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."

When you're looking for creative ways to deal with failing schools and budget cuts ... bring in a tank! From the Sacramento Bee:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a new rewards program for schoolkids: Stay in school, take a tank for a spin.

The Republican governor is bringing home an Austrian army tank he loaned the Motts Military Museum in Columbus, Ohio, and he said Wednesday he plans to use it to drive around inner-city children who do well in school, say "no" to drugs and avoid gangs in the Los Angeles area.

Standing outside the Northwood Elementary School in North Sacramento, where he promoted his plan to assist 97 troubled school districts, Schwarzenegger said he plans to take kids for a ride one day a month.

Though the future looks bleak, I now have newfound hope for the Year of Education. And my little brother will be psyched.

Three cheers for Prince Harry, who is now serving with the British army in Afghanistan; and four cheers for British authorities, who managed to keep the world in the dark about the younger prince's December deployment until now. Early last year, Harry was supposedly on his way to Iraq, a move that the editorial board applauded:

Nearly every British war features a version of this drama, in which cautious elders try to dissuade a young noble from putting himself in harm's way but the young noble insists on serving his country without special treatment or advantage. This supposedly private drama of stoic courage inevitably receives extensive press coverage, and Harry's case is no exception. But, in the end, it's hard to gainsay the physical courage required to deploy to Iraq at all.

Replace "Iraq" with "Afghanistan" and remove references to extensive press coverage and you have our position. Last May, when it was announced that the Iraq deployment was off, I  backed away from the earlier praise in a disappointed blog post. Thanks to Tribune's idiotic and suicidal policy of deleting the older stories that make up the overwhelming majority of our traffic (for the umpteenth time, I apologize; supposedly it's going to change soon), you can still read the post but not the original editorial. Anyway, props to the prince.

In the eternal struggle against The Jews, there can be no deserters.

That's pretty much the takeaway from this astounding interview that Norman Finkelstein, the historian, communist provocateur and academic-without-portfolio, gave last month to Lebanon's Future TV. Among many other Finkelsteinian aperçus: Any Arab who fails to resist the Israeli juggernaut to his last bullet will become a "slave of the Americans" reduced to "crawling on your knees"; interviewer Najat Sharafeddine reveals herself as neither a serious nor a level-headed person for suggesting that the 2006 attack on Lebanon could have been avoided; Hitler would have prefered to achieve his goals through peaceful means (I am not making that up); anybody who prefers survival to glorious death in service of the international Shiite jihad deserves no respect; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a "human freak"; any Lebanese who is presently alive has "no self-respect"; and of course, every situation everywhere always is exactly analogous to Hitler and the Nazis.

It's a mind-bogglingly arrogant, condescending, creepy, ill-informed performance. And in fact an overtly imperialist one that erases all marks of local politics and individual choice in order to make room for great-power conflict. In true Leninist fashion, Finkelstein does not believe in bystanders; any Arab who chooses not to engage the international struggle against the Zionist/capitalist enemy is not only expendable but beneath consideration. (Allah only knows what Fink made of Future TV's founder, the late rentier oppressor of the proletariat Rafiq al-Hariri.)

I've never given much thought to Finkelstein, who seems to have done some interesting historical (or at least historical-debunking) work, and my view of his long-running feud with Alan Dershowitz has never gone beyond a vague wish for both sides to lose. But at least Dersh contents himself with being a stateside nuisance of no danger to anybody except the wives of insulin-happy bazillionaires. Finkelstein, however, is speaking in the context of a goodwill tour of Lebanon on behalf of Hizbollah — whose views, don'tcha know, have been too long ignored in the United States. (Speak for yourself, Norm!) This is where the cesspool of leftwing extremism eventually flows, into a full-hearted alliance with any scuzzbucket willing and able to kill people. At Reason, Michael Young (who has had his own apparently bruising exchange with the no-nonsense Sharafeddine) expands on the pathology at work:

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Full interview (courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI) and transcript.

This probably makes me weird, but I'm glad to see that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) Board will be putting barrier gates in subway stations.  The gates, which will go up in Red Line, Purple Line and some light rail outposts, will be installed over the next 18 to 24 months. 

