Who can possibly stop talking election yet? Not the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Both the editorial board and Wayne State University professor John Corvino predict that, as society gains a deeper understanding of and appreciation for gay rights, there's a good chance voters will repeal the newly passed Proposition 8 in coming years. The board calls on the African American community, which voted heavily in favor of the gay-marriage ban, to remember the shared struggle of civil rights and how once society viewed interracial marriage as ungodly -- a few decades before the child of an interracial couple would be elected president.

The editorial board also applauds both presidential candidates' speeches on election night. After a long absence, the board says, the John McCain who reaches across the aisle to make things work, and who puts service to his country, showed himself. And Barack Obama reminded Americans of something they also haven't heard in a long time -- that success depends on people giving to their country as well as taking from it.

On the other side of the fold, Patt Morrison wonders whether party labels of outlived their usefulness:

How meaningful and relevant are candidates' political parties anymore? When a New England Republican can be more progressive than a Texas Democrat, when millions regard themselves as independents and occupy the takeout-menu middle on political issues, why do we need to belong to parties? Why red, why blue, why even purple, when there's the big deluxe Crayola box to choose from?

In a burst of free advice for Obama, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher offers trandition guidance to the president-elect and Rosa Brooks has ideas for how he can mend the country's global relations.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

It's a good thing there won't be time for small talk when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stands up on Jan. 20 to administer the oath of office to President Barack Obama. Ordinarily one might think that the two alumni of the Harvard Law Review -- Obama was president, Roberts managing editor -- would glide easily into a reminiscent groove, cheerily comparing notes about professors and pizza parlors in Cambridge. But any conversation might be awkward, because Obama, unlike 22 other Democrats, voted against Roberts' confirmation.

Worse, if The Washington Post is to be believed, Obama stiffed his fellow Ivy Leaguer by flip-flopping from support to opposition.

The Post reported:

"It was the fall of 2005, and the celebrated young senator -- still new to Capitol Hill but aware of his prospects for higher office -- was thinking about voting to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. Talking with his aides, the Illinois Democrat expressed admiration for Roberts's intellect. Besides, Obama said, if he were president he wouldn't want his judicial nominees opposed simply on ideological grounds.

"And then [Pete] Rouse, his chief of staff, spoke up. This was no Harvard moot-court exercise, he said. If Obama voted for Roberts, Rouse told him, people would remind him of that every time the Supreme Court issued another conservative ruling, something that could cripple a future presidential run. Obama took it in. And when the roll was called, he voted no."  (Ironically, political calculations may have inclined Obama to condemn a recent decision in which Roberts was in the minority -- the court's ruling that child rapists can't be sentenced to death.)

It's well known that Roberts was surprised when senators he thought were going to support him switched sides. That he was confirmed anyway, with votes from half the Senate's Democrats, may have softened the blow. And Roberts has the comfort that he is likely to hold on to high office a lot longer than Obama will. Still, it's just as well that the two men won't have to chit-chat before Roberts exercises a privilege Obama didn't want him to have in the first place.

School bonds are doing very well in Los Angeles County. With 16 school bonds and three community  college bonds on the ballot, all but three are winning easily.

The biggest, the Los Angeles Unified School District's Measure Q: Not even close. With 55% of votes counted, it's got nearly 60 percent. Short of two-thirds, but remember that special rules apply to school bonds - they need only 55%. This is by far the biggest school bond, at $7 billion.

The Los Angeles Community College District's Measure J is headed to a major win as well.

Check the results here, and click on schools - but remember to refresh periodically or you'll be stuck with old figures.

The $13 million bond in Acton-Agua Dulce (north of the San Fernando Valley) is losing, the Westside Union School District (in West Lancaster) is running 50-50, and the William S. Hart Union High School District (Santa Clarita) is ahead bit short of the needed 55%. But all the others are on their way to victory.

Photo of LAUSD Superintendent David Brewer: L.A. Times/Gary Friedman

Rescuing homeowners who ventured into their own unwise and unaffordable mortgages isn't a popular  idea, the Times editorial board acknowledges, but it holds real value for all of us:

Such aid also is consistent with the principle of intervening when the market can't help itself. Despite the banking industry's voluntary efforts to help borrowers, statistics compiled by the industry show that the number of loan modifications only recently has caught up to the number of borrowers starting the foreclosure process.

The board also advises the state drop its hasty decision requiring all eighth graders to take algebra by 2011, and begins a series of handy endorsement recaps to help you figure out all those names and issues on the Tuesday ballot.

On the other side of the fold, op-ed writer Jenny Price tells the story of her brother's murder and why this is no reason to approve the "victim's rights" promised by the Proposition 9 campaign.

Punishment for murder should not depend on how angry and bereft survivors are, or how beloved the victim was. It should not be proportional to the size of the victim's family, or to how many family members are willing to go to court or a parole hearing, or to how long they are willing to keep going to hearings.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute is pleased that no one seems to be talking any more about paying reparations to the descendants of slaves in this country, and Joel Stein asserts that he's an erudite kinda guy even if he doesn't know at what temperature water boils, what language they speak in Iraq or--well, a bunch of other things.

Photo by Damian Dovarganes/AP

The chickens have  come home to roost on today's Opinion page, where Humane Society of the United States CEO Wayne Pacelle argues that egg-laying hens need more space. Proposition 2 on California's Nov. 4 ballot would force chicken farmers to use bigger cages that would allow hens to stand up and stretch their wings -- currently, they're confined to a space smaller than a "letter-sized sheet of paper." It also calls for larger confinement spaces for veal calves and sows. Writes Pacelle:

The greatest nation in the world, with the most innovative farmers, can do better than immobilize animals in severe confinement systems for their entire lives. Family farmers know food quality is enhanced by more humane farming methods, and they know there is a balance between animal care and economics.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg weighs in on Barack Obama, arguing that the only thing truly novel about him as a candidate is the color of his skin. His liberal ideology, on the other hand, dates back to Woodrow Wilson, who proposed that "the old concept of individualism needed to be replaced by a new system in which the citizen 'married his interest to the state,'" Goldberg writes. Other formative influences on Obama's thinking are the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt and liberal philosopher John Dewey.

Dewey proposed that statism be taught as a kind of civic religion in our schools so that Americans could be raised to see the government as the solution to all of our problems.

While Goldberg beats up on Obama, author and Arizona State University Origins Initiative director Lawrence M. Krauss pounds John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin over their apparent disdain for science. Both have pointed to government funding of studies as a waste of taxpayer dollars, without recognizing the importance of the research. A $3-million study of grizzly bear DNA that was blasted by McCain is actually "essential to preserving a threatened species," Krauss writes, while Palin's casual dismissal of fruit fly research ignores the threat these bugs pose to American agriculture.

Over on the editorial page, The Times questions the timing of Sunday's raid by U.S. troops in Syria, believed to be the first U.S. attack on Syrian soil. The attack seems to be part of a continuing escalation of U.S. military activities within sovereign countries like Syria and Pakistan that are causing severe diplomatic headaches, worsening Western relations in the Middle East and complicating efforts to reach a security agreement in Iraq. If these strategic experiments by the Bush administration fail, it's the next president who will have to pick up the pieces.

Also worrying The Times is the Supreme Court's willingness to chip away at the concept of unanimous juries, allowing the state of Louisiana to convict an alleged killer even though all 12 jurors didn't agree. Only Louisiana and Oregon allow non-unanimous verdicts in criminal cases. "The unanimity requirement increases the credibility of verdicts by making it likelier that jurors will move beyond knee-jerk reactions to engage the arguments of both prosecution and defense."

Finally, The Times points out that Nebraska isn't the only state that has a problem with abandoned children. Though a poorly written law in that state led to a crisis in which parents were discarding young children and teenagers at hospitals without fear of prosecution, every state needs to do a better job of publicizing its counseling and intervention services for struggling families.

* Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles

He's running up the score, according to the Times editorial board. Like USC going for a touchdown when it's already leading 62-0, Barack Obama is spending oodles of cash on a Wednesday night 30-minute infomercial.

"For Obama, the decision seems to be based on the fact that he has raked in train-loads of campaign cash, and he can't possibly spend it all if he confines himself to battleground states. So he's trying to run up his popular vote count nationwide and increase what George W. Bush used to call his 'political capital.'"

The board also takes issue with some of the local governments that are asking voters for tax and bond money next week, but don't seem at all sheepish about using public funding to do their campaigning. That's because it's not really campaigning (wink) but is simply part of a public service informational outreach.

And, the SAT comes to kindergarten. Or just about. Students had their SAT and SAT II, and before that their pre-SAT, so it was only a matter of time before we had this: for eight-graders, the Pre-Pre-SAT, also known as Readistep.

Over on the op-ed side, the Times' Gregory Rodriguez picks through a psychological study finding that hubristic pride -- you know, kind of like overt patriotism -- masks some deep-seated insecurity.

Clearly, these studies shed some light on all the loose-lipped campaign rhetoric about who and what parts of the country are more patriotic than the rest. They suggest that not all pride is good, and they raise the question of whether hubristic pride is actually counterproductive. After all, if flag-waving braggadocio is no more than a mask for deep doubts about the viability of your "side," it just makes sense to put down Old Glory and stop shouting. That's the only way you're going to be able to engage in the hard work, sacrifice and practice you need for authentic achievement and authentic pride.

MIT Professor Charles Stewart III, co-director of the Cal-Tech/MIT Voting Technology Project, cites the McCain campaign attacks on ACORN as an opportunity to check in on the current state of voting security.

To stop attacks on voting machines (and thus remove any taint from Republican victories), states need laws that ensure a clear chain of custody for all machines and ballots before an election, require thorough audits of the machines after an election and make all software open to public scrutiny. Some states, including California, have made progress in this area, but most have not.

And Marc Eckstein, medical director of the Los Angeles city Fire Department, pays tribute to the "Great Stone Mother" -- General Hospital, the flagship building and symbol of Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center. Although a replacement opens next week, Eckstein says, the tradition of high-quality healthcare without regard to ability to pay will remain.

Photo: Jason DeCrow/AP

The big moment is coming up, or actually has. Over the weekend, the Times editorial board will conclude its series that lays out a vision of how the next president can uplift the nation, and then gives its endorsement of which candidate should be the one doing the uplifting--which a web special reveals today. (Yes, you have to click on the link for all to be revealed.) The advice for the new president touches today on issues of equity , for immigrants and for women. The editorial board cheers the candidates for their stances (somewhat abandoned in John McCain's case) in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and warns that there can be no rollback in abortion rights.  On Saturday, the series will address the need to restore the nation's world standing.

Closer to home, the editorial board calls for Orange County voters to reject Measure J, which would prevent the county government from improving employee pensions without getting voter approval, saying that voters shouldn't let elected officials out of the hard work of negotiating responsible contracts.

Getting back to the presidential election--because who doesn't these days?--Ronald Brownstein ponders what changes might occur if there is a "big" presidential win, along the lines of Ronand Reagan's, while law professor Douglas W. Kmiec assures Catholics that it's OK to vote for a pro-choice candidate:

"McCain's commitment, as he stressed in the debate, is to reverse Roe vs. Wade. But Republicans have been after this for decades, and the effort has not saved a single child. Even if Roe were reversed--unlikely, in my judgment--it merely transfers the question to the states, most of which are not expected to ban abortion."

Environmentalist Arlene Blum worries that fire-retardant chemicals on her sofa might have killed her cat Midnight, and might be doing in the rest of us, too. And Joel Stein receives grandmotherly advice on what to cut back on in a tough economy: The truffles might go, but HBO stays.

Drop that pencil! Before you fill out your absentee ballot, you should know about what's in Saturday's pages--a handy election recap that provides you with a quick, user-friendly guide to the major issues, state and in L.A. county, city and school district, on the November ballot. You'll get the Times editorial board's recommendations on how to vote, and why. Confused by the two alt-energy propositions? Wondering about the gamut of bonds, state and local? All will be made crystal clear, sort of. And if you prefer voting the old-fashioned way, this is a great editorial to clip and store in your wallet for your date with the voting booth.

Today's editorial page leads you to that recap with the last two endorsements on L.A. ballot measures. The editorial board registered a regretful No on Measure A, the tax to fund gang-diversion programs. Much as the money is needed, the city has yet to operate and effectively evaluate gang-diversion programs. Once we know the money will actually keep kids out of gangs, the board argues, it will be time to pass the tax. In contrast, the board gives thumbs-up to Measure B ...

Because counties don't keep a tally of whether the couples who get marriage licenses are of the same gender, it's been impossible to know how many gay and lesbian weddings have occurred since the state Supreme Court ruling took effect in mid-June. All of these marriages would probably be declared invalid--a kind of mass divorce by state initiative--if Proposition 8's ban on same-sex marriage passes in November.

The Williams Institute at UCLA came out today with a number, or at least an estimate: 11,000 same-sex weddings from June 17 to September 17. They did this by totting up, county by county, the number of marriages last year during that time and comparing it with this year, assuming that most of the increase would have been a result of the Supreme Court ruling. That seems like a pretty good assumption, since the biggest increases were seen in counties like L.A. and San Francisco that are known to have big gay populations.

This fits in neatly with the big delay to the big Proposition 8 sign-planting. Remember how in late September, a possible 1 million religionists were supposed to march out of their homes, at roughly the same time, and plant a Yes on Proposition 8 sign on their front lawns? Seems the printing of a number of those signs was outsourced to another country or countries--the campaign isn't saying which, but the blog rumor mill has been saying China--and the signs were somehow delayed. I see that the bumper stickers, which showed up in a more timely fashion, exhort people to "Restore Marriage." But what does this mean in the context of 11,000 same-sex marriages that stand to be undone by the initiative, a 17% increase in the number of all marriages in the state? Whose bumper stickers are these, anyway? Seems like the anti-Prop. 8 folks could use the same slogan; maybe there should be a few last-minute changes to those lawn signs before they arrive, whenever that is.

Photo by Ben Margot/AP

Against the advice of the Times editorial board, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have set some rules for private, for-profit trade schools. Previous regulations (which were fairly weak) expired a couple of months ago, and California already is getting a reputation as the place where bad operators open after they're shut down in other states.

Problems with trade schools over the years have included exaggerated claims that students could transfer credits to other schools and land lucrative jobs. In addition, a few schools have closed after students paid their money but before they received their training.

With SB 823 dead, it's all about the buyer being aware. Tough one, since ferreting out the good schools from the bad takes real reporting. Here's some advice Venice High School gave its students:

"Don't sign anything on your first visit to a school. And don't make a hasty decision because someone tells you there is limited space in the next class. This is a common sales ploy. Even if it's true, you'd be better off researching the school and waiting until the next semester than paying for the last seat in a class where you don't learn any real skills.

"Some application forms are binding contracts, so read them carefully before signing. Get a receipt for all payments and keep a copy of the application, contract, and all other documents."

That's a queston the Times editorial board asked two years ago. Now it's a question that mainstream college organizations increasingly ask as well.

A prestigious panel, pulled together last year by the National Association of College Admissions Counseling and led by the admissions dean at Harvard, reports this week that the importance of the SAT has been inflated and that grades and the so-called SAT II, or subject tests, are a better indicator of how well students will do in colleges.

Hard to figure out how that fits with the recent recommendation of the University of California's admissions panel, which advised keeping the SAT and getting rid of the SAT II as an admissions requirement. UC now requires two of the subject tests.

The SAT has become as much an industry as a supposed test of kids' reasoning and writing skills. The trend these days is to put more emphasis on grades, but we're already suffering hideous grade inflation, and without a national check on what those grades mean, it's easy to imagine ambitious high schools handing out A's like so much academic candy.

What's a college admissions officer to do?

Don't get me wrong, test scores mean something and educational accountability is a good thing. But unquestioning belief in all things data-driven sometimes just gets silly.

New York City has the latest example of that, with a reductionist "report card" for schools that already had gained a certain rep for being out of touch with reality. Now, the New York Times reports that a beloved elementary school that has been through a remarkable turnaround and won public praise from top school officials received an F on its latest city report card. The "grades" rely mainly on how much test scores improved, and where they were in comparison with schools that have similar demographics.

In the case of Public School #8, it appears there might be a problem with the way the data are compiled; the test scores are for students in  older grades, but the demographics are for the entire school. At this particular school, where middle-class families have only recently begun enrolling their children--something the city desperately wants--this skews picture.

The report cards are serious stuff; bad grades can mean replacing a school's administration. But if school honchos want to use the numbers to humiliate schools and punish principals, they'd better start learning to do more complicated math. Reducing a school to one overall grade is misleadingly simplistic at best, cute fodder for headlines but not for helping parents or the public understand schools. Los Angeles Unified is heading toward school report cards; let's hope these will give us some real information instead of becoming convenient but misleading symbols of accountability.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg, writing from the Republican National Convention, gushes about the excitement surrounding John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. If McCain's instincts are right, Goldberg opines in typically understated fashion, the selection could prove to be "one of the most brilliant political plays in American history":

... although the GOP base generally agrees with McCain's fiscal conservatism, they don't get excited by his reformer shtick. Palin reinforces the reform theme but, at the same time, she reassures the base enough that McCain has the maneuvering room to woo moderates and independents.

Goldberg doesn't mention the governor's pregnant teenage daughter, so he either was writing before the news came out or was following the admonition of his usual column topic, Barack Obama, not to sully this race with talk of the candidates' children.

Elsewhere on the op-ed page, Dickinson College philosophy prof Crispin Sartwell argues in favor of a recent Bush Administration regulation cutting federal dollars to hospitals and clinics unless they allow physicians to refuse to perform procedures -- most notably, abortion -- that run counter to their personal beliefs. Unfortunately, he doesn't try to reconcile his views with the recent California Supreme Court decision barring health-care personnel from refusing to perform procedures for gays or lesbians that run counter to their personal beliefs, most notably artificial insemination. Maybe next time.

Over in the editorial stack, the board urges the White House yet again to reach a deal that would allow former counsel Harriet Miers and other top officials to discuss the U.S. attorney firings with congressional investigators. It sheds light on a seemingly insane effort by Ecuadorean officials to endow nature with enforceable legal rights. And it urges Mark G. Yudof, president of the state university system, not to support a proposal that would reserve space at UC schools for far more high school students with less-than-stellar grades:

There should be a place for flexibility in the admissions process, and for crediting nontraditional achievement. But a switch to admitting a fifth of freshmen through subjective review runs a risk of lowering standards, eroding public support for UC and shortchanging students who have put their all into meeting the university's academic rigor.

The photo of Sarah Palin, John McCain and Palin's daughter Bristol holding four-month-old brother Trig at a recent campaign event in Ohio is courtesy of EPA/Mark Lyons.

The editorial board goes for the Provocation Trifecta today.

First, it praises the California Supreme Court for declaring that doctors cannot refuse care to a person based on sexual orientation. That ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed a San Diego County obstetrics and gynecology group refused to artificially inseminate her because she's a lesbian. Second, it expresses hope that Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis will be too busy in his new job at the Vatican to meddle in U.S. elections. Burke is best known for declaring during the 2004 campaign that fellow Catholic John Kerry should be denied communion because he supported abortion rights. Finally, it urges lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age to help colleges and universities combat an epidemic of binge drinking. (Take the poll!) Don't bottle up your outrage -- post your comments here, or at the bottom of each editorial.

On the Op-Ed page, scholar Mark Paul of the New American Foundation details how California voters could drive the state much more deeply into the red in November by approving one or more costly propositions:

Leave aside whether these measures are worthy as policy. Just look at the dollars involved. If voters pass all six, we will cumulatively add about $2.7 billion a year in bond debt service and direct state spending to the budget -- without including an extra dime to pay for them.

