Tomorrow's May Day march may not draw record-setting numbers, but it could see the first large-scale deployment of the LAPD's newest psi-ops gadgets. Captain Dennis H. Kato of the 77th Street Area explains that the police will be keeping in multilingual communication with crowds through the department's new Critical Incident Utility Vehicle, or "Polaris," a sort of souped-up golf cart that will patrol the streets dispensing helpful phrases.

Even more intriguing is the handheld "Phraselator," which will provide English, Spanish, Korean and Mandarin broadcasts of more than 100 useful phrases, with a range of about half a mile. That includes not only old favorites like "Hands behind your back" but some of the following:

Welcome to this event. We are here to help facilitate your First Amendment rights.

If you need medical attention see a police officer.

Please stay up on sidewalk. Please stay off streets.

Please stay out of the trees.

Please do not climb on the poles.

You are on private property. Please move back into this area.

All the phraselators are in the field at the moment, but I'm hoping to get a complete list of the phrases after the march is over. Meanwhile, if you really start trouble tomorrow you may get to hear the full Dispersal Order (text available on Page 53 of this PDF), which combines the urgent, the ominous and the legalistic in a frothy brew of police power. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Further reading:

"You're under arrest you have the right to make one phone call or remain silent so you better shut up," arguably the worst Miles Davis album of all time.

Photos and information about the universal translator from the Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki.

Otherwise, I'd be undergoing the trauma associated with discovering that your man-of-steel childhood hero is really a blathering hack. First, there was his light-hearted TV spot endorsing Republican Mike Huckabee that played on Norris' martial arts cred. Now we have his most recent rambling column on illegal immigration, which reads as if Norris were a guest on Art Bell's paranormal-themed radio show (for a real treat, skip down to his assertion that the federal government's shoot-to-kill security for Area 51 provides a decent model for patrolling the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border).

Finding an excerpt from Norris' column that best encapsulates the paranoid wing of the restrictionist movement is a tall order, as every paragraph is a pretty good candidate. This one, however, needs no summary:

Unfortunately, illegal transport of immigrants, terrorists and other contraband is only going to worsen, especially with the possible creation of a North American Union (with Canada and Mexico) and the so-called NAFTA Superhighways. Unless of course we stop it! (How is it that we can militarily overthrow a government like Iraq, yet we can't militarily keep illegalities from crossing our borders?) As Mike Huckabee still says, "If the government can't track illegals, then let's outsource the job to UPS or Fed-Ex."

You couldn't write a better caricature of the anti-immigrant Chicken Littles. Of course, Norris is dead serious.

Does Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo have too many non-lawyers on staff? The question is at the center of a verbal and email budget squabble between the city attorney and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office, which is backing the mayor's proposed 60-person reduction of Delgadillo's non-attorney staff of 497 (the office has 556 lawyers). That amounts to a budget reduction of close to 5%.

After releasing his proposed 2008-09 budget last week, Villaraigosa visited the Times Editorial Board and had this to say about Delgadillo's office:

By the way, just so you know, they're about a 1,000-member department; only 500 are lawyers. What we're proposing to cut is administrative staff. They have administrative staff ratios, you do the research on it to confirm it, but as I understand it, they have administrative staff ratios that are greater than Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, O'Melveny & Myers, and some of the biggest law firms, which are basically three lawyers for each administrative position.

Well — not quite. Not even close, actually. Law firms have become notoriously tight with what many call proprietary figures, but several of the largest firms confirmed that the numbers published in an annual survey by the Downtown News are just about right. If you take a look at the survey and do a little simple math, you'll see that the ratio generally is the other way around: most large firms have at least twice as many non-lawyer staff as attorneys.

Delgadillo's office jumped on the Downtown News figures and argued that in fact, he's quite thinly staffed in comparison with law firms in the private sector. On Monday, Delgadillo's budget chief, Jennifer Roth Krieger, sent an email to the mayor's budget chief, Sally Choi, asking for the "source data for the information your office has put out (which shows that our office has a higher percentage of support staff than law offices in the public or private sector)." Choi responded by email that the only information the mayor's office put out was the 1:1 ratio of attorneys to non-attorneys; both emails were attached to a letter to the City Council's budget committee from top Delgadillo deputy Richard H. Llewellyn Jr.

Time to pull over and figure out what "staff" means. Law firms have in fact moved to a ratio of about three lawyers for every secretary, in part because lawyers with computers on their desks now do much of the document drafting that they used to dictate, and that their secretaries used to type up back, say, in the 1980s. But the mayor wasn't talking about the city attorney's lawyer-secretary ratio, but rather lawyers to staff.