Metro says the gates will "prevent fare evasion, provide for seamless travel and improve transit station security."  Perhaps.  All I know is that they'll mean I won't have to fly into a panic every time I see uniformed personnel board the train car I'm riding, looking for proof that I paid my fare.  It's not that I haven't procured my little paper ticket; it's that invariably I've forgotten where I put it.  Or that, once I think I've found it, it turns out to be a ticket from some journey taken months in the past. 

I don't want to worry about this stuff.  Like the longtime New York subway rider I used to be, I want to pay my fare, squirrel away my farecard, and use my commuting time to zone out and avoid making eye contact with people.  Is this freedom--a modest mental vacation--worth tens of millions of dollars to the city, which stands to recoup $5.5 million in annual fare evasion losses?  Possibly not.  But this occasional Red Line commuter will appreciate it, all the same.

And no, he's not running for president, people. But! He still has plenty to say about partisanship, rhetoric and business as usual. From today's NY Times:

Over the past year, I have been working to raise issues that are important to New Yorkers and all Americans — and to speak plainly about common sense solutions. Some of these solutions have traditionally been seen as Republican, while others have been seen as Democratic. As a businessman, I never believed that either party had all the answers and, as mayor, I have seen just how true that is....

More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue. We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream. In New York, working with leaders from both parties and mayors and governors from across the country, we’ve demonstrated that an independent approach really can produce progress on the most critical issues, including the economy, education, the environment, energy, infrastructure and crime.

I agree with Bloomberg, but it's a little anticlimatic. The title of his Op-Ed kind of says it all: "I'm Not Running for President, but ..." But what, yeronner? But we should still listen to what you have to say?

Granted, a Bloomberg presidential campaign wouldn't have garnered much support from either end of the political spectrum. Besides, there are plenty of people out there who aren't running (and some who aren't superdelegates, even) whose voices still seem to matter in the race. And since the independent mayor of New York has reserved the right to throw his support behind one the the candidates in the future, he could still play a role moving those key unaffiliated voters.

And perhaps removing himself from the contest does take the showboat factor out of the whole endeavor, so people (unlike me, apparently) may actually listen to what he has to say.

Not that he has any problem with third-party candidates, as he told AP a couple days ago:

This business of Ralph Nader being a spoiler — you know, in any three-way race, two of the three are going to be spoilers. Come on. Everybody's got a right to do it — you're not spoiling anything ... If people want to vote for you, let them vote for you, and why shouldn't they?

You tell 'em, Mike.

With the recall of 143 million pounds of beef from a local meat processor, you know this mystery meat went to more than schoolkids. Many more. Lucky Californians! This is the only state where the public can find out which retailers bought recalled food. In other states, USDA secrecy rules (I have to wonder whom the USDA is there to protect, the consumer or the industry?) keep the public from finding out where suspect food was sold.

Just a gander at the list, which is still being compiled as new information comes in, is enough to make a person gape at how far this recall extends and what the eventual costs will be, all because of a meatpacker cutting corners and USDA inspectors who couldn't get their act together enough to know this was going on. Hundreds and hundreds of stores and eateries listed, more than 30 per page stretching for 58 pages.

National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn examines the late William F. Buckley's legacy:

A year after graduating from college, Buckley pioneered the depiction of American liberals as a smug, self-satisfied elite in his famous 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale." At National Review, he brought on a passel of former Trotskyites turned conservatives, such as Willi Schlamm and James Burnham, who churned out essays attacking the news media and universities as being filled with doctrinaire liberals. Sound familiar?

Ever since, conservatives -- whether it's Ann Coulter or Dinesh D'Souza -- have continuously denounced traitorous liberal elites. But they are bargain-basement Buckleys.

The editorial board has its take:

It was an irony of Buckley's career that after he boosted so many Republican presidents, they invariably disappointed him. Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and imposed wage and price controls; Ronald Reagan left office with the Department of Education intact; George W. Bush vastly increased Medicare benefits and plunged the country into a war that Buckley turned against long before that became an acceptable conservative position.

Elsewhere on the editorial page, the board says the Democratic candidates are wrong to vilify NAFTA, and asks U.N. member states, especially Russia and China, to pledge more money to fight drug resistant tuberculosis.

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Rosa Brooks looks at the new revision of the Army Field Manual. U.C. San Diego's James H. Fowler says the "Colbert bump" is real. And columnist Patt Morrison explains how lawmakers, activists, and backfiring corporate gluttony saved the California redwoods.

