Doug Floyd

If anybody appreciates the value of a penny – even better than Washington state’s fiscally strained  lawmakers – it’s the Spokane Guilds’ School.  Every year as part of its fundraising, the nonprofit organization appeals to the region’s schoolchildren to reach into their pockets literally for their pennies. And, as children do, they respond. Eagerly.

The sedan ahead of me was barreling along the byways outside of Kansas City, and I was glued to its bumper. The Washington state trooper at the wheel was hustling Gov. Dan Evans to his next speaking engagement and wasn’t worrying that traffic or red lights might throw me off his trail.

Whatever it was that was so shocking about South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst during President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday, it wasn’t the simple breach of decorum. Decorum, if you haven’t noticed, is extinct. We lost it long ago. I’ve become increasingly sensitive to its departure, not only because of what goes on daily in the news – or the cable TV screechfests that pass for news – but also because of the sour tone of political discourse that takes place in The Spokesman-Review’s own letters column.

It's spring, the season when, as poet Joan Walsh Anglund put it: "... new life presses out from every growing thing, fulfilling our trust, renewing our faith, that this has always been, that this will be again."

Creationists declare that evolution, (they prefer to call it Darwinism) is only a theory and no more entitled to be part of the public school curriculum than any other theory. They also pretend that creationism, which you can read about in the Old Testament book of Genesis, is supported by science and therefore belongs in the schools as much as evolution does.

Cherie Rodgers is known as a clean air activist. That shouldn't keep the Spokane city councilwoman off the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority, given the clean air agency's mission. If anything, it should make her an ideal fit.

"It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?" That familiar question has been around for awhile. It's an appropriate reminder to parents of their responsibility for the guidance and supervision of their youngsters. What if we shift the time frame a few hours?

Early in October 1959, a handful of New York consultants arrived in Spokane to begin laying out a 20-year development plan for the city's core. Four months later, the preliminary report was released. With a couple of slight modifications in the 1960s and early '90s, that plan still represents the guiding vision for downtown Spokane. That is about to change, however, beginning with a town hall meeting from 7 to 10 p.m. Thursday at the Spokane Convention Center.