Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Sorted by date Results 1063 - 1087 of 2504
When someone calls me “Scrooge” or “The Grinch,” I usually take it as a compliment. What’s up with the two-month long celebration, I ask them. I mean, we don’t celebrate the Fourth of July in May. I often think that if I were president (God forbid!), I would outlaw Christmas decorations and Christmas music until at least the 20th of December, if not a day or two later. Retail stores found guilty of holding Christmas sales before about mid-December would be subject to a special holiday abuse tax, proceeds from which would be used to enforce my n...
By Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg View Speculation over a contested convention -- when no candidate enters with the majority needed for nomination -- has picked up steam again. The Washington Post’s Robert Costa reported last week that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus met with senior Republicans about procedures, should an open convention develop. Smart analysts are on board: Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics believes the “most likely scenario is still that no one wins a sufficient number of delegates to claim the nom...
By Kalev Leetaru Special To The Washington Post Just over a month ago, I wrote about how Donald Trump seemed to have lost his media mojo. At the time, television news coverage of his campaign had plateaued for more than six weeks, falling to either equal or below that of his GOP rivals. But now he seems to have recovered from that lull. In fact, on Dec. 9, he reached a new record for the 2016 presidential race, accounting for 76 percent of all mentions of candidates of either party on national television news networks and 82 percent of...
“Hyperlocal” has become a popular term to describe the kind of news that newspapers like The Times present to our readers. Here’s a definition of the word from Wikipeda: Hyperlocal connotes information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community. The term can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term (e.g. news). The “well-defined community” that The Times serves is actually a group of communities we call the Touchet Valley. We take gre...
I jab at the majority Republicans in Congress when they don’t do their job, so I should give them credit when they do. A five-year highway bill has been sent to the president. That’s something Republican Congresses since the 1990s (and the Democratic ones in 2007-2010) have found difficult to do. Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz makes a reasonable argument against the way the bill is funded, but I agree with Kevin Drum of Mother Jones on this one: Muddling through is good enough. Up next is an education bill. Legislators have had rev...
Old people are absent-minded. Old people are grouchy. Old people can’t learn new things. If you believe these stereotypes, you may be at higher risk for Alzheimer’s, two new studies show. The studies, published in a paper Tuesday in the journal Psychology and Aging, show that people who have negative beliefs about aging are more likely to have brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Looking at healthy, dementia-free subjects from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, the nation’s longest-running scientific study of aging,...
On December 7, 1985, which was a Saturday, nearly 200 people gathered on Waitsburg’s Main Street to celebrate a new community event and take part in a drawing for cash prizes and gift certificates from local merchants. As The Times reported the next week, “Mayor Tom Baker (who was also The Times’ publisher at the time) plugged the tree in at about 7:30 p.m. The Waitsburg Chancel Choir and the Youth Choir sang ‘Jesus Knows Me, This I Love.’” (I think that’s a typo – either that or it’s a different song than the one I remember.) “Our Hometown Chr...
By Charles Lane, The Washington Post When you think about it, Thanksgiving Day is a paradoxical holiday for a country such as the United States. Gratitude is nearly the opposite of grievance. Yet, despite the many reasons we may have to feel the former, our political institutions were consciously designed to protect, even encourage, the expression of the latter. The right to take a day off each November to count our blessings, between mouthfuls of turkey and stuffing, isn’t actually in the Constitution; but our right to “petition the gov...
By Elizabeth Chang, The Washington Post Between daughters who prefer texting to any other form of communication, my workplace’s mandate to be follow-worthy on a variety of social-media platforms and a journalist’s general FOMO on the news, I’m on my iPhone quite often. Too often. Sometimes I catch myself picking it up and scrolling through Twitter or Facebook out of boredom, when my time would be better spent talking to a human (or even my dogs), or reading something more than a few sentences long. But, because of the aforementioned daughters,...
