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At the Center for Rural Affairs, we’ve heard from farmers across the Midwest and Great Plains about the negative impacts of federally subsidized crop insurance for over a decade. A farm safety net is important to help family farmers mitigate risks, but there are real concerns with the current crop insurance program. The best way to begin addressing those concerns is through honest assessment of the crop insurance system. Toward that end, the Center for Rural Affairs recently released a crop insurance report card, entitled ...
The 24-Hour-Tennis-A-Thon committee would like to give a big thank you to all the generous supporters, countless volunteers and community members who participated. Much of this year’s success is attributed to the generosity and assistance we received from sponsors and supporters like you. This year’s event benefited the local Food Bank, Medical Lake Outreach Program and the Medical Lake High School Tennis programs. During the 24 hours, we had approximately 100 players involved in the marathon. Altogether, everyone’s combi...
Last week was a roller coaster week for the city of Airway Heights, which has been under the microscope due to the actions of Mayor Patrick Rushing. I won’t go into full detail because you can read on the front page of this week’s Cheney Free Press to learn what happened. I could attack this issue from many angles. I could go on about First Amendment rights, which was something that was repeatedly brought up at Monday night’s City Council meeting. The First Amendment does give us the right to free speech but it doesn...
Editor’s note: The following editorial from the Detroit Free Press does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Cheney Free Press editorial board. Until last week, Pluto had been a distant dot in the sky; far out on the edge of the universe and so small and remote that it had lost its full status as a planet. But now, as the first images from the New Horizons trans-lunar mission stream back to Earth, we are getting up close and personal with Pluto and are quickly learning answers to questions that are c...
Last month, a Cheney Middle School student was struck by a car at the corner of Sixth Street and Golden Hills Drive. The driver of the car was a high school student on the way to Cheney High School. The bicyclist was riding on the wrong side of the road and was not wearing a helmet. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. There are several lessons that can and should be taken from this incident. First, parents should ensure their children are aware that bicyclists should ride with, not against, the flow of traffic....
The governor of Washington state, the mayor of Medical Lake and numerous fire officials asked that we forgo using Fourth of July fireworks this year due to the dangerous drought conditions. I was embarrassed and disappointed by the number of people who chose to ignore the requests and instead terrorize pets, traumatize veterans and risk the lives and property of their neighbors. What may I ask is so “patriotic” about watching your hard-earned money disappear with a bang and a puff smoke? Wouldn’t it have been more patri...
The following July 12 editorial from the Orange County Register may or may not reflect the views of the Cheney Free Press editorial board. Jeb Bush tripped over his tongue this past week when he posited that, to grow the U.S. economy, “people should work longer hours.” The remark by the Republican presidential candidate was misconstrued in some quarters as suggesting that American workers are somehow lazy. Indeed, that’s how the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response team chose to play it: “So does Jeb’s whole 4 perce...
The ink was barely dry on the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26 decision guaranteeing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right when the backlash against the ruling began. The most laughable of these came from Republican presidential aspirant Sen. Ted Cruz, who criticized the decision along with a ruling the previous week upholding the federal government subsidy of the Affordable Care Act as “judicial activism.” Cruz said he planned to introduce a constitutional amendment subjecting a “lawless” Supreme Court to intermitt...
Thank you to everyone who donated books or purchased books at our Friends of the Library Rodeo weekend sale. We also thank all the people who helped us move books indoors during Saturday’s rain. It takes many people to set up the sale and we thank them for their efforts. Special thanks go to the 11 EWU women’s basketball team members who carried up books and to the Cheney Faith Center youth group for organizing and placing tarps over the outdoor book sale area. We could not hold the sale without your help. Funds raised by...
This Independence Day was extremely stressful to many people in my area, especially seniors who long for a quiet and safe place to live. I thank God for His protection and care for all of us. On the human level it was reassuring that the Spokane County Police were monitoring our community and available when help was needed. I truly thank those who made that possible. I choose to keep on the positive side and to believe for the day when all people will celebrate the birth of our great country by means that are indeed peaceful...
What a great weekend. The just passed Fourth of July holiday served up a perfect menu of generous portions of family and friends topped off by time to dial life down just a little from the hectic pace it had been on recently. It wasn’t totally without sweat, however. I got to check off the big project, finishing the moving of the final dozen wheelbarrows of river rock — the last of 6,000 pounds dumped in my driveway — into the backyard and hopefully make one more flower bed a...
Being a state legislator is a thankless job — almost as bad as being a Hoopfest court monitor. And even more so this session what with the Legislature needing not only the four-month regular session but also two overtime special sessions and a last-minute, late-night negotiating meeting to pass the $38.2 billion 2015-2017 operating budget. And even then, apparently not all the work is finished as the whole package could unravel over funding, or not funding, K-12 classroom-reduction initiative 1351. We’ll know how the sta...
During a May 6 community forum on increasing train traffic through Cheney, Cheney resident Pamela Gray brought my attention to a large, dead, pine tree at the end of I Street in downtown Cheney. She even brought a picture of the tree to pass out at the meeting. At the close of the forum I spoke briefly with Gray and indicated I would see what could be done about removing the tree. After I finished talking to Gray, Ross Lane, regional public affairs director for Burlington Northern Santa Fe, introduced himself to me and...
