Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Sorted by date Results 1426 - 1450 of 1862
For shame, President Obama! The Veteran’s Administration has been serving veterans for many decades. There have been problems, as there are with any large department. They had a budget of $140 billion for 2012, even though you and the Senate haven’t produced a budget (required by law) for almost four years. Oh well, by now many of us know how you feel about laws and rules. You and your staff can’t possibly be proud of the more than $100 million that was spent by VA staff learning how to be better union members. It must have b...
There’s a new debate in paleontology, one that took me by surprise but that shows nicely how some science works. There’s a particular type of ancient fossil called the “Ediacara fauna” found in rocks about 550 million years old. The term Ediacara is reference to a place in Australia where the fossils were located and well-described. In a complex tale that unfolded over decades both before and a bit after the Australian discovery, similar fossils were found around the world at...
I’ve been thinking about labels lately. Not the ones we should all be reading at the grocery store. Not the ones that tell us where our clothing is made. Not even the ones that warn us of danger, like a skull and crossbones. Those labels all are designed to help us make informed decisions. No, I’ve been thinking about the labels we apply to ourselves (and often to others.) Some of this labeling is obvious from our appearance. I think we would all agree that I’m fat. Oddly...
I’ve never really thought of myself as much of a gambler. In fact, I was stunned when I moved here and found out how many people just loved getting in the car and driving a couple of hours to throw their money away. Since that time, I’ve made that trip a few times myself, usually with that same result. There are some people in the world who can’t stay away, but I’m not one of them. Actually, it’s kind of a relief to know that there’s at least one thing I’m not addicted to....
Newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry (who, by the way, served in Viet Nam) said recently to a group of students in Germany, “In America you have a right to be stupid – if you want to be.” In his illustrious career it might be known as the first time that he has told the truth, as is evident of the election results we had last November. Joe Wollman Odessa...
After listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address I felt that it could have been labeled the Christmas Address. There were several things that would be nice to have but in real life sometimes people have to be told that we just can’t afford to do certain things or we can’t afford to purchase certain things. Sometimes that is difficult to do and, unfortunately, President Obama is not old enough to have experienced that in his lifetime. President Obama is a person who would have been very successful in life as a...
American manufacturing is more dependent on the metals and minerals access than ever before. Yet, we are tied with Papau, New Guinea for the time it takes to permit a new mine. Seven to ten years is the average delay period. Waiting for technology metals will severely hamper our ability to innovate our advance weapons systems that are increasingly metals intensive. The U.S. has domestic resources for 18 of those 19 metals and minerals that we now exclusively import from abroad. However, a maze of government regulations has...
I think the most memorable single day of all my years as a student was the afternoon I got to examine Moon rocks in graduate school. Rocks here on Earth are exposed to water throughout their existence, and water acts to break down mineral grains on a tiny scale. If you look at thin slices of rock under a microscope – a normal activity for geologists like me – you see this tiny breakdown at work. To use a technical term, the mineral grains appear “cruddy” because they are bre...
They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. Mind you, I don’t know who “they” are, and I don’t really care. But I’ve been thinking lately, mostly as I’m driving to work in the morning, that it’s always ugliest before the spring. Every year since moving here, I count calves as I drive down the hill west of town. One day there will be one or two, then suddenly there are tens and twenties. This morning, there was a brand-new calf right next to the roadside fence. Mother w...
Mildred Deife was born November 19, 1921 at the family home in Tucker Prairie near Cheney to Thomas Clifford and Julia Teresa Smith. She attended Cheney Elementary and at the age of 12 left home and boarded with a family in Cheney where she attended High School. In 1938, at age 16, she graduated and entered Holy Names College, in Spokane. She graduated from Holy Names College at age 19 with a teaching degree and began her career in education at the school in Mohler. She...
Spring has not yet sprung, despite the wishes of gardening fanatics everywhere. A couple of warm afternoons do not make for a spring thaw. The night-time temperatures continue to drop well below freezing. Every morning we look out and see frost covering most everything. But February is the month that reminds us, with those occasional warm afternoons, that it won't be long before the buds will be bursting out and greenery will be poking up out of the brown earth. And a little past midway through March, the seasons officially c...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 2/21/13: Wheat futures fell 17 cents in Chicago Thursday, as it seemed that the wet weather in the plains was once again a negative factor. The U.S. dollar has been rallying sharply over the past few days, also adding pressure to commodities. Egypt bought only one cargo of U.S. SRW in Tuesday’s tender and nothing from other locations. However, Egypt was rumored to be a buyer today as prices fell. China has also been talked about as buying a bunch of w...
"Sequestration" is not the term that I consider to be the best to describe what President Obama is trying to do to our nation, but as we are seeing, he plans to do whatever he wants to do! His budget request for 2013 was to retire 300 airplanes while buying 54 new ones. The deletion is after retiring 700 more airplanes than it purchased. At the founding of the U.S. Air Force in 1947, we had 12,300 planes we have 5,200 today. The last time the U.S. bought so few aircraft was 1915 for the aviation section of the U.S. Army...
