January was a bleak month for the music industry, with sales well below the previous year, but at least there's a new Shins record. And fans were so eager to own it (and slap it onto their iPods), an unusually high percentage bought the downloadable version in lieu of the plastic one. Read more at the Bit Player blog.

Miami and Las Vegas, the nation's ultimate playgrounds, are putting on competing sports events/parties in coming weeks, with the Super Bowl in Miami this Sunday and the NBA All-Star game coming to  Las Vegas later in the month.

The All-Star game, the first time it's held in a city without an NBA franchise, is a huge get for Sin City.   With its convention business, Vegas has become the preeminent showcase for almost any industry you can think of, but the sports world has been leery of the town because leagues don't want to acknowledge that some people actually bet -- they'd be shocked, shocked, you understand -- on the games.

Credit the NBA for getting over this excessive, and somewhat hypocritical (given that gamblers fuel some of the sports' popularity), prudishness.  I am not saying the leagues need to embrace gambling.  But Las Vegas is a major city in its own right, a thriving entertainment venue which needn't be shunned on moral grounds.

That said, those NBA players better behave while they are in town!   

A couple of years ago, if anybody had suggested that fighting global  warming and increasing taxpayer spending on foreign aid programs would soon become bipartisan issues with widespread agreement from both right and left, it would have provoked lots of giggles and maybe some heart attacks on the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Yet the lion and the lamb are lying down together, and it's not even the apocalypse. Republicans and Democrats are working together on bills to impose cap-and-trade systems and looking at other approaches to climate change, while senators as far right as Kansas' Sam Brownback and as far left as California's Barbara Boxer are in total agreement about the need to boost spending on Third World development programs like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and President Bush's anti-AIDS initiative.

On the latter front, the most encouraging news to date was today's passage by the House of a $463.5-billion spending bill that surpasses the wildest dreams of development advocates. It provides $4.5 billion to fight developing-world diseases, a $1.3-billion increase over last year's level. This will be enough to scale up many highly successful programs and will likely save thousands of lives, while improving health standards to give indigent people in Africa and elsewhere at least a fighting chance to get out of poverty (it's pretty hard to be a productive worker when you've got AIDS or malaria).

So many attaboys are deserved on this one that they can't be listed, but deserving of special praise are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who fought hard to win the aid increase, and Reps. Barbara Lee (a Democrat from Oakland) and Christopher Shays (a Republican from Connecticut), who authored a letter signed by 92 members of Congress of both parties urging the funding boost. A similar letter, authored by Democrat Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Brownback, has also made its way through the Senate, raising hopes that the disease spending will make it through both houses. A guy could get used to this bipartisanship thing.

OK, let’s try this again.  I think I have the hang of it now.  Here’s what I meant to write in the “Modest Proposal” column that originally ran in the Sunday Current section on Jan. 21:

Where can President Bush find 21,500 more troops to send to Iraq?  Here are two ideas.

1/ “Draft the newspaper editors, they seem to have all the answers!”  OK,  this one isn’t my idea, for obvious reasons.  I stole it from an e-mail from someone in my previously suggested group, the Vietnam vets.  However, as much as many readers expressed a preference for this option, I gotta tell you: Unless we’re going to challenge the insurgents to a game of winner-take-all Scrabble, I don’t like our odds with this bunch.

2/ “Draft the draft dodgers.”  Now, this one came in a letter to the editor.  This option has a strong following among readers.  However, I think many of the draft dodgers went on to become lawyers, or president (no, not Bush, the guy before him.)  But it might work. They’d get over there, file a bunch of class-action lawsuits against the insurgents, drag them into court, and pretty soon two things would happen:  the insurgent suicide bombers would start killing just themselves, and we’d win the war, plus get a huge financial settlement.  Of course, only 25 cents of every dollar would go to taxpayers.
(Legal disclaimer: The above Point No. 2 is fiction; any resemblance to any real person or event is purely unintentional.  The author makes no claims as to its authenticity.  The author also refuses to take responsibility for any hurt feelings by any person who believes said paragraph refers to him/her, and refuses to accept any e-mail, letters, etc., using foul language to describe said author and what he wrote.)
That’s it for now. And to all the readers who wrote, pro and con, on my actual “Modest Proposal,” it’s been an experience.  What did my e-mails tell me? 
Well:

1/ The troops didn’t “lose” the Vietnam War.  Plenty of culprits were suggested, but space doesn’t permit.

2/ You can’t make light of Agent Orange and/or post-traumatic stress syndrome, even if it's just part of  work of satire.

3/ Opinion was pretty evenly split on the Harleys and the teeth.  Some proudly ride Harleys, some don’t; some have their teeth, some – like me – don’t. 

4/ 40 years later, most vets don’t much care for tired old stereotypes.  And you know what -- who can blame them?

But, I met some folks I never would have otherwise, and we had some healthy exchanges, and I think I may even have persuaded a few that I am not, in the words of the e-mail from a priest in St. Louis, “a jackass.”

My final thought?  As long as Americans preserve the ability to write what they think, say what they think, and honestly and openly debate what is written and said, without resorting to the brutal tactics of those who want to destroy us, America will be just fine.

The Federal Trade Commission wrote the final chapter in the Sony BMG rootkit saga today, announcing that the record company had agreed to a set of rules for copy-protected music CDs. With any luck, the FTC will also have closed the book on the music industry's efforts to fight piracy by treating CD buyers as if they were all lawbreakers in waiting. Read more on this topic at the Bit Player blog.

