Op-Ed

My Op-Ed ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy!  I am not a fan of the oxymoronic “mandatory gratuity.” The move in Washington State and by some Moscow restaurants to shift to mandatory gratuity changes the entire dynamic of food service in those restaurants. Incentives matter, and the waitstaff in these restaurants are less incentivized […]

My Op-Ed ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy!  The Moscow School District’s recent experiments with Competency-Based Education remind me of the educational fads practiced on me in the mid-1960s and 70s. Each hindered my education more than the last. The first education experiment was “Whole Language“ (Sight Reading/See-Say) in first grade. Brilliant Harvard PhD’s

My third column on climate change denial ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy!  As I noted in two previous columns (No one is a climate change denier Part 1 and Part 2), all agree that the climate has changed for millennia and is still changing. What scientists do not agree on is the cause.

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy!  The recent Moscow-Pullman Daily News article (High wages and tougher regulations worry local merchants) highlights Pullman businesses’ anxiety about three changes coming out of Olympia: first, Washington state minimum wage rising 12.5 percent on Jan. 1; second, the odious regulations being imposed on restaurant and hospitality

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! Bill Parks’ Op-Ed response (Students who live here have a right to vote here) shows that his real disagreement is with Idaho law governing residency classification, and Idaho’s justification concerning student voting, which I argue we should uphold. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with Idaho

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! I was born and raised in Florida and was a Florida state resident while at college in Colorado. When I wanted to vote, I applied for an absentee ballot from the State of Florida and had it mailed to me in Boulder. It never occurred to

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! In 1689, John Locke argued that political society exists for the sake of protecting one’s natural right to “life, liberty, and estate.” Thomas Jefferson extended Locke’s thesis, stating in the Declaration that we have unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” With every

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! When I was a child, we had Vocational-Technical schools that were trade schools for students not bound for college. They provided vocation-specific training and skills (carpenter, mechanic, electrician, plumber, painter, welder, etc.) for entering directly into the workforce. These schools would help place their students with

My Op-Ed ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! Forty years ago I started my junior year of college. I lived at home the first two years, working a part-time minimum wage dishwashing job that covered all college expenses and travel (including driving two hours round trip every day to class). I earned $3892 and

My OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! There seems to be a growing trend in suburban/middle-class sentiment that simple acts of patriotism like flying an American flag will get you labeled a “nationalist.” What is a nationalist? Some think of war hawks like John Bolton. Others define a nationalist as someone who is

My OpEd ran in yesterday’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News. Enjoy! When I entered the navy in 1981, I ran the gauntlet of medical corpsmen with jet injectors giving every inoculation conceivable, including vaccinations for measles, mumps, and chickenpox (even though I already had those three diseases as a child). Because military members can be deployed anywhere