Congratulations to Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon. For my money he's the Bernard Berenson of the funny pages, who not only shares my enthusiasm for the soap opera strips but has shown me the hidden treasures of cartoons I either didn't know about, like Get Fuzzy, or had never paid any attention to, like Slylock Fox. A few months back he diagnosed the disease at the heart of the comics page in a Times Op/Ed that the papers continue to ignore at their  peril.

So nobody is more deserving of The Week magazine's uncoveted Blogger-of-the-Year award, which Fruhlinger took home a few days ago. I especially applaud The Week, for acknowledging somebody who isn't singlehandedly saving the Middle East or organizing election groundswells, but dealing with pop-culture artifacts that aren't immediately recognizable as weighty or important. (Though they did give the award for the CC's work on editorial cartoons rather than his more free-ranging criticism of the daily comic strips.) With the newspapers' increasingly untenable mandate to bring you the world every morning, Fruhlinger's is the kind of smartass, pomo meta-analysis that actually adds value to its chosen subject, and while I'd doubt anybody is hanging on the results of The Week's awards for anything, there are few people who deserve free food and drinks and a trophy more than the Comics Curmudgeon.

A new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California finds a big majority of Californians (60%) believe the state benefits from immigrants' hard work and job skills. Moreover, 64% of residents say illegal immigrants should be allowed to apply for work permits.

But Californians also believe illegal immigrants need exercise. They should be pedestrians, busriders and bike riders; 64% of likely voters oppose state legislation allowing them to get driver’s licenses.

In today’s La Opinion, Nativo Lopez, president of Mexican American Political Assn., rails against the suvery’s findings. It’s in Spanish so here’s a translation:

It’s something so contradictory, so selfish, so ignorant. It says that it’s fine for the undocumented to work for our benefit, for our service, cleaning our houses, mowing our lawns, cooking, but it’s not all right for us to give them a driving permit so they can get to these places where they work.

Francisco Estrada, spokesman for the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, tries to put a positive spin on the findings:

I think the results demonstrate that although anti-immigrant sentiment continues to exist, people recognize the benefit of immigrants in our community.

The  PPIC survey, entitled Californians and Their Government: If You Lead, Will They Follow? Voters, Leaders Not On Same Reform Page, also has information on residents' attitudes about a host of other issues, including moving the presidential primary,  the economy and redistricting.

Today is Cesar Chavez day, honoring the legendary union organizer and civil rights activist who took on the California Grape industry. Chavez  (1927-1993) fasted, protested and organized a nationwide boycott of California grapes to force growers to improve what were often savage conditions for farm workers, and also to discontinue the use of toxic pesticides. Here's a selection of his quotes:

Do we carry in our hearts the sufferings of farm workers and their children? Do we feel deeply enough the pain of those who must work in the fields every day with these poisons? Or the anguish of the families that have lost loved ones to cancer? Or the heartache of the parents who fear for the lives of their children? Who are raising children with deformities? Who agonize the outcome of their pregnancies?

In the old days, miners would carry birds with them to warn against poison gas. Hopefully, the birds would die before the miners.  Farm workers are society's canaries.

The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity.

It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.

Do not romanticize the poor...We are all people, human beings subject to the same temptations and faults as all others. Our poverty damages our dignity.

Money is not going to organize the disadvantaged, the powerless, or the poor. We need other weapons. That's why the War on Poverty is such a miserable failure. You put out a big pot of money and all you do is fight over it. Then you run out of money and you run out of troops.

Our cause goes on in hundreds of distant places. It multiplies among thousands and then millions of caring people who heed through a multitude of simple deeds the commandment set out in the book of the Prophet Micah, in the Old Testament: "What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. Thank you. And boycott grapes.

Hang in there, Mrs. Butterworth! The glass ceiling that has kept not only women but racially embarrassing corporate avatars out of the top ranks of American business may finally be cracking. The New York Times reports that Uncle Ben, the fictional mascot for a line of rice and side-dishes, likes his own product so much he bought the company:

"Uncle Ben...is being reborn as Ben, an accomplished businessman with an opulent office, a busy schedule, an extensive travel itinerary and a penchant for sharing what the company calls his 'grains of wisdom' about rice and life."

A visit to Uncle Ben's boardroom hints at what a thankless task it is to try and explain away these uncomfortable institutional histories. Couldn't they at least have let Ben lose the bowtie? It's an effort that reminds you of the "Cook's Chicken" plot in the movie version of Ghost World; the attempt to revise the past is almost as embarrassing as the actual past. It turns out the Uncle Ben logo isn't some turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon that existed into the postwar era; he was actually invented in 1946. Not exactly recent history, but not colonial history either: As early as the 1934 version of Imitation of Life (not as good as the Douglas Sirk remake but worth watching, among other reasons, because it's partly set in this reporter's home town: get both versions on a single DVD!), the use of Louise Beavers' mug as the logo for a product she doesn't get to own was a major plot point—and even back then the audience was clearly supposed to understand the irony in that.

It's an interesting site. Among the features are Ben's appointment calendar and little book of aphorisms. These illustrate the kind of self-doubt and fearful circumspection that go into an effort like this—and yet you still can't help thinking it all sounds too white. What exactly are they getting at with the Uncle Benism "How about some respect for the meat & rice man?" And isn't there a hint of Robert Ripleyesque exoticism in Ben's writing about his adventures "traversing through Bengal and Doab...Turkey, Persia, the Steppes, and the Blue Mediterranean...magnanimous countries"? Or this item from Ben's appointment book: "travel to Australia—meet with Tasmanian Aborigines. Demonstrate why my Instant Long Grain White Rice is far more expedient than a mortar and pestle."