La Opinión leads today's edition with a look at L.A.'s declining glitter—signaled most recently by the city's placement at Number 15 worldwide on the none-too-widely known Anholt City Brands Index. Nationally, the City of the Angels distantly trails New York, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Even humble Toronto, a city best known for the fact that Angelenos believe it looks enough like New York to sub for the Big Apple on movie shoots, edges out L.A.

You might say that being number 15 on the planet isn't too bad, but Index master Simon Anholt tells the paper that L.A.'s problem is perceptual: When it makes national news, the topics generally seem to be gangs, pollution, or crime. (And wildfires, Simon, don't forget the wildfires!) There's some space given to the glamour of Hollywood and the idea that being a draw for immigrants is a sign of a healthy city (Fire away!), but the Anholt index, which is actually pretty interesting, assesses the city's "brand," and as Anholt notes, "There aren't many positive stories about Los Angeles." (A wiseacre might note that Hollywood is one of the reasons for the lack of positive stories.)

Every two-bit berg in the country has a legion of boosters, and perceptual issues are often an inverse measure of how much you'd actually want to live in a city. I've never met such a group of civic patriots as Philadelphians, whose hometown continued to lose population throughout the nineties renaissance of American cities. Conversely, though you don't hear much about it anymore, there was a time when you could measure New York's pre-eminence by the amount of time New Yorkers spent running the place down. Perception schmerception. Even Hobokenite Frank Sinatra finally admitted that L.A. was his lady.

Add Terry McAuliffe's book "What a Party!" to the pantheon of great Washington memoirs.   I opened up the book at random to page 128 of the former Democratic National Committee chairman's book, "without question the most successful fund-raiser in political history" according to the book jacket.   And I read (you may want to put on some rousing patriotic tunes in the background):

Two and a half weeks later a small group organized a surprise fortieth birthday party for me at the Hay-Adams with the President, my mother and father, my family, and a small group of small friends...The dinner at the Hay-Adams was a fun, small family affair, and they really surprised me.  After it was over, someone suggested we go over to the Mayflower and have a drink at the bar.  We got over there and the place was rocking with about five hundred people there to celebrate my birthday with me, my second surprise of the night.  The Vice President flew through a snowstorm to make the party and he grabbed the mike and he and Tony Coelho led the crowd in singing "happy Birthday" to me.

Wow!  They really really like their chief fund-raiser, those crazy pols! 

And lest you think such stirring prose is McAuliffe's alone, I should hasten to add that his book is co-authored by Steve Kettman, a writer who also collaborated with Jose Canseco on his book "Juiced."

Downtown blogger Don Garza takes a series of pictures at the intersection of Skid Row's 6th and San Pedro and finds ... not much!

I am amazed that there is no one there at all . but it did rain. [...]

Just a few months ago, the southeast corner of 6th and San Pedro streets was a drug bazaar nestled amid cardboard boxes, tarps and tents.

LA's Homeless Blog's Joel John Roberts questions the accuracy of having homeless people counting the number of homeless people:

So will the number counting be effective? Especially, after spending over $800,000? I wrote an op-ed piece two years, after the first homeless count. I called it a Homeless Numbers Game. Because the reality is, the politics with these numbers is extraordinary.

So the question of whether homeless people will effectively count homeless people is actually moot. The question to really ask is this... Since the final tally will be simply an estimate, will city and county officials decide L.A. is getting better (less homeless), getting worse (more homeless), or just more of the same? It's a highly political decision.

BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow posts excerpts and an illustration from Disney's 1943 employee manual.

UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman, a drug policy specialist, writes:

There's now good scientific support for the claim that psilocybin, the active agent in "magic" mushrooms, has a better-than-even chance of generating a full-blown mystical experience in properly selected and prepared subjects.

Animal Services chief Ed Boks drops some science about feral cats:

Feral cats, which are wild animals, typically live in colonies of six to twenty cats. You often never see all the cats in a colony and it is easy to underestimate the size of a feral cat problem in a neighborhood. When individuals or authorities try to catch cats for extermination this heightens the biological stress on the colony.

This stress triggers two survival mechanisms causing the cats to 1) over breed, and 2) over produce. That is, rather than having one litter per year of two to three kittens, a stressed female could have two or three litters per year of six to nine kittens each.

City Council President Eric Garcetti posts his annual State of Hollywood address.

LAist's Tony Pierce interviews Sarah from Brentwood, more famously known as the Bears fan who sold herself on EBay to get a Super Bowl ticket, and who as a result received four free tickets from Axe Body Spray, invited two girlfriends, and is now taking auditions for a male date:

About how many emails have you gotten from eligible men looking to be your date?
Um...probably about 200 so far.

Losanjealous identifies (and photographs) Pico Blvd.'s "Naked People Store District."

Blogging.la's Lucinda Michele, on assignment from the local art mag Coagula, discusses art "with one of the premier donors and patrons on the art scene" ... a man perhaps better known for portraying a Vulcan named Spock.

Martini Republic's Joseph Mailander takes a swipe at the Grand Avenue project:

The idea that whatever becomes of the north end of Grand Avenue—the street for LA's own bridge-and-tunnel crowd, where suburbanites can feel comfortable and safe at concerts and museums--will much impact all of downtown is about as silly a notion as the idea that going to a restaurant on PCH impacts the surf and sand and cliffs and bluffs on either side of it. It's not mere boosterism to say that downtown LA is more interesting than the people who dismiss it realize. And it is something far more insipid than boosterism to think that Grand Avenue--a shiny, silly project, controlled by a man who has made two fortunes by appeasing the minds of suburbanites--will have much impact on downtowners at all, beyond their occasional visits, which may even be as infrequent as the visits by the suburbanites themselves.