Private firms have bulked up on paralegals, tech support, billing, marketing, and even complementary professional services like accounting. They are all administrative or support staff, and most large L.A. firms have two or three such non-lawyers for every lawyer. Delgadillo may not need a lot of that work done in-house, but he does need people to back up misdemeanor prosecutions and other functions that private firms don't have to worry about.

The comparison of city attorney and private firm staffing figures actually tells us very little, except that Villaraigosa and Delgadillo are spoiling for a fight. The city attorney told the budget committee that his staff is needed to make the mayor's LAPD build-up work. "But, without prosecution and resulting jail time," Delgadillo said, "an arrest is meaningless."

To interpret: Moving money from the city attorney to the police doesn't accomplish much.

Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo said the staffing ratio was a "tangential issue." "We actually have to make real cuts to save real dollars," Szabo said.

By the way, here's something else Villaraigosa told the Editorial Board about Delgadillo:

"One council member said that if he doesn't agree to a 5% cut, maybe we ought to make it 10."

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is a politician after LAPD Chief William Bratton's heart. The  governor vetoed a bill Monday that would have required police departments to, as the NY Times put it, "join the federal immigration posse." The governor's merciless pen has received mixed reviews, but it's no surprise. The two-term governor holds her state's record for most vetoes issued.

As noted here a few weeks ago, the bill had an interesting parallel to Los Angeles' current drama over Special Order 40, the LAPD directive that bars officers from stopping people "for the sole purpose of asking about immigration status." The order came under fire when high school football star Jamiel Shaw was gunned down, allegedly by an illegal immigrant, but Bratton has defended the policy to the hilt — and rightly so, according to The Times:

The order was adopted in the late 1970s by then-Chief Daryl F. Gates, hardly a soft-on-crime liberal, who knew that the LAPD would be more effective if undocumented witnesses and victims felt free to speak with officers without fearing deportation.... It was good policy then and remains so today.

The governor didn't actually pull the "crimefighting" card herself when she vetoed it:

Napolitano, a Democrat, had been urged to reject House Bill 2807 by Latino activists who feared the measure would lead to racial profiling and further alienate the Latino community. But Napolitano cited neither of those issues in vetoing the measure. Instead, she relied on fiscal concerns, noting a provision that would have required the state to pay for the training of local officers in immigration enforcement if federal funds were unavailable.

In fact, Napolitano has been very clear that this ain't no sanctuary state. In an Op-Ed for the Washington Post urging Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform last year, she wrote:

Don't label me soft on illegal immigration. As a U.S. attorney (predating the Gonzales Justice Department), I supervised the prosecution of more than 6,000 immigration felonies. I govern a state where, in 2005, there were 550,000 apprehensions of illegal immigrants. I declared a state of emergency at our border that year, and I was the first governor in the nation to call for assistance from the National Guard.

Okay then. In any case, go Janet!

Time to turn the page on April, which means no more gazing at the standout photo in this year's Tom LaBonge calendar.

You know LaBonge, of course, the Los Angeles city councilman for portions of Hollywood, North Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Hancock Park and Toluca Lake. And Griffith Park, of course, where the councilman took this photo of the Observatory, with downtown's two tallest buildings poking through the low cloud layer. LaBonge is a veritable Mr. Los Angeles, so he would probably bristle at this notion, but you could almost mistake this photo for something in San Francisco.

Now get ready to flip your Tom LaBonge calendars to May, where you will be greeted with a very different photo of Griffith Park — one with flames from last year's fire climbing the ridge and consuming Dante's View.

The June 3 stealth primary actually starts Monday. That's when voters can pick up (and mark and send in) vote-by-mail ballots. They're often are still called "absentee" ballots, but unlike the old days, you can take care of business early without having to pretend that you won't be around on election day. True "absentee" ballots, for people who can't vote in the regular mail voting because of military or other commitments, began April 4. So hurry up.

Click here to apply for a mail-in ballot if you live in Los Angeles County. Of course, there are other ways to go; you could apply at the registrar-recorder's office in Norwalk, or you could send in one of those applications that you may get in the mail this weekend, courtesy of one of the campaigns with skin in the game.

Campaigns are counting on mailbox voters and will try to reach them with glossy slate cards and brochures starting -- well, it's every campaign's closely-guarded secret, but probably Saturday, with big spurts planned for every weekend in May. Very few people are expected to actually go to the polls next month, so the mailbox is where the action is -- and now is the time the action starts.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. This election was going to be the presidential primary, when a record number of Californians would go to the voting booth to very likely have the final say in whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee. But last year the Legislature decided to strip out the presidential portion of this election and put it on the earlier February 5 ballot -- so our vote would have more impact. Ironic, huh?

