Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 816 - 840 of 3750
YYYY What an impressive program at Steptoe School to celebrate out veterans....
Every year Nancy and I start vegetables indoors in little cups. Within a few months we take them outside to plant. We have gotten very good at nurturing our plants from sprouting to harvesting. And, come planting time, we love the fact that we chose exactly which vegetables to grow and are not limited to what some store business plan decided is best. Our vegetable garden gets better every year. Doing this, however, has produced some unfortunate outcomes and even one disaster. When we are totally responsible for the garden plan, budgeting, growi...
Preliminary sales trends from Small Business Saturday show a continuing increase in smartphone purchases even among shoppers patronizing local merchants. According to the Associated Press (AP), Adobe Analytics said smartphone income made up over 40 percent of all e-commerce revenue on Nov. 30. That is up 22 percent from a year ago. Shoppers spent $3.6 billion buying online from small businesses that day. Small Business Saturday was started in 2010 by American Express to encourage people to shop...
Initiative 976 establishing $30 car tags was once again supported by a solid majority of our state’s voters. If this were an election between two candidates, the loser would have conceded long ago. Not so with this initiative. This is the third time in less than a decade that the exact question has been brought before the people. Democracy has once again ruled, and it should be a closed issue, but it’s not. As was the case in previous elections, opponents are asking the courts to overturn the results. There is no doubt about the will of the...
An aerial view of Whitman County shows a vast agricultural area. Spotted in this expanse are some small enclaves of people. These are the towns of Whitman County. From the air, the small towns look isolated from each other. Connecting them and giving access to bigger population centers are black ribbons of roads. These roads stretch for miles. There is little along them but acres and acres of farmland. It is a perspective that is important. Each of these towns have businesses to provide for residents and neighbors the amenities so important to...
Let's return to yesteryear. Richard Nixon, coming off an already bitterly controversial career and countless tangles with the media, had just been beaten in the 1962 campaign to become California governor. He was severely resentful, and snarled at reporters, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore." It became known as "the last press conference," and "kick around" ranks right up there as one of the most famous quotes in politics, particularly since just six years later, Nixon was elected president of the United States. Fifty-seven years...
The clear loser of the Democratic primary is "Medicare for All." First, it demonstrated the unreliability of Kamala Harris out of the gate, when she endorsed it before quickly backing off. Now, it has blunted the momentum of Elizabeth Warren, made a mockery of her claim to be an uber-wonk and shredded her implicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters as an equally committed left-winger without the baggage. Under pressure for weeks for details related to her version of the proposal, Warren has now backed all the way down to promising to pass...
YYYY Living in this country where we are free to vote as we choose and know it will count! #!*! Colfax residents who do not seem to appreciate the efforts of our council members to do their best for our community....
In America, our Thanksgivings range from large family-gatherings to Good Samaritans volunteering in soup kitchens serving turkey dinners to the hungry. Now think about what it's like in other parts of the world where people are lucky to have a few slices of bread and some rice to eat. For example, before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was that way for people living in Poland and Eastern Europe. Communist dictators tightly controlled everything from the farm to kitchen table and...
A few days after Halloween, I went to the store to get some decorations for our family Thanksgiving celebration. They didn’t have any. It was as if Thanksgiving had been deleted. I found aisle after aisle of Christmas decorations, but nothing for Thanksgiving. I wonder if schools have deleted Thanksgiving as well. When I was in grade school, we read the stories of the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock. We were familiar with the love story of Priscilla and John Alden. Pocahontas was an actual native who convinced her father to befriend the P...
The Amazon rainforest is getting international attention, more than it has in the past. Long recognized as the heart of the world’s climate control, it is being devastated even more than in the past. Reportedly, more of the untouched jungles have been lost in the last year than in each of the past ten years. Industrial developments such as dams and proposed gold mines, logging and farming have taken a chunk out of the forest. More devastating is land speculation. Supposedly, cleared land is up to 50 or so percent more valuable than preserved n...
#!*! Colfax Residents for reinstating the same toxic council members for our future! YYYY 2020 fresh start with Jim Retzer for Colfax!! YYYY The county for filling holes in the pavement in Steptoe....
It's not fair to call Michael Bloomberg just a superrich dilettante. He is, after all, a former mayor of New York City, so he does have some experience as a political officeholder. It is fair to describe Bloomberg as a superrich guy who obviously was looking for something to do, so he decided, "I think I'll dabble in presidential politics." "Let's see. What am I, a Republican or a Democrat? This time around I'll be a Democrat, because that other rich guy is claiming to be a Republican. He's nowhere near as wealthy as I am. That much we know,...