Just when you think you know Opinion L.A.'s beat, here's evidence that even the muse Terpsichore falls within our purview. This week's featured reader response is a dissent from an L.A. Times dance review:

Dear Editor,

After reading through Lewis Segal's critique of the incredible Terracotta Warriors performance at the Kodak Theatre,  (Sat. Jan. 27 edition L.A. Times) I feel compelled to reply.

This is the 2nd production I have seen by this incredible company of Dr. Dennis Law, author, producer.     It featured 80 performers,  350 costumes,  and was indeed an historical account of what may have happened  over 2000 years ago.   The audience loved it.   How is it that Mr. Segal is so narrow minded that he criticizes that it does not fit the stereotype Broadway show (of which I have seen almost all)  with plot and character development?   And why does he say it needs to be more poignant with political crossover for today's age?  (As an intelligent audience,  we could figure that out easily.)

I don't think Mr. Segal realizes what Dr. Law is trying to accomplish in his 7 magnificent productions.  Why can't we see a lavish production, learn some history, and just be entertained?   Why can't there be 23 scenes with warriors,  or dancers?  And the two 6 year old little boys he said "distracted"  from the "plot"    instead,  added a great deal of audience interest.

Doesn't Mr. Segal remember the Siegfield Follies during the depression years?   Those performances were much less "historical"   and had no "serious message"  to communicate, yet were much needed and appreciated by audiences everywhere.

The Terracotta Warriors was magnificently presented,  and should be seen by all.  (There is a wide range of ticket prices).  The  only thing the Kodak Theatre should have provided is screens with the English Dubbing of the plot about 10 feet higher, so all could see.  The production company should have a special musical sound to alert the audience to look at the screen to read the plot as it developed. )

Hopefully, more of these productions will come to the Los Angeles area, and other reviewers will be more open-minded, thus encouraging, rather than discouraging,  people to attend.

Sincerely,

Carole Rubottom
Music Education Consultant

Presidential wannabes from Alaska to Connecticut are testing a new campaign theorem: All politics is social.

Following the trail blazed by Howard Dean in 2003, at least five of the nine would-be Democratic nominees are incorporating MySpace, Facebook (registration required) and other social networks into their campaigns. In fact, many are taking a shotgun approach to the Internet, posting links to an array of sites in the hope of spreading buzz about their candidate to the far corners of the World Wide Web, if not the world itself.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's site, for instance, directs visitors to the candidate's pages on four social networks, including MySpace, where they can find snapshots of more than 480 of his "friends," and Zanby, where there can join any of 58 support groups scattered around the country. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, in addition to lining up friends on MySpace and Facebook, is trying to create a conversation of sorts through videos posted on YouTube (no takers so far). And former North Carolina senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, who has racked up a party-leading 10,000 MySpace "friends," is deploying a customized social network, dubbed OneCorps, to mobilize supporters behind a series of projects in their communities.

The nine Republicans in the race are taking a more buttoned-down approach. Their sites include no links to social networks, viral video outlets or other sites outside the candidate's control. Instead, they focus on the meat and potatoes of campaigning - raising money and manpower - while posting little beyond a biography, some position statements, snippets of news coverage and maybe a video of their candidate in action.  (Other sites include Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo's -- not to be confused with the tomtancredo.com site controlled by some anti-Tancredo types -- and Texas Rep. Ron Paul's, which is still under construction. Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore doesn't appear to have an official site yet, just an unofficial one.)

That's not surprising, given the GOP's knack for campaign discipline. When candidates embrace sites such as MySpace and YouTube, they sacrifice some discipline and control in exchange for energy, creativity and a powerful network to distribute their message for free. The obvious risk is that someone in the loose-knit confederation will do something intemperate or offensive that embarrasses the candidate. That's what happened to Democrat John Kerry in 2004 when one of the interest groups supporting him, MoveOn.org, briefly showcased a volunteer's ad that likened President Bush to Hitler.

Perhaps that's why the Democrats' best-known candidates - Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois and Joe Biden of Delaware, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio - are avoiding social networks and using more conventional online tools to recruit supporters and dollars. Clinton, for instance, has invited the public to post blog entries on her site, and she's done three short question-and-answer sessions online. But these interactions, like everything else on the site, are carefully managed by the campaign.

Still, in the era of YouTube and cellphone video, candidates have less control over their image and message than ever before. And for underdog candidates, every bit of help counts - especially when it's free. By setting up shop on MySpace, YouTube and other popular Web outlets, candidates may extend their reach beyond political junkies into, well, Internet junkies. And as Arizona Sen. John McCain and Dean showed in 2000 and 2004, when networks of supporters spread online, millions of dollars follow.

Of course, neither man won his party's nomination, let alone the presidency. Meanwhile, other candidates - most notably former Virginia Sen. George Allen - have demonstrated the ability of user-generated, viral video to undermine their campaigns. Over the next year and a half, we'll see whether the Internet's social tools can make a candidate as well as it can break one.

Below is a sample of the Democrats' activity on YouTube. Like Clinton and Obama, the Republican candidates host their own videos; click here to check out former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's collection, which is powered by PermissionTV.

