Puget Sound Energy representatives made a point today of telling us about the utility's rebuttal to claims that selling it to private investors is too risky for its customers in Washington. We echoed that concern in a June 22 editorial.

PSE filed responses today with the state Utilities and Transportation Commission, which is considering a proposed $7 billion acquisition of PSE by a consortium of Australian investors and Canadian pension funds.

Our editorial followed formal opposition to the deal by the state attorney general's office of public counsel, which represents consumers in cases before the commission.

The deal, PSE argued, contains these benefits:

Customer benefits
• Provides $100 million in rate credits and reduced costs for customers
• Commits capital from the new investors to meet PSE’s $5 billion ($1 billion annually over the next five years) in infrastructure and energy supply requirements for the region
• Confirms headquarters, management and employees all remain in Washington
• Adds new service quality index (SQI) on billing and tougher SQI penalties
• Expands Green Power, customer renewable energy and energy efficiency commitments
• Sets goal for PSE to be carbon neutral by 2050, making PSE the first such investor- owned utility in the region
• Provides $5 million capital infusion to the Puget Sound Energy Foundation for local community efforts
• Commits to seek an increase in the fund to help low-income PSE customers pay their energy bills

Local governance and continued oversight
• Assures three current local board members, including independent chairman, on new boards of directors
• Assures continued state and federal regulatory oversight
• Assures on-going comprehensive financial and operational reporting

Financial security
• Provides additional safeguards to protect the financial strength of PSE
• Retains earnings, if required, with dividend restrictions on PSE and Puget Energy

Read on for PSE's complete press release.

=> Read more!

The people who want to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington seem almost obsessive about expunging the words "assisted suicide" from the English language.

I noted earlier that Initiative 1000 would forbid state agencies from using the term. In fact, "assisted suicide" would cease to exist "under the law." The proper term: "obtaining and self-administering life-ending medication."

I-1000's sponsors turned in their signatures today, enough to put it on the November ballot. The Washington Medical Association, an opponent, was ready to pounce. Its president, Dr. Brian Wicks, immediately issued a statement condemning physician-assisted suicide as "fundamentally incompatible with the role of physicians as healers."

One of his gripes had less to do with ethics than with nomenclature:

Under I-1000, if a physician prescribes a lethal overdose, when that physician completes the death certificate, he or she is required — actually required — to list the underlying disease (say lung cancer) as the cause of death, even when the doctor knows full well that the patient died due to the suicidal overdose he or she prescribed. To my knowledge, there’s no other situation in medicine in which the death certificate is deliberately falsified — and in which this falsification is mandated by law.

An analogy might be a cancer patient who has a fatal reaction to chemotherapy. Is it the cancer that killed him or the chemo? The chemo would be listed as the immediate cause of death – and it wasn't even intended to kill him, unlike the drugs used for assisted suicide.

Americans have a habit of trying to soften the reality of death with euphemisms. We don't like to talk about it; we don't like to think about it. "Coffin" smacked too much of the grave, so we substituted "casket." "Tombstone" was more than we could handle, so it's "monument."

But things are what they are. Pretending that a physician-assisted suicide isn't a "physician-assisted suicide" won't make it any less of a suicide assisted by a physician.

For some reason, our wire editors passed over a New York Times story Tuesday that really startled me. The third paragraph is the eye-opener.

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Whoo. That had sharp edges. The ruling was unanimous, and the panel included chief judge David B. Sentelle, described by the Times as one of the court's most conservative members.

The administration's whole legal basis for holding detainees at Gitmo is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels of the U.S. courts. It's reassuring to see our judiciary asserting its independence and insisting on the rule of law.

There’s terrible irony in the report that the harsh interrogation techniques countenance by the Bush administration were originally developed by communist regimes in China and the Soviet Union.

Starbucks’s strategy of trying to cover the planet with coffee stores has hit the wall as the company is forced to close 600 stores in the U.S. It turns out that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

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.
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Sports copy editor Dustin Lane sent this around on The News Tribune's internal email at 9 a.m. this morning:

I’ve got four great seats for tonight’s M’s game against Toronto – 16 rows behind home plate. $40 each.

To which I replied:

Do we pay you $40 or do you pay us $40 to take them?

This from Dustin, finally, at 4:03 p.m.:

Alright, nobody took me up on this earlier, so the tickets are free to whoever shows up first at the Reader Rep desk.

Hey, I would have taken them if he'd paid me only $20 a ticket. As long as I didn't have to actually go to the game.

Our Monday editorial opposing a plan to let voters decide this fall whether to end Tacoma City Council term limits drew a couple of corrections from readers. (The proposal passed Tuesday on a 5-4 vote; story here.)

First, from His Honor the mayor, Bill Baarsma:

Update: TNT city hall reporter Jason Hagey tells me the mayor's mistaken: A city charter amendment voters approved in 2004 requires a charter review at least every 10 years.

Dave:
I agree with today’s editorial. I would like to make one minor correction. The charter review process is not required—although there should be a provision in the code at least. (And I will offer one before I leave office at the end of my term.)

Since the great recall of 1970, it has been the practice of the city council to have a review process every decade or so. I served on two of the review committees—during the 1970’s and 1980’s. I sponsored the resolution that set forth the review in the 1990’s. The most recent review was in 2003.

One major reason for the periodic review was because of the antics of recalled five. They would collectively put issues on the agenda without notice or public comment—including charter changes. That all changed after the recall election when Gordon Johnston secured support on the council for the first review. Reviews followed during the terms of mayors Sutherland, Vialle and yours truly. Well over 90% of all charter amendments—minor and major—went through a lengthily review with much public outreach. As a result, most of the proposed changes passed.

And from Catherine Rudolph of the Tacoma-Pierce County Association of Realtors:

The editorial on Tacoma City Council terms limits said that Julie Anderson’s term is up in 2009. Its actually up in 2011, with Mike Lonergan’s term ending in 2009.