Readers discuss the editorial board's claim that Congress should ignore the issue of telecom immunity. Laguna Niguel's Richard Brock says, "The Times misses the crucial issue animating the retroactive-immunity-for-telecoms debate: whether we are a nation of laws in times of peace and equally a nation of laws in times of war."

More than a few years ago, I filled a chair at a swanky dinner for William F. Buckley.

I was a young student from farm country in Ohio, a state where, as Mark Twain said of Cincinnati in particular, "Everything that happens comes there 10 years later than anywhere else." So the sartorially resplendent Mr. Buckley was a novelty and a wonder to my eyes, down to footgear I'd never seen before — those gentleman's embroidered velvet slippers you see advertised in "The New Yorker." For all I can remember, they had dollar signs sittched onto them in gold bullion thread.

Toward the end of the dinner, he rose to speak. His language was just as highly ornamented as his slippers, with its curlicues of vocabulary and metaphor, and, I listened to him transfixed as I mechanically ate my dessert — a slice of cake. My great-grandfather ate cake in a curious fashion that I had imitated from childhood, eating the cake part first and leaving the frosting for last, standing on the plate like the ruins of a chocolate fudge fort.

In our family this is perfectly normal, but at some point during his peroration, Buckley glanced down the table and saw my odd gateau fortifications. He paused, stared, arched one renowned eyebrow, lifted one thin Brahmin nostril into the slightest quiver — and resumed his remarks at the precise syllable where had left off.

Mortified, I hurriedly and furtively cleaned my plate. Buckley went to Yale but that evening, I was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo appears to have jumped through all the necessary hoops to make sure its pending deal with a Saudi university doesn't break any U.S. employment laws.

Cal Poly would design an engineering department for Jubail University College, which will ban women both from teaching and taking classes in the program. But Cal Poly professors, who apply to be part of the $5.9-million contract, can participate in the design task regardless of gender (or religion, etc.) In addition, Cal Poly spokespeople say it's their "understanding" that the California school will not be restricted in any way from sending whatever professors it chooses to be the co-directors who help launch the department "on the ground."

If it appears to be so legal, why does it flunk the smell test so badly? If Cal Poly has to be so careful to set up the circumstances under which women can and can't be discriminated against, that would seem to be enough of an indication that this is a bad venture, especially for a state college. Yes, the Saudis would be paying for their services (Cal Poly isn't doing this out of charity) and are expected to fund some nifty research projects in addition. But Cal Poly is a public institution of higher learning, a place with the highest sort of obligation to uphold noble standards of anti-discrimination. Jubail might be funding this particular contract, but Cal Poly wouldn't exist to sign a contract if it weren't for California taxpayers.

The editorial board doesn't always get its way, but it, along with local activists, scored a victory yesterday when the City Council declared the former residence of writer Charles Bukowski a historic landmark. The board opined back in September, "To pick one place to officially associate with the man would seem to limit his legacy. But it's still a good way for his hometown to honor him." (No such luck for John Fante.)

Check out the report [pdf] from the city's Cultural Heritage Commission explaining why, of Bukowski's many residences, the De Longpre place merited saving. Also see columnist Al Martinez's take on Bukowski's alleged Nazism (and Opinion L.A.'s), and Book Review editor David L. Ulin's not-so-kind critique of the latest Bukowski poetry collection.

And there's at least one other unofficial Bukowski memorial in town (even if the bedrock of that square, Craby Joe's, is gone).

Author T.C. Boyle remembers his first trip to the soon-to-be-shuttered Dutton's Books in Brentwood:

It was like stumbling into a Borgesian reality in which everything was made of books -- the walls, the floors, the ceilings, even the employees. Before I could think, there was Scott Wannberg, one of the true literary zealots of our time, exploding from behind a cordillera of books to greet me. Within minutes, I'd signed the well-represented editions of my own titles, which were on permanent display right alongside those of all the authors I most admired, and then Scott was piling my arms high with books I absolutely just had to read. He had a sixth sense, knowing exactly what I wanted and needed, and from then on, though it was a bit of a haul from Woodland Hills, Dutton's was my bookshop.

Columnist Tim Rutten asks who'll stop L.A.'s gangs. Deputy U.S. Atty. Gen. Craig Morford says crack criminals should be kept in prison. And Claremont Review of Books associate editor Joseph Tartakovsky explains why writers love to booze.

