Pick your metaphor for California budget stupidity. We're eating our seed corn. We're destroying California in order to save it. Any parallel to self-destructive behavior will do.

Now it's recycling centers. California wisely charges customers a few cents' refundable deposit on those plastic and glass bottles we otherwise toss away so blithely, which is the same as tossing nickels and dimes away, because that's what they're worth at recycling centers.

[I was just in Arizona, a state which refuses to charge people a refundable deposit, with the result that its roads and public spots can look like a Third World refuse heap -- actually, I take that back. The Third World is too poor to be as wasteful as we are. I hope some forthcoming issue of Arizona Highways includes all the potentially recyclable trash that appears alongside those scenic roadways.]

California's program has been very successful in keeping hundreds of millions of bottles out of landfills and off roadsides. Too successful, it seems. After about two decades of profitable recycling that's given jobs to young people who need the money and the work, not to mention keeping California tidy, the state scooped nearly a half-billion dollars out of the prosperous recycling fund to try to fill its own pathetic budget hole. Recycling centers are closing, and the jobs for those young people are going with them. Once again, the state's inability to deal with its own finances mean another promising program gutted.

Here's my colleague Shane Goldmacher's story about the whole sorry mess.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-recycling30-2009nov30,0,34531.story

Now, Gov. Schwarzenegger says he means to refill the fund next year, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is the same governor who vetoed raising the deposit fees on those 5 billion California containers -- yep, billion. He wants wine and liquor bottles to be included in the deposit fees, too. So do I, but the chances of certain elements of the Legislature standing up to the rich, rich liquor lobby are probably about the same as the alcohol content in water -- to wit, zero.

Well, Christmas is coming. Let's all ask Santa to give Sacramento a new spine, shall we?

-- Patt Morrison

Public option, shmublic option. If you really want to get people worked up about healthcare reform, start talking about whether it should cover abortions and illegal immigrants. Today, the editorial board tackles both those issues, saying that abortion opponents are looking to "extend federal prohibitions into private pocketbooks. By restricting coverage offered through the exchange, they hope to make abortion coverage so unattractive that insurers eventually stop offering it in the market for individual and small-group policies." Healthcare reform thus should not restrict those who receive subsidies from buying extra coverage for abortions. And it's an odd healthcare policy that would eliminate all possibility for illegal immigrants to participate in subsidized care, but require them to purchase their own coverage regardless of their personal finances, the board argues.

"Extraordinary rendition" is just a dressed-up word for kidnapping in the editorial board's eyes, and it praises Italy for recognizing that fact, if mainly symbolically, by convicting 23 Americans and two Italians in absentia for grabbing an Egyptian cleric in Milan six years ago.

On the other side of the fold, the author of a book on the Cold War argues that former President  Reagan's seemingly bold words to Mikhail S. Gorbachev --"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." -- were for the most part a cover intended to build popular support for the president while he worked on effective diplomatic relations with the then-Soviet president.

And writer Joe Mathews raises his hand for the job of lieutenant governor. It's not that he has ambitions to run anything, he says, and that's exactly what qualifies him for the job. Meanwhile, think of all the spare time he'd have for blogging.

-- Karin Klein

Photo: People stroll by the giant dominoes set up at the site of the Berlin Wall, part of a gala celebration of its toppling. Credit: Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

  In today's editorial and opinion pages, the Times editorial board gives former Assembly Speaker Fabuan Nuñez a shout-out for being cleared of ethics charges arising from his lavish spending, and then gives him a shout-down for the underlying actions. No, he's not a crook. But he still relied too heavily on the largesse of donors with issues to press in Sacramento.

And we pair a shout-down of Philadelphia Eagles player Michael Vick's dogfighting operation with a shout-out to Wayne Pacelle of the the Humane Society of the United States -- for going on a, pardon the expression, dog-and-pony tour with Vick to educate communities about stopping cruelty to animals.

And shoutouts and shout downs abound for the food industry's Smart Choices program.

Columnist Meghan Daum weighs in on farming-chic, and two folks sack Sacramento's recent move to waive environmental laws to hasten construction of a football stadium in Los Angeles or, rather, the City of Industry. Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) worries that the Legislature "opened the floodgates" to future exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act. And sports author Dave Zirin sees just the latest in a series of sweetheart deals between unwitting taxpayers and tycoon team owners.

