America’s most irritating atheist is at again. That tiresome Michael Newdow and a bunch of other anti-God types have filed suit to bar prayer and references to God at President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in on Jan. 20. Newdow also filed lawsuits to remove prayer from President George W. Bush’s inauguration ceremonies in 2001 and 2005, and you may also remember him as the crank who tried to get the phrase “under God” eliminated from the pledge of allegiance.

At least when he went after the pledge of allegiance in 2005 he could halfway make an argument that there is an expectation, particularly for school children, that it be recited regardless of a child’s beliefs. But the oath of office? That’s one person’s vow to make. Millions of people are not being asked to say it too (and in fact should politely keep quiet while he does it).

Named in the suit filed by Newdow, 17 other individuals and 10 groups, according to the Washington Post, are Chief Justice John Roberts, who will administer the oath; Saddleback church Pastor Rick Warren, who will give the invocation; and Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who will give the benediction. Wow, this inaugural is shaping up to be one big religious hurly-burly. Liberals who support gay marriage are upset because of Warren will have a prominent place at the ceremony. Conservatives are upset because Obama will have a prominent place at the ceremony. And now atheists are upset that God will have a prominent place there, too. Obama wasn’t kidding when he said he’d bring everyone together.

But back to Newdow et al. If you don’t believe God exists, then why doesn’t it follow that phrases like “so help me God” have no meaning? And if that’s the case, then why does something meaningless matter? I have news for Newdow -- even if he managed to bar all religious references from public life it wouldn’t matter. The Soviet Union tried that; all it did was send religious fervor underground until communism ended and it came roaring back.

Besides, what would Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts be expected to do if Obama were to defy a ruling in Newdow’s favor, snatch away the Lincoln Bible and swat him on the hand? Scott Walter, the executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, hit the nail on the head when he said in a statement:

Newdow's lawsuit over the inauguration is a lot like the streaker at the Super Bowl: a pale, self-absorbed distraction. And anybody who looks at it carefully can see there's not much there.

Photo: Manny Garcia/Getty Images

I'm a Patt Morrison fan, but my view of the dispute between Time Warner Cable and Viacom is quite a bit different from hers.

Maybe it's because I don't have cable, but I feel compelled to stand up for Time Warner here, even as it prepares to cut much of the country's televisions off from SpongeBob, Jon Stewart and the genius of Jimmy Neutron. At the heart of the matter is Viacom's demand for more money for the privilege of carrying its channels. IMHO, it's the wrong demand at the wrong time. And the big loser here could be Viacom, which needs Time Warner more than Time Warner needs Nickelodeon, MTV, BET and the host of other Viacom cable networks.

You could argue that recessions are good for cable operators -- people spend less on entertainment away from home, raising the value of packaged home-entertainment bundles such as cable and satellite. But as the jobless rate climbs, it's hard to imagine Time Warner extracting sizable rate increases from their subscribers in 2009. More important, as Patt notes, Viacom puts its shows online, free of charge. So while it's asking Time Warner for more money for its channels, it's flooding the market with a cheaper version of the same product. This may be just the first in a long series of battles between multi-channel video providers and TV networks, and Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt seems eager to fight them.

Today, the amount of ad revenue generated online is a fraction of the $21.8 billion that cable networks collect through the Time Warners of the world. In a similar dispute with broadcaster LIN TV earlier this year, Time Warner held its ground for almost a month, keeping the LIN channels off the air before the two sides settled (terms were not disclosed, so there's no telling which side caved). During that time, the cable operator helped its customers hook their TVs up to the Internet to catch some of the programming that LIN had provided. My guess is, most cable customers would be willing to do that for a few channels, as long as they continued to get the bulk of their favorites through the usual route. That's why I think Time Warner's got the stronger hand here.

SpongeBob image courtesy of Nickelodeon

Time Warner Cable had better be careful what it wishes for.

Its legal head-butting with Viacom could wind up with Viacom yanking its channels off cable TV in about 12 million homes in LA and elsewhere before 2009 arrives at midnight tonight.