This is an image of the endpapers from Waging Peace, the second volume of Dwight D. Eisenhower's White House memoirs. (Click on the image for a much, much larger version if you're curious about the details.) The book provides ample insights, in recognizable Eisenhowerese, of Ike's diplomatic efforts to counter Soviet expansion and build U.S. alliances. The map is probably mislabeled: The president wasn't really in search of peace so much as in search of containment, and his travels were more about building a chain of alliances against the Russians than about promoting some kind of We Are the World vision of peace.

How well did it work? Dig the gap-toothed chain of U.S. alliances, hemming in the Kremlin:

   

(American allies, quite a few of whom turned out to be more temporary than expected, in shades of green--click for larger image.)

I have nothing to add to these artifacts, except that it might be interesting to stack these travels and this web of friendships against President Bush's versions of the same in the GWOT (where so far we haven't managed to find such a centralized and encirclable enemy).

The affable New Mexico governor and second-tier (so far) Democratic presidential hopeful stopped by our Editorial Board Wednesday for an on-the-record chat with both Ed Board members and some news-side reporters. Early on, he mentioned he was going to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. So by and by, we asked about how. Here's a transcription of the extended exchange:

How are you going to get us out of Iraq?

This is what I would do. It's clear, but it'll take a little while.

1) I would get us out of Iraq this calendar year. Without fail. When, I would let our military people decide that. But I would set a deadline determined by our military.

Number two, I would at the same time put it to the Maliki government that you've got to do three things: 1) You've got to convene a reconciliation conference of the three ethnic groups -- the Shia, the Sunni, Kurds -- and you develop a power transition of cabinet ministries, civil administration, and you use the leverage of a withdrawl to achieve that.

I would then convene a Persian Gulf Middle East peace conference that would deal with providing Iraq security, reconstruction, and their own transition.

More Richardson discussion of the peace conference, the Israeli-Palestine dispute, the Maliki government, Plan B, and the Cambodia option, all after the jump.

For those of you who enjoy looking at the innards of newspaper self-criticism, Media Bistro's FishbowlLA has posted a copy of the Spring Street Project memo.

For more reaction to and analysis of the L.A. Times' new web-centric strategy, see Staci D. Kramer, Mack Reed, Mark Potts, Juan Antonio Giner, Paul Gillin, Barbara Iverson, Gary Bourgeault, Mathew Ingram, Tony Adam, Sally Falkow, Frank Barnako, Bob Meyer, M Carleton, Greg Sterling, Charles Apple, Media Wire Daily, S.D. Watch, and, naturally, the L.A. Fire Department.

Bill Donohue--you know him as president of the Catholic League, I prefer to think of him as the greatest living American--sent me this the other day:

“Kenneth Turin of the Los Angeles Times was unhappy with Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ because of its ‘almost sadistic violence,’ but he loved the bestiality in ‘Zoo,’ calling it ‘an elegant, eerily lyrical film.’ What he liked best was that it was ‘a poetic film about a forbidden subject.’ But it’s forbidden no more. Next year look for Sundance to introduce a movie about same-sex incest.

“I have only a few questions. Whatever happened to the horse? Did he survive this ordeal? Has PETA filed suit alleging that his animal rights have been violated? And because the horse was an Arabian stallion, does this constitute a bias crime?”

Tough questions, but the only answer I have is: It's T-U-R-A-N. The typo's still on your site.

So, how did yesterday's whole L.A. Times web-refocus announcement go over in the community? Here's a sampling:

Ken Reich:

A Load Of Crap From James O'Shea [...]

A greater load of crap has seldom been unloaded on the L.A. Times staff than came this week from "editor" James O'Shea in an address to Times employees.

It was a dishonest speech, replete with misjudgments and failures to see things as they are, or to give the real reasons for things that have been happening, and it proves that O'Shea is unfit and ought to return home to Chicago. [...]

The prospect that everyone in the newsroom will now be expected to put the website first also is depressingly similar to the "synergy" that Tribune Co. said would mark the relationship between the L.A. Times and KTLA (Channel 5) when it first came to town after the purchase of the Times-Mirror papers in 2000. It never came to fruition, and without investment and much better skills, the website reforms won't take place either.

Howard Owens:

[T]he LA Times sounds like it's finally moving forward with its digital efforts.

My friend Rob Barrett gets a big promotion. This is great for Rob, of course, but even better for the Times.

More reviews after the jump.

Turkey, Armenia, and the Armenian diaspora are in an uproar over the cold-blooded execution-style murder of outspoken journalist Hrant Dink, a man who until being shot in the head in broad daylight on a busy sidewalk street was best known for braving jail time by insisting that modern Turkey finally recognize Ottoman Turkey's genocide of roughly 1.2 million Armenians nearly 100 years ago. This chronology of L.A. Times coverage tells the story in headlines:

Journalist slain in Turkey
L.A. Armenians saddened but not surprised over editor Hrat Dink's shooting
L.A. Armenians denounce slaying of Turkish editor
Teenager held in journalist's killing
Militant confesses in journalist death
Armenians say goodbye to a hero

On Jan. 23, we published an Op-Ed by Hugh Pope, the Istanbul-based author of Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World, entitled "Armenia haunts the Turks again: The killing of a prominent Armenian journalist last week further widens the gap between Turkey and Europe." Excerpt:

What killed Dink, in short, is the Turkish republic's inability to deal with the Armenian issue — the charge that its predecessor state, the Ottoman Empire, killed 1.2 million Armenian men, women and children in a genocide that began in 1915.