And what's with that hyperurbanized writing style? "Tree sledding in Japan, while remarkably exhilirating, has a chafing factor that I had not fully taken into consideration." Or: "[T]he ground rules of proper gentlemanly etiquette prevent me from revealing my chronological age." For a while I thought the diction was supposed to sound overly clunky and high-falutin'. But then I noted that even in his jotted notes, Uncle Ben makes sure to respect the registered trademark logo, as in: "Perhaps this is why plates of my READY RICE® pilaf are so popular..." Never attribute to malice what can be explained by a tin-eared copywriter.

Related: Josh Glenn reveals the hidden kinship of Jane Austen and Aunt Jemimah.

If you're heading to Greece for spring break, have a wonderful vacation. But beware of the women's volleyball hooligans.

One man was killed Thursday and seven others wounded in a skirmish between rival Greek volleyball clubs Panathinaikos Athens and Olympiakos Piraeus; as a result, play in all Greek professional sports has been suspended for two weeks. We've all heard about the open warfare that can break out between rival countries in soccer matches, but seriously -- women's volleyball?

Sports are inherently tribal (my high school/college/city is better than yours, because my steroid-enhanced gladiators can beat up your steroid-enhanced gladiators), but in Greece and some other countries it's so tribal that the fan experience becomes something like gang warfare. After Thursday's volleyball riot, police raided supporters' clubs and found an arsenal of makeshift weapons like pickaxes (they probably weren't being used for digging), iron bars and baseball bats. Repeat after me, Greek sports fans: Styrofoam fingers, good. Weapons of mass destruction, bad.

Maybe that's just the way it is in homogeneous societies (in this country, we like to divide our gangs up by race rather than sports affiliation). Or maybe the land that spawned the Olympics just takes its volleyball a little too seriously for its own good.

The Freeway Series began last night with a bang (pictured) and a triple play, signaling to a grateful nation of baseball fanatics that our long winter nightmare (occasionally referred to as "the offseason") is finally at a close. For Angels and Dodgers fans out there, here's a roundup of links to get you ready for Opening Day:

* The L.A. Times' own Angels and Dodgers pages.

* The Hardball Times' Five Questions series (Dodgers, Angels); plus Joe Florkowski's five good things and five bad things about the Angels' spring.

* ESPN.com writer Eric Neel's terrific multimedia piece on Dodgertown in Florida.

* For my money, the best local baseball websites:
Jon Weisman's Dodger Thoughts
Rev. Halofan's Halos Heaven
Rob McMillin's 6-4-2 -- an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Play ball, and let the trash-talking begin! I'll start: Angels will win at least 12 games more than the Dodgers....

(Photo: AP)

As horror films have grown more gruesome and graphic, so have their advertisements pushed the boundaries of the taste envelope. Yesterday, the Motion Picture Assn. of America said the ad campaign for one such film, "Captivity," went too far, and it imposed sanctions that could actually sting the distributor, After Dark Films. Read more about the sanctions and why the MPAA may be unusually sensitive on the violence front at the Bit Player blog.

Is Sacramento a minor league town? Depends how you look at it. It's not the biggest kid on the block, dwarfed by L.A., San Diego, amorphous San Jose, even puny San Francisco, which looks and acts like the Big Town despite its sub-million population. But Sactown is the locus of enormous power, the control center of California's $100 billion state budget, the place where decisions are made about what kind of light bulbs you can use and whether you can drive in the HOV lane.

For now it's still refreshingly minor league. Triple-A, to be sure, and on the cusp of major league status, with sprouting highrises, respectable rush hour gridlock and, as basketball fans try to tell me, an actual NBA team in the Kings. But the place remains smalltown and homey, and nothing drives home the point better than a trip across golden-spired Tower Bridge and the Sacramento River to West Sac and Raley Field, where the River Cats' rally in the ninth inning just fell short last night in the preseason exhibition game against the parent club, the Oakland A's.

They love their 'Cats in this town. Fans ate every single Dinger Dog (I missed out), and the food stands also ran low on salmon tacos and tri-tip. But no one seemed to mind as they watched Mike Piazza slug a homer. This was one of those games where you cheer for both teams--the hometown youngsters, and the guys like  Nick Swisher who graduated to the Show.

Who knows what kind of movers and shakers were sitting up in the luxury boxes--and yes, they have those at Raley Field. But there was not much evidence in the stands of the Other Sacramento--the electeds, the lobbyists, the political consultants. This was a Thursday night, after all, and those guys get out of town every Thursday afternoon, on the Southwest to Burbank, the I-80 to the Bay Area, or wherever else they spend their long weekends. This time they won't even be coming back for a week because it's spring break at the Capitol. Maybe they're in Palm Springs, or South Padre Island.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez went to Paris, by the way, killing any chance of hammering out a prison reform solution with Republicans before Easter. Now that's bush league.

Most TV viewers who caught D. Kyle Sampson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday were probably reminded of another chubby, balding and sheepish man: George Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld’s sidekick.

But for political junkies of a certain age – my age – the appearance of the sorcerer’s apprentice of the U.S. attorney firings recalled a witness from almost 35 years ago: John W. Dean, who ratted out the Nixon administration before the Senate Watergate Committee.

I’m not positing a physical resemblance – Dean was lean and still had his hair in 1973 – nor am I suggesting that Sampson has done anything criminal. The point of similarity is age: Dean, the former White House counsel, was 34 when he faced Sen. Sam Ervin; Sampson is 37.