The rest of the June ballot goes forward: Proposition 98 to curb eminent domain and phase out rent control, Proposition 99 just on eminent domain, party primaries for state Assembly and Senate, and in Los Angeles county, elections for Superior Court judge, district attorney and county supervisor.

Click here to see the Times endorsements for Superior Court, and here to see our endorsements for district attorney and two of the three supervisorial contests. Endorsements in the other races are coming soon, and of course you shouldn't even dream of voting early until you get the benefit of our guidance. But suit yourself.

And click here for the latest on the June 3 election, the November 4 election, and every election in between.

...I fell in love with a Mexican girl right before she got busted coming to work in a citrus farm.

From the Star of the Southwest comes an interesting comment on immigration reform from the area's chief Border Patrol agent. Victor M. Manjarrez Jr. tells the Associated Press that the Patrol is being forced to divert attention from catching criminals and potential terrorists to the pursuit of people who are jumping the border in search of work:

"Most of these people are economic migrants but we have to deal with them between the ports of entry because we have not, in terms of a legislative fix, determined what we do with these people," Manjarrez said. "I think it's pretty obvious that the country has a need for economic migrants. To what degree, I don't know. That's for the country to decide and for the politicians to decide."

Full story here.  Manjarrez estimates that of the 75,000 border crossers arrested in the 268-mile El Paso sector in 2007, at least 87% were coming for work. Without this "clutter," he says, agents would be better able to focus on securing the border against actual threats.

This was essentially my point a few years back, when I made the case for visaless exchange among the NAFTA countries. That's a bit more ambitious than the kind of "comprehensive reform" that usually amounts to issuing more guest worker visas. But I don't see the downside in ensuring that all non-criminal traffic into the United States (and out of it: read the story for details about how historically visaless entry has actually encouraged out-migration) is routed through legitimate border crossings where the feds can know who's who.

If you do know of a downside, the comments are wide open.

Tim Rutten marvels at the questionable artistic value of "Grand Theft Auto IV," and writer Gary Ferguson laments the senseless violence that hunters are unleashing on the gray wolf, just released from the endangered species list. New York University professor Stephen F. Cohen says hold the baloney: It's the U.S., not Russia, that's responsible for the heightened tensions of late:

During the last eight years, Putin's foreign policies have been largely a reaction to Washington's winner-take-all approach to Moscow since the early 1990s, which resulted from a revised U.S. view of how the Cold War ended. In that new, triumphalist narrative, the U.S. won the 40-year conflict and post-Soviet Russia was a defeated nation analogous to post-World War II Germany and Japan -- a nation without full sovereignty at home or autonomous national interests abroad.

The editorial board also worries about the gray wolf, and calls on Mexico's politicians not to fuel the debate over the future of the nation's oil industry with hot air. The board also gives Obama a thumbs-up for not falling victim to easy political gimmicks as gas prices rise:

High gas prices can prompt political hysteria in the best of times, but when they soar during an election year, the fumes rising from candidate stump speeches can make a person sick. Of the three candidates and the president they're out to replace, only one is telling the truth about oil -- and he may suffer for his political courage.

Readers rip into an editorial commending McCain for not indulging in political pandering. Fred Sokolow asks:

In your editorial, you characterize McCain as boldly preaching an unpopular message, but it's the same old, tired, free-market deregulation dogma.

There's nothing contrarian about it -- it's the Bush line, which has put America in the terrible spot we're in today.

Won't you begin to assess this guy for what he really is? He's no maverick; he's a throwback, and more of the same poison that's been killing America (and Americans, and Iraqis) for seven years.

...to the techorati tag below:

Technorati Profile

Follow the link if you want to be truly bored. This is just to get our technorati profile up and running...

... and soars on hot air from the blogosphere.

After more than a month of studied silence, the reverend has stepped into the public spotlight to defend his controversial remarks on race in America -- and make veiled criticisms of Sen. Barack Obama in the process. On Obama's repudiation of his incendiary statements, the minister had this to say: "He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician."

Obama reacted angrily to his former pastor's comments, calling them "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth." Jonah Goldberg gleefully celebrated Wright's coming-out as "every bit as radical as his detractors claimed."

They're not the only ones with choice words about Wright's recent performances:

The Times' own Top of the Ticket blog asks, "Was Jeremiah Wright's speech set up by a Clinton supporter?"

... we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright's speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at ... who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds ... an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Jeffrey Weiss over at the Dallas Morning News' religion blog wonders why pundits can't take Obama out of the equation:

After the NAACP speech, the all-news networks talking heads were mostly falling all over themselves to do political analysis about whether or not the speech would help or hurt Barack Obama, rather than attempt even a moment of thought about the meaning of what Wright actually said.

The Caucus over at the NY Times does a roundup of its own, observing:

Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding Barack Obama and his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but they certainly keep writing about it.

