John Webster

It's Father's Day. So what? Aren't dads optional? Television's Murphy Brown, culminating 20 years of male-bashing feminism, claimed they were. That silly sitcom became a wake-up call for public opinion. Now, even some feminists have begun to admit that men have a purpose, beyond supplying Hollywood with villains and buffoons. Fathers can help raise children, sharing the load that makes many a lonely working mother stagger.

Should Spokane County government be a branch office of the local real estate industry? Or does it have other obligations? For instance, to the general public, the folks who suffer when unregulated growth clogs streets, pollutes ground water and fuels firestorms. In the Puget Sound area, local governments gave free rein to developers for years, happily watching their tax base and agency budgets grow. The undirected sprawl degraded that region's quality of life. A few years ago, its residents forced the enactment of state growth management laws to make such misfortunes less likely elsewhere.

Nine months from now, Americans probably will know the identity of the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. Will Washington state's voters have a chance to help choose them through a primary election? The answer's up to the political parties. You'd think they would welcome voter participation in their nominating processes. The broader the participation, the more likely it is that the nominees will have broad vote-getting power in November. However, strong voter participation dilutes the power of party regulars and special interest groups.

If the Republicans who dominate Congress would shoo out the corporate lobbyists for a moment, they might discover common ground with a vulnerable, frequently overlooked group that they needlessly are about to cheat. Many American Indians agree with Republicans, that federal money and policy-making power should move from the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., to the local level where needs and services are better understood.

Suppose "Sesame Street" invited some Hollywood film producers onto the set to show the kiddies what they do for a living. To demonstrate, Ernie would whip out a machine pistol and blow Bert's head off, splattering a foul-mouthed Oscar the Grouch with blood. Big Bird would seduce Maria. Cookie Monster would rip Bert's heart from his chest and devour it. Of course, "Sesame Street" doesn't need to air such a show because Hollywood does it regularly. For children who watch films, there is no escape. The silver screen has turned the color of blood. The violence is graphic. The sex, irresponsible. Mothers, unmarried. Fathers, boors. Religious folks, fools. The body counts, beyond even The Count's ability to enumerate. Hollywood calls this art, entertainment, social commentary, make-believe.

Does capitalism need any of the regulatory restraints of government? No, say the conservatives who have given U.S. politics a hard shove to the right. But tell that to the lead-poisoned children and ripped-off pensioners left behind in the wreckage of Gulf Resources & Chemical Corp., owner of North Idaho's defunct Bunker Hill mine and smelter. A succession of buyout artists snapped up the company, which had major obligations to pensioners and to environmental cleanup. They spirited its cash out of the United States and squandered it on high living and risky investments.

If the plan succeeds, today could be a foundational moment for downtown Spokane's future. You don't usually see businesses, or anyone else, petitioning for an increase in their own taxes. But business people in downtown Spokane are doing exactly that. With good reason.

The Endangered Species Act needs to be amended. But the new Republican Congress will gut the act at its own peril, for Americans support reasonable environmental protection. Here in the Northwest, battles over endangered species have given the act a bad name. Yet the spotted owl and wild salmon runs would not have come so dramatically to crisis if timber and hydropower managers had paid more heed to biologists' concerns, and if resource-exploiting industry had not won decades of political dominance over forest and river operations. Politics is not the solution. The best fix for the Endangered Species Act is to avoid the need for it. Federal and state governments must continue the recent move to ecosystem management. This prevents crises for all species, rather than panicking over one species at a time. Northwest foresters are learning that with new methods, industry can coexist with the ecosystems it depends upon. But development of win-win methods hinges on adequate funding for biological research.

Business lobbyists popped champagne corks as Washington's newly conservatized Legislature headed for home last week. Regulators and tax collectors sulked. And the state's universities heaved happy sighs of relief. It was a significant session. It improved the state's notoriously hostile business climate, protected education, assaulted local government and the state's environmental quality, gave state workers a deserved raise, taught the new conservatives a needed lesson in compromise, and left some glaring governmental flaws unaddressed.

The United States does not need to amend its Constitution. We just need to use the one we have. Term limits? A balanced budget? To achieve those goals, the Constitution gives us all the tools we need. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned term-limits laws in 23 states, some conservative politicians promised they'd work to get term limits into the Constitution. What a waste of energy. Weren't they paying attention last November? Simply by marking their ballots, voters booted long-time incumbents from coast to coast. This familiar old constitutional process caused a political power shift far more dramatic than term limitations could achieve.

Life is too short to spend it fearing, stereotyping and regulating people we don't know or understand. It is far more effective - but more difficult - to learn how to enable others to achieve their goals, which usually turn out to be identical to our own. Consider illegal aliens, for example. What a damning term. What a tempting scapegoat. Pending in Washington state is an initiative, similar to one approved in California last year, to make illegal immigrants ineligible for tax-supported health, education and welfare services. This proposal is rooted in the poisonous politics of resentment. In Washington, there is no reasonable basis for the advocates' claim that illegals are stealing "our" jobs and entitlements. Spread across this state of 5.4 million people are an estimated 30,000 undocumented immigrants. That's no threat.

Divide $7,500 by four lost lives and don't count the plane. That's how seriously the U.S. Air Force takes the hot-dogging that caused a B-52 to crash near a nuclear weapons storage area outside Spokane. Col. William Pellerin, fall guy for last June's crash at Fairchild Air Force Base, will forfeit $1,500 per month for five months and be given a written reprimand. Pellerin had recommended approval of a flight plan that caused the crash. The plan called for a B-52 crew to practice stunts violating Air Force safety regulations. Why? To amaze the public at an upcoming air show.

