Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Sorted by date Results 1 - 11 of 11
Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison’s razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty. Almost. Rain or shine, however, a fog of regret permeates any maximum-security prison. But 37 men -- almost all minorities; mostly African Americans -- recently received celebratory attention. It was their commencement -- attended by Harry Belafonte, 90, and the singer Usher -- as freshly minted college graduates. Their lives after prison will not soo...
Beginning this week, Washington hopes that infrastructure, which is a product of civil engineering, will be much discussed. But if you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license. This happened to Mats Jarlstrom as a result of events that would be comic if they were not symptoms of something sinister. Jarlstrom’s troubles began when his wife got a $150 red-light camera ticket. He became interested in the timing of traffic lights and decided there was something wro...
As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts. One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society’s articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The other fact is how impervious government programs are to evidence incompatible with their premises. Fifty years and about 500 channels ago, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created to nudge Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society --...
When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York’s scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in the form of a guide to parenting. Moynihan understood that politics is downstream from culture, which flows through families. Sasse, a Yale history Ph.D. whose well-furnished mind resembles Moynihan’s, understands this: America is a creedal nation made not by history’s churning but by the decision of philo...
Although William J. Baumol, who recently died at 95, was not widely known beyond the ranks of economists, all Americans are living with, and policymakers are struggling with, “Baumol’s disease.” It is one reason brisk economic growth is becoming more elusive as it becomes more urgent. And it is a disease particularly pertinent to the increasingly fraught health care debate. Born in the Bronx, Baumol spent his teaching career at Princeton and NYU but remained an aficionado of New York opera, and when in 1962 the Metropolitan Opera’s orchest...
By George Will In July 1954, a 19-year-old Memphis truck driver recorded at Sun Studio the song “That’s All Right.” When a local disc jockey promised to play it, the truck driver tuned his parents’ radio to the station and went to a movie. His mother pulled him from the theater because the DJ was playing the record repeatedly and wanted to interview the singer immediately. The DJ asked where the singer had gone to high school. He answered, “Humes,” an all-white school. The DJ asked because many callers “who like your record think you must be c...
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possibl...
With a mellifluous name suggesting bucolic tranquility, Rep. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, is an unlikely object of the caterwauling recently directed at him and the House Freedom Caucus he leads. The vituperation was occasioned by the HFC’s role rescuing Republicans from embracing an unpopular first draft of legislation to replace Obamacare. A decisive blow against the bill was struck by the quintessential Republican moderate, New Jersey’s Rodney Frelinghuysen, chairman of the Appropriations Committee whose family has inc...
Impulse control is unfashionable as well as unpresidential, but perhaps you should resist the urge to trip people who stride briskly down the sidewalk fixated on their phone screens, absorbed in texting and feeling entitled to expect others to make way. New technologies are shaping behaviors and dissolving civilities. In 2005, Lynne Truss, in her book “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door,” presciently said we were slouching into “an age of social autism” with a...
The Senate’s coming confirmation of Neil Gorsuch will improve the Supreme Court, and Democrats’ incontinent opposition to him will inadvertently improve the Senate -- if Republicans are provoked to thoroughly reform the filibuster. If eight Democrats will not join the 52 Republicans in providing 60 votes to end debate and bring Gorsuch’s nomination to a vote, Republicans should go beyond extending to Supreme Court nominees the prohibition of filibusters concerning other judicial nominees. Senate rules should be changed to rectify a mista...
As a boy, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of the former senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee, would step out of his father’s house and shoot at tin cans 50 yards away. Now 78, he says he could fire in any direction and not endanger “anything but a cactus.” His father, born in 1909 in Arizona territory, three years before statehood, built the house on a bluff where, as an adolescent, he rode his horse there and slept under the stars. There were about 30,000 people in Phoenix. The house is now in the nation’s 12th-largest metropo...
