John Webster

For more than a decade, the Democrats who dominated Washington state government siphoned money from higher education and poured it down the social-handout drain. Now Republicans rule, but a new breed of blue-collar conservative is picking up where the liberals left off: attacking public education. This should alarm the state's businesses and parents. It couldn't be happening at a worse time.

Guy World took another step out of the Stone Age this week. One of its icons - a pro basketball player - publicly sought treatment for clinical depression, emerged with his hope restored and urged others to do likewise. Whether you're the one afflicted, or someone you love, you need to know the truth about depression. It could save your career, your marriage, your elderly parents, or the life of your teen-aged son or daughter.

Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a broken nation confidence when he announced that government would step in to help the weak and start the stalled wheels of industry. Six decades later, as Americans honor President Roosevelt's passing from life into history, confidence in government nearly has disappeared. But government's goals - education, justice, etc. - are crucial as ever.

A vacancy on Washington's Supreme Court has given Gov. Mike Lowry a chance to boost the court's scholarly heft and judicial experience. To judge judges, the court needs more members who've been there. It also needs members from outside Puget Sound. Philip J. Thompson of Spokane offers what the high court lacks. Over two decades he has worn the robe in county District Court, Superior Court, Juvenile Court and the state Court of Appeals.

Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt's first year in the White House have Americans seen a 100-day whirlwind like the one that launched the 104th Congress. We're surprised. We admit it. When this newspaper endorsed Tom Foley last fall, it seemed a safe bet Democrats would keep their majority and the widely respected Speaker would offer the best hope for fixing a dysfunctional Congress. It seemed a sure bet that the pledges in "Contract with America" would go the way of all campaign rhetoric.

At the north entrance to Riverfront Park, visitors pass the Flour Mill, then walk south across the Spokane River on a wide, barren expanse of asphalt. Now, picture that concrete-railed bridge alive with the color, music and wares of a farmers market. If this comes to pass, the park will have a new attraction and the Spokane MarketPlace will have a future.

Take a spring noon hour sometime soon, and stroll through downtown Spokane. You'll see stirrings of something that's been missing for years: Street life. No, cynics, not loiterers. Shoppers. Sightseers. Office workers. Sidewalk superintendents. Picturesque trolleys. Cobblestone plazas dotted with ornate lampposts, benches, pedestrians. Busy restaurants. The foot traffic is growing, in spite of the fact that the Wall Street plazas are still a construction zone.

Republicans can't retain power in the Washington state Legislature merely by swinging hatchets at our wicked government. While plenty of bureaucratic underbrush does need removal, the longer-term issue is how government can serve and spend in a better way. For examples of the new wave in government, legislators ought to take a closer look at Spokane. This community has a track record for local innovation in the use of state funds. Successful agencies here join hands to create new, multidisciplinary programs that remove bureaucratic barriers to the people being served. These efforts combine state funds with local and federal dollars to make the state's investment go further. Local policy making allows quick, responsive course corrections. State dollars make the projects viable.

Can the Pacific Northwest save both its threatened salmon runs and its hydropower-dependent economy? Rhetoric in the salmon debate sometimes implies we can save only one, not both. Wrong. Gradually, federal policy has begun moving in a direction that's encouraging for both the salmon and the economy. A crucial victory occurred this month when the Clinton administration agreed with the Northwest's congressional delegation that federal taxpayers should pay part of the cost of upcoming salmon restoration measures. After all, it is federal laws and treaty commitments that create the duty to save salmon. And it was largely federal policy - involving dams, fisheries and habitat management - that placed wild salmon runs in jeopardy.

Still wondering why Spokane County needs a unified government, as freeholders propose? Consider the governmental turf war over Moran Prairie, on Spokane's southern city limits. Years ago the prairie really was out in "the country." Today it's a developer's playground, a bedroom community that feeds off the city's jobs and clogs the city's insufficient arterials with commuters. But it gives the city no property taxes to relieve the congestion it creates. Its taxes go to county government and rural service districts, instead.

The Spokane area, well known for its contribution to last fall's Republican tidal wave, now begins to see what good the big change will do us. In the Washington state House of Representatives, the new majority has put together a budget for the next two years. In many respects it does live up to the voters' mandate. And yet, this draft Republican plan leaves the most urgent Spokane needs out in the cold, just as if West-Side Democrats were still in charge.

If the federal government is squandering billions of our money - and it is - the first thing it ought to do is spend less. The second and more important thing for it to do is spend more wisely. After all, the government's goals have merit. Consider, for example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. So extreme is the mismanagement there that some influential members of Congress feel tempted to throw up their hands, slash and cap Hanford's budget and walk away. Over the short term, cuts do make sense. Over the long term, mere cuts would be a recipe for nuclear disasters, particularly without major changes in the way Hanford spends its federal money.

