In a recent letter to the editor, Karen Robbins of Puyallup gives parents a timely reminder that’s worth repeating here: Starting Friday (Sept. 1), parents can request access to their children’s WASL test booklets and answers. The best way to do that is to go to the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Web site.
Here are the editorial topics the ed board plans to publish Wednesday. If you have comments or questions about them, please email them to david.seago@thenewstribune.com.
1. It appears Gov. Gregoire has had no luck trying to broker a compromise with the state Pharmacy Board over a proposed "refuse and refer" rule that would allow pharmacists with moral objections to refuse to dispense the Plan B contraceptive. The board is taking up the issue again Thursday, and we reiterate our stand against "refuse and refer."
2. For some time now, democracy in Mexico has been on the
…Remember the big fight in the U.S. Senate earlier this month over an estate-tax bill that included a provision affecting tips for restaurant workers? The bill would have counted tips as wages – a provision that prompted Washington’s two senators to vote against the overall bill. News story here.
Washington’s restaurant industry is still smarting from the defeat. Anthony Anton, president of the Washington Restaurant Association, is paying a call on the editorial board Wednesday to discuss the issue.
Anton is from Sumner and is a member of the Anton’s Restaurant family. See his bio here.
Mark B. Ganz, who used to work in Tacoma as a lawyer for the outfit once known as Pierce County Medical, has come up in the world. Now he’s president of the Regence Group, parent of Regence BlueShield, which operates in four Northwest states.
And he’s definitely not a status-quo sort of guy, we learned during his visit with the TNT ed board today. He contends the American health care system is “fundamentally broken,” and says Regence wants to be part of fixing it.
Basically, Ganz says, creating “transparency” in health care – code for making sure
…On the surface, state Supreme Court Justice Tom Chambers and his challenger, Jeanette Burrage, would not seem to have a lot in common. He’s a loquacious former trial lawyer; she’s a quiet, polite onetime Republican legislator who’s most noted as a conservative legal activist.
But our election-endorsement interviews revealed a curious and unlikely link between them.
As a young man, Chambers raced cars. He kept the pedal to the metal at the Yakima Speedway in the mid-1960s but wound up selling his car for tuition money at WSU. “These people were a lot of fun,” he
Here are the editorial topics the ed board plans to publish Tuesday. If you have comments or questions about them, please email them to editorial page editor david.seago@thenewstribune.com.
If there’s one lesson the nation learned from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that competent government matters. The disaster that wiped out much of New Orleans revealed incompetence at all levels of government, from city hall to the top echelons of the federal government.
2. The formal completion of an alliance between Puyallup’s Good Samaritan Hospital and Tacoma’s MultiCare Health System, plus the appointment of highly regarded local health care executive
…Representatives of the Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition will meet with the ed board at 11 a.m. Tuesday.
Guests will include Lee Fouts of Puyallup, a coalition board member, Mike Ryherd, the coalition’s lobbyist, and former TNT reporter Leslie Brown, communications director for The Nature Conservancy.
They’re pitching a legislative proposal to double to $100 million the state’s funding for a state program that helps local communities create parks, protect wildlife habitat and conserve farmland and shorelines.
We got an email press release from an outfit called Northwest River Partners concerning the big hydro dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. It wasn’t hard to tell where this group is coming from. Forget power and irrigation, they complain. We’re running the dams for fish.
NRP is a relatively new group formed by electric utilities, farmers and others utterly opposed to breaching the dams to save endangered salmon. It aims to counter the push from environmentalists to breach the dams or spill more water to aid fish migration.