Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Sorted by date Results 1600 - 1624 of 1893
Avista and the Better Business Bureau (BBB) serving Eastern Washington, North Idaho and Montana are warning customers to be alert to a scam that has impacted utility customers in several states across the country. According to reports, imposters are claiming that the federal government is providing credits or applying payments to utility bills. The imposters then attempt to obtain social security numbers and bank routing numbers. Utilities impacted by the scam also report that scammers have visited customers in person,...
I work just a couple of blocks from a special kind of bank. It doesn’t accept money for deposit, it won’t finance a new car, and it wasn’t part of the housing bubble. This unusual kind of bank deals mostly in seeds that it preserves, sometimes propagates, and often disperses without charge to anyone who has a research use for unusual strains of crop plants. Seed genebanks are part of the unseen work that helps increase the chance more people will have enough to eat for suppe...
Recently I’ve had a look at another world. It’s a world that many people already inhabit. The world of infirmity. We all know people who live in that world. Some are in a constant state of pain. Some teeter on the edge between being able to move and not. Some live under the burden of incurable and/or terminal illness. I’m not even close to any of those situations and yet here I am, complaining again! Please don’t be offended when I tell you that I don’t like this world and...
I have a question about the Memorial Day ceremony. Why is it you never mention the names of the veterans and picture of them placing the wreath at the World War II tank memorial? Nice to know who these men are and what they look like. I’ve always been asked by American Legion member Robert Kissler to place the wreath at the memorial, being a veteran and an American Legion member of Odessa Post #105 for 14 years, and my father, Reuben Els was for 50 years. He’s deceased. I feel proud and honored to do this small task, but my...
I have a new standard I’m planning to use in this year’s election. I’m not voting for any parrots. I don’t care what political party a candidate belongs to. If, when speechifying, a candidate repeats, word for word, a statement that I’ve already heard from another politician, they will lose my vote automatically. I want candidates who are capable of speaking (not to mention thinking) for themselves, and don’t just spout a party line that has been written for them by someone...
Students from Gonzaga University’s MBA program recently provided the Lincoln County Economic Development Council with an outstanding statistical analysis of our retail sales history. The results of their study are positive. The students used two different resources for their analysis. The Washington State Retail Survey, a compilation of data from the Department of Revenue published by the Eureka Group of California, was used to analyze retail transactions subject to state sales tax. The USDA Census of Agriculture was used t...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 6/6/12: The grain markets have been choppy so far this week as Monday saw solid gains which were promptly given back on Tuesday, only to be partially recouped on Wednesday. It still seems to be more about the value of the dollar and other economic factors right now rather than grain news. Soybeans got a bit of an extra boost today which was based on some fundamental information, as it was announced that China bought another 4 million bushels of old crop...
The claims The movement for national standards and tests is based on these claims: (1) Our educational system is broken, as revealed by US students’ scores on international tests; (2) We must improve education to improve the economy; (3) The way to improve education is to have national standards and national tests that enforce the standards, and rate teachers on the basis of student performance (value-added measures). Each of these claims is unfounded. Not true (1) Our schools are not broken. The problem is poverty. Test s...
It’s the same old song. “Second verse same as the first; a little bit louder and a little bit worse!” I had to shop for bigger clothes last week, because I have regained all but 2 of the 20 pounds I lost last year. And still I don’t stop eating as if all food may vanish from the planet tomorrow. My feet hurt. My right knee seems to have decided to punish me for all the years of abuse. My cholesterol just topped out at 234. It’s hard to get moving. It’s hard to keep moving...
There comes a time when enough is enough. No more excuses, no more delays. In 1986, hospitals, local governments, schools, small businesses and doctors were fed up with the high cost of personal injury lawsuits and liability insurance. They successfully lobbied for tort reform legislation, which was signed into law by Gov. Booth Gardner. Fast forward to 2012 and you see that same tipping point with our public schools. Taxpayers are tired of hearing, “Just give us more money a...
Activists waging a national war on coal have turned their sights on the Pacific Northwest, targeting proposed shipping terminals in Washington and Oregon that would export coal to China. They’re aggressively lobbying federal officials to change how these projects are evaluated. If they succeed, our economy could become a casualty of the war on coal. Currently, such projects undergo a rigorous environmental review known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) involving m...
5/25/12: Grain prices rallied on Friday at the end of a very volatile week of trading. Chicago wheat futures gained 17 cents on the day, and white wheat prices rose three cents, finishing a dime lower than a week ago. Weather stories will percolate over the weekend. How much rain falls and where will determine what things look like on Tuesday. Hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend everyone!...
We really enjoyed Lise Ott’s story about the birds, as we can relate to the story. We even have a book, and when we see a bird that we normally don’t see around our place, we try to find it in the book. Every time we come to Irby we love sitting on the porch and observing the wildlife that flies and walks around the bluffs. We have to say we would have loved being down by the barn and seeing the wild turkeys. Lise, keep up the great job that you do in your stories that we read every week. Chuck Wood and Joanne Kingsbury Gig...
