Shawn Vestal

Is it too soon to declare our state parks a complete failure and call in the profiteers? Or should we cut their budgets further first? Maybe to zero? We are at an important moment, regarding state parks and honesty about what things cost and what they’re worth. The all-cuts superminority in Olympia has produced a sausage grinder that took parks funding from $94.5 million in 2007-09 to $8.3 million in the current biennium. With a steadfast refusal to close a loophole or raise a tax, and with the Supreme Court-ordered catch-up on educational funding in place, mere parks could hardly compete. The park system would simply become “self-sustaining.” Raise fees. Cut fat. Enlist donors. Fire workers. Get nimble.

Is it time for the good to defeat the perfect, when it comes to police oversight in Spokane? Perhaps. There is a case to be made that the package of police oversight measures proposed by the mayor and police chief is the best we can do – while not, in my view, reaching the standards expressed by the mayor’s Use of Force Commission or by voters. There is a case that purists like me, or the mayor’s Use of Force Commission, or the voters, are being either unrealistic or unreasonable in continuing to seek full, unqualified investigative independence for the ombudsman. There is a case to be made that the city can either adopt this plan, which is very good in many ways, or find itself stuck in a losing battle against the more determined enemy of the good on this issue: the Spokane Police Guild.

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Several are a portrait of a place. The obituaries of recent weeks told a tale of the Inland Northwest that included farmers and arts patrons, harvest cooks and golfers. Here, summarized, are some of them:

Spokane’s city government is measuring itself with a vengeance. How fast do crews arrive at fires? How many water lines have broken? How many chronically homeless people had been placed into housing? How many books have been checked out from the libraries?

Next time, the man with the constant tales of woe really might need 20 bucks – to help pay a court fine. Brandon C. Pier found himself in jail over the weekend, charged with stealing a $13 haircut. Pier, whose nonstop small-time scamming has reached seemingly every corner of the community, apparently messed with the wrong barber.

Greg Jeffreys never quit trying. The man who set a new land-speed record for big-time Spokane grift never quit hustling. If one deal wasn’t working, he cooked up another. If one story wasn’t working, he told another. If inflating real estate values wasn’t enough, he invented properties out of whole cloth.

Robert Forman was a sociology professor in Oshkosh, Wis., when the Warren Commission report came out in 1964, asserting that a single gunman had killed President John F. Kennedy. The conclusion did not sit right with him, a feeling that deepened as criticism of the report grew. Eventually, Forman made his way across campus to the anthropology department, where he borrowed a skeleton. He began to examine angles and pathways through the human skeleton; he began to consider bullet pathways and angles; and he eventually came to a conclusion – not about what he thought had happened but what he felt certain had not: a single shooter, firing from the window of the Texas Book Depository.

Pork fat is delicious. But might it also be the grease that is needed to unlock dysfunctional Washington, D.C.? Former Rep. George Nethercutt is making that case, sort of. Nethercutt, the man who unseated Tom Foley in 1994, has written a defense of something that few support: congressional earmarks. Writing in last week’s Inlander, Nethercutt argued that earmarks – the supposed tool of cronyism and spendthrift government – are needed, within reason, to improve the toxic and broken political system.

There must be a special circle in hell reserved for rapists who later claim: She made it up. And then, beyond that circle, there must be a deeper one – deeper and more imaginatively punitive – for rapists and accused rapists and would-be rapists who, when their history is dredged up years later, drape themselves in a victim’s robes, whine about their oppression, and claim that everyone else is lying.

It was a Monday afternoon when a young man calling himself Chris stepped into Leland’s Barber Shop and asked if they had an opening for a drop-in. “Chris” told owner Claudia Kirkebo that he was a medical student, working for Group Health. When the haircut was concluded, he stood and patted his pockets, and then told her he had a 20 in his car and he’d be right back. Sure, Kirkebo told him. After all, customers do that all the time, and they had always returned.

Welcome to the strong council system of government. The Spokane City Council acted quickly and without equivocation Monday in rejecting the mayor’s failed effort at negotiating an acceptable contract with the Spokane Police Guild. Council President Ben Stuckart urged the strong mayor to go back and try again.

A former judge, former federal prosecutor and longtime local attorney have taken a close look at the region’s criminal justice system. The trio – dubbed the Spokane Regional Criminal Justice Commission – spent hours interviewing people in every phase of the system, from city courts to county courts to the jail. They scoured for problems and solutions. They praised programs they found effective and suggested a wide-ranging list of steps that might improve efficiency, reduce the expensive and ineffective warehousing of inmates in the overcrowded jail, and apply creative, evidence-based solutions to the way we dispense justice.

