It's an old moan, but a good one, and the Times editorial board makes it again today: There are too few races for the Legislature, in this heavily gerrymandered state, in which the outcome isn't a foregone conclusion. Still, the board finds one of these rarities in the Santa Barbara area and makes an endorsement in it.

The board also suggests that the question of how much racial profiling goes on in the LAPD is more complicated than a recent report conducted for the ACLU reflects, and advises Congress to get rid of the clause in the No Child Left Behind Act that requires schools to give students' personal information to military recruiters unless their parents specifically opt out.

If Congress wants the military to have access to students' home phone numbers, it should openly legislate it, rather than surreptitiously slipping such a provision into an unrelated law.

On the op-ed page, a veteran cop tells a chilling story of the false confession he obtained from a murder suspect. When police are looking for guilt, he discovered, they tend to find it, even when it isn't there. Videotaping interrogations can reveal where things go wrong.

Reviewing the tapes years later, I saw that we had fallen into a classic trap. We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession.

Joel Stein finds that last-minute voter registrants aren't the slackers he'd expected. And for those of you with access to the dead-tree version of the LAT, Ronald Brownstein describes what happens when the formidable campaign resources of the Obama campaign blanket Florida--but meet up with "one of the nation's most effective Republican organizations."