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. There are many stories as to its actual beginnings, with over two dozen cities and towns laying claim to being the birthplace of Memorial Day. It is more likely that it had many separate beginnings. Every planned or spontaneous gathering of people to honor the dead in the 1860s tapped into the general need to honor our dead. Each contributed honorably to the growing movement that culminated in the first o...
Over 20 years ago, in 1989 to be exact, a movie titled “Do the Right Thing” was released. There was quite a bit of controversy surrounding it at the time. Directed by Spike Lee, it was a social statement about racial tension. That’s really all I remember about the movie itself. What has stuck with me for all these years is the title. It’s a phrase I use a lot to try to improve my decision-making. Doing the right thing is often not readily discernible. In fact, sometim...
The next time you eat a baked spud you might want to think of the agricultural scientists who are hard at work trying to help the humble potato deal successfully with some significant diseases. Students of history will remember the Irish potato famine of 1845-1852. The denizens of Ireland had come to depend on potatoes as their main staple crop. The plant did well in the wet Irish climate, and the potato produced a lot of food for each acre that was planted. But a crisis...
Every once in a while, a reader will ask me where I get my ideas for this column. That question implies that I actually go looking for ideas. What most of you don’t realize is that the inside of my head is like a pinball machine. And that most pinball machines were manufactured around 1970. Shiny ideas bounce around, catching my attention for a moment or two. If I’m lucky, the flippers in my brain keep at least one of them in sight long enough for my memory to capture it. The more times an idea bounces off a bumper, set...
Energy is the lifeblood of modern economies and there’s no more amazingly useful form of energy than electricity. That’s why I was initially startled to read the recent news that the last of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants has been shut down, a turn of events that makes Japan the first major economy of this century to run without operating any such reactors. The news impressed me because prior to the mega-quake and tsunami of 2011, Japan powered 30 percent of its elect...
Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse. 5/18/12: It’s certainly been quite a week in the wheat markets as Chicago futures rallied nearly a dollar per bushel since Tuesday. New-crop soft white prices benefited much more than old crop but both enjoyed nice gains, although not nearly what futures were able to do. Basically the pressure of speculative liquidation from the past two weeks finally lifted, and then concerns over world weather for new-crop wheat started to pop up. Dry weather developing i...
Well, Congress is talking about reducing the food stamp program for the poor from around $1.48 a meal per person to somewhere between 98 cents to $1.23 a meal per person. So, here’s a two-step challenge for your readers: First step: Eat three well-balanced meals a day, each meal for $1.48. Try this for a day, for three days, for a week, for as long as you can manage. Second step: Eat three well-balanced meals a day, each meal for $1.23. Try this for a day, for three days, for a week, for as long as you can manage. Of c...
5/11/12: Not much need for grain news today. All one really needs to know is that commodities have fallen out of favor with investors and other speculative traders over the past few weeks, and money is fleeing the trading pits/servers. JP Morgan reported yesterday that they were facing a $2 billion dollar trading loss on credit default swaps, and there are rumors now that the loss could be as high as $5 billion. Another large commodity fund closed out their positions yesterday, as the fund had lost 13% of its value to date...
We humans go to some trouble so that we can choose which among our domestic animals gets to breed the next generation, thereby over time shaping various lines of animals ranging from types of sheep to varieties of chickens. Perhaps nowhere is the impact of selective breeding more clear to many of us than with the domestic dog. From ancient breeds like the greyhound and the Dalmatian to more recently derived types like the cocker spaniel, the diversity of dog breeds is a...
I have SO MANY QUESTIONS! Here are just a few: 1) What happens to the “data” when it is broken out simply by school buildings, especially those whole buildings that happen to be located in high-poverty areas? In other words, what is the gain in identifying the “subgroups,” when it is highly likely that those whole schools full of children did poorly on these tests? 2) Of the students who did not show high achievement, did they not only not have something to eat on the day of the test – what about their nutrition for the p...
I was listening to a radio piece about bird watching the other day. The reporter was talking about how all the newest gadgetry had changed what used to be a fairly humble pastime into a competitive high-tech sport. I’ve always imagined real bird watchers as bespectacled, mild-mannered people with extremely powerful binoculars slung around their necks and field guides in their hands. Or pockets. But, apparently, the species has evolved. Cell phones, GPS positioning, h...
I have dreams, you know. Not dreams of the future or what I would like to accomplish. Night-time dreams. When I was a kid, we were frequently entertained at the breakfast table by my father’s descriptions of the previous night’s dreams. They were always colorful, detailed and fantastic. Well, I seem to have inherited my father’s dreams. The other night I dreamed I was visiting the family farm in the company of my older sister. We discovered a stray cat in the front yard,...
