Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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I’m walking down a long, paved sidewalk in early March, with a practice baseball field on my left and a grove of well-trimmed trees on my right. I’m worrying about the snow that fell as I left Washington, D.C., the night before, worrying about work and bills and the hassles of everyday life, worrying about the sunscreen I left at home. A hundred yards from the stadium, I hear what has become an annual ritual: A cheer rising from the stands, the cheer of a happy and hopeful crowd that has traveled to Phoenix to watch their baseball team pre...
Donald Trump’s recent flurry of executive orders mandates that for every new regulation issued by any agency, two must be eliminated. This comes on top of a federal hiring freeze and vows to reduce administrative bloat and otherwise force the government bureaucracy to conform to the kinds of expectations that govern private business. While Trump sees himself as an outsider president bringing new ideas to Washington, these particular ideas would be painfully familiar to his predecessors. For the past century, presidents of both parties have s...
Americans who give or get roses on Valentine’s Day usually don’t think about where their flowers came from. But your roses may have traveled farther this year than you have. A few days ago, the roses were likely 2,000 or 3,000 miles away, sitting in a Colombian greenhouse near the foothills of the Andes Mountains. The blooms probably traveled to Miami on a refrigerated plane, where some were poked and shaken by agricultural officials. Then they were sent on their (still refrigerated) way to flower shops around the U.S., arriving just in tim...
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In 1993, President Bill Clinton was pictured holding a Washington State apple while promoting the virtues of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That photo only underscored the importance of the agreement and our trade with Mexico and Canada. Washington is the most trade dependent state in the nation. The Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ) reported last November, Washington State exported at least $134.5 billion worth of goods to Canada and Mexico since the agreement was signed....
It is not unprecedented for a White House to view the media as the enemy - the “opposition party,” as presidential adviser Stephen Bannon labeled us last week. But it is vital that we not become that party. After an exhausting, often alarming first week of the Trump administration, many people were telling journalists that we can no longer conduct business as usual. “You’re bringing a spoon to a knife fight,” one acquaintance told me. We need to stop covering the president’s tweets, we were advised. We need to label his false statements...
This is a franchise that, in no particular order: chose a guy who couldn’t win at the University of Toledo over a Hall of Famer as its coach, nearly electrocuted that coach at a news conference, suspended another coach for taking a different job in-season, played 19 seasons before hosting a playoff game, played 26 before winning a playoff game, and then reached the Super Bowl only as a means to sharpen the punchlines to an endless jokes steam of jokes. That was all before they reached rock bottom. It’s a franchise that was going to move to Bir...
Dear Editor, My Name is Trump My Great Grandfather, Joner Exary Trump homesteaded with his family at Promise, OR, in 1898, after leaving Raleigh County, West Virginia. He was a leader of the Promise community and well respected. My Grandfather, Green Spencer Trump was a kind and gentle man. He provided for his large family with hard work and diligence. I do not remember ever hearing a harsh or unkind word spoken by him. My Father, Benjamin Leonard Trump was well respected and a leader of the rural Tucannon River valley community. He did anythin...
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Donald Trump’s inaugural address was all the things commentators said it was - pugnacious, nationalistic, a repudiation of the Obama years and a warning to the power brokers of both parties. As I listened, though, I thought I heard echoes of another address. Only when I read the speech afterward did I realize: Trump’s speech bore an astonishing resemblance to Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, in 2009. Trump sharply criticized Washington’s power elite - many of whom sat nearby. “Today,” he said near the outset, “we are not merely transf...
In years past, many nutrition and weight-loss experts gave their patients rigid guidelines to follow. They often counseled eating less, switching to low-fat foods, carrying sliced celery in a plastic bag for snack time, and eating high-volume, modest-calorie foods like salads. This approach proved spectacularly unsuccessful, at least if you judge it by rampant obesity rates. Now, many of these same nutrition experts are taking a simpler, gentler approach. Physician Yoni Freedhoff has made the switch. Freedhoff also argues that the new way is a...
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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...