Official Turkey is stuck in a rut of denial. Discussing the great omissions on the subject in Turkey's public education remains taboo. Efforts to open archives and to "leave it to the historians" lead to dead ends, partly because a scholarly debate won't assuage diaspora Armenians who demand formal acknowledgment of the genocide, and partly because of Turkey's anti-free-speech laws — most notoriously Penal Code Article 301, with its catchall penalties for "denigrating Turkishness."

We published three letters today on Dink, including one directly referring to Pope's piece:

Hugh Pope wishes for Armenians to compromise, not realizing that you can't compromise when you are dead.

VAHE KHACHATURIAN
La Canada Flintridge

Khachaturian certainly wasn't the only person upset. After the jump, read a form letter we've been receiving, and some clarifications about The Times' policies when discussing the Armenian genocide.

Have you kissed a journalist today? Take a breather from savaging the big media elites; lay off the grotesque biases of the lamestream media; listen with new ears to the gargantuan lies perpetrated by the lapdog press doing the bidding of its corporate masters. Why? Because today is the feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists.

As author of Introduction to the Devout Life, Treatise on the Love of God and countless letters, the doctor of the church had one quality recognized by media types everywhere: He was poor. Here's how the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it:

He had an intense love for the poor, especially those who were of respectable family. His food was plain, his dress and his household simple. He completely dispensed with superfluities and lived with the greatest economy, in order to be able to provide more abundantly for the wants of the needy. He heard confessions, gave advice, and preached incessantly. He wrote innumerable letters (mainly letters of direction) and found time to publish the numerous works mentioned below.

Canonized in 1665, Francis de Sales didn't get picked as the spiritual light of the fourth estate until 1923, when Pope Pius XI assigned him this new task, apparently because nobody else wanted the job. So as you're griping about your local birdcage liner today, or blogging some new offense against decency, or, like reader Donna Turner, writing to let me know that you are "furious," "thoroughly disgusted," and canceling your subscription because our left wing rag didn't put the wounded police officer story on page A1, or even, like reader Thomas Rittenburg, writing to let me know that you're being harrassed by our circulation department (I'm working on it, Thomas, I really am!), say a Glory Be and remember that somebody's watching out for us.

As alert readers of our Sunday Current section are aware, we run a recurring feature called "Modest Proposal," named after this old column about eating babies. Recent examples have advocated making ethnic jokes, not war, and waterboarding members of Congress.

On Sunday, Paul Whitefield, who supervises the editorial pages' copy desk, wrote one headlined "Apocalypse again -- call up the Vietnam vets." Here's how it starts:

Listening President Bush's speech on Iraq earlier this month, my first thought was: "Where the heck are we going to get 21,500 more soldiers to send to Iraq?" Our Reserves are depleted, our National Guard is worn out, our Army and Marine Corps are stretched to the limit.

Then it hit me: Re-up our Vietnam War veterans and send them.

The reaction has been, well, swift, starting with conservative talkshow host Hugh Hewitt. Excerpt:

I am betting he's around 30, graduated from a small liberal arts college, and knows no one in the military today, much less any Vietnam veterans.

One outta four ain't bad! For more vitupertastic response, read on after the jump.

We may not have written about the Manhattan Spring Street Project here for a while, but that doesn't mean revolution hasn't been fomenting! The results of the FutureThink committee are in, and they are scathing. From the James Rainey article:

Los Angeles Times Editor James E. O'Shea unveiled a major initiative this morning designed to expand the audience and revenue generated by the newspaper's website, saying the newspaper is in "a fight to recoup threatened revenue that finances our news gathering."

O'Shea employed dire statistics on declining advertising to urge The Times' roughly 940 journalists to throw off a "bunker mentality" and to begin viewing latimes.com as the paper's primary vehicle for delivering news. [...]

Among the impediments the [Spring Street] group cited or implied as stalling growth at latimes.com:

· Lack of assertive leadership and adequate focus on the website, both inside The Times and at the paper's parent, Tribune Co.
· Understaffing. Latimes.com employs about 18 "talented and dedicated" editorial employees, only a fraction of the 200 employees at the Washington Post's website and the 50 employed by the New York Times' site.
· "Creaky" technology that has made it impossible for latimes.com to host live chats between readers and journalists and to let readers customize stock tables or weather reports.
· Failure to integrate the newspaper's large news staff into operations at the web, contributing to delays in posting breaking news.

What does this mean for you, the little people? Read more, after the jump.

Some quickie local reactions to the State of the Union Address:

Joseph Mailander:

Where was New Orleans?

HughHewitt.com's Dean Barnett:

A very pleasant surprise. A strong effort, especially the foreign policy stuff which actually did put the Iraq war in context. The president also benefitted from James Webb's supremely lame, divisive and petty response.

Lonewacko:

The idea that we should let those who want to come here dictate our immigration policies is insane. And, even with a "guest" worker scheme, people who weren't terrorists or criminals would keep trying to sneak in, such as those who didn't get into the "guest" worker scheme, former "guests", or spongers.

Wonkette's Ken Layne:

9:27 — Oh great, now he's going to screw up states' attempts to provide health care for the poor. Sorry, California and Massachusetts.

What a historic day for communication! Not the SOTU, silly, but the Opinion section's first-ever online chat, with beloved and be-hated columnist Joel Stein. As he says at the top of the show, "Welcome to 1997."

Highlights include recognizing that he'd be "the first person Geffen fires," pronouncing that Lou Dobbs is "really evil" (even worse than Nancy Grace!), and searching in vain for the address of Canter's. Mine the comical brain-dump here.

