Opinion: In today’s pages: Panetta, Gaza and billboards
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Demonstrating once again that its left hand doesn’t care what its right hand is doing, the Opinion Manufacturing Division offers conflicting views today on President-elect Barack Obama’s choice of Californian Leon Panetta to head the CIA. On the right-hand page, Columnist Tim Rutten argues that Panetta is a good choice, regardless of his lack of experience in spookery. To support his point, Rutten catalogs the roster of failed CIA chiefs with intelligence-community experience, while lauding one who brought none to the job: JFK’s CIA director, John McCone. Over on the left-hand side, the Times editorial board bemoans the Panetta nomination -- not because we don’t like the former congressman, OMB director and White House chief of staff, but because we worry he won’t be confirmed. And that, the board says, ‘could undermine the president-elect’s plan to purge the agency of the excesses of the Bush era.’
The board also throws its support behind a proposal to admit more out-of-state students into the University of California system. They’ll bring more than higher tuition revenues, the board writes:
... [T]he system never existed merely to educate Californians. It serves more broadly to advance the intellectual and cultural life of California, not just by educating its sons and daughters but by drawing others here.
Back on the Op-Ed page, Israeli author Etgar Keret dissects the twisted logic of ‘proportionality’ in the spiraling Gaza conflict. And former L.A. City Councilman Mike Woo praises the 9th Circuit’s decision upholding the city’s moratorium on billboards, and urges the current council not to trade new digital billboard permits for cash:
... [N]o amount of siphoned-off billboard revenues is worth sacrificing public safety. California has passed state laws regulating cellphone use and text-messaging while driving because we know that such distractions cause car accidents. And yet a digital billboard, like the one recently installed in my neighborhood at Silver Lake Boulevard and Effie Street, is undeniably meant to draw a driver’s eyes off the road.
Don’t forget to check out today’s letters, too, where readers vent on the out-of-state student issue, the Gaza conflict and taxis in L.A.