Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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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...
Dear Editor, Waitsburg citizens, across the board, are concerned about the future of the city. Marty Dunn summed up the purpose of the mayor and city council when he told the Times, “The biggest challenge and needs currently facing the city is maintaining our infrastructure.” I particularly enjoyed his humorous conclusion, when he added, “Without having to raise the taxes and fees…” That’s funny; without raising taxes and fees. What a kidder that Marty is. Humor aside, the future revolves around the reality of the present. Only those persons at...
Stung by the collapse of the Republican plan to reshape the U.S. health-care system, President Donald Trump’s White House says that it’s taking charge of the next big GOP initiative: tax reform. What it wants and who will manage the effort isn’t clear, but here are some legislative approaches the administration could pursue: --A sweeping tax-reform plan with huge cuts in tax rates balanced by elimination of special-interest tax advantages, plus a massive infrastructure-spending bill. This approach would be aimed at winning bipartisan suppo...
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...
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Last week in Gaborone, Botswana, Laura and I sat in a small room in Tlokweng Main Clinic, a facility that recently started screening and treating women for cervical cancer. Seated with us was Leithailwe Wale, a 40-year-old woman who was diagnosed with the disease. Thanks to early detection and access to treatment, she told us, today she is alive, healthy and able to raise her son. Good news like Leithailwe’s is becoming increasingly common in five African countries where Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon is operating. Since leaving the White House, L...
Roger Daltrey of the Who sang it with a full-throated scream in 1971: “We won’t get fooled again!” And yet, we still do. Oh, do we ever. Remember this one from the presidential campaign? The “news story” that spread the lie that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president? It was shared more than a million times. Or recall the faked report that the leader of the Islamic State was urging American Muslims to vote for Hillary Clinton. With the proliferation of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, doctored photos and lies that look like news, it...
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...
Who’s to blame for the failure of the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare? Who cares? What matters now is that Democrats stop gloating, Republicans stop sulking, and each party come to the table to improve a health-care system that both parties agree needs work. After the bill collapsed on Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump accused the Democrats of obstruction, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer accused the president of incompetence, Speaker Paul Ryan said health care was done, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi b...
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...
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After seven years of pledging to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as possible, Republicans today pulled their bill from the House floor just before a scheduled vote -- because it was going to go down in flames. We should pause and realize what a big deal this is. The number one agenda item for years, the one that most House Republicans campaigned on when first elected, and they couldn’t manage to even get an initial bill out of the House. Not only that, but it was clear this week that even though most of them were willing to vote for it, p...
The American Health Care Act is in trouble, with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., admitting Wednesday that the bill must change to make it through Congress. The reason? The Republican right and the Republican center want different things, and the rules under which the proposed Obamacare replacement can pass the Senate by a simple majority make it extremely hard to satisfy both sides. But the apparently difficult problems of policy reforms are just that: “apparent.” With some outside-the-box thinking, some dealmaking and a little hum...
If Benjamin Franklin was right, then we can be certain of only two things in life: death & taxes. And yet Washington citizens remain uncertain about our state’s pending budget and the potential tax hikes likely to be requested to pay for the ever-expanding government obligations, including mounting education, homelessness, and mental health needs. Few things are more frustrating to tax-payers than the bait-and-switch from politicians that occurs when local, state and federal legislators identify a legitimate need, impose a new tax to pay for it...
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Democrats denouncing the new House GOP health-care bill should actually be dancing in the streets. Perhaps, in the privacy of their own homes, the savvier ones are popping the champagne corks. The true meaning of the proposed legislation is that, after eight years of all-out political and ideological struggle against Obamacare, Republicans have surrendered - pretty much on all fronts. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., should have written the bill on a large white tablecloth and run it up the nearest flagpole. Yes, yes, the plan is labeled...
President Donald Trump’s order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was issued with the promise of saving American jobs, but it may also mean fewer opportunities for Washington farmers. The agricultural industry supported the TPP. Washington wheat growers hoped it would help them expand their markets in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia where demand for grain is growing. Wheat is a $600 million industry in Washington, which ranks fifth in the country for wheat production. Last year, wheat growers harvested m...
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In his address Tuesday to Congress, President Donald Trump promised to make sure that the U.S. military gets what it needs to carry out its mission by securing “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” More funding would surely be a good thing, although the issues of how much and what for are complicated. No one should be under any illusions that a higher Defense Department top line guarantees a more capable armed forces. Trump is reportedly seeking $54 billion over the sequester caps imposed by the 201...
Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly -- Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy. There is, however, a more re...
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White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that he expects states to be subject to “greater enforcement” of federal laws against marijuana use, a move that could undercut the growing number of jurisdictions moving to legalize the drug for recreational purposes. Spicer, speaking at a White House press briefing, said that President Donald Trump sees “a big difference” between use of marijuana for medical purposes and for recreational purposes. “The president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facin...
In 1960, when John Kennedy was elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military personnel and postal workers). Fifty-seven years later, with seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal policy agenda that were virtually absent in 1960 (health care insurance, primary and secondary school quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun control, o...
President Donald Trump just can’t get his story straight. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, he accused the news media of widespread fabrication, claiming without evidence that “they have no sources; they just make ‘em up when there are none.” It is a charge Trump has leveled before. Yet it is wholly incompatible with his assertions, at other times (or on the same day), that U.S. intelligence officials are leaking classified information to reporters - and must be ferreted out. Friday morning, he tweeted: “The FBI is tota...
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cautioned his colleagues and the network’s viewers Sunday that President Donald Trump’s latest attack on the media had gone too far. “Look, we’re big boys. We criticize presidents. They want to criticize us back, that’s fine,” Wallace said Sunday morning on “Fox & Friends.” “But when he said that the fake news media is not my enemy, it’s the enemy of the American people, I believe that crosses an important line.” The “Fox & Friends” anchors had shown a clip of Trump recounting that past presidents, including Tho...
