Costco might come to rue the day it spent millions to privatize liquor sales. It looks like it will have spirited competition from a liquor superstore called Total Wine, which is planning several locations in Washington according to an Associated Press story.

Anyone who’s gone to Arizona to watch Mariners spring practice might be familiar with Total Wine, which has a location a short distance from the Peoria sports complex.

I was in the area in October for a wedding and popped into Total Wine. It’s a pretty amazing place, with lots of advertised specials and a

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This editorial will appear in Friday’s print edition.

As the Washington Supreme Court pointed out earlier this month, the state is failing in its “paramount duty” to amply fund education. The court ordered the state Legislature to figure out how to resolve that situation.

By 2018.

It’s possible – though not probable – that lawmakers will come up with some new revenue source that provides everything local school districts need to educate children. Until that happy day, schools still need to repair and upgrade buildings, buy textbooks and computers, provide bus service, train staff and do a lot of other things that the money they get from the state doesn’t fully cover.
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This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

If there’s one thing worse than the death of a child, it’s the disappearance of a child.

Monday marked the 13th anniversary of the vanishing of 2-year-old Teekah Lewis of Tacoma. Bill Clinton was still president when she went missing. The bowling alley on Center Street where she vanished has since been razed.

She was a toddler then; she would be a high-schooler today. And she is still missing. Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

One of the most irresponsible ideas kicking around the 2012 Legislature is the Republican proposal to pack local card rooms across the state with thousands of slot machines.
What Washington really needs is less casino gambling, not more.

A new Washington State University survey provides a timely reality check for those who think commercial gaming is a harmless industry that promises a free lunch to needy governments.

Commissioned by the state Gambling Commission, the scientifically designed survey suggested that:

• About 88 percent of Washington’s population doesn’t want to see gambling expanded

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

A citizen’s advisory committee has come up with ideas for addressing Tacoma’s dire street infrastructure needs. They can be boiled down to two words: more money.

Given the city’s $32 million budget hole, that’s probably the only road the committee could go down. The alternative – doing nothing and letting Tacoma’s streets get into even worse shape – is intolerable.

The 13-member committee recommended not cutting existing revenue going to transportation needs, imposing a $20 car-tab fee to fund a new Transportation Benefit District and asking voters to raise their property taxes by almost $1 per $1,000 of assessed valuation for six years.
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“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” John Edgar Wideman

I am a writer, a columnist for this regional paper for over ten years. I have written about life, its challenges, losses and lessons. Yet I have not been able to write about my brother. Too important, too scary.

But, time has passed. And the time has come.

My younger brother, Paul, died last summer of a sudden heart attack. He was 59 years old.
When I think about him, these words come to

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This editorial will appear in Monday’s print edition.

The flooding threat posed by the meltdown of last week’s snow and ice is timely ammunition for the Pierce County Council’s attempt to create a flood-control taxing district.

Even areas that aren’t close to major rivers have experienced problems caused by too much water. Overtaxed storm drains and catch basins present surface-water issues for county residents who don’t live anywhere near rivers like the Puyallup or Nisqually.

That’s why the council’s new approach makes sense: Give communities that aren’t threatened by river flooding access to some of the flood district’s revenues for stormwater control. For cities that aren’t near rivers, that kind of sweetener should be attractive.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Initiative 502 has given the Legislature a big fat opening to separate medical cannabis from the legalization of recreational marijuana.

I-502 proposes to authorize and regulate the use and sale of marijuana in Washington. It’s an initiative to the Legislature, which means that lawmakers have three options: They can adopt it as is, ignore it and let it go to the ballot, or come up with an alternative measure to put on the ballot alongside it.

The issue belongs to the voters, though legislators may well be able to improve on the initiative as written.

With the legalization option out in the open – and cleanly contained in its own bill – lawmakers ought to be able to craft a medical marijuana policy that doesn’t amount to sneaky, corrupt pseudo-legalization.

They could get two-thirds of the way there with one simple step: explicitly outlawing clinics and medical practices that do virtually nothing but hand out so-called green cards to almost anyone who walks in the door.

The proliferation of pot docs and retailers in this state over the last few years has made a mockery of the 1998 initiative that carefully authorized the therapeutic use of marijuana for the genuinely ill within a doctor-patient relationship.

The law forbade sales of the drug and restricted its use to suffering patients who couldn’t be helped by ordinary treatments.

Those restrictions remain in force but are routinely flouted. Potheads and partiers claiming “intractable pain” can easily find practitioners who will legalize their habits for $100 or $200 – often promising them the money back if they don’t get authorization papers. In Tacoma, the situation is such a sham that police say they’re running into gang members who’ve been “medically” authorized to smoke dope.
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