Shawn Vestal

These figures are new, but the phenomenon isn’t. But incomes in the city are not just low compared to booming Seattle – they are hovering near the poverty line, indicating that a large proportion of residents are living below it.

This week’s announcement that the city would again pursue temporary solutions, almost all of which still have yet to be identified, for sheltering the homeless during winter put an exclamation point on a year of fecklessness and fumbling from the Condon administration.

Preserve some honor, Congresswoman. Support the impeachment inquiry. Use whatever influence and leverage you have to set an example. Be the leader your words would have us believe you are.

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Bring several together and you have a portrait of a place.

As special-interest money pours into local elections, do donors with $50 to contribute deserve 100 or even 1,000 times less free speech than the deep pockets? What about people without even that?

Officials shouldn’t lean too hard on an appeals court decision as the reason to provide shelter for the homeless – as opposed to the moral, practical and ethical arguments in favor of sheltering human beings in need – because the ruling is not settled just yet.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for bike lanes in the Liberty State.

If we wanted to be smart about the nexus of homelessness, addiction and crime, we’d double the city’s community court program tomorrow.

It was food that brought together Bright Brown and Dorcas Awuah years ago on the other side of the world. Awuah sold kenkey and fried fish, along with other dishes, from a roadside cart in Ghana. Brown would visit the stand, buy the food and watch – with appreciation – as Awuah served others with patience and kindness.

Joshua Conklin was more than his worst times. More than a John Doe OD. He was Kirsten Zurfluh’s friend and special charge, and she has worked to give his life and death meaning, to organize funeral arrangements.

On this Labor Day, amid a longtime downward trend in national union membership and following a recent Supreme Court decision celebrated by union busters, it’s interesting to note that it’s a relatively good time for organized labor in Washington.

Spokane is sick, apparently. And the snake oil has arrived.

An important question looms following last week’s decision by Prosecutor Larry Haskell that the shooting of David Novak by Spokane police was justified: Where is the body-cam support?

When my son enters seventh grade this week, he’ll be entering another year of education, via lockdown drill, about the political soul of this country. Another year of discovering implicitly that we will teach kids to duck bullets in third period, but do nothing in the nation’s capital to keep guns away from murderers, while Team NRA in Congress, including Cathy McMorris Rodgers, cashes checks from arms dealers.

If anything, the growing condemnation of Matt Shea by local officials, in response to the latest details about our region’s foremost conspiratorial, paranoid, gun-worshipping, anti-government zealot, will just fuel his appetite for martyrdom. Shea’s end-times worldview, in which he casts himself as a righteous warrior against evil, requires the presence of an enemy, after all. The government, liberals, the media, Islam, the sheriff – the more that sane people object to Shea, the more he likes it.

Often, when social issues become politicized – whether it’s homelessness in Spokane or gun violence nationwide – there is a brief, urgent flare of interest in “treatment” as a solution. Treatment for addicts. Treatment for the mentally ill. Sounds good. Makes sense. And it’s too simplistic by half, because the scope and complexity of the problem dwarfs the available resources and, with addiction in particular, there is the stubborn problem at the heart of recovery known as human motivation.

Everyone agrees we need affordable housing and services for the poor. Everyone has, they assure everyone else, a heart for the suffering among us. And everyone concludes, over and over again, that right next to them is simply not the right place.

Every single day of 1999, the air was safe to breathe. Imagine.

When she hears her father’s voice, Remi Marlow’s bright blue eyes find him across the room and lock on, tracking him with a broad smile. And when Dan Marlow spots the beam of his 6-month-old daughter’s smile, he does what any father would – he goes to her, looks into her eyes, talks to her, plays with her.

The early primary results included both signs of swing – chiefly in Nadine Woodward’s leap to the front of the mayor’s race and strong performances from other critics of the status quo – and signs of support for the current council, with three incumbents leading their races.

The people overseeing the Central City Line say the sharp recent increase in the project’s estimated budget is not a red flag marking an emerging boondoggle. In fact, they argue it’s the opposite: an attempt to produce a realistic budget before work begins, driven in large part by a federal requirement that the agency set aside a big pot of money to defray unforeseen costs.

Despite an explanation of the decision not the press charges against a man who has an extensive history of credible reports of abusing his three children, it remains inexplicable how every adult, every organization, every institution meant to protect those kids accountable could have blown this so badly.

Jim Valentine’s defense of the racist imagery he paraded through Coeur d’Alene’s Fourth of July celebration embodies the representative species of our racist moment – the “Who, me?” racist; the no-racist-bones racist; the racist who, in the manner of the president, simply insists, when their racism is noticed, that it is not racism at all, as an audience of fellow cretins cheers.

Every release from the Spokane County Jail, from the least serious to the most, from allegation to conviction to dismissal, tells a different story. But we apply the same blunt tool to every one: a jail cell, at a daily rate of $133.