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 […]
Hello?
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 […]
Can the Democrats get their act together for 2018?
A Great Civic Awakening is sweeping across the land, and for this we must thank Donald Trump. Slumbering citizens are rubbing the sleep from their eyes and paying attention to that is doing what to whom in their name. Commendably, they’ve set right to work, marshaling resistance to bad lawmaking. But if you want better […]
The Women’s March eludes network television
Last Saturday at least 600-plus residents of the Methow Valley, population 5,000, marched in Twisp to send a preemptive warning to the nation’s new president the day after he was sworn in. This message seemed to be: We want a president who upholds, not trashes, American values. When citizens take to the streets in protest […]
Here comes the new ‘Objectivist’ order
“… man exists for his own sake … the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose … he must not sacrifice himself to others nor sacrifice others to himself.” — Ayn Rand What do Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, secretary of state-designate Rex Tillerson, secretary of labor-designate Andy Puzder and CIA […]