The editorial board chastises the Bush administration for lying to Britain about its rendition flights. The board also offers an update on the situation in Kenya after mediation fell apart, and compares Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's star-studded schools team with the LAUSD's vacancy-riddled roster.

Readers react to the Health Net scandal. San Luis Obispo's M.J. Johnson says, "Health Net's dropping of Patsy Bates in the midst of chemotherapy proves that wrong. The fact is, healthcare and the corporate profit motive are incompatible."

Last Thursday's primary debate in Texas between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was supposed to provide Clinton a chance to find a chink in Obama's armor. Unfortunately for Clinton, she never really succeeded. And maybe that's why her campaign seems to have grown more aggressive, tossing strategy out the door in favor of shooting blind and hoping something makes a dent. (So far, it's mostly resulted in friendly fire.)

The New York Times calls it a "five-point attack." Politico calls it "highly improvisational". A Clinton aide christened it the "kitchen sink" method. If you want to judge for yourself, here are some gems from the past few days:

The xerox zinger: In the debate, Clinton defended her accusation that Obama plagiarized Massachussetts Gov. Deval Patrick. "Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox," quipped the junior senator from the Empire State, who has never lifted a phrase in her life. That didn't go over so well with the audience, judging from all the boos.

Kiss and make up: Later in the same debate, Clinton practically sang an ode to Obama. "I am honored -- I am honored -- to be here with Barack Obama," she said, offering her hand to her opponent. Awww... But wait, there's more:

Whatever happens, we're going to be fine ... I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about.

A gesture of concession? Hardly. More likely it was a move to undo the damage wrought by the Xerox quote -- and to woo back key demographics, especially white women. That sugarcoated moment earned her a standing ovation.

Oh, oh, do the one of Barack, that's my favorite: The warm fuzzy feeling soon wore off, though -- instead of sticking to her "ready on day one" pitch at a Sunday rally in Rhode Island, Clinton did her best Obama impression (gesticulation included) for an appreciative crowd:

I could just stand up here and say ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified.’ The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.

Straight out of "Karl Rove's playbook": At a rally in Ohio, a supporter handed Clinton pamphlets the Obama campaign was distributing on her healthcare plans -- information she called misleading. "Shame on you, Barack Obama," she scolded afterward, brandishing the offending fliers at reporters. (Who wants to bet that supporter was prompted?)

My best constituents are black! In a more passive-aggressive show of strength, Clinton was the only candidate to appear at the annual State of the Black Union in Louisiana last weekend (Obama offered to send his wife Michelle instead). There's nothing better than courting a reluctant demographic and kicking your rival under the table at the same time.

What's in a turban? Obama staffers wigged out at a Drudge report that Clinton campaign members had been circulating photos of the Illinois senator donning local dress in Kenya. It's not like he's the first public figure to don the local garb -- check out Calvin Coolidge in a Native American headdress. The campaign took hours to deny any role in their distribution, but given the long leash Clinton has given to overenthusiastic staffers (up until she fires them) it's hard to take them at their word.

How many kitchen appliances do you think she's got left for tonight's showdown? Post your thoughts below.

The editorial board reacts to the Ralph Nader candidacy:

Hey, America, want to hear some secrets the mainstream media and political parties have been keeping from you? There's a war going on in Iraq; President Bush passed some tax cuts a while back that, combined with undisciplined spending, have contributed to a ballooning national debt; and apparently the price of oil has really started to degrade the nation's energy situation.

These are some of the obscure issues that Ralph Nader, announcing his presidential candidacy on Sunday, promised to drag out of the shadows. It's an interesting demonstration of why he'll have a tough time mounting even a message-sending campaign this year, but also of why he's a welcome addition to the race.

The board asks downtown loft-dwellers to be a bit more generous toward a new tenant -- mental health services for the homeless. And the board wonders why it hasn't occurred to Congress, the president, or any of the candidates that turning corn into ethanol during while global starvation increases isn't a good idea.

Yale University's Jacob S. Hacker says "mandates" aren't the most important universal healthcare issue, contrary to what the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama camps would have us believe. Columnist Jonah Goldberg explores Obama's ties to 1960s-era radicals, and what it says about the left. New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains the power of lost objects, and contributing editor Bill Stall reminds that Ronald Reagan raised taxes and Gov. Schwarzenegger should too.