How many governments does Spokane County need? Two separate efforts for local government reform are moving full-speed ahead. The proposal to form a city in the Valley, rejected twice by the voters, goes on the ballot again in May. Next fall, the county can vote on a broader plan - by the freeholders, chosen and empowered by the voters. Both efforts are inspired by the failings of our current government. But the two solutions are at opposite poles.

This week, Puget Sound voters trounced a proposal for an expensive mass transit system. The area's traffic jams, the result of unmanaged growth, will just keep getting worse. Meanwhile, Republicans in the Legislature are attacking laws designed to prevent such headaches. Don't yawn. Puget Sound's problems are not as far away as the people of Spokane may think.

The people who live and work above the Rathdrum-Spokane aquifer have seen nothing but good as a result of its designation as a sole drinking water source. The designation made the public more cautious and government more vigilant about activities that might endanger this irreplaceable resource. So why is there such an uproar over a request that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency similarly designate the ground water that underlies most of southeastern Washington? To find the answer, follow the rhetoric. The primary source is a corporation that has excelled at manipulating politicians and public opinion so it can make millions burying Seattle's garbage out in the middle of Eastern Washington wheat country.

Baby Ryan went home last week, but neither his future nor the ethical dilemmas he posed are settled. Uncertainties remain about whether he will live, what kind of life he will enjoy, and at what costs. Neither medicine nor public policy know how to address those uncertainties.

The partisan ideologues who think they run Congress these days picked the wrong target when they tried to bully Mark Hatfield. The Oregon Senator, a devout Baptist, has won widespread recognition for his career-long struggle to apply faith and principle to politics - impossible as the task might seem. Back when Newt Gingrich was a liberal, scrounging for an ideology that would help him win elections, Hatfield was catching hell from conservatives who thought God and the American flag required American boys to die in Vietnam.

What sort of a ski resort will Mount Spokane be over the next 20 years? The state parks commission has heard loud and clear from the people it serves that major improvements are needed. The state cannot reasonably count on major improvements from a fine-tuning of its contract with the current operator. Especially when the state has not fostered a robust competition for the right to operate the downhill ski area. The current operator's contract expires this summer. The Mt. Spokane Skiing Corp. hopes to win the contract again. The company submitted the only bid last year when the state asked for proposals.

Shakespeare he ain't, but Tom Clancy is a great writer. So why does his newest book, Op Center, stink? Because he didn't write it. He and a partner outlined the plot, and a third party they refuse to name wrote the book. A few years ago, a wiser Clancy said: "Giving your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp." Now, the marketing industry has captured him in its diseased embrace. The same disaster has befallen one of the classics of children's literature. Hollywood recently produced a popular film version of Little Women. Some dim bulb in the marketing department decided to supplement the profits with a paperback version. But the original book contains long sentences, Victorian sermonettes and other qualities Hollywood views as a kiss of death. So Louisa May Alcott's 500-page classic was rewritten, shrunk to 130 pages.

I think what we did back then is better than anything we will do for the rest of our lives and I don't know if it's fortunate or unfortunate that it happened at that early an age. - Marty Wick, member of Brewster High School's championship basketball team from the 1970s. Is the B Basketball Tournament only about athletics? No way.

The most important steps toward reduction of the federal budget deficit won't be taken today. Sure, the Senate's about to vote on the balanced budget amendment. However, it's the actual budget cutting that counts. And if actual budget cutting occurs, the voters who asked for it are going to feel a pinch. Consider, for example, the voters in the 5th Congressional District. In Spokane County, the district's population center, government is a leading source of jobs - especially, jobs that pay a family wage.

Fifty years from now, Walk in the Wild zoo will be remembered as faintly as the zoo that once occupied the current site of Manito Park. What will stand on its gorgeous riverbank location? Aging condos? How about a park and community center as beloved as Manito, a big splash of peace, greenery and wildlife habitat in what's sure to be an urban sea of roofs and parking lots? Residents of the Valley already express justified concern over the inadequate supply of parks. Someday, dense development likely will stretch all the way from Spokane to Coeur d'Alene. Now is the time to set land aside so that this community-to-be will enjoy the same sort of park system for which the city of Spokane is today so grateful.

One-hundred and thirty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood before a divided nation at his second inauguration and observed: Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. Lincoln was speaking of Civil War adversaries. He might have been speaking of American politics, circa 1995.

Back in 1977, Washington's Legislature loaded up the juvenile justice system for a magical mystery tour on the battered bus of '60s idealism: What troubled children needed was lawyers, rules, rights, bureaucracy. So the state gave kids a right to run away, made it tougher to remove children from abusive families, placed its faith in serial foster care by government-regulated strangers and created a by-the-numbers sentencing system for juvenile crime. Today, with street kids too numerous to ignore, the foster care system overwhelmed and juvenile institutions crammed with streetwise thugs, it has begun to dawn on the Legislature that mistakes were made.