Gary Crooks

State of the Union

The Creach case

The Jan. 24 Thread

The mandate embedded in national health care reform seems to flummox a lot of people. “You can’t make me buy something! That’s un-American!”

Myth of Hero Gunslinger

The Jan. 17 thread

Do you live your politics? Do your daily actions reflect your deeply held beliefs to the extent that you can be called a positive role model for like-minded thinkers? I want world governments to work on the problem of global warming. In the meantime, I travel in airplanes, drive cars, heat and cool my house and maintain a lawn. Sure, the car is a hybrid, the mower is battery-operated and the new boiler is highly efficient, but I’m still doing some harm.

Political leaders often face the tension between doing the right thing and doing it the right way. My view is that if the latter is certain to thwart the former, then process should be the victim. Would it have been better if desegregation were triggered by elected leaders rather than the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision? Sure. But Congress had nearly a century to codify the emancipation of African-Americans and was continuing to drag its heels.

Hello to 2011

Say goodbye to 2010

Facebook is the future. Or so it would seem. So let’s get on with it. Time magazine named Mark Zuckerberg man of the year!

The Dec. 13 Thread

So many questions. Maybe you have the answers. 1. President Obama’s compromise on extending the Bush tax cuts has been labeled a flip-flop, but the capitulation by the many Republicans who have endorsed the deal has gone largely unnoticed.

For a nation that doesn’t like bailouts, we sure have spent a lot on rescuing the military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Initially, Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida, and when those rationales dissipated, it became about spreading democracy, stabilizing a Middle Eastern nation and “fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here” – the “them” being terrorists, which, according to this rationale, have fallen for our clever trap by flooding into Iraq to take on the military, rather than coming over here.

The Nov. 29 thread

Thanksgiving through a partisan lens

The Thanksgiving Week thread

I understand there is a lot of anger out there and that it played out during the recent election. So I thought I would try to reduce the tension by piercing some misunderstandings. A Bloomberg Poll taken shortly before the election found that voters were mad at some things that just weren’t true. By a 2-to-1 margin, respondents said the federal government had raised their taxes in the past year. Not true. In fact, taxes were cut by about $240 billion, and the middle class largely benefited. It seems that most people don’t realize that about one-third of the congressional stimulus package included tax cuts.

The Nov. 16 Thread

When Spokane Mayor Mary Verner announced that 120 city jobs would be lost without union concessions, including about 45 in the Police Department, Chief Anne Kirkpatrick commented, “We’re not going to be able to do more with less; we’re going to have to do less with less.” This made me smile. Not that I’m happy about the cuts or the loss in service. That, of course, is bad. It’s that she didn’t robotically utter the cliché that sets workers’ eyes to rolling: “We’re going to do more with less.”

Social media has it covered

The Nov. 8 thread

My favorite political joke in recent years wasn’t authored by comedians Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. No, it comes from Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who worked this gem into his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, which released torrents of campaign spending by overturning congressional limits. It goes like this: “With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

Midterms today