Doug Floyd

For a city that's too strapped to repair its wretched streets, Spokane is pretty cavalier about paying $2.78 million for the former Salty's property. It's not just the purchase price. The treasury also will kiss the revenue from private property, business and sales taxes goodbye.

From the outset it was hard to justify the state Medical Quality Assurance Commission's interest in disciplining Spokane County Coroner Dexter Amend. Certainly Amend's public displays of intolerance and insensitivity deserve censure. And the retired urologist's controversial conduct no doubt embarrassed many members of the medical profession. But that's no reason that Amend's license to practice medicine should have been in jeopardy over acts that had nothing to do with his being a physician.

The Spokane City Council is under heavy pressure to defend TV-watching households from an infiltration by unwanted smut. Specifically, a group of petitioners wants the city to require the community's cable television provider - which is about to change from Cox Cable to Tele-Communications Inc. - to black out the unwanted signals for so-called adult channels such as Spice and Playboy.

Even Supreme Court justices have personal opinions. Within reason, they have a right to express them. And that's all Justice Antonin Scalia did the other day when he said in a speech at Catholic University's School of Philosophy that the Constitution does not extend a right to die.

Three men, all county employees, were having a conversation one day in early summer when one of them made a suggestive remark. They thought they were alone, but a female colleague overheard the comment, which she believed referred to her. She heard a second man add something she couldn't make out, and she heard the three men laugh.

Washington voters approved legalized gambling 24 years ago. At the time, few people were talking about slot machines or casinos or even a state lottery. They were talking about bingo. "It's foolish to fear that this type of amendment would open the state up to Las Vegas-style gambling," said state Sen. Gordon Walgren, who was leading the movement.

It's disappointing, though not surprising, that the Board of County Commissioners backed down on Tuesday from making it illegal for minors to smoke in Spokane County. Chalk it up as one more confused, indecisive message to youngsters about smoking, a health risk about which there is nearly universal agreement: Kids shouldn't smoke.

All the Republicans you saw on television this week were pro-choice. Not about abortion, maybe, but about involvement. All of them have chosen the arduous work of citizenship. So have the Democrats who get the spotlight week after next. So are the enlistees in Ross Perot's Reform Party, and Libertarians, and Greens.

If the Founding Fathers had intended American democracy to be effortless, Thomas Jefferson would have extolled life, liberty and the delivery of happiness. But self-governance is work, and when it falters, no magic incantation will fix it.

When it comes to escapism, Saturday morning cartoon shows have nothing on presidential election years. So, there was President Clinton on Monday, streaking out of the sky like a caped superhero to rescue America's children from certain calamity. How? Easy (for a superhero, anyway). He ordered four commercial television networks to broadcast at least three hours a week of educational programming for kids.

Lorrene Hughes of Spokane has never been on public assistance. Jocelyn Silva of Pullman has. But they agree that welfare reform should deal with low-income mothers' need for skills and resources such as day care. "It would be very logical," said Hughes, "for women that need affordable day care - and a lot of these are unskilled women who make minimum wage and are not going to make any money after paying day care - to have some kind of a county-operated day-care center where they can work and earn not only free day-care time but also schooling to increase their skills."

Traffic-jam veterans know the experience. A tingle of expectation, just before the congestion actually does break up, that it's about to. In the Spokane Valley there are puffs of hope, like burps of diesel smoke from an idled semi coming back to life, that the rush-hour coagulation along Sprague and a series of Interstate 90 off-ramps may someday unclot. Spokane County commissioners have given their blessing to a one-way couplet using Sprague and portions of First and Second avenues, between University and Thierman.

A Richland lawyer did nothing to spruce up his profession's battered image last week when he recommended that a convicted felon - and fellow attorney - be allowed to keep practicing law. Fortunately, the state Bar Association's disciplinary board and the state Supreme Court will have a chance to apply soberer reasoning before the issue is decided. It was the disciplinary board that appointed Thomas Heye as a hearing officer in a disbarment move against Spokane attorney Ronald Kappelman. Kappelman, one of the defendants in a major cocaine case known as "Operation Doughboy," pleaded guilty in 1994 to three federal charges involving cocaine use. His license has been suspended.

Like it or not, this is an election year. In less than six months, we'll pick a president. And the entire House of Representatives. And a third of the Senate. And thousands of state and local officials. That, say the civics textbooks, is the way a self-governing people decide how they will direct their public affairs.

Let's be honest. Not everybody who buys Playboy, Playgirl or Penthouse magazine is looking for top-notch fiction and consumer advice about stereo equipment. Some readers just want to look at dirty pictures. Disgusting? A lot of people think so. But the First Amendment protects such publications just the same, not necessarily because of the values they impart, but because guaranteeing public access to all ideas - even some discomfiting ones - is less dangerous than letting the government decide which ideas are allowable and which ones aren't.

Nobody will go to the polls for Liberty School District's bond election on May 21. The polls will go to them. Ballots went out this week to all 2,200 registered voters in the district for the county's first all-mail election. Voting by mail is expected to save tax dollars and increase turnout.

Television can educate you, inform you and entertain you. Or it can isolate you and broil your cerebral cortex. It can be used or abused, and surveys tell us that Americans are big-time abusers. So a Washington, D.C., organization called TV-Free America wants all of us to switch the tube off - for a week - beginning Wednesday. A week's abstinence is supposed to purge us of the mind-numbing toxins we absorb for four hours a day. National TV-Turnoff Week will make us a healthier, more productive nation, says TV-Free America.

A reader called Monday to say how frustrating it is that so many people have such limited understanding of our political system. But Shannon Selland's frustration is no match for her persistence. Besides running her own family day-care, Selland is public policy chairperson for both the Eastern Washington Family Day Care Association and the Washington Association for the Education of Young Children.

Former House Speaker Tom Foley was at Washington State University last week to help launch an ambitious project of civic repair. Restoring Americans' confidence in their government and political system is the main goal of WSU's new Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service. Foley's detractors are sure to find irony in the matchup of man and mission. During the three decades he served in Congress, that institution watched Americans' respect for it take a nose-dive.

Stop! Cease! Hold it! Tonight the Spokane City Council plans to decide whether to pay a consultant up to $5,000 to collect the information council members will weigh in deciding whether to renew City Manager Roger Crum's contract. The council members shouldn't pay a consultant even $5 to do this work. That is part of their job. In fact, in a council-manager form of government it is the essence of their job. Employees report to supervisors who report to department heads who report to the city manager who reports to the council.

Inside Coeur d'Alene's two high schools, young people learn about the rights and responsibilities that go along with citizenship. They learn, for example, that Americans needn't fear searches of themselves or their property unless authorities have good reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.

Once there was a town where property developers identified a perfect location for new homes. Even though it would be decades before American communities would confront the hornet's nest known as zoning, these developers had vision enough to worry about protecting the area's residential character. So they adopted a covenant prohibiting any building there from being used "for business purposes of any kind." A harness shop couldn't move in next door, for instance.

It's too bad James Madison's words don't have as much impact on American politics today as does his picture - the one on a $5,000 bill. Madison warned that "factions" - what we usually call special interests - endanger popular government.

An election in Spokane County would be incomplete without a jail issue on the ballot. Or so it seems from the past three years. True to form, this Tuesday's general election includes a sales tax proposal to raise $12 million for various jail construction and staffing efforts. As modest as the tax is at 0.1 cent on the dollar, and as pressing as the crime issue is, there are numerous reasons to vote no on Spokane County Proposition 2. Chief among them are these: