Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Like Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago, I believe American society thrives when people act out of an enlightened regard for themselves that constantly prompts them to assist each other. I remain optimistic that our nation can unify around policies that promote a system of mutual benefit for people from all walks of life. As President Donald Trump nears 100 days in office, we are moving closer to that ideal in some respects, but not in others. But no president can - or should - be expected to solve every problem alone. To be...
Attempting comprehensive tax reform is like trying to tug many bones from the clamped jaws of many mastiffs. Every provision of the code -- now approaching 4 million words -- was put there to placate a clamorous faction, or to create a grateful group that will fund its congressional defenders. Still, Washington will take another stab at comprehensiveness, undeterred by the misadventures of comprehensive immigration and health care reforms. Consider just one tax change that should be made and certainly will not be. The deductibility of mortgage...
Let’s face it: The past 100 days have been a disaster . . . for Democrats. While much ink has been spilled in the past week assessing President Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Democrats’ abysmal performance has largely escaped scrutiny. So let’s review their record. The Democrats spent much of Trump’s first months in office pushing their unfounded narrative of Trump’s alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin. But that narrative went up in smoke when Trump launched missile strikes against Putin’s Syrian ally, Bashar Assad. Trump not only hit...
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Despite the best efforts of the White House “PR apparatus” to sell the president’s first 100 days as a success, the New York Times declared in an editorial, the new administration has, in fact, been plagued by “many missteps” including a “bungled sales job” on his first major legislative initiative and a “snakebit” confirmation process, all of which have produced “a flurry of articles bemoaning the lack of focus in the White House.” The first 100 days, the Times declared, is a period the president “might prefer to forget.” The president...
President Donald Trump’s apologists were convinced that the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch, the strikes on Syria and the mega-bomb dropped in Afghanistan signaled Trump had “grown.” He’s learning on the job! He’s coming back into the mainstream! As we’ve seen each and every time he showed signs of maturing, excitement over momentary improvement was vastly overblown. Consider this past week: - Trump was uninformed or lied about the whereabouts of the USS Vinson, falsely suggesting the “armada” was heading for North Korea. - While foreign...
In his first annual message to Congress, John Quincy Adams, among the most experienced and intellectually formidable presidents, warned leaders against giving the impression that “we are palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this regard, if in no other, the 45th president resembles the sixth. Donald Trump’s “Oh, never mind” presidency was produced by voters stung by the contempt they detected directed toward them by the upper crust. Their insurrection has been rewarded by Trump’s swift shedding of campaign commitments, a repudiation...
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For the past few years, I’ve sat in New Orleans high school classrooms watching students debate the fairest way for government to raise revenue. They role-play - first as management consultants advising legislators; then as lawmakers, weighing what to tax: property vs. sales vs. income. Are there limits on what or who can be taxed? Is a flat tax or a progressive rate structure fairer? Sometimes their discussions are heated. These teenagers, however, have an edge that many adults don’t: basic tax literacy. Guided by Tulane law students, the hig...
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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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