter seems to believe that most of the credit should go to her for all the games and drills and practices, which is just silly. “Your natural athleticism flows through my DNA into...
Pox I couldn’t help but notice that in his partisan blast at the House of Representatives in last week’s Letter to the Editor, Norm Luther from Spokane (whom the internet shows to be the past Democrat State Committeeman from Skamania County) used the term “executive action” rather than “Executive Order” for President Obama’s illegal, illegal immigrant amnesty charade. That shows Mr. Luther knows that in spite of all the hype about an Executive Order on not deporting illegal aliens, and the stage show production about the President sig...
“Sir, this is Patton talking ... You have just got to make up Your mind whose side You’re on. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to your Prince of Peace ...” — Prayer of Gen. George S. Patton, Dec. 23, 1944 It is with Patton’s plea to the Ultimate Commanding General that Stanley Weintraub opens his book, “11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944.” It’s the tale of the worst Christmas for American soldiers since Valley Forge. The Allied breakout from Normandy after...
There have been so many times when we’ve been looking at issues in the wrong way. This is one of them. When Republican representatives, led by Paul Broun (Never-Heard-of-Him from Georgia), demanded that President Barack Obama be denied an invitation to make a State of the Union address in January, it was viewed by many as a petulant reaction to the president’s sweeping immigration executive order. That’s probably because it was. Broun also was derided as just another conservative who simply can’t get it into his head that Mr. Obama legitim...
It has been a bloody week. In Pakistan, 132 school kids were killed by Taliban murderers, shouting God is Great. In Sydney, Australia, a coffee shop was taken over by a crazed man resulting in a hostage situation and standoff with police. Three including the gunman were killed. Then, in America, a father killed six members of his ex-wife’s family before he killed himself. The hatchet attacks in New York, the vehicular assault and attack on Parliament in Canada and the furor over police shootings in this country all paint a gruesome picture o...
Rioters in Ferguson, Missouri shattered the windows of Natalie’s Cakes and More and vandalized the baking equipment. However, when owner Natalie Dubose put her story on the internet, Americans immediately responded, donating more than $260,000 to help her rebuild her business. The money was more than Dubose, an African-American small business owner, needed so she used the surplus donations to help the other 60 or so proprietors rebuild in the St. Louis suburb. The contributions were timely, because it helped her immediately restore her shop a...
Outrage So Republican House of Representatives leadership is outraged by President Obama’s executive action on immigration reform, claiming “this is not the way democracy is supposed to work.” But democracy is supposed to work by majority rule, and the real outrage is that Republican leadership, including our Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, has never allowed a vote of the full House on the bipartisan immigration bill passed 17 months ago by the Senate, even though the bill has long had enough House votes to pass. This bill, that Obama...
The White House response to Ferguson wouldn’t be complete without a meeting with Al Sharpton, the infamous agitator who has become President Barack Obama’s “go-to man on race,” in the words of a Politico headline from last August. So Sharpton was inevitably one of the civil-rights leaders at the White House. The president no doubt passed up the opportunity to direct Sharpton to the Treasury Department up the street, which would surely love to have him visit and make good on all the taxes he has avoided paying through the years. A New York Ti...
All law enforcement agencies are gearing up. They are following a long-held holiday tradition. They will be conducting emphasis patrols looking for impaired drivers. In the old days, that meant drunk drivers. Now, it means much more than that. Now, new concerns involve drivers on marijuana and other drugs. Additionally, dangers persist with inattentive drivers. These include those texting and using cell phones. We have seen the dangers of all these different types of drivers. Accidents, some fatal, have marked the highways in and around the...
Remember the Occupy movement, with all the encampments across the nation, populated by citizens taking on the 1 percent? At best, we have a vague recollection of them and their noble cause, which was to shame the country into doing something about the toxic inequality of our wealth. We took notice for a while, then lost interest as the media switched to others stories du jour. It wasn’t long before the authorities were able to sweep away their protest with nary a squeak in return from any of us, while also brushing off any hope for reform. L...
Jonathon Gruber recently created a stir with his comments about Obamacare and “the stupidity of the American voter.” Gruber, an MIT economist, was one of the architects of the President’s health reform law. Recently, videotape surfaced of Gruber’s appearances over the past several years in which he described how the drafters of Obamacare used deception and manipulation to get the bill passed. In one venue, Gruber noted that because taxes were a hard sell politically, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressi...
To think that President Barack Obama has taken the oath of office four times (through accidents of circumstance, twice each time he was elected). Taking the oath must have become such old hat that he stopped paying attention. The president is issuing an executive amnesty for illegal immigrants based on blatant contempt for the constitutional order that he is sworn to uphold. Where does Abraham Lincoln go to get his Bible back? There are many opponents of the president’s unilateral action, but few as eloquent as the president himself through t...
Now that Barack Obama, with his immigration executive order, has taken off the gloves and, in effect, raised that time-honored gesture of defiance to Republican “members of Congress who question my authority.” They are angrily throwing down their own gauntlets, basically saying that he and (to quote John Boehner) his “lawless” presidency are toast, with no chance they’ll deal with him. Don’t you believe it. We certainly can expect the GOP House and Senate to do their very best to make Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hil...
Remembered I so enjoyed the update on Clarita Liddle. She was my 4th grade teacher over 50 years ago. She left quite an impression on me and had a huge impact on my yearning for knowledge over the years. I remember doing a small newspaper in her class that I eagerly embraced and just retired from the newspaper industry after over 40 years. She pointed me in the direction of the newspaper industry as did Jim Stack and Bill Wilmot when I grew up in Colfax. My life was very fruitful due to their efforts and passion for the industry. God Bless...