They also say they’re sick of the expression “thrown under the bus,” but they keep using it.

For some Wright-Obama commentary with both local and international flavor, Ha'aretz's Shmuel Rosner invokes the "Bradley Effect," but also snarks at the minister's comments about Israel:

At moments he came off as mocking and somewhat vain, but made an effort to soften the hardliner perception his speech had left behind. He was also asked about his views on Israel. "Apartheid?" he asked, adding that Jimmy Carter used this term, not him.

Israel, Wright said, "has a right to exist". His only desire was that the Israelis and Palestinians live in peace. He made no reference to the sermon in which he connected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the September 11th attacks, but he did make sure to emphasize his "Jewish friends". As it turns out, Jeremiah Wright also has a couple of those.

Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post compares Wright's position to one of the 2000 presidential election's most beleaguered political players:

Wright has no obligation to put Obama's interest above his own; dragged through the mud for news, the pastor has an opening to make people listen to him and hear the full context of his theology. Those who today profess themselves appalled that Wright would throw Obama under the bus miss the point that Wright does not think of himself as having any allegiance to Obama or to his election, just as Ralph Nader had no any allegiance to the Democratic Party making it hard to understand why 2004 was "a betrayal."

Wonkette agrees, in an offbeat sort of way:

He's blowing open the racial politics that Obama wants to close and claiming that Obama is insincere when he rejects Wright's "extreme sermons"; he's trying to balance a deserved self-defense with the collateral damage that that brings on Obama. He has an ego. Most importantly, he's just some old preacher and not Obama's surrogate father. He can say whatever he wants and Barry will just have to deal with it. Individual people have a right to defend themselves, and politicians have a right to disown them. That's all, goodnight.

While Sen. McCain had the plug pulled on the North Carolina Republican Party's ad highlighting the Obama-Wright connection, it seems the state party leaders will be getting the airtime they wanted for free.

Tomorrow Thursday is May Day, which, depending on your leanings, is a pagan pole-dancing holiday, a day of labor solidarity against The Man, a day off for immigrants and their supporters, or some combination of all three, a grab-bag of un-American activity. (To the latter group, Happy Law Day!)

The last two May Days have been major events in Los Angeles. May 1, 2006 was the Great American Boycott, when legal and illegal immigrants were encouraged to stay away from businesses and schools. The editorial board raised some eyebrows by leaving blank the space where a third editorial would usually run on the page, printing only the words "Pass comprehensive immigration reform now." One million people were said to have participated, and almost all marches were peaceful and law-abiding.

Fast-forward to 2007: no immigration reform, and quite a bit of violence from the Los Angeles Police Department against protesters at MacArthur Park, some of whom threw sticks and water bottles at officers. The boards praised most marchers for a May Day well spent...

Now the Interior Department has to make up its mind by May 15 whether to list the polar bear as threatened. It's been putting off this decision for months after its original deadline, and a federal judge finally ordered it to move forward, even if it does want to sell a bunch of oil leases in prime polar-bear habitat.

That's not to say this is an easy decision. Polar bear populations have been growing in recent decades. These aren't condors, folks. The question isn't the bear's numbers, but whether global warming is melting the ice floes that polar bears depend on for much of their lives. And that opens up a big can of worms. Like, does buying a Hummer contribute to the bear's decline--if it is declining? Not bad questions for us to start asking.

But Interior has been looking at this for years. The decision isn't going to get any easier, unless rising ocean levels suddenly have water sloshing into DC.

The Center for Immigration Studies' Norman Matloff comes up with a new measure that, he says, indicates H-1B visa recipients are not in fact the best and the brightest that proponents sometimes suggest they are.

I don't know how persuasive you'll find Matloff's "talent measure," or TM value. I think it fails to prove Matloff's main conclusions: that H-1B holders overall are not noticeably more skilled than native workers and that within the universe of H-1B holders, Western Europeans are more skilled than Asians. But the TM value has one attraction: It uses a marketplace value for making its assessment.

The value is calculated by comparing the ratio of the worker's salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. So if you've got a TM value of 1.0 you're making essentially the average salary for the job you're doing. Since employers can't (officially at least) pay visa holders less than the stated prevailing wage, nobody should show a TM value of less than 1.0. On the other hand, if you're a gifted worker you should have a higher TM value because you can command a higher salary.

The shocking conclusion? One multiplied by one equals one:

• The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.
• The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.
• Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.
• Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that “Johnnie can’t do math” in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc" can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

The breakouts by company and nation of origin are interesting, but I'm not sure they prove anything other than that Microsoft appears to be a generous employer and that immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command higher salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus a little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German brings language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and technological strength, would be worth paying a premium for. 

