Here's what you were reading in the last full week of 2007. Our American Values series finally scored, as did our holiday Big Fix feature. The violent deaths of Timothy Johnson and Benazir Bhutto drew attention, but as always, Jesus, dogs and Jonah Goldberg were tops with readers.

1. The cancer drug by Diana Wagman
2. A life and death, raw by commenters
3. Aunt Benazir’s false promises by Fatima Bhutto
4. The common defense by the editorial board
5. Tracking the mild coyote by Meghan Daum
6. A little bit of heaven on Earth by Joel Stein
7. It’s a campaign, not a crusade by Charlotte Allen
8. Domestic tranquillity by the editorial board
9. Politics? We’ll take good cheer by Jonah Goldberg
10. Collar the dogs by Will Beall

You perhaps recall Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs, who was defeated for re-election to the bench last year by a woman who had spent more of the previous decade running a bagel shop than practicing law. The defeat outraged many, including those of us at the Los Angeles Times editorial page and, apparently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who promptly reappointed Janavs to the bench.

Janavs' tenure on the court was uninterrupted. But since, on paper, she was starting a new judgeship, she's up for re-election all over again this June. So if it's true that she was targeted because of her  foreign-sounding name, something that made her vulnerable at the ballot box, could she be defeated for the second year in a row? And would the governor again return her to the bench despite the voters' actions?

We'll never know. The Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported today that Janavs is retiring from the bench.

Janavs was the first Los Angeles Superior Court judge defeated for re-election in 18 years. She was trounced by Lynn D. Olson, an inactive attorney who ran Manhattan Bread & Bagel with her husband, Hermosa Beach Councilman Michael Keegan.

The Janavs-Olson race told establishment types everything they don't want to hear about judicial elections: slate mailers count more than newspaper editorials or Los Angeles County Bar Association ratings (the County Bar rated Janavs "exceptionally well-qualified," Olson "not qualified"); voters respond to partisan appeals (Janavs is a Republican, Olson a Democrat); voters like all-American-sounding names better than foreign-sounding ones; and voters are generally clueless when it comes to selecting judges.

In case you don't think that whole foreign-sounding-name thing really makes any difference, check out this review of recent judicial elections by Court of Appeal Justice Rebecca A. Wiseman.

In the end, Janavs was defeated not because she was a bad judge, but because she was beat-able. Schwarzenegger won wide praise (and considerable relief) from Janavs' colleagues when he reappointed her. The Times editorial page, which strongly backed Janavs, was queasy about the governor overriding the will of the voters, no matter how ignorantly they were acting (see the editorial below).

By the way, it's judicial election time again. Incumbent judges and challengers begin filing later this month for the June 3 primary.

The Times' editorial board wraps up its American Values series with 'The blessings of liberty':

The Bush administration soon will be consigned to history, and not a moment too soon. The end of this cynical, mean-spirited presidency provides the opportunity for a renewal of generosity and hope, for a widening of political and cultural horizons, for a return to strength tempered by humility, for an era of decency and mutual respect rather than the blunt exercise of force.

That will be the mission of the next president.

The board also raises an eyebrow at a lawsuit filed by J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. seeking to block the publication of the "Harry Potter Lexicon."

The Opinion page caps off 2007 with a quiz on the year's "hard-to-forget moments," while columnist Joel Stein looks into his Magic 8 Ball and makes some predictions for next year. Under "Presidential election":

Barack Obama wins the general election but does not carry the Northeast, due to New Englanders' ingreasingly implausible excuse, "It's not that we're racist; it's just that the South would never elect a black person."

Readers weigh in on oil and green energy, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's hunting prowess and the billion-dollar child-support suit against Donald L. Bren. Snarks John Rabe,

I hereby publicly offer to be adopted by Bren. For a monthly remittance of $1,000, I promise to buy him one tie on Father's day, one pair of slippers and/or a robe at Christmas, and one joke card on his birthday....

For my part, the contract will be considered null and void if I get a DUI, disparage Bren in public or cause the police to be called to a noisy beach-house party.

The grisly and continuing story of the tiger that escaped from its San Francisco Zoo enclosure on Christmas to kill a man and maul two others brings to news accounts a name familiar and praised in some Los Angeles circles: Manuel Mollinedo, the zoo's director.

Mollinedo left his job as director of L.A.'s Department of Recreation and Parks in 2003, amid sharp budget cuts to his department, to take the San Francisco Zoo job. He previously was director of the Los Angeles Zoo from 1995 to 2002 and won high praise for his management there despite his lack of background in animal care or zoos. The job usually requires at least as much knowledge in the care and feeding of politicians and donors as it does oversight of exotic animals.

At the L.A. zoo, he oversaw improvements and expansions that helped stave off the loss of accreditation by the same organization that now is awaiting a report on the deadly tiger escape.

He grew up in Los Angeles and directed the parks department in Austin, Texas, before returning to L.A.

Mollinedo ran the L.A. Zoo in 2001 on the day that a Komodo dragon bit off a chunk of toe belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle's executive editor Phil Bronstein. That's a fact that may help keep the Chronicle's attention on Mollinedo as the probe of the tiger attack continues.

