Quotes & amp;amp; Notes

by Inlander Staff
Pot Calling the Kettle... -- Here's a good one: Democrats plan to start running a TV campaign criticizing President George W. Bush for including false and misleading statements in his State of the Union speech about Saddam's ability to become a nuclear threat. The Associated Press reports that Republicans are asking TV stations not to carry the ads, claiming they are "false and misleading."





Vanishing Jobs -- The news that some economist back East announced that the recession actually ended in late 2001 may not make Washington state workers feel any more secure -- that is, the ones who still have their jobs. According to the federal Department of Labor, Washington lost 1,600 manufacturing jobs last month. As pointed out by the Association of Washington Business, that means in three years, Washington state has lost roughly 20 percent of its manufacturing jobs.


"What is even more troubling," comments AWB President Don Brunell, "is if you go back to 1998, our state employed over 360,000 in the manufacturing sector. As of June, that figure is 265,200. That is almost 100,000 high-paid, family-wage jobs which are gone."





Lake Water -- Yum! -- While Idahoans have to wait until fall to find out whether Gov. Dirk Kempthorne will be tapped by the Bush administration to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Kempthorne offered some insight to his green genes last week in the Lake City. After an early morning swim in Lake Coeur d'Alene on July 21, the Coeur d'Alene Press reported that Kempthorne said at a later event: "It's fishable, it's drinkable, it's swimmable. There is no Superfund site here."





A Martyr Out of a Molehill -- Maybe we're the only ones who weren't totally jazzed about finally killing those Qusay and Udai characters. Sure, if anybody deserved it, they did. But with all due respect to the difficulties faced by our troops in Iraq, why not just capture these guys? As human history has proven again and again, nothing drives religious zealots to extremes like a good martyr or two.


True, the armed forces said they had no choice but to kill the brothers. But when Saddam gets similarly cornered, perhaps waiting him out would be a better plan. Let him do the perp walk on Al Jazeera. Then let Iraq administer its own justice to the man who kept them under his thumb for all those years. That's how you take down a dictator for good.





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Publication date: 07/31/03