Hypocrite of the Month: Ira Ballasiotes, R-Bellevue, for sponsoring a state bill that would absolve parents of liability when their kids kill themselves with a family gun (there's a concept) left in reach. This is the woman who got elected on a victims' rights platform. One more example of how weirdly the laws twist inside the nuclear family force field... Davis Oldham

The continuing S&M soap opera between Microsoft and Netscape recently developed a new twist: Netscape reported in January a $115.5 million loss in 1997. Just six months ago, it had the dominant position in the Internet browser software market, but now it's on the bottom, and is scoping out a merger with Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM, or America Online. What's caused this turnabout for the maker of Netscape Navigator and the Java programming language? Microsoft's Internet Explorer, of course. While Microsoft is being sued by the Justice Department for unfair marketing practices for forcing its distributors to bundle its Explorer software with the Windows operating software, Netscape has been forced to give away free copies of Navigator just to hold onto its slipping market share. Microsoft can no longer claim that it's in a subordinate position in the browser market. Stay tuned as Microsoft cracks its whip and sends the Justice Department scurrying for cover! M.T.

Portland's Mayor, Vera Katz, has approved a police department request to arm Portland's finest with semiautomatic assault rifles. In a money-saving move, the police department did its own study recommending that the city spend $310,000 to buy 166 Colt AR-15s. The study itself remains classified and unavailable to the public because of "safety reasons." After a highly publicized shootout between Los Angeles police and two heavily armed bank robbery suspects six months ago, Portland police began to lust after AR-15s, which can be fired from a much further distance than handguns or shotguns. Of course, semiautomatic weapons shot from a long distance away often send bullets spraying into innocent bystanders, but that's a small price to pay for protecting Portland's police. M.T.

Meanwhile, what is Los Angeles itself doing to stem the body count? According to an AP report, the L.A. Unified School District board voted 5-2 last week to buy 75 Remington 12-gauge shotguns for school district cops. Wonder if any Board members justified the move with some variation on the phrase, "We love the kids!"? G.P.

Speaking of pols who love our kids--excepting the ones she's helped throw in poverty or criminalize--congratulations to Washington's Sen. Patty Murray. She placed a breathtaking #4 on investigative reporter (and co- editor, along with Alexander Cockburn, of CounterPunch, the nation's finest newsletter for D.C. and corporate muckraking) Ken Silverstein's annual list of the ten stupidest members of Congress. For 1998, Murray placed the highest of any Democrat on what is traditionally a GOP-dominated list of boneheads. The Northwest's Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, was the only other Dimocrat in the top ten, clocking in at #7.

As Silverstein notes, the competition is stiff. Why Murray? From his article in the March Progressive: "Staffers report that Murray frequently seems confused about the finer details of procedure and debate, a fact reflected in her complete lack of accomplishments since winning office in 1994...Murray often talks about how her experience as a preschool teacher left her with an abundance of compassion for children. Such compassion was hard to spot during an interview she gave to Gannett News Service, in which she described a three-year-old boy in one of her classes as `the epitome of every teacher's nightmare, the kind of kid you want to nail to the wall.'"G.P.

Talked to a few folks this last week who were troubled by the anti-jingoism "Rah Rah Rah You Fucking Assholes" ETS! headline list week. Along with aesthetics, there's the quite valid point that the spirit of the headline contradicts one of the concerns of my later article--that anti-war activists be respectful of and include folks who opposed military action for different reasons. In this case, the headline didn't exactly exude respect for over-the-top patriotism--even tho many military folks themselves opposed an Iraq strike (quite properly) as militarily pointless and as targeting civilians.

The editors & production folks went back and forth on the headline, which came with Matt Asher's article, quite a bit at the last minute--as well as several other changes made as word of a settlement unfolded during our Sunday/ Monday production cycle. We were by no means unanimous, but for me, the headline conveyed something important being left out of virtually all of the intellectual debates on What To Do About Iraq: rage. Rage that a huge chunk of our political leadership, mass media, and ordinary citizens were casually discussing the mass slaughter of civilians already under tremendous hardship--people just like us, with no more, probably even less control over Saddam Hussein's actions than you or I have over Bill Clinton's--as though it were the most reasonable thing imaginable. At that point, one begins to understand how horrors like German acceptance of the Holocaust became possible: the banality of evil. Have we sunk this low in our understanding of what it is to be human? Personally, I hope I never become numb to the horror of situations such as the one unfolding in recent weeks (and that may come back again, too; the pouting over our lack of big explosions is still phenomenal). At some point, rational discourse and tame headlines simply don't do justice to the scope of what we as a society are revealing about ourselves.--G.P.