Columnist Rosa Brooks accuses neocons of trying to revive the Cold War, although she stops short of blaming them for the Russian invasion of Georgia. (That's so last week!) Michael Kleinman, a veteran of humanitarian efforts in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, discusses the uptick in direct attacks on aid workers in and around war zones. And columnist Patt Morrison gives at least seven good reasons for the quadrennial political conventions to move from the real world to the virtual one:

I've been to four or five party parties, and I'm convinced that there's almost nothing that happens in the hall that needs to take place in real life and real time anymore. Like the "footprint" fireworks at the Chinese Olympics, political conventions could be crafted entirely in a computer.

Right on! My avatar is ready, whenever the Dems and the GOP are.

The editorial board takes up the issue of campus binge drinking, urging lawmakers to let colleges and universities explore ways to teach students to drink responsibly. That means moving away from the rigid legal drinking age of 21, a standard that has saved thousands of lives over the past two decades. What do you think?

Have a better idea? Post a comment!

Thursday's letters question the wisdom of a new test for college-bound 8th graders.  Melanie Rome, a college admission counselor in Tarzana, writes:

...the fact that the College Board has come up with yet another way to put pressure on students infuriates me.  If you think 13-and 14-year-old education-savvy kids haven't begun to worry yet about college, think again.

Writers also argued with a Monday op-ed that suggested gas is more affordable now than it was in the 1960s, and with the notion that artificial lawns are necessarily more earth-friendly than the real thing.  Thoughts on end-of-life care, worker's compensation, and building a footpath through the Cahuenga Pass, too.

*Photo: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News

Hallelujah, say the academics and scientists. The University of California has prevailed over a lawsuit that sought to force the university to accept creationist science classes from two private Christian high schools as college-prep courses.

And what did they teach in these science classes at Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, one of the schools that sued? Well, one textbook in the class, published by Bob Jones University Press, informs youngsters that the earth is about 10,000 years old. The other textbook, "Biology: God's Living Creation," includes a lesson on how dinosaurs walked the earth with people, and might have faced extinction via flood. You know, THE flood.

That's one of the reasons for private schools, so that parents can find an educational environment tailored to their beliefs and values. But why they thought this would pass muster as science education with a top-flight public university is a mystery; as a matter of simple academic rigor, these lessons do not ready the students for classes at most colleges in the nation. The students who joined in the lawsuit reportedly were surprised to find that their courses didn't quality for UC; their beef ought to be with the high schools that led them to think this was college-prep material. Lawyers for the school say they've already filed appeals, but wouldn't the school be better off spending its money on real science textbooks?

Evan R. Goldstein writes an excellent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of George P. Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose theory of "frames" became very popular among the Democrats back when they were still failing. Now the Democrats are ascendant, yet Lakoff is oddly out of the winners circle. The basic dramatic structure includes a eureka scene:

In working out his theory, Lakoff found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the right "frames." Consider the phrase "tax relief," an effective staple of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word "relief" elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every time the phrase "tax relief" is heard or read by people, the relevant neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.

The hero's moment of hubris:

"When I entered the room, these senators got up and hugged me," Lakoff says. "It was an awesome situation."

And the tragic fall:

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the "neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings.

Did Lakoff's stock dwindle because he refused to become a Donkey Frank Luntz? Was he too eager to be the Donkey Frank Luntz? How did he end up drawing the ire of the good (Dust-Up contributor Marc Cooper), the bad (Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel) and the hairy (Harvard cognitive psychology prof Steven Pinker)? And where does Noam Chomsky fit into all this? Goldstein gets people speaking for all these positions and more.

I'm not so sure Lakoff's way of thinking is as dead as it appears. What made him a Democratic star was that in the early part of this decade the party went in for a particular brand of self-criticism, which involved convincing themselves that the real problem was in the packaging, not the product. That seems to me still operative: Barack Obama has channeled Thomas Frank's duped-yokel thesis effectively enough that it's clear he or somebody on his staff has read "What's the Matter With Kansas?" with care.

I think there are still plenty of Dems out there persuaded that if not for Karl Rove and his captains of consciousness (or more precisely, if only we had some new captains of consciousness), the American People would realize that taxes are a public good and private enterprise a necessary evil. Fortunately for those folks, in 2008 they may have gotten a pooch that can't be screwed.

* Update: Penultimate paragraph has been rewritten because reading it over even I couldn't understand what I was saying.

Presidential hopeful John McCain is the star of Monday's Letters to the Editor, as readers react to his plans to promote nuclear power (and to the editorial board's take on them) and to a report about his advisor, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.  Writes Kim Monson, of San Pedro:

If he gets his economic advice from people like Phil "Americans are whiners" Gramm and Carly "there is no job that is America's God-given right anymore" Fiorina, then corporate elitism will be alive and well in a McCain administration.

USC's outspoken dean of architecture, Saturday shutdowns at the DMV, militant animal rights activists and a busy shrink, too.

*Photo: Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

In Sunday's Letters to the Editor, readers commiserate with television writer Ellie Herman's op-ed about the trials and tribulations of enrolling--yes, merely enrolling--in courses to earn her teaching credentials. Laments former teacher Larry Zeiger, of San Diego, who fought his own credentials battle:

My patience, like Herman's, was tested by a deplorable, frustrating and insensitive bureaucratic system that will only lead to mediocrity as more and more bright, energetic and creative teachers seek careers elsewhere.

Thoughts on China and the Olympics, farmworkers vs.farm animals, gay marriage and a courageous veteran, too.

*Photo: Rick Loomis/TPN

The backers of Proposition 8 argue that the ban on same-sex marriage is about protecting school children.

From what?

According to the pro-Prop. 8 ballot argument -- which is being challenged in court, with the case expected to be heard today -- same-sex marriage isn't about "live and let live." No, it contends, a continuation of same-sex marriage would force on our children, from the earliest years of grade school, a curriculum that teaches that gay marriage is fine.

"State education laws require teachers to instruct children as young as kindergarteners about marriage," the argument reads. "If the gay marriage ruling is not overturned, then teachers will be required to teach young children that there is no difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage....That is an issue for parents to discuss with their children according to their own values and beliefs. It should not be forced on us against our will."

The only problem is that everything about this argument isn't just specious, it's just wrong.

Before we get too entirely riled up about China rousting its beggars, pickpockets and, most recently, its petitioners from the streets of Beijing in an attempt to pretty up the city's image for the Olympics, let's take a quiz. When does this headline date from?

"City Polishing Its Image For Olympic Visitors"

If you guessed 1984, you are a smart reader who looked at the title to this blogpost. The Los Angeles Times story from July 21, 1984, about preparations for our own Summer Games, starts out like this:

"Los Angeles police have added 30 horse-mounted officers downtown and stepped up their stopping nd questioning of Skid Row homeless in an effort to clean up the city in time for the Olympics....Many of the homeless--most often drunks, the mentally ill or others down on their luck--have apparently relocated to other downtown areas to escape the police pressure."

It goes on to quote a police captain saying, memorably, "We're trying to sanitize the area."

Certainly, nothing on the same scale as Beijing is attempting. But among our memories of the tremendously successful Summer Games, let's not forget to include a sliver of embarrassment about the people we tried to sweep aside.

*Photo:  TEH ENG KOON / AFP / Getty Images

Because The New Yorker hates the future, it will not allow you to read online a wonderful blast from the past: Charles Van Doren's version of his role in the "Twenty One" scandal.

You may know of the scandal around this and other early-TV game shows (as I mostly do) from Robert Redford's highly entertaining anti-television film "Quiz Show." (For scenes of Van Doren's and Herbert Stempel's actual performance on "Twenty One," click here, here and here.)

Titled "PERSONAL HISTORY: All the Answers: The quiz-show scandals — and the aftermath," the piece is worth...well, I don't know if it's worth the $4.50 cover price of The New Yorker, but it's worth a Starbucks paper-wastebasket dive or a trip to a not-distant library.

Most interestingly, Van Doren introduces a note of media ambition that may have been driving several of the central players. Van Doren's abortive post-"Twenty One" career at NBC included straightforward journalistic work such as an interview with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and a job doing high-culture segments for Dave Garroway. Manhattan Assistant D.A. Joseph Stone, who eventually nailed Van Doren and nine others on second-degree perjury charges, ended up trying to get Van Doren's help for a book on the affair in the 1990s. The ambitions of Richard Goodwin, the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce investigator who brought Van Doren to testify before Congress, are obvious even through Redford's smoke and mirrors: He went on to serve both Kennedy brothers and collaborated on the film.

But the best new wrinkle for me was one hidden in plain sight: Although Van Doren and Stempel had both finished their respective runs on the show by March 11, 1957, Redford opens his film with a pre-credit sequence involving the launch of Sputnik, which took place seven months later, on October 4 of that year. I remember because this witty scene was what informed my decision to like the movie. It's a harmless chronological distortion (one of many in the movie), but this new reminder of how Redford and screenwriter Paul Attanasio forefronted the anti-capitalist ironies of the material (the scene balances the supposed national emergency of the USSR satellite launch against a sequence of the actor playing Goodwin shopping for a fancy car) had me shouting out anew: Why was the quiz-show scandal ever considered a matter that demanded state attention? If the Hollywood Ten are considered martyrs to a shameful episode in our country's history, why should the quiz-show villains be any less sympathetic?

Read, for example, Van Doren's description of his initial interrogation by district attorney Stone:

From Arts & Letters Daily, Dissent has a thoughtful, unsympathetic piece on Friedrich Hayek by the writer Jesse Larner. The upshot: Hayek's popular classic "The Road to Serfdom" was right on a big point, but he was wrong on plenty of little ones. Here's Larner describing the basics:

The core of Road is an exploration of why a planned, state-managed economy must tend toward totalitarianism. If this is one’s concept of socialism, it could hardly survive a fair-minded encounter with Hayek. He lays out the complex ramifications of a relatively simple set of ideas, always with their impact on individual agency at the center of his analysis.

His argument takes a familiar classical liberal stance. Economic planning assumes a social goal at which the plan aims. But whose goal? In a society of competing interests—a condition that would describe every human society—any goal, any plan, inevitably favors some interests against others. Who is to say whether the favored interests are “better” for society as a whole?...

A complex economy is something no person or institution can understand. But it can generate a sustainable order, with a rational allocation of resources, as individuals respond to their own circumstances and make choices as consumers and entrepreneurs, signaling the subjective value that they place on goods and capital stock through the price mechanism: One of Hayek’s most original contributions to economic theory is the insight that economic systems are based primarily on information rather than resources. To plan an outcome and to direct economic inputs and outputs toward this outcome is to stifle the emergence of a spontaneous, democratic response to the needs of the individuals who make up the community—a response that will necessarily have winners and losers, but that will not privilege the vision or depend on the limited information of a governing elite, and that will encourage further experimentation.

To the extent I'm familiar with Hayek's work, Larner's presentation of his ideas seems pretty fair, though he could have spent less time on the dated parts of "Road to Serfdom" and more on later work. There's plenty of material I disagree with throughout, but I'll limit myself to his discussion of rent seeking, the tendency of large players (labor unions, trade groups, big corporations) to try and make money by manipulating law and government rather than by producing and trading:

Hayek’s solution is to deny the legitimacy of any movement to impose restraint on competition. The paradox is that forming spontaneous associations for the collective good of insiders seems to be a universal human activity. When individuals are free to make choices, this is invariably what they choose to do. Hayek’s principle might be sound, if applied universally, which it could never be.

I agree with the premises here but draw the opposite conclusion: If rent seeking is a universal behavior, that's a reason to want to keep the mechanisms of coercion as weak as possible. Anybody who has read the following words of death in the paper knows what I mean: "Even industry leaders support the proposed regulations." The solution is not to restrain unions or companies but to devalue the goody that they spend all that money trying to obtain: the overwhelming force of state power. Maybe there are true monopolies that have come about without the active participation of government, but I can't think of any.

OK, one other nit:

Hayek’s political philosophy recognizes only negative rights. Positive fulfillment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving.

Yes, positive fulfillment results only from individual striving, and even then only if you're lucky. That's not a part of Hayek's philosophy or a tenet of free marketism. It's the central fact of human existence.

But I come to praise, not to bury. It's a well done piece, worth reading in full.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait pens a mega-smack down of anti-capitalist Naomi Klein's book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," and all I can say is: Thank you, Jon Chait.

Why the gratitude? Buzz over her book has pushed Klein to the verge intellectual canonization, so much that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan saw her as a worthy enough adversary to debate on a live radio program. Her conspiracy theorist-like contention in "The Shock Doctrine" is that profit-hungry free marketeers relish major disasters, (from everything to Hurricane Katrina to, yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) which allow them to push their unpopular reforms on the the rest of us who are "shocked" by calamity. Her supporting arguments and examples are so absurd that, as Christopher Hitchens said in a debate on the existence of God, "There are no statements worth arguing here; all you can do is underline them.”

Where I merely underlined Klein's absurdities while reading her book, Chait ripped them to shreds. An excerpt from his piece:

Klein's model leaves little room for the non-economic varieties of conflict, such as ethnic or sectarian strife. "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era," she observes, "which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical freemarket 'reforms.'" One example Klein cites in her list is the U.S. intervention in Kosovo. But the human rights violation that she deplores was not the ethnic cleansing of Albanians, it was the American response. And what motivated the American attempt to stop the mass atrocity? Capitalism, of course: "The NATO attack on Belgrade in 1999 created the conditions for rapid privatizations in the former Yugoslavia--a goal that predated the war." (Klein assures her readers that economics was not the "sole motivator" for the war, but her analysis makes no room for any such complication.)

What I find most repugnant in Klein's work is her unrepentant character assassination of Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist she indicts as a sort of evil genius behind disaster capitalism. Klein's smoking gun? A three-sentence statement plucked completely out of context from an introduction Friedman wrote to one of his books. Friedman died before "The Shock Doctrine" was published, allowing Klein to peddle her ridiculous accusations without so much as a reply from the accused. (I pointed out Klein's misuse of Friedman's quote here.)

Oh, my heaven! (Oh, my Hubbard?) Is Will Smith a secret Scientologist? Is that why he appeared in that dreadful sequel to "Men in Black"? If he is (and he says he's not), why is he being so coy about it? Will the private school that he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith are funding inculcate scientological principles on the impressionable minds of the young students who attend?

And, breathlessly, above all: Why are they being given such a hard time about it?

It's a private school, and Smith & Smith are entitled to fund it according to their educational vision, without having to explain, deny or be coy about their personal beliefs. At least, unlike a celebrity or two we could name, they're not trying to shove beliefs of any sort down our throats. Maybe, as one educator in the know says, the school will cram a lot of Scientology jargon into kids' heads, maybe it actually will make learning more fun by having children learn through experience instead of deadly long lectures, and maybe it will do both.

This is why we have private schools, so that people of any particular belief can frame education according to their own philosophies. Sometimes this means no standardized testing, and sometimes it means Advanced Placement kindergarten.

There is something to be taken from this whole celebrity stew, though. The Smiths' money is the Smiths' call. But what if the taxpayers were called on to pay for kids' education at this school? If the supporters of school vouchers had their way — and they never give up on trying to have their way — this is the kind of question we'd have to confront.

This is why school vouchers are not, as proponents like to frame it, just a way to save students from miserable inner-city schools. Once the public's money is involved, the public should have the right to ask these questions and approve or disapprove of whether a school like the Smiths' would be entitled to a share of that money.

Vouchers aren't just problematic for public schools, or for public expenditure. They're a problem for private schools, too. Once the public is paying, it has the right to demand — and it should demand — good performance from those schools. But how do we measure performance? These days, through standardized tests. So what about schools whose very philosophy runs counter to those tests? The private schools wouldn't just put financial pressure on public schools; the public would be placing subtle financial pressure on private schools to change their ways to make them acceptable for public funding. There goes the beautiful diversity of private schooling.

Is the Smiths' school an example of that beautiful diversity? That's up to the beholder. The important point is that private schooling works best for both private and public schools when it stays private.

Mathew C. Taylor's recent Blowback "Stop cheering on charter schools" is a gift that keeps on giving. From Lompoc, some Econ 101:

Since Mr. Taylor is an English teacher I will cut him some slack. He’s probably never read an introductory economics book and so doesn’t realize how bad monopolies are.  How they lead to higher prices, and poorer service.  In fact our school systems are a perfect example of this.  California’s higher education systems are some of the best in the world.  Competition between universities makes everyone perform better and helps to keep costs down.  Our public education systems though, are some of the worst performing.  Lack of competition has resulted in a in bloated bureaucracy and teachers union.  Are there good people in our public schools still?  Of course, but the system is working against them.  The teachers union, and school bureaucrats fight any attempts at reform or change that would weaken their power.  That’s why they hate charters, because they can’t control them.  Luckily the people of California are waking up and demanding change.  It’s not ok for hundreds of thousands of kids not to graduate, or learn.  It’s not ok for schools to be unsafe.  And it’s not ok for teachers unions, or school bureaucracy’s to stand in the way of students educations.   

Mathew Andresen
Lompoc CA

And some more economics:

Mr. Taylor,

I can appreciate your frustrations and I believe that most understand the difficulties of teaching but your assertion that California does not spend enough on students is an outright misrepresentation.  In fact, if you include funding from the state of California for universities we in this state spend more per student than any other state in the union. 

I will never forget how a peer from Florida could not believe how cheap our junior college system was.  Junior college in Florida is more costly than the UC system in California.  If you want increased funding for k-12 then go to Sacramento and fight for it but please acknowledge what the taxpayers of this state do pay for all eduation.  Higher education is a privilege and most states make the student/family pay for it. 

Ken Bartels

We start the new Mailbag with two letters that continue the tradition of finding revanchist-counter-revolutionary-kapitalist-rentier assumptions lurking behind the language choices of the L.A. Times. Do these unravelings of our underlying mythologies reveal the unconscious bias of the Times, heightened sensitivity among readers, creeping carelessness with language, or something else? I'm just happy that people are reading carefully.

Replying to Megan McArdle and Ezra Klein's Campaign '08 Dust-Up, a reader in the Twin Cities detects the shadowy hand of the racetrack lobby:

Editor:
 
Regarding "Obamcainia" you write: "Megan McArdle discusses the McCain-Obama horserace with Ezra Klein."  Well I've got news for you.  It isn't a horserace.  And the fact that you and most other media outlets view and report it as such, is the primary reason why the political process has so tragically devolved in America.

BTW, how's circulation?

Lowest Regards,
Mark A Tarnowski
Minneapolis, MN

And from scenic Fort Myers, Florida, a language consultant has some hard words for Allen Jones' recent Blowback "Let nonviolent prisoners out."

"Building beds for the mentally ill is a fine goal" sounds more like a surrealist film than journalism. There is a tinge of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in it. Dali, Ernst. DeChirico, Bosch could probably have painted it well.

You transferred two metaphors to journalism that are not at home there, "building beds," a euphemism of state bureaucracies, and "the" mentally ill, an alley prejudice, the equivalent of "the" Jews in Mel's drunk mouth. The transfer is jarring.

Can you tell me what you were trying to paint with those words?

Harold A. Maio
Advisory Board
American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation
Board Member
Partners in Crisis
Former Consulting Editor
Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal
Boston University
Language Consultant
UPENN Collaborative on Community Integration of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities

We'll be back with more biased framing.