Or maybe language skills have nothing to do with it, and there are some other variables at work. (For example, suppose most or all of the people in the U.S. doing a particular job are Indian H-1B holders: Then a TM value of 1.0 could just mean that they're all above average, Lake Woebegone-style.) In any event, I don't see how these numbers refute the claims of the hypothetical industrialist or lily-livered immigration supporter who thinks the best person to judge what skills he or she needs is the person doing the hiring.

Prove that I just don't get it or am being intentionally obtuse by reading the whole article right here.

Update: Matloff responds. Good stuff in the comments too...

UC Santa Barbara professor Brian Fagan warns that our future survival in a drier world depends on our ability to adapt to our environment, and writer Francis Fukuyama blames the Chinese government's weakness, not strength, for domestic human rights violations. Economist Korinna Horta and attorney Delphine Djiraibe argue that Darfur cannot be saved without fixing Chad first, and Jonah Goldberg thanks the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for revealing how radical he really is:

Asked whether he stood by his assertion that the U.S. government created HIV as part of a genocidal program to wipe out the black race, Wright mostly dodged but ultimately offered this nondenial denial: "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." He also offered a zesty defense of Louis Farrakhan -- "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century" -- and dismissed criticism of Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.

To cap it off, Wright threw Obama under the bus. First, the pastor explained, Obama himself had taken Wright out of context. Moreover, Obama neither denounced nor distanced himself from Wright. And, besides, anything that Obama says on such matters is just stuff "politicians say." They "do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls." So much for Obama's new politics.

The editorial board warns parents that avoiding vaccinations for fear of autism could result in a future epidemic, and gives a reluctant green light to MTA's decision to turn some carpool lanes into toll lanes. The board also condemns the Supreme Court for upholding Indiana's voter ID law:

Indiana has a right to safeguard the integrity of its elections, but its identification requirement imposes sufficiently burdensome rules that it raises the question of whether the state is actually trying to discourage certain types of people -- the poor, the elderly, the infirm -- from exercising their right to vote. It's one thing to deter fraud; it's another to deter voting, particularly by certain classes of voters.

Readers react to the Dodger Stadium makeover. Ken Chane writes:

The Dodgers' new stadium plan sounds and looks wonderful. But before it attracts larger crowds, the current chaotic parking situation should be corrected. Management keeps touting the "wonderful fan experience." No matter how great it may be, it dissipates quickly when it's time to go home.

There's an information vacuum on autism, and where there's a vacuum, people tend to rush in with theories, wild or otherwise. No one knows why the numbers of autism cases have risen over the past two decades, and in the absence of well-researched theories, there's been plenty of space for the vaccination notion to grab attention.

But another thing that happened during this big increase was that diagnosis changed, as well as the definition of autism, which was expanded in ways that were certain to make the syndrome more "common." For example, in some of the most severe autism cases, there's also mental retardation. A generation ago, doctors would diagnose the retardation and ascribe social and communication problems to that. Doctors and researchers know this is a big part of the picture, but they suspect it's not the only one.

These days, there's also some purposeful misdiagnosis that tends to boost autism's numbers: Parents of children with severe developmental problems seek an autism diagnosis because, as a recognized disability, it's a ticket to social services. There's no doubt the kids need the services, but there are some skewed numbers here. One researcher said that when his institute re-examined children who had been diagnosed with autism, they found the condition had been overdiagnosed about 15% of the time.

It's also unclear whether autism rates have continued to climb since 2000, but they're at least holding steady.

Immigration reform may be down and out, but it doesn't mean Congress can't agree on important immigration issues — such as ensuring that supermodels, singers and athletes have an easier time getting into the United States. From Sunday's L.A. Times:

Even in polarized Washington, Democrats and Republicans can appreciate immigrants who throw a fast pitch, have a beautiful face or sing a catchy song. Bills to make it easier for athletes, fashion models and performers, such as British singer Amy Winehouse, to work in the United States have enthusiastic support, even from some of the most hard-nosed immigration critics.

Yep, this is what immigration legislation has been reduced to in the name of progress. Not that I'm complaining — a little reform is better than none at all, right?

The legislation does deal with a more pressing problem: Many models have to apply for an H-1B skilled worker visa. This further limits the number of those priceless documents available to tech companies, which face a desperate annual scramble for international talent. But there is a solution in the making:

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) proposed a solution that could address Silicon Valley's hunger for skilled foreigners and benefit his city's fashion industry. His bill would create a new category for those models, probably limited to about 1,000 five-year visas, and would free up H-1B visas for more engineers. 

Ranking subcommittee member Lamar Smith (R-Texas) had something to say about that:

He said he could picture Weiner (who is single, handsome and 43) "in a posh downtown New York City hotel celebrating the passage of this bill surrounded by hundreds of energized, wildly ecstatic fashion models. And you know for a fact he's going to have an annual celebration. It's almost too much to bear."

