Doug Floyd

If anybody appreciates the value of a penny – even better than Washington state’s fiscally strained  lawmakers – it’s the Spokane Guilds’ School.  Every year as part of its fundraising, the nonprofit organization appeals to the region’s schoolchildren to reach into their pockets literally for their pennies. And, as children do, they respond. Eagerly.

The sedan ahead of me was barreling along the byways outside of Kansas City, and I was glued to its bumper. The Washington state trooper at the wheel was hustling Gov. Dan Evans to his next speaking engagement and wasn’t worrying that traffic or red lights might throw me off his trail.

Whatever it was that was so shocking about South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst during President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday, it wasn’t the simple breach of decorum. Decorum, if you haven’t noticed, is extinct. We lost it long ago. I’ve become increasingly sensitive to its departure, not only because of what goes on daily in the news – or the cable TV screechfests that pass for news – but also because of the sour tone of political discourse that takes place in The Spokesman-Review’s own letters column.

It's spring, the season when, as poet Joan Walsh Anglund put it: "... new life presses out from every growing thing, fulfilling our trust, renewing our faith, that this has always been, that this will be again."

Creationists declare that evolution, (they prefer to call it Darwinism) is only a theory and no more entitled to be part of the public school curriculum than any other theory. They also pretend that creationism, which you can read about in the Old Testament book of Genesis, is supported by science and therefore belongs in the schools as much as evolution does.

Cherie Rodgers is known as a clean air activist. That shouldn't keep the Spokane city councilwoman off the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority, given the clean air agency's mission. If anything, it should make her an ideal fit.

"It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?" That familiar question has been around for awhile. It's an appropriate reminder to parents of their responsibility for the guidance and supervision of their youngsters. What if we shift the time frame a few hours?

Early in October 1959, a handful of New York consultants arrived in Spokane to begin laying out a 20-year development plan for the city's core. Four months later, the preliminary report was released. With a couple of slight modifications in the 1960s and early '90s, that plan still represents the guiding vision for downtown Spokane. That is about to change, however, beginning with a town hall meeting from 7 to 10 p.m. Thursday at the Spokane Convention Center.

Washington state Sen. Bob McCaslin takes great pride in never voting for tax hikes. Yet even that staunch conservative has said he's ready to support a fuel tax increase if that's what it takes to get the Evergreen interchange built. That's how important the freeway project is to the Spokane Valley where Republican McCaslin's voters live and drive.

Declaring federal holidays is not a task to be undertaken lightly. The last time Congress decided to establish a holiday was in 1983 when Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday was added to federal workers' calendar. That decision took years to debate and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to implement.

To every citizen or motorist who ever muttered, "Where's a cop when you really need one?" one answer is: Not on the state and county highways on and near the Spokane Indian Reservation. If you travel those roads and you count on the Washington State Patrol's enforcement activities to protect you and your loved ones from drunken drivers, speeders and other highway menaces, you can't - not since tribal officials accused Trooper David Fenn, a prolific ticket-writer, of racist motives.

When it comes to talking to kids, the S-word that stops more parents in their tracks than "sex" is "suicide." The typical response when a youngster drops hints about ending his or her life is no response. Mental health professionals say adults are afraid to talk with an adolescent about suicide because it might plant the idea in an impressionable mind.

In courtroom legalese they're known as guardians ad litem. In the language of childhood make-believe, they would be called guardian angels. "They" are the volunteers who dedicate heart-wrenching hours to making sure abused and neglected children are fairly represented when lawyers, parents and government agencies fight over them in court.

The sequence of name changes that eventually converted Cheney Normal School into Eastern Washington University tells us something about the modernization of public higher education in the Spokane area. But in its drive to keep pace with the changing needs, bad times have befallen the institution. Enrollment has nose-dived by nearly 1,000 students in four years. State officials are withholding revenues until they see evidence of a plan to correct the slippage. And when this fall's numbers revealed yet another decline it was seen as good news - because the decline wasn't as severe as expected.

In 1970, Washington voters decided this state's longstanding restriction against lending public money for private purposes was too limiting. They amended the Constitution just enough to let local governments loan money to private property owners for water- or energy-conservation improvements. Now, House Joint Resolution 4209 offers voters a chance to extend that authority to stormwater and sewer services.

Twenty years ago, the crisis in Washington state's public schools was how to pay for them. Today's crisis is even more urgent than that. It's how to set higher learning standards and hold students, parents and teachers accountable for reaching them. It's how to do it while affording all students, regardless of differences, an equal opportunity to learn. And it's how to relate the whole process to the world where today's youngsters will contribute as workers and citizens.

Homosexuality is controversial. Fairness isn't. And Initiative 677 is about fairness more than it's about homosexuality.

It's the American way: identify a problem, write a law, go on to the next problem. So, if teenagers account for a disproportionate share of traffic accidents, it's not surprising that several states have responded with a complex system of graduated driving privileges, doled out along age divisions narrow enough to defy the most observant law-enforcement officers' ability to make the distinctions.

A virus is going around. It goes around every election season. It's called cynicism.

Police officers are vested with virtual life-and-death authority. That, Spokane Police Chief Terry Mangan has said, subjects them to a higher standard of conduct than other citizens. In spite of that, he has conceded, police officers, being human, sometimes err.

It doesn't happen often, perhaps twice a year, that a hazardous-waste scare shuts down one of the Spokane regional trash-disposal facilities. When it does, it's annoying, it's costly and, usually, it's avoidable. Most recently, on Sept. 15, the Valley Transfer Station was closed for half a day after alert employees spotted some common but nevertheless hazardous items mixed in with normal household garbage. Whoever discarded those materials may not have been aware of the proper procedures, or may have been deliberately trying to duck what he or she expected would be cumbersome compliance rules.

Less than a fourth of Spokane County's registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday's primary election. Yawn. Dismal as it is, that wholesale abdication of civic duty is only half the story. The other half is that only about two-thirds of the eligible population is registered to vote in the first place.

If the name thalidomide scares people, it should. Unfortunately, people who ought to be scared the most - women of childbearing age - "have no clue" about the 12,000 severe birth defects blamed on thalidomide before it was banned worldwide in 1962. The words quoted above are from Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Her agency has been measuring public awareness of thalidomide as the FDA moves toward approval of the drug in the United States.

Here's today's multiple choice question. Clinton Falls is: (a) A town in Indiana (b) A town in Minnesota (c) The headline Newt Gingrich dreams about (d) A renowned tourist destination The answer? All of the above - except d.