Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 826 - 850 of 3750
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...
The 2019 election is history. The results are in except for a few stragglers left to count; not enough to change the outcome. Before the 2020 campaign engulfs us, we have a brief opportunity to examine the latest results to see what we can learn. I was impressed with the voters. It would have been tempting to look at the long list of confusing advisory votes and lump them all either yea or nay. But they didn’t. It appears they actually read each one before marking their ballots. It gives me confidence in our democratic system. I would have m...
Changing clocks every so often may be a thing of the past. The regular shift from Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time and back again is under scrutiny. Originally, Daylight Saving Time was initiated to save energy, improve worker productivity and make better use of natural daylight. It was first used in the United States and other parts of the world during World War I. Soon thereafter it was eliminated. Again in World War II it was ordered that clocks be reset for daylight saving. Then, for a while, regular or standard time was used. The...
Let's give credit where it's due: As commander in chief, President Donald Trump can claim success for the military operation that took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the long-elusive founder of ISIS, who, according to the White House and military sources, blew himself up setting off a vest of explosives that also took the lives of three of his children. This was the president, making his nationally televised announcement: "Last night the United States brought the world's No. 1 terrorist leader to justice. ... He was a sick and depraved man, and now...
California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation -- it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life. More than 2 million people are going without power in northern and central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California's best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires. Power -- and all the goods it makes possible -- is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn't be negotiable...
In last week’s Gazette editorial, Gordon Forgey commented on the jeers Donald Trump received at a World Series game in the other Washington. Forgey decried the “utter disrespect shown to a sitting president” and by extension, “the cost that has in respecting the office of the presidency.” He mentioned the distinction between the office and the man holding it. I learned early in my brief military experience that one respects the rank of an officer, not necessarily the person holding that rank. That rank carries authority that might one day s...
Now that President Trump’s impeachment process is formally underway, Democrats and Republicans need to avoid becoming completely absorbed by it. They must work together on other important issues such as immigration, health care, education, infrastructure, environment and trade agreements. Impeaching a president can be all-consuming and is polarizing. It is more prevalent today than it was prior to Richard Nixon’s presidency (1969-74). Before Nixon, only Andrew Johnson had been impeached and remo...
The House has decided to make the closed door inquiry an official impeachment process. The headlines indicated that they had enough votes to unveil their activities. I heard rumors that some Democrats were going to vote against it, but CNN didn’t mention any. The radical left and CNN present a unanimous front. I have never witnessed such hatred. The radical Democrats with the support of a liberal national media have been trying to overthrow the 2016 election from day one. It began with the “Not My President” demonstrations before the inaug...
The President of the United States was booed at a World Series baseball game. Reportedly, the majority of the crowd participated. They also yelled in unison, “Lock him up.” This chant comes from Trump’s own words when he repeatedly said Hillary Clinton should be locked up. Fans in the stadium apparently also made extemporaneous signs calling for his impeachment. Remember this was at a World Series game. Such things get us nowhere, except to make matters worse. Sadly, even a World Series game is not immune from the widening disparity of opinions...
It's really difficult to tell because his hands are so small, but it looks for all the world that President Donald Trump has an extended middle finger raised at, well, all the world. Who knew that he could speak in sign language? Or at least that he knew how to say one word? Come to think of it, it's two words. He seems to have decided on a defiance strategy, his last resort, since his "high crimes" and his low crime of total incompetence are there for everyone to see as he faces impeachment. Every once in a while, he pokes himself in the eye...
