The Times' editorial page today takes President Obama to task for his back-and-forth pronouncements on the destructive practice of mountaintop coal mining. We say the president merits "quiet applause" for new restrictions, but we also note that they come on the heels of approval of two-dozen new projects.

The best approach to mountaintop mining would be to ban it completely. It's cheaper and less labor-intensive than underground mining, but not worth the environmental cost. At a minimum, Obama should address some other highly destructive rule changes imposed by the Bush administration -- a good place to start would be restoring a regulation that forbade mining within 100 feet of a stream, and disallowing the use of mine waste as "fill" material in waterways.

The editorial board also scolds the president about his exception-filled "paygo" plan and the rest of the decisions that may show how comfortable Washington is getting with deficit spending. Growing the debt may have had some merit as a way to stimulate the economy, but where are the plans to restore fiscal balance?

And we take another look at the difficulty in firing bad teachers, and the role that unions play in elevating teacher job security over the welfare of students. The new secretary of Education wants teachers to be paid based on how well their students learn. California isn't close to that, or any other objective measure.

Here, it is considered revolutionary for a school board to beg for relief from a tortuous, money-wasting teacher termination process that is nearly doomed to failure anyway.

On the Op-Ed page, Ben Ehrenreich calls on the U.S. to get down off its high horse on torture. It isn't new, he argues, and it isn't a thing of the past either.

Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration's great act of hubris was not to allow torture -- that was nothing new -- but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that "the United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know.

Ehrenreich last wrote for The Times in April, when he reviewed "News From the Empire" by Spanish novelist Fernando del Paso.

Author Craig Childs is friends with and lives among private collectors who grab pot fragments and other archaeological artifacts, robbing the bits and pieces of much of their historical value. He opposes the practice -- but describes the mixed feelings he has about recent raids that resulted in the arrest of some of his friends.

Childs last wrote for The Times in February, when he discussed what a recent finding of chocolate in an ancient New Mexico jar has to say about pre-Columbian North American civilization.

And Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders whether the recent murderous attacks on an abortion doctor and the Holocaust museum in Washington mean we have entered the era of the angry old man.

Photo credit: Jeff Gentner / Associated Press

Credit the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign for its clever ability to poke people right in their discomfort zones. Generally, the target is getting people to believe that the children of California will be indoctrinated into tolerance of the gay population. The latest wave of ads, from what I read (Nope, I still don't watch or listen to campaign ads.), grabs one high-profile case of a Massachusetts teacher who read her students the picture book "King and King," about a prince who's supposed to find a princess to wed but finds another prince instead.

And really, I don't know what the teacher was thinking. The book's writing is lackluster, the characters undeveloped, and the illustration a downright mess.

But it's a theoretical reach from there to the Prop. 8 mantra that same-sex marriage equals schools teaching children as young as kindergartners all about gay marriage. The state has an Education Code and an instructional framework that don't call for teaching marriage at all until kids get older, and even then in only the most bare-bones way, like the difference between dating and marriage. State law also is quite clear on the subject of parents' rights not to have their children attend lessons on sexual and other highly personal matters.

Yes, first graders in San Francisco attended their teacher's lesbian wedding as a field trip. Parents have to sign permission slips for field trips, too, even if it's to the post office. (Two parents opted out.) The parents could well have given permission for their children to attend a civil-union celebration. Prop. 8 wouldn't change what teachers read to children or whether students see their teachers in a loving same-sex relationship. All the things that scare Prop 8's proponents the most could happen even if it passed.

One way or another, kids are going to learn things at school, whether from teachers or fellow students, that go against their parents' beliefs. Part of learning tolerance is learning that people think differently and believe differently; this is a lesson that both schools and parents teach, and that's not to even mention what the kids learn from playing Halo.

(Attention, those who believe in Santa Claus -- spoiler alert!)

