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Via e-mail exchanges, here's the evolution of the Chris Britt cartoon above honoring the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. A black-and-white version will appear in Thursday's print edition.

Chris, who used to cartoon for us, is now at the State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill. We subscribe to his syndicated cartoons, and he often sends them to me earlier than he sends them to the syndicate, especially on breaking topics.

CHRIS, 9:03 a.m.: I'll have a Kennedy cartoon to you very soon.

ME, 9:06 a.m.: Tasteful, I hope. No sinking VWs (which I expect to get from Ramirez*).

CHRIS, 9:07 a.m.: Very much so. I'm going to have Teddy sailing off in his sailboat. The boat will be labeled "The Lion." Above the visual will be a Teddy quote.

I considered having his brothers and sisters waiting for him in heaven, but there will be loads of those.

Yes, Ramirez will do something like that.

ME, 9:11 a.m.: I think your first instinct is best. Some of the most powerful obit cartoons are very simple.

CHRIS, 9:13 a.m.: OK. That is what I think too. I'll send it to you after lunch. Thanks for the feedback.

I could have Teddy crashing into the pearly gates in his car? (kidding)

* Cartoonist Michael Ramirez, who is likely to come up with a Kennedy cartoon that is, shall we say, less than complimentary.

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You can also see what people are saying on our Chatter Box line by following twitter.com/tacomachatter.

I’ve been in the business of candidate endorsements since Ronald Reagan was president, and I’ve never run into the dilemma presented this year by the District 5 race for the Tacoma City Council.

It’s the only time our editorial board has ever had to evaluate a fellow News Tribune employee as a candidate for public office. Joe Lonergan, who’s running against Beckie Summers Kirby and John Miles, is a TNT advertising account representative. His desk is literally a 30-second walk from my office. He’s been here for years. We see him all the time. We know, like and respect him.

How do we sort out that familiarity when we’re sizing him up against Summers and Miles? How do we be fair to them? Or to him, if we’re bending over backwards to be fair to them?

We wound up endorsing Miles, but we first did a lot of talking about the Joe-as-co-worker issue.

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The six of us on the editorial board usually figure out something to say about any controversy we tackle. Not so with the proposal to ban smoking in Tacoma’s parks.

Three of us – David Zeeck, Cheryl Tucker and myself – would welcome smoke-free public parks. The other three – Karen Peterson, Kim Bradford and Dale Phelps – think that would be too much government.

Kim’s going to lay out their side of the argument. Here’s ours:

• It’s a protect-the-public-interest issue. Smokers don’t invade our air space, but smoke does. Parks are public accommodations. But if you can’t sit on a park bench or your kid can’t swing on a swing without getting a whiff of obnoxious tobacco smoke, you’ve been intruded upon – and not by government.

• You ban smoking in parks for the same reason you ban smoking at ballparks: Nobody should be forced to breathe someone else’s toxic exhaust.

• It’s a quality of life issue. Parks with clean air are more attractive and greater community assets.

• It’s a litter issue. Many smokers routinely drop their butts on the ground. Either the public pays to have the butts cleaned up, or park users have to play in an ashtray.

• Yes, it would be hard to enforce a smoke ban in parks. But it’s harder to enforce litter laws; unlike littering, smoking is easily spotted. In any case, laws often serve to spell out social expectations even when they aren’t enforced. Law-abiding smokers – the majority, I assume – won’t need the threat of a ticket to comply.

Pat makes good arguments for why Tacoma should ban smoking in public parks. I just don't find them convincing.

As the mother of a 2-year-old, I spend plenty of time in Tacoma parks. I don't challenge parks officials' assertion that discarded cigarette butts are a problem, but what mostly catches my eye is the bigger stuff – the bottles, cans, hamburger wrappers, empty bread bags at the duck pond, used condoms in the woods, discarded diapers at the sprayground.

But this isn't really about litter. It's about sending a message. Metro Parks' top 10 reasons to pass a smoke ban mention litter but primarily focus on the public health costs of smoking, what we say to kids when we allow people to light up in parks, and the tired justification that other cities are doing it and so should we.

Smoking is legal. I know the toll on a smoker's health and the public health care system is atrocious. If we as a country want to have a conversation about outlawing tobacco use altogether, I'm there.

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When news of Michael Jackson's death broke this afternoon, we had an internal discussion about whether to write a quick turn-around editorial for Friday.

My impulse – since I'm the one who probably would have had to write it – was to say no. I couldn't figure what I would say, other than something along the lines of "great talent, weird life, even weirder face."

