As with all things in the Trump era, McMorris Rodgers has adopted the three-monkeys strategy: Neither seeing, nor hearing, nor speaking any uncomfortable truths.
The day after a U-Haul full of masked, militarized white supremacists were arrested on their way to riot during a Coeur d’Alene Pride Day event – complete with written plan! – the city’s mayor insisted, “We are not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations.”
An audit of attitudes about race among deputies in the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office crashed and burned last year, because so few deputies bothered to respond that auditors could not accurately draw conclusions.
As the City Council looks at soaring overtime costs in the fire department, some council members want to rehire firefighters who chose to leave their extraordinarily well-paid jobs rather than get vaccinated against COVID-19.
In the 1990s, I lived in beautiful Bozeman, where a woman’s access to an abortion – a supposedly settled constitutional right – was nevertheless precarious.
One of the persistently baffling elements of our criminal justice discourse is the large number of people, including public officials, who seem lightly committed to the presumption of innocence.
Six years ago, the mayor of Spokane and other leaders stood in the House of Charity and talked about creating a city where every human being who needs a place to sleep can find one, at any hour of any day.
One of the consequences of the pandemic that has rippled through our community – economically, socially and psychologically – is shrinking access to child care.
In a little over a decade, the Houston metro area has seen a 64% reduction in homelessness and has moved more than 25,000 people into housing. More than 90% of those people have remained housed, according to the city’s homeless nonprofit.
When a group of Spokane leaders went to Houston looking to make a short documentary about that city’s system for managing homelessness, they wanted to find an encampment to film.
One of the grossest and yet most successful grifters in the culture wars – who is now pushing the right toward casually labeling everyone in sight a pedophile – is also one of the most cynically direct about his intentions.
Good news: Former Spokane Police Officer Kristofer Henderson, who kicked a handcuffed suspect in the genitals while he was being held by two officers, will stay fired.
As we were reminded last week, sometimes when people act badly, they trot out a raft of self-pitying, self-justifying words right in the place where an apology belongs, in a way that only deepens the original offense.