This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

Seattle and Tacoma can’t help being neighbors, and they’ve also been friendly rivals at times. The “friendly” part has included an implicit gentleman’s agreement not to fire nuclear warheads at each other’s economic base.

With his covert move to lure Russell Investments out of Tacoma, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has ditched the friendliness and turned rivalry into enmity. Plenty of Tacomans take this very personally.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not talking about the citizens of Seattle or its City Council. Of the city’s political leadership, Nickels alone appears to have initiated secret contacts with Russell executives and offered them a tailor-made break on its business and occupation tax, providing they move the company’s headquarters from downtown Tacoma to Seattle.

Without that tax break, Seattle already had plenty to offer Russell, including lots of cheap, vacant office space and the international cachet of its name. We like to think that Tacoma has more to offer, including $148 million worth of incentives the city is offering the company to stay home.

Tacoma is playing defense here. The loss of its headquarters and its roughly 900 well-paid – and civic-minded – employees would hurt the area badly. If that loss occurs, Tacomans would long remember any complicity on the part of Seattle’s city government.

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This editorial will appear in Thursday's print edition.

U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg has a point, to a point.

The Democratic lawmaker from New Jersey says it “simply defies common sense” to allow gun sales to people suspected of being terrorists. He’s right – until he proposes that the government’s terrorism watch list should be the deciding factor of whether someone can buy a gun.

At Lautenberg’s request, the Government Accountability Office recently studied firearms and explosives purchases among terror watch list members. It found that people on the list tried to buy guns 963 times in the last five years, and nine out of 10 times they were successful because nothing else in their background disqualified them.

That sounds outrageous, but consider this: The FBI refused to divulge details about who was able to buy a gun and what their connection to terrorism might be. That itself makes conclusions rather hard to draw.

Then there’s the watch list itself, which has a number of problems, the first being its size.

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Pat, Cheryl and I are in the thick of interviewing 40-some local candidates with primary election races.

Among the candidates we've talked with so far are two of the people running in the crowded contest for Judge Michael Morgan's seat on the Federal Way Municipal Court. One of them – Rebecca Robertson, a Seattle city prosecutor – shared with us that she's been rated by the King County Bar Association as "well qualified."

In checking the bar association's Web site, it looks like Robertson is the only candidate so far to receive a rating. I have a note into the bar to find out who else has requested a rating and will update here when I hear.

UPDATE: The bar association will be rating each of the candidates by the end of July. Possible ratings are: “exceptionally well qualified,” “well qualified,” “qualified” and “not qualified.” The judicial screening committee also has the discretion to decline rating a judicial candidate, with statements of reason – “insufficient information to rate” or “declined to participate” or to give a rating with the notation, “failed to cooperate fully with the judicial screening committee.”

In 2005, Morgan was rated by the bar association as "not qualified" – and circumstances certainly haven't improved since then – so I am guessing that he won't be voluntarily sitting for interviews with the bar association's judicial screening committee. But I could be wrong.

Robertson, by the way, is one of several candidates who lives outside Federal Way. State law requires that a municipal judge need only live in the same county as the city where he or she presides, presumably to help create a bigger pool of talent from which small cities can draw.

Here's what we're working on for tomorrow:

• The best defense in the business-recruitment-and-retention game is a good offense, and we like how Tacoma's offensive to keep Russell Investments stacks up against Seattle's attempts to lure it away.

• A U.S. senator from New Jersey says it “simply defies common sense” to allow gun sales to people suspected of being terrorists. He's right – until he proposes that the government's terrorism watch list should be the deciding factor of whether someone can buy a gun.

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

Want to sit in on a daily ed board meeting? Email cheryl.tucker@thenewstribune.com to make an appointment.