I wouldn't blubber over a blank screen where "Spongebob" used to be, though I might feel some initial pangs of separation anxiety when it comes to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

But then again, I know that I can always find Stewart's and Colbert's best bits online. And that's Time Warner's dangerous gamble -- that people can learn to live without what it's selling. I already have, to some extent. When Time Warner pulled Turner Classic Movies from its basic cable lineup -- in Hollywood, no less! -- and substituted the Golf Channel, I didn't bite and upgrade to premium. I've ended up buying a lot of the black and white classic films I love, and can now watch them on my schedule, not Time Warner's.

I don't know what Viacom -- or for that matter Time Warner -- has planned for my viewing pleasure for New Year's Eve tonight, but I'll be micro-programming and watching my own DVDs.

It's Public Shaming Day on the Times opinion pages, as the editorial board, columnists and op-ed writers ridicule politicians and local officials who've made news this week (and not in a good way). Columnist Tim Rutten berates would-be Republican National Committee Chairman Chip Saltsman for violating one of the five rules of politics: never make racial or ethnic jokes. (Check out Lisa Richardson's Opinion L.A. blog post, too, for more on "Barack the Magic Negro.") The editorial board chastises indicted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for appointing Roland Burris to Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, although it argues that Burris should be allowed to take the post because the "distasteful" appointment was, ahem, lawful. Insert your Blago joke here. And former Times reporter Joe Mathews, now at the New America Foundation, blasts the Tournament of Roses Assn. for downsizing the Rose Parade to appease broadcasters at the expense of the event's lifeblood: its fans.

But no matter how accommodating parade officials are, in a world of fragmented media and diminished TV audiences, the Tournament may not be able to maintain its network TV presence.

In fact, the cure may be worse than the disease. In trying to retain network coverage, the Tournament could lose the support of its local base.

Rounding out the op-ed page, author Pico Iyer searches for the meaning of the New Year's holiday. And over on the editorial page, the board urges the next president to abandon the futile efforts waged by his 10 predecessors to "overthrow, undermine or cajole" Fidel Castro:

Fifty years of failure is too long. The incoming Obama administration should move quickly to embark on a rapprochement with Cuba and bring an end to punitive policies, especially the economic embargo. The United Nations condemns it, the European Union is trading with Cuba, and Latin America is urging the United States to allow Cuba back into the fold. This policy change will take time and political will, but it is in our national interest and, ultimately, in Cuba's.

Finally, in Letters, readers react to recent Times pieces about Inglewood police, the value of midwives, the late Eartha Kitt, a lost cat and the Interstate system.

Illustration: Christopher Serra For The Times

Pity Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, whose full name sounds like a law firm and whose first name sounds as if it were picked by his maternal grandmother, Sarah Palin. This love grandchild of the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee was a figure of fun even when he was in utero, so I'm reluctant to trash the little guy. But his parents and grandparents are another matter.

Where do the Palins get these names? Tripp can look forward to years of Christmas gifts from Uncles Trig and Track and Aunts Willow and Piper. In the unlikely event that he decides to call his mother by her first name, he will be saying: "More milk, Bristol."

According to the New York Daily News, the senior Palins didn't pick their kids' names out of thin air. Track was born during track season, Trig's name comes from the Norse word for "true" or "strength" and Bristol is named after a bay where the family fishes. Less clear are the origins of Willow and Piper, though the Daily News noted that there is a town in Alaska called Willow and that "Piper" may have been inspired by the Piper Super Cub, a poular airplane in Alaska.

A couple of decades ago, you can bet that the Palin kids would have been mocked for their names, and not only by little Democrats. Today, not so much. I'm probably betraying my age when I admit that innovative and/or wacky names for children annoy me. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when tradition trumped creativity in the naming of newborns. I attended Catholic school with a multitude of Johns, Michaels, Jameses and Peters. A lot of the girls' names consisted of "Mary" plus a second name. (One of my sisters was Mary Catherine.) No Trigs or Willows -- or, for that matter, Jareds, Jasons, Ryans, Caitlins or Ashleys.