Smith paused. "But not too much to oppose the bill."

Author Stefan Merrill Block remembers his home-school days:

When I tell people that I was home schooled, I frequently encounter an amalgam of awe, pity and curiosity. I can see the false images materializing behind their eyes -- a childhood spent idling in front of the TV in my pajamas, or spent subject to the fanciful whims of a flighty New Age mom, or spent imprisoned by my parents' ignorance and severity.

These myths have alternately amused and annoyed me, but now it seems they threaten the very survival of home schooling in California.

Hampshire College's Michael T. Klare says China and the U.S. would be wise to cooperate rather than compete for oil as the market heats up. And Bryan A. Liang of the San Diego Center for Patient Safety notes that drugs have to stay safe particularly as they grow more complex.

The Times endorses for district attorney and the Board of Supervisors, and asks the presidential candidates 10 serious questions.

Readers discuss proposals for converting carpool lanes into congestion-priced toll lanes. L.A.'s Samuel Gould says, "Charging anyone using special lanes at rush hour regardless of occupancy will merely give advantages to those who can pay and exclude those who cannot, selling convenience to the affluent."

The Mars candy company is gobbling up Wrigley, the chewing gum empire.

The heirs of tycoon William Wrigley Jr. no longer own some of the landmarks that bear his name, like the Wrigley Mansion in Pasadena, now headquarters of the Tournament of Roses, the New Year's festival.

Nor does the Wrigley firm still own the Chicago Cubs; the Tribune Co. has the pink slip to the team. If Wrigley still did, we might see a new name getting painted on the Cubs' home stadium. "Mars Field'' -- which would explain a lot.

Stupidity, Manichaeism, self-loathing, pedantry and self-absorption: You folks must have been feeling some serious mid-spring irritation this week, because those were the themes in the five Opinion stories you liked the most. And the second five, a wretched den of dupes, liars and weasels brightened by our 40-on-40 All Stars, looked only slightly better. Whatever you're drinking, I'll have something else.

Thanks for reading Opinion L.A. and we hope you're feeling better next week:

1. Still with stupid? by Meghan Daum
2. Meet John Dubya McCain, J. Peter Scoblic
3. Sleeping with the enemy, by Arianna Huffington
4. Men who explain things, by Rebecca Solnit
5. Talking to ourselves, Susan Jacoby
6. My winning strategy, by Rosa Brooks
7. The GOP's bait-and-switch tax strategy, by Bruce Bartlett
8. Gods and earthlings, by Richard Dawkins
9. Pennsylvania's bitter bloc, by Shawn Hubler 
10. 40 on 40, by various 

According to a New York Times article, “Pants May be Touted as the Coming Thing, but Women Seem to Prefer Dresses.” Included as evidence? Quotes from the 1941 classic “Citizen Kane” and allusions to a decades-old short story, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”

If you assumed the piece to be an old nugget from the archives trotted out for amusement (like we do here, on occasion), you’d be wrong. Here’s a choice bit:

I am not eager for women to become “a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.” Yes, gender play is fun, and trousers are a useful wardrobe default for the woman in business. But unless you are Thomas McGuane and find nothing sexier than a woman with crow’s feet, tight Wranglers and suede chaps, you will have to concede that, for flattering a woman’s body, nothing is quite like a dress.

The sentiment alone—men like women in dresses—is too obvious to be objectionable. That the story tries to couch the sentiment as advice for women is plain silly, as is the idea that New York City women would wear summer dresses in winter, or the dreaded “trousers” in summer (we in L.A. can pull both off a bit more easily).

But there are some objectionable things here: the peeping-tom creepiness; the weirdly old-fashioned gender ideals; the patronizing slide-show title, “Enjoy Being a Girl”; the clear and cruelly-put preference of the writer for the young and full-figured; and the dismissal of successful women in the fashion industry. (How dare those power-grubbing witches anoint pants trendy and ruin it for the men!)

Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore explains why China sees Tibet quite differently than the West:

Chinese history records dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. China's control has ebbed and flowed -- but this is equally true in many other parts of China. Central control by the capital has never been consistent, shifting with the strength of the central government. But this much is certain: China has been in control of most of its territories longer than some Western nations have existed.

More important, the Chinese recall that the latest efforts to separate Tibet from China came as recently as the 1940s and 1950s, when British and U.S. agents were seen to be encouraging Tibetan independence while the new People's Republic was still weak.... Virtually no Chinese believe that Western governments have a strictly moral interest in Tibet. They are convinced that their efforts are only the latest efforts to dismember or derail China.

