The Times editorial board and columnist Tim Rutten both throw their support behind Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's choice of Charlie Beck to lead the Los Angeles Police Department. The board likes Beck's credentials as a reformer, but notes the work still to be done on that front. Rutten echoes that sentiment, and throws in a few more issues that matter to the City Council.

On a less sanguine note, Edward H. Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that neoconservatives transformed the Republican Party into an interventionist, big-government operation with no conservative policy agenda. Them's fighting words! Good thing they came out of Crane's word processor and not, say, Rutten's.

And Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Cal State University Board of Trustees, laments the slow death of the California dream. No, not the one about having a house on the beach. That died a long time ago. He's referring to "the promise of low-cost education that brought so many here, and kept so many here":

Speaking of schools, the editorial board criticizes a bill by Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) that combines some common-sense reforms to the public system with ill-considered ones. And, although it agrees that colleges and universities could do a better job controlling costs, it defends the decision by some to pay top dollar for top-drawer presidents.

-- Jon Healey

Illustration: Ted Rall / For The Times

Departing Police Chief William Bratton prods immigration culture warriors today with an op-ed explaining why the LAPD doesn't, and shouldn't, participate in the controversial 287(g) program, which gives local law enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents. Turning police into de facto Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harms community policing and discourages witnesses who might be illegal immigrants from coming forward.

Also on the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that trying to limit carbon emissions to fight global warming is a pointless waste of money because it can't solve the problem; better to invest in technological solutions and adjusting to a warmer world. And think tank scholars Leo Michel and Robert Hunter argue that U.S. allies are already doing plenty of heavy lifting as part of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, so American officials should do less lecturing and more listening if they want more cooperation.

Speaking of Afghanistan, the Editorial page says the country can't be pacified simply by sending more troops. That has become abundantly clear in the face of increased suicide bombings in Iraq, which like Afghanistan has been slow to build a credible government.

We also send a rare love note to the California Legislature, pointing out two genuinely worthwhile bills that will help cities make better use of water, an increasingly precious resource in this dry and crowded state. And we weigh in on Operation Gatekeeper, the federal effort started in 1994 to tighten border security in a five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Though the program has been successful in reducing crossings in that area, it has had an unintended consequence that must be addressed: Deaths of people trying to cross the desert farther to the east have skyrocketed.

Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

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

I don't usually consider Facebook posts to be worthy of transplanting to a (cough cough) professional blog like this one, but I'm making an exception for an FB thread about a Washington Post story.

The article focused on Georgetown University sophomore who has advertised for a personal assistant who would handle tasks "such as organizing his closet, dropping him off and picking him up from work, scheduling haircuts, putting gas in the car and taking it in for service, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry (although the assistant will be paid only for the time spent loading, unloading and folding clothes, not the entire laundry cycle)." The pay: $10-$12 an hour.

One response was whimsical: "Just this morning I told my mom I needed a PA. She laughed at me. Then [she] saw this article on Facebook and told me about it." (Oh, oh, Parent On Social Media Alert!) But the Facebooker who introduced the subject considered the student's quest  "the most egregious of all insults."

 I weighed in ...

The Vatican today announced a new arrangement under which Anglicans may enter the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions, including married priests and the use of at least some parts of the Book of Common Prayer. (It isn't clear from the Vatican news release whether this means only that already married Anglican priests will be welcome, or that future priests and candidates for the priesthood will be free to marry -- probably the former.)

This is a big deal. First and foremost, it is a reflection of the continued crackup of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide association of churches with roots in the Church of England, which was created after King Henry VIII declared himself the head of the church. (As Protestant kids in Northern Ireland used to spraypaint on Belfast city walls: "One Bible, One crown, No pope in our town.") 

In an attempt at face-saving, Rowan Williams, the Hamlet-like archbishop of Canterbury, said the new express conversion (as George Costanza would say) wasn't a "commentary on Anglican problems" over the ordination of gays and women as bishops. It's lucky he doesn't claim to be infallible, because this is a holy whopper.

