News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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As I complete my final weeks in Congress, it is only natural to reflect on the past 20 years. It has truly been my honor and privilege to serve you and represent those who call Central Washington home in Congress. Whether it’s helping seniors with their Social Security benefits, ensuring that veterans are awarded the medals they earned but never received, or cutting through bureaucratic red tape to support local families and small businesses – the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives is something that I will always be grate...
Every day, I hear from hardworking people in Central Washington who are struggling to support their families and put food on the table. At a time when three-quarters of Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck, the Obama Administration is imposing a new nationwide mandate that could cause millions of workers to see their hours cut and their take-home pay slashed. The Obamacare law requires employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health insurance to all of their full-time employees. Buried deep within the thousands of pages...
Somewhere along the way, most of us have had a teacher who influenced our lives in a big way. Perhaps a teacher encouraged us to pursue a particular interest or skill, challenged us to push the limits and achieve more, or saw something in us that we were unable to see on our own. During the first full week of May, communities across America will celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, a time to reach out and pay tribute to over 7 million men and women nationwide who dedicate their lives to educating children. Teachers play an important role in...
Last summer, news reports broke that the U.S. Department of Labor was effectively holding hostage the crops of blueberry farmers in Oregon until they signed documents agreeing to alleged violations to federal labor laws. Since then, similar cases have popped up on the west side of our own state of Washington. Agents from the Department of Labor accused these farmers of a variety of labor violations and invoked an abusive tactic known as the “hot goods” provision — impounding the farmer’s crops until they agreed to sign a form admitting to break...
There is no question that the past few years have been challenging for many Americans. Americans have weathered 45 straight months of unemployment ranging from 7 to 10 percent. After four years of running trillion-dollar deficits, our national debt currently stands at $16.2 trillion. These figures are so large that it is sometimes easy to forget that they have real consequences, but our debt level means each American owes nearly $52,000. Last year, Congress and the President reached a compromise to put a $2.4 trillion down payment on our debt....
Almost a century ago, the U.S. Forest Service established a program for Americans to build cabins on small lots of forest land. The goal of the program was to encourage public recreation and enhance the stewardship of our National Forests. Many of the cabins are simple, rustic structures hand-built by the grandparents of the current owners and passed down from generation to generation. Today, there are more than 14,000 recreational cabin owners, including many here in Central Washington. Unfortunately, over the past several years, this family...
It is easy to forget how important the dams are to our everyday lives in the Pacific Northwest. Without these dams, our energy bills would be higher, the Columbia Basin wouldn’t have the thousands of acres of green fields and orchards that feed millions of people around the world, and it would be more costly for our wheat farmers to get their products to market. Unfortunately, extremists – mostly from outside of Central Washington – have been trying for decades to remove these dams under the guise of salmon recovery. Their radical agenda threa...
