Shawn Vestal

Would requiring paid sick leave for Spokane workers drive businesses to Idaho? Or is that just a herring that grows redder every year?

Could someone please find Spokane’s Eighth Man an actual issue? The group’s members have passion in spades. They have commitment. They have identified and named their enemies. They will stand up and beat their chests and be counted. But counted for what?

For every 100 of Spokane County’s poorest residents – those who earn 30 percent or less of the median family income – there are 12 affordable apartments for rent. But take heart. Things are getting better.

They call themselves the People’s Oversight Committee – sometimes just “The People” – and they’re doing their darnedest to engineer a coup d’état in Stevens County. Using the style of legal reasoning and logical coherence that marks so many self-styled anti-government groups, from the Posse Comitatus to sovereign citizens to the Freemen, the committee has declared that every elected official in Stevens County is illegitimate. Why? Because, The People say, the officials have not properly filed their oaths of office with the state.

The dispersion followed no logic: Dickens and Whitman in Browne’s Addition. Sherman Alexie and Jonathan Lethem on the North Side. Marilynn Robinson and Joyce Carol Oates in the Perry District. Henry James and Saul Bellow on the South Hill. In no particular order, and for no reason other than this week is Get Lit! – which fills me with good cheer over books and the people who make and read them – I spread a bunch of books around Spokane this week. Cleared them off my shelves and left them in “little free libraries” all over town.

It’s been a week since Dan Price became the newsiest CEO in the land by cutting his own pay and setting his company’s bottom salary at $70,000. The decision made news everywhere and spread online like dengue fever. Many hailed Price – an Idaho native and CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments – as a hero, a businessman who sees his payroll as an expression of his belief in fairness and straight dealing. He once said in a speech, “We never want to make ‘screw-you’ money.”

Give credit to the Idaho Nine. They were accidentally right about one thing: A group of extremists is threatening the state’s security and future. It’s them.

Have you been wondering what position the Washington Policy Center is taking on the Spokane transit ballot measure? They don’t have one!

Douglas Glen first snorted meth as an ironworker in Las Vegas, trying to keep up with an all-day everyday schedule. He knew a guy named Speed, and Speed had a suggestion. He tapped out a line of white powder.

Remember “Bette in Spokane”? Bette in Spokane was the anecdotal hook that Cathy McMorris Rodgers used to critique Obamacare last year when she gave the GOP rebuttal to the State of the Union address. Obamacare had driven up Bette’s premiums, Rodgers said, by $700 a month. But Bette’s story was too bad to be true: Some basic efforts at verification here at the newspaper made it clear that Bette’s tale was not so simple. She did have the kind of inexpensive, catastrophic coverage that the new law eliminated. But cheaper options were available, and Bette simply did not investigate them. “I wouldn’t go on that Obama website at all,” she said at the time.

There’s an old journalism cliché about the primacy of bad news: We cover crashes, not landings. The logic of this has always seemed sound to me. Crashes are unusual; landings are commonplace. Crashes are life-changing; landings are routine. Crashes are problems, and a free, self-governing people need to know about problems.

What if one weapon to fight homelessness was actually something very small, affordable and obvious? What if it just boiled down to providing a house? A tiny, tiny house? It would be too simplistic – by far – to say that this would erase homelessness. But various communities are experimenting with tiny-house villages for the homeless: providing very small, relatively inexpensive homes in a setting with access to medical and social services. Now a Spokane man is trying to get a project off the ground that would combine work-skills training with tiny-home villages on church or nonprofit land, allowing homeless people to work toward ownership of small homes themselves.

They’ve got your number, gun grabbers. The gun lobby has again helped undermine a piece of common-sense public safety legislation. The proposal, Washington House Bill 1857, would have allowed judges to issue temporary “extreme risk” protective orders against people deemed dangerous to themselves and others, including requiring them to temporarily surrender their guns.