Why invest $80 million in downtown Spokane? Betsy Cowles says she can spearhead a private/public partnership to save the core now, or she can spend the rest of her career trying to revive it. Cowles heads the companies that own downtown's Riverpark Square. Her family has published this newspaper for generations. Now it is stepping forward to commit tens of millions - the amount is not final - to help keep the city center alive.

Contrary to popular belief, Jesus was not a Republican. Nor did he hang out with the religious moralizers of his day. He lambasted them. See Matthew, chapter 23. He wasn't into politics, he was into personal compassion, service and redemption. He used persuasion, not coercion. His approach benefits from civil liberties, a fact his followers regularly forget. Jesus said the poor always would be with us. He might have added the Pharisees would be, too. Pharisees thought the coercive power of law could achieve religious goals. Their modern descendents inject religion into politics, an error that spawned some of history's ugliest abuses: The Dark Ages. The not-so-Holy Roman Empire. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The persecution of Jews. The Salem witch trials. With a track record like that, you'd think the church would grow wary of politics, might stick to its more constructive roles in history. Yet today, American politics crawls with conspicuous Christians who are fond of firearms, shrill about other people's sexual sins, harsh toward the poor, cozy with environmental plunderers, censorious toward the arts, suspicious of education and convinced that ritualistic public prayer can restore faith. If Pharisaism could make Jesus mad, this modern version might make him weep.

Spokane County Assessor Charlene Cooney was right about one thing. Fighting successfully to exempt her staff from budget cuts, she pointed out the importance of her office to the fiscal underpinnings of local government. But an ample staff isn't enough. It has to have a competent manager.

Should the Valley incorporate? Hey, it could be fun. Imagine Steve "Cornbread" Hasson as the George Washington figure for a new strong-mayor government. Or think about the one-ring circus that performs in Spokane's City Council chambers. If that's the best a city of 185,000 can produce, imagine what a bedroom community of 73,000 could do, coming up with a City Council of its own and a full slate of laws and bureaucrats and regulations and taxes to match.

Who knows best: Government inspectors and regulation writers? Or the business people and communities they try to regulate? Voters answered that question last fall. They're sick of the paperwork, the red tape, the attorney fees and the meddlesome inspectors who enforce arbitrary rules, written in distant places, which don't fit the realities of a local workplace. Washington's Legislature heeded the voters' message this spring when it passed HB1010, a bill to rein in regulation writers. The measure would restore the Legislature to its constitutional role as the maker of laws, a role increasingly taken over by a shadow legislature of unelected rules writers from the executive branch of government.

Washington's legislators can't even agree on how to achieve efficiencies and a customer-service mentality in state government. So why on earth should consumers trust them to mess around with the telephone industry? US West, GTE, AT&T;, MCI and other corporate titans are fighting for market share - and your money. None is above using government's power for competitive advantage. During the past year, for example, US West lobbyists blitzed Washington's Legislature for a bill to extend that company's dominance as a "local area" service provider and to inhibit the state's utility regulators from opening the door to competition.

The Henry Foster slimed this week in the Senate was not a human being, it was a scarecrow, fabricated for political purposes from the obsessions, distortions and imaginings of the religious right. The real Henry Foster has done more to relieve some of our toughest social problems than his Senate critics are likely to do in the entirety of their political careers. The real Henry Foster deserves to be our next Surgeon General.

Who represents the general public when legislators let lobbyists draft the laws? The current session of Washington's Legislature has been a lobbyist's heaven. Decision-making hinges on a contingent of political novices, unfamiliar with the state's laws, its budget, its hidden power struggles and the legislative process. Furthermore, the new legislators sympathize ideologically with the business interests that many of the slickest lobbyists represent. This may not have been the best environment, from a consumer's point of view, for rewriting Washington's health care reform act of 1993.

Baby Richard knows who his real father is. He's not the man who copulated with an unmarried woman and got her pregnant. He's the Chicago firefighter who adopted Baby Richard, loved him through the first four years of his life and stood weeping helplessly this week as our messed-up laws ripped the terrified child from his home. Americans who rightly felt sickened by the scene can expect such atrocities to occur again - until we change our laws to place children's best interests first.

Last fall, voters made it clear they want a new spirit of thrift in government. Now, it's follow-through time. But in Olympia, change is not coming easily. The Legislature seems stalled. That's partly the conservatives' own fault. Some, naively, refuse to compromise. They threaten to shut state government down this summer if the next budget's any bigger than $17.3 billion. Crucial as it is to limit spending, that arbitrary figure is even below the tight spending lid voters set in Initiative 601. Veteran conservatives like Sen. Dan McDonald, who has fought Olympia's excesses for years, know that the total isn't the key. It's how well the money is spent.

The delusions that inspired Hitler and his Nazis - guns will make us strong, hate will show we're brave, slaughter will make us safe - have not grown less hypnotic with the passing of 50 years. Like a virus, these lies are spreading through a paranoid subculture of the United States. Let us be honest: The country's angry new conservatism helped spread the disease. Talk radio has incited hatred against our government and its employees. Religious zealots conscript God as an ally in their political jihads.

It's been 25 years since the first Earth Day rallied public support for the stewardship of this fragile planet on which our lives depend. But it took two centuries of accelerating industrial plunder to make Earth Day popular. Now that the environment is getting cleaner, can Americans afford to roll back their environmental laws? C'mon. We've tried laissez-faire capitalism. Anyone who's forgotten where that leads can visit the stripped forests and polluted cities of the Third World.