Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Watching Donald Trump conduct his news conference Wednesday, it suddenly struck me that, underneath all those now-familiar idiosyncrasies, the president-elect is just like many successful entrepreneurs and owners of family businesses in his management style. For them, business is personal. They are the sun around which all the stars and planets revolve, the source of all the energy and inspiration, the guiding light and the gravitational force that holds it all together. They shape the product and the business strategy, cut the deals with...
I take my next-door neighbor’s political temperature by perusing his bumper stickers. During the reign of Bush II, Rob’s work van sported this exhortation: “Visualize No Liberals.” I didn’t take it literally. I even managed a smile. It was pithy and rather witty. I knew Rob didn’t want me gone, just like I didn’t believe what I heard in Catholic school: that all Protestants were going straight to hell. My mother was an eminently lax Episcopalian. No, it would take more than a bumper sticker to drive a wedge between Rob and me, not to mentio...
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Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Henry Higgins demands to know in “My Fair Lady.” These days, labor economists are asking the opposite question: Why can’t a man be more like a woman? The decline of traditionally male blue-collar work like manufacturing has left many men adrift. There are growth industries, such as health care, where some of these men could get work. But they don’t seem to be taking advantages of the splendid opportunities to become home health care aides or day care workers. In part that’s because many of these jobs...
Home & Garden Television is the mac and cheese of cable -- video comfort food. And, like that perennial favorite, it sells very well. Last year, HGTV was the third-most-watched cable network after ESPN and Fox News. In a recent feature on the company, Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith attributed the network’s success to the “escapist appeal of looking at other people’s beautiful homes” in a year rife with conflict. “The relentlessly pleasant programming is a comfort, especially in hard times,” he wrote. But there’s more to HGTV’s appeal than mere blandne...
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By almost every measure for the incoming Trump administration, Ryan Zinke, the president-elect’s pick to run the U.S. Department of Interior, has the perfect resume. He’s a former commander in the Navy’s Seal Team Six special-forces branch, which among other things took out Osama bin Laden. He’s the lone congressman from Montana, where the Interior Department figures large because it owns significant swaths of land used for grazing and mining. And Zinke is all for developing and exploiting resources on public lands, earning him a lifetim...
Shortly before I got married, I received a piece of sterling advice that I have been mulling a lot over the last year: “You have a big decision to make: Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?” Even a good marriage offers a lot of opportunities for grievance. Suddenly, you cannot make any major decision without consulting this other person -- who will, inconveniently, often have very different ideas from yours about where to live, what to spend the money on, how to raise the children, and whether to turn the basement into a hom...
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Whether you make formal New Year’s resolutions or not, the changing of the calendar often leads to contemplating what changes we might like to see in our lives. On the nutrition front, these are my top five picks for habits worth cultivating in 2017. --- Cook more Creating and serving even the simplest of meals is a profound way of caring for yourself and your loved ones. Homemade meals tend to be more healthful than ones you purchase, because when you cook from scratch, you know exactly what you’re eating. That makes it much easier to eat in...
Republican Senate and House leaders who have summarily decided on a “repeal and dawdle” plan for Obamacare don’t seem to understand what they are up against. They see House and Senate majorities, an incoming president who vowed to repeal all of Obamacare and a reconciliation process that allows them to gut Obamacare taxes and subsidies, essentially killing the program with 51 votes in the Senate. Do they understand it won’t be that easy? The first problem is Republicans in the House and Senate. Several Republicans have already voiced doubts...
Picture the commute of the future: You live in Palo Alto, California, but work 350 miles away in Los Angeles. After your morning latte, you click on a smartphone app to summon your digital chauffeur. An autonomous car shows up at your front door three minutes later to drive you to a Hyperloop station in downtown Mountain View, where a pod then transports you through a vacuum tube at 760 mph. When you reach the Pasadena station, another self-driving car awaits to take you to your office. You reach your destination in less than an hour. That is...
[Editor’s note: The following originally appeared anonymously in a newspaper called the Troy Sentinal, in Troy, N.Y., on Dec. 23, 1823. Its author was later revealed to be Clement Clarke Moore, a writer and professor of literature in New York City.] ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in the...