The latter's (relative) youth provoked one of the dismissed U.S. attorneys to gripe that "it looks like that authority was delegated . . . all the way down to a bunch of 35-year-old kids." (A Washington Post reader wondered whether you can still be a kid at 35.)

But it’s an open secret in Washington that many decisions are crafted – and many speeches are written – by thirtysomething aides. (The Supreme Court is different: most of the justices’ law clerks are in their 20s.) Perhaps the Almanac of American Politics should consider merging with this publication.

YouTube has become a music lover's paradise, but it's also something of a jungle -- dense and hard to navigate. Enter the new version of MOG, a music blogging site that offers users a guided tour of YouTube's video landscape. Read more about it at the Bit Player blog.

The mysterious Booster known only as L.A. City Nerd has concocted a five-question civics quiz for the readers of LAist. In the interests of Fair Use, I'll post only, uh, three:

1. Before the 2005 opening of LAPD's Mission Division in the San Fernando Valley, what was the last LAPD Division to be added?

2. At the turn of the 20th Century, where was the only place within a mile of the coast in California that blacks were allowed own property?

4. What monument in Boyle Heights did then-First Lady Hillary Clinton visit in her "Save America's Treasure's" campaign in 1998, the first such project in Los Angeles for the campaign?

Don't cheat; leave your answers in the comments, and we'll award at least a symbolic taco to the winner.

Given that Southern Californians don't as a rule obsess about all levels of politics and governance (despite the best efforts of the best intentioned), I've thought for years that it'd be fun to include a rapid-fire Civics Quiz in any on-the-record conversation with a notable human who lives south of the Tehachapis. How would it go? Something like this:

City or not?
Studio, Culver, Panorama?
Moorpark, Monterey Park, Montebello?
San Pedro, San Fernando, Santa Fe Springs?
West Toluca, West Covina, West Magazine?

Longest river -- Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Santa Ana?

Largest population city:
Palmdale or Pomona?
Pasadena or Santa Clarita?
Torrance or Glendale?

Last presidential election when the county tipped Republican.

Quick: Name five U.S. congresspersons who represent pieces of L.A. county.

Number of daily newspapers the city supported in 1957. Bonus points for naming them all.

Number of members of the L.A. City Council, County Board of Supervisors, and L.A. Unified School District Board.

Number of Hall of Famers on the 1988 Dodgers. Number of potential Hall of Famers on the 2002 Angels.

Starting with the 1930s, which decade featured the county's highest percentage population growth? The lowest?

Vinny or Chickie Baby? (That's the tiebreaker.)

Remember -- no looking.

Well, there goes the neighborhood.

Thanks to the New York Times.

The paper profiled my part of L.A. last weekend as a hot, up-and-coming neighborhood with comparatively cheap housing, geographic convenience and views that "could be mistaken for Tuscany."

As even downtown and Hollywood became gentrified, Northeast L.A.—Eagle Rock, Mt. Washington, Highland Park—had to know that its turn would be coming.

Already, we were seeing the hipsters move in. More and better restaurants followed them. That part was great. Alas, sometimes, so did the attitude.

In the venerable hillside neighborhoods of NELA, the roads are old and narrow and sometimes, happily, still unpaved. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, where I've lived for 18 years, nor in many others around me; people walk their dogs and push their strollers in the street. These are real neighborhoods of old people and little kids, artists and office managers, nurses and writers. There's an amiability, a pleasant knowledge that this isn't the struggling, striving Westside, but a lucky, placid little Eastside Eden.

Even before people read the New York Times article and began emailing their real estate agents about this NELA place, stratospheric housing prices were squeezing buyers east, from the Westside and Hollywood Hills, across the Los Angeles River and into NELA. Most of them I've met really want to be part of the neighborhood they've chosen, and are probably delighted to be homeowners just about anywhere in L.A.

But a few of them seem angry at being here, and indifferent, even hostile to the local way of doing things. They ignore a passing ''hello'' on the street. They roar heedlessly up and down the narrow, 75-year-old streets in glittering Range Rovers and such wheeled fauna which they sometimes park, astonishingly, in the red zones that are there so ambulances and fire trucks can squeeze and wiggle up and down the fire-prone hills to save our lives and our houses. Where's the "gentry" in this gentrification?

There's such a thing as being in a neighborhood but not of it. I'm inclined to think their corporate clocks are ticking away angrily, "I'm 30 years old, 31 years old, and still not a studio chief? AND I have to live on the Eastside?" In a city where folks in the 310 area code can think of the Eastside as beginning at La Brea, life in NELA must be an affront to some people—a waystation on the way up to a bigger title and a more acceptable address. For the rest of us, living here is a destination.

I'm sure that the New York Times piece added $20,000 to the value of my house. But what it did to the worth of the neighborhood—well, that's another calculation altogether.

"Five years ago today, President Bush signed into law the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Today, American politics is so clean you could eat off it," says Ryan Sager in the New York Sun. That second sentence is sarcasm, dontcha know, and Sager rattles off the many ways the McCain-Feingold law, as it is popularly known, has either failed in its goal of cleaning up politics or succeeded in its goal of moving the political process further away from the citizenry.

The results so far: There is no evidence political corruption has been decreasing; major party candidates are on track to break all first-quarter fundraising records next month; incumbent-reelection rates—even in the face of last November's Democratic surge—remain well over 90% in the House and nearly 80% in the Senate; and the 2002 law has been used to punish small participants in the political process, not help them. I'll live the closing argument to Sager:

Last but not least—and here we get to the real nub of campaign-finance regulation—McCain-Feingold supporters promised that the bill would curb the scourge of "negative" and "dirty" advertising. "It is about slowing political advertising," Ms. Cantwell said during the debate. "Making sure the flow of negative ads by outside interest groups does not continue to permeate the airwaves."