In the course of endorsing District Attorney Steve Cooley for re-election in the June 3 primary, The Times editorial board reminded voters that Cooley promised to serve only two terms (this would be his third). We also expressed alarm at his plan to anoint a successor. If he had kept his promise, we noted, there would be other qualified candidates running to succeed him instead of the two we believed would be worse than Cooley. Here's a link to the full editorial. Here's a brief selection:

As for Dist. Atty. Cooley, it is noteworthy that he criticized predecessor Gil Garcetti in 2000 for seeking a third term and promised that he would serve only two. This year, he is seeking his third.

It's not the first time a politician has broken a promise, but we recall his rationale -- the office benefits from "fresh eyes" on old problems. It held true then, and it holds true today. Under Cooley, the district attorney's office has done a competent job of handling felony prosecutions, and Cooley deserves credit for his principled stand on third strikes -- agreeing to prosecute them as strikes only when they are violent felonies. But if he stepped down now, as he had promised, other lawyers would be stepping up as candidates to reinvigorate the office.

We're especially concerned about Cooley's stated plan to stick around until he has groomed and selected a successor. That's a power that belongs to voters, not to him.

So it's with chagrin and a hint of admiration for his chutzpah that I take note of this Cooley mailer that quotes from the editorial in the lower right-hand corner and puts "Los Angeles Times" in huge letters to show we're on his team. "We go with Cooley." Well, we did say that.

Nigerian Larry Bowoto says he was shot by soldiers in the pay of a Chevron Corp. subsidiary:

I was standing on a drilling platform in the Niger Delta run by Chevron Nigeria Ltd. More than 100 unarmed villagers joined me there to protest the loss of our fish, our clean water and our trees because of Chevron's oil production activities in our region, and to protest the loss of our traditional ways of supporting ourselves as a result of these activities.

The lawsuit I (and others) filed in 1999 contends that Chevron Nigeria's own documents show that it paid for, transported and supervised Nigerian military and police forces that responded to our protests. They opened fire on us; it is our contention that they did this without warning. Two of the protesters were killed; I and more than 10 others were wounded. Still others were arrested and beaten by the Nigerian authorities.

Columnist Rosa Brooks objects to the notion that Hillary Clinton represents all women. Contributing editor Bill Stall parses Prop. 13 after 30 years and says it's time for a change. And Dickinson College's Crispin Sartwell looks at affirmative action for an oppressed minority in academia -- conservatives.

The editorial board endorses legislative candidates and wonders what's next for SAG now that AFTRA has signed a deal.

On the letters page, readers discuss local parishes paying for the Catholic priests scandal. L.A.'s Susan North says, "Let the Vatican have a yard sale. Rome is ultimately responsible, and Rome should pay."

*Art by Richard Downs

At the Center for Immigration Studies, David North says foreign students who are too poor to have cars can't be contributing to the U.S. economy:

For several decades in the last century many foreign leaders, particularly from Europe’s former colonies, had been educated in America and were friendly to the United States. That was and is a purely good thing.

Further, at the university level, it is helpful to U.S. students to have non-U.S. students in their classes — particularly in the fields of the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. It makes for a more cosmopolitan experience for the Americans involved. Unfortunately, most foreign students, particularly at the graduate level, are studying science, mathematics, and engineering, fields where the students’ overseas backgrounds are of lesser value.

But foreign students as a plus for the American economy, like soy beans grown in Iowa and exported to China? That’s an argument that does not stand up under examination.

Straw man argument? Not exactly: He's responding to the annual "Open Doors" report from the Institute of International Education, which states: "International students contribute approximately $14.5 billion dollars to the U.S. economy, through their expenditure on tuition and living expenses."

North says that figure's wrong: See what you think of his proof. Still, I'm not sure how important the balance-of-payments argument is among the universities that want to attract more foreign students. The main attraction is that they pay full tuition, isn't it?

In a cover story for the Jewish Journal, Brad A. Greenberg gives a long, fascinating profile of Kevin MacDonald, the Cal State Long Beach professor whose, um, particular interest in The Jews has created a dilemma for the college. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll just note that praise is due to: 1) Cal State Long Beach, which is doing a creditable job of balancing MacDonald's academic rights (if you believe such rights exist, as I don't) against the need to protect itself against both anti-Semitism and lawsuits; 2. Greenberg, who seems to maintain a perfectly dry tone in the face of some pretty hair-raising stuff (and I only say seems because I'd never heard of MacDonald before reading this piece and have nothing against which to measure it); and in a strange way, 3) MacDonald himself, who blends creepiness, crackpottery and a surprising forthrightness into a weird form of amiability that I can sort of respect. I hate to use such a hoary cliché, but he's a quintessentially American type of oddball, the kind you don't want to listen to because he occasionally makes you say "Hm, he's got a point." In particular, check out his case for why David Irving's biography of Goebbels should be put back on the shelves; if the book is as he characterizes it, then... Hm, he's got a point. (Experts alert: If it's not as he describes it, the comments are open!)

As I said, I'd never heard of MacDonald before this piece, but in the way of such things, once you're aware of him, he starts showing up everywhere. Interestingly, his real pillars of support are not just among white supremacists. (MacDonald, don'tcha know, isn't against other ethnicities; he's just supportive of his own European roots.) Instead, he attracts some pretty broad interest for his particular case on immigration:

MacDonald's core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.

"European people in this country will be a minority in a few years," MacDonald said. "I don't think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs."

Which is weird, because I thought building secure border fences was one of those areas where The Jews and the proud European-Americans were in perfect harmony. This stuff gets so confusing so fast you can drive yourself crazy. And then you get tenure, I think.

Whatever your race, creed, color or religion, enjoy this beautiful weekend.

What do you do when a guy high in the running for most hated man in the world teaches at your law school? If you're Christopher Edley Jr., dean of UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, you half-heartedly defend the professor while highlighting your powerlessness to do anything -- as he did last week did for his embattled faculty member John C. Yoo.

Yoo, of course, is the Berkeley law professor best known as the former Bush administration lawyer who authored the infamous "torture memo" of 2003. Besides laying out a legal argument he thought could protect practitioners of almost certainly illegal "enhanced interrogation" methods from prosecution, Yoo exhibited in his writings a stunning disregard for international law and a creepy nonchalance about expanding the president's terrorism-fighting authority. That much Edley denounces, just as the administration did when the public got wind of the memo. Edley's criticism of Yoo's work in the Bush administration isn't surprising.

More intriguing is how Edley approaches the question he set out to answer: Why is Yoo a professor at such a prestigious university when his legal advice to the most powerful man in the world has come under such resounding criticism by his colleagues? This is where Edley's insight sheds some light on the machinations of the great academy; ready why after the jump.

That'll be $18.1 million, please. BBC reports:

The key to the Kaaba - the ancient cube-shaped shrine in Mecca - went to an anonymous bidder at Sotheby's.

The auction house said the price set a record for the sale of an Islamic work of art.

Made of iron and measuring 37cm in length, the key is engraved with the words "This was made for the Holy House of God".

The key was the centrepiece of Sotheby's Islamic art sale, which realised more than $40m (£21.5m) in total.

According to Bloomberg, the key went for 20 times its estimated value, quite possibly because it was the only one left in private hands. (The 58 other ceremonial keys are held by museums, and the original keys remain with the Bani Shaybat tribe in Saudi Arabia, charged with the shrine's upkeep.) Its rarity certainly buoyed the total take of more than $40 million, more than twice Sotheby's previous record.

Fellow high-end auction block Christie's also broke its record on Tuesday, raising more than $23 million in sales of Islamic art. Which raises the question: Is this an anomaly in an unpredictable market, or a growing trend?

It's certainly hard to say what's fueling the demand. Since the buyers were anonymous, their reasons remain their own. But keep in mind, the lucky bidder won what was once a privilege reserved for the caliph: symbolic access to the holiest shrine of Islam: literally a "black box." The symbolism of the purchase in these Islamo-fascinated times is pretty hard to miss.

Richard Rothstein, last seen debating the achievement gap in a Dust-Up with Russlyn Ali, takes to the lackluster Cato Unbound with an interesting take on the 25th anniversary of the report A Nation At Risk, which examined the nation's puported crisis in education. According to Rothstein, the doomsaying of 1983, like most of the doomsaying from that period, turned out to be wrong. But unlike your harmless, garden-variety doomsaying, this one had some negative results:

Because of the report’s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements - the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more of it?

A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. Not thinking that President Reagan’s rule (’if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002.

I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.

Full article.

Keep it in mind next time you're presented with the secular version of Pascal's Wager. (That is, the "Hey, if it turns out we're wrong about the decline and fall of X, all we did was take enlightened action Y" line of argument, which usually precedes the "It's time to stop talking about X and just do something!" argument, and frequently ends up with "Hey, problem X seems to have solved itself, but now what do we do about all these Zs we've created?")

Seventh months after a Los Angeles Times editorial urged Hillary Clinton to expedite the release of records from her time as first lady, the National Archives and the Bill Clinton Library have disgorged more than 11,000 pages of her official schedules.

Having sifted through such artifacts in a previous life, I sympathize with the reporters who are now excavating the files for newsworthy nuggets. It helps when they’re available, as the Clinton cache is, on the Web or a CD. I have unfond memories of being part of a posse of reporters who had to prowl through the paper records of John G. Roberts Jr.’s service in the Reagan administration.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, the pesky public-interest group that filed suit to obtain the first lady files, said a quick eyeballing of the document (or datebook) dump indicated that Hillary was indeed a “co-president.” Fitton presumably meant this as a criticism, but it bolsters Hillary’s claim that her experience in the White House is relevant to her campaign to return there under her own colors. But if the Clinton campaign wants to make that argument, it should explain why it didn’t move heaven, Earth and the National Archives to produce this material earlier.

Can you shoot spitballs in home school? If so, Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer had better watch out, because home schoolers are fuming about their recent Blowback "Regulating home schoolers."  Commenters are all over the story — you can add your own two cents in the message board — and several readers were motivated to break out the old stone table and send an old-fashioned letter to the editor. Some samples:

Homeschooling Works Well Without State Oversight

As a homeschooling mom I am so encouraged by the many who choose to show their support for homeschooling and  those of us who choose to do so. However, I am surprised by how many of those who think that a proven method of teaching would be "improved" by state oversight.

If one does not wish to to consider the successful people both in history as well as those who are walking among us in workplaces and colleges that were homeschooled, perhaps you might want to consider your pocketbook. 

Regulating Homeschools would cost you big money in taxes that this state cannot afford right now. Do we really need a new section in the department of education to fund?

Wouldn't it make more sense to use all available money on the children currently in public schools?

In January, Education Week's comprehensive report card gave California a grade of "D+" when it comes to funding our schools, a "C-" on the teaching profession, and a "D" on K-12 achievement. Taken along with the California high school drop-out rate I find it odd that so many are calling for homeschoolers to be regulated now.

Do your research! Homeschooling works best without heavy regulation!

Angie Weaver
Garberville

---

Editors,

What a shame authors Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer hadn't yet shared their self-professed insights into the motives and intentions of home schoolers some 20 years ago when I began homeschooling for a number of years.  Maybe if they had my homeschooled kid would have been able to know some academic success in her life instead of graduating from UCLA.

Dana Strunk
U.H.S.P. (Uncredentialed Home Schooling Parent) Redlands

---

Dear Editor,

In reference to “Regulating Homeschoolers,” Op-Ed page, 3/13/08: To borrow a phrase, “there has always been something decidedly…anti-democratic in” traditional schooling. What could possibly be less democratic than top-down curriculum aimed almost wholly at raising test scores to keep the funds coming in? Ask any public school teacher who has a principal or district curriculum heavy breathing down her neck to make sure that she is on the right page in the language arts text book or is reading from the script in her teacher’s manual. In terms of the students, public school classrooms are at best benevolent dictatorships. With state standards and benchmarks to keep time with how could you possibly let students choose their own course of study? I imagine that the authors would also say that the bullying and teasing that goes on in traditional schools is character building and homeschooled children are missing out on that important part of growing up in a democracy. The fact is, state regulations have put a stranglehold on the public schools. The result is a disaffected populace. I think that Coombs and Shaffer would do well to check with their colleagues, college professors who look forward to having homeschooled students in their classes because those students have not had their passion bulldozed out of them, still can think for themselves, and are self-directed learners. Those, in my opinion, are the kinds of citizens we want in a democracy.

-Susie Stonefield Miller
Sebastopol,

---

It seems to me that Coombs and Shaffer protest too much. Although our older child was public schooled, we chose to educate our younger child at home. We have been able to teach him at the rate and level that fits him. He is ahead of his peers in all subjects, but one, where he we are taking extra time with him.

When my older child with similar abilities was in second grade the teacher told us that she was sorry he was bored; we should provide advanced work for him ourselves at home. We provide a secular education, sans TV, and are both scientists. There are many like us. Just as credentialed public school teachers regularly make the news for various abuses, there are abuses that occur and make the news among all groups of people. This cannot be defended, but neither can it be regulated away.

Our tax dollars pay do not support the schooling of our younger child - they go to the public schools. These same California public schools provide a popular program, abbreviated CAVA, which provides school at home. The children learn from a computer program and their parents.

Please do not promote misunderstanding through stereotypes, professors. There are many, many secular home schoolers who provide top-notch educations to their children. Studies conclude that home schooled children are better educated than their public schooled peers. Public schools admit they are having trouble teaching the children they already have. What would they do with over 166,000 more?

Lisa Whelan
Goleta

---

As a secular homeschooler I strongly resent Professors Coombs & Shafffer's attempt to pigeonhole all homeschoolers as some kind of religious nut cases who leave the education of their children to television. My six year-old daughter is studying American history, geography, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, cursive handwriting, literature, mathematics, and science. In addition she takes ballet and art lessons and has more friends than I am able to keep track of. A child's education, like a child's upbringing ought to be a parent's responsibility and prerogative. In the absence of specific evidence of abuse or neglect the state has no right to interfere.

Gideon Reich
Aliso Viejo

What a two-week punch it's been for New Jersey. First Wall native Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Kristen, proved to be the only sensible character in the Empire State's Spitzer farce. Now the ashes of Dina Matos McGreevey's divorce from former N.J. Gov. James McGreevey have returned to blue, hot life with revelations from an actual graduate of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

By way of both praise for truth-seeking and caution about evaluating claims made by adultery correspondents, please take a look at Andrew Strickler's piece highlighting the sharp dissonance between Kristen's unflattering description of the Jersey Shore and the awesome, awesome awesomeness of the actual Jersey Shore. I don't believe Dupré should feel compelled to deflect or soften or in any way defend her personal reputation, and I wish her hard work and success in whatever path she chooses to take. But just because the bluenoses are ganging up on you is no excuse for dumping on the Garden State.

Theodore Pedersen, the Scarlet Knight now at the center of the toothache-probingly annoying-but-compelling McGreevey saga, emerges as a 29-year-old philosopher. As he tells America's finest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger:

"[Dina Matos McGreevey]'s trying to make this a payday for herself. She should have told the truth about the three of us." Pedersen did not say if he was gay or bisexual and only described having contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts. He also said he never knew for sure if McGreevey was gay.

"I had heard the rumors in circles outside of work," he said. "In hindsight, there might have been light interest (in me), but it didn't seem like he was gay. It did enhance their sexual relationship having me be a part of it."

Even casual Savage Love readers will recognize that the tripartite alignment alluded to here does not dispose of the question of any participant's permanent sexual orientation, if permanent sexual orientation does in fact exist. The Star-Ledger quotes a four-sentence passage from Matos McGreevey's book which is equally nebulous on the matter:

In her memoir, Matos McGreevey says little about the sex life she had with her husband, except to say that it never gave her any reason to doubt he was straight.

"The sex was good," Matos McGreevey wrote.

It's worth noting that both Matos McGreevey and Pedersen could both be telling the truth (at least as quoted here; I have not read Silent Partner, so I don't know if she makes any falsifiable claims about specific romantic activities). In fact, more credit to Matos McGreevey if it is true, for trying to make the most of her mate's special interests — though others may take a less tolerant view than I do, particularly when full custody of a child is at issue. At Matos McGreevey's request, Pedersen has given a sealed deposition in the McGreeveys' divorce case, reports the Star Ledger, which also quotes Pedersen's useful seduction tips:

"The more we spend time with each other, the more we begin to trust each other with non-professional things," he said. "That relationship starts to progress, to transform into subtle hints, flirts."

Yes, Pedersen is fine! But how will this affect James McGreevey's efforts to become an Episcopal priest?

Sen. Gil Cedillo is no quitter. For years, the Los Angeles Democrat has been bringing forward bills to given driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Sadly for him (and for basic safety on the streets). Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger keeps coming up with inventive new reasons not to like the idea.

Now Cedillo has another politically unpopular idea he's planning to go the distance on — financial aid for illegal immigrants. The first version of the bill would have made it harder for students here legally to get financial aid, since there already are limited amounts to go around. A second version of the bill was better, using new funding, but nevertheless failed.

This year, Cedillo recognizes there is no way to add state funding for financial aid. Probably such aid will be cut. So his newest bill would direct the state's colleges (and ask UC) to consider illegal-immigrant students as qualified for their own reserves of aid, some private, some public.

The problem is, we're dealing with an even smaller pot of money during an unhappy economic period, when many families throughout the state will need more aid.

Still, there's a rationale behind Cedillo's idea. This state accepts illegal immigrants who live in Califorina to its public universities and colleges, as state residents (in other words, they don't have to pay out-of-state tuition). These students are regarded as no different from other students, and their very attendance at these schools is, in fact, a form of financial aid, since state subsidies keep the fees at these schools extraordinarily low. Why, then, should these students somehow become "other than" when it comes to additional financial aid?

Heather Mac Donald's lightning-rod piece on campus rape takes the top spot this week, with Dallas Weaver's Blowback on copyright a very close second. Readers didn't make this another mostly-Obama week, opting instead for conscience-stricken paparazzi and stubborn sadness. Here they are:

1. What campus rape crisis? by Heather Mac Donald
2. Copyright this, by Dallas Weaver
3. Surge doesn't equal success, by Michael Kinsley
4. The snapper snapped, by Nick Stern
5. Too good to win, by Joel Stein
6. White like us, by Gregory Rodriguez
7. What a little bird told us, by Jonathan Rosen
8. The miracle of melancholia, by Eric G. Wilson
9. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
10. Food or fuel? by the editorial board

Gregory Rodriguez advises Barack Obama to start wearing his patriotism on his sleeve -- or on his lapel -- and American University law professor Nancy D. Polikoff calls for laws to recognize the whole spectrum of family structures, whether gay or straight, married or unmarried. Civil rights lawyer Peggy Garrity assesses the damage that tort reform has caused the justice system:

A second woman is likely to face the same fate in the same court, in a suit alleging that she was drugged and brutally gang-raped by co-workers in Iraq and then held incommunicado, without food or water, in a shipping container by the same employer.... Adding insult to injury, the rape kit used by a military doctor in examining the victim was reportedly handed over to Halliburton/KBR, and doctor's notes and photos of her bruises are missing.

There was no criminal prosecution of the alleged perpetrators because they worked for a defense contractor, which is exempt from criminal sanctions under an order enacted by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during L. Paul Bremer III's tenure as its administrator.

That decision was outrageous enough. But now the Texas court ruling appears to say that because of the arbitration clause, these women have no standing in a U.S. civil court either.

