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Shawn Vestal

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Shawn Vestal
Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: The only good laws are popular laws

If there’s anyone who understands the limits of gun control – who really gets how ineffective any and all gun laws are – it’s Rep. Matt Shea. Gun laws are totally ineffective because only law-abiding people follow them, says Shea, the Republican state lawmaker from Spokane Valley. Only fools believe that laws of any kind can do any good, because criminals don’t follow laws.
News >  Spokane

Growth vote unsupported by the math

Math is hard. Guessing is easy, and occasionally useful. It’s guessing – wild guessing – by the county’s chief planning official that has some people feeling that the public debate over whether to expand the county’s development borders was infected by a noxious spore of BS.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Departed residents brought color to our region

One obituary is a portrait of a life. Many obituaries add up to a portrait of a place, an example of the variety of people and personalities who add up to a community. Here are a few of our neighbors who have passed away recently, with some brief biographical notes drawn from their obituaries.
News >  Spokane

Adoption evangelists

Tim and Summer Gilstrap always wanted to have a family. But when, after a long and costly effort, they found they couldn’t conceive, they initially had different responses.
News >  Spokane

Investor trying to rebuild his life

In 2006 and 2007, things were going very well for Brian Main. Main was involved in several real estate deals that seemed ripe to produce fast, fat profits – deals that seem now, in the cold light of hindsight, too good to be true.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Stephens’ demotion puts police at crossroads again

Will the Scott Stephens debacle take us to a new ring of hell with regard to the city and the cops? Will it carry us from the age of the unfirable cop into the age of the undemotable assistant police chief? Or might it, instead, be a necessary speed bump on the road to a better police department?
News >  Spokane

Vestal: If supermajority votes govern, a minority rules

“If a pertinacious minority can controul the opinion of a majority respecting the best mode of conducting it; the majority in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will over-rule that of the greater.” Thus wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, and thus cited the majority of Washington’s Supreme Court in striking down the supermajority requirement for tax increases.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Plaintiffs in Jeffreys lawsuits blame appraisers, lawyer

The real estate investments put together by developer Gregory Jeffreys in the years before his criminal indictment have been the target of lawsuits by investors, who claim Jeffreys took advantage of them. But these investors do not blame Jeffreys alone. They – and others who are familiar with elaborate transactions at the Ridpath Hotel and in Airway Heights – are unsparing in their assessment of appraisers, bankers, an attorney and other institutional parties involved with the transactions. The system, they say, broke down.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Microsoft PAC backs broad slate

The explosion of money – and particularly secret money – in politics has gotten a lot of attention. Much of that attention has focused on groups and donors who tend to heavily support one side or the other. Super PACs and “outside contributors.” But there is another kind of political giver: organizations that apply a No Candidate Left Behind approach. Lots of large, mainstream corporations have political action committees that fit this bill; in Washington, our biggest one is Microsoft’s PAC, which spreads a lot of money to a lot of people on both sides of the aisle.
News >  Spokane

Indictment alleges Jeffreys’ dark side

People describe Greg Jeffreys as one of the smartest men they know. A persuasive salesman. A tireless worker. An aggressive negotiator and sophisticated dealmaker of uncommon boldness. He was also someone whose audacity could turn threatening.
Shawn Vestal
Opinion >  Column

Shawn Vestal: Nailing down the hammer analogy

Perhaps you’ve come across the latest low-water mark in our debate about guns. It is the assertion – made recently in Spokane City Council chambers and at a public forum in Coeur d’Alene, as well as in the echoing void of the all-guns-at-all-costs universe – that hammers kill more people than assault weapons. Hammers! Outrageous!
News >  Spokane

Historic Ridpath will have a future if Wells succeeds

The logjam may finally be breaking at the Ridpath Hotel. Developer Ron Wells, whose fine touch with condos and historical properties is well-established, has begun purchasing units at the decrepit hotel. Though the plans aren’t final – and though the problems at the hotel are notoriously thorny – Wells said Thursday that he is “100 percent certain” he’ll be able to secure financing for a project combining high-dollar condos at the top of the tower and a mix of apartment units below.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Glimmers of hope or clouds of economic gloom?

How’s our economy? Improving? Turning around? That’s the conventional wisdom – that here in Spokane and in North Idaho, we are crawling toward recovery. When the economists talk about next year, they tend to predict more of the same: slow growth. Media reports – even when noting minuscule changes in the jobless rate or other factors – tend to take a similar line.
News >  Spokane

Lawmakers find common cause in chasing leak

The new “bipartisan majority” in the Washington Senate is wasting no time jumping into a serious matter. Call it the Roach affair, and note that the new coalition – made up of Republicans plus a couple of defectors – is going right after it, even before the first gavel echoes die down.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Futility source of pride in U.S. House

Cathy McMorris Rodgers has not distinguished herself as one who makes a lot of bold, off-the-cuff statements. Even as her profile rises, with convention speeches and appearances on the Sunday morning shows, she often conveys the sense of someone tiptoeing very carefully from word to word.
News >  Spokane

Vestal: Knezovich needs help in Olympia

What do you have to do to stay fired as a cop in this state? Kick a handcuffed suspect while he’s down? Force a mentally ill suspect to strip and do jumping jacks? Lie to your boss? Lie to your boss more than once? Drive drunk and get into an accident and then drive away? Mishandle evidence? Destroy private property in an overzealous, illegal search for contraband?
News >  Spokane

Truth eludes in good guy gun story

Perhaps you’ve heard the story – the unreported, true story – of the good guy with a gun who stopped the shooting at that mall in Portland a few weeks back. Or perhaps you haven’t, given how diligently the liberal media work to hide the truth. But out in the nether reaches of the Internet – where the truth about the truth is certain – the story of the good guy with a gun in the Clackamas Town Center has become a kind of gospel, and the refusal of others to embrace it has become a proof of conspiracy.
News >  Spokane

How did Portable Baby Cage not catch on?

Here in Spokane, we’re proud of our contributions to the wider world. Father’s Day. Expo ’74. Craig T. Nelson. Somehow, though, one revolutionary contribution to the world’s parents has escaped widespread notice: the Portable Baby Cage.