Sound off about recent web-only content from the folks at Opinion L.A.:

Opinion Daily: "Foreclosure heaven" Sometime house hunter Paul Thornton looks at all those defaulting borrowers and longs to give them a Rupert Pupkinesque "Tough luck, suckers; better luck next time." But will Democratic busybodies ruin his only chance to afford a home?

Dust-Up: "Golden state, gay marriage" Lorri L. Jean and Ron Prentice lock horns over same-sex nuptials.

Opinion Daily: "Was Ted Kennedy right about Scotus?" Michael McGough reviews the Roberts-Alito court's record and finds both more and less reason for concern than originally advertised.

Dust-Up: "Rumor romp" Luke Ford and Eric Spillman get to wrasslin' over blogs, ethics, gossip and the fall of the destination media.

Opinion Daily: "Torrent trackers get RAMmed" Jon Healey tracks the indexers, indexes the trackers, and finds a world of confusion in efforts to crack down on online copyright infringement.

Dust-Up: "Subprime players" Should the government bail out bad loans? How many people will lose their homes? Can Paul Thornton ever afford to buy a house? Robert Camerota and Paul Leonard to duke it out on these issues and more.

There's plenty more where those came from, and more coming every day. So make your opinion known in the comments, or email us at opinionla@latimes.com.

I wasn’t much of fan of the late Tom Snyder, but I mourn his passing because it exacerbates a problem that has perturbed me for several years: the dying off of the targets of the great television satirists of the 1970s and ‘80s. Did you notice that most of the obituaries for Snyder mentioned Dan Aykroyd’s Snyder impersonation?

It’s bad enough that some of the satirists themselves are no longer with us — John Candy and Gilda Radner, among others — but what really turns those old Saturday Night Live and SCTV episodes into period pieces is the passing of the people they parodied.

I am something of an inter-generational evangelist for those old shows, available now on DVD, but my teenage nephews are tough sells. The missionary work is made harder by the fact that so many of the sketches I found and still find hilarious skewered people who have died.

Take the SCTV  Christmas special hosted by Orson Welles (impersonated by Candy)  and featuring a piano duet by Elton John (Rick Moranis) and Liberace (Dave Thomas). Sir Elton is still standing but “Lee” and Citizen Welles are no more. Ditto Pierre Trudeau, Martin Short’s impersonation of whom was my favorite bit of SCTV’s Canadian content. Jack Klugman (channeled by Joe Flaherty in “Quincy, Cartoon Coroner” is still with us, but his very imitable voice is even raspier now because of throat surgery.

It’s hard to recommend a DVD to people born in the 1990s when you have to provide a viewer’s guide to the targets of the satire, complete with obituaries. My nephews likely would view Aykroyd-as-Snyder with the same incomprehension that old cartoons satirizing Bogart and Kate Hepburn produced in TV-watching kids of my generation.

As for Aykroyd, at least the man who inspired his other SNL star turn is still alive.

I am just old enough to remember back when Tom Snyder was just an ordinary Joe on Channel 4 newscasts here in the Southland. (Also, I'm just native enough that the word "Southland" doesn't set my teeth on edge, unlike some of my colleagues, partly because at the height of Latchkey Nation I was raised at least in part by the Tom Snyders and Jerry Dunphys of the world.) There are some good remembrances of Tom's breakout "Tomorrow Show" triumphs on the Internet, including a bit of thanks from Mickey Kaus and a delightful little anecdote by the Huffington Post's Bill Barol. Excerpt:

I met Snyder and his crew in a gigantic suite at the Waldorf, and we waited for [Jimmy] Carter. And waited. And waited. Snyder grew visibly more restive. Carter finally arrived, something like 30 minutes late, and introductions were made. The ex-president sat on a couch, Snyder in an armchair. "Are you sensitive, sir, about the glasses in your breast pocket?" Snyder asked. "You might want to do something about that."

Read the whole thing. Also fine are the various videos flying around, including this interview with The Clash. As that latter link aptly demonstrates, Snyder was just about the last of an era (actually, early David Letterman, to whom Snyder played John the Baptist, has some claim on that, too); when popular culture and news felt like it had been all shaken up, and Establishment-looking types like Tom Snyder and Mike Douglas enthusiastically sifted through the pieces, trying to figure out punk rock, Charles Manson, and campus radicals gone wild, not in any particular order. People any younger than me will probably have a hard time understanding that there was a time when people genuinely cared what a New York Jets quarterback thought about politics, the best novelists of a generation could be found at the same heavyweight boxing championship in Africa, and the pop charts could be topped by a song that celebrated jogging in the nude. It took a while before the promoters and the professionals not named Bill Graham realized that there was money in them thar counterculture, and that intimate journalistic access was a pointless risk of untold millions. I'm not saying that life was any better then, but the celebrity journalism? You betcha.

The editorial board sees some similarities between President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe:

Bush came to office opposing nation-building and has floundered trying to rebuild Iraq, while Abe came to office pledging to improve relations with China and South Korea but has alienated both with intemperate remarks about Japan's World War II-era sex slaves. As part of his conservative agenda, Abe also has been pushing a revision of Japan's no-war constitution and a broader global security role for the military. But the public hasn't shared his enthusiasm for these goals. It's odd that Abe, like Bush, became a successful politician by selling a new brand of smart conservatism, only to become politically tone-deaf.