Readers react to skeptic Michael Shermer's take on Scientology. L.A.'s Kendra Wiseman says, "Why is it that journalists repeatedly and insistently focus on the sensationalist aspect of the Xenu story when reporting about Scientology, ignoring child labor, physical assault, psychological abuse and other travesties that go on every day behind those walls?"

Have they thought this through?

If Mike Huckabee and a 20-year-old Colorado woman get their way, every fertilized egg would be a person.

There's all manner of astonishing possibilities here. For one thing, a fetus could have a Social Security number. We could have identity theft victims who aren't even born yet. For another, this must be retroactive — how could you discriminate against the post-born by denying them the same rights as the pre-born, whose lives would by law begin at conception? We'd all celebrate the Year of Two Birthdays. Our birthdates would change; we’d have to check different horoscopes. Twenty-year-olds could drink legally nine months sooner than they can now. Baby boomers could start collecting retirement and Medicare nine months sooner.

And women could test this amendment through the IRS and the federal 1040 form.

You could say you've missed a menstrual cycle — gosh, you must be pregnant! You get to claim a fetal child dependent — and the $1,000 tax credit — on your taxes. And then, within a matter of days, there might be a spontaneous miscarriage; that happens in about half of all early pregnancies, according to the NIH and U.S. National Library of Medicine. By the Colorado Human Life Amendment, that was still a full person, and you, the parent, would be entitled to a full tax deduction.

What are the feds going to do, go through your trash to look for the EPT test to see whether you're lying

Don't kid yourself — any government that could pass this amendment could go through your trash, and a whole lot worse, to enforce it.

Can anything or anybody replace Barack Obama in readers' hearts? Not this week: Despite a selection of hot topics from Scientology to gun control to torture to the Christian Oscars, and even a surprise return by perennial favorite Stonehenge, Sarah M. Miller's Obama Blowback drew more traffic than the rest of the Top 10 combined. Hats off to Obama for continuing to draw readers and voters, and to you for reading the L.A. Times Opinion pages.

1. Open letter to Barack Obama, by Sarah M. Miller
2. The invasion of America, by Andrew P. Napolitano
3. A leap beyond faith, by Michael Shermer
4. 'Prayers' just won't do, by Tim Rutten
5. Hola, Obama, by the editorial board
6. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
7. Peter Principle of award shows, by Joel Stein
8. Political surge in Iraq, by the editorial board
9. Fidel's slow fade, by Jon Lee Anderson
10. Shame, Sen. McCain, by the editorial board

KUSC ran a richest-classical-composer feature a few days ago, which drew its top-10 list from a 2005 survey by a U.K. radio station. It's unlikely the numbers — which were apparently calculated in adjusted currencies — have changed much since then, so here's the list:

1. George Gershwin
2. Johann Strauss II
3. Giuseppe Verdi
4. Gioachino Rossini
5. George Frideric Handel
6. Joseph Haydn
7. Sergei Rachmaninoff
8. Giacomo Puccini
9. Niccolò Paganini
10. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 

Why is this interesting (to me at any rate)? Because longhair music is pretty much universally recognized as an art form that can't compete in an open market and must be supported through royal or (these days) public patronage. Yet this list is remarkable for the lack of patronage its members enjoyed. All but two of the composers on the list date to the industrial revolution or afterward, and the two who came earlier than that — Haydn and Handel — did plenty of lucrative for-profit work in Britain, which boasted the most liberal economy in Europe. Verdi, Rossini and Puccini were all piece-work producers who were less interested in pleasing the royal ear than in filling up the house with paying customers. Paganini and "Waltz King" Strauss were expert self-promoters and brand builders, Rachmaninoff made much of his fortune on recordings and performances, and Gershwin made it to the top of the list strictly by producing music for a large popular audience. I'm not sure he ever got a dime of public support.

By comparison, Richard Wagner, another 19th-century rock star with a long list of patrons and supporters including a king who built the composer his own mansion and theme-park/mini-city, didn't make the list. That's a special irony given how massively popular Wagner was and still is, not just in opera houses but throughout the popular culture.

