Pierce County labor and antiwar activists expect dockworkers to shut down all West Coast ports for an eight-hour shift on May to protest the war in Iraq and support worker rights.

Activist websites talk as though the action by the International Longshore & Warehouse Union is a done deal, but there’s nothing on the ILWU’s own website today confirming strike plans.

No independent local confirmation yet. The newsroom is chasing it down.

(7 p.m. update: Cargo Business News, an online shipping newsletter, quotes an ILWU spokesman indicating that the shutdown is planned.)

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright is doing his best to wreck Barack Obama’s presidential bid. Obama needs to have a Sister Souljah moment regarding the pastor.

Auburn School Board shouldn’t even have considered creating a special advisory committee that would meet privately to interview and evaluate superintendent candidates. A meeting like that can’t be an executive session.

About our editorials:

If you have comments or questions about these topics, please email them to david.seago@thenewstribune.com. Editorials represent the consensus view of The News Tribune’s editorial board.

Want to sit in on a daily ed board meeting?

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In some of Washington’s rural areas, teachers and administrators are among the best-paid workers in the community. Their jobs are usually recession-proof, unlike those of most of their neighbors.

In an unusual acknowledgment of hard economic times in Clallam County, 21 school principals, assistant principals and district level administrators in the Port Angeles School District have volunteer to forego their 2.4 percent “step increases” next year. (News story).

The move would save the district around $33,000, but the school board needs to make about $500,000 in cuts to next year’s budget. The district is hurting from steep

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You knew it was going to be a different sort of author’s talk when the speaker walked to the podium in full kilt, preceded by several minutes of bagpipe music.

Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith gave one of the funniest, smartest, warmest talks I’ve ever heard Saturday at Pacific Lutheran University. And as far as I can tell, he spoke for 40 minutes without notes before answering a good many questions from the audience. Pierce County Library estimates about 1,600 people attended. Smith stayed for about two hours after

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Whoo, that’s a nasty cut Washington state Democratic Party chairman Dwight Pelz took at John McCain today. “Job-Slayer John McCain,” a party press release dubbed the Republican, who brings his campaign to Washington next month.

Here’s the logic. McCain hates Boeing, loves Airbus. If Boeing loses its appeal and Airbus and Northrup Grumman get the big Air Force tanker contract, we can thank McCain for “outsourcing 9,000 Washington jobs to France.”

McCain’s a Republican. So are Dino Rossi and Rob McKenna, running for governor and attorney general, respectively. So Rossi and McKenna are guilty – by association – of killing Washington jobs, too – unless they disavow the GOP’s presidential candidate.

Fat chance. But it was an entertaining piece of partisan malarkey.

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For more proof that wishes are not horses, read Vision 2040.

This is the grand plan for the region’s future just approved by the conglomerate of local governments known as the Puget Sound Regional Council.

In a recent Crosscut posting, former Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald pitilessly dissects the document’s blueprint for regional population growth.

His critique is well worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few highlights:

Vision 2040 anticipates 1.7 million new people living in King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap County by 2040. About a third of them are supposed

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Matt Rosenberg, who writes a knowledgable transportation blog for the Cascadia Center, offers a cleverly succinct analogy for congestion pricing:

Suppose electricity was free, even at hours of peak usage. Think your power supply would be reliable, then? Exactly. Now apply the same common-sense approach to highway capacity.

The Cascadia Center, a unit of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, promotes alternative solutions to transportation and development problems. The Center is a big fan of congestion pricing, which will get its first real-world test in Washington beginning Saturday.

That’s when the state DOT opens its first

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