Shawn Vestal

You might have been forgiven for thinking it would never happen. The storied Ridpath Hotel – a downtown fixture for more than a century – had fallen into such a state since its closure in 2008 that it was reported to the city as unsafe. Transients moved in and out. Garbage piled up inside and in doorways. Graffiti and disrepair became the primary decorative characteristics. It stank.

It’s not like the guy could be all that smart. But there’s no way Jim Valentine could be quite this dumb: The Post Falls man stuck a gross caricature of a young African-American girl eating a big slice of watermelon on the side of one of his business’s trucks. When decent people criticized it, prompting news reports this week, Valentine pretended not to understand what all the fuss was about.

How many dead children per year is the going price for religious freedom? One? Three? Seven?

There are a lot of reasons to celebrate the fact that Washington ended the costly, counterproductive and racist war on marijuana.

When Don Adams decided he would go to college as a way to rise above fast-food work, he started at Spokane Community College. He paid his way with federal grants and a full-time job as a night manager at a Pizza Hut.

It’s hard to think of a clearer collision between old and new Spokane than what’s happening on North Monroe Street.

None of your business. Wondering how the Legislature’s coming along in its negotiations over funding education? Wondering who the legislative leaders are meeting with as they try to hash it out?

The harshest critics of our congresswoman, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, deride her as a do-nothing who has risen to leadership in a do-nothing legislative body – one that so far can’t manage to do the one thing it relentlessly boasted it would do: gut the evil Obamacare. But that assessment of McMorris Rodgers is unfair, because it omits what she’s been busy undoing. She voted with congressional GOP majorities to block Obama-era rules that would require internet providers to get consumers’ permission to sell their data – standing up for corporate profits over citizen privacy. She’s also proposed legislation that would undo nutrition labeling requirements at pizza chains.

Refugee Aung Zaw’s life has been full of enough strife that a few racist posters pasted to the door where he works didn’t rattle him too much. But the rest of us in Spokane need to confront such hate and ensure it doesn’t find comfort in our city.

It was the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day, 1992, which meant St. Patrick’s Day season was well under way. Patty Henchel went to the Hi-Neighbor Tavern on North Monroe with a friend to play darts. Someone introduced her to Pat Hallinan. If they noticed the coincidence at the time – Pat, Patty, St. Paddy’s – it went unremarked.

Another dreary, desperate day in Spokane. The skies are gray. Our hopes are dim and dimming. We wander listlessly, zombies scouting for vestiges of community, trying not to get robbed. There’s rust on the Ferris wheel, the carousel is closed, the streets are piled with the cooling bodies of the murdered…

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and the GOP are yanking the rug out from under the poorest and most vulnerable people in her Eastern Washington congressional district.

Gloria Ochoa-Bruck came to America as an undocumented baby. She went on to law school and now serves in Spokane Mayor David Condon’s Cabinet.

It’s a good thing there are science teachers in Idaho to stand between students and the designs of state lawmakers. Otherwise, they might be getting the kind of “balanced” view of climate change that some members of the House Education Committee would like to see taught. You know – the view that “balances” science with faith and guessing and polluter-funded research. Based on the resistance in the House, an Idaho Senate stripped the subject of climate change and the consensus scientific view of the human role in it from new science standards for students in public schools.

The mayor seems to have learned one very clear lesson from the Frank Straub debacle when it comes to the hiring and firing of top administrators. Too bad it’s the wrong one.

Are you mad? Seems that everyone is these days. And perhaps that’s okay, because sometimes incivility is a necessary and messy part of democracy.

Twenty years ago this month, the Washington Legislature passed the first of two bills “defending” marriage from gay people. Five years ago this month, the Washington Legislature became the first state in the country to repeal its Defense of Marriage Act and pass marriage equality. Voters affirmed that legislation in a referendum later that year, and counties began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Within three years, the Supreme Court established marriage as a right for all people.

It’s a sad sign of our mollycoddled age. Too many people have been swaddled and softened in echo chambers of approval. Too many have been made to feel entitled and special and deserving of adulation – “snowflakes,” if you will. A lot of them have been scrambling away lately from the scrum of public debate, seeking out “safe spaces” where they are protected from the “violence” of attitudes that conflict with theirs.

When the president met with law enforcement officials this week, what made news was his flip comment that he might “destroy” a state senator’s career. What got less attention was the nature of the proposal being discussed: A sheriff was complaining about a bill to limit the government’s ability to seize and keep the cars, homes and other property of criminal suspects who have not been convicted of a crime.

Breitbart News’ treatment of Twin Falls, Idaho is illustrative of its approach to “news.”

Turning over welfare to the states has resulted in more people being mired in “deep poverty.”

Maybe this is how it becomes great again. Citizens using their constitutional authority to gather and protest. Individuals standing up for fundamental American values when their elected officials don’t. Leaders from college presidents to governors to the heads of major employers speaking out to support first principles. Scientists and park rangers and government attorneys refusing to shut up. Truth-loving people speaking against lies, and journalists assailing systemic, intentional falsehoods.

Do bigger paychecks help produce bigger babies? Some recent research suggests they might. That was one of several interesting and unexpected results of a recent attempt to check on the state of research and rhetoric about the minimum wage.

A CIA official expressed concerns about the “arrogance and narcissism” of two Spokane psychologists who developed and helped implement the U.S. post-9-11 torture program, and said the men “have both shown a blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues,” according to internal agency documents. The documents show that at least some people within the agency had the same concerns that outside critics would later raise about the roles of Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the two former survival school psychologists at Fairchild Air Force Base who earned millions in government payments for devising – and applying – the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” program for high-value detainees in the war on terror. The documents were obtained and posted online by the ACLU, which is suing Jessen and Mitchell on behalf of three former detainees, including one who died.