Sorted by date Results 745 - 769 of 3216
Jill Weiszmann is a community gem and we need her to continue serving us on the Cheney City Council. Jill has already proven her outstanding effectiveness representing all of us during her terms in office on the council. As retired educators, a former mayor and active participants in the community, we have known, worked closely with and been friends to Jill for the past decade. No one is better connected with the local community or more active in participating in local events or organizations. Jill is honest, energetic,...
Like Frank Watson, I’m also a Vietnam-era, retired Air Force officer, with similar life experiences, and yet my values are very different. For example, Frank’s dire warning against the evils of socialism (CFP, 8/1/19) is interesting coming from a guy who spent much of his working life living under a model socialist system. One of my minor conundrums in getting through my first weeks as a civilian after retirement from the Air Force was deciding what to wear every day. The Air Force not only decided that for me, they also pro...
Honest. Consistent. Intelligent. Successful. Compassionate. Driven. Energetic. Giving. These are the words I would use to describe Jill Weiszmann who is once again running for Cheney City Council representative Position 6. I have known both Jill and her opponent for nearly four years. As a business owner in the West Plains, a member of the West Plains Chamber of Commerce, and vice-chair of the board of directors for a local non-profit organization, I can tell you that my experience with Jill Weiszmann has been nothing short...
The Cheney School District Board of Directors is headed for the second reading and vote of a new policy (3423) at their Oct. 9 meeting at Windsor at 6 p.m. This policy will allow the consuming of so called “medical” marijuana on school grounds, events and buses by school children. I was fooled by the word “medical” until I read that medical marijuana or regular marijuana is not approved by the FDA for the treatment of anything as other medical drugs have to be. The content of medical marijuana is just like regular marijua...
What once seemed like science fiction will soon become reality. Doctors will perform surgery from thousands of miles away using remote-controlled robots. Self-driving cars will zip through traffic. This is the promise of fifth-generation wireless technologies, or “5G.” Internet users will download up to 10 gigabytes of videos and documents per second -- one hundred times faster than existing 4G networks. The ability to transmit vast quantities of data virtually instantaneously will revolutionize our lives. But 5G will also un...
I bought my first electronic calculator several years ago when I was in grad school. It was made by Texas Instruments and was a little bigger than a deck of cards. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide much faster and more accurately than I could with my old slide rule. I paid $100 for it. After a couple weeks, I put my slide rule away and never used it again. Today you can find smaller calculators with more power at the Dollar Store. As manufacturers skill increased, the price went down. The fancy economic term for...
The proverbial bovine fecal matter has been piling up recently. According to columnist Frank Watson, in his Sept. 26 piece, the minimum wage was never intended to be a living wage, but an income for “untested, unskilled labor.” Meanwhile, Don Brunell complained in his Sept. 12 column about the skyrocketing national debt, blaming it on so-called entitlement programs and government overspending, noting “taxes must be affordable.” Both perspectives are patently misguid...
Traditionally, media coverage of the Paris Air Show focuses on the battle between Boeing and Airbus over market share for newer large commercial jets. However, this year Mitsubishi shared the spotlight with its state-of-the-art "SpaceJet." SpaceJet is not the latest aircraft to join British billionaire Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital space fleet. It is a new regional passenger aircraft designed to compete head-to-head with Brazil's Embraer E-175 for routes...
Chip, chip, chip away. Do you notice the chipping away of human rights of migrants and reduction of total number of refugees by the present administration? Day after day, it creates an even more cruel way to block asylum-seekers; the latest being the denial of refuge for Bahamians fleeing the ravages of Hurricane Dorian, and people living here sometimes for years, who require advanced medical care. This of course includes children being sent back to their countries of origin where there is limited access to medical care, a...
“Cigarette butts, the most littered items in the world, are proving to be an intractable trash problem for regulators and tobacco companies. Throwing them on the ground is a firmly entrenched habit for many smokers.” This statement published in the Wall Street Journal was sent to me recently. It goes on to say “Regulators are taking a tougher stance on cigarette filter pollution amid concerns about the environmental impact of single use plastic. For decades, butts have been made from cellulose acetate, a form of plast...
For years, politicians have railed about the high cost of prescription drugs. But now, they appear poised to take action. Democrats and many Republicans want to impose price controls on medicines. One proposal would allow patients to import price-controlled medicines from Canada. Another would allow federal bureaucrats to effectively dictate the price of medicines sold through Medicare’s prescription drug program. Yet another plan would index Medicare reimbursements for advanced drugs to the artificially capped prices paid i...
I heard a news report last week proudly announce, “The economy improved last week fueled by consumer spending.” Consumer spending, or lack thereof may be an indicator of economic strength, but it doesn’t drive. It doesn’t fuel the economy. Military bases weren’t always welcome in some communities. When signs begin to appear saying, “Dogs and soldiers keep off the grass” the Army would frequently pay their troops in $2 bills. This flood of $2 currency was supposed to demonstrate how vital the base was to the local economy...
