Shawn Vestal

If there’s anything good arising from the fever swamp of Trump, it has been the occasional blips of political courage in the GOP, peeking from the stew of calculation, cynicism and cowardice. Call it the Crapo Line.

WSU has lots of plans to bring in more revenue to help dig the athletics department out of its $50.7 million hole, but no plans to cut spending.

Mayor David Condon believes that he can determine, on his own, which city laws to follow and which are “void.” Talk about a strong mayor.

Shawn Vestal says it’s past time for Republican politcians and party leaders to publicly defend Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich from Rep. Matt Shea’s “slimes and slanders.”

Washington has the nation’s most lenient threshold for the use-of-force by police officers, making it virtually impossible to file a criminal charge against a cop for using deadly force. Now, lawmakers, police officials and community leaders are debating whether the standards should align with those most common in other states: whether the officer reasonably believes the suspect poses a threat.

How well a gun-control initiative fares with voters this fall may tell us whether we’re at the tip of a wave – where modest proposals to make the country safer are no longer DOA – or whether the background checks measure passed two years ago was a lone splash.

WSU president Kirk Schulz’s football first mantra fails the leadership test needed to deal with the problem of player arrests.

Don’t look now, but things have gotten kind of hot – positively hot-ish – in the Spokane home market.

McMorris Rodgers has raised $8.6 million in this election cycle, and passed on $3.2 million for fellow House members and candidates.

Milan “Mickey” Dukich, a Spokane native, was known as the Cecil B. DeMille of football video, and was a pioneer in the use of game film in the NFL.

Most of us voted to privatize liquor sales because of the reflexive assumption that it would bring down prices. And you know what they say about assumptions ...

A new state audit says Washington’s city, county and state agencies spent $60 million on fulfilling public records requests last year. Shawn Vestal says that’s money well-spent.

Shawn Vestal: There are few things that make less sense for Spokane right now than a recall of the mayor.

Lois McConnell worked as an “old-fashioned nurse nurse” in hospitals in Baltimore, San Diego, Wenatchee and Tekoa over a 40-year-career. But she’d never encountered anything like the letter one of her relatives received recently inviting the relative to “thank a special caregiver” by donating to the Providence Health Care Foundation.

Karl Landrus lost his home and business equipment in the Beacon Hill fire. “It was just moving so fast,” he said.

The bad news regarding police reform in Spokane is that three years after voters demanded “independent investigations” of police misconduct, we’re still debating the meaning of “independent,” as if it is a puzzling and difficult notion. The good news is that there are signs of a re-energized push for more independence in the city’s ombudsman’s office. Part of this comes from a proposal that may be on its way toward the City Council that would attempt to untangel the ombudsman from the department’s internal affairs process. And part of it comes from the guy who is filling the ombudsman’s job right now, Bart Logue.

When Khizr Khan held up that pocket Constitution at the Democratic National Convention and taunted Donald Trump, it was a moment that reverberated with a lot of people in a lot of places. One of those places was Malta, Idaho, population 193ish.

Tim Nyden hadn’t heard from his brother, Don, in 16 months. This time.

A report prepared by the Spokane Regional Health District goes a long way toward quantifying what happens to people “downstream” of homelessness: worse health across many measures, from high blood pressure to arthritis, and less access to care. This is true not only for people who are currently homeless – but for those who have ever been homeless. This adds a definite urgency to one of the report’s other conclusions: Too many of our city’s schoolkids are homeless or living in a kind of near-homeless limbo, teetering at the edge of lifelong consequences.

Part II: “This has always been a hole Condon has insisted on digging ever deeper, out of defensiveness and a failure to treat the criticisms and questions as legitimate.”

Does the buck stop anywhere at City Hall? Or does it vanish into a black hole called the city attorney’s office?

Has the initiative machine of Tim Eyman and Spokane City Councilman Mike Fagan become such a Gordian knot of self-interest that state law needs a new tool to cut it?

New leader of Spokane NAACP is bringing a fresh and effective style during tumultuous times.

For the longest time, “Division Street exit” was code for “Spokane’s ugly front door.” Now it’s an example of what Spokane can do.