If the impeachment effort isn't taking the nation by storm, the Democrats have an answer -- blame it on Latin. The use of a Latin term, quid pro quo, is now thought to be a damper on the impeachment cause because it sounds complex and technical. Latin is one of the great legacies of the Roman Empire, influencing languages across Europe and giving us scientific, medical and legal terms that heretofore had been thought perfectly fitting. That was before Democrats felt they needed a more emotive phrase to characterize President Donald Trump's...
I wish we could have some way to put an initiative on the ballots in all states so all voters could decide on eliminating the problem we now have with Democrats and Republicans. An initiative on a federal election for all states to vote on similar to what we have for our state. We could then rather require our federal legislatures to enact a law that could prevent the deadlock we have now between the Democrats and Republicans where the federal government is no longer functioning and does nothing but fighting like a couple of kids. The problem...
The grounding of the 737 MAX is testing Boeing’s resiliency. It has turned the company upside down in just six months. Boeing executives and engineers have been under duress since the two fatal crashes killing 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia and that is likely to extend well into 2020. What started as a continuation of a most successful 2018 for Boeing has turned into a prolonged migraine. Hopefully, the world’s most successful aerospace company will weather the storm and quickly con...
The all-female space-walk was front page news for several days until it was replaced by a story about a female squadron commander at Fairchild Air Force Base. The reality of capable women shouldn’t be a news splash. The attributes for becoming an astronaut or a military commander have nothing to do with gender. I look forward to the day when everyone realizes that. Our country seems to be lagging behind the rest of the world in accepting women in the role of national leaders. Maybe we just need the right individual to break the ice. We h...
The country is entering a historic period. The House of Representatives is conducting hearings for its impeachment inquiry against the president. The hearings started Wednesday. Ostensively, the hearings are to determine if there is enough evidence to bring formal impeachment charges against President Trump. If so, then the Articles of Impeachment would be sent to the senate for a trial. Simple arithmetic suggests there are votes enough in the House to arrive at Articles of Impeachment, but not enough to convict him in the Senate. That is based...
Here's the thing about those bright, shiny human objects that are so irresistible to those of us in media: The truth is that, like so much bling, they are merely fool's gold, soon tarnished by reality. The overexposure reveals that there's little under the gloss, and this "next big thing" is very quickly reduced to "same old, same old." So it was with Beto O'Rourke. He skyrocketed to national fame as the Democrat who almost beat a Republican for US Senate in Texas, which has turned indelibly deep red. But the Republican was Ted Cruz, who has...
If there's one thing that elite opinion tends to agree about on the left and the right, it's that nationalism is a very bad thing. If anything, this view has become even more entrenched as nationalism has demonstrated its potency in recent years, from the election of Donald Trump to Britain's vote to leave the European Union. When President Trump first openly embraced the term "nationalist" at a 2018 campaign rally, commentators reacted in horror. Patriotism is about love, nationalism about hate, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof...
The House Executive Rules Committee is a five-member committee within the Washington State House of Representatives consisting of the Speaker of the House; the House Majority Leader; the House Majority Caucus Chair; the House Minority Leader; and the House Deputy Minority Leader. The committee was created on the final day of the 2019 legislative session by House Resolution 4642, without a vote of the House, and with the consent of the House in that there was no objection when it was proposed. According to HR 4642, the committee was formed for...
“Go ahead and drop it in.” I watched in bewilderment as my classmate unloaded several large pebbles into the empty cauldron, which resounded with a cacophony of metallic clangs. I sat waiting my turn in line with my can of sweet corn amongst fellow second graders who held a smorgasbord of ingredients from barley to potatoes to rosemary sprigs. We were re-enacting “Stone Soup,” the childhood fable that teaches the value of community and contributing to a greater good (or as I realized as an adult - how to surreptitiously finagle a free meal li...
Just before Veterans Day, the last known survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor died at age 98. With the passing of George Hursey of Massachusetts, it closed that chapter of World War II---the world’s most deadly conflict in which over 60 million people perished. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, “the date which will live in infamy.” During the surprise attack, 350 Japanese aircraft descended on Pearl Harbor and nearby Hawaiian military installations in two waves...
