1. The Olympian reports on a budget bombshell from state schools superintendent Randy Dorn: In order to adequately fund education as ordered by the state supreme court, the state will need to spend $4.1 billion on schools through 2015. Gov. Chris Gregoire has said that a spending increase of $1 billion will require a tax increase.

2.  The Seattle Times profiles the two candidates for the state supreme court seat being vacated by Justice Tom Chambers, attorney Sheryl Gordon McCloud and former supreme court justice Richard Sanders. While Sanders accuses McCloud of having insufficient experience in civil law, McCloud says Sanders behaved unprofessionally from the bench. After Sanders' infamous claim that black people have "a crime problem," he lost his seat to challenger Charlie Wiggins in 2010.

3. Also in the Times : Republican Michael Baumgartner, who's challenging US Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), says he wants to raise the federal gas tax by a penny to benefit veterans' programs, as opposed to the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for highway, bridge, and transit projects and faces insolvency next year. This "liberal blog" fails to see the connection between veterans' programs and the gas tax---and we don't think letting the highway fund go bankrupt is a smart spending strategy.

4. King County Council member Reagan Dunn, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, wants the county to consider reinstating the downtown Seattle ride-free area,  on the grounds that it benefits downtown businesses. As the PI.com points out, this position seems to be a change of heart for Dunn, who previously wanted Seattle to pay millions for fares lost to the ride-free zone; until the zone was eliminated last week, Seattle paid the county $400,000 a year.

5. Paul Krugman shreds Romney's "pre-existing conditions" lie in the NYT , pointing out what should be (but apparently isn't) obvious: What Romney is proposing---allowing people without jobs to keep their existing health-care coverage, as long as they keep paying the premiums---is already the law of the land. But that, Krugman notes, is

not what anyone in real life means by having a health plan that covers pre-existing conditions, because it applies only to those who manage to land a job with health insurance in the first place (and are able to maintain their payments despite losing that job). Did I mention that the number of jobs that come with health insurance has been steadily declining over the past decade? ...

Furthermore, if all you do is require that insurance companies cover everyone, healthy people will wait until they’re sick to sign up, leading to sky-high premiums. So you need to couple regulations on insurers with a requirement that everyone have insurance. And, to make that feasible, you have to offer insurance subsidies to lower-income Americans, which have to be paid for at a federal level.

And what you end up with is — precisely — the health reform President Obama signed into law.