You could counter that money earned is no indication of musical achievement, and that wastrels like Wolfgang Mozart and Franz Schubert, or humble workers like J.S. Bach, would top a list of actual composing value. True enough, but hardship and poverty are the default positions of human existence. It's success that's the unusual thing, and the numbers here indicate success becomes a little more likely in a profit-centered environment. Interestingly, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff, who both died before the middle of the 20th century, are the most recent names on the list. Audience indifference has since encouraged classical composers to avoid the uncertainty of the marketplace; but maybe all those composers with academic sits would have been better off trying to make a bigger buck. Maybe classical music needs more market discipline, not less.

How well does the new study on religious identity in the United States really describe us? At first glance, you'd think we're a bunch of liturgical wobblers, unable to stick with a conviction. Forty-four percent have either switched religious affiliations, or dropped them.

But the survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life counts movements within Christianity a switch. Say, for example, a Baptist joins a nondenominational Christian church, this is a change in religion, according to the survey. Once that kind of switch is removed from the survey, the numbers drop way down.

It seems quite possible that these definitions of one church or another meant more in the world of formal structures than they ever meant to Americans. It hardly means a wholesale conversion.

Worth noting: Californians are more likely to be unaffiliated with any religion than the nation as a whole.

South Africa has lifted its moratorium on killing elephants. The outcry against the move has been predictable, and to be sure, there's something visceral about the thought of sharpshooters killing an animal quite this grand from a helicopter. Not only that, elephants have such a tightly knit social structure that the sharpshooters would have to take out entire herds, rather than individuals.

Before anyone leaps too quickly on the calls for boycotting South African tourism, it's worth noting that this is a complex issue even from an environmentalist's point of view. The government oversaw a moratorium that successfully raised the country's elephant population to about 18,000. The population in Kruger National Park alone rose by 50%, to 12,000 elephants. Animals this massive have a tremendous effect on the environment; wildlife managers are concerned for biodiversity, since the elephants can out-compete many other species. The country is gradually merging Kruger with reserves in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to give the giant mammals a greater range, reducing their impact in South Africa. And wildlife managers would have to show that the herds were causing major damage, and that culling was the only way to reduce that damage. From South Africa's point of view, elephants are getting to be a bit like our white-tailed deer.

Of course, that assumes the government actually lives up to the standards it's talking about.

Given information in recent years about elephant welfare in zoos and circuses, putting more elephants in captivity would be a big mistake. At least South Africa says it wouldn't allow any of that.

The elephant situation brings to mind current concerns over the gray wolf. Once gravely endangered, the wolf was re-introduced to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, with enormously success. With 1,500 wolves in the region, the U.S. now proposes delisting the wolf. And its rules for what the three states would have to do to maintain healthy populations are much less stringent than what South Africa proposes for the elephants. Even before the wolves are delisted, the government wants to loosen up its rules on hunting the wolves. Hunters have been complaining that the wolves deplete the populations of deer and elk that they, the hunters, would like to deplete instead. They want to hunt wolves in order to have more elk to hunt. Seems like government wildlife managers have forgotten the idea of natural balance, in which animal predators keep down the populations of other animals that otherwise become a nuisance. Nature doesn't exist solely to give hunters something to do. If these ideas go forward, do we add this country to our travel-boycott list?

Animal welfare groups might be right. There might be no humane way to kill the elephants. But is there a humane way to keep them alive?

Columnist Gregory Rodriguez finds out who's behind the hit blog, Stuff White People Like:

Six weeks ago, 29-year-old Culver City Internet copy writer Christian Lander started a blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, on a whim, thinking he'd poke fun at himself and fellow white people....

Lander, who arrived in L.A. from Toronto 2 1/2 years ago, came up with the idea for the blog after talking to a Filipino friend about how much they both liked the HBO police drama "The Wire." For some reason he's already forgotten, they both wished that more white people watched the show. Which got him thinking: What exactly do white people like?

Author Christopher D. Cook says mass recalls show we're all playing meat roulette. Writer Jim Henley argues that an $8 million program isn't enough to get Americans reading again. Yale Law School student Ronan Farrow explores a growing conflict in Ethiopia, where the army is attacking its people.

The editorial board launches a series on water in Los Angeles and around the world:

The early history of Los Angeles was defined by its struggle to get water wherever, and whenever, it could. William Mulholland and his colleagues did such a good job of securi