I'm reminded of one of my son's own kindergarten lessons, when the teachers talked someone into dressing up as Santa to hand out gifts -- without advance warning to parents. "Mommy, Santa does exist!" Sam came home and announced, despite our frequent teachings otherwise. "He was at school today." When I argued that this was a man dressed up to look like a make-believe character, he countered, "Oh, no, this was the real Santa. Mrs. H told us so."

So the authority figure spoke, and then the real authority figure spoke, and he learned that sometimes teachers say things that we don't agree with, or even things that are downright wrong. Sorry, Santa.

Image of the "King & King" cover courtesy of the Ten Speed Press website.

A skeleton, believed to be 1.6 million years old, of Homo ergaster. (EPA/Jan-Peter Kasper)

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?

Can we ever get enough of mature women sex tourists on Viagra? I didn't think so! Commenter Jeannette Belliveau (I just hear that name and I'm already hooked) hipped us yesterday to her book "Romance on the Road," that describes female sex travel "as a qualified victory for feminism." The brief excerpt available on her site is terrific, in particular the "Sexual Geography" world maps, which feature fat and skinny arrows pointing all over the place and look like the rise-and-fall-of-the-Axis endpapers they used to have in histories of World War II. But Belliveau's world conquerors are even more impressive. Dig these feats from the sex travellers Hall of Fame:

In Jamaica, a tourist woman in one night took three lovers page 47

In the Dominican Republic, in 14 days a German woman took 18 lovers page 100 

Hot stuff! And as demonstrated in this hilarious blog post detailing the nearly total fabrication of an interview with the Daily Mail, she's an effective critic of that weird combination of sweaty-palmed leering and pleasure-hating moralism with which the mainstream media always treat matters of lust. Check out her site.

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.

Memín Pinguín, the controversial funnybook character who has caused some U.S.-Mexico friction in the past (most recently in 2005, when President Bush protested Mexico's issuing of a stamp in his honor), is in the news again. Wal-Mart announced earlier this week that it would stop selling Memín Pinguín comics. In an announcement, the retail giant, which had been offering Memín books at stores in Texas, Florida and California, stepped carefully to avoid angering either fans or detractors.

"We understand that Memin is a popular figure in Mexico," said Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. "However, given the sensitivities to the negative image Memin can convey to some we felt that it was best to no longer carry the item in our stores."

More coverage in our own Hoy.

Most of what I know about these kinds of images I learned from Spike Lee's not-perfect-but-not-to-be-missed 2000 joint "Bamboozled." It's a tall order to try and argue that Memín, whose simian features and hysterical demeanor seem excessive even by genre standards, is actually some kind of progressive figure. Nevertheless, some do make that argument. Adalisa Z says the new controversy reveals the huge cultural differences between the U.S. and Mexico, and during the stamp controversy, historian Enrique Krauze wrote in the WashPost that umbrage at the character was misdirected:

To Americans, the figure, with his exaggerated "African" features, appears to be a copy of racist American cartoons. To Mexicans, he is a thoroughly likable character, rich in sparkling wisecracks, and is felt to represent not any sense of racial discrimination but rather the egalitarian possibility that all groups can live together in peace. During the 1970s and '80s, his historietas sold over a million and a half copies because they touched an authentic chord of sympathy and tenderness among poorer people, who identified with Memin Pinguin.

I generally think dealing in racist stereotypes while arguing that you're attacking racism is like having your cake and eating it too. I mean, in the arm-wrestle between authorial intent and reader response, reader response wins every time: How much difference does it really make whether a particular character is tagged as amiable or villainous within the context of the story? But again, some do make that argument. The Wiki page on Memín details the comic's progressive pedigree.

For the same reason, I'm never sure of arguments from historical context: i.e., you have to remember that this stuff was commonplace in the 1940s. But again, the counterargument: Occasional Superheroine tracks the divergent careers of Memín and Will Eisner's Ebony White, who got a subsequent makeover designed to make him more palatable to modern audiences.

One argument from context that I do find plausible is about the context of our own age. It's possible the history of minstrelsy is becoming so remote that stuff like this will no longer be radioactive simply because nobody knows to be offended by it. I certainly have to reread "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" to remind myself that respectable people thought my own ancestors looked like monkeys back in the day. (And no, I'm not arguing that the Irish had a particulary hard time in America. Just sayin' is all.)

In other words, what do you think:

Photo courtesy of Armando Mota/EPA.

If you thought you could live out the final days of Bush's term without being forced to imagine the man in the sack, think again.

Curtis Sittenfeld's forthcoming novel "American Wife" tells the story of the Laura Bush-esque Alice Blackwell, a librarian whose husband happens to become president. No unpleasant details left behind, judging from excerpts posted by Radar Magazine (really, read at your own risk). The author has previously written quite (to borrow a Bush-y term) reality-based fiction about the better-off, and now she seems all the more eager to capitalize on fiction that isn't quite fiction. Republican reaction isn't hard to predict, but The Plank too called it "tawdry and gimmicky."

But the book won't be all provocation, judging from an old Salon piece by Sittenfeld unequivocally titled "Why I love Laura Bush":

Much of the public frustration with Laura seems to stem from her perceived passivity, especially in light of widespread assumption that she's significantly more liberal than George Bush. But what, I asked the people I know, is she supposed to do? Their answers ranged from "drive a wooden stake through her husband's skull" to "poison him."

Clearly, liberals' visceral loathing of George Bush transfers into a loathing of Laura as well. But that transference strikes me as reductive and even sexist. Because here's the thing: Both the new biography about Laura Bush and Laura Bush herself are a lot more complicated than they initially appear.

As the [Ann] Gerhart book proves, Laura Bush is a true role model. She's smart and curious about the world. She's sincere and down-to-earth and compassionate. She's both confident and modest, she knows who she is, and she doesn't try to prove anything.

Sounds like we're in not for a book of romantic and sexual speculation, as the Radar excerpts imply and which might have been fun in a car crash sort of way, but rather for something that lives up to its title -- examining what it means to be the archetypal wife.

*Photo courtesy Getty Images.

Larry Lessig had a fascinating copyright idea in the other Times a while back, which gives an interesting perspective on this L.A. Times story about J.R.R. Tolkien's descendants' fight for some of the gross on the New Line Cinema "Lord of the Rings" adaptations. Writes Rachel Abramowitz:

Tolkien obviously isn't Peter Jackson, who directed the franchise, or Liv Tyler or Viggo Mortensen, who starred in it, or New Line Cinema, the studio that financed it, or Miramax, which owned the film rights for a second but couldn't get the movie made, or producer Saul Zaentz, who bought the rights in 1976. He's just the guy who dreamed up the cosmology, the whole shebang of hobbits and dwarfs, orcs, ents, wargs, trolls, whatnot. "Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne." Those were old John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's words.

But he's dead, so why should Hollywood share any of the dough?

In reference to a far less lucrative literary franchise, here's a good reason why not.

I realize this puts me at odds not only with the Times but with the EU, Her Majesty and the U.S. Congress. But I find it offensive to common sense to argue that the heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien (who are as dismayingly numerous as Kennedys in the court filing) are entitled to a shilling for work in which they had no hand and which was completed in 1949.

I'm not evaluating the legal merits of their case, the questionable management of New Line Cinema, or the Tolkiens' contractual rights under a contract that was signed with United Artists in 1969 and passed to New Line (and now to Warner Bros.) by way of Zaentz and Miramax. (Though with these dramatis personnae, it's amazing there's a plug nickel left to fight over.) I am saying current copyright law is well outside the bounds of rationality. There should be no fight over rights on the literary property because on a logical planet, a 59-year-old literary property by a 35-years-dead author would be in the public domain.

Now to Larry Lessig, who proposed a seemingly rational solution back in May:

Following the model of patent law, Congress should require a copyright owner to register a work after an initial and generous term of automatic and full protection.

