Opinion: In today’s pages: Food, courts, the Fed
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UC Irvine’s Jack Miles says a strike by UC service workers raises questions about administrators’ pay, and Assemblyman Ted W. Lieu argues the Fed hasn’t regulated mortgage brokers tightly enough. Former ‘Seinfeld’ writer Peter Mehlman remembers his childhood correspondence with famed surgeon Michael E. DeBakey. And columnist Tim Rutten tells America to get over the New Yorker cover:
Whatever it is that makes CNN’s commentators ‘the best political team on television,’ it certainly isn’t a sense of humor. In fact, it was downright grotesque to see Bill Bennett and L.A. City Councilman Bernard C. Parks holding forth on the magazine’s racial insensitivity. In fact, I couldn’t help but think that the former Los Angeles police chief’s sudden emergence as an art and comedy critic might have something to do with his current race against Mark Ridley-Thomas for the county supervisor’s seat in the heavily African American 2nd District, where Obama probably enjoys a 98% approval rating among registered voters.
The editorial board urges the state to support a bill to better fund California courts, and wonders why the U.S. lags behind other countries in food safety. Finally the board tells Arnold Schwarzenegger to act like a governor:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won himself a lot of buzz with his statement Sunday on ABC’s ‘This Week’ that he would consider taking a post in a Barack Obama administration.... The actor-turned-governor knows good box office. He’s not vice presidential material because his Austrian birthplace makes him ineligible to be a White House understudy, but he has the global warming issue plus the political and show-biz smarts to use it to keep his name in the thick of the presidential campaign. One problem, though. He’s still governor of California, and his state is more than two weeks past the legal deadline for adopting a budget.
On the letters page, readers discuss cheating on the SATs. Claremont’s Karen Martin says, ‘How telling it is that the test scores are being nullified because students cheated, but the administrators and staff are being meted out ‘punishment.’’
*Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson, Philadelphia Daily News.