Here are the editorial topics the ed board plans to publish Friday. If you have comments or questions about them, please email them to david.seago@thenewstribune.com.

1. We announce our endorsements in the primary contests for seats in the 2nd, 26th and 28th legislative districts.

2. We remind readers that Friday is the deadline to register to vote in the Sept. 19 primary.

All editorials represent the consensus view of The News Tribune’s editorial board, not the opinion of an individual writer. Readers are welcome to visit the editorial board’s daily 10 a.m. topic meeting.

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We have a scoop: Congressman-for-life Norm Dicks is now a grandpa.

Son Ryan Dicks and his wife are the proud parents of Wilson Henry Dicks, 8 lbs. 8 oz. The baby was born last week. Mom and baby doing fine. Ryan was the Cascade Land Conservancy’s Pierce County conservation director until his recent promotion to CLC vice president for conservation.

We’re betting here that the elder Dicks, now in his 30th year of representing the Sixth District in the other Washington, will have great-grandchildren before he leaves the House.

We recently wrote an editorial applauding the City of Tacoma’s effort to close homeless camps and keep them closed by offering campers alternative places to live where help is offered but few demands (i.e. sobriety) are made of them.

With that in mind, I was interested to hear about the problems that Seattle is encountering in moving its homeless population out of downtown and into other neighborhoods. Residents of those neighborhoods are none too happy about their new neighbors, hanging their complaints on the fact that the city is building new housing projects and packing homeless

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Here are the topics for The News Tribune’s editorials on Thursday. If you have comments or questions about them, please email them to david.seago@thenewstribune.com.

1. We endorse the Pierce County Library System’s Sept. 19 ballot measure, which asks voters for a levy-lid lift so the system can restore its tax revenues and enhance services, including the addition of Sunday library hours.

2. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld crossed the line when he compared critics of the war in Iraq with those who tried to appease the Nazis before World War II.

All editorials represent the consensus

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Federal Way School Superintendent Tom Murphy paid his traditional start-of-school visit to the ed board today. He told us the district will be asking voters in November to approve a scaled-down version of the $245 million bond issue that failed in February.

What really interested, us, though, was Murphy’s update on the remarkable demographic changes in Federal Way. Often thought of as a largely white, suburban district, Federal Way in fact more closely resembles an urban district like Tacoma. Its students have a 45 percent poverty rate, and this year for the first time Caucasian students may constitute a

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One of the Democrats running in the primary against incumbent Sen. Maria Cantwell is the intriguingly named Michael Goodspaceguy Nelson of Seattle. (Is there a Badspaceguy out

there?) He also ran for King County executive in 2005 and for governor in 2004 as a Libertarian.

I couldn’t resist Googling Goodspaceguy – and yes, I expect a stern letter from the folks at Google telling me that I should say "I employed the Google search engine." Up pops his blog, full of interesting info about the candidate. His address is

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The ed board met today with folks representing the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition. One was Lee Fouts of Puyallup, a member of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

They hope the governor and the Legislature will double to $100 million the biennial capital budget appropriate for a state program that helps local communities create parks, protect wildlife habitat and conserve farmland and shorelines.

The 15-year-old program is highly popular, and it’s helped a lot of projects in Pierce County, including the Foothills Trail, parks on Tacoma’s Ruston Way, parks in various communities around the county,

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It’s been a mixed-bag week for the historic-church preservation effort. First United Methodist Church near Tacoma’s Wright Park celebrated its final service Sunday; the building will soon be torn down to make way for MultiCare’s emergency room expansion. Just days before, the Seattle church by the same name was spared a similar fate when high-rise developer Martin Selig withdrew his offer for the church property.

With the loss of Tacoma’s First United all but assured now, attention must turn to the other historic churches that face the same dilemma of trying to maintain aging buildings

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