Author Carolyn See navigates Santa Monica sans car, and columnist Joel Stein finds a place for thoughts that aren't even well-formed enough to be blogposts: the tumble and the twitter.

The editorial board encourages Congress to extend unemployment benefits, urges California to fight proposed federal fuel emissions rules, and says there are small signs of a thaw in Turkey-Armenia relations.

Readers discuss McCain's disability pension and whether it raises questions about his ability to serve as president. L.A.'s Anthony Filosa says, "I'd like to remind The Times that Franklin D. Roosevelt's significant disabilities did not affect his ability to successfully lead this country through some of our most tumultuous times and be remembered as one of our greatest presidents."

And Long Beach's Barbara Hubbs hopes that "McCain is donating that money to the disabled veterans who were not able to put their lives back together."

President Bush has done it again -- commemorate the genocide of around 1.5 million Armenians nearly a century ago without offending the Turkish government by avoiding the word "genocide." Click here to read Bush's complete statement; here's an excerpt:

On this day of remembrance, we honor the memory of the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. I join the Armenian community in America and around the world in commemorating this tragedy and mourning the loss of so many innocent lives.

Bush later implores Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations and praises those who "support joint efforts for an open examination of the past in search of a shared understanding of these tragic events." But an overwhelming consensus of historians already has a clear understanding of what went on between 1915 and 1917: that the mass deportations, forced marches with no food or water and senseless massacres were nothing more than a genocide of Armenians by the Young Turk government of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Bush's call for an "open examination" is nothing more than a nod to Turkey's rigid (and incorrect) position that whether the events of 1915 - 1917 constitute a genocide is an open question. It isn't.

Matt Welch, a former editor at The Times' opinion pages, wrote about Bush's mealy-mouthed genocide statements last year; click here to read his Op-Ed.

Not Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Both came out in favor of a congressional bill that would make it easier for victims of pay disparity to charge discrimination in court. That's what Lilly Ledbetter tried to do, but the Supreme Court ruled against her, adhering closely to a law that says discrimination must be reported within 180 days of its occurrence. As the editorial board wrote earlier this week:

As a narrow reading of the law, that's all well and good. But as a prescription for redressing harm -- the intent, after all, of anti-discrimination law -- the court's approach is impossibly binding. Most cases of discrimination, including the one before the court in Ledbetter, are difficult to discern at once, for the simple reason that most discrimination is covert. In the case of Lilly Ledbetter, a jury found that her employers had unfairly paid her less than male colleagues over a period of years.

Here's Obama's statement, and a video of Clinton on the Senate floor. The two returned to the capital to make remarks, uniting briefly on the issue before going back to trading blows in Indiana. (CQPolitics' David Nather has the play-by-play of their close encounter.)

For the record, the bill didn't get enough votes to avoid a filibuster. And John McCain joined most of his fellow Republicans in opposing it.

And as an aside, doesn't "Lilly Ledbetter" have a great Rosie-the-Riveter-ish ring? To hear more from the woman herself, read The American Prospect interview.

Right-wing Dutch politicos-turned-producers watch out — free speech cuts both ways. From NPR:

A video portraying aggressive behavior by Christians matched with verses from the Bible is gaining traction on the Internet.

Raed al-Saeed, a young businessman from Saudi Arabia, is the creator of Schism, a six-minute video response to Fitna — a short film released last month that portrays Islam as a violent, fascist-like ideology. "Fitna" provoked anger in many parts of the Muslim world.

In case you don't remember, Fitna (a word meaning "ordeal" in Arabic) overlaid verses from the Quran over acts of violence — suicide bombings, beheadings, planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It was produced by Geert Wilder, a Dutch politician who happens to be unabashedly anti-Islam. Some found the film to be an act of bravery — Jonah Goldberg compared it to the Darwin fish — while Dutch Muslims greeted it with disgusted silence.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a response to Wilder's celluloid screed — the point being that you can find nasty bits in many different religious texts, including Christianity. Unfortunately, Saeed didn't find footage of many nasty people saying those verses out loud — and his substitution of the political for the religious (such as images of the bombing of Baghdad and the beating of prisoners) detracts from his point.

But, to my utter surprise, Saeed did strike darkly comic gold with some unassuming Christians whose rhetoric runs pretty close to that of radical Islamists. One woman — who looks like she could have run my preschool daycare — explains , "I wanna see [young people] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, because we have — excuse me, but we have the truth!"

And later, at the center of a roomful of kids, upper arms jiggling with righteousness: "Take these prophecies ... and make war with them .... This means war! This means war!"

But Saeed is quick to point out that this video isn't an attack on Christianity or any other religion. The final text of the video reads,

It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.

