Actually, we have 11 of them so far, all on the November 4 ballot. The deadline has passed for initiative measures put on the ballot by voter petition, but the Legislature still has time to add a few more. Secretary of State Debra Bowen assigned numbers to those already lined up, starting with Proposition 1.

But wait, you say. If we just voted on Propositions 98 and 99 on June 3, why don't we get Proposition 100 in November?

Ballot measure numbering runs on a 10-year cycle, and that cycle began in November 1998, so it just ran out and is starting over. If the Legislature adds more propositions, lawmakers can decide whether to add them to the end (Propositions 12, 13, etc.) or to the beginning (Proposition 1A, 1B, etc.).

Those are just the statewide measures. We could still get an MTA sales tax from the county, and on Tuesday the City Council could add a parcel tax to fight gang violence.

What will those be called on the ballot? We don't yet know. They are lettered instead of numbered, and are designated by the registrar-recorder.

Backers of tax measures believe the November election is their best shot at victory. The thinking goes like this: Los Angeles voters will be coming out in droves to vote for Barack Obama, or against a Republican of any stripe, and against the ban on gay marriage (Proposition 8).

The ballot is still growing. To keep up, check in regularly at www.latimes.com/elections.

Most of the growth of the stateside Latino population is coming not from immigration but from reproduction, says a report in this month's Population and Development Review. USA Today gives that story front-page treatement and touts the good news for the nation's depopulating heartland in two followup stories.

I haven't seen the PDR article, but here's an abstract:

Natural Increase: A New Source of Population Growth in Emerging Hispanic Destinations in the United States / Kenneth M. Johnson, Daniel T. Lichter

Updated US Census Bureau estimates and race/ethnic-specific birth and death data for the post-2000 period are used to highlight the increasing role of natural increase as an engine of population growth in emerging Hispanic destinations. Newly emerging Hispanic growth areas are distinguished from established and high-growth areas from the 1990s. The findings document that recent Hispanic population gains have been generated increasingly by natural increase—the excess of Hispanic births over deaths. Hispanics accounted for 46 percent of the population gain and 53 percent of the natural increase in nonmetro America in 2000–2005. Yet, Hispanics represented only 5.4 percent of the nonmetro population in 2000. In metro areas, they accounted for 50 percent of the population gain and 47 percent of the natural increase, although they comprised only 14 percent of the metro population. Current trends suggest that the ascendancy of the US Hispanic population is likely to continue unabated, whether restrictive immigration legislation is enacted or not. The growth of the Hispanic population, caused increasingly by natural increase, has taken on a demographic momentum of its own. [34, no. 2 (Jun 08): 327–346] (offsite link*)

Since we're talking here about at least first-generation Americans (or second-generation: the terminology is hard to pin down), and since we MSM traitors are usually the ones accused of downplaying unfriendly evidence, here's a factoid the restrictionists never like to discuss: English-language attainment [pdf] and other assimilation markers among contemporary immigrant groups happen at almost exactly the same rate that they always have.

Tired of walking down the street and chewing gum at the same time? Looking for new things to do with your hands when tomorrow's handheld cell phone ban kicks in?

This Christine Rosen essay in The New Atlantis may give you a new reason to fight the power. Bearing the giveaway title "The Myth of Multitasking," the piece focuses with singleminded concentration on the possibility that when you're doing lots of wonderful things at once, you're doing all of them poorly:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players...

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking...

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Read the whole article.

There's some intuitive sense in the argument against the kind of permanent distraction level built into the multitasking culture. But there's a bigger context to the fad: the decline of specialization, and the rise of an amateur, Renaissance-person approach to work.

This shift may be the kind of thing you see more clearly in the field of journalism — where a thousand Mayhill Fowlers bloom and specialized work is being either outsourced or phased out entirely — than you see in, say, neurosurgery. I know I was appalled, upon my arrival at this very newspaper, to discover how rigid the practice of 19th-century division of labor was here. I just hadn't realized there were still places running on industrial-era production models. That has been changing quickly (if 15 years too late) even during my brief tenure, and I suspect you'll see the same thing in many jobs. This means you have more opportunities to learn new skills, to work in fields outside your own and, as Steve Martin advised, to criticize things you don't know about; but it also means you no longer have the leisure to focus on a single task for a great length of time.

So the ability to handle multiple activities, to manage rapid shifts in attention, to organize many different elements that used to be done by different people — to multitask, in other words — will carry more value. A great chunk of specialized skill and artisanship is being lost in the process, but that's not the result of advertising or media exuberance. It's a fundamental change in the way work gets distributed. Most people aren't very good at multitasking, but that's probably because most people weren't very good at single-tasking.