Over the years, I finally made peace with myself, and God, when He called Tom and I into the ministry. You see, I never, ever wanted to be a "pastor's wife". In the back of my mind, I knew if we were to go into the ministry, taht would lead us to the mission field and I never, ever wanted to go to some place like "Africa". I hadn't heard of missionaries being sent to exotic places, like Hawaii. Between college and seminary, Tom and I were asked to fill in for short term missions. Missionaries who needed to come home to rest...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 2/8/13: The only real surprise in the supply-and-demand report today was that wheat carryovers were reduced instead of getting an increase. Total wheat ending stocks were down 25 million bushels, and soft white stocks were cut by 10 million bushels. Wheat exports were left unchanged despite their tepid pace to date, but feed use was upped by 25 million, which was the reason for the cut to ending stocks. Corn ending stocks were increased by 30 million...
There’s a hole in my living room today. Not an actual hole, mind you. It’s just the space where my piano once sat. You see, I gave my piano away this weekend. My piano was just about the first major purchase I ever made. It cost $750 back in the late 1970’s, when I was a single working woman living in Yakima. It wasn’t a fancy name brand. But it was pretty. For the first few years, anyway. It was moved twice in Yakima, and then from Yakima to Portland. In Portland, it was mov...
Eighty years ago my mother was in grade school where schoolroom paste was made by mixing a little flour and water together. Memories of that simple glue came back to her when she and I recently stood in my kitchen, mixing two small batches of flour and water. First I mixed regular “better for bread” flour with water in a little dish, then I did the same with special test flour made from soft durum wheat. The first mixture was a pasty, lightest-of-light-tan color, the second ha...
Senate Natural Resources and Parks Committee last week approved two bills that would reduce the restraints on landowners and county legislative authorities from lethally removing a wolf posing an immediate threat to livestock and/or domestic animals. Both bills have been sent to the Rules Committee for floor-vote consideration. Substitute Senate Bill (SSB) 5187 would allow livestock-owners, their family members and employees to trap or kill gray wolves without a permit from the Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) if their...
Hang on to your hats! President Obama considers that his 52% vote during the 2012 election was a mandate by the people that he was to be granted supreme power. To h*** with the legislature! He believe that his 52% margin (the highest during the last five elections) gives him the right to bypass congress and misuse executive powers. He has already shown his propensity to do this during his first four years. He believes he has nothing to lose. But, the talk by the liberals of a third term should concern us because the...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 1/29/13: For all the volatility in the markets in the last few months things sure have been boring lately. There just doesn’t seem to be a strong catalyst to break this market out in either direction for the time being. Unless exports begin to beat expectations our gains over the last few weeks may begin to erode. 1/31/13: Chicago wheat lost 7 cents today after being up 10 the day before. Yesterday’s rally was sparked by concerns about South American wea...
“The Sequester is coming! The Sequester is coming!” Yup, Congress is in a panic over a problem they created, and many in Congress want you and me to pony up. Again. Some want to cut only non-military discretionary funding – like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, transportation and the like in order to “find” about $1 trillion to balance the federal budget. Instead of planning on cutting programs and raising taxes on you and me to balance the federal budget, Congress already has a known-to-them remedy at their...
Just a few minutes ago, I was more than halfway through a column about my birthday. I paused to read it through, just to make sure it made sense, when I realized I was WHINING. Ouch. I decided I don’t need to do that anymore. Instead, let’s talk about technology. I have some fairly strong Luddite leanings, but am basically too lazy to actually act on them. It’s one thing to despise technology, and quite another to live without it. So I have a smart phone. One of the reasons I...
My father taught me the line when I was a child: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Those were the words William Shakespeare put into the mouth of King Richard III when he was knocked off his horse in the midst of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Richard was killed, ending the rule of the Plantagenet royalty in England and ushering in the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare famously depicted Richard III as a hunchbacked villain who murdered members of his own fam...
First of all, we regret to inform you that there is only silence on the IEO front. No word from anyone, except when the Bankruptcy Court sends out legal notices to all of us who are creditors (almost every business in town, it would appear). Odessa's other big project, however, is about to break ground as soon as weather permits. The meat-processing facility under project manager Sue Lani Madsen of Edwall is taking shape, both on paper and in terms of obtaining capital and gearing up for production. Area livestock producers...
There’s that song again. My unwanted, inadvertent, unloved theme song. “I’m just a girl who cain’t say no . . .” Well, wait a minute now. Yes, I can. Or is that “cain?” I do. Say no, that is. I’m saying no to the voice that says I’m crazy to try to continue Odessa’s tradition of having a quilt shop. I’m saying no to the voice that says Old Town Hall is past redemption, or that its future is unalterably linked to the success of existing organizations. I’m saying no to the...
