“A free press … is not the enemy of the American people; it is the protector of the American people.” — Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, April 6, 2018 Outraged citizens recently helped persuade Gov. Jay Inslee to veto an ill-considered bill to limit public disclosure of legislative records. But your right to know […]
Hello?
Putting on our big girl pants
“Oprah for president!” some women are shouting. Empowerment guru Oprah Winfrey is a national treasure — and seems smart enough to remain one. (Presidents don’t get much “national treasure” adulation.) Want real political empowerment, ladies? Do it yourself. Oprah would approve. American women have been exceedingly slow to grasp that to get more female-friendly governance, […]
What’s the matter with women?
When my grandmother was born in 1880 in Finland to an unmarried indentured dairymaid named Marie, the men of the Finnish Lutheran Church knew exactly what to do. First, Marie was ostracized for 40 days. As with all new mothers, married or not, she was deemed morally unclean. To prevent spread of the contagion of […]
Turkeys bearing tax tricks emerge from the swamp
A pair of tricked-out turkeys, gobbling nonsense, waddled ashore from the murky swamps of the Potomac this Thanksgiving season. We used to rely on Republicans to flap their wings and throw squawking hissy fits whenever federal spending promised to outrun income. But now the Republican-led House and Senate propose tax bills creating deficits of at […]
Are we there yet?
We’ve already forgotten about it. On Oct. 1, people enjoying an outdoor concert in Las Vegas were picked off like fish in a barrel by a gunman shooting from the 32nd story of a hotel. He owned 47 guns, 12 of them semiautomatics fitted with legal “bump stock” devices that turned them into illegal automatic […]
Don’t blame us for climate change
“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.” — President Donald Trump June 1, 2017 More than 40 years ago, I began writing news reports that briefly alluded to something scientists were calling “global warming.” Global warming really wasn’t much […]
Where are the Dan Evans Republicans?
“The Republican Party did not achieve greatness nor will it regain greatness by being a party of radicalism or of the lunatic fringe.” Gov. Daniel J. Evans, 1965 As we were absorbing the fallout from electing a Republican president who waffles on white supremacists, an event at Olympic National Park recalled a moment when the […]
Barbarians have stormed the gates of Congress
Safely back on these splendid capitalist shores after a driving trip through the moral wilderness of European socialism, I return with a burning question: How is it that those airy-fairy socialists build better roads than we “can-do” capitalists? Hello? Three thousand miles of driving — Holland, France and Spain — on rural byways and speedy highways, and nary a […]
Let’s dress up your brain with neural lace
Today we will plumb the depths of an abiding mystery: Why does the astonishing brain of Homo sapiens sapiens so often serve us so poorly? Why does this utterly amazing, precisely tuned instrument routinely seize up and play off key? Misread evidence? Ignore demonstrable fact? Persist in self-sabotaging misjudgments? Historians don’t pretend to be brain […]
Discrediting bearers of inconvenient news
There’s an old saying in the newspaper business: Doctors bury their mistakes; we publish ours. So, my abject apologies to readers, and U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, for misstating in last month’s column the margin by which Newhouse beat his opponent in 2016. I said it was 1.6 percent, but that was in 2014. In the […]