A fair observation, spelling errors aside — and yet, according to NPR,

A day after Saeed posted his video on YouTube, it was taken down for having "inappropriate content." He immediately reposted it with a message arguing that if his video was inappropriate, then Wilders' Fitna also should be removed. For now, both videos are available on the site.

And it still is. Go check it out — there are a few versions up, but the most-watched one has racked up more than 350,000 views so far, and more than 4,000 comments. Looking through what people had to say about Islam and Christianity made me wonder: How many viewers who made generalizations about Islam based on 'Fitna' were fully prepared to give Bible-lady's comments a pass?

And while the film means to make a point about not judging a religion by radicalism, I have to say, those angelic-looking children dancing around with what looks like warpaint on their faces is a little too Lord-of-the-Flies for me to handle.

Columnist Rosa Brooks plays Hillary Clinton:

Thank you, Pennsylvania! What an incredible margin of victory you gave me! Ten percentage points over Barack Obama. Count 'em! Ten!

All right, 9.2 points if you insist on actually counting. But they said I had to win by double digits to keep my campaign alive, and I think 9.2 points counts as double digits. And I am alive! And kicking! And punching and biting and kneeing my opponent in the groin!

Contributing editor Arianna Huffington says only a media filled with self-loathing could hire the likes of former Bush rep Tony Snow. USC emeritus professor Robert E. Tranquada argues for an independent authority to oversea L.A. county health services. And columnist Patt Morrison reveals what she and other Angelenos would do with the city budget if they had their way. (Coffee poured by the mayor at the Getty House Bed and Breakfast, anyone?)

The editorial board praises three African countries that stopped a Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe, looks to a 1983 report on education for present-day advice, and looks beyond the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania:

The Democratic race only seems interminable; there will be a winner, and he or she will reconcile with the loser and call for party unity. If Republicans can withstand the abrupt alliance of Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, why shouldn't Democrats be united by an enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton by Obama, or vice versa? After all, for all the attacks, the two Democrats aren't far apart on policy.

On the letters page, readers take on the race, as well. Valley Village's Larry Margo has this to say to Clinton-bashers: "Quick! Stop her! Force her out before she wins again!"

Given my obsession with the celebrity endorsement, I couldn't resist posting this one, courtesy E! Online:

Barack Obama just scored another Hollywood endorsement.

E! reality star Kim Kardashian is backing the Illinois senator in his bid for the White House. She revealed her support last night at the launch party for ex-jailbird Joe Francis’ Girls Gone Wild magazine at Area nightclub in L.A.

“I had dinner with him [Obama] once, and he just seemed very firm about the change, and that’s, like, his motto,” Kardashian said, referring to the slogan "Change We Can Believe In."

As E! is quick to note (and the Obama camp must be grateful), accidental celeb Kardashian did not dine with the senator alone -- the meeting took place at an event.

If celebrity endorsements are already fairly useless unless they're wackily self-aware enough for an image boost, what about the endorsement from the useless celebrity? Useful, or extra useless? Yes, I know the answer to that. Well, at least Kardashian can put some of her sex-tape cash toward Obama's campaign -- a quick search through the Center for Responsive Politics turns up no evidence of a donation.

New Republic executive editor J. Peter Scoblic says if you like George W. Bush's foreign policy, you'll love John McCain's:

Weaned by a military family on the lessons of that most classically Manichaean of modern conflicts, World War II, and psychologically defined by his own maverick streak, McCain's worldview may be more instinctual than intellectual. But it doesn't matter. Like Cold War conservatives, McCain has taken a moral observation that the United States is a force for good battling the forces of evil and turned it into a strategic guide.

Thus, he rejects negotiation with our enemies in favor of "rogue state rollback," repeatedly deriding as "appeasement" the 1994 deal that froze North Korea's plutonium program and mocking calls for unconditional talks with Iran....

Columnist Tim Rutten argues that immigrant bashers weren't right to rough up the pope. And author John M. Barry thinks paying for New Orleans should be the federal government's responsibility.

The editorial board urges Congress to pass a bill that would make it easier to assert pay discrimination in the work place, and analyzes Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's new budget. Finally, the board tells the Writers Guild of America to stop chastising the few members who broke ranks.

On the letters page readers discuss Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas. San Francisco's Joanne Minsky says, "I proudly voted for him twice, but his failure of memory and judgment calls into question the value of his forays into international politics. It is time to retire, Mr. President."

Lest we think the Special Order 40 controversy is just an L.A. thang, the Arizona state legislature has voted overwhelmingly to prohibit local police departments from instituting similar rules. According to AP:

The bill also would prohibit county and city governments from having policies that prevent or restrict them from receiving or exchanging information about people's immigration status in certain instances. Those cases include determining the eligibility of people fo