Writer Amy Wilentz describes the Benazir Bhutto she knew:

I'd known her for years, on and off -- mostly off -- since we'd been in college together, and her brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, had been a good friend of mine there too. To be a Bhutto seemed -- to us outsiders -- the essence of glamorous progressivism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, their father, was the democratically inclined president of Pakistan, and we thought of the Bhutto family as Pakistan's Kennedys. Benazir, in jeans and sweaters with her straight black hair, was a torrent of energy; she was garrulous and articulate, skinny as a rake, unfailingly present and engaged, intellectually curious and as ready as a teeny-bopper to chase after every little piece of life she could get.

"Those were fun days, nice days," she said to me this fall.

But these days: less fun, was the implication....

Also on the Op-Ed page, the Big Fix series continues, asking experts how to survive the housing bust.

The editorial page features the eighth installment of the American Values series, on 'the general welfare.'

Pro-dog readers defend their pets against Will Beall's Op-Ed. Pacific Palisades' Rita Burton says, "Before Beall has a doggy meltdown, perhaps someone should remind him about obnoxious parents and their equally obnoxious children in restaurants, theaters and shopping malls."

As we have examined the values and candidates in this election, we, the members of The Times’ editorial board, have not had a lot of praise for President Bush. We disagree with him on the war in Iraq, on Guantanamo, on abortion, on the right of gays to marry, on global warming… I could go on.

That trend continues with today's piece in our series, as we have our issues with the president in areas such as healthcare and school vouchers. Still, we do sometimes agree, and two places where we converge are aired in today’s editorial. As we note, President Bush has been an important educational advocate and leader, and he has done his best to devise and win approval for comprehensive immigration reform.

So, while we’re not likely to find ourselves missing President Bush much after he goes home to Crawford, we appreciate that he has done much to elevate the place of education in our national dialogue. No Child Left Behind isn’t perfect — not by a longshot — but Bush’s advocacy of it helped bring Republicans into the conversation and expand the sense of a president’s responsibility in an area traditionally left to the states. Bush deserves credit, and we’re happy to give it.

On immigration, he has less to show for his work, but there, we can only hope that the next president will build on what Bush tried to do and finally create a mechanism for those who are in the country illegally to stay and become citizens. That’s a worthy goal for Bush’s successor. Unfortunately, the candidates so far aren’t doing much to inspire confidence that they’ll take up that cause.

As those of you who have been reading know, these editorials all have been framed in terms of eternal American values, but examining those values in fresh light yields some reminders. Education, for instance, now dominates much of our national political debate, but it barely existed as a public right in colonial America and through much of the 19th century. As a matter of “the general welfare,” then, it is a fairly new concept. Immigration, by contrast, was as vital to early America as it is today, testing some of our systems, yes, but also supplying the nation with new ideas and cultures and allowing to become a truly polyglot enterprise, unlike any country on earth. We only wish that more of our neighbors shared our faith in this country to absorb its migrants to adapt to them and with them.

Today’s editorial is the penultimate piece in our nine-part series, which we will conclude next week and then turn to our endorsements for president. We welcome your reactions — so far, we’re posted more than 125 entries on our discussion boards, and we’ve received several hundred letters and emails. The range of response has essentially covered the waterfront, from the much-appreciated admirer who wished he could elect an editorial page as president (who doesn’t?) to the less-impressed critic who this week wrote to say, simply: “your editorial again shows the world you are the scum of the earth.” Oh well.

A special Los Angeles minimum wage for workers at a handful of hotels near Los Angeles International Airport may take effect soon in the wake of an appeals court ruling today upholding a second attempt at a "living wage" ordinance.

The City Council acted in 2006 to extend to hotels near LAX the living wage laws that until then had applied only to businesses with city contracts. A coalition of business groups gathered signatures for a referendum to overturn the ordinance, and rather than go to the ballot the council repealed its law. Then they replaced it with a second ordinance that also compelled the hotels to raise their workers' pay and also committed the city to various property enhancements in the area. The business groups sued, asserting that the second ordinance was substantially the same as the first and, therefore, in violation of state election laws on referenda. The Superior Court agreed, but the Court of Appeal today reversed. Here's the opinion.

News releases abound. The hotels, as you would expect, are none too pleased with "a decision not supported by facts or precedent" in which the court "gutted the ability of Californians to challenge the acts of their government through a vote of the people."

The New Century Coalition, which campaigned for the special wage, said the ordinance is important "because often hotel owners don't pay a fair wage to their employees and this is a perfect example of what our public officials can do to reverse the growing gap between the rich and poor in our city."

Backers said today's ruling will lift 3,500 workers out of poverty. Opponents claim the ordinance is the first step of many to impose special wages on particular businesses based on their geographical location or their industry.

The Times editorial board opposed extending the living wage to the hotels. "The council should stop throwing good money after bad policy and instead withdraw the law," we said on January 3. "The living wage extension is an unwarranted and capricious government intrusion into private industry that could chase businesses out of Los Angeles while encouraging hotels to raise prices or lay off workers. It reinforces the growing notion that City Hall is not friendly toward employers."