But if the "poping" of conservative Anglo-Catholics eases tensions in the Anglican Communion, it is likely to exacerbate them in their new spiritual home. Many Roman Catholic liberals will be aghast at this development, because they too believe in opening ordination to gays and women. And even some moderate Catholics are likely to grouse over the fact that cradle Catholics can't become priests and be married, but Anglican arrivistes can. (Married former Episcopal priests in the United States have been allowed to switch teams for some time, through the creation of an "Anglican Use" -- a church within a church.)

One group of Roman Catholics, which comprises liberals and conservatives on issues of sexuality, will be happy about this development. They are the Catholics (and I'm one of them) who abhor the tone-deaf language of the post-Vatican II Mass in English. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer is one of the wonders of the English language. Asked what he missed most about his former church, an Anglican-priest-turned Catholic supposedly replied: "The Mass in English."

After today's announcement, I suspect a lot of cradle Catholics in other countries will be sneaking off to "Anglican Use" parishes on Sundays.

-- Michael McGough

Truly, the whole marriage issue, including questions the right kind of household for kids to grow up in, is something the nation can't seem to stop arguing about. But the latest uproar doesn't concern gay marriage. It's the case of a Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to officiate at the wedding of an interracial couple, an issue that was resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago.

Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace, refused to perform the ceremony for a white woman and black man this year. This month, in fact. He said their children would suffer because society would not accept them. Yeah, we've really noticed how that held back a kid once called Barry....

The ACLU is calling for Bardwell's resignation. Sounds silly to me. He should be fired immediately, and brought up on disciplinary charges and then sued. It is illegal to refuse to marry an otherwise eligible couple because of their race, or in this case, races.

Photo: A 1965 photo of Mildred Loving and her husband, Richard, whose lawsuit against Virginia led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1967 in favor of interracial couples' right to marry. Credit: AP file photo.

-- Karin Klein

Ralph Lauren has apologized, but that doesn't mean blogs or feminist groups are about to let go of the  grotesque retouch job on a fashion shot that makes the model's waist look like it was squeezed into an illegal torture device. Her hips appear narrower than her head, as blog Boing Boing pointed out, and her thighs look like they came straight from a classroom skeleton. The clothing company eventually confessed to the mistake, saying it was having a bad Photoshop day.

But now the National Organization for Women is demanding a further apology, to women everywhere for the company's alleged obsession with portraying extreme thinness, and preferably also to Filippa Hamilton, the model in the ad who was fired by Ralph Lauren after years of being one of its top models. Hamilton said the clothier found her 120-pound girth on a 5-foot-10 body -- translating to a size 4 -- too  bulky to fit into its sample sizes. The company denies that's why she was fired.

Meanwhile, the blogs are gleefully showing off another photo, reportedly also Ralph Lauren, showing a pretty model with a bizarrely thin, elongated, hipless body, like the aliens in "Cocoon." Never fear, E.T. Your short legs and dumpy midsection will never qualify you as a Ralph Lauren model -- that is, not without emergency Photoshopping -- but NOW is holding its fourth annual "Love Your Body" celebration next Wednesday.

Photo: On the left, Filippa Hamilton with digital liposuction; on the right, as she is. Credit: AP

-- Karin Klein 

The Times editorial board meets three times a week to discuss what we're going to say in our editorials, but sometimes news breaks between meetings and we scramble to reach a consensus through e-mail. The announcement that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize is a case in point. To give you an idea how ideas germinate within the Opinion Manufacturing Division, here's a transcript of that electronic discussion (with the spelling cleaned up a bit). Please note that this is just the starting point for an editorial -- the off-the-top thoughts that present the writer with angles to pursue and questions to answer. In other words, don't confuse this banter with the reporting editorial writers put into their pieces.

Michael McGough, our Washington-based senior editorial writer, started the conversation at 6:57 a.m. Pacific with a query circulated to the rest of the board:

Marjorie Miller, who writes about foreign policy (and Winnie the Pooh sequels), punched out a retort on her Blackberry as she got out of the gym:

Nick Goldberg, editor of the editorial pages, responded:

Miller soon elaborated ...

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