Photo: AP/Nick Ut

California's "three-strikes" law is about truly heinous crimes. But in politics, it's a serious breach of behavior and self-interest to commit a ''do as I say, not as I do'' violation.

Maria Shriver is not an elected official, but she is married to a renowned one, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was born into an even more famous family of them, the Kennedys.

So the inevitable outcome when hubris meets hypocrisy can't have been lost on her. Why should the hoi polloi of us feel we need to obey the laws the politicians pass, if the high and mighty themselves won't observe them? It undercuts the repute of politics and the public regard for the rules and regulations we are all supposed to adhere to.

At least twice, Shriver has been photographed using her cellphone without a hands-free device -- a violation of a law her husband signed. When he made it law, he noted that if he ever caught his teenage daughter breaking it, ''she'll be taking the bus.''

After his wife was caught by a gossip site driving while chatting on a cellphone sans legally required device, Schwarzenegger promised, ''There's going to be swift action,'' and Shriver apologized. I wonder whether her daughter, the one who was threatened with the bus if she broke the law, gave her mother a piece of her mind.

But Shriver was not aboard a bus -- although a Cadillac Escalade is certainly of long and lumbering proportions -- when she was seen parking said SUV in a red zone in Santa Monica for nearly an hour. She was reportedly at a doctor's office, which I can't imagine to be official business.

Everybody screws up once in a while, sometimes in bigger ways than not. But a red zone is a big unmistakable crimson no-no that drivers learn even before they're old enough to get behind the wheel. How could she not see it? And if she did see it, what little voice told her, ''It's OK, go ahead,'' especially on the heels of her cellphone transgressions?

It's a shame that paparazzi follow her hither and yon, but one definition of morality is doing the right thing even when no one's looking, isn't it? I am pretty sure that if I'd tried to get away with the same thing, I'd have come out of my doctor's office to see my car on the way to the tow yard.

What ''swift action'' will her husband insist upon this time? Another apology will ring a bit hollow on the heels of the other one. In the meantime, maybe we should all chip in and buy her a bus pass.

-- Patt Morrison

This, apparently, is how to win a parks award: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sided with the toll-road agency and against San Onofre State Beach, supporting plans to build a freeway through the length of the park.

Then as soon as the budget got incredibly bad, one of his first ideas was to close a couple hundred state parks, even though the savings were relatively paltry. He backed down on that only after an analysis showed that it could be more expensive to close the parks than to keep them open because of the potential for vandalism, fires and illegal use.

On Thursday, the governor will receive an award from the National Park Trust for his record of supporting and protecting parks. This is a little befuddling, to say the least. Oh, wait, there was that moment when he told the federal government that he wanted California's road-free areas in its national forests to remain road-free.

If this is how awards are given out, we could have fun imagining similar honors. Nadya "Octomom" Suleman for the Zero Population Growth Award? The possibilities are endless.

-- Karin Klein

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Reports are in that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't going to close 100 state parks or anything like that number. Closing parks isn't the big moneysaver the governor had expected; the Times editorial page warned him about that in early June.

There also were small towns whose financial lives depend depend on the tourism brought by state monuments or parks.

The Times will editorialize tomorrow on the reasons why the governor should have thought this out better before donning his parks-Terminator costume.

Photo of Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier. Credit: David McNew / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

Threats and intimidation enliven the Op-Ed page, courtesy of two former Los Angeles Times scribes who've gone on to pen books.

Miriam Pawel details how the United Farm Workers switched from backing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to increase Central Valley water supplies to opposing it. Backed by the Change to Win union coalition, Pawel writes, the UFW established a $1 million fund to campaign against Schwarzenegger's water bonds in a "clumsy attempt at political blackmail." And Michael Krikorian recounts how five LAPD officers came to train four handguns and a shotgun at him and his girlfriend's son on a recent night in Hancock Park.

