Shawn Vestal

John Hancock is keeping a close eye on the Obamacare clock. Hancock has 14 months until he reaches age 65 and qualifies for Medicare. A self-employed consultant who relies on health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, he wonders if he’ll make it to Medicare before losing his current insurance – or if he’ll return to the ranks of America’s uninsured one last time.

He helped stave off a depression. He opened the doctor’s office to millions of Americans, changing the country’s fundamental expectations about health care. He got Osama bin Laden.

When Michigan billionaire and school “reformer” Betsy DeVos goes before senators for confirmation hearings as education secretary next Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray will have a few questions.

As the nation slowly stands down from its counterproductive and expensive war on marijuana, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has staked out a unique position.

When the governor announced that he would seek major tax increases to fully fund schools and meet other pressing state needs, he called it “bold.” You know what would have been more bold? To have told everyone before the election that he intended to be so bold after it.

Did Cathy McMorris Rodgers actually vote to eliminate the ethics watchdog that gave her a big old bite in 2014? The answer seems to be: She would’ve if she could’ve.

Poor Washingtonians are second-class citizens before the law because of a lack of state funding for civil legal aid, Shawn Vestal says.

When I was a child, my family had an annual tradition of being Secret Santas for another family. On Christmas Eve, we would load boxes of gifts and food into a van, and head out into the night. In an idealized hindsight, I picture sparkling snowfall on fallen snow, mounds plowed to the roadside, roofs lined with fat, bright bulbs in primary colors.

Every time a bell rings – at least in the hallways at Catholic Charities – a homeless person gets a place to live. This year, that’s been 73 vigorous peals. Seventy-three people who have gone from the streets to a permanent apartment. At this rate, Rob McCann figures, street homeless in Spokane could become largely a thing of the past.

It was a chilly way to spend the spring. Von Walden, an engineering professor at Washington State University, worked for about a month on a ship in the Arctic in May and June of 2015. Every morning he’d get up, put on his “flotation suit” – a heavy snowsuit with a life preserver built in – and head down the gangplank.

You may not have heard much about this – since it didn’t involve a football player and a state senator braying at the regents – but there was an appeals court ruling this month that ordered colleges and universities in Washington to do a better job allowing students to defend themselves in expulsion cases.

After president-elect Trump’s statements supporting torture of enemy combatants, a Spokane psychologist who helped design the CIA’s waterboarding program says the country must do what’s necessary to collect enemy information or “we’re going to be standing on a moral high ground looking down into a smoking hole that used to be Los Angeles.”

Acting under the “miscellaneous items” portion of the Spokane County Commission agenda last Tuesday, the commission put a moratorium on outdoor marijuana farms, citing complaints they’d received about odor. The one person in attendance to be surprised by the move was a Spokesman-Review reporter. Though it was apparently a legal move, the vote smells worse than any barnyard in full flower.

In more than 30 plats or subdivisions across Spokane County, covenants restricting home sales to whites still exist. They have no force of law, but would take individual action to be removed.

The people who study this stuff say that expressing gratitude can make you experience gratitude – that you can literally create a sense of thankfulness and appreciation about your life, to a degree. With that in mind, I have been thinking about the small, good things in Spokane that make me glad to be here. I’m not talking about big stuff, not family and friends, not health and relative good fortune. Those are easy; I am lucky.

Some people are claiming a rash of graffiti and possible hate crimes are hoaxes. As these incidents mount, so do denials. If you’ve let the Klan into your tent, after all, you’ve got to pretend it isn’t so.

Shawn Vestal gives some advice to his son – in 2028, when the now-9-year-old is first able to vote for president.

With every stroke of a paintbrush, the word seemed to disappear. The mayor took a swipe. Ordinary citizens did, too. City Council members, clergy, social justice advocates and organizers, children, police and fire officials – all took up the brush.

It seems that the entire national discussion about education has been taken over by four letters: STEM. The performance of American students on STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – has been analyzed, worried over, and targeted with every manner of attention we can muster. In the rush to focus on those disciplines, some educators say, we’re underestimating the importance of history, philosophy and the arts – even to those in seemingly unrelated fields.

Imagine it: Your house on fire. Your children inside.

The new U-District bridge linking the promise of college with the problems of a neighborhood is a chance for change that Spokane should embrace.

Time to redraw and rename the Crapo Line, after the guy who really deserved it all along: Chris Vance.

Downtown Spokane is in the midst of a massive, generational transformation, a series of changes that will redefine it for years to come.

Spokane’s torture doctors have been battling for months to pry information out of the CIA as they try to defend themselves against a federal lawsuit. Now one of them is asking a judge to keep a secret of his own: a book manuscript.