Shawn Vestal

I went to a City Council meeting expecting a brawl. Instead, there was an outbreak of civility.

We’re No. 9! A new analysis of income growth in America confirms and updates the depressing reality of our so-called economic recovery: Virtually all recent bounceback has occurred in the bank accounts of the 1 percent. Not only have the 99 percent not kept pace – they’ve fallen behind, measured against inflation. And Washington is at the front edge of this trend.

Mayor David Condon was chatting with his former boss, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, over the holidays when she asked him when he would next be back in the nation’s capital. Condon told her he was planning to attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting there in January. Fast forward to mid-January: Condon got a call from a Rodgers staffer, asking if he might want to attend the State of the Union address as one of her guests. The speech was scheduled for the night Condon was arriving.

It’s all well and good for those of us here on earth to make fun of Idaho’s lawmakers for their rejection of an eighth-grader’s request to declare the Idaho giant salamander as the state amphibian. After all, they’re probably saving that official designation – as the Gem State’s most distinctive form of cold-blooded, tiny-brained vertebrates – for themselves.

Pam Silva moved into her rental house on West Shannon Avenue five years ago, and she’s been averaging a burglary per year. Break-ins at her garage and home have cost her power tools, a lawnmower, Christmas presents, electronics …

Is the state to blame for the wildfires that destroyed hundreds of homes in north-central Washington last summer? Did the bureaucrats who run the Department of Natural Resources purposely let fires burn until they were beyond control, destroying homes and communities, in the hopes of bolstering their budgets? Were the ruinous effects of these fires – characterized as the worst in the state’s history – actually foreseeable, preventable consequences of a decision to keep state firefighters on the sidelines, literally watching as flames spread?

One obituary is a portrait of an individual life. Several of them add up to a portrait of a community’s life. As 2014 has drawn to a close, the recent passings tell stories of decorated military men and dedicated businessmen, of women who worked as riveters and schoolteachers, of municipal planners and dairy farmers.

So a federal judge in Seattle has now formally ruled what is obvious on its face: Jailing the mentally ill while they wait for the state to provide them services is unconstitutional and “must stop.” This comes just a couple weeks after a Spokane judge started fining Eastern State Hospital over the same issue, and just a few months after the state Supreme Court made a similar ruling involving the practice of “boarding” mentally ill patients in hospitals.

On the Fourth of July in 1995, a Spokane native named Donald Hutchings was kidnapped by armed militants while he was trekking high in the Himalayas. He and four other men – another American, two Brits and a German – were led away. Hutchings’ wife, Jane Schelly, and other women were freed. A few days later, another man was kidnapped and decapitated – left on a mountain path as a grisly message. The kidnappers, Islamic separatists seeking an independent state in the disputed region of Kashmir, were demanding the release of prisoners being held in India.

Millennials! You’ve heard of them, right? Judging by the relentless media inquiry, you might suspect they are an alien race, landed from the future or outer space or Brooklyn, whom we must now dissect sociologically. As with every successive generation, at least since the Baby Boom, there is a widespread and thumb-fingered effort to get a grip on just who these young people are. National news magazines do cover stories. Pollsters track their attitudes. The Pew Research Center offers a quiz: “How Millennial Are You?” And everyone tries to fold 73 million young people, ages 18 to 34 or thereabouts, into a single box. They’re self-absorbed. They’re pampered. They’re socially conscious. They wear pajamas in public. They’re creative and entrepreneurial. They’re this or that, or that or this.

If you call the number once listed for the defunct Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, you will be told that neither James Mitchell nor Bruce Jessen has any association with the company now at that number. Which is not to say that connections between the two companies don’t exist.

James Mitchell – considered one of the men who built a torture empire from Spokane – has started speaking publicly. And though he mostly dances around the shocking and specific allegations that have arisen against the work he did, Mitchell still manages to find a lot to say.

It’s long been known that a pair of former Fairchild Air Force Base psychologists helped develop and personally implement the CIA torture program following the 9/11 attacks. A new Senate report details how much money they made doing it.

The story of Rogers High School’s wandering copy of “Gone With the Wind” just keeps going – now with a possible exoneration of sorts. A copy of Margaret Mitchell’s massive and popular melodrama was returned recently to Rogers, overdue by some 65 years and arriving from 3,000 miles away and with zero explanation for how it had made such a journey. A man in Carmel, Maine, discovered the book in his father’s New England cellar and sent it to Rogers – after first sending a letter checking to make sure it was the right book and begging for relief from the overdue fines. He had no idea how the book made its cross-country journey, but the last known person to check it out was Betty Mandershied, a student at Rogers in 1949. Mandershied later married Tony Stokes.

What is the biggest threat to Spokane’s future? Politicians inciting riot? Profiteers destroying civil society? Ben Stuckart’s “dirty smear” on the Spokane Municipal Code, and the rest of the City Council majority’s “lawlessness”?

Today I’ve got follow-ups on two recent columns – one about the mayor and city pensions, and one about magnificent facial hair. A couple of weeks back, I wrote about beards, hipster beardos and the notion of a “bearded lifestyle.” I poked some fun at the over-the-top seriousness of the modern beard trend, and in particular about the marketing hype that emerges from a company formed in Spokane, Beardbrand.

Seventeen Spokane police officers put on body cameras 13 weeks ago. In the time since, at least two important things have happened: Chief Frank Straub said the department was tightening the rules to give officers less discretion in turning off the cameras, moving toward a default position of “always on.”

Did some local reporters bite too hard on a heartwarming do-gooder story last week, when telling the tale of an anonymous man handing out cash in Spokane? Or did they bite too hard after the fact – by revealing the donor’s identity and criminal history?

Mayor David Condon is a guy’s guy. Early in his term, he referred to himself as an “action guy.” Not long ago, he called himself an “accountability guy.” Earlier this week – during an interview discussing his time so far in office – he called himself “kind of an operations guy.”

Dan Sisson grew up about an hour away from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s famous plantation home near Charlottesville, Virginia. “We used to go and have the whole place to ourselves, just wandering, and I fell in love with it,” Sisson said.

How much nonconfiscation of guns will have to occur before those who opposed closing the gun-show loophole recognize no one’s trying to confiscate their guns? How many uncles will have to hand guns to their nephews without being prosecuted for it, how many patriotic neighbors, sharing guns and apple pie over the back fence, will go completely unarrested, before it’s clear that the opponents of background checks were, once again, as always, crying wolf?

I grew my first beard in college. It was scruffy, I was scruffy, it was a scruffy time. Since then, there has almost always been some sort of hair on my face, even as the follicles up top were being vacated.