Of course, curbing and "slowing" speech critical of politicians by "outside interest groups" (a.k.a. "citizens") is in no way a permissible goal under the First Amendment. But, ultimately, the politicians may have failed in this most nefarious goal. And it's not just the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who showed the way around it.

While the Supreme Court has so far upheld the patently anti-Constitutional ban on advertising by citizens' groups 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, the rise of Internet politics may eventually supercede this atrocity. Witness the anti-Hillary Clinton "1984" ad that caused such a stir on YouTube just last week. Such ads, cheaper than dirt (it costs money to distribute dirt, YouTube's free), will only be more important with every election cycle.

For this reason, look for Congress to start taking an interest in "unregulated" Internet speech any day now. Money has never been the issue. Cleansing our speech of impure thoughts about politicians is the real agenda.

Courtesy of Brian Doherty.

President Bush enlisted the LA Times' arguments today in blasting the Congress for meddling on Iraq war policy.

"I want to read to you what a major newspaper editorial page said -- and by the way, this editorial page, like, generally not singing my praises -- (laughter) -- "Imagine if Dwight Eisenhower had been forced to adhere to a congressional war plan in scheduling the Normandy landings -- or if, in 1863, President Lincoln had been forced by Congress to conclude the Civil War the following year. This is the worst kind of congressional meddling in military strategy." (Applause.)

The editorial Bush was referring to ("Do we really need a Gen. Pelosi?") ran March 12.

So does this mean the president is reading our other missives? Including "Blunder after blunder"? 

Two items of potential interest on the Bit Player blog. First, a report by Broadcast Music Inc. (better known as BMI), a top performing rights organization, says that this country's mania with ringtones is over. And second, Verizon is set to announce a "hyper local" channel on its FiOS TV service (an alternative to cable) in Washington, D.C., that has all the makings of a missed opportunity.

Berkeley, which has long considered itself a very important place, declared itself a “nuclear-free zone” two decades ago. No matter that the city was taking on a federal issue that it had no power to control. The municipal label might have been meaningless, but it celebrated Berkeley’s own brand of solipsistic chutzpah.

Now New Mexico has left Berkeley in the nuclear-free dust by declaring state powers over the solar system. When Pluto passes over New Mexico, the state legislature decided earlier this month, it will have full planet status.

For those who missed Pluto’s demotion last year, scientists decided to shrink the solar system down to eight planets because there are other little round things circling the sun that are just as big. Now Pluto is one of a handful of “dwarf planets” in the solar system.

It’s all about hometown pride. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, was a New Mexico resident who had no formal astronomy training, but still built his own telescopes and found—well, a little round thing out there beyond Neptune.

A personal note on Tombaugh. Back when my now-23-year-old daughter was in second grade, she called Tombaugh for a report she was doing on Pluto. (People were listed in those days.) He was uncommonly kind about answering the sorts of questions a 7-year-old thinks up. (“How’s your cat?” “Uh...it died.” Flood of tears.) When he died seven years later, she cried again.

In an age that celebrates advanced degrees over just plain smarts, we don’t have many Tombaughs, and it’s honestly sad to see his accomplishment diminished in any way. But he was a scientist above all, who knew, as New Mexico’s lawmakers apparently don’t, that science is about what’s true, not about what we wish were true.

A small portion of Tombaugh’s ashes are carried on the New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto. He wouldn’t mind that they were speeding through space toward a dwarf planet discovered by a genius.

Republicans are shocked, shocked that House Democrats sweetened their Iraq spending bill with non-germane goodies like subsidies for peanut and dairy farmers. How could they desecrate the issue of war and peace by laying on the pork?

But it isn’t just in America that the legislative process marries the sublime and the mundane. According to the Times of London, this week’s historic agreement for a Protestant-Catholic power-sharing government in Northern Ireland was pushed across the finish line by a threat from British authorities to raise water bills for people in the North if Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams didn't make nice.

On his presidential campaign's official MySpace page, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) came out in favor today of gay marriage, "particularly marriage between passionate females." No, The Onion didn't seize control of McCain's campaign. Instead, according to TechCrunch, McCain's MySpace page was, umm, retouched by one Mike Davidson, a peeved software developer. Evidently, McCain's campaign used a MySpace template from Davidson's company, Newsvine, to construct its page, but failed to give the company credit as it demands. Think of this as the page-design equivalent of borrowing lines from a British politician's speech without acknowledging the source. The McCain campaign also pulled one of the images used on the page -- a list of links for messages and other community-related functions -- directly from Newsvine's computers. Davidson said he doctored the image (which was stored on his equipment, after all), turning it into a fake statement by McCain reversing his position on gay marriage. It didn't take long for McCain's staff to react; the senator's MySpace page is back in conformity with his political beliefs.

Public officials – and future public officials – have appeared on game shows before, with mixed results. Future California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a contestant on "The Dating Game," but according to his website never got to accompany the woman he chose on the town because she had a boyfriend.

Then there was Desert Storm commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s appearance on Celebrity Jeopardy! (the real thing, not the Saturday Night Live parody). Schwarzkopf didn’t show himself to be a dumb Kopf; on the other hand, his charity winnings of $14,000 were only a little more than half of the $25,000 racked up by Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. (Cheech must have swept that "Potent Smokables" category.)

The award for Worst Performance by a Public Official on a Game Show probably should go to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer for his recent performance on NPR radio’s twee quiz show "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" Along with some very small talk about his practice, when he was the junior justice, of delivering coffee to his colleagues, the brainy Breyer answered three questions about rock stars in the show’s "Not My Job" segment.

