The Times endorses an unusual idea being considered today by the L.A. Unified School Board: allowing assorted groups inside and outside the district to operate 50 newly built schools over the next four years. Yes, there are pitfalls to this idea, but it's still the most intriguing experiment to reinvent local education to come along in years.

The ongoing crisis in Honduras, meanwhile, is starting to look like it won't be resolved without some "superpower pressure" from the United States, The Times opines. It's time to impose sanctions on those behind the coup that ousted the country's rightful president, Manuel Zelaya, and take other actions aimed at restoring democracy. "Failure to return to constitutional order would send a signal to the rest of Latin America that once again political problems can be solved with an old-style coup."

And we celebrate the nomination of Regina Benjamin as surgeon general. This "angel-like" figure, known for her work bringing clinics to rural areas, rebuilding health centers devastated by Hurricane Katrina and leading medical associations, "has the potential to be one of the strongest voices in public health in decades."

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg raises an eyebrow over a recent comment in the New York Times from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

'Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided,' Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, 'there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.'

Goldberg lists other prominent abortion backers, including former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who appeared to think that abortion was necessary to cull undesirable elements -- like the poor and minorities -- from the population. He'd like to see more questioning of such attitudes in the media.

Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project says the Obama administration is breaking its promise to bring transparency to government surveillance programs. The administration is reportedly proceeding with a Bush-era plan to use the National Security Agency to screen government computer traffic on private-sector networks, a program known as Einstein 3 that has no intrinsic security value -- but will allow spooks to read e-mail communication between the government and private citizens.

And Deborah Doctor of Disability Rights California challenges Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to document all the fraud he claims to have identified in the state's In-Home Supportive Services program, a quarter of whose funds he says are wasted. The governor not only hasn't proven the accuracy of that figure, he has proposed fixes that could well cost more than they would save.

In today's pages: reform. Reform of the health care system, reform of immigration policy and reform of fire retardant laws. Let's start with health care.

The editorial board today takes a look at how to improve medical care while lowering costs in a reformed health care system, and suggests three ways to do so: invest in primary care, develop treatment standards for medical professionals and promote information technology that tracks patient care.

The board is perturbed by the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historical landmark, and the businesses that are affiliated with it on Olvera Street. The site, which claims to be the location where Los Angeles was founded, has been costing the city money instead of paying for itself. The rents on the merchants' stalls along the back alley are much lower than market rate, and the board calls for the city to reset the rents and make this historical landmark cover its costs.

On the op-ed side of the pages, health care again! Phil Lebhertz, director of the Foundation for Health Coverage Education, points out that many health care programs exist for lower-income folks, but many just don't know about it:

And reform is again the word of the day, as Jeb Bush, Thomas F. McLarty III and Edward Alden broach the issue of immigration policy and the outcome of a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force they recently headed. Encouraged by President Obama's call for change of the immigration system, the three politicians propose to make it easier for some illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, reward businesses that use programs such as E-Verify to check applicants' immigration status, and align immigration policy with America's competitive interests.

Russell Long, vice president of Friends of the Earth, urges California to stop requiring that fire retardant chemicals be used on baby products. Long says the chemicals are not proven to be fire-proof, and instead could be dangerous to the infant's, and their parents', health:

Finally, columnist Gregory Rodriguez tries to find a link between the recession and the declining divorce rate. His conclusion? Our society has yet to find (or create) a marriage model that incorporates all of society's changes and the choices both men and women have:

Photo: U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden (C) speaks as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (L), and President and CEO of Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) Carol Keehan (R) listen as Biden makes an announcement on health care at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House July 8, 2009 in Washington, DC. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images

An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.

It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.

On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:

Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.

Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images

In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, race. Aren't we past all that? No. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court wants us to be.

But it's not clear how long this conservative court will hold off. In the Austin case, the court noted ominously that "we are now a very different Nation" and hinted that a new look at the constitutional issues surrounding race might be coming. In the New Haven case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court "merely postpones the evil day" when these issues will be taken up.

Your editorial writers also find themselves wondering what the folks at the Orange County Museum of Art were thinking when they flouted art-world protocol and did a quickie and quasi-secret sale of California Impressionist works.

Though OCMA officials may have meant well -- and Szakacs is a respected director who deserves credit for returning more than 3,000 works to the Laguna museum -- they have done their institution few favors with the sale. At least one museum in addition to Laguna's is miffed at not being offered a chance to outbid the mysterious buyer.