In the next installment of its series "The Great Thirst," the editorial board predicts plans for a peripheral canal will be a win-win in the water wars between Northern and Southern California. The board also kicks off the one-year countdown to round one of Los Angeles' city elections, and calls out John McCain and Barack Obama for inching away from their commitment to public funds:

[W]ith his new front-runner status -- and facing the prospect of raising more private money than McCain in a general election -- Obama has begun to waver. Asked in the last Democratic debate if he was waffling on a promise to accept public financing, he dodged, saying that, if nominated, he wants to "sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that is fair for both sides." That sounds like the "old politics" that Obama inveighs against.

Both candidates should get over their buyer's remorse. What they gain by abandoning public financing, they may lose in credibility.

Readers write requiems for Dutton's books, set to close at the end of April. "With the imminent passing of Dutton's books," mourns Burt Prelutsky, "I feel as if I am on the verge of losing a relative. That is, a relative I actually like."

Bored after the War On Christmas ceasefire, I tried in late 2007 to get another civil war going, this one over New Year. To wit: Who are you to wish me well on holidays drawn from your "rational" sun-worshipping eurocentric calendar? My lunar calendar, where holidays show up during high midsummer in some years and the dead of winter in others, where we never know which month is crop-planting month, is no worse than yours, merely different!

I got nowhere with that prank. One bored colleague replied, "Eh, our calendar's no better. They can't even do it without adding an extra day every four years."

Too true! To all people who still wonder why the cycles of the day, the lunar month and the year can't be better matched, and to everybody else, I highly recommend Thomas S. Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. "Being able to understand how it looks from the creator's point of view is just great," writes Amazon reviewer A Customer. "My lesson learned: work your tail off and when you win, it always looks easier than it was..."

But don't take Customer's word for it, take mine. Whether you're a history buff or just curious about why people still comprehend so much of the world through meaningless human-scale patterns, Kuhn's book is full of valuable insights and disambiguations.

In the eternal struggle against The Jews, there can be no deserters.

That's pretty much the takeaway from this astounding interview that Norman Finkelstein, the historian, communist provocateur and academic-without-portfolio, gave last month to Lebanon's Future TV. Among many other Finkelsteinian aperçus: Any Arab who fails to resist the Israeli juggernaut to his last bullet will become a "slave of the Americans" reduced to "crawling on your knees"; interviewer Najat Sharafeddine reveals herself as neither a serious nor a level-headed person for suggesting that the 2006 attack on Lebanon could have been avoided; Hitler would have prefered to achieve his goals through peaceful means (I am not making that up); anybody who prefers survival to glorious death in service of the international Shiite jihad deserves no respect; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a "human freak"; any Lebanese who is presently alive has "no self-respect"; and of course, every situation everywhere always is exactly analogous to Hitler and the Nazis.

It's a mind-bogglingly arrogant, condescending, creepy, ill-informed performance. And in fact an overtly imperialist one that erases all marks of local politics and individual choice in order to make room for great-power conflict. In true Leninist fashion, Finkelstein does not believe in bystanders; any Arab who chooses not to engage the international struggle against the Zionist/capitalist enemy is not only expendable but beneath consideration. (Allah only knows what Fink made of Future TV's founder, the late rentier oppressor of the proletariat Rafiq al-Hariri.)

I've never given much thought to Finkelstein, who seems to have done some interesting historical (or at least historical-debunking) work, and my view of his long-running feud with Alan Dershowitz has never gone beyond a vague wish for both sides to lose. But at least Dersh contents himself with being a stateside nuisance of no danger to anybody except the wives of insulin-happy bazillionaires. Finkelstein, however, is speaking in the context of a goodwill tour of Lebanon on behalf of Hizbollah — whose views, don'tcha know, have been too long ignored in the United States. (Speak for yourself, Norm!) This is where the cesspool of leftwing extremism eventually flows, into a full-hearted alliance with any scuzzbucket willing and able to kill people. At Reason, Michael Young (who has had his own apparently bruising exchange with the no-nonsense Sharafeddine) expands on the pathology at work:

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Full interview (courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI) and transcript.

More than a few years ago, I filled a chair at a swanky dinner for William F. Buckley.

I was a young student from farm country in Ohio, a state where, as Mark Twain said of Cincinnati in particular, "Everything that happens comes there 10 years later than anywhere else." So the sartorially resplendent Mr. Buckley was a novelty and a wonder to my eyes, down to footgear I'd never seen before — those gentleman's embroidered velvet slippers you see advertised in "The New Yorker." For all I can remember, they had dollar signs sittched onto them in gold bullion thread.

Toward the end of the dinner, he rose to speak. His language was just as highly ornamented as his slippers, with its curlicues of vocabulary and metaphor, and, I listened to him transfixed as I mechanically ate my dessert — a slice of cake. My great-grandfather ate cake in a curious fashion that I had imitated from childhood, eating the cake part first and leaving the frosting for last, standing on the plate like the ruins of a chocolate fudge fort.

In our family this is perfectly normal, but at some point during his peroration, Buckley glanced down the table and saw my odd gateau fortifications. He paused, stared, arched one renowned eyebrow, lifted one thin Brahmin nostril into the slightest quiver — and resumed his remarks at the precise syllable where had left off.

Mortified, I hurriedly and furtively cleaned my plate. Buckley went to Yale but that evening, I was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo appears to have jumped through all the necessary hoops to make sure its pending deal with a Saudi university doesn't break any U.S. employment laws.

Cal Poly would design an engineering department for Jubail University College, which will ban women both from teaching and taking classes in the program. But Cal Poly professors, who apply to be part of the $5.9-million contract, can participate in the design task regardless of gender (or religion, etc.) In addition, Cal Poly spokespeople say it's their "understanding" that the California school will not be restricted in any way from sending whatever professors it chooses to be the co-directors who help launch the department "on the ground."

If it appears to be so legal, why does it flunk the smell test so badly? If Cal Poly has to be so careful to set up the circumstances under which women can and can't be discriminated against, that would seem to be enough of an indication that this is a bad venture, especially for a state college. Yes, the Saudis would be paying for their services (Cal Poly isn't doing this out of charity) and are expected to fund some nifty research projects in addition. But Cal Poly is a public institution of higher learning, a place with the highest sort of obligation to uphold noble standards of anti-discrimination. Jubail might be funding this particular contract, but Cal Poly wouldn't exist to sign a contract if it weren't for California taxpayers.

Stanford University announced Wednesday that it will join Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the other elite universities who waive tuition for students whose families earn less than $100,000 a year, throwing in free room and board for families who make less than $60,000.

This mind-boggling observation, from the San Jose Mercury News:

[T]he changes mean Stanford could be cheaper than state schools. For instance, a youth from a family with an annual adjusted gross income of $55,000 would pay $4,400 to $4,900 a year at Berkeley after scholarships. They'd get a free ride at Stanford.

This is great news for brainy high schoolers whose families otherwise might not be able to cover Stanford’s $36,000 yearly tuition tab, right?

Of course. There's just this catch: first they have to become one of the lucky few (around 11%) who make the cut.

Colleges, especially those offering blockbuster student aid deals like Stanford, are receiving record numbers of applications this year. Writes Audrey Kahane, a private college admissions counselor in West Hills:

Cornell's applications are up 7.5 percent this year and an incredible 57 percent since 2004. Northwestern's applications have climbed almost 14 percent this year and 54 percent in just the last three years. University of Chicago has 14 percent more applications this year, and Amherst is up 17 percent. Harvard has had a 19 percent increase in applications this year, which will lower last year's 9.1 percent acceptance rate to 7.7 percent this year.

...Here in California, University of California campuses have received 121,000 applications, an increase of 9 percent. Applications to Cal State campuses are up 11 percent.

With that kind of competition afoot, even safety schools aren’t sure things anymore. Blame it in part on the ease of filling out applications online. Blame it in part on the sheer numbers of boomer spawn swimming their way through secondary school these days (an estimated 3.2 million this year, expected to peak next year.) Whatever the reason, Stanford’s new program won’t make life any easier for most college-bound 12th graders, who, in addition to having to compete for scarce admissions slots, face a student loan credit crunch and rapidly rising tuition bills at most other schools, which don't have $17 billion endowments like Stanford's.

Party on, kids.

The Pope of the New Novel is dead.

Or, let me rephrase that: The body of Alain Robbe-Grillet is room temperature though seemingly cooler to the touch, with slack surface areas along its longitude and discolorations in transverse patterns. The anterior section is a faded beige while the dorsal area and extremeties show evidence of settlement.

Dullest writer of the twentieth century? Visionary genius of the post-religious age? Cinematic huckster? Fearless explorer of the post-rational? I'd say all of the above. The author of, among others, The Erasers, The Voyeur and La Jalousie, and the screenwriter of the mother of all art-house puzzlers Last Year At Marienbad was 85 years old. If you're going to give Robbe-Grillet a shot, I'd suggest any of the above, although my favorite is the short novel In the Labyrinth. I suspect with his passing we are now out of literary lions in winter, those people like Norman Mailer who could still pass as enfants terribles even in their ninth decades.

Dennis Dutton has a useful collection of obits. Le Monde calls him of all the great postwar writers "undoubtedly the best-known abroad and the least-liked in France." A very extensive piece in The Telegraph recounts the following telling anecdote:

In 1961 he had a narrow escape when the aeroplane in which he was travelling from Paris to Tokyo crashed on take-off after a stop at Hamburg airport. Robbe-Grillet dictated his account to a journalist, who found (as so many of the novelist's readers were to find) his version of events objective, but lacking in drama.

This soon changed to a complaint that Robbe-Grillet's version was described in clichéd journalese. His protestations that the journalist was responsible for these infelicities were ignored, though Umberto Eco rushed to his defence.

Whatever you think of his stuff (and the chances are extremely high that, whoever you are, you'll hate it), you can learn more about writing no-loaded-language descriptions from Robbe-Grillet than from any other recently deceased author.

It's tough being Milton Friedman these days. On top of being dead, the Nobel prize-winning economist is getting a posthumous beat-down by popular anti-capitalist Naomi Klein. In her writing and talks on globalization and the free market, Klein often quotes three sentences of Friedman's writing to expose the economist as an evil genius who helped inspire so-called "disaster capitalism." As Klein recently wrote in the L.A. Times:

Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

A smoking gun? See the quote in context and decide for yourself after the jump.

Green fever seems to have hit the state, the media, or both. Here are some of the verdant shades of California controversies:

Tree-huggers versus sun-lovers: A Sunnyvale couple refuses to cut down their redwoods, even though a neighbor says they're blocking his solar panels. Now that's environmentally awkward.

EPA battle heats up: EPA head Stephen Johnson gets the third degree at a hearing chaired by California's Sen. Barbara Boxer for preventing the Golden State from enacting tougher fuel efficiency standards. Embarrasingly enough, Johnson's mostly on his own, as EPA staff last month issued findings that contradicted his decision.

Off the mean streets, into green sheets: Alameda County is opening an environmentally friendly homeless shelter, equipped with solar panels and water-based heaters.

Green eating hits Sacto: And we're not talking vegetarian.

Thin as plastic: Los Angeles city councilmembers' willpower, that is. The city has given up on following San Francisco's lead and instituting a plastic shopping bag ban. The editorial board said China had a better idea, anyway.

It's not easy smoking green: Even with a doctor's note (and strictly off-hours), a state court rules that using medical marijuana can get you fired. Assemblymember Mark Leno says he'll see about that.

Okay, so maybe that last one wasn't exactly on topic.

The fight between the University of California and grad students enrolled in 2003 looks like a warped version of the typical underdog story — you know, the one where the little guy keeps getting beat down but bounces back to go for the win? Except, in this case, the little guy (students fighting to recover fees that UC improperly raised) won, but the university (which owes 35,000 graduate students about $40,000,000) just won't give up.

In 2003, UC graduate and professional school students saw their fees shoot through the roof, even though UC documents promised that they would not rise for continuing students. In July, some of the affected students filed suit, and the situation has been tied up in court ever since.

When the appeals court decision came down in November, I figured UC would throw in the towel and exit the ring as gracefully as possible. I was wrong. According to the San Jose Mercury News:

Every month that passes adds more than $300,000 in interest to the award, said an attorney for the plaintiffs. But a UC lawyer said the university believes it can still win the case.

"You have to make a judgment whether accumulation of interest outweighs the legal strengths of the case," said the UC attorney, Chris Patti. "We decided that it did not.

"It's going to be a big ticket, whether we have to pay now or in the future."

Translation: We're screwed either way, so why not spend a few million more, especially when we can take it out of student pockets?

It's kind of like writer's strike syndrome: There's no reason not to settle the whole thing and move on, so that I can get my weekly dose of NBC's Chuck — but the two parties are so embittered that they're going to see the other side buried.

The problem with that attitude? They each dig their own holes, and they both still get covered in crap.

The editorial board sees a post-Bhutto future as a chance for White House policy to "get on the right side of history," and writes an open letter to her son on his, and Pakistan's, future:

If you truly wish to struggle for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, you need to make your own way. Identify worthy candidates with the values, skills and experience you believe are needed to run Pakistan, and work for their election. Or start your own NGO. Or go to graduate school and decide for yourself which policies will help your country. Or run for parliament. In 2008, legitimacy cannot be inherited. It must be won with ballots.

Please learn to be the democratic and wise leader your country yearns for. Pakistan will need you — just not now, not in this role. We wish you luck.

The board also tells the city to mind its own business and stop meddling in private labor disputes.

On the Op-Ed page, historian Joseph J. Ellis waxes skeptical about presidential campaign promises, and Manhattan Institute fellow Tamar Jacoby warns that when it comes to anti-immigration sentiment, don't believe the hype. Author Eric Weiner kicks off the New Year by tossing out his self-help books:

Social scientists studying happiness (or subjective well-being, to use the academic term) have found that external factors — quality of government, social interactions and, to an extent, money — determine our happiness more than anything else. In other words, happiness does not reside inside of you. Happiness is out there.

Readers take sides on current state malpractice law. "To put it more bluntly," writes John Fortman, "we need the doctors more than we need the lawyers." Lisa Smock, who describes the fallout from her mother's botched surgery, points out, "to use a 1975 dollar amount for malpractice awards today is a disgrace to the ones who have put their trust in doctors but have been injured by them."

Biotechnology has left the domain of 'weird' and planted its feet firmly in the realm of 'kind of scary.' NPR takes a look at some bizarro bio-art:

During a recent workshop, hosted by the Machine Project in Los Angeles, Zurr guided a small group of aspiring bioartists through a "painting" exercise. First, [artist Ionat] Zurr sawed open the femur of a freshly-slaughtered cow. After choosing which cells she wanted, she "painted" them onto a three-dimensional scaffolding made of degradable polymer — a type of plastic. Over many weeks, the cells will grow over whatever shape the scaffolding takes, turning into a living sculpture of skin.

And now, according to the Loh Down, scientists have created creepy, crawly biobots:

...bio-engineers grow heart muscle cells, harvested from rats, onto thin plastic skeletons. The skeletons are patterned with protein blueprints that guide the cells into alignment. Once deposited, the cells mold around the plastic to form working muscle tissue.

The robots can flex their home-grown muscle tissue and move independently -- like living creatures. One such tissue robot, invented at Harvard, creeps across its Petri dish like an inchworm. Another one has a tail like a fish and can swim. A group at National University in Korea has designed a crab-like version that sidles about on six legs.

Because they're partly alive, these machines don't need external power. They just need food -- a simple sugar solution.

Seriously, haven't these guys seen "The Matrix"?

Granted, the art above probably raises more objections than the science, but it won't be long until scientists incorporate artificial intelligence and these half-living vessels -- and then the moral issues are bound to get messy.

Notice, stem cells feature somewhat in the first of these projects -- but neither one really needs them to push the limits of bioethics. As the editorial board notes in 'Life,' part two of its American Values series:

Last month's news that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin had modified adult skin cells to behave as embryonic stem cells seemed at first to have resolved this issue, but that's only true if you believe that the debate over stem cells, cloning and genetic modification is a subset of the debate over abortion. It is not. It is, or could become, the central life debate of our time, and depending on your perspective, the questions it raises are either exhilarating or horrifying.

You can read the piece and explore the series here.

The grim mood of the nation did not spare readers of the L.A. Times opinion pages this week. Tales of doom, gloom, war, corruption and the ruins of ancient societies dominated our traffic (which was light, so tell a friend about Opinion L.A. already). "A more perfect union," the opener for our American Values 2008 series, barely missed the top 10 and our second, "Life," made the top 20, so if you haven't started feasting on the whole series, do yourself a favor. ("Liberty" and "Justice" went live today and will be counted in next week's traffic.) Without further ado...

1. Symptoms of an economic depression By Steve Fraser
2. AWOL military justice By Morris D. Davis
3. Stonehenges all around us By Craig Childs
4. Is this really World War IV? By Peter Beinart
5. The Supreme Court's habeas hearing By the editorial board
6. A FISA fix By Michael B. Mukasey
7. F in science, A in self-esteem By the editorial board
8. Torture's blame game By Rosa Brooks
9. Two beautiful Dems stand before us ... By Jen Sullivan Brych and Matt Vespa
10. Big Oil buys Sacramento By Jamie Court and Judy Dugan

The the UN's 12-day green-fest in Bali and Al Gore's co-acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize have helped raise the heat on environmental policy. But there's smog hovering over that verdant hope — the political pressure has helped spark renewed interest in nuclear energy. IBM recently created a Nuclear Power Advisory Council, and as the San Diego Union-Tribune reports,

Spurred by concerns about global warming, a state Senate committee launched an inquiry yesterday into the potential of using nuclear power as a clean energy source.

Yesterday's special session in San Diego was the first time in two decades that the Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications held hearings on nuclear power, said Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, the panel's chairwoman.

The key question facing the committee was whether nuclear power could help the state meet its goal of slashing greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050.

“Before we talk about changing state policies, we want to find out what's going on in the world,” Kehoe said. “We haven't heard any information on nuclear power in 20 years.”

That's not a move The Times' editorial board favors:

The U.S. government allows nuclear plants to operate under a level of secrecy usually reserved for the national security apparatus. Last year, for example, about nine gallons of highly enriched uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee, forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might have formed a critical mass sufficient for a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation to kill or burn workers nearby. [...]

...the U.S. government spends more on nuclear power than it does on renewables and efficiency. Taxpayer subsidies to the nuclear industry amounted to $9 billion 2006, according to Doug Koplow, a researcher based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Earth Track consultancy monitors energy spending. Renewable power sources, including hydropower but not ethanol, got $6 billion, and $2 billion went toward conservation.

That's out of whack.

Well, then ... tell us how you really feel.

At least four California universities applying for stem cell research grants from the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee might be knocked out of the running due to conflicts of interest. But instead of being your humdrum tale of conspiracies and backroom deals, the whole thing is starting to reek of multiple administrative brain farts. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Although the grant application called for letters of support from the deans or department chairmen, the conflict-of-interest policy for the stem cell institute also specifies that its board members "shall not make, participate in making, or in any way attempt to use their official position to influence a decision regarding a grant ..." [...]

The apparent contradiction in the rulebook is the kind of problem that critics say was built into the stem cell initiative passed by voters in 2004. [...]

It remains unclear what will happen if the grant applications are rejected. One option, according to sources, is to simply have the four universities reapply at a later date - a delay of at least six months. Another option would be to reject all of the grants and have everyone update their applications because of the confusion regarding the letter-of-recommendation rules.

If the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime, there may be a reason. The ICOC is still recovering from a conflict-of-interest controversy sparked this summer, according to The Scientist blog:

The conflict of interest occurred in August, when John Reed, a member of the CIRM's governing board, wrote a letter to Arlene Chiu, then CIRM's chief scientific officer, opposing the denial of a CIRM grant to a researcher at the San Diego-area Burnham Institute for Medical Research.

Reed, who is president and CEO of the Burnham Institute, wrote the seven page letter lobbying CIRM to reconsider its denial of a $638,000 SEED grant to David Smotrich, a researcher affiliated with the Burnham Institute but also the founder and president of a San Diego-area infertility clinic.... CIRM's conflict of interest rules prohibit board members from participating in any grant award discussions that involve their home institutions.

A state audit soon followed, along with calls for Reed and committee chair Robert Klein (who prompted him to send the letter) to resign. So in all likehood, the committee was a little twitchier than usual.

All the same, the four offending administrators are committee members and must have known about Reed's royal muck-up. At the very least, they should be familiar with the regulations — especially one so basic.

Which raises the question: Do we really want these guys in charge of millions of dollars of research money, anyway?

If you're one of those minorities whose ancestors hailed from the eastern hemisphere, figuring out what box to check in the "race/ethnicity" section of any form is a stressful experience requiring a quick soul-searching session. Now, though, the University of California hopes to ease that existential burden for UC applicants, raising the number of Asian/Pacific Islander categories from eight to 23. From The Daily Californian:

...the University of California will increase threefold the number of subgroups under the Asian and Pacific Islander categories on its admission application, officials announced Friday. [...]

Asian American categories will include Chinese, Taiwanese, Asian Indian, Japanese, Pakistani, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian and “other Asian.”

The Pacific Islander category, previously under one heading, will now include Native Hawaiian, Guamanian/Chamorro, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and “other Pacific Islander.”

And no, this is not about being PC. Or at least, not just about that. In between the Asian supernerd stereotype and the fact that Asians now outnumber whites across the UC system, many Asian minorities fall through the cracks.

It's kind of the reverse of the way whites assimilated: Asians are now being officially subcategorized in finer detail, while whites have blended from very distinctive communities — German, Italian, Polish and others — into this monochromatic mash. Part of that has to do with intermarriage: Many people know where their parents and grandparents came from, it's just that none of them came from the same place. That's generally still not the case for Asian Americans. 

Not that this ethnic differentiation is a new phenomenon. Go to any number of California colleges and you'll see the unsanctioned version: Pakistani students sit at one club table and the Pilipino students man their own. (Some Korean-Christian groups, however, do have a tendency to proselytize to unsuspecting freshmen.) Self-contained social networks spring out of those isolated groups, and it's debatable whether that's a good thing -- even if the alternative is the monstrously huge Asian American Association.

Oddly enough, Asian Americans aren't the only ones experiencing diversity/fragmentation issues. A recent Pew poll found that 37% of African Americans surveyed no longer saw blacks as a unified race. The question is, how exactly would they break blacks down by ethnicity? Is it region, or dialect, or country of origin?

What do shoe company moguls do with their free time? The Wall Street Journal finds out:

Late one spring afternoon last year, a mystery man sat in the back of a creative-writing seminar at Stanford. Evidently a student, he was much older than anyone else in the room. He was wearing a black blazer and white Nikes. He said his name was Phil.

As the days passed, the man's identity gradually came into focus. The instructor "made several vague allusions to Phil taking off in his private jet," recalls André Lyon, an English major enrolled in the class. And tales about Michael Jordan found their way into the man's literary discourse.

After a couple of weeks, a rumor began to circulate that the old dude in the Nikes was Philip H. Knight, the billionaire founder of the world's largest sportswear company.

It's hard to say which is more intriguing: The fact that a Nike exec wanted to be an English student, or the fact that he blended in so well.

He's not the only high-profile personality to go undercover for higher ed. This summer, Shakira took classes at UCLA:

She enrolled in a history of Western civilization course under her middle and last names, Isabel Mebarak, telling clueless classmates she was just visiting from Colombia.

"Oh, it was such a respite for me," Shakira recalls. "I felt that need to put a brake on everything, to escape from the celebrity life and reclaim a normal life for a while. It was very healthy for me."

College: the new secret rehab.

You can't blame stars for keeping educational endeavors below the radar. While some seem to do rather well by college, a la Julia Stiles, others find that their academic decisions become uncomfortably public, as happened with Mary-Kate Olsen's leave of absence from New York University. Most, though, generally seem to view college as something to do before their careers take them off to new heights, similar to normal students taking a year off to travel before facing the real world.

Not all stars view college as just an academic feather in their celebrity caps — Network World profiles a range of actors, singers and others in show biz who come from uber-geeky backgrounds. For these Tinseltowners, such as chemical engineer Terrence Howard, returning to college means picking up a career that was set aside when the acting (or singing, or directing) bug bit.

On the whole, this seems like a social positive: Personalities are making college cool. Forget Kabbalah or exotic tatoos — now a pop princess can flaunt her B.A. in art history.

The editorial board considers whether it's time to let USC run the Coliseum:

The Times has long promoted the Coliseum as the best place for an NFL team. Still, we have to hand it to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for recognizing the truth: The NFL and the stadium broke up long ago and aren't getting back together. At least, not as long as the commission acts as a marriage broker.

USC, of course, wants everything: the ability to run the Coliseum for the next four decades, lucrative naming rights, power to bring much-needed seating, lighting and facility improvements. And it wants it for a very long time. Would USC be able to demolish part of the stadium or to alter the look and feel of the historic structure with renovations?

The board doesn't like the GOP's new compassionless conservatism, on display at Wednesday night's debate. And the board wonders whether Lebanon's new leader can bring in democracy.

The University of Richmond's Carl Tobias takes a look at the newest member of the 9th Circuit. Mansoor Ijaz thinks neither Nawaz Sharif nor Benazir Bhutto would make for good Musharraf replacements. Columnists Joel Stein plots world domination, one drink at a time. And columnist Ronald Brownstein says there's still some fight left in the GOP.

Readers react to USC's proposal to leave the Coliseum for the Rose Bowl. Calabasas' Jonathan Kotler notes a trend of teams leaving the Coliseum: "The Los Angeles Chargers: gone. The Los Angeles Rams: gone. The Los Angeles Raiders: gone. The Los Angeles Lakers: gone. The Los Angeles Kings: gone. UCLA football: gone. USC basketball: gone. USC football: one foot out the door."

Three big papers report this week on three new local studies challenging assumptions about the cost of illegal immigration. The Times writes up a UCLA study finding that in California, Latino illegal immigrants are less likely to visit doctors, clinics, and even emergency rooms compared to U.S.-born Latinos. (That doesn't mean that illegal immigrants healthcare is low-cost, however, particularly because they're less likely to have health insurance than native Latinos — some studies put the cost well over $1 billion.)

The New York Times noted that immigrants (legal and illegal) contribute nearly a quarter of the state's economy (and make up 21% of the state population). The study also found that immigrants pay proportionate federal and state taxes.

And the Washington Post comes in with a report from Fairfax County that shrugs and says it's impossible to figure out the cost of illegal immigration, anyway, because some services illegal immigrants use — particularly public infrastructure like roads and parks — aren't tailored specifically to them. A county official offers a sage and no doubt well-documented explanation for why we don't need to worry about the burden illegal immigrants pose to libraries: "Our libraries are not being rushed by undocumented aliens looking for bestsellers."

It's almost too good to be true, particularly in light of the whole Hwang Woo Suk scandal a couple years back.

But in two separate studies, one from the University of Wisconsin and another from Kyoto, scientists found that skin cells can be manipulated to become pluripotent — the same quality that currently makes embryonic stem cells a hot commodity.

That's not to say the current methods are without risk:

... both sets of scientists admit that the retroviruses employed to insert genes into the human skin cells could cause tumours. They claim that research must continue to develop methods of reprogramming cells by simply 'switching on' genes.

Obviously, it's not a good idea to count your cells before they're reprogrammed. But if this technology bears fruit, it would effectively end the battle between advocates and opponents of embryonic stem cell research. Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, certainly sees this as a moral victory.

There are medical advantages over embryonic stem cells, too: Using patients' own cells in treatment would eliminate the risk of rejection.

Richard Murphy, interim president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, praised the findings (while also covering his bases, given that state voters have already committed to up to $3 billion in funding through Proposition 71):

Richard Murphy ... added that "these are very exciting new directions for stem-cell research."

Since voters created it in 2004, the institute's focus has been on human embryonic stem cell studies, because President Bush had restricted federal financing for that kind of research. But now that scientists can give skin cells properties similar to human embryonic stem cells, "we think that we need to have parallel tracks," with some studies on embryonic stem cells and others on reprogramming, Murphy said.

The institute already has given a few grants to scientists attempting to reprogram cells and Murphy said it intends to seek applications for more in the spring.

Jim Geraghty from the National Review Online does have one suggestion for people who might be somewhat peeved at this otherwise happy discovery:

Today's breakthrough is a big reason to celebrate...unless you saw fetal stem cell research as a useful wedge issue in 2008.

Can't say I'm too broken up about that.

Well, we already knew left-leaning softies were to blame for Rush, but it's not just because they give the radio personality someone to rail against. It's also because liberals are actually tuning into his program. That's according to a poll conducted by Zogby International and USC's Norman Lear Center.

Given what the terms liberal and conservative are actually supposed to mean, it may not be a surprise that bluebloods value diverse viewpoints, while the red-blooded prefer programming aimed at reinforcing their beliefs. And granted, this is the kind of finding that seems to be right up Zogby's alley. Nevertheless, it's intriguing that the anecdotal evidence has actually been validated by people who know how to handle statistics.

But the research didn't just show liberals' media sources to be more varied than conservatives'. It found that, based on entertainment preferences, people can be clearly grouped into one of three categories: liberal, conservative and moderate. You are what you watch. And read. And play.

A sample of the findings: Liberals like PBS, conservatives dig FOX News. Moderates, meanwhile, watch talk shows and avoid politics as much as possible. It indicates, Lear's deputy director Johanna Blakley told KPCC's Larry Mantle, that Oprah's endorsement of Barack Obama may turn out to be a crucial victory for him.

The whole thing seems to reflect better on lefties than on right-wingers — though happily, they both love Hugh Laurie. But moderates (or "purples," as the study calls them) come out looking the worst of the bunch. Then again, don't take my word for it — go read Zogby's summary yourself, and tell us what you think.

Opinion L.A.: We blog. YOU decide.

In today's Dust-Up, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Brian Katulis take aim at Iraq's fractured politics. With the apparent drop in violence and sectarianism, why haven't Iraq's leaders managed to build a more unified and effective government?

Katulis makes his first move:

The so-called political surge has not happened because of two main reasons — structural flaws in Iraq's political transition and institutions and the Bush administration's unconditional and open-ended commitment of U.S. money and troops fostering moral hazard among Iraq's leaders.

When it's his turn, Rivkin doesn't hold back:

Your musings about the absence of a "political surge" reveal two fundamental mistakes, widely shared among the administration's critics: The first is a serious failure to appreciate why democracy-building in the Middle East, while a slow and painful process, is the only way to advance America's long-term national security interests. ... The second failure is an obsession, widely shared among the critics, with the alleged mistakes and ineptitude of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq.

Read the rest and join in the debate here.

The editorial board advocates a way to pressure Myanmar's junta:

Thanks to Hollywood and a tireless campaign by human-rights activists, many people have heard of "blood diamonds." An international outcry over the sale of diamonds to fund atrocities in African countries such as Sierra Leone led to a gemstone certification process that has helped quell the problem.

Today, rubies are the new diamonds, and this time the atrocities are happening in Myanmar.... With much of the world searching for ways to pressure the Myanmar regime to stop killing and imprisoning its political opponents, Human Rights Watch has a sensible suggestion: Don't buy Burmese gems.

The board also cues the Ghostbusters theme song and hails the return of L.A.'s Drought Busters, and wonders if Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' extends to protecting gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination.

Columnist Rosa Brooks says Bush made the wrong choice by befriending Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf. California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi and UC Davis law professor John Oakley want to freeze college fees for the state's students. R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director, explains why companies cooperate with the CIA, and why they should be protected. Author Jeremy Scahill points out that prosecuting Blackwater for shooting Iraqi civilians might be impossible.

Readers discuss the writers strike on the letters page. Frank Pierson, a former president of the Writers Guild and of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and an Oscar-winning writer of "Dog Day Afternoon," says, "The law says that in 'work for hire' the employer is 'deemed to be the author.' If you follow this logic, Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria wrote Wagner's operas and the pope personally painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling."

Halfway though this week's dust-up, David B. Rivkin and Brian Katulis are still split on whether there's light at the end of the tunnel. Today they're opining on whether Sunnis have turned away from Islamism, and if Shiites will follow their lead.

Rivkin's reading of the situation:

It would be premature to announce that Iraq's Sunni Arabs have entirely forsaken Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, great strides have been made, and are being made, toward this goal.
[...]

The benefits of this cooperation extend far beyond Anbar province, let alone Iraq. The entire Islamic world can now see traditional, and undoubtedly religious, Sunnis making common cause with the United States military against a terrorist organization that purports to carry the banner of Islam.

But Katulis contends,

The simple fact is that Sunni Arab insurgent groups and tribes in Iraq were never all that close with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its affiliates. Reports of divisions and outright fighting between more local-minded nationalist groups and those aligned with AQI had been bubbling up since 2004.

Read the whole exchange and shoot us your own comments here.

Katulis and Rivkin again cross ballpoint pens, this time regarding troop levels: Should we stay or should we go now?

Katulis says if we stay, there will be trouble:

Iraq cannot stabilize without serious action from Iraq's leadership, and it is self-defeating for the United States to want Iraq to succeed more than the Iraqi leadership does. U.S. troops in Iraq have served with honor and done their share. And the time has long passed for Iraq's leadership to step up and take responsibility for its own affairs.

Rivkin retorts that if we go, it will be double:

Like most critics of the war, Brian, you demand success within an artificial and unrealistic time frame. Wars, particularly counterinsurgency wars, which are fought in small engagements and patrols rather than set-piece battles, take time to win. If the unrealistic time frames the critics impose on the war in Iraq had been insisted upon in any of America's past wars, most of which included periods of terrible setbacks, the results would have been disastrous.

Read the rest and spill some of your own ink here.

Trouble seems to come in threes (or fours, or lots) for the University of California. A proposal to raise UC campus chancellors' salaries by 33% has raised the ire of the state — according to the Sacramento Bee, Lt. Governor John Garamendi snapped:

"The students get to pay more so the chancellors get to have more," Garamendi said Monday. "I am really astounded that the administration would propose a salary increase of this size to the highest-paid executives in the entire system."

I have to say, kudos for having this discussion out in the open, but major minus points for having it so soon after the pay perk scandals of last year.

Meanwhile, UC Regent John Moores abruptly and tersely quit his post — which is too bad, since he was a prominent voice of dissent on the board. He famously called the regents "about as relevant as furniture when it comes to governing;" tried to pass a proposal banning schools from accepting research funds from tobacco companies and wrote an editorial for Forbes supporting anti-affirmative action policies, getting a lot of flak in the process. In a blogpost, Chris Reed thinks UC's handling of affirmative action sealed the deal. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if he just reached the end of his tether.

Apparently, the ex-regent sent out a one-line resignation letter. Short, probably not so sweet.

Perhaps the 33% proposal got his goat. Or, maybe it was a possible plan to slash the 12.5% guarantee (that is, the top eighth of eligible California seniors are promised a spot in UC) to 4%. Granted, the plan actually aims to increase diversity at UC campuses, which only serves to make it more controversial.

UC's got it's fair share of problems right now. It seems to be wearing some state officials thin: State Treasurer Bill Lockyer recently suggested that the state should cut the university system loose, and let it run itself as a private institution.

That's unlikey to happen. Still, even voicing that suggestion has to raise UC officials' blood pressures to critical levels. Sooner or later, someone had to bust a valve.

This week's dust-up kicks off with White House veteran David B. Rivkin Jr. and author Brian Katulis taking on the numbers coming out of Iraq. Does the good news on casualties in Iraq show the surge is working?

Rivkin takes the first shot, concluding:

Americans should be pleased with the results of the surge.   Iraq's steadily improving security environment gives the United States a lot of flexibility.  Having crippled Al Qaeda, we can now pursue simultaneous efforts to improve Iraq's political process, not only at the central level, but also at the regional and local levels.  By destroying Al Qaeda, the United States has become the indispensable power in Iraq.  If the American public and their leaders keep their nerve, the United States will be perfectly positioned to wield considerable and positive influence throughout Iraq and the broader Middle East over the long term.

Katulis' rapid-fire response:

No one can dispute that the numbers of deaths of both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers are down from their highest level. Nevertheless, overall levels of violence remain dangerously high — 2007 is the deadliest year for our troops since President Bush began this unnecessary war of choice in 2003.

These declines may simply be the dust settling from the latest phase in Iraq’s struggles for power.  As the most recent National Intelligence Estimate noted, declines in violence — particularly in Baghdad — are in large part due to population displacements.  In other words, sectarian cleansing continued even while U.S. troop numbers reached their highest levels since the invasion.  Independent refugee organizations like the International Organization for Migration and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society report that the number of Iraqis displaced by the conflict doubled since the start of the surge, adding to millions already pushed out of their homes from 2003 to 2006. 

Read the rest of the barrage and join in the melee here.

Here's what we've had at Opinion L.A. over the past few days:

Pakistan's and the stock market's unhappy upheavals prompt some digging through the old archives.

Past boards on healthy international relationships:

It comes hard to blame the Pakistanis for breaking off their affair with the United States.

Pakistan has given the United States whole-hearted support from Korea on, siding with us in hot and cold crises.

We have failed to back Pakistan as stoutly in the dispute with India over Kashmir. India's Nehru has broken his pledged word to allow a decision by plebiscite in Kashmir. He has temporized, brushed off the recommendations of neutral commissions, and still hangs on to the province.

On nationwide money woes:

This country has withstood graver dangers than the present, and when it was not half as strong. Stand fast! The Republic lives! Long live the Republic!

Catholic author Gregory Popcak objects to Garry Wills' argument that religion has nothing to say about abortion:

Scripturally, the basis of Christian condemnation of abortion comes not only from the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" as Wills asserts, but from the fact that the Bible considers children a supreme gift and blessing from God. One does not reject a gift from God lightly. Jeremiah 1:5 tells us that God knew us in the womb, and Exodus 21:22-23 imposes a penalty for those who cause the miscarriage of a fetus.

Web editor Tim Cavanaugh, in a Swift turn of logic, argues for restrictions on problem-breeders like himself. Editorial researcher Paul Thornton, meanwhile, bonds with Stalin over their shared atheism.

Finally, LAPD superstar Chief William Bratton joins the editorial board to chat about overtime, drivers licenses for illegal immigrants and, or course, crime. Some candid remarks on that last topic:

I don't think it has anything to do with warmer weather, it has nothing to do with lead poisoning, it has nothing to do with abortions, and if it does those are very minor influences on the crime rate. What does influence crime is people deciding to break the law, or unintentionally finding themselves in violation of the law.

Tell it like it is, Chief.

The editorial board enumerates the reasons why there's more at stake in this writers strike than the one 20 years ago:

While the writers were walking the picket lines, however, consumers around the world were buying more than 1.8 million pocket-sized music and video players, 600,000 video game machines and countless video games to play on them. They picked up 2.1 million computers, 140,000 camcorders and 9 million cellphones, at least 1 million of them capable of tuning in video from the Internet.

Meanwhile, more than 14 million people spent up to two hours a day on MySpace, Facebook or other social networks, and more than 5 million spent about an hour, on average, watching video clips on YouTube....Put another way, consumers are rapidly equipping themselves to tap into entertainment sources that don't contribute a dime to Hollywood or the writers union.