Oh, my heaven! (Oh, my Hubbard?) Is Will Smith a secret Scientologist? Is that why he appeared in that dreadful sequel to "Men in Black"? If he is (and he says he's not), why is he being so coy about it? Will the private school that he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith are funding inculcate scientological principles on the impressionable minds of the young students who attend?

And, breathlessly, above all: Why are they being given such a hard time about it?

It's a private school, and Smith & Smith are entitled to fund it according to their educational vision, without having to explain, deny or be coy about their personal beliefs. At least, unlike a celebrity or two we could name, they're not trying to shove beliefs of any sort down our throats. Maybe, as one educator in the know says, the school will cram a lot of Scientology jargon into kids' heads, maybe it actually will make learning more fun by having children learn through experience instead of deadly long lectures, and maybe it will do both.

This is why we have private schools, so that people of any particular belief can frame education according to their own philosophies. Sometimes this means no standardized testing, and sometimes it means Advanced Placement kindergarten.

There is something to be taken from this whole celebrity stew, though. The Smiths' money is the Smiths' call. But what if the taxpayers were called on to pay for kids' education at this school? If the supporters of school vouchers had their way — and they never give up on trying to have their way — this is the kind of question we'd have to confront.

This is why school vouchers are not, as proponents like to frame it, just a way to save students from miserable inner-city schools. Once the public's money is involved, the public should have the right to ask these questions and approve or disapprove of whether a school like the Smiths' would be entitled to a share of that money.

Vouchers aren't just problematic for public schools, or for public expenditure. They're a problem for private schools, too. Once the public is paying, it has the right to demand — and it should demand — good performance from those schools. But how do we measure performance? These days, through standardized tests. So what about schools whose very philosophy runs counter to those tests? The private schools wouldn't just put financial pressure on public schools; the public would be placing subtle financial pressure on private schools to change their ways to make them acceptable for public funding. There goes the beautiful diversity of private schooling.

Is the Smiths' school an example of that beautiful diversity? That's up to the beholder. The important point is that private schooling works best for both private and public schools when it stays private.

Fuel prices squeeze cities: Safety patrols, school bus routes, even mowing services are cut as governments struggle with budgets. By Nicholas Riccardi

Hospital mistakes go public: Hundreds of patients are being harmed in preventable incidents, filings required by a new state law show. By Jordan Rau

COLUMN ONE: Kicking aside a social taboo: Women in soccer are frowned upon in Guatemala. But here, three hardworking sisters find freedom on the field. By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

Mugabe's foes brace for fallout: As Zimbabwe's leader is inaugurated, analysts say his opponents are in danger. Observers reject the election. From a Times Staff Writer

Plot twist in union talks: stars vs. stars: SAG urges members to vote down a rival group's contract. By Richard Verrier

CAMPAIGN 'O8: Long and short of VP lists: What strategists say Obama and McCain are looking for. By Doyle McManus

Inside Today's Times

Drivers, hold all calls please: Cellphone use, even hands-free, is too big a distraction, research shows.

Earvin Johnson has Magic touch: The former Laker has built a business empire by investing in long-ignored urban areas.

Spain reigns at Euro 2008 soccer final

Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino asks whether a constitutional ban would nullify same-sex marriages already on the books:

...I believe the amendment would void the marriages. For the same-sex marriages to survive, freedom-to-marry advocates would have to win at least one of two arguments in the courts. Both arguments would rest on the unfairness of applying the reinstated ban retroactively, but both would probably fail.

Human Rights Watch researcher Sarah Tofte says a backlog in testing rape kids in L.A. means many crime victims are still waiting for answers. And writer Margaux Wexberg Sanchez describes the journey of two men to call attention to the 100 million tons of plastic junk in the world's oceans.

The editorial board laments the prevalence of counterfeit malaria medicine in Africa, wonders if it's time for a fireworks ban, and hopes SAG won't strike:

Even if they managed to kill the AFTRA agreement, SAG's leaders would still have to persuade the studios to make concessions that the writers couldn't win after a 100-day strike -- a hiatus that cost many writers more in lost pay than they gained from the eventual deal. No matter how much leverage it has on July 9, SAG is unlikely to break the pattern established by the previous deals without putting everyone who works in and around the industry through considerably more pain.

On the letters page, readers discuss the Supreme Court ruling against executing child rapists. Kathleen Brown of Santa Clarita says, "Those whose loved ones are victims of violent crime might garner the wisdom in Coretta Scott King's words: 'Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.'"