The board expresses disappointment with the House Democrats' failure to drop subsidies in the latest farm bill, and praises the California Supreme Court for stopping cities from seizing cars involved in drug or prostitution offenses.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg wonders if some people are just too uninformed to vote. UC Davis' Gregory Clark argues that immigrants will keep coming to the U.S. as long as our southern border is a de facto dividing line between prosperity and poverty. UC Hastings College of Law's Brian E. Gray advocates his choice for Vice President in 2008 -- Bill Clinton. And political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson sticks up for L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke, under fire for possibly living in Brentwood instead of her district.

Letter writers react to the Burke controversy as well. Katherine Gonzalez of Palos Verdes Estates says "[s]he should be prosecuted for her deception."

Interplanetary hubris watch: Scientists continue to ignore the warning of that great astrobiologist Elton John: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. This time, NASA scientists and a University of Mexico professor are checking out the top of Pico de Orizaba volcano to see whether trees that grow all the way up there might make it possible to send hearty perennials (in the words of the accomplished physicist Lou Reed) way up to Mars.

The goal, according to NASA's Chris McKay and U of M's Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, is to use trees as "the engines of the biosphere" to pump "powerful gases," with the goal of bringing human-caused global warming to the cold and thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.

Here in the backyard of the robot-probe-friendly Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rooting for the home team means taking a dim view of NASA's human-centric projects (which this one, characterized by Reuters' Catherine Bremer as a way to "create an atmosphere that would support oxygen-breathing life forms" is deep in its carbon-based heart). But in this case I'm especially skeptical. Aren't we a lot closer to, say, the "Genetic modification and selection of microorganisms for growth on Mars" [pdf] stage of theorizing than to the E.T.-cruising-the-Redwoods stage?

McKay innoculates himself against absurd claims for terraforming by cautioning: "I don't have this vision of people moving to Mars the way people settled the New World, setting up homes and bringing their families." But the terraformers always want to have it both ways — making judicious-sounding claims about how long the process of earthifying Mars would take (centuries even!), but never acknowledging something more basic: Outside poetry or religion, terraforming is the closest you can come to the anthrocentric fallacy.

That's because Earth-like conditions are not some default position to which we can reconcile the rest of the universe but an apparently improbable (and constantly changing) set of circumstances under which life as we know it evolved. There's no indication, other than our own never-dwindling sense that we are at the center of the universe, that a square milimeter of territory outside our own atmosphere can ever be rendered Earth-like in any serious way.

The glib but well meaning counterargument to the above goes something like this: Hey, we've done such a number on Earth's atmosphere, just by accident, imagine what we could do if we set our minds to it on Mars. It does not minimize the seriousness of global warming to reply to that with a supercilious Oh, rilly? Have we really screwed up our environment so badly that human beings now explode on contact with fresh air? Have we rendered our planet lopsided, with a giant bulge in one hemisphere? As far as I know we haven't even managed to stop all geological activity or eliminate the magnetic field that is the only thing keeping good ol' Planet Earth from getting fried by radiation (though that idea was explored by Hilary Swank and a cast of A-minus listers in a wonderfully goofy movie a few years back). To believe you can change these very basic negative factors in the Arean real estate market is to believe in essentially god-like powers of creation and destruction.

You never hear NASA projects described as faith-based initiatives, but manned space travel is one of those. Your tax dollars may not be paying for those initiatives, but your tax nickels are. Whatever we get out of the federal space agency, we'd be getting a lot more if it would stop rewarding people who envision space-for-us and start rewarding people who envision space-as-it-actually-is.

Thanks to Ron Bailey.

Related:

"Mean Scientists Dash Hopes Of Life On Mars"

If you're talking outer-space forestry, you're talking Bruce Dern, baby!

Given all the celebratory gunfire that went off throughout Iraq on Sunday, you’d have thought that a small war had been won. In this case, however, the battleground was Bung Karno stadium in Jakarta and the victory was over Saudi Arabia for the 2007 Asian Cup.

While the fanaticism of soccer fans worldwide is terrifying to behold, there’s something supernatural about the way a sports field can produce more patriotic sentiment than any arbitrary national boundary. As National Public Radio's Steve Inkseep noted, the three frontline players were an Iraqi Kurd, a Sunni Arab and a Shiite Arab. Together, they led their team, the Lions of the Two Rivers, to victory.

It's a testament to the power of the games that even last week's car bombings, which targeted and killed more than 50 Iraqis celebrating Wednesday's victory over South Korea, couldn't deter exuberant fans from taking to the streets.

Sports might seem somewhat trivial, in light of Iraq's many serious problems. As Matthew Gray, head of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at Australian National University, notes, "Far more important is the day-to-day safety and economic opportunity … for ordinary Iraqis, and on that front, you've got to be pretty pessimistic." Team captain Younis Mahmoud, who refuses to return to Iraq given the level of violence, seems to agree—and that's a sad, though understandable, standard to set.

But in a country facing political strife, religious tension and ethnic violence, it’s still significant that this multicultural team has seized the spotlight.

And as the Iraqi parliament went into recess today without passing any of the legislation that could bridge the gap between Sunnis and Shiites, it's a reminder that at least some people are willing to put differences aside and get the job done. As Sunni bloc member Omar Abdul Sattar sardonically suggested, "Maybe we should replace the political team with the football team."

Personally, I think it would be better to replace the soccer team with parliament. If only both sides had thrown aside their differences, thrown on jerseys and scrimmaged instead, the world would be a better, albeit sweatier, place.

Years ago I coined the term Anglophilia nervosa to describe the sickness that comes over England- (and Britain-) loving Americans when a crass fellow Yank behaves boorishly before Brits. In extreme cases, this malady prompts the Anglophile Yank to identify himself as Canadian.

I first experienced this illness as a student in England 35 years ago; and had a minor relapse today watching the joint press conference of President Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Scotsman.