I had already written the tribute to Army Chaplain Tim Vakoc, and just didn't see a good reason to pull it and substitute one about Jackson. I suspect enough will be written elsewhere in the paper that readers won't mind that we took a pass on MJ.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times just moved an editorial on Jackson, so I'll get that in on the "rail" Friday. Here it is:

Michael — maybe we knew
too much about ye

What felt the most shocking, as the first reports of Michael Jackson’s death rolled out, was how expected the news was. Maybe not this day exactly, but if ever there were a Greek tragedy that seemed to be forming in the very first years of a man’s life, this was it.

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Readers have complained loudly about our publication last week of John Yoo's column from the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he had some advice for the president on possible Supreme Court picks.

The general theme of reader e-mails, calls and letters: How dare someone who authored memos condoning torture attempt to offer his advice to Obama, and how dare you, TNT, publish it.

The Inquirer, which has gone much further and actually hired Yoo to be a regular columnist, has been under a great deal of heat itself. On Sunday, the paper's editorial page editor responded:

Our Editorial Board strives to take distinct positions on every topic that we write about. But we also want to make sure our pages present alternative points of view.

That's the reason we run Yoo, and former Sen. Rick Santorum, who also generates quite a bit of critical e-mail when he writes. But despite the suggestion of bloggers, there's nothing more nefarious at play.

There have been calls for Yoo's disbarment, or worse, for his work for President Bush. Many of the e-mails that we have received are already calling him a "war criminal."

Whatever happens to Yoo, I hope to have his reaction in a column written exclusively for The Inquirer. Then, our readers will get their turn to respond to what he has to say.

That's what newspaper opinion pages do well.

When newspapers stop being a vehicle for thoughtful conversation, and instead provide an arena for one crowd to pummel the other crowd, without listening to what anyone else has to say, then papers might as well be the blogosphere - or talk radio.

If the letters to the editor are any indication, the four-person Puyallup City Council majority has ticked off a lot of folks in that community. (See our editorial on the subject Wednesday in the print edition and later today on the blog.)

We've received five letters criticizing the council majority for actions that include abruptly deciding to take a vote on changing council district positions to at-large. One member of that majority, Mike Deal, has now reversed course, so it's unlikely that the change will be made.

Whenever we receive that many original letters on one subject, it's pretty safe to say that emotions are running high. A sixth letter writer (whose letter ran today) took the opposite tack – criticizing the council minority for being quarrelsome – but the trend is heavily in the other direction. There may be a council majority, but the majority of letter writers doesn't seem to be on board with it.

One of this state's elder statesmen (I'm not sure he'd appreciate the term, not being elderly) has challenged the consistency of our editorial logic.

Last week, we argued that the Legislature should fund human welfare programs in the budget rather than let voters decide their fate.

(We've been primarily concerned with the Basic Health Program for the working poor, which will have 40,000 people pared from its rolls.)

Here's his criticism. Below it is my response.

Patrick:

I appreciate the logic of your April 22 lead editorial: lawmakers should not tell voters they need to vote for a tax increase to fund an essential service. If a public vote on a tax increase is a good idea, it should be the sacred cows they put on the ballot instead.

Yet my memory is that the Tribune consistently endorses EMS levies, ostensibly based on the premise they are needed to fund an essential service. Why should state lawmakers be criticized for doing the same thing you praise local lawmakers for doing: telling voters they need to vote for tax increases to maintain an essential service? Why shouldn’t EMS services be funded with existing revenues and local lawmakers told to put sacred cows on the ballot?

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We often leave our morning editorial board meetings with many more ideas for editorials than ever make the page.

We may have spotted a story that makes us wonder what's really happening behind the scenes, or a news event has us pondering "what ifs." Our discussions are usually just the starting point, after which we do our homework to figure out if there's anything worth writing about.

That was the case last week when a story about the fate of the crumbling People's Center pool on the Hilltop got us asking, "Hey, isn't Metro Parks looking for some place to put a 50-meter pool? Wouldn't that be a great asset for the Hilltop?"

Our great idea is a no-go, according to the staff at Metro Parks. Here is the response I got from Lois Stark at Metro:

There is definitely not enough space at Peoples to build the 50M pool – even if we tore down the Center and replaced it with a 50M pool (which we would never do!), there still wouldn’t be enough space. You really need a lot of parking to make a 50M pool successful since it is used for swim meets and competitions.

We've talked a couple times about commenting on Jennifer Rice's kidnapping and rape conviction. We couldn't figure a way to do it – an interesting way to do it.

One thing we look for when picking topics for commentary is some degree of controversy. Take a case like Rice. Once you say that "pedophilia is bad, especially when teachers do it," that's about the end of it. Nobody's going to argue that it's good for teachers to molest their students. We can't argue a position, because there's no other side to argue against.

So, no editorial of Jennifer Rice. For the record, we're opposed to child-rape, too.