Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Divided since 9/11 I fear America has gone back to sleep – self satisfied and dead. I think about it every day. What am I living for? Could our unexamined lives not be worth the living? Though I write an unpopular letter I am still warm at age 93. Along with my World War Two friends we agree America should reinstate the military draft to active service for both young men and women. The results would bring discipline, ideological training, how to love another for freedom’s sake that are lacking in this country today. For example: People don...
With 2017 half over (yes, that’s right!) and summer in full swing, here at The Times we’re giving our newspaper a bit of a fresh look, as experienced readers will notice. Maybe it was the Fourth of July, or because we’re proud to be a small-town American paper, but we’ve added some red to our formerly blue theme. I hope you like it. Some other changes are underway, especially here on Page 4. For the past many months, we’ve featured a range of political commentary from the Washington Post news...
Republicans said they wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare because the exchanges were “broken.” By that they meant deductibles and premiums were too high and insurers were pulling out, leaving fewer choices and less price containment via competition. The Senate bill makes those things worse - taken the minimum actuarial value of the plans from 70 to 58 percent (i.e., the insurer has to pick up less and you have to pick up more of the cost), phasing out subsidies at a lower income point (350 percent vs. 400 percent of the poverty line) and...
The Senate health-care legislative draft - officially titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 - will, if passed, represent the greatest policy achievement by a Republican Congress in generations. Given that Democrats have filled the airwaves with wild claims that the bill amounts to mass murder, it may feel jarring to think of the bill as a historic achievement. But it is. For decades, free-market health-reform advocates have argued that the single best idea for improving U.S. health care is to maximize the number of Americans who...
Two days before last year’s presidential election, Frank Luntz walked away from a CBS 60 Minutes focus group leaving people uncontrollably screaming at one another. He couldn’t stop it. Nobody could. America’s political frustration has boiled far beyond anyone’s ability to listen and find common ground. Our country’s polarization now is to the point where people are shooting one another. Luntz is the best in the business. He is a pioneer in the field of communications and public opinion research...
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...
The United State is engaged just now in a freewheeling debate about - freewheeling debate. Or, to put it more precisely, about how freewheeling debate should normally be. The struggle is being waged across various battlegrounds - college campuses, social media, New York theater, even the air-conditioned offices in which federal employees decide whether to protect trademarks, such as that of Washington’s National Football League franchise. Now comes the Supreme Court with a strong statement in favor of free speech, to include speech that many f...
Journalists are warned to never use the word “unprecedented” in their articles, and for good reason: There is very little that is new under the sun. That said, plenty of commentators have used that adjective to describe the Great James Comey Roadshow in recent weeks, be it about his firing as FBI director by Donald Trump, his seven-page advance statement to Congress on Wednesday or his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. So, is this a legitimate exception to the “unprecedented” rule? To answer that questio...
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...
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Every new president tries to claim a mandate for his agenda, that because they won the election that means the public supports everything they want to do. But ask yourself this: Is there anything - anything - on the agenda of the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress that enjoys the support of the majority of the public? Let’s look at a couple of examples from the biggest items on their agenda, starting with health care. The latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll finds that an incredible 84 percent of Americans say that i...
Reactions to President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate change are -- forgive me -- overheated. The ACLU is calling it an “assault on communities of color,” for some reason, and environmental activist Tom Steyer says it’s a “traitorous act of war against the American people.” For his part, Trump says that staying in the agreement would have assured us a future of “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.” Yet Trump and his critics alike know that very little in the a...
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 --...
A few weeks after Inauguration Day, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller declared on national television that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Three months later, it is increasingly clear that the powers of the president to stop leaks are rather unsubstantial and will be questioned almost daily. The Washington Post reported Friday - based on information from U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports - that President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushn...
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...
The U.S. and Russia are engaged in a rivalry for dominance once again, this time in the wheat market. After Russia recently pulled ahead, the U.S. has fought back, with the help of a weaker dollar. One irony of the situation is that the U.S. is taking market share partly as the FBI investigation into ties between President Donald Trump’s aides and Russia. The probe has weakened the greenback and made American grain cheaper for overseas buyers. That’s helping the U.S. to regain its position as the world’s largest wheat exporter for the first tim...
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Republicans like to point out how disastrous President Barack Obama’s tenure was for the Democratic Party. During his presidency, Democrats reached new lows in state legislative, gubernatorial and congressional seats. More than 1,000 state and federal seats moved to the GOP. And though many prefer to blame James Comey or Russia, there can be no question that Democratic losses in 2016 were compounded by an inept Clinton campaign team that ignored the plight of working-class Americans in the Rust Belt, focusing instead on people who looked and t...
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...
As the Trump presidency enters its fourth month, conservatives are eager for more legislative successes, more nominations and confirmations of judges, the rapid confirmation of a new FBI director and other achievements. Given the charges of collusion and obstruction that have dogged Donald Trump and his administration from before he took his oath of office as president, the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor to oversee the Justice Department’s inquiry into those charges is a greatly encouraging d...
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If President Donald Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party and the news media want to bring him down -- which manifestly they do, at all costs -- they had better come up with something better than vague insinuations and clumsy metaphor-heavy inferences. An editorial in Friday’s New York Times -- “The Trump-Russia Nexus” -- is a fine instance of the kind of empty gesturing I mean. The word “nexus” itself a word writers sometimes use when they don’t have something more concrete or specific to allege. It’s not any one thing, the word seems to s...
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...
Strolling through the bustling construction zone of Amazon’s urban campus in Seattle, you instantly recognize the charm offensive the company has aimed at its hometown. “Banistas” at two outdoor stands offer bananas -- a visual cue to Amazon’s smiley logo - to employees and passers-by. Most American cities would do backflips to have a jobs juggernaut like Amazon.com in their midst. After all, the company will soon fill more than 10 million square feet of office space in a place where it now employs more than 30,000 people. But Seattle is not...
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