Praise for Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is coming in from every corner. President Bush said that Bhutto, who was assassinated today, "bravely gave her life" for Pakistani democracy. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called her an "outstanding leader who worked for democracy." U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said "she believed in democracy and the rule of law while opposing extremism and terror."

Here's Benazir Bhutto in her own words, when she last wrote for The Times:

We must be realistic about the history and politics of Pakistan. In a perfect world, perhaps the military would not play a role in politics. But Pakistan is less than perfect in this regard. The security forces fundamentally have served as a political institution in Pakistan, ruling either directly, through generals, or indirectly, by manipulating and ultimately sacking democratic governments.

I know that some people have been surprised that I have been negotiating a transition to democracy and talking about the future of Pakistan with Musharraf. On dictatorship, there can be no compromise. The parliament must be supreme....

I go back to Pakistan this autumn knowing that there will be difficult days ahead. But I put my faith in the people and my fate in the hands of God. I am not afraid. Yes, we are at a turning point, but I know that time, justice and the forces of history are on our side.

Niece Fatima Bhutto's recent Times Op-Ed offers a preview of the revisionist takes on Bhutto that are bound to come:

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.

I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto's presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet "democrat" like Ms. Bhutto.

And click here to see what The Times editorial boards of old thought of Bhutto while she was in charge.

Photo courtesy Associated Press.

The editorial board examines 'The common defense' in its American Values series:

The challenge for the presidential candidates is to explain how they plan to defend the United States, particularly how they would combat international terrorist networks and how they would restore American prestige and leadership in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Most are struggling to do so while trying mightily to avoid awkward truths. It's not politic to admit that the U.S. is weaker than it was a decade ago. And there is no campaign advantage to acknowledging that our current troubles cannot be blamed solely on either the very real failures of President Bush (as the Democrats would prefer to do) or on the very real dangers posed by Islamist terrorists, nuclear proliferators or oil-flush anti-American strongmen (the preferred targets of Republicans).

We believe that the restoration of American leadership amid rising global anti-Americanism requires an explicit repudiation of the exceptionalism that has soured this administration's dealings with other nations, and so hindered the collective defense of the world's democracies.

The board also reacts to a report on how to safeguard the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Op-Ed series "The Big Fix" continues, asking local experts how to solve L.A.'s most pressing problems in 2008. Today's question: how should we get from here to there?

Readers react to the death of leukemia patient Nataline Sarkisyan. Calabasas' David Hurwitz says, "Nataline's chances of long-term survival went from slim to zero as soon as Cigna meddled in her medical care."

Of the great purposes for which the Constitution was drafted — to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility and the like — the call for a “common defense” is perhaps the most readily acknowledged in modern life. No one disputes this nation’s right to defend itself or its allies.

And yet, our modern sense of defense is far different from the one the founders first struck. When “the common defense” first became an obligation of the government, the United States lacked and feared strong central authority, even as the states struggled without it. The Constitution supplied that authority, and gave the new nation the structural institutions that allowed it to grow.

Still, the development of a massive defense apparatus was slow. As America set out on the course that has brought us to the present, its early years were defined in significant measure by this nation’s physical isolation from Europe. Distance allowed the United States to mature without the same defense burdens shouldered by its allies, but as America’s remove from the world diminished, our sense of defense has altered as well.

Today’s defense is a gigantic obligation of the federal government and a singular preoccupation of many Americans. We are engaged in two wars at this writing, and there are those who want to fight a third, against Iran, before the sand runs from the glass of this administration. Meanwhile, the scale of our national defense would surely stagger any of those who drafted the nation’s founding language. As we noted in an editorial just last week, none other than Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates recently pointed out that the Pentagon’s healthcare budget alone is larger than the entire American investment in building alliances through the State Department.

But, as we argue in today’s installment of our series on American values and the national campaign, this administration has confused bellicosity with strength. The president has taken America’s exceptional history and place in the world to such an extreme that he and his administration have substituted bluster for leadership. The result is a more dangerous world and a more isolated America.

A final word on defense: It is tempting for every generation to see its challenges as singular to their time and place. But as we note in today’s Cold Copy, the last time the editorial board of The Times was contemplating a presidential endorsement, it did so in the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Despite their long appreciation for President Nixon — who received the last presidential endorsement by The Times — our predecessors took a firm and principled position in 1970 that the time had arrived for the United States to leave Vietnam. Earlier this year, we took a similar view of the war in Iraq. “Having invested so much in Iraq, Americans are likely to find disengagement almost as painful as war,” we wrote on May 6. “But the longer we delay planning for the inevitable, the worse the outcome is likely to be. The time has come to leave.”

That editorial made us the first very large American paper to call for such a withdrawal. As you consider our reflections on “the common defense,” I hope you’ll also take time to read the editorial from May and still another few moments to listen to the quiet call of history that comes through the Cold Copy pieces of the Vietnam era.