With the same frat-boy abandon that led Bush to make fun of an L.A. Times reporter's dark glasses (not knowing the reporter had an eye condition), Bush riffed on whether Brown lived up, or down, to the ethnic stereotype of the "dour Scot."

Read it and cringe:

BUSH: All right. He's a Scotsman, you know, kind of -- he's not the dour Scotsman that you described or the awkward Scotsman. He's actually a humorous Scotsman, the guy that we actually were able to relax and to share some thoughts. ... You know, I was very interested in his family life. He's a man who suffered unspeakable tragedy, and instead of that weakening his soul, it strengthened his soul. I was impressed. And I'm confident that we'll be able to keep our relationship strong, healthy, vibrant and that there will be constant communications as we deal with these problems."

Bush wasn't specific about the "unspeakable tragedy" in Brown's life; maybe he was referring to the fact that the future prime minister's first child died in infancy or that Brown himself was blinded in one eye as a teen-ager (is Bush obsessed with visual impairments?). Either way, it came across as gauche, though arguably not as embarrassing as his tribute to former Prime Minister Tony Blair: "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."

Brown responded  graciously to both Bush's ethnic reference and this tribute to the PM's triumph over tragedy:

What President Bush has said is both very compassionate and it reflects the conversation we had about a whole series of issues that we can deal with together. I think your understanding, if I may say so, of Scotland was enhanced by the fact that you went to Scotland, you told me, at the age of 14 and had to sit through a very long Presbyterian church service in which you didn't understand a word of what the minister was actually saying. So I think you came to a better understanding of the Scottish contribution to the United Kingdom from that.

Translation: Tony wasn't kidding about this guy.

A.S. Hamrah asks why the White House's torture policies sound sexually perverse:

In April, former CIA Director George Tenet appeared on "60 Minutes," telling interviewer Scott Pelley -- between swigs from a tiny bottle of Evian and his insistent, repetitive bark that "we don't torture people" -- that the reason he has never personally seen the evidence of the interrogation techniques he refuses to talk about is because he is "not a voyeur."

Tenet's reference to voyeurism -- which the dictionary defines as "the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretly" -- would seem to imply that these unmentionable techniques are sexual in nature and therefore inappropriate. But Tenet can never know if that's the case because he, not being a voyeur, claims never to have seen them. So why bring up voyeurism at all?

Colby College's Paul Josephson says the nuclear industry has never proved itself, and columnist Niall Ferguson thinks Malthusian theory is set to make a come back, thanks to global population growth and dwindling resources. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders why academia nurtures less-than-objective scholars like Ward Churchill.

The editorial board harshly critiques President Bush's latest speech linking Iraq and Al Qaeda, and praises a City Council plan to create a dense downtown. The board also explores what might happen if the Supreme Court takes its first second amendment case in decades.

Letter writers take issue with Democrats' abortion stance. Los Angeles's Margaret Daugherty says, "For more than a generation, Democrats have stood for the principle that personal reproductive choices are not the business of government. Shame on any candidate who discards this principle purely to grub a few more votes."

We're in the home stretch of the Be Joel Stein contest, and turnout's been lower than you'd see in a special election for Maywood commissioner of cat litter disposal. Now's your chance to get behind the hapless Times Friday columnist, pile some more glory on Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple (who is cleaning Stein's clock as of this writing) or vote for any of our underdog finalists. Does Stein stand a chance? Is the bris lobby really that strong? You can make a difference by casting your vote today! And again tomorrow.

Author Brian Copeland wonders why people ask Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) if he's black enough:

if you go to the street corners of Oakland, Baltimore, Detroit, Compton or any other major urban area in the country on a given night, you'll find guys selling crack, guys with five babies by five different women, guys headed to jail and guys just released from jail, gang bangers and pimps along with hustlers and dealers. Nobody is questioning their racial authenticity. Nobody is saying that they're not real black men.

How and when did we come to the point where black people in America are defined by the lowest common denominator? When did the bottom rung of the ladder become the expected norm, and those who strive for things greater become racial anomalies?

Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum doesn't think Disney's plan to nix smoking in its movies will stop kids from lighting up. Columnist Joel Stein defends the "performance-enhanced" and reveals why he hates Rosa Brooks, who writes this week about President Bush's latest executive order on detaining terrorists.

The editorial board fears that California Republicans are becoming a rural fringe, and asks Congress to give taxpayers free access to NIH studies funded by...taxes. The board also points out that Arabs and Jews are learning separate histories in Israel.

Letter writers react to The Times' printing op-eds by Hamas officials. While Monterey's Patrick Frank says he'd "rather that people write Op-Ed articles than fire rockets or build illegal settlements," L.A.'s Charles S. Berdiansky thinks that "Hamas would have to attain the janjaweed's genocidal success in Darfur for The Times to deny it a byline." Read the others here.

It's an inside-the-Beltway story in more ways than one: A boring procedural standoff over an issue that itself is of interest largely to political junkies: whether registered lobbyists who play rainmaker for members of Congress seeking re-election should disclose for public inspection how many contributions they have “bundled.”

Both houses of Congress have passed legislation to require disclosure of bundling, a practice that subverts the limits on individual contributions contained in federal election law. But a conference committee to resolve different versions of this and other ethics reforms has been stalled by an objection from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who is afraid that a conference might inter disclosure requirements for another Washington folkway — special-interest “earmarks.”

Now, in an attempt to make an end run around deMint’s “hold,” congressional leaders are talking about skipping a conference and having the House and Senate enact identical ethics bills.

But there’s a catch: Roll Call reports that Senate Democratic leaders are redrafting the bundling-disclosure provision to “shift responsibility for the disclosure from lobbyists to the candidates themselves.” This could make it harder for the public to keep track of which lobbyists are bundling and into whose laps those bundles are being dropped.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if election law could allow the public to know who’s bundling contributions for which candidates — presidential as well as congressional. But that doesn’t alter the case for bundling disclosure as part of the reporting required of lobbyists, who arguably get a bigger bang from their bundling than other financial angels.

Felix Chevrolet dealership operator Darryl Holter isn't pleased with the city for deeming the famous Felix the Cat sign at Figueroa and Jefforson a historic landmark:

Like most people, the commissioners are in love with the Felix the Cat sign. But they were not swayed by arguments based on property rights of the owners -- who opposed the designation -- economic development, job retention or sales tax revenue. Instead, their views reflected only a narrow perspective of some in the historic preservation community -- not the needs of the broader community. And they are not beholden to anyone. This became apparent in some of the comments made by commissioners and other historic preservation experts. One suggested that if GM closed the franchise, we could switch to selling cat products. Another said maybe we could open a restaurant. Another suggested that maybe this would teach GM something about corporate responsibility.

Columnist Patt Morrison notes that even the greeting card industry is making jokes at President Bush's expense, and the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein wonders if conventions will actually pick 2008 presidential candidates for the first time in decades.

The editorial board wants to know what exactly is allowed under the CIA's "enhanced interrogation methods." The board praises grocery chains for accepting new economic realities in its deal with unions, and urges the state legislature to fix prison overcrowding, especially now that California is the first state to have a federally mandated prison population cap.

Letter writers react to the board's stand against the Fairness Doctrine. See why San Diego's Mark Gabrish Conlan thinks "It's amazing that, out of all the conceivable arguments to make against restoring the Fairness Doctrine, your editorial picked the worst."

He hasn’t yet said that the dog ate his memo, but U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is proving to be a master of shifting the blame.  Gonzales was the victim of a bipartisan beating Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee for what senators regarded as unresponsive and/or incredible answers. But Gonzales was forthcoming -– about what other people did.

Gonzales described the now infamous visit to John Ashcroft’s  hospital bed  as originating not with him or former White House chief of staff Andy Card but with the “Gang of Eight” members of Congress who oversaw intelligence activities.

It was the  consensus of that meeting, Gonzales said, that the unspecified intelligence program should be reauthorized despite the opposition of Acting Attorney General James Comey. One of the “gang,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Gonzales "is making  up something to protect himself.” Another, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice, said the AG was selectively declassifying a secret meeting in order to spin things his way.

Passing the buck is nothing new for Gonzales, who suggested that the invisible hands that fashioned a hit list of U.S. attorneys might have belonged to his deputy, Paul McNulty. Who’s next? His compadre George W. Bush? Or, now that it’s summertime, a Justice Department intern?

Watching C-SPAN last night was painful, and I don’t mean because it bored me to death. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s testimony at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing provided the same entertainment value as the first round of American Idol, in which a self-deluded contestant puts in a lousy performance, the judges delightedly make an even bigger fool of him and the in-studio audience guffaws at every single gaffe.

The whole excruciating charade would have been easier to take had Gonzales shown remorse, anger or some other human emotion. But for most of the four hours he just floundered along impassively, rendering many committee members’ hard-hitting questions about as effective as punching a jellyfish that keeps stinging itself.

Take the infamous scene where Gonzales insisted he made a misstatement but clarified it with the reporter two days afterward. Minutes later, he admits a spokesperson made the clarification — and Gonzales didn’t even know what was said.

I’d like to believe there’s a reason for all this well documented obfuscation. Heck, I’d even take some cunning, devious master plan on the part of the administration over the ineptitude demonstrated last night.

But frankly, I'd wager that if the Attorney General were asked, "Alberto, how could you have thought going for this was a good idea?" the best we'd get is, "I would say that that's a good question."

If you haven't already checked out this week's Dust-Up between Eric Spillman and Luke Ford, read it now. The KTLA reporter and the artist formerly known as the Matt Drudge of porn go at it on unconfirmed rumors, the Villaraigosa-Salinas scandal and the changing nature of major media, with more coming tomorrow and Friday. Send us your thoughts in the comments, or at opinionla@latimes.com.

The editorial board reacts to a Pew report that Muslim support for suicide bombing is on the skids:

In Lebanon, for example, 63% of those polled this spring said they opposed the U.S.-led war on terror. But only 34% thought that suicide bombings against civilians were sometimes or often justified -- down from 74% who considered suicide bombing justifiable in 2002. Support for Bin Laden plummeted from 20% to 1% of those surveyed in Lebanon, and substantial drops were also registered in Jordan, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan and Kuwait.

The exception to this trend is in the places where Muslims see themselves at war with a vastly stronger enemy: Israel and Iraq.

The board applauds a City Council committee for making the tough call to switch police from patrols to counterterrorism, and wonders how the NFL will handle Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, accused of helping run a brutal dogfighting ring.

On the op-ed pages, Soto Zen priest Nick Street notes that meditation in schools doesn't mix church and state. Turkish TV host Senay Ozdemir praises Turkey's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party as expanding opportunities for women. KGO Radio host Gene Burns argues for an across-the-board budget cut instead of separate cuts that hit the homeless and other disadvantaged groups. And columnist Ronald Brownstein explores Rudy Giuliani's states' rights strategy on gay marriage and abortion.

Readers react to the editorial board's long piece against nuclear power. UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Per Peterson thinks the editorial "misses the mark not just on the Japan quake but on assertions about the likely growth potential and cost of new nuclear plants...."

As the debate over the debate winds down, I'm gearing up for the debate over the debate over the debate. To wit: How many Second Amendment advocates will it take to give Joe Biden a hiding over his insulting comments toward a gun owner named Jered Townsend?

The First State's senior senator fired up his feisty demeanor twice last night, first by making a nasty crack about a proud gun owner and later by calling the evening's touchy-feely last topic by its true name: "a ridiculous exercise." As you might expect, it's the gun crack that's got people hoppin' mad:

Many thumbs down from bloggers great and small:

Mickey Kaus says the insult shows Biden "lacks even moderately calibrated snap judgment."

Robert of Stony Brook loses bowel control.

Hamstress in the Garden of Eden says Biden "made a complete ass out of himself" and notes that Biden could have simply made his opening crack without belaboring the issue of poor Townsend's mental health.

The Instapundit says all the Democrats will be wounded in this crossfire.

Howard "Extreme" Mortman says get some help yourself, Joe!

And as if to reiterate every old chestnut about the angry bloggers and the aloof MSM, CNN's John King calls Biden the evening's winner.

Wonkette and Delaware Dave Weigel have more here and here.

Although I've never supported Biden, I'll say that last night's controversial comments proceed from the one thing I like about him: his off-the-cuff-itude (which was in much better form when he gathered wool on the topic of the Iraq withdrawal). To expand on the Hamstress' comment above: The initial crack was within bounds. A guy who's that into his rifle and makes a public display of his affection sets himself up as the target of unkind fun-making. It's weird to be that lovey-dovey with any inanimate object; Townsend brought the ridicule on himself. Where Biden steps over the line is in trying to expand his witty barb into a serious point about gun laws and mental illness (which didn't even depart in any interesting way from Bill Richardson's earlier point on the same topic). The rules of courtly insult are quite clear on this: Humiliate your interlocutor and then bring the conversation back around to the only subject that matters — yourself.

[Ed. note: Thanks to our lousy blogware provider, you're getting a post from yesterday morning this morning. Don't think of it as old; think of it as seasoned.]

Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that Democrats, in arguing for withdrawal from Iraq, are giving the go-ahead for genocide:

It's worth at least pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren't our fault. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren't at least partly to blame. Yes, the mass murder would have more immediate authors than the United States of America, but we would undeniably be responsible, at least in part, for giving a green light to genocide. Obama offers precisely that green light in his proposed Iraq War De-escalation Act.

Orange County teacher Jeffrey K. Wallace suffered a guilty conscience for having looted antiquities as a child, but now he's sending his bit of rock back to Athens. The Heritage Foundation's Brian M. Riedl sounds off on farm subsidies, and Douglas Ring and Diane Donoghue warn city officials that without better housing policies L.A. could become a "gilded ghetto".

The editorial board explains why it's OK to root for the Islamists in Turkey, why the Fairness Doctrine is unfair, and why the county needs to be open about using taxpayer money to settle lawsuits.

Letter writers respond en masse to William Lobdell's personal story of losing his faith. Los Angeles' Harry Shragg notes, "I am convinced that he has finally found his faith. It is faith in himself that is most important...."

      David Beckham blah blah blah Tom Cruise blah blah blah Will Smith blah blah blah Demi Moore blah blah blah ...

      Big party movie stars glam glam glam Posh Spice Beckham platform shoes [not on Tom Cruise's feet].

     So much coverage -- how could all those news agencies miss the big story of Sunday night?

     Just where was this fab uber-party to welcome the big big Beckhams to LA?

    Downtown LA, baby! East of the 405 Freeway! Heck, east of the Harbor Freeway!

     It's happened at last!

     El Centro is no longer L-7! It's hip! It's hot! It's .... time to move!

The editors of the British Catholic magazine The Tablet (full disclosure: I’m an occasional contributor) are passing along to their readers a quotation from Cardinal Mahony that first appeared on the Daily News' opinion blog. The quote is music to the ears of liberal Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The Tablet notes that "while many church conservatives maintain that the increasing societal acceptance of homosexuality — and, sometimes, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council — contributed to the abuse, Cardinal Mahony said that 'many of the priests' accused in his archdiocese 'came out of the [so-called] good old days — Latin-only, cassocks-only.'"

To be fair, Mahony's comment came in response to a question from Chris Weinkopf about whether the scandal resulted from a "lack of discipline and orthodoxy in the seminaries." But both the question and the answer touch on a fault line in Catholic opinion.

I have written before about the way the scandal has been seized on for point-scoring purposes both by conservatives (who blame the supposed "anything-goes" ethos of Vatican II) and liberals (whose preferred explanation is the celibacy requirement for priests).

Each side, moreover, has its own bogeyman. For conservatives, it's Paul Shanley, the defrocked Boston priest and convicted molester who was described by the Associated Press as  a former "long-haired jeans-wearing street priest." For liberals, it's  Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the octogenarian founder of the traditionalist Legionaries of Christ, who was invited by the Vatican to lead  "a life restricted to prayer and penitence, renouncing any public ministry" after he was accused of molesting several men when they were young. (The Legionaries noted that Maciel has long "declared his innocence," but said he decided — "following the example of Jesus" — not to defend  himself.)

Obviously both "liberal" and "conservative" priests can abuse children — as can clergy of other denominations, not to mention teachers, scoutmasters and parents. To find "larger meaning" in the scandal for the purposes of intra-church polemics is another kind of exploitation.

Opinion L.A. all-stars weigh in on recent articles.