Answered them wrong, that is. Breyer, who has betrayed familiarity on the bench with the technology that allows kids to listen to pop music, was pretty clueless when it came to rock trivia. The former Harvard law professor didn’t know that David Bowie tried to exorcise a demon from his swimming pool, that Iggy Pop followed a sausage-only diet for a year or that Ozzy Osbourne, on checking into rehab, asked for directions to the bar.

If only Breyer had brought along his law clerks.

Some smoking bans are so outrageous that even the California Legislature doesn't pass them the first, second, third, or even fourth time around. State Sen. Jenny Oropeza is confident that the fifth time's a charm, with her attempt to ban adult smoking in cars carrying anyone under 18 -- the most restrictive such ban ever attempted in California. Previous versions (all since 2004) went as far cars with kids six year old or younger or in car seats. Under Oropeza's bill, cops could pull over any adult puffing away in a car with anyone who looks 17 or under; so kids, better grow out that adolescent beard if you don't want mommy or daddy to get a $100 fine.

Oropeza's bill goes before the state Senate's health committee tomorrow. Among Oropeza's supporters who echo the senator's troubling logic is the Long Beach Press-Telegram, which wrote in an editorial:

Not putting a child in a car seat is an unimaginable transgression in this era, but planting the seeds of cancer and other ailments remains OK under the law because the damage is done over years, not seconds.

Personally, I don't like "slippery slope" arguments because they avoid evaluating the merits of the issue at hand. But the Press-Telegram and similar arguments beg for such a rebuttal. A car is one's own private property, but it's acceptable for the state to legislate behavior such as child-seat requirements because driving a car and child safety are intertwined. But smoking while driving has nothing to do with an adult's ability to operate a car safely while a child is present, as car seats do. If it's bad for kids in inhale second-hand smoke, why not outlaw puffing away in one's own home? (Belmont, a city south of San Francisco, is putting together such a draconian proposal, which we editorialized against in January.)

Before he disappointed me by taking the job as chief White House spokesman, Tony Snow was one of the sharpest and most lucid conservative commentators in contemporary media. It was encouraging that he seemed to have weathered his 2005 battle with the big C, and I'm sad to see that his cancer has spread.  He has been a rare example of somebody who stakes out a position for the Republicans or the Democrats and still manages to remain interesting, and even, dare I say, unorthodox. Dig the defense of illegal immigrants he gave to Reason back in the day, before taking a job where such frankness tends to be frowned upon:

Immigration is not the pox neo-Know Nothings make it out to be. Begin with the astounding influx of illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom hail from Mexico. While the population includes an eye-popping number of crooks, drug dealers, and would-be welfare sponges, it also provides a helpful prop for sustaining American economic growth and cultural dynamism.

Princeton University sociologist Douglas S. Massey reports that 62 percent of illegal immigrants pay income taxes (via withholding) and 66 percent contribute to Social Security. Forbes magazine notes that Mexican illegals aren’t clogging up the social-services system: Only 5 percent receive food stamps or unemployment assistance; 10 percent send kids to public schools. Skeptics counter that immigrants have clogged our hospitals, which is true—but primarily in places that offer lavish benefits to illegal immigrants.

(This last point, by the way, is always worth considering when you wonder why the immigration debate is so much more virulent in California than it is in other states.) Snow and the White House are giving the standard we'll-lick-this-thing bromides, and I wish him the best in his fight—though as Michael McGough noted the other day, relapses are pretty much the worst news you can get. Here's hoping Snow will still be around for a post-White House career.

The Onion News Network takes a gag that shouldn't work and makes it work: Who will speak for the overprivileged when illegal immigrants steal their jobs?

In today's Opinion offerings, Jonah Goldberg makes a point about the McCain-Feingold Act:

Campaign finance reform doesn't keep money out of politics, as the price inflation demonstrates. It merely skews the market, making it harder for rookies and amateurs to get in and easier for the pros and incumbents to game the system.

Indeed, it's a lot like government tuition aid intended to keep costs low, which has had the effect of causing college tuitions to explode by skewing the market and allowing schools to shift costs onto government. The richest kids can afford to go to college without government help or big loans (and they can afford to pay for tutors and consultants in order to get into their preferred school), but few others can.

Similarly, the richest candidates or the candidates with the biggest war chests -- surprise! they tend to be officeholders — love campaign finance reform because it puts burdens on the competition.

In other Op-Eds, Sandra Tsing Loh describes the live-blogging of Cathy Seipp's death, and LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith -- chief cop for skid row -- rails against the local head of the ACLU:

I was sorely disappointed by Ramona Ripston's complete distortion -- in a column on this page -- of our efforts to stem the lawlessness, suffering and human misery that was commonplace on skid row just a few months ago.

I am outraged that Ripston, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, implied that our officers are violating the very Constitution they are sworn to uphold and protect. The officers in skid row, who all volunteer for the assignment, have one of the lowest rates for the use of force in the city. And I am even more appalled by her views because she walked skid row streets with our officers and rode around in a black-and-white last year and was shocked then at the horrific conditions under which our most vulnerable citizens survived. How quickly she forgot!

Our Opinion Daily of the day comes from Sonni Efron, who war-games Iraq's economic mess, and how the country might go about enlisting various foreign factions in bringing home the bacon. Also, in our newish Blowback feature, Judea Pearl rebuts Saree Makdisi's Outside the Tent feature criticizing the Times' coverage of Israel's "right to exist."

Our three editorials include a blast at the one-party nature of Los Angeles politics, which is compared to the "Politburo."

And the Letters section includes this contribution from a certain Andres Martinez of Santa Monica. Excerpt:

As to the "scandal" that caused my integrity to be questioned, I can assure readers that I had no knowledge that any friend of mine did publicity work for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer when he was asked to guest-edit Current, a decision taken by three editors in our department and approved by the publisher. And I never dreamed that any friend of mine or any firm employing a friend would be asked by Grazer to help publicize his involvement with Current. When that turned out to be the case, I flagged the apparent conflict to the publisher and our in-house publicist.

Finally, and on a related note, the news pages inform us that "guest editing" is a dead letter in the Trib-Times, and that Publisher David Hiller

appointed The Times' reader's representative, Jamie Gold, to determine whether personal or professional connections improperly influenced previous content in the editorial pages. [...]

Reader's representative Gold said she would begin her review of past opinion-editorial decisions immediately. She said she was not sure how long her investigation would take.

Hiller said Gold would try to discern whether any undue influence had taken place.

"She will report to me and ultimately, if appropriate, to the readers, who are first and foremost our concern," he said.

Martinez said in an e-mail response to a question that there was ample evidence the editorial pages leveled tough scrutiny at Hollywood and played no favorites.

"The suggestion that I was currying favor with friends on the editorial pages is silly to anyone who knows me," Martinez wrote, "but I can understand the need to find some justification retroactively for a terrible overreaction that has undermined the autonomy of the paper's opinion pages and stained the newspaper's reputation."

Take a group of popular but revenue-challenged user-generated video sites, add a cluster of piracy-prowling entertainment conglomerates, and what do you get? A massive market opportunity for any firm that can identify Hollywood-produced needles in a haystack of data flowing online. Read more about this emerging segment of the tech industry at the Bit Player blog.

Luke Ford, the Mr. Blackwell of Orthodox Judaism, finds a suitably inappropriate way to send off his old friend Cathy Seipp: quietly video- and audio-recording her funeral for maximum snark and catty caught-in-the-acts. Ford's icy neutrality on questions of loyalty and good taste has produced an unsurprising negative reaction from friend and foe alike. From an ad hoc Seipp mourners' list, here are some of the few fit-for-family-reading responses:

I am flat-out astonished at your utter lack of sensitivity, decorum or even the thinnest hint of empathy. You seem to believe that your brutal honesty somehow insulates you from proper judgment. Not in my book, pal.

Had I known you were recording the service, I'd have personally intervened and attempted to remove the device from your person. As I write this, I actually find myself shaking with rage... 

How do you even live with yourself? Oh yeah, that's right, being the center of your universe, you are unaware of any other way. It's the method of the sociopath whom you so obviously are.

Luke is the reason anti-Semitism is on the rise.

I'm barely even an armchair Ford watcher, but it seems like every time there's a brouhaha like this (i.e., every month or so), the conversation turns to whether this time, this time!, he's gone too far, whether it might finally, finally!, be time to write the Vulcan porn gossip out of polite society. I suspect the reason he always comes back can be found in this recent defense of a Seipp family enemy. If he were just some amoral jerk who constantly turned on his friends, they would drop him without further thought. But Ford always has some elaborately worked-out justification for doing the wrong thing—and even if the morality is understood only by Ford himself, there's something compelling in the amount of thought and ethical self-torment that goes into the decision. In any event, the last laugh belongs not to Ford but to Evelyn Waugh, who somewhere in Purgatory gets to look up or down from his holy torments and see the plot inspiration for The Loved One II, wherein an emotional Forest Lawn funeral ends up as some fakakta gossip item that won't be remembered next week.

* Kevin Drum ponders whether 24 is really liberal or conservative.

* Curbed L.A. helpfully points to a haunted Victorian on the market in Monrovia.

* Lonewacko catches the ACLU comparing U.S. immigration enforcement to Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing.

* The artist known as Zuma Dogg piles on Eric Garcetti for his union-hotels letter.

* Noah Shachtman explains how a few raindrops can disable the U.S. missile defense system.

* Mitt Romney enthusiast Hugh Hewitt attacks a fellow righty for engaging in an "effort to mainstream religious tests and even religious bigotry."

* Bill Bradley reports that Phil Angelides is asking his e-mail list to pony up cash to run ads against 19 Republican members of Congress from California for opposing Nancy Pelosi's Iraq-pullout plan.

* Defamer warns of a proposed 50-foot statue of Michael Jackson in Las Vegas.

* Amy Alkon wonders whether President Bush is promoting socialism in South America.

* MediaBistro's FishbowlLA does the 20 questions thing with journalist-turned-novelist Denise Hamilton.

* Patrick "Patterico" Frey argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act is out of control.

* Over at the L.A. Zoo, Mark Frauenfelder captures video of a "happy tapir" getting a massage.

* And Don Garza makes a startling discovery in skid row.

There have been many outrages uttered during the past few days around and about these parts, but for my money (literally speaking) the cruelest blow of all came within this dog-bites-tennis-ball story about how former mayor Richard Riordan, in light of the recent Spring Street tumult, still doesn't care for these L.A. Times. The offending (to me) bit:

Riordan once fancied himself as a newspaper publisher. He toyed with the idea of creating a paper that could compete with the Los Angeles Times. Eventually, Riordan determined that the project wasn't viable and dropped it.

"The smartest thing I ever did was not following through," he said. "I was in over my head."

He walked away lighter by a few hundred thousand dollars, but much wiser. "I lost a quarter-million bucks, which is nothing."

