Opinion: In today’s pages: Hitler, healthcare and the Klan

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The editorial board still likes a plan that will go before the L.A. school board this month, allowing outside operators to submit proposals for running 50 new schools that will open over the next few years. What it doesn’t like are signs that the district isn’t acting transparently about the issue, as indicated by a town-hall meeting where opponents were locked out, and the L.A. Unified’s decision to give a new school to the mayor’s education partnership even though parents and teachers were not consulted:

It would be a shame to see a progressive idea fall victim to the usual shenanigans within L.A. Unified. The 50-schools resolution could help reinvigorate neighborhoods that have suffered for years with overcrowded, dilapidated, low-performing schools. But if it becomes another excuse to play the same old games, students will once again be the losers.
The board has this much to say about Adolf Hitler’s manifesto ‘Mein Kampf’: It’s repetitious, long-winded and evil. But it also argues that Germany should stop banning the book and go ahead with a new, annotated publication of it:

But a liberal democracy cannot tolerate such bans on free expression indefinitely. Last week, Stephan Kramer, the secretary-general of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, the country’s leading Jewish organization, said his group now backs a proposal to publish a new edition of ‘Mein Kampf,’ albeit with a scholarly introduction and notes that put it in context. The book, which Hitler wrote while he was serving a four-year sentence in a Bavarian prison in 1924, offers a chilling preview of his thoughts on racial purity and the Jews, as well as his belief that Germany needed to conquer new territory to fulfill its historic destiny. After Hitler came to power in 1933, millions of copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ were sold (bought in many cases by the state and given out to newlyweds and soldiers in the Third Reich, making Hitler a millionaire).
On the other side of the fold, the op-ed page ponders how President Obama’s healthcare plan can prevail over doomsayers who claim the government will be taking over Americans’ lives. Author Nancy J. Altman offers a possible solution: Take a cue from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strategy for the passage of Social Security. And folklorist Patricia A. Turner tells the story behind a Ku Klux Klan quilt, and what the quilt’s changed ownership says about America.

-- Karin Klein