It took 45 years for Larry Shook’s war trauma to fully erupt. When it did, he was a long way from Vietnam. But Vietnam – what he did there and what that did to him – had never been far from him. It was always there, lurking underneath the surface normalcy, pressing against his vision of himself as a strong, competent, capable person. He was quick to emotion, quick to cry – and quick to feel humiliated about those emotions. “John Wayne doesn’t cry,” he said. Sadness and a sense of isolation trailed him. When it threatened to bloom into uncontrollable grief, he fought it off.

Two questions for the morning after: Who’d you vote against yesterday? And are you feeling smarter yet, now that the fog of politics is lifting? The day after Election Day is, perhaps, not the most opportune time to point this out, but despite our lionization of citizenship and participatory democracy, politics often brings out the worst in us. I don’t mean politics can be a dirty business, though it can. What I’m referring to now is the fact that political battle very literally makes us worse at being people – it makes us less rational creatures.

When you think of a “charity,” what do you picture? When you think about an organization that is dedicated to “education,” what sort of schooling springs to mind? Does a charity rank every legislator in the state, scoring their conservatism numerically? Does an educational organization work to “educate” lawmakers to vote the way it wants them to? Does a charity show up more or less constantly throughout the Capitol to generously contribute influence?

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich has a reputation as a straight shooter. But was he shooting straight when he claimed that his jail staffers had developed programs that reduced repeat offenses and added alternatives to incarceration? Knezovich’s political opponents – a group of disgruntled former deputies opposed to the sheriff’s hard line on discipline – asked the county to provide the evidence for the sheriff’s claim, in a news release eight months ago, that rehabilitation-oriented community-corrections programs had done just that.

Randall Sluder has laid his head in a lot of downtown spots over the past 13 years. Few were comfortable, and few his own. He spent a lot of nights simply wherever he could – or, more to the point, wherever he ended up, so drunk he couldn’t remember. Doorways, hallways, anywhere he could find. Fire crews hauled him to the emergency room more than 50 times last year.

And so we come to another election season when we are asked to consider: Whose interests are “special”? And whose are simple, pure, virtuous and just? Just kidding. We’re not asked to consider it – i.e., think about it – in any way whatsoever. We already know the answer: Our interests are simple, pure, virtuous and just. Theirs are special, and all that that implies.

Paul Wasson is reading his 4,000th book since 1971. Or perhaps that should be cast in the past tense: He was reading it, as of Tuesday. By now, he’s probably on 4,001.

Betty Wheeler gave so much during her life, it’s fitting that it continues after her death. In recent months, Wheeler’s South Hill home has been gradually emptied of possessions, with most of them going to the many charities she generously supported for years. Several closets full of clothing and shoes – dispersed to St. Margaret’s Shelter, the Transitions programs that help women and children, Our Sister’s Closet and others. Books to the House of Charity. Vases to Father Bach Haven, a transitional apartment building. Vintage clothing to the Carroll College theater department. Lotions, makeup, lipsticks and other toiletries to needy women throughout the Catholic Charities network.

Malcolm Renfrew didn’t invent Teflon. But one of the fascinating developments of Renfrew’s fascinating life was that he frequently had to correct people who said he did. It was Renfrew – a son of Spokane who went on to a long, distinguished association with the University of Idaho – who introduced the stuff to the world and who oversaw the team that developed uses for the miracle plastic to which nothing would stick.

One obituary is a portrait of an individual. Several are a portrait of a place. The obituaries of recent weeks told a tale of the Inland Northwest that included veterans and businessmen, teachers and prosecuting attorneys, nurses and restaurateurs.

OK, just for the record. All seven members of the Spokane City Council have supported, in principle, the need for independent, investigatory oversight of the Police Department, and opposed any agreement with the Spokane Police Guild that will preclude that.

There it was in stark relief: House Republicans, including Shutdown Cathy, calling a press conference to protest the shutting down of an essential, life-or-death government service. Some of them put on lab coats. The Washington press corps attended and took notes. Shutdown Cathy intoned about the crucial importance of the work done by the National Institutes of Health – vital, life-saving work that had tragically come to a halt for some reason that these lab-coated, research-loving Republicans just could not understand.