The efforts of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to differentiate themselves on the issue of gun ownership has been, like so many of their efforts to differentiate themselves, a kind of off-key opera buffa. Does Obama support individual ownership or a universal ban? Does Clinton really believe law-abiding citizens should be allowed to own guns? Do either of them believe the right of self-defense is anything but a quaint conceit? Are Second Amendment stalwarts right to view this as a choice between one gun grabber and another?

Richard Feldman, author of Ricochet; Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, hips us to an obscure but telling difference in how the two candidates view these issues. It involves law-abiding citizens, shades into self-defense in its most elemental form and arguably reveals a great deal about how the two view the use of force — that is, the use of force against law-abiding citizens by the state. And there's a clear distinction.

I give you Vitter Amdendment No. 4615, which was voted on in the U.S. Senate at 6:13 PM on July 13, 2006. Here's the text:

To prohibit the confiscation of a firearm during an emergency or major disaster if the possession of such firearm is not prohibited under Federal or State law.

The amendment, which was attached to a Homeland Security appropriations package, was approved 84-16. The bill itself was signed into law in October 2006.

If the confiscation issue seems recondite, set your wayback machine to the post-Hurricane Katrina period, when wild and largely inaccurate tales of disaster-area pillage gave way to revelations about how incompetent police chief Eddie Compass and other authorities eventually went about pacifying the Big Easy. In particular, some footage of cops manhandling Patty Konie — an elderly resident seen holding (by the barrel) a revolver that looked like something that would have blown up in Wild Bill Hickock's tiny hands — provided a shock even to those who don't normally get excited about such matters.

This was the context in which the Vitter amendment was introduced. Here is how the Democratic front-runners voted:

Clinton (D-NY), Nay

Obama (D-IL), Yea

Neither campaign has responded to my request for more information on their votes and decision-making processes. Will update if they do.

There's an old tension here between individual rights and the need to establish (by force) police supremacy in a chaotic and dangerous situation. That question dates back to frontier times, or at least to George Romero's The Crazies, and it's not one we can answer here. But post-Katrina weapons confiscation did provide some pretty clear choices: If you really think legally owned handguns were degrading, or in any other way influencing, the security situation in New Orleans in 2005, you've got your ideology where your common sense ought to be. And if you don't believe in the right to bear arms to protect your life and home during a days-long period when the authorities are nowhere to be seen, well, how can you say you believe in that right at all?

At the risk of seeming to side with Rush Limbaugh, I am bemused by the controversy over the casting of Fred Armisen as Barack Obama in "Saturday Night Live”’s send-up of the contest between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. The skit, which portrayed the media as star-struck Obamaniacs,  got more exposure than usual when Clinton mentioned it in the last Democratic debate. Hillary didn’t mention that the actor impersonating her rival wasn’t black. But others have pounced on  SNL’s decision to cast Armisen, who is of mixed South American and Asian ancestry, as Obama.

"Let's get one thing straight,” Hannah Pool wrote. “The moment anyone starts reaching for 'blackface,' they are on extremely dodgy territory. Anyone who thinks it's either necessary or, for that matter, remotely funny to black-up needs to have the gauge on their moral compass reset." But the point of Armisen’s impersonation wasn’t the mockery of the made-up minstrel; it was to try to create a reasonable facsimile of the senator. And it worked. Modern makeup is pretty amazing: It can make Joe Flaherty look like the late William F. Buckley Jr. and Dave Thomas a dead ringer for the dead Bob Hope. Physique and stature are harder to fake than skin color or Hope’s ski nose, which is why the lanky Armisen beat out his burly African castmate Kenan Thompson for the Obama gig.

So one response to the complaints about Armisen-as-Obama is that all that matters is the final illusion: Armisen may be a non-African-American, but he can convincingly play one on TV.  So why the controversy? I don’t think it’s because the impersonation is the moral equivalent of an old-style minstrel show, or because in casting Armisen as Obama Lorne Michaels was “taking sides” between Obama’s black and white parents or perpetuating the idea that Obama isn’t “really black.” The Washington Post offered another explanaton: the casting seemed to add insult to the injury of SNL’s chronic underuse of African-American performers. Here was an easy opportunity to feature a black comedian, and they blew it.

