Amazon's shameful California tax dodge

[Commentary] The fact that Amazon refuses to collect California sales taxes obviously gives it a competitive advantage over all the brick-and-mortar bookstores and appliance showrooms with facilities here. If Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, has a spare moment there in Seattle, he might go on his website and buy a copy of Norris' "The Octopus." (As a resident of Washington state, he'll have to pay sales tax.) In any event, he might skip to the end of the first chapter and consider how it might feel to have Amazon regarded as the poet-narrator describes the Southern Pacific: "The leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus."