Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 2460 - 2484 of 3750
The good news is Washington is separating itself from the national jobless rate. In July, an average 6.2 percent of Americans were looking for work, while Washington State’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent. The state added an estimated 7,300 jobs in July, and June’s report of 9,100 new jobs was revised upward to 13,600 jobs. The Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area boasts our state’s lowest jobless rate at 4.7 percent. Even so, warning lights are flashing. Counties in northeast and southwest Washington continue to struggle with unemp...
“Stop just hatin’ all the time.” If you haven’t been following the news, you might not know whether this bon mot was uttered by a character on the ABC Family show “Pretty Little Liars” or by the president of the United States. Of course, it was the leader of the free world at a recent Kansas City, Missouri, rally, imploring congressional Republicans to start cooperating with him. The line struck a characteristically — and tellingly — juvenile and plaintive note. How many books and articles have been written by conservatives seeking to divi...
Maybe it’s time to get really tough, my fellow Americans. Without a doubt, someone needs to be creative in coming up with ways to punish those corporations that are bailing on the United States of America — a place where they made their fortunes — and renouncing their citizen responsibility to pay the going tax rate at home. The tactic is known as “inversion.” American corporations, such as Chiquita Bananas or the medical-device giant Medtronics, merge with or buy into a company in some country with a much lower corporate tax rate than the U.S....
Ferguson, Missouri, has been torn apart by violence and rioting. Civil disorder has disrupted the city since since August 9. The protests stem from the shooting of an unarmed teenager by police. The victim, shot six times, was African-American. The policeman is white. The shooting is serious enough in itself, but the local police blundered after the shooting, withholding information and trying to discredit the victim. Crowds took to the streets. Protests grew, and the local force could not control the situation. Riots, looting and shootings...
For decades, radio newsman Paul Harvey gave us a side of the news that we either hadn’t heard or hadn’t considered. His “Rest of the Story” commentaries provided an in-depth look at the news behind the headlines. Today, all the headlines are about the negative impacts of fossil fuels. But when you dig deeper, as Paul Harvey did, you get the rest of the story. For thousands of years, food, water, clothing and shelter were the basic necessities of life. Today, we need to include electricity. In China and India, home to more than a third of the...
Sad facts We tell our young people that alcohol and marijuana are bad for them and then we voted to make alcohol more available than it had been previously. Then 56% of the registered voters (who voted) passed a law to make weed available in many different forms so that non-smokers could escape reality. The laws about alcohol and marijuana were written so that most people didn’t understand them. Alcohol is more expensive and weed will be more expensive until supply matches demand! The sad facts about both situations are that we have a lot of p...
If an Israeli high-level official were caught on a hot mic candidly commenting on Secretary of State John Kerry’s ill-fated act of Israel-Hamas peacemaking, he might call it “a hell of a diplomatic foray.” Kerry was caught sarcastically describing the Israeli offensive into Gaza as “a hell of a pinpoint operation” during his round of Sunday-show interviews two weeks ago, before telling his aide over the phone, “We’ve got to get over there,” and “It’s crazy to be sitting around.” Kerry’s belief in himself as the Indispensable Man is to...
Yes, I know. How many times have we been told “We are a nation of immigrants”? The welcome, after all, is right there on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” And in fact, millions of people have sought refuge and thrived here, including my parents. But the tradition gets obliterated in all the angry debate about those who try to breach our borders ... even the children we see today, trying...
The Organization to Void Illegal Conduct is disbanding. It was created in 2012 in response to the county’s contract to increase its financial support for the Hawkins Co. shopping mall at the Idaho border. Already contracted for $9.1 million for infrastructure at the center, the county proposed increasing its commitment by another $5.9 million. It was money the county did not have. Concerned residents of the area attended what was billed as an open forum to express their disagreement with the proposed deal. Suddenly, former Commissioner Greg P...
Today’s news is filled with images of the massive wildfires roaring through the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in central Washington. The arid pine forests east of the Cascades are prone to wildfire, especially when they are attacked by bark beetles which bore into the trees and suffocate them. Now those tiny insects are boring into healthy majestic trees in the pristine Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. One way to prevent such infestations is through selective thinning and removing dead and diseased trees. But many community organ...
Backs Pakootas We’ve all been appalled by the lack of effective legislation passed by this Congress in which our representative, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, is a Republican leader. It is apparent that the problem is their lack of willingness to work with the President on any major questions. Our representative, instead, voted to sue him. This year, we have the opportunity to vote for a change-agent who has done the hard work of bringing two sides together for the common good. As CEO of the Colville Confederated Tribes, he is credited with the econo...
The fat lady will sing — but only in strict keeping with the work rules set out by the American Guild of Musical Artists. The Metropolitan Opera has a labor problem. Personnel expenses account for $200 million of the financially struggling Met’s $327 million budget. In the interest of survival in an era more attuned to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” than “Le Nozze di Figaro,” the Met wants to reduce its labor costs by 16 percent by getting the unions to accept common-sensical work rules and less-generous pension and health benefits. T...
How is it that in and around politics, we manage to trivialize nearly every crisis and at the same time, turn what’s trivial into a crisis? The debate over the flood of child immigrants to U.S. borders is typical: Here we have a wrenching human dilemma with awful choices about removing children who have fled their brutally dangerous countries, often sent by their desperate parents. It’s a highly complex matter, as so many are. But it is mostly reduced to pettiness by political hustlers, with shameful cooperation from those of us in media. The...