The board says Southern California deserves more Proposition 1B money because its ports process more goods. The board also weighs in on the economics of the ports' clean trucks plan.

On the op-ed page, producer Marshall Herskovitz asks if the suits are ruining TV. The New America Foundation's Andrés Martinez says U.S. immigration policy is keeping talent out of the country. And Scott Olin Schmidt argues that USC sends the wrong message when it continues to honor infamous grad O.J. Simpson.

In round four of this week's debate on fire policy, Richards Carson and Rider show no signs of abating — though the two find their views aren't diametrically opposed:

Rider begins, "First, let me say that you were correct when you said I didn’t assess enough blame on FEMA and the feds. I bow to your expertise in this matter. I let ’em off too easy." Nevertheless:

Should the feds be the disaster relief Sugar Daddy? No.

Ideally, disaster relief would be voluntary -- through the Red Cross and other philanthropic institutions best geared to providing aid in times of need. In addition to not requiring force to obtain funding (taxes), such organizations are far more effective in getting the aid to the truly needy in a timely and efficient manner. If we were not forced to “give at the office” (through taxes) for the government aid programs -- and then assuming that the aid problem is taken care of -- most of us would contribute far more to such charitable organizations.

Carson concurs:

Again we agree on several of the key issues. FEMA is still a mess and still has a clean-up-after-the-disaster mentality rather than focusing on how to prevent a situation from turning into a disaster. Local military aircraft should have been allowed into the fight very early, when they would have been most effective. The public was deceived about this issue having been solved.

But with one really big caveat:

Where we are in substantive disagreement is over when the federal government should get involved, and the extent to which voluntary organizations can be relied upon.

Read the rest and fuel the discussion here. 

Columnist Rosa Brooks takes attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey to task for being vague on whether waterboarding is torture:

On Tuesday, Mukasey "clarified" his views in a letter that still offers no opinion on whether water-boarding (or any other interrogation technique) might or might not constitute torture. According to Mukasey, water-boarding is "repugnant," but he can't say whether it's illegal because, among other things, it would depend on the circumstances, he's not sure if the CIA actually uses it, and he wouldn't want any CIA interrogators who might have used it to think they could be in legal trouble.

This is garbage.

UCLA's Edythe London defends her use of animals in her medical research. Novelist Amos Oz explains how literature can help bridge the gulf between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. And columnist Patt Morrison asks if we're all punchlines for Stephen Colbert.

The editorial board asks indicted Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona to resign. The board notes that, given the several recent toy recalls, the Consumer Product Safety Commission could probably use more resources. And finally the board says that Hillary Clinton can't avoid discussing important issues just because she's the frontrunner.

Readers respond to columnist Jonah Goldberg's thoughts on small government. Toluca Lake's Terrence Hartwell says, "Jonah Goldberg takes a very long-winded tome of Gipper nostalgia to claim that Americans simply don't want smaller government, so better to have big Republican government than big Democratic government. His simplistic theory misses the nonpolitical truth: People really just want a government that works."

Blogger David Ehrenstein performs last rites for Barack Obama's "relevance to gay and lesbian African Americans":

Now a gospel star may have driven a wedge between Obama and his gay supporters and roiled others as well. For, by putting McClurkin in the spotlight, Obama has broken black America's 11th Commandment: "Don't talk about it in front of the white people!"

Environmentalist Andrea Kavanagh finds a National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition very fishy, and Rollins College professor Paolo Spadoni advises the While House that if it wants to free Cuba, it "should stop pandering to a shrinking group of Cuban American hard-liners and start listening to that world he claims to represent." Sharon Browne, Linda Chavez and Ward Connerly condemn a Caltrans plan to "use race, ethnicity and gender when awarding contracts under the federal highway program. What are the agency and the governor up to?"

The editorial board shakes its scandalized head at the news that State Department officials, apparently acting without authority, promised Blackwater USA contractors immunity; and plays down the significance of class-action attorney William S. Lerach's guilty plea. In the wake of a new report on healthcare in South L.A., the board states its case on King-Harbor Hospital:

To be clear: We do not trust the county to run this hospital, and we will oppose, as anyone should, any recommendation that would involve the county in its future management. But we will insist, and others should as well, that the county find alternative ways to care for a population whose needs are so profound.

Readers react to Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky's Op-Ed on dividing Jerusalem. "In reality," writes George Epstein, "giving up a part of Jerusalem will not solve the problem, nor will removing settlements from the West Bank." George Saade reframes the idea: "It's not about 'dividing' Jerusalem; it's about sharing it."

In round two of this week's Dust-Up, Richard Rider and Richard Carson square off over the differences between local and federal responses to the fires in San Diego.

For Rider, "the real issue is where the coordination and planning did NOT improve — the timely use of Navy, Marine and National Guard air assets":

It's popular to blame just the bureaucrats. But the truth is that the real responsibility rests with Gov. Schwarzenegger, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and especially our San Diego County Board of Supervisors. They were ill-prepared to move quickly to get the air assets active. They were too busy holding press conferences and patting themselves on the back.

Indeed, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, State Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents parts of Orange County, said 24 hours after the fires started that "San Diego was eligible for air support and [local officials] didn't even know it."

Carson contends:

I could not agree with you more that (a) the federal response was disastrously slow; and that (b) the state and local government bears substantial responsibility for this slow response. We are also in agreement that FEMA was practically useless in the early days of the fire, and that the military were anxious to help out and should have been allowed to do so. You are, however, much too quick to let FEMA and the military off the hook, and you left out the U.S. Forest Service altogether.

Sparked your interest? Read today's entry and join the discussion here.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg critiques liberals and conservatives who place rhetoric over policy:

...both sides are certain they have staked out the intellectually superior ground. So they fixate on tactics, packaging and spinning. A lot has been written, including by myself, about how liberals consider political strategy more important than ideas. But it's worth noting that conservatives fall prey to such lines of thinking too, even as we take pride in our squabbles about liberty versus virtue.

Duke University professor Henry Petroski follows the evolution of the toothpick through human history. David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks decry the Los Angeles City Claims Board's award of $95,000 to Gloria Jeff, linking it to "a worldview in which racial/ethnic identity is more important than any other factor in judging a person." Meanwhile, Mark Weisbrot cheers the role of Argentina's powerful first couple in their country's economic upswing.

The editorial board tips its hat to the Georgia Supreme Court for freeing Genarlow Wilson, originally sentenced to a decade in prison and branded a child molester. The board eyes upcoming water and power rate changes, and reminds NBC Universal and News Corp. that while joint project Hulu "seems to want complete control over the programming lineup ... the Net isn't television. Content may be king, but the mob rules."

Spooked by Joel Stein's recent column about tomorrow's sexed-up All Hallow's Eve, readers ruminate about the nature of sluttiness. Estin Stewart wonders, "Since when did underwear become a costume?" while Erin Tavano retorts:

Either Stein's column on Slutoween is unbelievably retrograde and sexist — a serious assertion that any woman who wears a sexy costume is a slut or a whore? — or a childish and tiresome attempt at being shocking.

Washington Monthly blogger and Irvine resident Kevin Drum pours some long-overdue cold water on one of the most celebrated pieces of SoCal writing, Joan Didion's bit on the Santa Ana winds in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Excerpt from Didion:

We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks....The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days....In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.

....It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.

Comments Drum:

I've lived in Southern California my entire life, and this just doesn't bear any resemblance to anything I know about the place. Santa Ana winds are just....Santa Ana winds. They do whip up brush fires, as Didion says, but otherwise her description seems way, way over the top. Sure, the weather feels a little weird when Santa Anas kick up, but teachers don't cancel classes, pets don't go nuts, people don't stay inside their houses, and Los Angeles doesn't get gripped in crime waves.

Amen. The Santa Anas, while always potentially destructive, figure most radically in the imagination of local writers, who are smart enough to recognize a good metaphor and chance for show-offery when they see one. For instance, Raymond Chandler:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Great writing? Unquestionably. True? Aside from the itchy skin, I think not.

This, I believe, gets close to the heart of the Joan Didion Problem. She is such a gifted descriptive writer that she often can't resist the temptation to wrap her otherwise keen observations with some Chandleresque hyperbole, just to see how the language turns out. It's delightful to read, and leaves lasting impressions on your brain, but many of the impressions are, regrettably, not true. Not only that, but they advertise some near-secretive knowledge -- hey wait, all this time I've been living here and I didn't realize that the Santa Anas were the primordial force unleashing the dark side of human desire?? -- allowing readers to congratulate themselves on being among the minority to break the SoCal code. It's like when postgrads first stumble upon the sunshine/noir dialectic, or when yet another searing cultural critic sees a book-length metaphor in the fact that (gasp!) Brian Wilson couldn't surf.

Still, at least Didion was barking up the right tree. As the amusing list of cultural references on this Wikipedia page illustrate, some people apparently hear the phrase "Santa Ana winds" and assume it must be some kind of sweet Spanish lullaby. Stand back in awe at the song poetry of Debbie Boone:

California, where the sun is warm,
where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong

It's been a while since we hit the mailbag. Some recent correspondence from you, the fabulous little people:

If you go weak in the knees anytime somebody uses the magic words "Looney Left," you'll love Delta Max president Robert Swanson's salty rejoinder to "Boys, girls and 9/11," my take on Susan Faludi's new book:

Why do some pundits yearn to seek "meaning" in an event beyond the obvious?

The USA was attacked by religious extremists who want to bring our country and culture down, nothing more nor less.

The most shocked among us were those to whom the idea of another culture hating ours simply because of who we are, goes against all of their idiotic Pollyanna platitudes that "...we are all the same...!"

In other words, the Multi-culturist, Citizen of Planet Earth, Looney lefties.

Robert Swanson
President
Delta Max

Newport Beach

R. Stephen White's Blowback "Nukes still work when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" gets another reader's reactor core leaking:

To the Editors:

Regarding R. Stephen White's opinion, Nukes still work when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, the point is not if renewable energy is intermittant.  Obviously, it is.  The point is that renewable energy is desirable and, arguably, nuclear energy isn't.  In fact, one produces horribly toxic byproducts and the other doesn't.  One mankind could use forever with few consequences, the other leaves perpetual poison.  One is, potentially, available to everyone, the other is extremely expensive and, potentially, deadly.  Take your pick.

David Sears

Robert Greene writes about the "Return of the Westside lefty" and everybody's favorite nun in the Federal Reserve says Amen:

It is refreshing and consoling to read Robert Greene's cogent and concise analysis of the "pragmatic-left development of Los Angeles on the part of builders and politicians pursuing complementary interest"

This may be the beginning of real down to earth housing.

Thank you!

Sister Diane Donoghue

Why will we miss the opinion stylings of Ronald Brownstein? Because he got people talking! In response to Brownstein's "Republicans run right," one reader appeals to a higher authority:

Enjoyed your article.

However, you are, once again, neglecting the importance of Family and Moral Values.

Conservatives have the formula for real peace in the world--"Listen to, and obey, the Word of God."

The Word of God emphasizes strong family and moral values--conservative values.  Muslims, Christians, and Jews all believe in one God, the same ONE AND ONLY GOD; and all  try to live up to these family and moral values. Many fail!

When they fail, they sin; and the wages of sin is death!

They fail when they tolerate, promote or commit the deadly, and equally abhorrent, sins of Abortion, Homosexuality, Euthanasia, and cold-blooded murder of innocents by means of terrorism.  Unless we can all agree to stop all of these violent and atrocious sins, there will never be peace in the world.

This is why all Americans must, and will, make Family and Moral Values the most important issue in the Presidential Race of 2008.

Tom Balish

Another reader finds it is possible to be less popular than President Bush:

Atlantic Monthly associate editor Matthew Yglesias asks who's giving money to Bill Clinton:

Disclosing who's contributing to Bill Clinton's foundation after his wife wins the election would be about four years too late. The voters ought to have this information before the election, when it could still make a difference. Indeed, we really ought to find out who his donors are before the nomination is settled.

If the former president wants his gesture of transparency to be taken seriously, he ought to disclose right away. After all, by sponsoring a law to mandate disclosure of donations to presidential foundations and agreeing that Bill would voluntarily comply, the Clintons have already conceded the key points of principle.

And it's impossible to view the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary Clinton campaign as entirely separate enterprises.

Columnist Patt Morrison explores Blackwater's domestic work and says, not in our backyard. Gen. Kevin P. Chilton explains how, 50 years after Sputnik, a Chinese missile test demonstrates the need to secure our satellites in space. Cal State Long Beach's Tyler Dilts asks why CSU administrators are getting big raises when faculty salaries are low and tuition high.

The editorial board asks why the Bush Administration has let so few Iraqi refugees into the country. The board praises state Treasurer Bill Lockyer for starting a conversation about California's deficit denial, and takes a look back at Sputnik and the space race.

Readers react to the editorial board's take on MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ads. See why both Richard Morse of Redondo Beach and Encino's Michael K. Finnigan think the board falsely equated MoveOn.org with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign against Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that journalists don't ever discuss the patriotism that holds the U.S. together:

I've come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from "progress." America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France's or Mexico's. That's where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

Yet the strangest and most ironic aspect of our national culture is that we have an aversion to talking about a national culture. Samuel Huntington, one of the country's premier social scientists, has become something of a pariah for constantly reminding people (in books such as "The Clash of Civilizations" and "Who Are We?") that the United States is a nation, not just a government and a bunch of interest groups.

The New America Foundation's Tomás R. Jiménez says race isn't to blame for the academic struggles of Latinos in the U.S. New York University's Jonathan Zimmerman remembers the murder of Amish school girls one year ago, and what it taught us. UC San Diego's Barbara F. Walter notes that civil wars usually drag on and rarely produce peace deals.

The editorial board praises rock band Radiohead for coming up with a pay-what-you-want plan to sell its new album. The board thinks Santa Ana city appointees shouldn't have to choose between blogging and serving the public. The board also weighs in on what the latest attacks in Darfur mean for peace efforts.

Readers react to Bush's plan to veto an expansion of kids' healthcare. Marcia D'Amico of Portland, Ore. writes, "By threatening to veto this bill, Bush once again proves that while he champions the rights of the unborn, he cares little for the child once it leaves the womb."

No one seems to be protesting the U.S. Navy’s decision to spend $600,000 to remodel a configuration of barracks outside San Diego  that looks — from the air and on Google Earth — like a swastika. Maybe that’s because the story hasn’t reached Tajikistan, which dusted off the ancient symbol last year as part of the Year of Aryan Civilization.

Aryan, as in Indo-European (the proto-language spoken in Europe and Western Asia from which English is distantly derived), not Aryan as in Hitler’s imaginary Master Race. Hitler, believing that the original Aryans were blond, blue-eyed types, was responsible for the negative connotations that still bedevil the term “Aryan.”  (That didn't stop the Shah of Iran from describing himself as "Light of the Aryans.")

It may be possible to rehabilitate “Aryan” (at least in linguistics). But rebranding the swastika is a Mission: Impossible, except maybe in Dushanbe.  Never mind that the symbol's origins are innocuous. You don’t have to be a  semiotician to see how the symbol has merged with what it symbolized at a particular point in history. It's impossible to look at a swastika and not be repelled.

Yet pre-Hitler the swastika was not simply a cultural symbol; it was the trademark of a popular brand of beer. In the early 1970s, some college friends and I toured the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. At the gateway to the brewery stood two carved elephants with saddle blankets bearing swastikas. Our elderly guide complained about how the Nazis “took this beautiful symbol and ruined it.” Hardly the worst of their sins.

Our guide’s spirit lives on in quixotic efforts by some Hindus to strip the swastika of its relatively recent Nazi associations. But, as Radio Free Europe noted in what may be understatement of the millenium: “It is hard to rid the swastika of its negative associations.”

Tonight, on the CW, the much-hyped Aliens in America — a show about a small-town Wisconsin family saddled with a Pakistani Muslim exchange student — will premier, and whether it’s fresh or a flop, most people have already made up their minds about it.

I think I’ll wait until 8:30 tonight to make a final decision, but that’s not stopping me from Googling all the previews and clips I can, so I’m armed with my own opinion before I ever turn on the TV.

Given the competition, I wouldn’t put it past the CW to go for curiosity over quality. ABC still boasts veteran shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, while newcomer Pushing Daisies is racking up the critical accolades. NBC, soaring on the wings of Heroes, is milking the sci-fi cash cow for all it's worth, with a high-tech Monday lineup and amped-up publicity for Bionic Woman. The CW's main draw Gossip Girl, while it's generating major buzz, follows myriad dramas about pampered high school students, and the supernatural draw of Reaper is unlikely to make a dent in NBC's enthusiastically over-the-top lineup. (Several CW affiliates, including KTLA in Los Angeles, are owned by Tribune Company, the parent of the L.A. Times.)

The truth is, comedies involving such racy topics as Muslims (gasp!) generally fall flat, mainly because they’ve invested much in the novelty factor and little in character development or dialogue. The Canadian series Little Mosque on the Prairie suffered from that very affliction: While the pilot brought in 2.1 million viewers, it quickly dropped off to an average of 1.2 million per episode. Don't get me wrong — I enjoy watching Americans display their cultural ignorance as much as the next American, but you can find that theme in just about every other sitcom on the face of the earth.

Perhaps because my parents were immigrants, I’m inherently wary of shows that draw comedic inspiration from cultural mishaps. Invariably, the foreign culture is feebly offered up to the American characters — who, in their endearing ignorance, humorously maul it in the name of cultural acceptance. That always gets a lot of laughs. 

I'll reserve judgment until this evening. Although to be completely honest, I’ll probably just grab snippets of the show in the ad breaks during Heroes.

The editorial board tells Congress it has better things to do than condemn MoveOn.org ads:

"General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Get it? See, it's funny because it rhymes. Good one, huh?

Well, not really. MoveOn.org's juvenile attack on Gen. David H. Petraeus in a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sept. 10 might have merited a trip to the principal's office, or at least a stern rebuke from some of the liberal activist group's more grown-up multimillionaire donors. But an official condemnation from both houses of Congress?

Oddly, Congress didn't seem eager to intervene after a far more egregious and consequential low blow directed at a military man by a political activist group: the infamous "Swift boat" ads attacking Democratic Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign.

The board praises the governor's water plan but tells him to work out the details, and wonders if the Supreme Court will return to consensus and caution in its new term.

Columnist Gregory Rodriguez debunks the myth of L.A.'s black versus brown race war. Contributing editor Gustavo Arellano discusses that other wayward socal bishop, Orange's Tod D. Brown. Columnist Niall Ferguson follows the impact of an aging China, and former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich asks if Harvard is really a charity.

Letter writers respond to an op-ed on the dangers of delivering babies by C-section. Pacific Palisades' Russell Kussman notes that vaginal delivery can be dangerous, too, "When 'vaginal birth after caesarean' was in its heyday -- before publication of data showing it to be risky -- I represented dozens of severely brain-damaged babies whose mothers had uterine ruptures during delivery."

Media Matters has a new report about the “conservative advantage in syndicated op-ed columns.”  Its  title — “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over” — is presumably a reference to “red” as in “red states,” not, as in my formative years, to Communism. (Maybe Media Matters can follow up with a report on Republican-leading TV and radio and call it “Red Channels.”)

If you accept Media Matters’  division of columnists into “progressive,” “centrist” and “conservative” — a big if, at least if you’re a libertarian — the results are interesting in the way that the results of any quantitative analysis are interesting. But they don’t prove that the “liberal media” are really the “conservative media.”