When a guy with an assault rifle walks into a pizza joint to “self-investigate” the made-up conspiracy theory he found on the internet about a nonexistent child-prostitution ring, there’s no doubt we’ve got a problem. And regular folks are reasonably alarmed. A new Pew Research Center study finds that two in three U.S. adults say that fabricated news stories cause “a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.” This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, political affiliations and most other dem...
If you’re running a business, you might as well shut up shop for Christmas now. More than half your employees might be there, but they’re not putting their heart into it. “Christmas seems to be starting earlier every year,” said Dan Rogers, co-founder of Peakon, a Danish startup that collects and measures data on employees. A survey by the company found that 54 percent of British workers mentally check out for the holidays by Dec. 16. At the younger end of the workforce, the great Christmas check-out comes sooner. Already Friday, six in 10 m...
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OLYMPIA – The public is invited to ring in the new year with First Day Hikes, offered on Jan. 1 in any of 32 state parks across Washington. State Park rangers and volunteers will be on hand to guide participants and most participating parks will offer refreshments. More than 30 parks will offer guided hikes, snow shoe treks and fat tire bike rides. There will be something for every fitness level. For more information about the hikes being offered visit www.naspd.org/initiativ...
Christmas decorations appear in stores in September. Holiday tunes creep into TV and radio broadcasts soon after. December editions of magazines arrive in the mail in early October, laden with red and green Christmas décor. Ugh! I’m one of those people who is tired of Christmas by the time Halloween rolls around. (And don’t get me started on Halloween, either.) You can call me “Scrooge” or “The Grinch.” I’ll take it as a compliment. But I think holidays should be celebrated when they arrive, not a quarter of a year before. After all, we don’t...
Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election on Twitter. There, he created what the head of a major market-research company called “a continuous Trump rally that happens on Twitter at all hours.” He attracted millions more followers than Hillary Clinton, garnered three times more free exposure than Clinton on social media and, according to the social media firm SocialFlow, made himself “the most talked-about person on the planet.” Trump’s ability to outsmart other politicians on social media also stands to be one of his most formidabl...
The most-gifted piece of apparel during the holidays? Sweaters? Nope. Scarves? No. Ties or hats? Not those either. Socks. The dowdy necessity long regarded as one of the most boring gifts ever, is suddenly cool. Sales of socks -- particularly funky, patterned, novel varieties -- are on the upswing, as more Americans look to express themselves through their footwear, according to market research firm NPD Group. And as the holidays near, retailers say we’re approaching peak buying season: Roughly 20 percent of sock purchases take place in D...
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There are dams that should come down and those that shouldn’t. Hopefully, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducts its review of the 14 federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, that will become abundantly clear. Here is the difference. Demolishing the two dams on the Elwha River west of Port Angeles was a good thing. The dams were built in the early 1900’s to bring electricity to the Olympic Peninsula at a time when salmon and steelhead were plentiful in other Pacific Northwest rivers....
[Editor’s Note: Former Marine Corps General James “Mad Dog” Mattis has been selected by President-Elect Trump to serve as U.S. Secretary of Defense. Gen. Mattis is an Eastern Washington native and currently resides in Richland.] Donald Trump has professed that he’s not much of a reader. He told The Washington Post over the summer that he had not read biographies of presidents because he does not have the time and that he makes the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common s...
Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg called on President-elect Donald Trump and Congress to ensure that U.S. companies have the tools necessary to compete in a global economy, from a reformed tax code to financial support from the moribund U.S. Export-Import Bank. For Chicago-based Boeing, the largest U.S. exporter, that means a reformed tax code, a fair global trade system, regulatory changes that make it easier to close foreign defense sales and re-opening the ex-im bank for business, Muilenburg said Friday in remarks to the Illin...
In October, malls and department stores throughout the country get the season started with a flourish. The halls (I mean aisles) are decked with boughs of holly, and the campaigns to lure holiday gift shoppers are in full swing. Retailers have big sales and advertising is dominated by red and green. I grew up in suburbia, and even all those years ago, it seemed obvious to me that the Christmas season was designed primarily as a commercial campaign to get people to buy more stuff. But out here in the wilderness we call the Touchet Valley,...