Before pointing too many fingers at our beleaguered Secret Service agency and its recent foibles, we should consider its success so far in its bottom line responsibility: to keep President Obama and family alive and injury-free. Interviewed during Obama’s 2012 visit to Portland, Ore., the Secret Service reported that “Obama faces more death threats than any other president. More than 30 a day.” (Portland Oregonian, 7/28/12). This is consistent with the big spike in U.S. hate groups, spread quite evenly over all states excep...
Rolling down the corporate-political assembly line is a trade deal so treasonous to the people of the world that it should serve as revolution’s matchstick. The treaty is secret, but one fact is well known: the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is being negotiated by transnational corporations without a single U.S. legislator present. Each time I hear this, my eyes blink in disbelief. Without a single legislator present ... without their presence at negotiations, without so much as seeing a draft of the deal, and most treac...
The following June 29 editorial from the Panama City News Herald may or may not reflect the views of the Cheney Free Press editorial board. In the wake of the murders at a Charleston, S.C. church, details are sinking in — and with them, the recognition that racism lives, breathes and festers, even as we dream that it is a thing of the past. A man just 21 — looking more like a schoolboy than a hard-core white supremacist — stands accused of killing nine respected community members, all black, at the historic Emanuel Afric...
Exercise great care when lighting fireworks I’ve had extensive emails with city officials here in Medical Lake about my concerns of Fourth of July fireworks being allowed in this extreme drought season that we are experiencing. There have already been serious fires all around this area. Anyway, the way it looks now is that fireworks for private use will be sold legally, and used as desired once again here in Medical Lake. I just hope that all citizens will make sure their fire hoses are up and running, and will exercise g...
"Who wrote that?" It's a question I often receive regarding our in house editorial feature "In Our Opinion." I get it enough, and lately from several readers, that it probably means it's time to reiterate how we go about producing the weekly opinion piece, and maybe a couple other things as well. As I said, "In Our Opinion" is produced here at the Cheney Free Press. It's the product of discussion from our editorial board, the members of which are listed in our mast at the bottom left corner of this page. It works like this....
It’s going to be another hot and dry summer for the West Plains, which means there are plenty of chances for wildfires in the area. It’s late June and we’ve already seen some wildfires in the region, including last week’s 145-acre blaze at Fish Lake, east of Cheney. There have been 306 wildfires this year, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Washington has already taken some precautions to address the wildfire season. Earlier this month, DNR imposed a burn ban on DNR-protected lands east o...
The federal crop insurance program provides an agricultural safety net, and crop insurance premium subsidies were created to increase usage of these risk management tools. The federal government subsidizes, on average, 62 percent of crop insurance premiums annually. Crop insurance guarantees income year after year, but does not require much at all in terms of good soil and water conservation. And nothing in the federal crop insurance program prevents or discourages the increased planting of marginal land or land that is unsui...
What starts out as a simple dispute can sometimes grow to unimaginable proportions. In the last week, many eyes across the nation have been fixated on Rachel Dolezal, the recently resigned president of Spokane’s NAACP chapter and a part-time African Studies professor at Eastern Washington University. Dolezal, who is originally from Montana, has been under the microscope after her parents revealed to the media that she is white with a trace of Native American heritage and alleging that their daughter has been portraying h...
Once again the nightly news broadcasts, both national and local, found a story that they could not get enough of. On June 5, a McKinney, Texas policeman, Cpl. Eric Casebolt got caught on cellphone video strong-arming a 14-year-old girl to the ground as he helped to quell a disturbance stemming from a pool party held in this Dallas suburb of 150,000. The problem was, along the way, Casebolt briefly drew his weapon, quickly holstered it, and then returned to try, with the help of 11 other McKinney Police Department officers to...
I’m not sure how to take this whole Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, thing. I won’t recap how a former 1976 Olympic male decathlon gold medallist became a 2015 female talk show and magazine personality. You’d truly have to have returned from a desert island to not know the story. I never gave the transgender/gender change subject much thought until last fall when the Cheney school board considered changes to its non-discrimination policy. The new language recommended by the Washington State School Directors Association propo...
From 1960 to 2014, the average house size has more than doubled from 1,200 to 2,600 square feet, automobile ownership has gone up from 1 to 1.7 per household and the percentage of household income spent on food has dropped from 17.5 percent to 9.6 percent. In addition, we take longer vacations, retire younger and have a plethora of electronic and other products that didn’t exist in 1960. The reality is that all segments of society, from the poor to the middle class to the richest 1 percent, are better off today than ever b...
It’s that time a year when we map out our summer getaways. But as you plan to visit destinations that are maybe far away, or even foreign, think about ratcheting things back a little and remember what might just be in or near your backyard. The West Plains has events that both need your patronage, and maybe even some help, too. If you missed Cheney’s third-annual Mayfest, staged May 29-30, an opportunity passed you by to connect with businesses and neighbors. The event, one of a number that showcases Cheney, was well att...