The Opinion Manufacturing Division also offers two takes on President Obama's speech Tuesday to students. Columnist Tim Rutten gushes about the speech and the president's Q&A session with a group of Virginia high-schoolers, then urges Obama to take the same approach and tone -- speaking plainly and personally but without condescension -- tonight in his speech to Congress about healthcare. The editorial board, meanwhile, frames the controversy that led up to the speech in the context of "what historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style in American politics,' an ancient, exasperating form of discourse."

The board also urges the state Fair Political Practices Commission to adopt a proposed set of rules limiting how public agencies may use taxpayer funds in support of ballot measures, bond issues and other Election Day causes. And it urges the Los Angeles City Council to settle the dispute over the city controller's power to audit functions within the city attorney's office:

City Controller Wendy Greuel and City Atty. Carmen Trutanich have accomplished something remarkable. They have given new life to a dispute between their predecessors that should have expired when the new term started July 1. Each made a campaign issue of cooperating to resolve the case of City of Los Angeles vs. Laura Chick, but each now claims the other is not cooperating. It's as if the contentious ghosts of termed-out politicians refused to leave and now possess the bodies of the new officeholders.

Credit: William Brown, TMS

-- Jon Healey

 In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, author Ethan Rarick finally gives Nevada the business, so to speak. In case you've missed the flap, Nevada is the latest in a long line of states to spend money making a play for California businesses, which claim to be mistreated and which others claim are deserting the state in droves. Not happening, Rarick says, picking up on stats that the Public Policy Institute of California put out a couple of years ago. 

The Times editorial board remembers Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Here's someone whose life actually measures up to the tributes.

The ed board also checks in on Tuesday's school board vote to, in essence, get the board out of the business of running more than 100 Los Angeles schools.

And columnist Meghan Daum nails the entire generation: we're still trying to figure out how to be grownups. The dead giveaways are the similarities, and differences, between "thirtysomething" and "Mad Men."

Photo: AP Photo / Charles Krupa

--Robert Greene

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a new forum this week for Californians to pitch their ideas for how to fix the state's problems. But at MyIdea4CA.com, there's not much room for explaining how to implement an idea, what the benefits might be or how much it might cost. In fact, there's not much room, period. That's because the site publishes the ideas that people submit via Twitter, which has a 140-character limit on its messages.

That doesn't strike me as the greatest way to tap the public's imagination and resourcefulness, particularly not when dealing with issues as complex as the state's budget mess. Then again, I write long. Even my emoticons run longer than 140 characters. Besides, people can always include links in their tweets to lengthy blog posts or white papers about their ideas, as Paul Benedict (aka paulbenedict7) did in the following tweet on the state budget: "Reduce costs by fewer gov rules that must be enforced: http://www.nolanchart.com/article6524.html." Most of the others weighing in on the budget problems, though, went with simple one- or two-sentence prescriptions, such as "automate unemployment biweekly claims. Permit online filing and direct deposit like tax returns" and "Add variable gas taxes, when it's low in way to obtain money for debts." Then there's this from Francisco MelliHuber (aka fmelli): "get a new governor who's not insane."

Got a proposal for the Gubernator? Send out a Tweet with the hashtag "#myidea4ca." But remember, keep it short. He's running out of time.

Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chats (briefly) with Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Credit: Justin Short, Office of the Governor.

-- Jon Healey

In today's editorial pages, The Times wishes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the rest of California, the best of luck in tackling the looming public pension crisis.

The ed board also tries to wrap its collective head around the notion that so many Americans think the current health care system is just fine as it is now -- and so many Americans have been showing up to take advantage of a program to get around the current health care system. Check out the editorial on the Remote Area Medical Foundation:

Also, we applaud Hillary Clinton for her focus in Africa on rape as a war crime.

On the Op-Ed side, in the wake of the recently announced deal between the IRS and the Swiss bank UBS, law professor and Holocaust lawyer Burt Neuborne takes on Swiss banks, their secrecy, and their penchant for protecting tax cheats and worse.

And Tom Hayden thinks someone somewhere ought to check to see whether there was a plot by independent police monitor Michael Cherkasky to get a federal judge to lift the LAPD consent decree for the express purpose of allowing Cherkasky to hire LAPD Chief William J. Bratton at Cherkasky's new security company.

And one more: Gen X-er columnist Meghan Daum salutes her era's Boswell, the late John Hughes.

Photo: Max Whittaker / Getty Images