Stuck in traffic? Why not try passing the time with today's editorial on making carpool lanes work the way they're supposed to? If you're looking for hundreds of recommendations on how to get over the traffic mess, you can also check out columnist Steve Lopez' bottleneck blog.

A recent OpEd on solving the gridlock problem with innovative road projects, meanwhile, garnered a spirited response from readers. John E. Boyden avers, "I think that any solution to the gridlock problem that involves accommodating more cars is insane." Lisa Ann Carrillo opines, "To our leaders I can only say, no more studies, no more proposals and no more talk. We need action now. Pick any one of an even longer list of studies over the last half a century and implement it. Just do it!" In reply to a recent Times story about plans to build a Waldorf-Astoria in Beverly Hills, Doug Weaver asks, "Does the thirst for profits always have to trump responsibility and restraint?"

The other day, Matt Welch questioned an almost universal assumption that you will find underlying most of the comments at the bottleneck blog and the letters section: that building more roads causes more people to drive. This belief has become so popular that it's hard to imagine any way to step outside it, but there is a surprising lack of evidence to support it. According to this report (PDF) from the Federal Highway Administration, "[O]ver the last 20 years vehicle miles of travel (VMT) on U.S. roads have nearly doubled while lane miles have increased only about four percent." The level of drivership in the United States, in other words, has expanded at a pace totally unrelated to the rate of roadbuilding. If anything road construction has lagged usage patterns by an astronomical degree.

The flipside of the more-roads-more-congestion argument is that we need to spend more on public transportation to reduce traffic. Again, though, revealed preference renders this a questionable claim. The U.S. Census Bureau has shown steady declines (PDF) in the percentage of commuters who use public transportation ever since it began keeping such data in 1960. During that period, spending on public transportation hasn't decreased, or held steady, or even risen slightly. It has massively increased.

I have my own beefs with an autocentric culture--one of the big ones being that wherever things are designed for drivers, walkers get hosed. Your odds of strolling down a street that turns out not to have a through exit for half a mile, of not being able to turn a certain corner because the sidewalk has vanished or is blocked by mud-covered utility boxes, of getting a pedestrian right-of-way light that changes in less time than it would take Roger Bannister to get across the street, of not being able to walk your kids to the playground, of just generally having an unpleasant walking-around experience, all increase massively the more driverly the local geography. I don't like that experience, but I also can't argue with a massively demonstrated preference for cars and driving by my fellow citizens. It might be "insane" to design transportation policy with the assumption that people like to drive and always will like to drive, but that's the way things are in this here modern world.

Stein Online fever is rising to a boil. In about an hour and twenty minutes I'll be moderating as the hellraisin' columnist fields your questions. Go here for our main chat page, or go directly to the chat registration. You can also email us your questions if you can't attend the chat. (We'll post the transcript later.) We look forward to seeing you, starting at 2pm sharp, Pacific time.

     On Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” Cokie Roberts offered a discordant note in what generally has been a chorus of approval for a Senate ethics bill that would prohibit lobbying by senators’ spouses (though Bob Dole is grandfathered).

    During the TV program’s roundtable, Roberts suggested that it was a “low blow” for Congress to prohibit lobbying by the wives of senators. “Well what's her other job going to be?” Roberts asked. “It's not easy.

   

When George Stephanopoulos replied that “a lot of Americans, though, will say, ‘well, we  don't really care but  . . . we don't want her to be a lobbyist,'” Roberts shot back: “For the Girl Scouts? Could she be a lobbyist for the Girl Scouts?”

       Roberts was giving voice to the feminist critique of the “Caesar’s wife” theory of political ethics: that traditional notions of conflict of interest (and maybe traditional notions of marriage) work against the interests of high-achieving women married to high-achieving men.

    Given what psychologists call “assortative mating,” Washington is full of power couples and marital ties can put together what the Constitution’s separation of powers puts asunder. For example, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, is married to Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

  The ultimate power couple, of course, is Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Cokie Roberts’ own network is speculating about what role Bill would play in a Hillary campaign.

 

   When Bill ran for president, Hillary’s stature led to jokes about “Buy one; get one free”  -- a slogan that prompted the editor of my former newspaper to ask Bill Clinton during an endorsement interview  in 1992 whether we shouldn’t be scrutinizing his wife’s views as well.

     Would it be fair to put the reverse question to Hillary? Or would that, in Roberts’ words, be a “low blow”? And if Bill  may not lobby Hillary  (even for the Girl Scouts) while she's in the Senate, shouldn't he be expected to take a vow of political silence if she were elected president?

   A readers and some bloggers have faulted The Times for saying, in a Jan. 3 editorial, that "if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed a bill in 2005 legalizing same-sex marriage instead of vetoing it, the California Supreme Court would have been spared the task of deciding, as it probably will this year, whether a voter-approved ban violates the state Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.”  Even if the governor signed the bill, the argument goes,  the high court eventually would have to rule on  the constitutionality of Prop. 22.

    Not necessarily. Schwarzenegger could have signed the bill with a clear conscience, and if he had done so the Supreme Court might have stayed on the sidelines instead of agreeing, as it did in December, to review a lower-court ruling upholding the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples. With a Schwarzenegger signature, same-sex marriage would have been legalized in California by the governor and the legislature, not by “activist judges.”