In this sense the Obama flap is reminiscent of another casting conmtretemps: the objection a decade and a half ago to the casting of the British actor Jonathan Pryce as an Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon” on Broadway. Pryce didn’t help matters when he said: ''If the character is half Asian and half European, you've got to drop down on one side of the fence or the other, and I'm choosing to drop down on the European side.''  (Armisen was wise enough not to make a similar comment about playing the biracial Obama.)  Actors Equity, which had refused to agree to Pryce’s casting, later negotiated a compromise with the producer under which he advertised for other roles in Asian-American newspapers.

That sort of outreach is a good idea, but it can’t resolve all the contradictions in the debate over race and casting which has been raging in theatrical circles, amateur and professional, for a long time. (I can be a source of strife in at schools where the racial composition doesn’t match the range of ethnicities in the school play.) Makeup can only do so much, and in some plays — a conventional  dramatization of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” say — it matters that the actor look like the character. But in others, the suspension of disbelief can be extended to accepting a black man in a part written for a white man  . . . or a short man playing a  tall man . . . or a woman  as Hamlet  (or John Travolta as a woman). But sometimes it’s too much of a stretch, as SNL will discover if it tries to cast Fred Armisen as Hillary.

If only Chuck Quackenbush had told us years ago that he wanted to be a policeman when he grew up, and not a politician — he and we would have been spared a lot of grief.

The former California insurance commissioner now wears the uniform of the Lee County sheriff’s department in Florida, and has, for well over two years.

Last week, as Quackenbush was handcuffing a guy wanted for domestic battery, the guy tried to make a break for it. There was a struggle, the guy got Quackenbush's Taser and pointed it at him, and Quackenbush pulled out his weapon and shot the man, who was last reported in critical condition. Quackenbush had some minor injuries.

If the parade of California politicians leaves a blank spot in your memory under Q, he was the insurance commissioner during the Northridge earthquake in 1994. He allegedly let insurance companies off the hook on fines for paying out less on policyholders' claims than their losses.

In a supposed tradeoff, the companies gave millions to "education funds" like sports camps his kids went to, and an education fund that Quackenbush used for television PSAs that were pretty much about the wonderfulness of … Chuck Quackenbush

The impeachment heat was on, and he resigned (investigators later decided not to press charges against him; a subordinate was sentenced to federal prison).

When the Lee County sheriff's department first asked why he wanted to wear its uniform, according to the News-Press newspaper in Florida, he said, "My wife and I have made a lot of money in real estate and now I can follow my lifelong dream of being a police officer."

What happens to a dream deferred? Politics ...

That seems to be the gist of Sen. Hillary Clinton's latest ad, titled "Children":

It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.
It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?

As the voiceover continues you see, yes, a series of children sleeping peacefully. It's like the pre-slasher scene in a horror movie, just moments before they cue the creepy music and you know that shadow with the knife in hand is going to be creeping up the stairway within 30 seconds. The ad is a bold move -- though nowhere near Tom Tancredo's for sheer fear tactics -- but was it a smart one, given that "hope-mongering" is dominating the primaries?

Barack Obama, predictably, reacted to that very weakness. From the Houston Chronicle:

With the pivotal March 4 Texas primary just four days away, Obama said "the question is not who you want to pick up the call, the question is what kind of judgment will you exercise when you pick up that phone."

"In fact we have had a red phone moment when the decision was made to invade Iraq," he said, referring to the crisis line in the White House. "Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer."

Obama, who has taken a lead in most recent Texas polls, including one published today in the Houston Chronicle, said Clinton was trying to "scare up" voters with her latest ad.

Then again, the junior senator from New York wasn't gaining much ground with her "change through experience" pitch, so maybe scare tactics aren't such a bad idea. And of course, this TV spot openly plays on the maternal instincts of all those middle-class women (or the Security Moms, as Reason's David Weigel puts it) she's trying to hold on to for March 4. There's a big fat wad of irony in here somewhere ...

With an obit, an Op-Ed, an editorial, blog posts and more, we've added our own cannons to the 21-gun salute to the late William F. Buckley, but before we move along, a last word on National Review, or as it was known back in the Kennedy years, "National Review Bulletin."

Our editorial noted that the early NR "had a fair claim to being the foremost cultural magazine of its time," and after two hours of microfiching the 1963-1964 run of the magazine on Wednesday I can expand on that. The cultural sections of the magazine were quite lively, and the sharpness of the overall package still comes across after four decades. Among the big names: Theodore Sturgeon, Arlene Croce (on Resnais and Antonioni!), Steve Allen (yes that Steve Allen), Thomas Szasz (as always channeling either Michel Foucault or L. Ron Hubbard with a piece on "Psychiatry's threat to civil liberties"), John Leonard, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (is that where they met?), Auberon Waugh, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner (on Cleanth Brooks!), John dos Passos (with a piss-take on Edmund Wilson — so far so good, but unfortunately the criticism centered on The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, a book NR probably should have been defending), Myrna Bain and Emilie Griffin (a not-insensitive look at John Osborne's Luther). There was also a pretty good, and prescient, appreciation of Mary McCarthy as a refugee from the left, as well as a critical pan of the movie adaptation of The Cardinal, which Michael McGough references in his Opinion Daily today. And if you think the catalogue of rightwing poetry begins and ends with W.H. von Dreele (who was in there too), cast your eyes on Ezra Pound's "Mindscapes," which appeared first in Buckley's rag in Old '63. I didn't see any Renata Adler but I understand she was in there too back in the day.

Between this and Encounter, you could make a case that the right, or at least the strong-anti-communist coalition, was not only culturally competitive but dominant in the fifties and early sixties. Part of that may be materials selection: At what other time were you going to get Didion writing about Evelyn Waugh or Waugh's own son discussing Muriel Spark? Some ambitious historian ought to do an analysis of NR and Ramparts as the secret Catholic movers of everything in the sixties, the Gallant and Goofus of the Great Disruption.

I make no case for the decline of this or the dumbing down of that, and if all the material above strikes you as an odyssey of boredom, well, I'll fight like hell for your right to feel that way. But I think the soft power of conservatives is in eclipse. The post-Allen Bloom bellyaching about how feminists or queer theorists are brutalizing our culture might be a little more credible if you could believe the people complaining had something interesting to say about the culture themselves. We know what you think of Hillary, Rich Lowry, but what do you think of James Joyce?

Every couple of days, the U.S. Department of Education sends out another press release saying that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is talking about the No Child Left Behind Act in Texas, or Minnesota, or whatever state her neverending pitch for the law is taking her.

Spellings has been a major improvement over predecessor Rod Paige. She has tried to make implementation of the school accountability law more flexible, more sane. But traveling around the country spouting predictable phrases about school reform are not going to make an insane law sound sane to the masses.

NCLB was a well-intentioned law. It was a truly bipartisan law. Accountability is a good idea for schools that for too long have promoted and graduated kids with deplorable reading and math skills. But it's a remarkably badly written law. Good schools along with bad suffered under its "failing" labels and sanctions while sanctimonious lawmakers refused to consider changes. Imagine a law that actually punishes states for setting high standards, and you've got NCLB. Now that the law has come up for reauthorization, at least one of those lawmakers, California's Rep. George Miller, would like to make substantial changes, while the Bush administration wants the law kept almost exactly as it is. Other lawmakers would just like the law to die, period. With the current stalemate, that's a real possibility. It would become just another relic and the schools would be right back where they were six years ago.

All the press conferences around the heartland are not going to make people love this law. Instead of going on the road to promote NCLB, Spellings should be beating a regular path to the White House to convince the president that NCLB  needs a major rewrite. Otherwise, it will be hard for anyone to mourn its premature death.

The young woman came to my door at around 7 p.m., a good time to catch working people at home on weeknights. She was from South Central, she said, the mother of a young son — she showed me his photo on her cell phone just to prove it — who was working her way toward college. By selling magazines, she said, she could get a scholarship to turn her life around. Her story was laid on so thick, with so many rehearsed appeals to the heartstrings, that before very long it started to sound like ... a scam.

It was.

Magazine crews have been around since the Depression, but with laws restricting telemarketing they've become more common than ever — so common, in fact, that I seem to get a new crew through my neighborhood two or three times a year. The magazines they peddle are legitimate, but offered at prices that are usually far higher than you'd pay by subscribing directly. What's more, buyers are lucky if they ever actually receive the magazines they purchase. One favorite technique of the crews is to tell people who turn down their magazines that they can win points toward a scholarship if the homeowner will simply give a contribution to their organization. This gives the impression that the salesperson is working for some kind of nonprofit: In fact, he or she is working for a sleazy, for-profit, fly-by-night operation that seldom keeps its promises to the naive young people it lures to sells its magazines.

Magazine crews were the subject of an in-depth report in the New York Times last year. So many salespeople have been abused while traveling around the country in crews that support organizations have been set up for recovering crew members and their parents; two such groups can be found here and here. The best way to discourage them: Politely say no and close the door.

