Shawn Vestal

Washington State University President Elson Floyd came out recently with some “clarifying” remarks about his university’s plan to go it alone on medical education. He emphasized the ways that WSU’s pursuit of state dollars to train doctors in Spokane would differ from the University of Washington’s pursuit of state dollars to train doctors in Spokane.

A few months back, Don Waller, the head of the Spokane firefighters union, criticized the mayor’s plan to expand political appointments as “not the way government is supposed to work.” He could just as easily have been referring to the more recent news that Ben Stuckart, president of the City Council, passed along an internal legal memo to Waller himself – who just so happened to be the city’s opponent in the legal case in question. The subject line of the email, sent to City Council members from a city attorney, read: “ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED appeal decision.”

The eulogy was over, but the stories about Toots Robinson were not nearly finished. They kept erupting, unbidden, from the audience.

The most intriguing candidacy in our region came from someone who didn’t make it to Tuesday’s main event. Dave Wilson ran as an independent for Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ seat – a seat in which she has proven once again to be as safe as a bubble-wrapped tricyclist. From the first, Wilson’s candidacy seemed like a challenge to voters to put our ballots where our mouths are. He staked out positions that were clearly located between the poles, he steered clear of the unproductively divisive dead ends, and he said practical, obvious things that flouted the conventional and intentional horse puckey that comprises 97.4 percent of all campaign speech.

It all started with Geordi La Forge. When Kobie Boykins was growing up, he had to engage in one of the crucial decisions facing young people interested in science and space: “Star Trek” or “Star Wars”? Boykins was a fan of both, but he was a “huge” fan of the second-generation Star Trek series, and in particular of La Forge, the chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise played by LeVar Burton.

Does the man once hailed as the “father of Spokane” haunt the cemetery he designed? In honor of the day, let’s suspend our disbelief and acknowledge that Anthony McCue Cannon, the first banker and second mayor of Spokane, is believed by those who believe in this sort of thing to be among the unsettled spirits haunting the Greenwood Cemetery and its notorious “1,000 steps.”

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Several add up to a portrait of a community. Recent obituaries document the passing of a family doctor and an Air Force commander, a meter maid and a barber, a farmer and a PR man. Here are several of them, summarized from recent notices published in the newspaper:

The living-room wall in Chris Bovey’s home is draped with Spokane iconography. Dick’s Hamburgers. The Milk Bottle. Trade Winds Motel.

It was always clear that for many, matrimony is a holy sacrament. Apparently, so is gettin’ hitched.

Spokane’s new citizens commission charged with overseeing police complaints opened its first meeting with many of the dreadfully dull but important questions that government work is made of: scheduling meetings, deciding leadership duties, learning the ropes of Robert’s Rules of Order and the state public meetings law. But before the night was over, the Office of the Police Ombudsman Commission was already engaging serious issues, formally asking the Spokane Police Department to more thoroughly investigate two complaints, including one that has been the most significant point of disagreement between the ombudsman, Tim Burns, and police Chief Frank Straub.

Now that gay marriage has arrived in Idaho, we will get some answers to a few pressing questions. Will the expansion of civil rights for gay people drive heterosexuals away from marriage? Will it lead to an “increase in the levels of fatherlessness and motherlessness among the vast majority of children”? Does the prospect of two men marrying mean that straight Idaho men will turn to dissolute lives of sex and drugs, leaving their kids untended while they snort and hump their way through life? Will it erode Idaho’s very sovereignty and “democratic legitimacy”?

Sherri Ybarra has a fascinating vision of civics to share with Idaho’s 280,000 schoolchildren. It goes something like this: People who repeatedly fail to perform the simplest, most basic responsibility of the citizen – voting – should repay society by taking on leadership positions of vital importance in government.

What does the yawning gulf in fundraising between Cathy McMorris Rodgers and her challenger, Joe Pakootas, tell us? A lot – and maybe a lot more than David-and-Goliath narratives about political money suggest. Yes, the incumbent has leveraged all the advantages of incumbency – perhaps including the improper mingling of the public’s business with her campaign, which has been the subject of an ethics complaint. And yes, lots of money from out of the district has come into her coffers.

Like everything, the payday loan industry has migrated to the Internet. Some of that is doubtlessly the mere reality of modern technology. But some of it has come in response to attempts by state and federal regulators to crack down on the scummy practices of many lenders, who entrap people into “short-term” loans they cannot repay, sucking them dry with astronomical interest payments.

Everybody says they want more civility in politics. But there is nothing quite so bracing as an old-fashioned political fistfight in a room full of people who give a damn. Josh Arritola and Rep. Matt Shea swung hard at each other Monday night, in what will probably be the sole debate between the two Republican candidates for a 4th District legislative seat. The room was packed and buzzing, and each candidate was well-prepared with specifics and fast on his feet. As with a prize fight, one might have wondered just who was edified by the spectacle, but it was fun as heck to watch.

Last year, business students at Gonzaga University had a very experienced guest lecturer. This visiting instructor to GU’s wonderful study-abroad program in Florence brought oodles of “real-world experience” to the classroom. He could provide these aspiring financiers with firsthand knowledge of the very highest levels of American business and finance. You might say he was uniquely positioned to do so.

The freshly paved section of Grand Boulevard, from 14th to Ninth avenues, has forced me to ask myself some difficult questions. Why do I find it so deeply pleasurable to drive on these redone roads? Am I just an irredeemable, bone-deep dork? Or are others also so conditioned by the bump and grind of Spokane city streets that a carpet of smooth, unbroken asphalt seems like nirvana?

There’s a wonderful scene in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,” in which officers in the British army that is violently “colonializing” Africa display their obtuseness when they are told a man has had his leg bitten off by a tiger. “ A tiger?” goes the dumbly perplexed chorus. “ In Africa?”

Has the entire notion of campaign finance disclosure jumped the shark? Shall we now treat the idea of transparency in big-money politics as a silly, sanctimonious, outdated notion – one that has been surpassed by the simpler formulation that secret cash equals free speech? Are we all cool with the idea that the biggest political spenders can hide behind a preposterous claim that they are actually “social welfare groups”?

Before the courts slapped down the mayor’s attempt to expand political appointments in the city’s hiring, one handpicked hire snuck through the gate. That appointment – the hiring of Mike Lopez as head of EMS services – illustrates the problems built into the entire approach. Lopez was hired without a competitive process. He was hired before his position had even formally been created. His hiring was justified by a bureaucratic rigmarole – title-shuffling and department-creating – and placed in a Catch-22 type of category, which Assistant Chief Brian Schaeffer described in an internal email as a “civilian EMS Chief that isn’t a chief.”

This spring, a man in King County posted an ad on an online gun market, seeking a 9mm handgun. “Cash in hand for the right deal,” he wrote.

One obituary is a portrait of an individual life. Several of them create a portrait of a community. Recent obituaries tell a story of a flower shop owner and a cemetery’s guardian angel, a public health nurse and a magazine editor, a man nicknamed “Bear” and a man nicknamed “Dude.” Here are some of them, summarized from recent obituaries.

Seattle’s controversial Mars Hill megachurch has had a tough summer. Its flamboyant pastor has stepped away temporarily in the wake of some boorish comments about women and conflicts within the church. Mars Hill has recently closed and consolidated churches, and new internal battles are being reported almost daily on the West Side.