  But what about Proposition 22, approved by the voters in 2000, which says that “only marriage between a man or a woman is valid or recognized in California"?  In enacting the bill Schwarzenegger vetoed, didn’t the legislature concede that “the California Supreme Court is the governmental body that  has authority to make a final determination regarding the meaning, validity, or invalidity of [Prop 22]?

   It did. But, as The Times noted in an editorial published in 2005 after Schwarzenegger said he would veto the same-sex marriage bill, Prop 22 can (and should) be interpreted as barring the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states.

That was the legislature’s view as well. It’s based partly on history and partly on the fact that Prop 22 is codified in Section 308 of the Family Code, which used to say, without respect to gender, that  “a marriage contracted outside this state that would be valid by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the marriage was contracted is valid in this state.” Thanks to Prop 22, Section 308 now says (in 308.5) that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

    Having concluded that Prop 22 referred to out-of-state same-sex marriages, the legislature took aim at another part of the Family Code, Section 300, which defines marriage as “a civil contract between a man and a woman." The vetoed bill would have changed that wording to "a civil contract between two persons."  Section 300 was written by the legislature, and could be rewritten by the legislature.

  Had Schwarzenegger signed the bill, the gay and lesbian  Californians who brought the suit now before the Supreme Court would have gotten what they wanted – the right to marry in the state.   Of course, opponents of same-sex marriage could have challenged the law in court, citing judicial opinions that have assumed that Prop 22 covered more than out-of-state marriages. Even then, the Supreme Court could have decided that the legislature was right to construe Prop 22 as referring only to out-of-state marriages. That would finesse the constitutional question.

      Does The Times editorial page owe  the governor an apology? Not for suggesting that he would have changed the dynamic around same-sex marriage by signing the bill. But  some readers took the editorial to say that we thought  his signature would have averted all future lawsuits over same-sex marriage. In litigious America – and initiative-happy California – that would be way too much to hope for.

During a conference at the L.A. Chamber of Commerce today, Gov. Schwarzenegger made the pitch for his health care reform package. It's an impressive plan that draws on a premise—mandatory health insurance for all—that some great minds support. Like Columbo, though, I've been scratching my head and thinking about something that's still puzzling me. To make the numbers work (i.e., to make it cost-effective for providers to offer insurance to everybody regardless of pre-existing conditions and the like), the plan relies on getting the Golden State's 6.5 million uninsured residents into the system. It's especially attractive to mandate that young and healthy people pay for insurance, since they'll help fund the system without, in most cases, burdening services.

My question: What will be the mechanism for compelling these people to buy insurance? Not everybody who is currently uninsured is unable to pay for it. How do you force a person who just doesn't want to buy insurance to buy insurance?

So I asked the governor. His response was that it would be like auto insurance: You have to have auto insurance to drive. I questioned the comparability of the two cases: In the case of auto insurance, there's a privilege the state can deny you if you don't comply. If you don't buy liability insurance, you can't drive legally. What privilege can the state take away if you refuse to buy health insurance, since denying emergency room care is not an option?

To this, Daniel Zingale, the governor's senior policy advisor, replied that there will be many places to "reach out" to the currently uninsured, specifically naming schools and the tax system. (In Massachusetts, the insurance mandate is covered in state income tax forms, which require filers to specify that they are insured.)

The governor then said that what his plan really aims for is to "change the mentality of people." He mentioned his own experience as a young immigrant accustomed to the situation in Austria, where everybody had health coverage, and bewildered by the challenges of getting covered in the U.S. The mentality change, he added, is part of establishing a "culture of coverage." He and Zingale both said that the currently uninsured do want to be covered.

I'm all for changing the mentality of people, but I still think there's an issue here: If people don't want to come to the ball park, nothing's gonna stop them, and if they don't want to buy insurance, at some point you'll have to force them. I don't know that that's a showstopper, and there appear to be many ways of addressing the problem. But the end point I keep seeing is the use of force to get that healthy 25-year-old freelancer doing something he or she just may not want to do. Compulsion is not an issue anybody wants to talk about this early in the proposal, but it's a real issue nonetheless.

Speaking of congestion, the Reason Foundation's Ted Balaker and Sam Staley have an Op-Ed in the paper today about how they'd untangle your gridlock -- tunnels, double-decker freeways, toll roads and private financing all play a role. Monorails and people-movers are conspicuously absent.

Jillian over at Blogging.la makes a statement about traffic you hear all the time:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: freeway congestion is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Building more freeways makes the traffic better for about five minutes until they fill up again.

There are people who actually study this issue, and I'd link to them if I had time (tomorrow!), but absent data I've always wondered about the logic of this: Does it make any kind of intuitive sense that building more freeway lanes basically creates more (or at least as much) congestion?

For that to be true you'd have to assume that people choose between driving and public transit based on freeway congestion. But in any kind of practical sense, do they? Or more to the point, do you? See what I'm talking about after the jump.

As L.A. and Chicago compete for the 2016 Olympic games, Patt Morrison makes the case for choosing the venue based on average local BMI.

Dinesh D'Souza believes the Democrats caused 9/11.

David Bosco predicts disenchantment will come quickly once Darfur stops being a potential humanitarian mission and becomes an actual intervention.

Sally Schultheiss calculates how to pay her mortgage with gift cards.

The mayor's bully pulpit: Villaraigosa's latest LAUSD plan is ambitious. If only he actually had control of the schools.

The Dems' antiwar shuffle: Hillary Clinton, back from Iraq and facing a challenge from Obama, decides she's not so pro-war after all.

FCC scrambles for an answer: Agency is finally getting serious about offering cable TV customers more choice.