Like the city of L.A., Los Angeles County has a telephone tax that has been challenged in court. Like the city, which preserved its phone tax by taking it to voters on Feb. 5, the county might put its tax on the ballot. But not yet. This Tuesday is the Board of Supervisors' last chance to put something on the June 3 ballot, but county CEO Bill Fujioka said it's too early to decide how to proceed. That leaves a November vote or, perhaps, a court fight. Or the end of the tax.

If you want to look up the county's tax — and of course you do — click here, then click on Title 4, Revenue and Finance, then on Chapter 4.62, Utility User Tax, then — still with me? — on 4.62.060, Telephone user tax. It's a 5% tax on calls in unincorporated county areas. But the whole shebang, including the tax on electricity and other services, could be covered by the lawsuits.

The county is not doing well in court so far. In the Oronoz and Kaufman cases, a judge granted the plaintiffs' request that their suits be treated as class actions on behalf of anyone who was (they claim) improperly taxed. An appeals court affirmed that ruling on Jan. 24, so now the county is asking the state Supreme Court to reverse. There are likely still many months before the cases go to trial.

The city did better on the class action issue, convincing a judge to reject a class action. The plaintiffs against the city (in the Ardon and TracFone cases) are now appealing. Trial on the merits of the case is a long way off, but in theory the plaintiffs could win back any tax money they paid up to the time Proposition S was adopted.

Cities (and three other counties) up and down the state are in a similar fix, facing lawsuits challenging phone taxes. City councils and boards of supervisors could change the ways those taxes were calculated only until 1996, when California voters passed Proposition 218. Any tax changes made since then are suspect unless ratified by voters.

The Times editorial page endorsed Proposition S as in the best interests of the city and its residents, but not without reservations. We were put off by the campaign, which stressed the tax reduction from 10% to 9% — true enough — but glossed over the fact that the tax was broadened to include more types of calls. Those campaign tactics — trying to fool voters instead of being straightforward with them — made opposition to Proposition S perfectly understandable.

That's something the county may want to keep in mind if it eventually moves forward with a phone tax ballot measure.

By the way, another reason the county isn't putting its phone tax on the June ballot may be the fact that two supervisors — Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe — are up for re-election on the same day. Why remind voters that their supervisors take their money? Besides, neither Antonovich nor Knabe are fans of taxes.

Bored after the War On Christmas ceasefire, I tried in late 2007 to get another civil war going, this one over New Year. To wit: Who are you to wish me well on holidays drawn from your "rational" sun-worshipping eurocentric calendar? My lunar calendar, where holidays show up during high midsummer in some years and the dead of winter in others, where we never know which month is crop-planting month, is no worse than yours, merely different!

I got nowhere with that prank. One bored colleague replied, "Eh, our calendar's no better. They can't even do it without adding an extra day every four years."

Too true! To all people who still wonder why the cycles of the day, the lunar month and the year can't be better matched, and to everybody else, I highly recommend Thomas S. Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. "Being able to understand how it looks from the creator's point of view is just great," writes Amazon reviewer A Customer. "My lesson learned: work your tail off and when you win, it always looks easier than it was..."

But don't take Customer's word for it, take mine. Whether you're a history buff or just curious about why people still comprehend so much of the world through meaningless human-scale patterns, Kuhn's book is full of valuable insights and disambiguations.

Contributing editor Erin Aubry Kaplan says Barack Obama isn't the post-racial panacea that everyone thinks he is:

The core of the resistance to seeing Obama as what he is -- a black man -- even among his supporters (or perhaps especially among his supporters) is an assumption that he is capable and successful because he is "other." Beneath the post-racial talk and the how-black-is-he speculation lies an antebellum belief that blackness is inherently limiting, while whiteness is inherently transcendent. (Blackness is, however, inherently good for style and "soaring" oratory, qualities the media have been quick to attribute to Obama.)

Columnist Joel Stein says female running mates could save men the wrath of women mad about missing the chance for a female president. Author and former prison detainee in Tehran Zarah Ghahramani objects to Americans' radicalized image of Iran.

The editorial board praises newly-appointed Assembly Speaker Karen Bass. It also looks at two cases that will test the Supreme Court's commitment to protecting Americans from searches, and notes that ships can keep polluting California's ports unless lawmakers take action.

Readers react to The Times' poll on the presidency. See why Pasadena's Siddarth Dasgupta says, "The Democrats have not yet chosen their nominee, and you are already lining up to mislead the voting public."