2nd Legislative District: Sen. Randi Becker, Reps. Gary Alexander and
J.T. Wilcox.

To contact your legislator, follow this link.

This editorial will appear in Sunday’s print edition.

Take a good look at the list in the next post.

Those 24 lawmakers have the power to create nearly 100,000 jobs and keep Pacific Rim shipping pouring into Puget Sound through the 21st century.

Yet those same lawmakers could also help forfeit 100,000 jobs. For lack of interest or courage, they could allow the ports of Tacoma and Seattle to become backwaters of maritime commerce — which supports more than 200,000 livelihoods.

The decision before these South Sound legislators is whether to throw their combined weight behind the Puget Sound Gateway to secure its passage in the special session of the Legislature.

The Gateway is a $1.8 billion project that would extend state Route 167 from Puyallup to the Port of Tacoma, state Route 509 from Sea-Tac Airport to Interstate 5 and build strategic interchanges to create a transportation super-corridor in Pierce and King counties.

It’s an expensive project: Highways don’t come cheap. Regardless, the future of the ports of Tacoma and Seattle, the preservation of jobs, the expansion of payrolls, and the efficiency of Interstate 5 all depend on passage of the $1.8 billion Gateway project.

Because it will require gas taxes and tolls, the Legislature won’t touch it in 2014, an election year. And there’s no reason to believe it will pass in 2015 if it can’t pass this year. Business and labor organizations are pulling together to get it to the governor’s desk as part of a larger transportation package.

But so far, there has been no corresponding push from what might be called the Pierce County caucus. (We’re including the three lawmakers from the 30th District in the Federal Way area.)
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This editorial will appear in Friday’s print edition.

The Washington Legislature has been wrestling lately with ways to bring down drunk driving fatalities. Now it’s got another option to look at.

The people charged with making the nation’s roads less deadly, the National Transportation Safety Board, called on states Tuesday to reduce the legal limit of blood alcohol from .08 percent to .05 percent. There’ll be the usual complaints about nanny statism, but the board makes quite a case.

Start with the fact that the United States and Canada are virtually alone among the world’s developed countries – including Europe, Russia and nearly all of Asia – in permitting people to drive with .08 percent ethanol running through their brains.

According to the NTSB’s new report, the laws of more than 100 nations consider drivers intoxicated if they have .05 percent in their blood. Some forbid any level above .00.

Why? Because lower thresholds save lives.

The board cites many studies indicating that serious impairment begins well below .08. At .05, drivers – on average – are 38 percent more likely to cause crashes than if they drank nothing before they drove.

The “average” part is important. Some people have higher tolerances for alcohol, some lower. A safety rule should be calibrated to the drivers most – not least – likely to kill others.
Someone who does fine at .07 percent wouldn’t likely be nabbed in the first place, because officers must have probable cause – e.g., seeing the car swerving erratically – before they pull someone over on suspicion of DUI.

But .07 is a long way from safe for most drivers. The report found that someone driving with that much alcohol has twice the risk of crashing as a sober driver.

In the United States, unless you hang around with street gangs, you are far more likely to get killed by a drunk on the road than by a thug with a handgun. In any given year, the number of Americans killed by drunk drivers exceeds the combined U.S. military deaths in both the Iraq and Afghan wars since 2001.
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This editorial will appear in Thursday’s print edition.

From the shores of Commencement Bay to the foothills of Mount Rainier, more opportunities for recreation are falling into place.

• The day people will be able to walk from Thea Foss Waterway to Point Defiance is a little closer, thanks to work being done at the old Asarco smelter site. Part of Mike Cohen’s billion-dollar Point Ruston development, the mile-long Waterwalk Esplanade (www.pointruston.com/lifestyle) will link the existing walkway along Commencement Bay to Point Defiance Park when it opens in the next few months.

The esplanade – which will …

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This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

Here’s what you don’t do if an IRS division is discovered to be singling out the political opposition: Sit on the explosive information for at least two years, and let the abuses fester in the meantime.

Here’s what you don’t do if a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans are killed by jihadists in Libya: Water down the public explanations until it sounds as if lax security had nothing to do with the attack.

The blunders behind these two evasions aren’t remotely comparable in magnitude. But the Obama administration’s impulse to conceal the truth is the same.

An Internal Revenue Service unit’s seeming hostility to exemption-seeking conservative groups could conceivably go nuclear if responsibility reaches high enough in the Obama administration. The fact that IRS employees were hunting down Republican-leaning groups is shocking in itself; if it was even tolerated on high, it’s a revival of Nixon-style political tactics.

It also gives the lie to President Obama’s mantra that he’s running “the most transparent administration” in American history. Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS division that granted or refused tax exemptions for advocacy groups, learned in June 2011 that its employees were using such search terms as “tea party” and “patriot” when targeting groups extra scrutiny.

She didn’t bother to inform the public until Friday, on the eve of a scathing inspector general’s report. Even then, she insisted that the Determinations Unit had no political agenda.

The problem never would have arisen in the first place had the IRS been more forthcoming about its practices.

The unit uses what it calls “be on the lookout” criteria for scrutinizing particular groups. There’s no reason the BOLO has to be secret. Had it been an open document, no one would have dared add small-government advocacy to the guidelines.
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The New York Times editorial board is doing some after-the-fact damage control over its enthusiastic support last year for Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea party groups.

Excerpt:

Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are “social welfare” organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.

Note the subject-less, passive-voice headline on its new editorial: “The I.R.S. audits are condemned.” Who, exactly, condemned them? (Please don’t ask.)

In politics, this grammatical evasion is standard fare for …

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

One of the deeper mysteries facing a patient who’s entered the bewildering labyrinth of the hospital world is why – after he’s discharged – those nice people send him a bill high enough to empty his 401k.

Then another bill comes: His insurance has paid an inexplicably low rate, and the hospital is inexplicably satisfied with it.

If he has insurance, that is. If he doesn’t, it may be time to look at that 401k.

The nation’s capricious and incomprehensively high hospital bills came under harsh light last week when the Department of Health and Human Services released a database showing what American hospitals charge for common inpatient services.

Try to compare one hospital’s bills against another and you quickly wind up in Wonderland.

According to HHS, inpatient charges for a joint replacement runs an average of $5,300 in Ada, Okla.; in Monterey Park, Calif., it’s $223,000. Bills can vary wildly even in the same area.

Typical inpatient treatment for heart failure costs from $21,000 to $46,000 at various Denver hospitals, for example.
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This editorial will appear in Monday’s print edition.

Nothing better sums up the military’s problem regarding sexual assault than the mug shot of Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski.

The officer in charge of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention programs had been arrested — on suspicion of sexual battery in a parking lot against a woman he did not know. Police say she fought him off and called 911.

That someone like Krusinski – an Air Force Academy graduate – may not have gotten the message about unwanted sexual advances shows how far the military still must go to address the problem.

And it’s a big one. Based on anonymous surveys, the Defense Department estimates that about 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012 – an increase of almost 37 percent over the previous year. Sexual assault was defined as anything from rape to “unwanted sexual touching” of private parts. Only 3,374 of those assaults were reported in 2012.

Why are so few reported? The survey suggests that victims fear retaliation and have little confidence that the military will prosecute the offense. Read more »