Our "Subprime Players" Dust-Up raises rates of interest in interest rate raises. Author Martha Williams stands up for a dynamic market:

The dialogue between Robert Camerota and Paul Leonard is interesting, even when they argue opposing viewpoints from the same statistics. I have to take issue with Mr. Leonard's remark that "[W]ith minorities being much more likely than whites to get sub-prime loans, the recent boom in sub-prime lending could very likely lead to the greatest loss of minority wealth in our nation's history." The italics are Mr. Leonard's.

I don't want to downplay the trauma produced by the foreclosure of one's home, but a major problem with sub-prime loans is that the borrower has little or no initial investment in the property, so it's hard to understand how a defaulting sub-prime borrower will experience a loss of wealth. If anything, the defaulting borrower will enjoy some months in which to consider alternatives while the foreclosure process plays out. If the home foreclosure sale price is less than the amount owed, some states (such as California) protect the borrower by what is call anti-deficiency protection. In other states, the lender may forgive the debt. This can result in the IRS taxing the "phantom income" produced by the debt forgiveness, but Congress is currently considering legislation to eliminate that possibility. Finally, who will buy the foreclosed-on property that has seen a drop in market value and is now more affordable? It may just be a member of the same minority who had to sit out the market a few years ago but today is in a position to buy. Now is the time to educate those prospective buyers on the burdens as well as benefits of home ownership. This is also the time to make clear that federal guidelines are to be followed by mortgage brokers and lenders.

Martha R. Williams, JD
Co-author, California Real Estate Principles,
6th edition update, Dearborn Real Estate Education, 2007

In Los Angeles, Richard Maize says put borrowers in the right categories:

Dear Editor,

In response to Robert Camerota’s July 17 Local Neighborhood, Global Markets article, I believe we must revisit the reasons for the "sub-prime" collapse.  One of the main reasons is that there is no secondary market now for this type of product for the lenders to sell to (remember the junk bonds during the 80's?). With no market for sub-prime paper, lenders stop offering the product. Those looking to buy a house that fits into the sub-prime category can’t buy, thus there is more inventory and prices could fall. The other effect of the dried up market is the expiration of the “teaser rate” and borrowers facing soaring rates. In the sub-prime arena, that teaser period is typically two years. Before the market dried up (sub-prime secondary), those who had this lower teaser rate would then become “serial refinancers” to take advantage of the two-year low rate "clock" hoping some day to become prime borrowers by way of more equity in their homes or improving their credit profile over time.

One major problem is the mortgage originators. They either lack knowledge and experience or are simply lazy, looking for the  higher commission rates sub-prime loans offer. If a potential borrower has a 640 credit score, it is easy to place that borrower into a sub-prime loan. Finding an alternative loan program is the correct approach (this would be in the trade known as an "Alt-A" product which has a slightly higher rate than prime loans, but can be sold in the pool of "prime loans").  Putting a borrower into the wrong category hurts the market and the borrower.
Although it’s more work and less commission dollars for mortgage brokers to put borrowers in appropriate loans, it is the right thing to do and it would eliminate the glut of unsalable sub-prime loans. As a result, we now need to examine the individual loans to see if they actually belong in the sub-prime category.  My guess is that 65% of them do not, so they should be refinanced into the proper category (which is either prime of Alt-A loans neither are sub-prime).  Borrowers will love the change and so will the marketplace.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard Maize

And if somebody says "Alt-A," somebody else must be saying "A is A." The Ayn Rand Institute's David Holcberg says an Objectivist prayer for the embattled lender:

Dear Editor:

Re: "High-risk traps or low-credit tools?" (July 18, 2007)
 
With hundreds of thousands of homeowners defaulting on their mortgage payments, we are increasingly hearing denunciations of lenders for having loaned money to people who had no means of paying it back. But these denunciations reveal a disturbing double standard. For years, politicians pressured lenders to not discriminate against those with poor credit history and shaky finances. Now we have the despicable spectacle of politicians accusing lenders of not having discriminated enough and of having made too many risky loans.

Lenders are damned if they lend--and damned if they don't. Whatever lenders do, politicians seem to always find their practices objectionable, and will take advantage of any excuse to call for more regulations and increased political power over lending. Politicians should leave lenders alone, and instead of damning them, they should acknowledge their crucial role in making home ownership possible for so many people.

David Holcberg
Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, CA

Ronald Brownstein's "First step back to consensus" gets a nod from Prescott Valley, Arizona's own Sam Brunstein:

My first and last thoughts about Brownstein's column are the same.

We, voters, must pressure our next President and the various committee heads in Congress to follow the lead of the Stanley Foundation (and Abraham Lincoln) by getting people with intelligent and opposing viewpoints into the same room, posing the important questions, and listening to what they have to say. The key word here is "Listening."  That means actually expending the effort to understand what each side is saying and why, then acting on the appropriate meld of the two views.

There has been enough partisan debate and law-passing.  We voters are sick of the ideologues on both sides of the aisle in Congress.  Both sides have appropriate ideas but the other side has steadfastly refused to consider them.

And our President?  Listen to opposing views?  Would probably give him a headache!

Regards,

Sam

My tale of tale of swimming-pool tragedy gets local reader Lisa Marlin calling "Polo!"