One quibble:

Law professors Vikram Amar and Richard H. Sander ask if affirmative action hurts minorities:

The schools involved are dozens of law schools in California and elsewhere, and the program is the system of affirmative action that enables hundreds of minority law students to attend more elite institutions than their credentials alone would allow. Data from across the country suggest to some researchers that when law students attend schools where their credentials (including LSAT scores and college grades) are much lower than the median at the school, they actually learn less, are less likely to graduate and are nearly twice as likely to fail the bar exam than they would have been had they gone to less elite schools. This is known as the "mismatch effect."

The mismatch theory is controversial.

Former New York Times correspondent Barbara Crossette says that while industrialized nations worry about their declining populations, developing countries face a bigger problem -- uncontrolled growth. Columnist Ronald Brownstein wonders if Bush will veto a bill to expand kids' health insurance, which was once a priority of the president's.

The editorial board says speeches at the U.N. by Bush and other leaders revealed that the new big debate in the world is between liberty and inequality. The board also asks Gov. Schwarzenegger to save the condor instead of pandering to the gun lobby, and argues that companies should have to ask consent before selling customer data.

Letter writers react to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches and the editorial board claim that the audience was rightly laughing at him, not with him.  Santa Monica's Edward Singer says, "There is no humor when a leader who has the power, means and intent to bring about evil speaks. Both Columbia University and your editorial board need to grow up." 

Have you been following our "Great fat debate" Dust-Up this week, between professors Kelly Brownell and Paul Campos? If not you've missed some doozies, for instance Campos' assertion today that

The fundamental strategy of the war on fat is to universalize the attitudes of middle- and upper-class white American women toward weight, food, dieting and exercise. Such women are taught from a very early age to hate their bodies, to be terrified of fat and to turn eating into an endless moralistic struggle between the imperative to eat appropriately petite portions of supposedly "good" foods while avoiding the quasi-erotic seductions of "bad" foods. [...]

Needless to say, both diet companies and obesity researchers are doing their best to change this unacceptable situation. Thus we have researchers advocating "the development of culturally sensitive public health intervention programs ... to encourage black youth to achieve a healthy and reasonable (sic) body size." Translation: Let's make black and brown girls feel as bad about their bodies as we've managed to make the average white girl feel about hers.

Or this bit from Brownell:

One myth rises above all others. It affects public opinion about what drives America's diet, how politicians respond to increasing obesity, what we permit of the food industry, and the health of the nation.

It is captured in two words -- personal responsibility -- and relies on several assumptions: a) adverse changes in the nation's diet and exercise result from irresponsible behavior; b) there is no social or corporate responsibility; and c) people who suffer from problems such as diabetes bring it on themselves.

The myth has strong, well-funded and politically powerful proponents, most notably the food industry, its trade associations and political figures influenced by industry lobbyists.

Read the whole thing!

So you think you've heard all there is to hear about Chemerinskygate? Wrong again! (For a refresher on the basics, see our previous posts here, in chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.) Since then we've also had a David E. Bernstein Op-Ed about politically correct campus speech-smashing entitled "What about Larry?" (meaning Summers); and wee rant from me called "'Fess up, Chancellor Drake."

Well the big news today is that Chancellor Drake did not fess up in a Wednesday interview published one hour ago in the L.A. Times, aside from acknowledging that he "bungled." Some excerpts:

"This is certainly something that I bungled and I regret it completely and totally," Drake said. "I am always trying to do what I can to enhance the institution and have it move forward. It's awful that all this has blown up like this. I couldn't regret it more." [...]

"The why of it is straightforward, but I think it's going to be unsatisfactory," he said. "It was a personnel issue and there are a lot of things that go into that. We as a university have a policy that we don't talk about personnel decisions.

"First, I don't want to talk about it," he added, "but second, it wouldn't be appropriate to do that." [...]

"This has been an awful period," Drake said during the interview. "I would have wished that I could have avoided it. I'm pleased that we got it back on the right track. The most important thing now really is the school and developing the school going forward. That's really what it's all about ultimately." [...]

Drake declined to comment on allegations that he faced pressure to dump Chemerinsky from well-connected Orange County conservatives and potential donors to the law school.

"There's a lot of information out there that doesn't come from me and I have no comment on that," he said. "No one pressured me. That's all I can say." [...]

"It would be easy to say here's what happened. What we need to do is do it right going forward. We have come to an agreement, and I think it's an exciting agreement for a really outstanding law school."

"There's no particular smoking gun," he added. "I just don't know what to say."

And though the controversy in question has mostly been resolved, the reaction keeps on chugging. To read about anti-Semitism, the L.A. Times' "crusade," and some defenses of Chancellor Drake, click the jump for more!

The editorial board responds to the Blackwater USA investigation in Iraq:

The accusation that the Blackwater security guards mistakenly opened fire on Iraqi civilians is devastating. But no matter what misdeeds Blackwater personnel may have committed in the past, the guards must be considered innocent unless proved guilty in a court of law. According to the State Department, the contractors operate under the same rules of engagement as the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security personnel. These rules are more defensive and circumscribed than those that govern U.S. military operations in Iraq, but they still permit the use of deadly force. It is possible that the Blackwater personnel erred, yet still acted legally within rules of engagement that are in need of an overhaul.

The board also argues that the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts were a smart move even if they sent mixed signals. Finally, the board encourages the Los Angeles school district to learn some lessons from its award-winning southern neighbor.

George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein says that even if Erwin Chemerinsky is back at U.C. Irvine, academic freedom remains elusive in the face of the far left. Columnist Ronald Brownstein compares Hillary Clinton's latest healthcare plan to her failed 1993 initiative. New America Foundation fellow Douglas McGray writes in support of the DREAM act, which would grant conditional citizenship to young illegal immigrants. And writer Erika Schickel thinks parents could use a ditch day.

Readers respond to columnist Niall Ferguson's claim that Rudy Giuliani is a risky choice for president. Irvine's Amy Smith says, "The one issue on which Rudy Giuliani is staking his campaign is 9/11. He ties everything to that event, no matter how absurd...."

Joint Statement

Michael V. Drake & Erwin Chemerinsky

Re: Donald Bren School of Law

University of California, Irvine

September 17. 2007

We are very pleased to announce that Erwin Chemerinsky, the Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, has been offered and has accepted the position of founding dean of the Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. As always, the appointment must be approved by the UC Board of Regents. We go forward with excitement and the unqualified belief that working together, we will create a truly outstanding law school.

Throughout the past week, we have maintained an open dialogue. Over the weekend,

Chancellor Michael Drake traveled to North Carolina to meet in person and at length with Professor Chemerinsky. Many issues were addressed in depth, including several areas of miscommunication and misunderstanding. All issues were resolved to our mutual satisfaction.

Our new law school will be founded on the bedrock principle of academic freedom.

The chancellor reiterated his lifelong, unqualified commitment to academic freedom, which extends to every faculty member, including deans and other senior administrators.   

Professor Chemerinsky expressed his excitement at working with campus leadership in founding the new school and in representing and leading the school during its growth and development.

We resolved to put recent events behind us and immediately begin to focus on our shared vision of creating a law school dedicated to providing the best education for future lawyers, to producing the finest legal scholarship, and to helping to address the legal needs of Orange County and the nation. The law school, like all great educational institutions, will be a place of great diversity, where differing viewpoints are nurtured, debated and cherished. 

Our goal is to create nothing less than one of the finest law schools in the country.

We believe that together, and with the many talented faculty and staff at the University of California, Irvine, we will succeed.

Michael V. Drake                        Erwin Chemerinsky

Chancellor                      Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science

University of California, Irvine        Duke University

Erwin Chemerinsky is back in as UC Irvine's founding law dean. News conference scheduled in five minutes. Stay tuned to this space!

The big news for us Chemerinskygateologists is that some anti-Erwin right wing bogeyman have now been identified. Actually, they were identified as early as Sept. 12 in the Orange County Register, but I failed to fully notice. From the first OCR story:

Yet as early as Aug. 29, Republican political consultant Matt Cunningham said he received a forwarded e-mail in which Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich asked fellow Republicans how Chemerinsky's appointment could be stopped. [...]

Attorney Scott Baugh, chairman of the county GOP, said Chemerinsky shouldn't have been picked in the first place.

"It's not because he's a liberal," Baugh said. "It's because he's polarizing. You wouldn't hire Jerry Falwell to be the dean of religious studies at Berkeley."

The Associated Press then got the best quote of the scandal so far (I'll bold it):

A conservative Los Angeles County politician asked about two dozen people in an e-mail last month how to prevent the University of California, Irvine from hiring renowned liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as its founding law school dean, a spokesman for the politician said Friday.

Making Chemerinsky the head of the law school "would be like appointing al-Qaida in charge of homeland security," Michael Antonovich, a longtime Republican member of the county Board of Supervisors, said in a voicemail left with The Associated Press.

He was not available for further comment on why he was getting involved in the situation at a campus located outside his jurisdiction in Orange County.

Antonovich's e-mail "expressed his dismay with the choice for the dean of the law school and suggested that this was the wrong decision and it should be changed," said Tony Bell, a spokesman for the supervisor.

Antonovich, a local GOP stalwart, was first elected in 1980. He is a staunch conservative who has supported crackdowns on illegal immigrants, and voted against tax increases and HIV-prevention programs that distribute free syringes.

He clashed with Chemerinsky in the past when the professor supported the removal of a cross from the county seal.

And then today's L.A. Times story puts more details on the Republican anti-Chemerinsky efforts:

Michael Schroeder, one of Orange County's most powerful GOP political players, said a group of 20 prominent Republicans organized against Chemerinsky in recent weeks, believing him to be a "longtime partisan gunslinger" and too "polarizing" for the job.

Another member of the group, who asked not to be identified, said Drake's cellphone number was distributed so the protesters could call the chancellor.

Antonovich said he too worked to derail the appointment by sending an e-mail to a small group of supporters and urging them to contact the university.

And finally, from the same LAT story, is this question-begging section about how California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George, a Pete Wilson appointee, expressed to Chancellor Drake his dismay at Chemerinsky's fateful Aug. 16 op-ed:

The criticism included a letter from the California Supreme Court criticizing a Chemerinsky opinion piece in The Times.

In an interview Friday, George said Chemerinsky made a "gross error" that was "very troubling" to the court in an Aug. 16 article that criticized U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales. Drake offered him the job that same day.

George, an appointee of Gov. Pete Wilson, said that Chemerinsky wrote incorrectly that only one state, Arizona, provided lawyers for death row inmates who want to file a constitutional challenge, known as a habeas corpus petition, to have their sentences or convictions overturned.

George said he was surprised Chemerinsky would make such a mistake. The court asked Court Clerk Frederick K. Ohlrich to write a letter to the editor to The Times to correct the piece.

"None of us could understand how somebody, let alone someone who is very bright and a fine legal scholar, could get that wrong," George said. "It had nothing to do with his philosophy. I certainly feel he is an outstanding legal scholar and a fine advocate."

The Times has no record of the letter being received as a letter to the editor or as a request for correction.

George gave a copy of the letter to [Prominent Orange County attorney Tom] Malcolm.

Malcolm said he gave the letter to Drake. "It disturbed him, but I don't think it was the reason for his decision."

Chemerinsky was angered by the letter when told about it by The Times.

"If the justices sent a letter to UC Irvine with the goal of influencing the dean process, that's inappropriate," he said.

He also stood by his article. "My op-ed was accurate in saying California does not comply with the federal standards for providing counsel to those on death row in their post-conviction proceedings, and Arizona is the only state deemed in federal district court to have met the federal standards."

What does it all mean? What the hell was Antonovich thinking? And did the Republican anti-Chemerinsky lobby actually have any power over Drake's decision? Who knows! But there's lots of embittered commentary after the jump.

As the Erwin Chemerinsky saga continues, the man himself writes in:

Tenure has many costs, but it exists so that academics will feel free to express themselves without fear of reprisal. It is based on the idea that everyone benefits from the free exchange of ideas. Without academic freedom, the reality is that many faculty members would be chilled and timid in expressing their views, and the discussion that is essential for the advancement of thought would be lost....

My concern is that the message from this episode, especially for my more junior colleagues who may aspire to be deans someday or, for that matter, judges, is that if you speak out -- liberal or conservative -- you may lose your chance at a position that you really want.

That's why I decided to answer questions about what happened and to accept the invitation to write this article. [UC Irvine] Chancellor [Michael] Drake initially asked that I simply say that we had mutually agreed to end my prospective deanship. I refused and said that all I wanted was that the truth be told.

Drake offers his side of the story. Columnist Rosa Brooks says that the Iraq war and the debate around it should make it clear why Americans lead the world in medical narcotics use. And columnist Joel Stein offers a no-nonsense assessment of career comeback benchmarks achieved by Britney Spears.

The editorial board thinks it's time for democracy to come to D.C., in the form of a House seat. The board also argues that, after the switch from analog television, newly opened spectrum 'white space' should be used wisely rather than left empty. Finally, the board laments that Sacramento failed at redistricting again.

Readers respond to the Chemerinsky hiring and un-hiring. A former student, Anthony Sbardellati of Los Angeles, writes, "I can attest that Chemerinsky never forced his political views on anyone in the classroom and always presented all sides of the constitutional issues he taught in an evenhanded manner."

Pepperdine law professor Douglas W. Kmiec talks about UC Irvine's hiring and controversial un-hiring of legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky:

Erwin Chemerinsky is one of the finest constitutional scholars in the country. He is a gentleman and a friend. He is a gifted teacher. As someone who participates regularly in legal conferences and symposiums, I have never seen him be anything other than completely civil to those who disagree with him.

So the news that UC Irvine had selected him to be the first dean of its new law school was welcome indeed. And the subsequent news -- that it withdrew the offer Tuesday, apparently because of Erwin's political beliefs and work -- is a betrayal of everything a great institution like the University of California represents. It is a forfeiture of academic freedom.

Contributing editor Timothy Garton Ash says Europe is in the thick of the war on terror, even if Europeans don't know it. Former CIA counter-terrorism official John Kiriakou and Kissinger McLarty Associates' Richard Klein talk about that other war we're losing--in Afghanistan. Columnist Patt Morrison wants to ban the Star Spangled Banner from being sung at ball games so it won't be butchered by tuneless fans.

The editorial board advocates for stronger water conservation to prepare for a dry 2008, and thinks congressional sub-prime bailout plans fail to help the true victims. The board also weighs in on UCI's Erwin Chemerinsky controversy.

Readers react to a Column One on Elyn Saks' struggle with schizophrenia. Los Angeles' Frank C. Baron says, "Those of us struggling with mental illness just want to be treated like anyone else...."

In the 9:48 p.m. version of our Erwin Chemerinsky story, Times reporters Garrett Therolf and Henry Weinstein drop a bombshell guaranteed to chill the hearts of any newspaper opinion editor:

Chemerinsky and [UC Irvine Chancellor Michael] Drake agreed the new dean's dismissal was motivated in part by an Aug. 16 opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, the same day the job offer was made. In it, Chemerinsky asserted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was "about to adopt an unnecessary and mean-spirited regulation that will make it harder for those on death row to have their cases reviewed in federal court."

But Drake and Chemerinsky split sharply on what role the article played in the decision to fire the incoming dean and whether academic freedom was at stake.

"Shouldn't we as academics be able to stand up for people on death row?" Chemerinsky said.

Drake said "we had talked to him in June about writing op-ed pieces and that he would have to focus on things like legal education in this new role, and then here comes another political piece. It wasn't the subject, it was its existence. What he said doesn't matter."

He would have to focus on things like legal education is the part that really tells me Michael Drake isn't going to win any Manager of the Year prizes any time soon. I guess academic freedom's just another word for "stick to the hyper-narrow confines of your job, at least when communicating with the public." No more Karl Rove pieces for you, Dean Lemann!

The deal-breaking op-ed is here. Amina Khan poured a heaping of historical doubt on Drake's he'll-upset-the-Regents excuse here. Some righty defenses of Chemerinsky here. And check today's editorial, and op-ed by Douglas Kmiec.

In case you hadn't heard, longtime USC law professor and prolific public commentator Erwin Chemerinsky, more recently of Duke University, was unhired Tuesday just one week after being hired as dean of the brand spanking new UC Irvine Law School. The reason? His liberal politics, he says. From the L.A. Times story:

Chemerinsky said in an interview today that UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake had flown to North Carolina on Tuesday and told him at a hotel near the airport that that he did not realize the extent to which there were "conservatives out to get me." [...]

He said that "concerns" had emerged from the UC regents, which would have had to approve the appointment, Chemerinsky said. The professor said Drake told him that he thought there would have been a "bloody battle" among the regents over the appointment.

Drake is issuing no-comments everywhere, plus this non-statement. Excerpt:

Over the past several months, UC Irvine has conducted a nationwide search for the founding dean of our School of Law. Last week, we made an offer to Duke Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, an eminent academician, legal scholar and commentator. The offer was contingent on approval of the UC Regents.

Since then, I have come to the very difficult conclusion that Professor Chemerinsky is not the right fit for the dean’s position at UC Irvine at this time. I met with him on Sept. 11 to inform him that we were rescinding our offer and continuing the recruitment process.

Professor Chemerinsky is a gifted academic and his credentials are outstanding. I respect him greatly. My decision is no reflection whatsoever on his qualifications, but I must have complete confidence that the founding dean and I can partner effectively in building our law school.

UPDATE: Drake tells The Times Chemerinsky erred gravely by publishing an op-ed in this newspaper.

Reaction has been swift, and almost universally negative, particularly (in the words of blogger Gay Patriot), among "bloggers who themselves are right of center." A sampling of those:

Hugh Hewitt:

Erwin is a man of the left, of course, but a remarkably distinguished and accomplished scholar who enjoys the esteem of professors, jurists and practioners across the ideological spectrum. [...]

This is an astonishing and disgraceful episode, which, if perpetrated against a conservative, would rightly lead to a massive outpouring of outrage directed at the university that had allowed such a purge to occur. I will be astonished if any reputable scholar agrees to take the job over Erwin's broken contract, and many professors who would otherwise have welcomed the chance to join the UC system will be wondering about the Administration of such a place, even if they find someone to agree to be dean.

Glenn Reynolds:

OKAY, THIS IS JUST WEIRD: Hiring and firing Erwin Chemerinsky in one week? Because it turns out he's too liberal? First of all, who doesn't know about Erwin's politics? Certainly anybody who managed to hire him without knowing his political leanings would have to have been grossly negligent in their evaluation. Second, he's a nice, fair guy regardless of his politics -- which aren't that liberal by law school standards -- and which just shouldn't matter anyway. Perhaps there's more to this story than we're hearing, though I'm not sure what it could be, but it makes absolutely no sense as reported.

To see more outrage, keep reading after the jump.

Green Dot founder and CEO Steve Barr dropped by the editorial board this afternoon, along with his chief academic officer Sandy Blazer, to discuss his project for taking over Locke High School. Here's a bit of his presentation, with questions from the peanut gallery:

Tim: Am I right in thinking that Locke is a bigger project than you've taken on in the past?

Barr: Yeah.

Tim: Then the first of two pie-in-the-sky questions: How big can your model scale?

