Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 809 - 833 of 3750
YYYY Well done Colfax. All of the businesses decorated and inviting to customers for Winterfest. You should be proud. WELL DONE....
Nigerian Christmas Nigerian Christians celebrate Christmas in special ways. If possible, most return to the village of their ancestors, even those living abroad. Beginning early on Christmas day, goats are brought to slaughter, and then the cooking and feasting begins. Children are all around, and there is a competition among grandmothers as to which “compound” is the noisiest, i.e. has the most people returning for the celebration. The day is spent attending church, feasting, visiting, discussing and arguing various topics including pol...
WSU Coach Mike Leach is finishing his eighth season as head football coach at WSU. Last week's editorial incorrectly said he was finishing his seventh season....
In the coming decade, investors are betting that hydrogen will become a prominent fuel which can eliminate CO2 discharges from the vehicles it energizes. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) the transportation sector has dominated the growth in US carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, accounting for 69 percent of the total increase. It is important that hydrogen technology advances rapidly because cars, trucks and buses are a growing contributor to greenhouse gas buildups...
On a Saturday last August in Pullman, a Lentil Festival parade entry rounded the corner of Main Street. A scattering of claps rose. Was it a small, unfamiliar non-profit? The Pullman junior soccer league kids? The Rising Stars Dance Studio? It was the Washington State Cougars football team, coming off an 11-win season. If you closed your eyes, or bent down to tie your shoe as they passed, you wouldn't have known it. Why? Why the muted reception for this team? It was similar to other recent...
Which of these campaign posters would be better: "Fiona Hill for President" or simply "Fiona!"? Whichever, the Russian foreign affairs specialist has demonstrated that she has what it takes to unite our own badly divided country with her powerful combination of intellect, toughness and charm. Unfortunately, she was born and raised in the United Kingdom, so she doesn't fulfill the constitutional requirement that the chief executive must be a natural born citizen. A Brit who emigrated to the United States to seek opportunity, she found it in...
Nancy Pelosi said she undertook impeachment "prayerfully," and apparently what she was praying was that she could get it over with as soon as possible. The House is preparing to send a flagrantly incomplete factual record to the Senate as the basis of an effort to remove a sitting president for the first time in our history. Pelosi has affected a posture of heavy-heartedness since the outset of the process, saying that "there's no joy in this" and urging a somber spirit as Democrats pursue the facts wherever they may take them -- so long as...
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...