Lots to think about on the Op-Ed side today. Start with Times columnist Meghan Daum's look at Sarah Palin's resigna... -- no, wait! Come back! This is new and different! There's some good stuff here -- Daum checks out Palin through the lens of her Christian conservative Palin-fan friend, and offers some insight:

* Photo: Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images

In the same Nov. 4, 2008 election in which Barack Obama was elected president, Los Angeles voters defeated (but just barely) a $36-per-property parcel tax measure to fund youth and anti-gang programs. Measure A was spearheaded by Councilwoman Janice Hahn; as a local tax, it had to pull in two-thirds, or 66.67% of the vote to win. It got 66.27%. Times endorsements may not have the clout they once did, but I think it's safe to say that our opposition helped make a difference on this one.

Hahn wants to try again, and wants to know what it would take to win us over this time. Fair question.

The subject came up at Tuesday's City Council committee hearing, at which Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr reported on the last six months of the city's still-new Gang Reduction and Youth Development programs.

When the Times called for a "no" vote on Measure A, we said the city had not shown it was ready to use new tax money properly. We explained that Los Angeles had floundered with anti-gang efforts for years, throwing money at programs without knowing whether they were working or even defining what they were supposed to accomplish. Just months earlier, the city had scrapped L.A. Bridges and authorized the mayor to take charge of gang programs and to establish standards and evaluation methods. Carr was a newcomer. It was too early to tell whether the city had improved. Here's a snippet, in case you don't want to click on the link and wade through the while thing:

No. Nonononononononononono. Ab. So. Lute. Ly. No.

The city of Los Angeles is a half-billion dollars in the hole. Layoffs. Furloughs. Potholes unfilled, trees untrimmed. Animal services, the ethics commission, whack whack whack.

So why, why, in any rational universe, should the city of L.A. pick up the policing tab for Michael Jackson's obsequies at Staples Center?

For the Lakers' victory parade -- certainly a more civically significant event than the excesses that follow Jackson in death as they did in life -- the city found private donors because of the pushback of public opinion over subsidizing the athletic triumph of, as they say, millionaires working for billionaires.
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So why is there now any thought at all of dipping into a city fund for ''extraordinary events'' to subsidize this one -- which, if a ''public viewing'' becomes part of the memorial, will turn the whole thing into a Michael Jackson corpse carnival?

An earthquake is an extraordinary event. But Michael Jackson's family deciding, gee, let's invite the world (or at least something above 17,000 members of the world) to mourn our relative -- extraordinary to them, and to Jackson fans, certainly, but hardly enough to stick it to the taxpayers of LA.

Council member Jan Perry said the city would ''deeply appreciate'' any private citizen coming forward to pick up the tab. ``Any company, entity, individual who would have such great love, the city would welcome the support,” she told the New York Times.

I nominate the Jackson family to pay the bill, perhaps going halfsies with AEG, which owns Staples (and was the promoter on Jackson's planned comeback concerts). The Jackson estate stands to benefit enormously from this. The undoubted live, free, worldwide news coverage of the memorial, the frenzy of 10, 20, 30 times more fans clamoring outside than can possibly cram into Staples, will generate mind-boggling sales of MJ music. The Staples name will figure into every video clip.

So why should the Jacksons' private arrangement with Staples to commemorate the passing of a man who was almost pathologically averse in life to the public's gaze become, in the end, a public burden?

Hint: that's a rhetorical question.

Photo: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republicans in the Legislature are playing hardball with their Democratic counterparts: No new taxes, balance the budget with cuts and -- as Schwarzenegger ordered earlier today -- force state employees to take a third monthly furlough day, further reducing their pay. According to The Times' article, thousands of public employees plan to show up in Sacramento today to protest the additional pay cut.

The third imposed furlough day opens a deeper divide in one of the more drawn-out battles of this year's budgeting process: the one pitting public-employee unions and their Democratic allies in the Legislature against Schwarzenegger and state Republicans, who seemed to have rekindled their relationship after the May 19 special election. It's a topic being debated in this week's Dust-Up exchange between Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. and John Tanner, executive director of SEIU Local 721, which represents tens of thousands of government employees in Los Angeles County (their third and final exchange, in which they mull ideas to preserve state services in this budget crisis without reducing pay or laying off workers, will be posted later today). In the comments board for Monday's Dust-Up installment, several readers have come down on the side of Schwarzenegger and the GOP, posting comments similar the one left by "Pete":

Photo: Service Employees International Union protest Schwarzenegger's proposed furloughs and state employee pay cuts Tuesday, June 30 (Rich Pedroncelli/AP) 

Here at the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division, we like to check in on how our editorials and Op-Ed articles are doing -- and where they are going -- in the blogosphere. What follows is a sampling of blogs that have picked up our opinions and generated opinions of their own.