As we slog through another depressing period of obstruction and shutdown threats in Congress, it might be worth looking backward to another moment that felt impossibly polarized: Autumn 2013, when Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan produced a budget agreement that many observers considered unattainable. To be sure, the agreement they reached was modest. Though it prevented a series of brutal cuts and kept the government operating without the constant threat of new deadline showdowns, it was unsatisfying to the most vocal and passionate voices on the right and the left. But in these days of extremity and bad faith, we seem to have forgotten that this is what political compromise is: less than all you want, in exchange for something you can tolerate if you must.

Should the views of a public official’s spouse matter to the citizens that official was elected to serve? This is the basic question raised by the case of Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell and wife Lesley’s prolific online commentary. But it is no longer the important one.

Spokane police are investigating a package of racist, threatening literature sent last week to the head of Spokane’s chapter of the NAACP. The incident has left Rachel Dolezal, the new president of Spokane’s NAACP, concerned for the safety of herself and her 13-year-old son. She’s keeping a revolver handy and has decided to home-school her son; she’s worried about the way the incident might affect those around her – from the organization she leads to her students at Eastern Washington University. But Dolezal, an energetic, forceful voice, insists the threats will not make her pipe down.

Hooray for the Kootenai County Republicans, who this week rejected a resolution to “formally and specifically” declare Idaho a Christian state. The resolution declared that Christianity is under assault across the nation, a target of unique hostility from the country’s public institutions. Christians, it says, have been ejected from “schools, curricula, sporting events and public discourse.”

As someone who initially gloried in the apparent idiocy of Vito Barbieri and his tiny-camera question, I think it might be time for a second opinion: Vito was wronged. Barbieri – whose political ship tacks right so hard that it goes in circles – was saying something ridiculous while questioning a doctor on a bill that would ban doctors from overseeing abortions by videoconference. But it is very, very unlikely that he does not know that a pill swallowed by mouth does not proceed to the vagina, and it is very, very likely that he was posing a rhetorical question, and not a literal one, however inartfully he did it.

When the Veterans Affairs scandal was breaking last year, there was no delay from politicians and the press in identifying the villain: Sharon Helman. Helman, the former director of the Spokane VA center who had taken over the Phoenix hospital, became the face of the scandal, perhaps even more than former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. A VA inspector-general report concluded that Helman had falsified wait times and that veterans had died while waiting for care at the Phoenix hospital. In the end, she was fired by the VA in a manner that left many of the important questions unanswered and let most everyone else off the hook, despite a well-documented history of problems in Phoenix and elsewhere that pre-dated Helman.

David Cay Johnston is worried about creeping socialism. He’s concerned that the tax code is too complicated and unfair. He thinks that we are taking too much money from average, hardworking Americans and subsidizing those who don’t need or deserve it. He thinks it’s time to return to the country’s fundamental economic principle of free, competitive markets.

Pam Roach has every right to talk about “whack jobs” from Idaho. It would be more help if she weren’t such an embarrassment to Washington. Roach is Washington’s longest-serving and worst-behaved senator. She is now, inexplicably, the Senate president pro-tem – put there in a payback maneuver by Senate Democrats against Tim Sheldon, the former president pro-tem who defected for the Republican caucus. That means Roach will sometimes preside over the Senate, for which the Dems owe the entire state an apology.

When police Chief Frank Straub steps before the Spokane Use of Force Commission for the final time today, he will have a lot to report. But if he had to boil it down, he might just say: Crime is down, and so is the use of force by officers.

Dear Science: Could you send Mike Fagan a memo? Like, a very long memo? One that mentions a bunch of the studies about the repeatedly disproven “link” between autism and vaccines? You don’t have to send them all – no one has time for that. But maybe 100 or so examples of actual scientific research?

Cast your mind back to June, when the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby could deny contraception coverage to its employees. At the time, some people wondered how far this exemption for the “sincere” religious beliefs of employers would go. How much medical coverage can corporate persons deny their employees?