He was a family-friendly mini-celebrity in the seventies, a has-been in the eighties, a by-word for squaresville irrelevance in the nineties, and an I-thought-he'd-died-years-ago trivia question thereafter. Now he's back as a family-friendly mini-celebrity, and if Rich Little can make that journey in only a little more than three decades, doesn't he deserve all the acclaim official Washington can give him?

OK, maybe not, but the legendary impressionist, who will host this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner, is at best highly unlikely to cause the kind of high dudgeon that followed Stephen Colbert's appearance at last year's dinner. If you are blessed with a poor memory, you may need some help recalling the dustup that followed Colbert's '06 performance: See it here, here and here, and get a particularly choice piece of the Margaret Dumont umbrage that followed in this Richard Cohen column and a followup.

Now check out Little's November appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman, where he dares to step on the toes of such no-longer-living lights as Johnny Carson, Ronald Reagan and the Smurfs. At Reason, Jeff Taylor highlights a quote from Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers: "We don't need to have a blogfest and a partisan slugfest after the dinner. We don't need that."

We sure don't! Washington being pretty much a black hole from which no comedy can ever escape, it's probably best to have Rich Little back on the job and the corresponents dinner back to being what it was before the Clinton era: a safe and dull celebration of the press corps' futility. The Colbert brouhaha was a pathetic display of the kind of self-regard and institutional stodginess that is encouraging more and more Americans to tune out both D.C. and the mainstream media. With a semi-funny performance (which I would have winnowed by about ten minutes), Colbert opened a window on a universe most of us would prefer not to see. Now Rich Little is here to reassert the eternal values.

If only Frank Gorshin were here to see it all happen:

Seen minutes ago on CNN:

Developing Story: Snow and ice close part of I-5 in northern Los Angeles County.

Why, you could fill up an entire winter with shockers like that!

The gang truce offered by the notorious 204th Street 'bangers down in the Harbor Gateway area contains a proposal that some might suggest is an apt (or at least funny) metaphor for certain notions of redevelopment:

Najee Ali, an activist who runs Project Islamic Hope and negotiated the truce with the 204th Street gang, said the gang members are asking the city to use its eminent domain powers to accumulate land for a recreation center. The 12-square-block neighborhood has no park, school, community center or church and has only one business — a small market that the gang claims as its territory.

"The only way the truce is going to hold is if city leaders do their part and bring in more resources," Ali said.

Though it's definitely true that Harbor could use more parks.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its infmaous doomsday clock up two minutes today to five minutes to midnight. The world hasn't been this close to nuclear war since 1984, according to the Bulletin, when the U.S. and Soviet Union virtually cut off all relations. Iran and North Korea get their due nod for moving the world closer to nuclear war, as does climate change. But the Bulletin's report puts much of the blame on the nuclear mainstays -- the U.S. and Russia, especially in the following wrath-of-gad warning:

The five NPT-recognized nuclear weapon states have failed in their obligation to make serious strides toward disarmament--most notably, the United States and Russia, which still possess 26,000 of the 27,000 nuclear warheads in the world. By far the greatest potential for calamity lies in the readiness of forces in the United States and Russia to fight an all-out nuclear war. Whether by accident or by unauthorized launch, these two countries are able to initiate major strikes in a matter of minutes. Each warhead has the potential destructive force of 8 to 40 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. In that relatively small nuclear explosion, 100,000 people were killed and a city destroyed; 50 of today’s nuclear weapons could kill 200 million people.

The Bulletin isn't the only one keeping track of the apocalypse. RaptureReady.com, a Christian doomsday-watch site, puts the world at two minutes to the second coming of Jesus and, consequently, the end of the world. Its signs of the times include the growing European Union, a busy Atlantic hurricane season in 2005 and China's thirst for Mideast oil.

We ran an op-ed piece Monday about two Moroccan journalists who were facing prison for publishing a piece about political humor in that country.

I asked co-author Jesse Sage what had happened and here's what he had to say:

The verdict came down on Monday: 3-year suspended sentence (i.e., no jail time); thousands of dollars in fines, and a two-month ban on publishing Nichane. On the whole, they are very relieved about not having to go to jail. But on the other hand, it's a blow.

The Washington Post's story offers more details.

If you read Steve Lopez' column "Watching a hole fill up with money" last week, you'll be interested in this rebuttal from Tutor-Saliba president Ron Tutor, whose company is doing the contracting work described in that column:

Gentlemen:

Of course, I spoke to Mr. Lopez and read his article in the Los Angeles Times.  If I was rude to your reporter, it was unfortunate; however, the sarcastic and negative tone of his questions and his obvious attitude was so unacceptable that I found myself angry that I could be approached in such a negative context. And yes as I spoke to Mr. Lopez, I do not believe that our company has ever received fair treatment from the Los Angeles Times and the majority of its reporters despite our literally billions of dollars of public works built for this city and state.

Lopez asks, “If the city is so nervous, why did it hand this job to Tutor-Saliba?”  The absurdity of that remark is that the city never hands anything to anyone.  We were the low bidder after the city tried for months to find competition from all over the country.  Tutor-Saliba was the only company that finally tendered a bid and after long negotiations agreed on a revised price to build this project.  To somehow create something negative out of that is just the typical outrage that’s put forth in the press.  We did not construct the circumstances of the bid, we only responded as a company based in Los Angeles that has performed work for the city for some 40 years.

The maverick from Arizona makes a speech:

I have listened carefully to the expl