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.