Barr: We don't want our model to scale. We want our model to be a model that can enforce change, that all schools adopt that model. So what I'm saying by that is, it's a little bit tricky: We don't want to be, you know, ten years from now, be the only group out there taking over high schools, fighting this fight. We gotta figure out a faster way to get them to ask us, and then take all our tenets within their model. That's always been the idea. So we think what'll happen, and this was the bet at Jefferson, and it's going to be what's going to happen after Locke, at least the way we see the world: What happens when those schools are open and those teachers are making more money under improved work conditions, and they're successful. What do you think the teachers at Jordan are going to do, and at Washington Prep and at Fremont. It's already happened, and Joel [Rubin] reported on it, after the original revolt, is that there are schools lined up, like the planes lined up at LAX, hovering over the city, that want to do this. We don't have the capacity to serve all those schools. We've had to do a lot of pushing off those teacher collectives that want to do it. But we sure as hell want to show you how to do it, and teach you to do the same thing, and help you with your the back office, and we'll give you our union contract. But the idea that this is really some market share issue, that we want ten more schools to prove it... We will keep doing what we're doing until the district looks like us. I think Locke will be, will create a demand. I think it really will. I think there was a demand for it when those teachers revolted that day. That was just... The calls that came in the next week or so were just bizarre. I mean, chapter chairs. It's not like it was just the lunatic fringe of teachers; this was the front line of UTLA's defense.

Joel Rubin: Assuming it takes a year or two for the district to, even, you know, for that break to happen, what is your capacity? Could you do another high school the year after Locke?

Barr: Yeah.

Rubin: And another one after that?

Barr: Yeah.

Lisa Richardson: Could you do a Santee?

Barr: Absolutely. If you have the... See, the reason why, in some ways it seems humongous with, at some point, you look at Locke and Watts and say: My God, look at all the problems. In another sense, especially after this — this was the hardest year of Green Dot. We doubled in size, and we took in attendance area. That was pretty hard. Can we do that with the advantage of not being in the facility business? Which takes up 80% of the bandwidth of the executive team of this organization — converting crappy churches into marginal classrooms is really hard. The C.U.P. process, I mean, tenant improvements — can you get that on time? I mean it's an insane amount of work. And also pulling off what we're pulling off — all of that with 30% less money. So we have meetings where the teachers want this, the teachers want that. I think we've come pretty close to hitting our ceiling for potential on the one-off charter schools. I think the average is 700 [API scores]; I think we could probably get to 750, if we stopped running.

Former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon wrote a discussion-generating Sunday piece for the L.A. Times about the "four main misconceptions" that foreign emissaries have about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Before getting to the reax, a refresher on the four myths:

1) "[T]hat solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a prerequisite for stability in the Mideast."

2) "[T]hat Israeli territorial concessions are the key to progress.

3) "[T]hat 'the Occupation' blocks agreement between Israelis and Palestinians."

4) "[T]hat the Palestinians want -- and have the ability -- to establish a state that will live in peace alongside Israel."

Now, the reaction, starting with Carl in Jerusalem, who thinks Ya'alon should be the next prime minister, and (more importantly?) informs us that Moshe's nickname is "Boogie":

After leaving the IDF and letting his 'cooling off' period pass, Yaalon joined the Likud, where he is not even an MK - yet. Yaalon has the kind of fresh thinking that has not been corrupted yet by Israeli politics. He's a straight shooter. [...] Yaalon's fresh thinking and refusal to abide by political correctness are just what this country needs.

Matthew Yglesias in Adams-Morgan does not subscribe to this point of view:

One can sympathize to some extent with Israeli officials feeling like their country attracts a disproportionate quantity of busybodies pushing peace plans, but while it would be one thing for Ya'alon to genuinely argue that Israel should be left to its own devices, it's another thing entirely to say that the United States should just be totally indifferent to how our most generously subsidized client state relates to its neighbors and to the millions of stateless Arabs over which it rules.

For more raspberries & attaboys, read on after the jump.

If you weren't reading this week's mano-a-studento Dust-up debate over the L.A. Unified School District, you really missed a thing or two. Not least of which was some insight into the worldview of five organizationally active high school students, bouncing their ideas for reform off of recently departed LAUSD board member David Tokofsky. Some highlights:

Downtown Magnets High School junior Jordan Senteno:

The No Child Left Behind standardized test treats students of color as inferior, not good enough. The test marginalizes non-English speaking cultures. It makes students feel as if their culture isn't good enough because they must change or hide their culture to learn English so they can pass these tests. Students who come into this world learning English as a second language have their intelligence silenced.

The Los Angeles Unified School District takes state-approved textbooks, curricula, teachers and tests, and puts them into a school such as Crenshaw, where fewer than 1% of the students are white, or Garfield, where 37% are English-language learners. Is it a wonder that so many students are failing? Then, they expect the students to be engaged in learning from the European point of view while their culture is kicked to the curb. The school district still wonders why a majority of students drop out and fail? Instead of changing this problem, they point the finger at the students. Strike three.

Wilson High School senior Paola Tejeda:

Since before the East Los Angeles Chicano blowouts of the 1960s, students have been asking their schools to make learning more relevant. This is not an excuse. It's a demand! [...]

Somos Raza attracts students to learn because they study the problems facing them as Latinos, and challenge what they are taught in regular classrooms. Members meet after school and on the weekends, organize rallies, unite black and brown students, and clean the streets to improve their communities. They believe that schools are lying to them, so they study the beauty of their culture and learn about their true history.

By not learning the truth, Latinos are learning how to continue their own oppression. Crenshaw High School Somos Raza member Jonathan said, "They're brainwashing us in school."

Opportunities Unlimited Community High School senior Amandla Traylor:

Some of the most influential people in our communities are gangbangers. They do whatever it takes to get what they want. Most people feel the gangbangers' goals are wrong, but at least they follow through on what they started. Teachers who just pass students along are giving up on their goals and quitting on what they came to our schools to do.

If schools gave gang members more opportunity, they could become positive role models instead of negative ones. Don't give up on them so easily, because if you believed in them, they could be future teachers. [...]

We need to find a way to make these people the teachers. Gang members are not just ignorant; they're misunderstood.

Crenshaw High School junior Leslie Campos:

I understand that money is not easy to come by, but our schools should be top priority. I don't have the answers for that, but the fact that we give so much of our national budget to our military and so little to our schools tells us that our priorities are more on aggression toward others than affection toward our youth. Let people live, and let our children learn!

King/Drew Medical Magnet High School 10th grader Carla Hernandez:

The No Child Left Behind Act and its definition of a highly qualified teacher does not work well in our communities. The act defines a teacher as "highly qualified" when he or she has subject-matter qualifications and university teaching credentials. But how about communication qualifications and culturally empowering credentials? If you don't have credentials we can respect, then you don't have the quality we need.

Are the kids all right or all wrong? Or somewhere in between? Let 'em know.

As mentioned here previously, journalism professor Michael Skube's Aug. 19 op-ed on how blogs can't replace journalism has generated a torrent of negative feedback. Add to the list journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has penned an example-laden Blowback in response. An excerpt:

Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it "journalistic malpractice." And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube's columns, there's a teacher who doesn't believe in doing his homework - any homework.

So I did it for him.

On the same topic, Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton has written a note to readers that includes this Skube statement over the controversial editing of the piece:

Before my Aug. 19 Opinion piece on bloggers was printed, an editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.

Whole thing here.

Thoughts on Skube, Rosen, Newton, or the L.A. Times? Leave 'em in the comments.

Some initial responses to Michael Skube's Blogs: All the Noise That Fits from this Sunday's Opinion, starting first with the bloggers he name-checks in his piece:

Joshua Micah Marshall:

I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere. [...]

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. So to that extent I'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..." [...]

This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example -- along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn't seem to remember what he'd written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he'd never read.

To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... "

And this is from someone who teaches journalism?

Matthew Yglesias:

The widespread availability of a vast sea of armchair analysis and commentary on the internet will, over time, force large, professionalized news organizations to focus on their core, hard-to-duplicate competencies -- and spend less time on the sort of fact-averse punditry Skube's doing right here.

Kagro X of The Daily Kos:

The Grand Inquisitor of Serious Journalism deigned to speak to us about the evils of the blogosphere but... had no examples in his article? Or at least, not enough to satisfy his editors?

And this is the great advantage of Serious Journalism? That it has an editing, vetting and fact checking process?

Whatever happened to the Liberal Hawks, that breed of opinion-slinging bird who urged war then shrieked when it didn't end in puppy dogs and rainbows? Tim Cavanaugh says they're back from the brink of extinction, thinking about doubling down on the surge, and reminding the rest of us why an anti-war country can only produce pro-war policies.

Interplanetary hubris watch: Scientists continue to ignore the warning of that great astrobiologist Elton John: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. This time, NASA scientists and a University of Mexico professor are checking out the top of Pico de Orizaba volcano to see whether trees that grow all the way up there might make it possible to send hearty perennials (in the words of the accomplished physicist Lou Reed) way up to Mars.

The goal, according to NASA's Chris McKay and U of M's Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, is to use trees as "the engines of the biosphere" to pump "powerful gases," with the goal of bringing human-caused global warming to the cold and thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.

Here in the backyard of the robot-probe-friendly Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rooting for the home team means taking a dim view of NASA's human-centric projects (which this one, characterized by Reuters' Catherine Bremer as a way to "create an atmosphere that would support oxygen-breathing life forms" is deep in its carbon-based heart). But in this case I'm especially skeptical. Aren't we a lot closer to, say, the "Genetic modification and selection of microorganisms for growth on Mars" [pdf] stage of theorizing than to the E.T.-cruising-the-Redwoods stage?

McKay innoculates himself against absurd claims for terraforming by cautioning: "I don't have this vision of people moving to Mars the way people settled the New World, setting up homes and bringing their families." But the terraformers always want to have it both ways — making judicious-sounding claims about how long the process of earthifying Mars would take (centuries even!), but never acknowledging something more basic: Outside poetry or religion, terraforming is the closest you can come to the anthrocentric fallacy.

That's because Earth-like conditions are not some default position to which we can reconcile the rest of the universe but an apparently improbable (and constantly changing) set of circumstances under which life as we know it evolved. There's no indication, other than our own never-dwindling sense that we are at the center of the universe, that a square milimeter of territory outside our own atmosphere can ever be rendered Earth-like in any serious way.

The glib but well meaning counterargument to the above goes something like this: Hey, we've done such a number on Earth's atmosphere, just by accident, imagine what we could do if we set our minds to it on Mars. It does not minimize the seriousness of global warming to reply to that with a supercilious Oh, rilly? Have we really screwed up our environment so badly that human beings now explode on contact with fresh air? Have we rendered our planet lopsided, with a giant bulge in one hemisphere? As far as I know we haven't even managed to stop all geological activity or eliminate the magnetic field that is the only thing keeping good ol' Planet Earth from getting fried by radiation (though that idea was explored by Hilary Swank and a cast of A-minus listers in a wonderfully goofy movie a few years back). To believe you can change these very basic negative factors in the Arean real estate market is to believe in essentially god-like powers of creation and destruction.

You never hear NASA projects described as faith-based initiatives, but manned space travel is one of those. Your tax dollars may not be paying for those initiatives, but your tax nickels are. Whatever we get out of the federal space agency, we'd be getting a lot more if it would stop rewarding people who envision space-for-us and start rewarding people who envision space-as-it-actually-is.

Thanks to Ron Bailey.

Related:

"Mean Scientists Dash Hopes Of Life On Mars"

If you're talking outer-space forestry, you're talking Bruce Dern, baby!

A.S. Hamrah asks why the White House's torture policies sound sexually perverse:

In April, former CIA Director George Tenet appeared on "60 Minutes," telling interviewer Scott Pelley -- between swigs from a tiny bottle of Evian and his insistent, repetitive bark that "we don't torture people" -- that the reason he has never personally seen the evidence of the interrogation techniques he refuses to talk about is because he is "not a voyeur."

Tenet's reference to voyeurism -- which the dictionary defines as "the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretly" -- would seem to imply that these unmentionable techniques are sexual in nature and therefore inappropriate. But Tenet can never know if that's the case because he, not being a voyeur, claims never to have seen them. So why bring up voyeurism at all?

Colby College's Paul Josephson says the nuclear industry has never proved itself, and columnist Niall Ferguson thinks Malthusian theory is set to make a come back, thanks to global population growth and dwindling resources. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders why academia nurtures less-than-objective scholars like Ward Churchill.

The editorial board harshly critiques President Bush's latest speech linking Iraq and Al Qaeda, and praises a City Council plan to create a dense downtown. The board also explores what might happen if the Supreme Court takes its first second amendment case in decades.

Letter writers take issue with Democrats' abortion stance. Los Angeles's Margaret Daugherty says, "For more than a generation, Democrats have stood for the principle that personal reproductive choices are not the business of government. Shame on any candidate who discards this principle purely to grub a few more votes."

Recent feedback from our readers...

David Bright of Dixmont, Maine, replies to "Paging Dennis Kucinich" by Paul Thornton:

Dennis Kucinich is one of a very few members of Congress who is an member of the AFL-CIO. It would be highly unlikely that he would cross a labor picket line.

My advice to UC Berkeley would be to resolve its labor issues with its employees first, then go looking for commencement speakers.

Responses are still coming in for Michael McGough's Opinion Daily "So what's illegal?" Writes Joe Hale of Atlanta, Georgia:

One reason many Americans may be ambivalent about enforcing immigration laws is because lots of Americans broke Mexican immigration laws by sneaking over the border into Texas, California, New Mexico, etc in the 1840s.  And before that the Spanish violated the borders of the Comanche, Apache, Ute, etc.  If you go back far enough, everyone comes from somewhere else.

Fiery responses to Sonni Efron's "Can we make them hate us less?" From beautiful Coronado, Tom C. Stickel writes:

I was amazed to read Sonni Efron’s concluding editorial claims that stated: “the bigger battle against Islamist fanaticism” has “data that suggests we have already lost”.

Following the Efron logic, where do we pragmatic American’s now surrender? What country or Islamic government will be the location for us to sign our official surrender documents? Efron’s suggested no mas fighting of “Islamist fanaticism” is so remarkable that I wonder if Efron now believes American Christians and Jews need to convert to Islam immediately to save ourselves? Is our certain defeat (as seen by Efron) the end of our Western civilization?  Please, now that Sonni Efron has declared us the loser to our Islamic radical enemies in this battle of cultures, when will Efron be so kind as to illuminate all of us on what our children’s future will look like under Islamic law? Is the L.A. Times soon to write a number of feature stories by Efron on how we should plan on living our lives under Islamic law? Inquiring minds want to know!

Hey, Sonni Efron, when passing out the white flags of surrender, skip sending one to me!

A few years back, I spent several months talking to mid-level tech workers about what was then a new trend: their jobs getting outsourced to India. Most of the people I interviewed were middle-aged white guys with big suburban houses, gas-guzzling SUVs, and families to feed. Most had never finished their college degrees. Out of work for months on end, they spent a lot of time driving their kids to school, surfing the web, watching TV, seeking like-minded unions and politicians, and hanging out in Starbucks complaining to journo-types like me. Usually, they insisted on paying for my four dollar latte. They were nice, and rather sad. I felt bad for them.

I have no idea how many of them ever found jobs.  But a recent feature in West Magazine about offshore tutors for high school kids offers a glimmer of hope—for the next generation, at least.

So much of the outsourcing story in America has been about work and wages lost. But low-cost tutoring from Indian companies like Growing Stars and TutorVista offers middle-class and struggling families in the United States access to one-on-one instruction—at a relatively inexpensive $20 an hour—that used to be available only to the rich. This kind of outsourcing could help my interview subjects’ kids excel in school, earn diplomas, and stay more competitive in the workforce.

As Don Knezek, chief executive of the Washington D.C.- and Eugene, Ore.-based International Society for Technology in Education told West writer Scott Kraft,

For years, tutoring was an elitist activity for the elite. Now, the offshore operations are making it available to the middle class. It really fills a need in the nation right now.

Wonder if any of the guys I interviewed have hired Indian tutors for their kids?

As predicted, today President Bush wrapped "his double-talking mouth around one of the most curiously persistent debates in modern geopolitics: Whether to call a 92-year-old genocide a 'genocide.'" Here's how the Leader of the Free World avoided the G-word:

Each year on this day, we pause to remember the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, many of them victims of mass killings and forced exile. I join my fellow Americans and Armenian people around the world in commemorating this tragedy and honoring the memory of the innocent lives that were taken. The world must never forget this painful chapter of its history.

That "never forget" line's always a nice touch. Other non-"genocide" phrases included "horrific events" and "terrible struggle." For a few other tidbits in the terrible struggle over genocide-recognition on this National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man, read on after the jump.

The editorial board marks the passing of Boris Yeltsin without quite mourning him:

He embraced the rhetoric and ideals of democracy but cultivated none of its habits. He was erratic, autocratic, arrogant, unforgiving and drunken. He plowed salt into the political earth that his successors would have to cultivate when he administered economic "shock therapy" without the anesthetic of a safety net or the rule of law, allowing communist bureaucrats to morph into oligarchic kleptocrats before Russian citizens knew what hit them. He invaded Chechnya against the advice of every advisor who knew the region and waged a war of shocking brutality against civilians.

The board is kinder to Nigeria (seeing the glass as half full for the country's shaky democracy) and drug users (supporting a program to give them treatment instead of time).

On the next page, former presidential nominee George McGovern says Dick Cheney wrongly compared the current Democratic platform to McGovern's 1972 plan. Columnist Jonah Goldberg probably finds that scuffle unnecessary, since he notes today that most Americans are completely clueless. Contributing editor Max Boot keeps hope alive on Iraq, noting that once-violent Ramadi is now fairly calm.

Virginia Tech still dominates the letters page. See what an Asian American psychotherpaist has to say about mental health in the Asian American community, and why Elayne Rodriguez-Haven thinks The Times' coverage is "overly sensationalized" and "appears to blame Seung-hui Cho's family and culture for the killings."

In my column of today, about the curious political potency and shameful recent American track record of recognizing the Armenian genocide as a "genocide," I wrote the following about Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice:

Watching Rice's linguistic contortions in response to harsh congressional interrogation by [Rep. Adam] Schiff, who has become the Armenians' great House champion, is profoundly dispiriting; it makes one embarrassed to be American.

Too purple? Watch the video and conclude for yourself.

The scandals rocking the student-loan business have Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, on the warpath. Today he called on the Education Department to issue emergency regulations to stop lenders from buying goodwill with college and federal financial-aid officials. He also wants the department to halt "preferred lender lists," which college aid officials provide to students and their parents, "until we can ensure that these lists no longer feed corruption and cronyism, which they apparently do now."

Such criticisms are too broad. Miller admitted that he didn't know if the problems in financial aid offices were isolated or widespread. Typically, those officials compile preferred lender lists because students and parents don't have the time or the ability to find the best deals. But the recent scandals certainly have undermined their reputation as honest brokers, and Miller's push reflects those doubts. The Times' editorial page has called for a simple, bright-line solution to the problem: a complete ban on financial relationships between colleges and lenders. That would go a long way toward assuring that lenders make it onto preferred lists because they provide better terms and service to students, not to financial-aid offices.

The San Francisco State University flag-stomping brouhaha has come to its stunning anti-climax. Late last year, SF State College Republicans had global terrorism on the ropes with an "anti-terrorism rally" in which participants stepped on the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah. But just as the forces of international jihad were ready to give up in the face of this relentless campaign of taunting, a campus students association condemned the Repubs and threatened to get the group's official campus recognition yanked. In the perpetually aggrieved SFSU style, double secret probation and a blue-ribbon-panel investigation followed. Now the flag stompers have been cleared. Depending on how you look at it, this is either a defeat or a victory for those once-maligned, now-triumphant "San Francisco values:" although the countries where flag-desecration is allowed are A-OK, the ones where it's actually popular tend to be strictly Grade Z.