I appreciate Mr. Cavanaugh's comments regarding the local "free" pool situation.  Here is my story.  Last year I signed my two seven-year old daughters up for swim lessons at the Westchester public pool.    At the first lesson, the instructor, standing on the pool deck, asked each child to perform a variety of swim strokes and floats.  He then told me my children needed to be in the pre-beginner's class, which specialized in getting children comfortable in the water.  So we switched to that class, and in that class the instructor, standing on the deck, asked the children to do a variety of bobs in the water, etc.  I went over to him and asked him when he was going to get in the water and teach the children how to swim.  He replied that he was never going to get in the water, because the LA City pools no longer had the instructors in the water because of liability issues.  He intimated that this was due to the specter of allegations of improper touching during swim lessons in which the instructor was in the water demonstrating strokes.  So the children would get out and lie on the concrete deck and practice their arms strokes , then get in the water and practice them as he taught  them from the deck.  As Mr. Cavanaugh mentioned, the pools are now not only prison-like (no white t shirts, no personal belongings, no parents on the deck unless they are in a swim suit, etc.), but they don't even teach swimming anymore.  We ended up going to the YMCA, where I notice the instructors are in the pool at every moment with the kids, helping little ones do "big arms" and "big kicks".  Surely, the City could get better insurance rates than the YMCA?                                       
                                                                                          
Lisa Marlin

That's it for today. Send us your comments, dagnabbit! We love to hear from you and we love to post your comments, so keep those cards and letters coming. Send them to opinionla@latimes.com. That address again is opinionla@latimes.com.

The editorial board continues its "A Warming World" series with an analysis of nuclear power in the wake of Japan's earthquake-related nuclear accident last week:

[R]ising natural gas prices and worries about global warming have put the nuclear industry back on track. Many respected academics and environmentalists argue that nuclear power must be part of any solution to climate change because nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases.

They make a weak case. The enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste ensure that ramping up the nuclear infrastructure will be a slow process — far too slow to make a difference on global warming. That's just as well, because nuclear power is extremely risky. What's more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Ventura city manager Rick Cole also chimes in on global warming, arguing that California has to change its car culture. LA Weekly columnist Marc Cooper reports on another hot-weather trend -- tyrannical tots taking over Palm Springs-area pools. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez explains why a study saying Americans aren't attuned to others' views doesn't see the whole picture. Bloomberg columnist Amity Shlaes explains that unlike this Congress, even Franklin D. Roosevelt knew when to reform his reforms.

On the letters page, see why San Luis Obispo's John Handy thinks that "The only safe course for Democrats is to pin the blame on Iraqis, not President Bush."

I've been an admirer of Pete Wilson, the ABC-7 news anchorman and KGO radio blabbermouth in San Francisco, and was shocked and saddened to hear of his death Friday. The Bay Area media market is raucous enough to handle some old-school prickly figures who keep the region more dynamic and exciting than its self-regarding cult of niceness would suggest. Wilson was one of those, but his higher-profile gig was in local network TV, where his opinions were at most suggested by a cocked eyebrow or heavy sigh. (Read between the lines of the SF Chron obit above about how annoying Wilson's fellow TV-news drones actually found his habit of trying to debate issues with them during off-hours: because, you know, why would anybody who works in news ever want to discuss issues of the day at any kind of ideological level?)

To get the real Pete you had to listen to his radio show, where he was a witty and eloquent exponent of a set of political philosophies I never quite nailed down: I'd say it  was a sort of free-ranging, cranky, vaguely conservative populist skepticism, but he contained his share of contradictions. The Chron obit contains a bit where he took some shots at my old friend Bevan Dufty for a gay/lesbian reproductive decision. I guess that position could actually square with free-ranging, cranky, vaguely conservative populist skepticism, but he wasn't much of a values conservative as far as I could tell. To the degree you can know a man by his fans, here are some words from Pete's.

His death, in a weird heart-attack-during-surgery-for-something-else, seems especially needless and leaves California media much poorer. I'm sorry he's so unknown down here that the only reaction seems to have been thank god they weren't saying it was our beloved former governor who died. 

Attributor, a company that I opined about back in April, has some interesting insights about the online leaks of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Hint: don't blame the Potter fan sites -- it's the splogs! Read more about Attributor's findings at the Bit Player blog.

Bill Fujioka was sworn in this morning as Los Angeles County's chief executive officer, a position invented earlier this year after it turned out no one — really, literally no one — wanted the old job of chief administrator. The difference is that the CEO has authority over most of the county departments; the old CAO worked with them, but could not direct them.

It's a step forward in L.A. County, but an awkward one. The county is still run by five legislative/executive supervisors, and Fujioka is at their mercy. Down the road, perhaps, the county will grow up and acknowledge the need for an elected executive — a true Los Angeles mayor with a jurisdiction covering 88 municipalities stretching from the beaches to the deserts.

Still, as it is Fujioka instantly becomes one of the most powerful local governmental officials in the nation. You don't get to this position without some political skills, and he has them. In his last job, as CAO of the city of Los Angeles, he was fired by then-Mayor Richard Riordan. But so what? He kept on in the job as if nothing had happened, and indeed nothing had. Fujioka rallied members of the Los Angeles City Council, which without a vote made it clear to the mayor that the firing would be ignored. It was.

Several years earlier Riordan pushed for a new city charter that, among other things, was to undermine the city CAO's stature in part by changing the name of the job to director of the Office of Administrative and Research Services. Voters passed it. But on Riordan's first day out of office, and at the urging of Fujioka, the City Council changed the name of the job right back to City Administrative Officer.

Fujioka has spent his entire career working for the city or the county of Los Angeles. Out of college he was a CETA intern for the city in the 1970s and worked as an administrative assistant for the LAPD. At the county, he worked in the personnel office, became human resources director for County-USC Medical Center, led other county hospitals, then in 1997 was hired back to the city — by Riordan — to head the personnel department. He became city CAO in 1999.