Catholics in my youth had a special incentive to choose traditional names: the church's preference that babies be named after saints. (The priest who baptized my sister Laurel Ann complained that laurel was a shrub, not a saint.) But conservatism in nomenclature was a general phenomenon.  Parents who saddled their offspring with exotic or cutesey names were considered borderline abusive. I confess that I haven't shaken off that prejudice. I wince when I hear a parent in a supermarket telling Trey or Trevor to behave. (If Donald Duck were created today, his nephews might be named Trey, Trevor and Trig instead of Huey, Dewey and Louie.)

Straining to rationalize my snobbery, I came up with a conservative cliche: "When it's not necessary to change, it's necessary not to change." That includes changing what children are called. Naming a baby after a parent, uncle or grandparent is a nod to the ties that unite generations. Naming a baby after a soap-opera character -- or an airplane -- connotes a contempt for continuity. That's why the new Palin baby's name is a bad Tripp.

There's one little gift of knowledge I'd welcome this season. I would be thrilled if someone could explain this singular bit of California conduct to me.

I've lived here since I was about 16, but clearly that hasn't been long enough to understand this quirk in our behavior, so I can only surmise it only comes with the Golden State DNA.

It could be 45 degrees, we could have rain squalls and puddles to our ankles, and young people still wear flip-flops (or ''thongs,'' as we used to call them, before that name got repurposed for a different article of apparel and moved northward from the ankles and into greater and more louche renown; thank you, Monica Lewinsky).

Even when the mercury plummets below, say, 60, the young men, too, but mostly young women, sensibly bundle into puffy parkas, sling scarves around their necks, pull on knit gloves and caps -- but still slap around the wet, cold pavement in flip-flops. Is it that they can't manage the smell of damp socks? Have their feet grown so broad from a barefoot Nature Child life that footwear is an annoyance? Are their pedicures too fancy to hide? Or do they truly feel the cold from the top down? Or, to put it another way, global warming from the toes up?

Your solutions and suggestions are welcome -- I look forward to reading them, with my slippered feet up.

Ever since Chip Saltsman, a candidate for Republican National Committee chairman, circulated a CD with a parody on it called "Barack the Magic Negro," Republicans, pundits and more Republicans have been debating whether Saltsman's move was racist, racially insensitive, dumb or just a good ole boy's idea of clean fun. 

Is the song, which has a white man posing as Al Sharpton singing along to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," racist? Is it lampooning white liberal guilt and mocking other black leaders' supposed jealousy of Obama? Honestly, who cares? Rush Limbaugh referred to or played that song a bunch of times on his show and Barack Obama still won the election. Black punditry has hardly commented on this most recent flap; they're too busy picking out inaugural outfits.

But Saltsman still deserves to be raked over the coals. Not for anything to do with Obama, per se, but for campaigning with cultural references that are decades out of date.

"Puff the Magic Dragon?" You've got to be kidding. Was he on another planet Nov. 4? Did he miss how Republicans lost 66% of the vote of people age 30 and under? Thirty-year-olds weren’t even born when Peter, Paul and Mary's hit came out in 1963. Sure Limbaugh used the parody and his crowd loved it, but the average Limbaugh listener is 51. Then there's the parody itself and the faux Sharpton. Sure the Rev. deserves the disdain and disapprobation he earned for his outrageous behavior during the Tawana Brawley hoax case, but that happened in 1987. The World Wide Web wasn't even invented then, which means young people have never heard of it. To them, Sharpton is just that black guy from New York with the funny hair.

It's a given that Republicans are done trying to appeal to black voters, but are they really ready to give up everyone else who isn't white? Because if not, here's the thing: it’s not much of a stretch for Latinos and Asians -- who also voted overwhelmingly for Obama -- to imagine how a president-elect of their ethnicity also could be the target of such lighthearted Republican fun. "Mike the Magic Jap” and “Maria the Magic Mexican” probably wouldn't go over that well either.

It just goes to show that spanking is ineffective discipline. If it worked Saltsman would have learned from the party's its electoral walloping last month. By 365 to 175 electoral votes, Americans demonstrated that they want political leaders who are in tune with the themes of the current day, not the Billboard hits of 1960s.

UPDATE: An astute reader pointed out that Obama won by a larger electoral-vote margin than our post claimed. The correct total was 365 to 173.