*Art by Anthony Russo

A mixed bag in the week's Top 10. Kery Howley and Kay Hymowitz dominated the week, with their Dust-Up on The Children placing twice in Top 10 (and twice more in the Top 20), and an end-of-the-week surge by Cy Bolton's Blowback was good for a Place. But it was former L.A. Times editorial board member Jacob Heilbrunn who brought home the gold in a week that contained neither Hillary nor Barack. Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next week.

1.  Big Oil isn't the big problem By Jacob Heilbrunn
2.  How does President Bush lie? By Cy Bolton
3.  The float vote By Frank Luntz
4.  What's in the teen pregnancy pact's fine print? By Kerry Howley and Kay Hymowitz
5.  Resetting Earth's thermostat By Samuel Thernstrom
6.  Ma, ma, where’s my pa? By Kerry Howley and Kay Hymowitz
7.  The patriots who killed Custer By Michael A. Elliott
8.  Canada's thought police By Jonah Goldberg
9.  The George Carlin I knew By Britt Allcroft
10.  Mortgage measure meltdown By the editorial board

Just when you thought it was safe to go back over the border...

Was Tuesday's primary defeat of Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) by challenger Jason Chaffetz a sign of something bigger? In what is said to be one of the Beehive State's most conservative districts, six-term incumbent Cannon lost by a 60-40 vote. Were voters fed up with incumbents, fed up with the economy, or was it ... ¿inmigración?

Mickey Kaus (He's not against immigrants! He's just aware of them!) says it was Cannon's insufficiently restrictive stances on immigration what done him in. "As if by eerie coincidence," Kaus writes, "John McCain has been having trouble generating the kind of popularity among Republicans typically enjoyed by Republican presidential candidates! And he's also been pushing 'comprehensive' reform of late, potentially winning Latino support but further jeopardizing his GOP support."

In Human Events, Marcus Epstein calls Cannon's defeat "without a doubt, the greatest electoral victory of the immigration control movement.  The election was about one -- and only one --  issue: Chris Cannon’s long support of amnesty for illegal aliens."

The Salt Lake City Tribune calls Cannon the "congressman in the coalmine," and Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) tells the paper, "[A]ny Republican who's running for office and believes the immigration issue is dead should take another look and see what happened to Mr. Cannon."

On the other hand, Deseret News political editor Bob Bernick Jr. writes at length about Cannon's defeat without mentioning immigration — but then that may just show that the MSM is in on the conspiracy.

The St. George Daily Spectrum also downplays immigration in the case, viewing the defeat as "a warning to incumbents as the 2008 campaign hits full stride."

Michael Barone somewhat reframes his 2006 assessment that Cannon proved immigration was not political death for Republicans, but he doesn't see the issue as fully scalable in the 2008 election: "What does this mean for immigration legislation in the next Congress? Not a lot. I thought that this would be the first presidential election in my memory in which the major party nominees would have sharply different positions on immigration. It would have been, had John McCain not won the Republican nomination."

A definite maybe? Proof that the elites aren't willing to speak the truth about immigration? And whose head will roll next?

It took a while, but Hillary Clinton finally came around to campaign for Barack Obama. And now, they've taken their show on the road, as The Times reports. The wife of the Man from Hope went to Unity, N.H., today and said, with Obama at her side, "Unity is not only a beautiful place... As we can see, it's a wonderful feeling -- isn't it?" Clinton apparently bore no grudge about Obama's hiring of her former (and unfavored) campaign aide. And Obama, meanwhile, pledged to help Clinton pay off her debts.

Unfortunately some of her female fans haven't quite made it to Unity. In fact, some of them are deriding the whole concept by calling themselves Pumas, to stand for "Party Unity My Ass," and perhaps unintentionally invoking another not-so-complimentary feline term for women. Some insist they'll vote for John McCain, while others plan to abstain, or write in Clinton's name. Rebecca Traister of Salon had the best explanation of their reasoning. (Traister also had a solid explainer of why liberal women were so peeved by the attitude of male Obamaniacs, many of whom, she noted, insisted they would vote McCain if Clinton was the Democratic nominee. In other words, this isn't chicks-holding-grudges, Chris Matthews fans.) On why they're mad at Obama himself:

...for some, there is lingering sting -- about the paucity of women in Obama's top advisory team during the campaign, about the way they feel the Obama campaign stained Clinton's supporters -- and Clinton and her husband too -- as racists, about the patronizing "You're likable enough" comment during a January debate. Perhaps the worst slight, in their eyes, came after Obama had secured the nomination. When he should have been smoothing ruffled feathers, he instead decided to hire Patti Solis Doyle, longtime Hillaryland denizen from whom the senator is now reportedly estranged....