Italics mine, to emphasize the fact that WHERE THE HELL WAS MY CUT, HIZZONER? Barely four figures for basically four months' solid work on my part, during which time I was literally begging pathetically for scratch, while the consultants peddling last century's business models just kept the meter running? The rich are different from you and me ... they think we don't need money.

L.A. Examiner prototype editor Ken Layne (disclosure: Layne is reportedly my bandmate) comments:

It was fun to make a pretend paper with Dick Riordan. My only real regret is that I didn't take at least $100,000 of that $250,000 for myself. When Antonio Villaraigosa wants to start his pretend paper, my fee is $50,000 per month.

Your Opinion diet from today includes former Marine Corps war-gamer Gary Anderson telling us to think outside the cultural box when fighting the next war; former Clinton treasury secretary Lawrence Summers telling economic decision-makers to think outside the over-reaction box when addressing the sub-prime meltdown; and columnist Meghan Daum dreaming that her house had more room for boxes. In Editorials we urged revision of the Patriot Act, regionalism around Iraq, and realism about Manhattan Beach's racist past.

What did you miss over the weekend? Bylined highlights include Ron Brownstein assessing Barack Obama's blue collar problem, Daniel Hernandez assessing the immigrants' rights movement one year after the protest, the LAPD's Will Beall arguing that blacks and Latinos unite over crime, Jon Chait tweaking Republicans for digging in against Global Warming, Gregory Rodriguez observing El Paso's conflicts over its colonial history, and Arianna Huffington lamenting that the War on Drugs is a war on minorities. Meanwhile, the Editorial Board argued for letting Arnold be Arnold, and keeping senior city officials higher above the fray of union-hotel disputes.

I winced when I heard Sen. John Edwards insist the other day that his wife Elizabeth’s cancer, while incurable, was treatable, “and "many patients in similar circumstances have lived many years undergoing treatment.”

It was the same message doctors delivered to my brother Matthew when the colon cancer that eventually killed him staged a reappearance. As Matt relayed his doctor’s message to his family, the idea was that for him cancer was now a “chronic condition.”

I don’t remember Matt mentioning the analogy to diabetes that figured in the Edwardses’ press conference last week.  But the general idea was the same, and so was my reaction: a mixture of hope and skepticism. Professionally sensitive to PR spin, I reacted with a mental raised eyebrow when Matt mouthed the “incurable but treatable” mantra.

I’m no science journalist, but I knew enough from my reading – and the experience of other family members with cancer, including our father – that “incurable” trumped “treatable.” I also was skeptical about the notion – a cliche in most newspaper feature stories about brave people “battling cancer” – that surviving cancer was a matter of will power.

At the same time, I was grateful for Matt’s sake that he was being encouraged to accentuate the positive, although, as this wonderful piece he wrote in 2001 shows, he wasn’t naïve about the implications of “incurable” for his lease on life.

Unlike my brother, Elizabeth Edwards is a public figure, if only by marriage, so it didn’t take long for journalistic spoilsports to report that, while recurrent cancer is “treatable,” mortality statistics are not encouraging. The lead of a Washington Post story came brutally to the point: “Elizabeth Edwards' chance of surviving five years is well below 50 percent if her experience is similar to that of other women whose breast cancer has returned within five years of its original discovery and treatment.”

I’m glad my brother wasn’t prominent enough for someone to write the same thing about him.

Our former editor's Daffy Duck routine has brought with it one benefit: We've been getting some better-than-usual traffic on this blog. So while we still have some eyeballs on us, I'd like to let all-y'all know about the many fabtrabulous new features we've been introducing at Opinion L.A. We have rolled out a variety of new online-only features, which we hope will begin to bridge the gap between "print" stuff and "online" stuff as the newsprint medium continues to wither and these here internets allow for even more and better news coverage.

You can start with our few-months-old Opinion Daily, a column that comes out each weekday, written by alternating members of the editorial board. Recent dailies of interest include Michael McGough's disambiguation of the political bedfellows in the Bong Hits For Jesus case; Andrés Martinez' moving tribute to Hal Rothman; Robert Greene's fascinating study of the future of direct democracy in the cellphone-voting age; and Sonni Efron's defense of economic sanctions.

Straight outta 1995, we've also brought online chat roaring back to life. Dig our recent chats with columnist Rosa Brooks and assistant editor Matt Welch, as well as the SRO blowout with columnist Jonah Goldberg. Look for more of the Opinion L.A. Chat in the weeks to come. 

Dust-up is our almost-newest feature, a weeklong debate between experts, wonks, politicians, blowhards and other luminaries, on topics in the news and/or in our region. This week's dust-up focused on best ways to solve L.A.'s traffic crisis. In recent weeks, we've had debaters go at it on performance-enhancing drugs in sports; the Scooter Libby trial; and Gov. Schwarzenegger's health care initiative.

That health-care debate, by the way, brought a spirited rejoinder from Pacific Research Institute's John R. Graham, which we were happy to run.  This brings us to yet another exciting new feature: Blowback, an opportunity for concerned readers to publish oped-length rebuttals to features that have appeared in the Times. Recent responses have come from the Venezuelan ambassador, a senior State Department official, and others. (Sorry, I just realized as I'm typing this that we don't have a Blowback archive: Will get to that asap!)

In old-fashioned "push" media, we'll be rolling out a daily email newsletter, within the next week I hope, that will keep you informed of what new stuff we've got going on at Opinion L.A.—including old media stuff, new media stuff, and an exciting blend of the two. Signup instructions will show up in this blog and at the Opinion front page, but if you'd like to get in early, email us at opinionla@latimes.com, and we'll set you up.

And of course, we still have all the old print stalwarts: editorials (those unsigned thingees that run on the left page of the print version and speak—more or less—for the board as an institution); opeds (signed columns written by people from oustide the Times opinion section); letters from our readers; the Sunday Current section; and our murderers' row of regular columnists.

I'd like to thank Andrés Martinez for his steadfast and enthusiastic support in guiding our new features and innovations through a work environment where change is frequently less than welcome. If not for Andrés, you would be looking at a much smaller catalogue of new features. I wish him the best, and hope that we can continue his ambition of making maximum use of new media to produce a better and more exciting Los Angeles Times. *

* I made a change to this last graf to eliminate some accurate but stylistically extraneous material. For the original version, see L.A. Observed and Patterico.

Andrés Martinez in L.A. Observed:

The disgruntled news staff is cheering [Jim O'Shea] on as he leads the charge to storm the editorial page and bring it back into lockstep with newsroom, but pretty soon they will remember why those pictures of Dean are still up on their walls and what Jim's mission here really is. With any luck for him, the second floor witch hunt can prove so time-consuming he can get a delay on those firings. 

Read all of the above post, then Jim O'Shea's response to the troops:

I also want to correct some misinformation being published on blogs by Andres Martinez. I don't want to engage in mud-slinging with Andres. He is a good journalist and I feel bad for him, worse today, in fact, than yesterday. But I'm also not going to sit here like some silent lamb while he distorts my record and attacks this newspaper and my newsroom.
   
I am not in charge of the editorial board of this newspaper. The editor of the editorial page reports directly and independently to Publisher David Hiller. That is as it should be. I strongly believe in the principle that separate editors should be in charge of news and opinion. To suggest that I told David Hiller I didn't want the editorial board reporting to me on a "whim" is untrue. He is referring to part of a longer conversation with Nikki Finke, and to take my remarks out of context is unprofessional and sloppy. Moreover, no one in this newsroom is on a campaign to "storm the editorial page and bring it back into lockstep with the newsroom." It is true that we have journalists in the newsroom who don't agree with Andres' views on the ethical problems that led to his resignation. I count myself among them. But these are legitimate, genuine differences of opinion held by people with a passion for the news and this newspaper. To suggest otherwise is pitiful. He also attacked Sue Horton and Julie Marquis for having the audacity to alert the editorial pages to the important work of the staff in case it might make a good editorial. Sun and Julie did nothing wrong.
   
Lastly, Andres suggests I came to Los Angeles as some sort of agent of Tribune Company to quell an "uprising by the imperial subjects." To refer to the journalists at this newspaper in such a manner in an insult to hard-working people who happen to disagree with Andres. I came here because it was an honor to be selected to lead a great newspaper with an excellent staff in one of the most interesting cities in the world. I will stand on my record and credentials as a newsman and journalist. The suggestion that I make decisions simply to curry favor with the staff is also simply untrue. We face hard times.  If I have to make decisions that are unpopular with the staff but in the best long-term interest of this newspaper, I will not hesitate to do make them. That is what leadership is about.  I've said that openly from the day that I walked into this newsroom.
   
I believe in full disclosure.

Other stuff:

Kevin Drum dismisses Grazergate here and here.

Mickey Kaus agrees that the whole unfortunate business is a big nothing.

At Radar, John Cook takes a look into the glass house of Martinez' accusers.

The indispensable Patterico sniffs out a left-wing coup here, here and here.

Coverage from the Times of New York and Los Angeles.

And Nikki Finke puts a tremulous finger on the real infection: "Sanctimonious newsroom reporters and editors acting all holier-than-thou about journalism ethics, even though they never complained about the impropriety of their ousted editor Dean Baquet's behind-the-scenes cozying up to a Billionaire Boys Club of potential local buyers for the LA Times. An editorial editor who oversaw the opinion/Op-ed pages spiralling into irrelevancy, in part because Spring Street's 2nd floor now panders to neo-con and libertarian and other fringe ideologues whose main qualifications for being published there seem be that they're all palsy-walsy with each other." (There's plenty more of this one, but long ago I vowed before God to stop reading any text once I come to the phrase "palsy-walsy.")

At today's very moving funeral for Cathy Seipp, Allan Mayer started off his eulogy by noting his brouhaha with the Times and regretting that longtime Times-watcher Seipp "isn't around to enjoy the festivities."

You've been telling us you want less omphaloskepsis out of Opinion L.A., so here's a topic that's about as far as we can get from Spring Street: We fully approve of the discovery of large amounts of ice on the planet Mars.

Space.com reports that the Red planet "has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out...

With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.

Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the North and South Poles of Mars. Until now, the deposits have been difficult to study closely with existing telescopes and satellites. The current advance comes from a probe of the deposits using an instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter.

Radar echo sounding reveals that about 90 percent of the polar cap is water ice, with some mixture of dust. This is on top of (or actually below, depending on which side of the polar wander we're on) the large amount of ice already known to be packed into the North Pole. More on that at David Darling's brilliant and essential Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy and Spaceflight.

So dream on, terraformers! There may yet be octuple-black-diamond snowboarding on the geologically dead planet. The astronaut-hatin' curmudgeons at the L.A. Times editorial board, of course, will have none of Red Planet real estate. But as with all things at the Times Opinion section, that may be subject to very rapid change.

The San Francisco State University flag-stomping brouhaha has come to its stunning anti-climax. Late last year, SF State College Republicans had global terrorism on the ropes with an "anti-terrorism rally" in which participants stepped on the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah. But just as the forces of international jihad were ready to give up in the face of this relentless campaign of taunting, a campus students association condemned the Repubs and threatened to get the group's official campus recognition yanked. In the perpetually aggrieved SFSU style,