Los Angeles Times photo

In a desperate attempt to offload some Los Angeles Times-branded apparel, the Opinion Manufacturing Division held a contest last week challenging readers to name the five most popular topics among letter writers during the last half of 2008. Yes, I know, "the last half of 2008" doesn't sound quite as meaningful as the year in full, but we didn't start tallying up the submissions until mid-year.

Anyway, no one entered, so no one will be able to claim the lovely Los Angeles Times sweatshirt we had squirreled away. Hmmm. Perhaps it's time for a new contest: suggest a contest! "Predict the size of the stimulus package," say, or "Guess how many stimulus dollars are directed to Illinois," or "Pick the day when the California Supreme Court throws out Proposition 8".... The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, to close the loop on the whole Letters Top Five contest initiative, here are the answers to the puzzle no one tried to solve:

Of the 16,493 publishable letters received by the letters maven in the last half of 2008, 49% were in one of the Top Five topics:

• Prop. 8, 2,311 letters;
• Sarah Palin, 1,862 letters;
• The economy (including the Wall Street bailout), 1,632 letters;
• Barack Obama, 1,367 letters; and
• John McCain, 944 letters

Not surprisingly, politics were the dominant theme. Still, it's telling that Palin would generate more letters than the men at the top of the two tickets. What this bodes for her future is anybody's guess, but it does suggest another possible contest: Guess the date that Palin forms an exploratory committee for her presidential campaign.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not counted in the chart.

Reader reaction to President-elect Barack Obama's decision to invite Saddleback Church leader Rick Warren to speak at the Inauguration brought in more mail to The Times than any other topic last week.

During the week ending Dec. 27, The Times received 534 usable letters, 257 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

• Rick Warren: 88 letters;
• Proposition 8, including responses to California AG Jerry Brown's about-face on the initiative: 68 letters;
• California's ongoing budget insanity: 50 letters;
• Bush, Iraq and the shoe: 29 letters; and
• This Joel Stein column about Jews in Hollywood: 22 letters.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not counted in the chart.

In Monday's editorial pages, the Times revisits last year's series on values, which was written to help identify what to look for in a presidential candidate. Now, with George W. Bush on the way out and Barack Obama on the way in, we look back and we look forward and find that we prefer the view ahead.

We have lived through eight grim, violent and disheartening years. Intellectual prowess has been ridiculed, achievement belittled and virtue sacrificed for gain. It's time to begin again.

On the Op-Ed page, a discouraging word about Bush policies from the other end. Richard A. Viguerie warns against the continuing embrace by conservatives, including Bush, William Kristol and Mike Huckabee, of what he calls big-government conservatism. Its fruits: No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefits, deficits, and now, the bailouts.

Quoting Tennyson and (by way of Shakespeare) King Henry V, Viguerie gives his version of the St. Crispin's Day speech on behalf of the limited-government, Barry Goldwater, libertarianish wing of American conservatism:

Whether we win or lose, future generations will celebrate us as those who fought for freedom at a crucial time in our nation's history. No one can guarantee victory. But if we do not fight, we guarantee defeat.

An aside here: Look for Viguerie's reference to "the coming battle with Chicagoism." Chicagoism? We're starting to hear that word a lot, but -- is it a reference to Milton Friedman and the "Chicago school" of economics, which Viguerie would presumably cheer -- or to Barack Obama and what conservatives in the campaign suggested was a kind of neo-socialist approach? Is it a battle for Chicagoism or against it? Or a battle for the use of the word?

If you're excited by, angered at or intrigued with Viguerie, check out his website and blog, ConservativeHQ.com, and his book, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause. And see what Viguerie has had to say in past Times Op-Ed pages.

Los Angeles writer Robert David Jaffee's touching and humorous accounts of living with and overcoming mental illness have graced the Times Op-Ed pages in the past. Now Jaffee is back with an update in which he acknowledges that (notwithstanding respect for the civil rights of the ill), forced treatment may be the best thing for some, including himself.

I can't speak to what's right for everyone. But I do know that for me, being involuntarily held at the hospital in 1999 allowed me to get back on my medication -- and may have saved my life.

Last but not least, columnist Gregory Rodriguez admits to watching movies that may, according to a recent study, be ruining his love life.

Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak