This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

Some men may now find it easier to vent their rage with bullets. That was certainly the case in Saturday’s Graham massacre.

Pity the police who responded.

The crime scene they discovered in Graham Saturday was a horror: four children shot to death in their beds, another in a bathroom amid clear signs of a struggle. Each child shot multiple times.

The perpetrator: Daddy. Daddy had also shot himself after he’d finished executing his children.

People are inevitably lumping this shocking massacre together with six other multiple killings that have left 53 dead since March 10. One bore resemblance to this slaughter: a March 19 attack in Santa Clara, Calif., in which a man killed his two children and three other relatives.

Two were lethal attacks on police. In another, a gunman shot his mother and nine others in a lethal rampage in southeast Alabama. In another, a Vietnamese immigrant slaughtered 13 people in an immigration center. In yet another, a man broke into a nursing home and shot seven elderly residents and a nurse.

The apparent motives included wives who’d walked out, loss of jobs, difficulty finding jobs. Obviously, none of those frustrations and disappointments are grounds for murder, much less murder on such a scale. The one factor connecting all these massacres was the lack of inhibitions against killing, the ready resort to lethal force.

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This editorial will appear in Tuesday's print edition.

The size of the state’s fiscal crisis makes a squeeze on the criminal justice budget inevitable. The trick is to do the least harm.

Washington won’t dig its way out of a $9 billion budget hole without making communities more vulnerable to criminals.

That’s one of many hard truths that emerged last week as the Senate and House rolled out separate plans to bring state spending in line with revenue projections hit hard by the recession.

One proposal trades early prison release for greater monitoring of ex-convicts in the community. The other attempts to preserve truth in sentencing, but at the expense of probation and supervision for supposed “low- risk” offenders.

Each approach has its detractors. The question for lawmakers is which strategy will do the least damage.

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Michael Kinsley is an all-purpose commentator who's worked in television and magazines (he edited both The New Republic and Harper's) before going online with Slate magazine.

Here's his take on the future of newspapers. Basically: They don't have a future, and don't sweat it.

Go all the way to the end to see my rebuttal.

Life After Newspapers

By Michael Kinsley
Special to The Washington Post

Few industries in this country have been as coddled as newspapers. The government doesn’t actually write them checks, as it does to farmers and now to banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers. But politicians routinely pay court to local newspapers the way other industries pay court to politicians. Until very recently, most newspapers were monopolies, with a special antitrust exemption to help them stay that way.

The attorney general has said he is open to additional antitrust exemptions to lift the industry out of today’s predicament. The Constitution itself protects the newspaper industry’s business from government interference, and the Supreme Court says that includes almost total immunity from lawsuits over its mistakes, like the lawsuits that plague other industries.

And then along came the Internet to wipe out some of the industry’s biggest costs. If you had told one of the great newspaper moguls of the past that someday it would be possible to publish a newspaper without paying anything for paper, printing and delivery, he would not have predicted that this would mean catastrophe for the industry.

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Surely it is okay to talk about the Wailers on a Pacific Northwest editorial website. And I don’t mean “Bob Marley and the Wailers” for crying out loud. I mean THE Wailers, the Boys from Tacoma. In case you haven’t heard, they’ll be co-starring alongside the Ventures (another Tacoma band) at the Moore in Seattle next Friday night.

Many northwesterners who were teeneagers in the 60s have a Wailers story. Mine has to do with the difficulty of picking up KJR (95am) radio in Ellensburg. At night-time it was possible; in your car cruising down 8th in front of Central Washington State College, the rock and roll waves from KJR came in on pretty strong.

Daytime was harder; the signal came in and out. But where there’s a will…

My best friend, Lloyd Nickel, lived across from the “Big Pool” on Poplar and 6th. On a hot summer day, the Big Pool was about as good as it got in Greasewood City (aka Ellensburg). Lloyd brought the radio outside via an extension cord; he placed it on a lawn chair in the exact right location, antenna extended. Full tilt boogy. Disc Jockey Pat O’Day came on the air prime time, the 2pm to 5pm show.

Everyone knows the Wailers’ “Tall Cool One,” but my memory is the “Seattle” 45rpm. It’s ironic that the Boys from Tacoma would call a signature tune “Seattle,” but Wailer Kent Morrill explains the song was originally called “Dallas.” Its post-November 22, 1963, release found it renamed. Marketing.

They didn’t need to market that song to me, man. It starts out hard with drums, 2 bars, then Buck Ormsby blasts in on bass, then Kent electronc piano; then guitar. They all amp up and continue to rock. “Seattle” is all instrumental, a motif of the Northwest (and west coast) sound at that time. And those drums! I am sure other regions had drummers who could do syncopated push-beats, but this was the first time I had heard any drum kit move like that.

Where did they learn that syncopation? Fort Lewis was 10 miles south and Jackson Street 40 miles north of the Boys from Tacoma. Northwesterners didn’t have to go to Memphis to learn rock and roll; the South came to us.

And all of that blasted out of a tiny (1”?) speaker in an AM radio on a lawn chair in front of the Big Pool in Ellensburg, Washington, summer 1964.

Ed McClanahan once aptly wrote: “It was at this moment that I discovered there was such a thing as art, and I had to get me some.”