Jerry Roberts' and Phil Trounstine's Op-Ed listing six factors that are at the root of California's inability to be governed caught the attention of several blogs this week. The Housing Chronicles Blog linked to a post about its own theories on California's detrimental changes:

Bob Burnett of the Huffington Post linked to the piece in his take on California's growing troubles and who's to blame:

On FarmPolicy.com, a blog dedicated to news about the farming industry that took particular interest in the climate change bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked to The Times' editorial that supported the bill. It seems the farm industry, based on the blog's long and varied list of supporters and naysayers, is quite conflicted on this issue. The Harvesting Justice blog came out slightly more strongly against the editorial's favorable position on the bill, offering this comment (which I believe is meant to be sarcastic?):

Another example of the excesses of the "greedy growers," as former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson used to say.  We poison the environment and our farmworkers and agribusiness continues to lobby for the ability to continue to do so, while getting paid subsidies not to do so.

On June 26, The Times ran an Op-Ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton -- a controversial figure in the world of diplomacy -- that encouraged the United States to support regime change in Iran. Not surprisingly, several bloggers had a lot to say in response. The Citizens blog said Bolton's argument is a veiled call for war:

The UN Dispatch blog offered a similar reaction, and added that the target of Bolton's attack was clearly the Obama administration, and even worse, offered no real solution to his goal. It was written for a partisan purpose and little else, the blog said.

Gregory Tejeda, a Chicago-area freelance writer and former UPI reporter, took issue with Zev Chafets' Op-Ed, in which Chafets argued that Latino baseball players are being singled out by the Hall of Fame for their use of steroids. Tejada said he knows just as many non-Latino ball players who were disgraced by their drug use:

And finally, Noel Sheppard on the NewsBusters blog was quite taken aback by Karen Bass's statement during an interview with Patt Morrison that Republican radio talk-show hosts were "terrorizing" their fellow Republicans in the California legislature.

Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger addresses a joint session of the state legislature in Sacramento on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. Schwarzenegger urged state lawmakers to act quickly to close a $24 billion deficit that opened in the state budget because of the worst U.S. recession in half a century. Credit: Ken James/Bloomberg News

I'm not a doctor, and the guy who tried to revive Michael Jackson is. But it's hard to avoid having questions about how Dr. Conrad Murray went about administering CPR to the pop star.

Why did he perform the chest compressions while Jackson was still in bed rather than move him to a firm surface? On a bed, the victim is simply pressed deeper into the mattress. According to reports, Murray tried to overcome this by bracing Jackson's back with one hand, which left the doctor only one hand to do compressions. Usually, the rescuer uses two hands, interlocked, pressing down with the heel of the lower hand. It's hard work to get a compression deep enough.

Murray also, according to his lawyers, performed the technique for 25 minutes or so before having an ambulance called. But according to the CPR classes I've taken, the procedure seldom revives a patient; it's more a technique to keep blood flowing until an ambulance arrives. Rescuers also generally aren't supposed to try to do CPR for such a long period even if an ambulance isn't immediately forthcoming. They're supposed to show someone else how to do it as they do it, and have that person spell them for awhile. It's exhausting to give CPR properly, and studies show that rescuers, without noticing, start to let up on the speed or depth of the compressions after a few minutes.

It's early for anyone to be passing judgment on how things were handled in Jackson's particular situation, but it would be helpful to have some top experts come forward to comment on how people should handle CPR in an emergency. Given the phenomenal interest and concern in this case, doctors and public-health officials have been presented with a teachable moment that might be used to save other lives.

Photo: A July 2006 photo of Dr. Conrad Murray. Credit: AP Photo / Houston Chronicle

As the California State Assembly adjourned around 11 a.m. today (that's, what, a 3 hour workday?) with no apparent progress made in crafting a budget the Governor would sign by the Tuesday deadline, Assemblymen Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) and Mike Davis (D-L.A.) suggested it was time to buckle down and figure this out.

Er, no, wait. They stood to honor Michael Jackson as the King of Pop that he truly was, and Farrah Fawcett as every man's favorite pin-up girl, before taking the rest of the day off:

It's all well and good to honor notable Californians who have passed away. Still, I would have preferred to hear such tributes at the end of a normal business day -- or, in the case of this group of legislators, an extraordinary day -- in which some movement were made toward enacting a new budget. Especially considering that the alternative is California issuing IOUs for the next fiscal year.

Photo: Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, chair of the budget conference committee, left, consoles State Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, chair of the Senate budget committee after the Senate fell short of the necessary two-thirds vote to approve a package of budget related bills at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, June 25, 2009. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)