It is hot. And, it is going to be hot for a while longer. Forecasts indicate high temperatures will continue. Heat advisories have been periodically posted. They are a warning to take it easy and a reminder that this weather can be life threatening. The inside of closed vehicles on hot days can rise very quickly and reach as high as 140 degrees. There are always tragedies in hot spells like this one. Kids and pets are particularly vulnerable if left in vehicles. The inside of the family car can be a death trap. Recently, the father of a...
Reducing mankind‚’s carbon footprint has become the defining issue of our time and rightly so. Virtually every level of government has policies to reduce greenhouse gases by regulating everything from industrial CO2 emissions to cow flatulence. But as Kermit the Frog said, It’s not easy being green.” It turns out that some good ideas don’t work well or not at all. Still, the government continues to mandate them. For example, a three-year study funded by the Department of Energy confirmed that producing ethanol from corn and corn stalks cr...
What is best I am new to the eastern Washington area, coming over here last fall to take the job as medical director at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane. I have held a faculty appointment in the University Of Washington School Of Medicine for the past 20 years. I am a huge fan of UW, and it is truly a world class institution and medical school. However I must say I am very impressed with the programs Washington State University has set up in Spokane. WSU is already a bona fide world class research organization with a myriad of e...
As a defender of the nation’s borders, President Barack Obama is a hell of a pool player. Obama’s recent game in a Denver bar with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper was bright and cheery, as one would expect of a president who didn’t have any depressing visits to frightened ranchers, overwhelmed border agents or desperate migrants on his future itinerary. The first rule in a crisis for any executive is put on his windbreaker and boots and get out on the ground. President George W. Bush didn’t do it soon enough after Hurricane Katrina and, po...
That recent Pew Research Center poll is pretty jarring. We are so politically polarized in this country that nearly one in three “consistently conservative” Americans would be upset if one of his or her children wed a Democrat. For the “consistently liberal” respondents, it was nearly one in four for the opposite wedding. Imagine the new remake of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” How many would be protesting they weren’t really closed-minded, saying, “Some of my best friends are (right wingers/left wingers), but would you want your daughter to m...
Two hospital shootings took place recently in Spokane. Hospitals are not normally considered places of violence, except in movies and on T.V. Yet, violence, whether with guns or not, is a growing reality at hospitals, especially in emergency rooms. It has even become a concern in Whitman County. Disturbances and violent patients are not new at Whitman Hospital and Medical Center. In fact, the Colfax Police Department has started to position officers there during the early morning hours. The new program gives the hospital, and for that matter...
If you are looking for a family-wage job these days, there is no better place to look than the Dakotas . . . but for entirely different reasons. While both states rely on agriculture, North Dakota’s Bakken oil field is driving that state’s economy, which boasts a 2.7 percent unemployment rate. It is the lowest among the 50 states, and there are thousands of jobs unfilled. Propelled by well-paying jobs in its western oil-producing counties, the state’s average annual pay has jumped a whopping 44 percent since 2007. Workers in the oil and natur...
Class size research Currently in the State of Washington, Initiative 1351 will appear on the November ballot. The initiative calls for the following class sizes: grades K-3, 17 students; grades 4-6, 23 to 25, and high school 24 to 29. I will not address the costs at this point, but will summarize the Tennessee “Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio” or the STAR study conducted during 1985-1989. This study was funded by the state of Tennessee. In brief, over 7,000 students were randomly assigned to one of three interventions: 13-17 students per tea...
Forget about the World Cup or World Series or even the Super Bowl. The No. 1 competitive sport is the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest at Coney Island, New York. The legendary Joey Chestnut won for the eighth straight time, downing 61 in the allotted 10 minutes. While that’s not his personal best of 69, it’s still pretty impressive, if one would call speed gorging impressive. By the way, feed racing has its own Title IX. Miki Sudo inhaled 34, finishing ahead of three-time chomp champ Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. Call that an upset. Call the...
It’s hard to imagine a more apt summation of the lunatic state of the nation’s immigration debate than the split screen over the past weeks. In Washington, most respectable opinion lined up, yet again, to condemn Republicans for not passing an amnesty under the guise of defunct-for-now “comprehensive immigration reform.” Meanwhile, the crisis on the Southern border continued. A massive influx of people — largely driven by Central Americans, many of them children — drawn here in the expectation of lax immigration enforcement is overwhelmin...
The middle East is in turmoil. Hatred of all things different seems to be the norm. Tribes fight one another. Ethnicity divides people living as neighbors. Differences in political ideologies are cause for violence. Religious differences are justification for murder and brutality. It is virtually impossible to get a grasp on all the various sects, parties, organizations and groups that are violently warring with one another. Conflict has become a way of life. Many in America look upon the Middle East with dismay. How could such old and proud...
Internet sales tax I send this to you as both a business owner and elected official. As I get my business website up for sales across the nation, I believe that internet sales should be subject to the same sales tax charges that any local retail sales are subject to. Doing sales tax is a “pain” but those dollars are what keep our cities alive. Especially in the difficult economy when cities are not promised anything from the state or federal level. Please consider taking time to contact your representative to express your views on this sub...