Dear readers, I have worked for the Cheney Free Press for more than a year, and it has been a pleasure to do so. But now, it’s time to move on. While at the Free Press, I’ve travelled to firefighter trainings and photographed military parachute jumpers, covered city meetings and community gatherings and met some seriously wonderful people. I want to thank the subscribers of the Cheney Free Press for supporting your local newspaper, for being involved in your communities and for allowing us to share with you important new...
“Agitators are generally involved only for themselves.” My observations combined with reading some history of agitators provides me with a completely different opinion of these people than Frank Watson expresses in the Aug. 29, 2019 issue of the Cheney Free Press. Consider the agitators such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and cohorts. Today we have Elizabeth Warren, four young Congresswomen, Bernie Sanders and Mandy Morris, all of whom are bringing to our attention many of the social problems...
My hubby and I have been Cheney residents for 40 years next January and the whole time we’ve read the Cheney Free Press to first learn about our community, and then to keep track of the many issues facing our community. Even though we’re county folks, Cheney is our home community. In a time when so much fragmented - as well as opinionated - information is shared, we still rely on the Free Press to know about issues important to Cheney whether we agree — or not — with decisions concerning those issues. So keep up the good wo...
Our nation is on an unsustainable borrowing trajectory and it could get much worse unless voters start asking politicians: “How are taxpayers going to pay for what they promise!” We now owe over $22.5 trillion to lenders of which nearly half are off shore. (China $1.11 trillion). At the rate which we are selling treasury notes, the deficit will balloon to $24 trillion by 2020. That means when the presidential election rolls around next year, each taxpayer’s share of the debt...
Many of us in Cheney are affected by Spokane city and county administrations. At today’s (Sept. 5) Spokane Homelessness Coalition with candidates Ben Stuckart, Nadine Woodward, Breean Beggs and Cindy Wendle, I took away one realization. We need a mayor and city council president with experience to work together. I like to support qualified female candidates, but the only two I trust to improve homelessness is Ben Stuckart and Breean Beggs. I’ve immersed myself in these issues for the past year at Monday Camp Hope meetings wit...
I had a wonderful opportunity in 2000. I was selected as part of Spokane’s sister city educational exchange, and taught English in the Japanese public school system. One of my students was considering applying to be an exchange student in America. She asked me several questions including how safe my country was. I assured her that the reports of violence were overblown by our free and open media. Although we were not as safe as Japan, we felt secure anywhere in our country. I couldn’t make that statement today. School sho...
Is democracy threatened? Look around and it seems like — feels like — something is off. Things are amiss, and to offset what some consider the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it requires civic responsibility. We are seemingly bombarded on a daily basis by arguably disturbing news about far right conservative leaders like Donald Trump and Britain’s Boris Johnson, both of whom are actively undermining long-held and intertwined systems of trade, commerce and strat...
Lawmakers have recently increased efforts to introduce legislation that would impose strict reporting requirements on medical research involving monkeys and other non-human primates. The goal is to substantially reduce such research. These restrictions could endanger lives. Primate research has led to some of the most important breakthroughs in medical history — and promises to unlock treatments for the world’s deadliest diseases in the not too distant future. Consider a groundbreaking treatment for glioblastoma, the dea...
Hopefully Puget Sound Energy (PSE) will receive final permit approval so it can complete its Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant currently under construction on Tacoma’s Tide Flats. For background, LNG is natural gas chilled to a liquid state, (-260° Fahrenheit), for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in its liquid state is about 600 times smaller than in its gaseous state. The comparison is similar to condensing air in a beach ball to a ping-pong ball. In its li...
I thought the court decisions against the makers of Roundup were over the top, but I was absolutely astounded at the recent ruling against Johnson & Johnson. These judgments are not only out of line, but tend to spawn even more outrageous claims in the hope that money will rain down on litigants and their lawyers. World health agencies have repeatedly stated Roundup is not a threat, with one lone exception that said the active ingredient in Roundup (glyphosate) might contribute to cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection...
“Leaves are falling all around, it’s time I was on my way.” Thus sang leader singer Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s classic 1969 song “Ramble On.” OK, so leaves aren’t falling — yet. And I’m not really on my way anywhere. But with Labor Day behind us, we are officially on our way into the election season. I know, I know, that’s not a season on most people’s radar, at least not until leaves really do fall and it starts getting cold. It’s hard to think about checking ballot boxes when it’s still pretty hot outside. Many people...
To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. I have found over my considerable years that when you have nothing to add, you should keep your mouth shut. Our President seems to have missed that lesson. When congresswomen Tlaib and Omar were planning their trip to Israel, he had nothing to add, but he did anyway. He tweeted something silly about allowing the two congresswomen to visit Israel would be a sign of weakness. A sign of weakness for whom? The liberal press immediately condemned the President for picking on two “wom...
By now, anyone with access to a television or computer has heard of the catastrophe facing the Amazon rainforest in the form of blazing fires consuming forested land and the creatures that inhabit it. As of press time, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) had reported at least 74,000 fires in the Amazon this year — an increase of 84 percent since this time last year. Statistically, the Amazon rarely burns on its own — its foliage is typically too wet to ignite, so fires are often found to be caused by human...