Growing up in East Los Angeles, he was involved with a gang, an experience he recounted in detail at an open City Hall hearing on resources for divert youth from gangs. He comes across as a gentle sort, but is known for a strong backbone and a penchant for profanity. "He has a vocabulary that would make a sailor, but not a supervisor, blush," Council President Eric Garcetti said at Fujioka's oath-taking today.

The new CEO is also full of surprises. He was joined on stage by Darlene Kuba, a longtime City Hall lobbyist whose clients include labor unions and property owners. Many of Fujioka's city and county associates were aware unaware that he and Kuba married earlier this year, after his retirement from the city.

"I can get a little feisty," Fujioka said at his swearing in. "And that's a good thing."

After taking the oath, which included pledges to protect the state and federal constitutions, Fujioka joked:

"I think I can do any damn thing I want with the county charter. I didn't swear to protect that."

Will health concerns succeed where appeals to decorum failed in persuading Americans to cover their feet?

Like my father, who thought bare or even semi-bare feet should be confined to the beach and the bedroom, I never have worn sandals. I confess to a sort of reverse foot fetish where other people's dogs are concerned.

Maybe it’s the fact that bare feet are a reminder that our hands used to be feet, too. Or maybe it’s that disfigured toes seem to be more common than mutated fingers. Or perhaps I’m influenced by repressed memories of traumatic childhood trips to the shoe store, in the days when creepy salesmen X-rayed kids’ feet.

I was shocked and appalled (as readers who complain about editorials like to say) when some members of the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team showed up at the White House wearing flip-flops. One upside of the return of the Latin Mass may be that men and women alike will resist the temptation to flip-flop their way to the Communion rail.

Unfortunately, my aversion to exposed feet isn’t universally shared, and the shaming of the Northwestern lacrosse players hasn’t discouraged flip-flopping in other public places. But now USA Today is reporting that flip-flops aren’t just tacky; they may be a health menace. Among the ills linked to flip-flops are sore arches and heels; calluses; hammer toes; and irritation between the toes.

Poetic justice, I say.

Not enough attention is being paid to the Bush administration’s appointment of Craig S. Morford, a career federal prosecutor, as acting deputy attorney general. If the seemingly invulnerable Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were to leave office — perhaps after a critical report by the department’s inspector general, who is looking into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the deputy attorney general would be acting attorney general until Gonzales' successor could be confirmed by the Senate.

Now consider another scenario: Gonzales doesn't step down, but the inspector general's report emboldens the attorney general's critics to demand the appointment of a special counsel (a euphemism for special prosecutor) to investigate the AG and/or White House officials.

Who would name such a counsel? Not Gonzales, obviously, even if he weren't the focus of the investigation. As a former White House counsel, Gonzales likely would recuse himself from a case involving his former colleagues in the office of the president.

The decision would fall to the deputy AG, just as it did when John Ashcroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame leak case and Deputy Attorney General James Comey tapped Patrick Fitzgerald, now famous as Scooter Libby's nemesis.

Given that the deputy attorney general would  play such a pivotal role,  the Bush administration should move quickly to submit Morford’s name to the Senate as soon as a background check is completed. 

The administration can take comfort — or maybe not — in the fact that Morford’s appointment has won praise from one of Bush's harshest critics on the Judiciary Committee, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). ''Mr. Morford starts out with one thing going for him," Schumer told The New York Times. "He's a career prosecutor and not a politician.”"

I wrote an Opinion Daily column last month about the lobbying surrounding the proposed XM-Sirius merger, and what motivates some interest groups that are, well, less than household names to weigh in -- mainly on the pro-merger side. In a nutshell, many groups throw in their 2 cents because they want to be seen as having influence, both by their constituents and by the Washington establishment.

The lobbying on this issue took a bizarre twist today, when none other than the Catholic Archbishop of New York, His Eminence Edward Cardinal Egan, threw his support behind the merger in an op-ed in the New York Post. The church is an interested observer here; it has channel on Sirius called, innovatively, "The Catholic Channel." According to Egan, the merger is "an unmatched opportunity to strengthen this new medium and position satellite radio to compete with the ever-growing list of audio entertainment providers." In addition, he wrote, the companies have promised to offer "more choice at lower prices" post-merger, along with the ability to block and not pay for channels with offensive content.

Say what you will about Cardinal Egan's grasp of communications regulation or antitrust law, but he certainly knows how to deliver the talking points.

The editorial board sees pitfalls in President Bush's new attempt at a Middle East peace meeting, but concedes it's better than nothing:

It's easy to itemize the reasons why this initiative might founder. It comes late in the second term of a president who hasn't made the Israeli-Palestinian issue a priority. Some of the would-be participants resent continued U.S. involvement in Iraq. The two-state solution Bush rightly advocates is opposed not only by rejectionist Palestinians but by right-wing Israelis who are loath to dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank or return the Golan Heights to Syria.

Finally, in coupling the conference with pleas for financial support for Abbas and his Fatah administration, Bush finds himself hoist on the petard of his simplistic insistence that democracy is the key to the transformation of the Middle East.

The board also takes a look at the YouTube video questions sent in so far for Monday's presidential debates, and notes that it's getting harder to know how long a property has been on the market.

Journalist and author Oliver August knows what's to blame for poorly made goods in China: corruption. Columnist Rosa Brooks argues that the Bush administration has finally succeeded in making its own reality -- unfortunately, a nightmareish one. Eric J. Weiner is skeptical about the Dow Jones' historic closing above 14,000. And columnist Joel Stein studies another market  -- the one for sugary cereal.

On the letters page, see if San Pedro's Cathleen Clay is right when she argues that columnist Jonah Goldberg commits a logical fallacy in his defense of President Bush.