Before I begin, a couple of caveats: First, I’m a proud graduate of the University of Washington, and I prefer my apples purple and gold. And second, you can probably tell that this column is about football, so if that’s not your thing, you might want to move on to the Mitt Romney article. It’s been fun to watch a successful Washington State Cougar football team this year and see their fans get all excited. It’s sort of like when your kid brother gets better grades than you do one semester – you’re proud of him, but you know he’ll never...
PRESCOTT – With fresh memories of the prior night's windstorm that left thousands of Spokane residents without power during the first cold snap of winter, attendees were all ears during a Red Cross disaster preparedness class held at the Prescott Library last week. Casey Branson, Disaster Preparedness Coordinator for the Kennewick American Red Cross branch, discussed the Red Cross organization, how to prepare for a disaster, and what resources are available to citizens, at the Wed., Nov. 18 c...
Friday morning, hours before news broke that terrorists killed more than 100 people and wounded hundreds of other innocent victims in coordinated, bloody attacks all around Paris, President Barack Obama told Americans that “we have contained” the advance of the Islamic State. Now that the Islamic State is claiming credit for these attacks, we know just how wrong he was. After Paris, it’s clear: Doing the minimum won’t make us safe. It’s time the president stopped hedging and took meaningful steps to defend us and our allies. The president...
It is very important for people traveling by airplane this Thanksgiving to consider the consistency of their pies. They must be firm. If your pie’s interior is found to be too soupy, that culinary labor of love might be banned from boarding. And don’t try to slip pie by the agents of the Transportation Security Administration. Expect the same degree of scrutiny your pie might get from the judges at a county fair. “As a general rule of thumb,” the TSA advises, “if you can spread it, spill it, spray it, pump it or pour it, then it’s usually in...
This is likely to be the last copy of The Times you’ll see before Thanksgiving, so we thought we’d give you some things to think about as you head into the 2015 holiday season: According to CNN.com, TV dinners were invented in 1953 when Swansons had 26 tons of frozen turkeys left over after Thanksgiving that year. (And you thought you had a lot of leftovers!) Someone had the bright idea of slicing them up and wrapping them in foil, with trimmings. The day before Thanksgiving has the most liquor sales of the year. The day after Thanksgiving is...
It took the Chicago wheat futures market 12 grinding sessions to reach up 44 cents to the high close of Wednesday, Nov. 4 at $5.25, then it peeled backwards 33 cents in a couple of days. All that was accomplished in the week was a confirmation of the range highs back to July. Can this wheat market ever break out of the sideways pattern that has defined the price since July? It will require something more that we have on the board right now…weather, currency shifts, global peace… Since we are busy with a trapped market ping-ponging back and for...
WALLA WALLA – Corrections experts say that a large percentage of jail inmates suffer from mental health and/or chemical dependency illnesses which negatively impact their ability to function as contributing citizens. Walla Walla County Commissioners, the County Corrections Department, and the County Department of Community Health have recently established new programs to provide behavioral health treatment and support for those inmates. “Having these services made available in the jail is something the Board was interested in, to allow inm...
Veterans Day will probably be over by the time you read this, but it’s on my mind, so I’m going to talk about it anyway. My grandfather was in the military during World War I. He was in Europe, though I don’t think he saw combat. But I can remember him talking about how horrible that war was and the devastating affect it had on many of the young people of his generation who survived the war. It was supposed to be “The War to End All Wars.” It didn’t work out that way, but in the years immediately thereafter, there was a clear sense of gratitud...
TOUCHET VALLEY – Like death and taxes, fraud plays few favorites. Young or old, rich or poor, nearly everyone of legal age is a potential victim, whether random or targeted. Scams are a constant concern, but with fraudulent activity typically taking an uptick during the holiday season, it’s wise to be vigilant. Last month’s Dayton Police Notes are peppered with reports of fraudulent calls, and that’s probably a fraction of the calls that were actually received by citizens. Conversations with Wa...
Today, many elected officials are fixated on tearing down coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind farms. But that isn’t practical, because when there is no wind or sunlight those plants produce no electricity. There is an alternative. Nuclear power plants supply 10 percent of world’s electricity. But opponents say they are too dangerous and too expensive. They point to the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union, considered to be the wor...