For 14 years, a copyright owner would need to do nothing to receive the full protection of copyright law. But after 14 years, to receive full protection, the owner would have to take the minimal step of registering the work with an approved, privately managed and competitive registry, and of paying the copyright office $1.

It's not clear how the Tolkien case would play out under this regime. "The Lord of the Rings," as I have heard the story, didn't hit its full popular stride (or is that schritt?) until the 1960s, and it's possible that the author, preoccupied with the commercial potential of "Smith of Wooten Major" or "Farmer Giles of Ham," might have neglected to do the necessary update. Interestingly this would probably have had the effect (all else being equal) of reducing the specific take for Peter Jackson's movies, because they would have been competing with dozens or scores of previous adaptations, not just Ralph Bakshi's.

But more likely, Lessig's proposal would merely move these sorts of battles a few years into the future. I don't see any way around the central problem: Copyright term is simply too long. It needs to be dated for some reasonable period from the date of creation (I've previously said 35 years, so I'll stick with that figure), and then it needs to end. If you're the author or the author's estate, you can keep trying to use your goodwill and/or familiarity with the franchise to keep making money on it, but you've got to fight for it like everybody else.

Which, ironically, Tolkien's heirs have proven quite capable of doing. Back when Peter Jackson was known mostly for "Heavenly Creatures" (his true masterpiece), here's how my old friend Tom Spurgeon described Christopher Tolkien's place in the universe of lucky inheritors:

The Caretaker

Caretakers are all about access. Their basic strategy is to place themselves between a beloved creation and a still-rabid audience and claim their involvement is an extension of the creator's wishes — even if the nature of those desires must be inferred from beyond the grave. Once duly recognized as a keeper of the flame, the caretaker can dispense missives from the promised land with the measured touch of a Mr. Bumble. The perfect situation for the caretaker is to be placed in charge of an open-ended franchise targeted at anal completists. Christopher Tolkien and Brian Herbert are exemplars of this type, with multi-volume releases of first drafts or brand-new novels taken, cross-their-hearts, from papa's real, honest, left-behind notes. If criticized as a profiteer, the caretaker emphasizes his or her connection to the successful parent's life work, particularly if it ends up in a deal for a project celebrating the parent-child relationship, such as a suite of fairy stories or album of lullabies. While embracing the parent's vision is the most reliable way to pursue strategy, offering complementary skills necessary to maintain that legacy can be just as effective. Hugh Hefner popularized the Playboy philosophy by living it; Christy Hefner helped legitimize it because she didn't.

So buy your advance tickets to Ang Lee's "The Silmarillion" now!

Crossposted at Jon Healey's Bit Player.

Columnist Rosa Brooks details John McCain's flip-flop on terror:

It was McCain who refused to sanction torture. It was McCain who said Guantanamo detainees "have rights under various human rights declarations. And one of them is the right not to be detained indefinitely." It was McCain who advocated moving Guantanamo detainees to Kansas' Ft. Leavenworth, where they would come under the certain jurisdiction of federal courts. It was McCain who insisted that we respect the basic rights even of enemies who "don't deserve our sympathy" because "this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are."

John McCain, who are you now?

Law professors Darren Bush, Harry First, and John J. Flynn note that the U.S. has sued many a multinational cartel in the past, so why not OPEC? The New America Foundation's Rourke O'Brien says having a car shouldn't prevent families from receiving welfare. And columnist Patt Morrison attends a book club at Camp Gonzales.

The editorial board tells the Los Angeles Police Protective League to stop blocking sound public policy that would open misconduct hearings to the public. The board says the USDA should stop interfering with private companies that want to test for mad cow. And finally, the board suggests a better strategy for the Associated Press than blocking bloggers from using AP content.

On the letters page, readers criticize the paper for its Lakers coverage. Glendale's Brian Bard says the paper took a "cheap shot" at Kobe Bryant, but San Diego's Russ Wilson says, "Bryant's ego is fed daily by the vain Times.... Thank God that's over."

*Cartoon by Scott Stantis, Birmingham News