Cy Bolton's Blowback "How does President Bush lie?" is getting a big response.

From the Buckeye State comes a note of thanks and a critique of the Times:

Thank you for running "How does President Bush lie? Let Cy Bolton count the memos."

When the Times decided to originally run James Kirchick's piece I was incredulous. I felt it was a serious disservice to your readership, and it has caused me to question every decision the editorial page editor has made since.

Russell leisenheimer
Cuyahoga Falls, Oh

From Fair Harvard, a lengthy chronology of misdeeds and Tribune Company conspiracies:

To the editors:

The LA Times should be congratulated for publishing Cy Bolton’s Op Ed today.  It was overdue.  It is an unfortunate commentary on the editorial standards fostered by the Times under its new leadership at the Tribune Company, however, that Mr. Bolton’s article was required to correct James Kirchick’s offensively patronizing and demonstrably false article published by the Times on June 16.  Mr. Kirchick’s premise, that “Bush Never Lied,” was so egregiously stupid that no respectable newspaper should have considered printing it.  Perhaps the editors at the Times were given false reassurance by Mr. Kirchick’s position as an editor at the New Republic, which sometimes pretends not to be a mouthpiece for neoconservative views.  It should be remembered, however, that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the New Republic that happily published such articles as “Blood Baath” by former CIA director James Woolsey (issue of 9/24/2001, Vol. 225, Issue 13), where we were offered claims like “the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.”  In recent years, the editors at the New Republic – particularly Peter Beinart -- have publicly recanted their role in fanning the war flames throughout 2002 and 2003.  Because their support for the war was such a devastating embarrassment to the New Republic, and because their later recantation was so cynical and self-serving, it is very difficult to believe anything its editors say, especially when it comes to George Bush and the Iraq war.  Mr. Kirchick’s article of the 16th sounds like a fantasy projected by someone who has spent the last 4 years trying to believe that his attempts to sell the American public on an illegal and disastrous war were the result of an honest mistake.  If you substitute Mr. Kirchick’s own name and those of his fellow editors at the New Republic for that of George Bush, his article has some slight ring of truth.  Otherwise, it’s worthless.

In any case, the Los Angeles Times would do well to heed the warnings contained in Mr. Bolton’s brief summary of the various forms of disinformation the Bush regime disseminated in the run-up to war.  It is worth noting, for example, the close parallels between Rafid Ahmed Alwan (“Curveball”) and the man Italy’s intelligence services claimed was at the origin of the forged documents showing Iraq’s fictitious purchase of uranium from Niger.  Much as the LA Times article of June 18 by John Goetz and Bob Drogin portray Curveball as a compulsive liar and cheat who just happened to fool the CIA, in 2002 Rocco Martino’s handlers at SISMI portrayed him as a “swindler” and “liar” whose bumbling accidentally fooled everyone, including analysts at the CIA.  Reporters and editors at the LA Times would do well to take a page from reporters like Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo, whose work carefully examined the web of falsehoods SISMI used to distance itself from the false information it disseminated through Rocco Martino in order to please the Bush administration. As it turns out, Rocco Martino was not a kooky swindler forging documents on his own, without the collusion of SISMI.  Rocco Martino is a scapegoat, and his role as freelance document-forger was a clumsy piece of disinformation designed to hide the true involvement of the intelligence services of Italy, along with its allies in the Bush administration, in the run-up to war.  The timing of the LA Times article revealing Curveball’s name, along with biographical details of his career as a petty con-man and swindler, should raise doubts in the mind of any informed reader about his alleged role in “fooling” the Bush administration into believing Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.  It seems far more likely that “Curveball” is a creature of the Bush administration, a convenient scapegoat designed to hide the campaign of outright lies and manipulation the Bush regime used to sell their war to the American public.

Arriving as they did on the heels of the presentation of articles of impeachment against Bush by Dennis Kucinich, the articles by Mssrs. Kirchick, Goetz, and Drogin have created the unfavorable impression in my mind that the LA Times is now serving as a mouthpiece to the Bush regime’s ongoing campaign of disinformation concerning the lies they told in the run-up to war.

Perhaps I am just imagining things.  But roughly, the plotline goes like this. 

First, Bush lies about the reasons for going to war, in clear violation of international war crimes treaty to which the United States is a party, thereby subverting the Constitution, which easily meets the standards of high crimes and misdemeanors that would justify impeachment.