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

Today the Opinion Manufacturing Division takes both sides of the debate over whether to investigate CIA interrogators, with columnist Tim Rutten lamenting the appointment of a special prosecutor and the editorial board applauding it. Rutten argues that it would be a "travesty" to charge the small fry without going after the higher ups in the Justice Department and the White House who egged them on. And that, he says, is a road to a place we don't want to go:

The editorial board, on the other hand, sees wisdom in having a respected career prosecutor conduct a limited inquiry into whether interrogators violated laws against torture or exceeded the "minimal" limits imposed by the Justice Department. It also opines:

The board also questions the motives ...

Columnist Tim Rutten returns from vacation to find the "birthers" still discussing citizen grand juries and opponents of healthcare reform bringing guns to President Obama's town hall meetings. There's more than the usual dollop of crazy talk in our politics, Rutten warns:

Read the column, then leave your comments -- rational or otherwise -- below. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, criminal law scholar J. Kelly Strader warns that courts around the country are essentially ignoring the Supreme Court's admonition in Lawrence v. Texas that states couldn't outlaw private behavior that clashes with the majority's view of morality. And Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers insights on the four front-runners in Thursday's presidential election in Afghanistan.

In the editorial stack, the Times board blasts the California legislature for its failure to mandate more use of renewable energy by state utilities, despite the support of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, utility regulators and most voters. It pooh-poohs GM's eBay initiative, questioning whether the carmaker can do anything truly innovative on sales without hurting its dealer network. And it looks past newly released scores on standardized tests to find something encouraging at Locke High School:

Photo credit: AP Photo / John Bazemore

-- Jon Healey

Just as the birther frenzy over President Obama's "fake" birth certificate and his eligibility to be commander in chief was dying (much too late, I might add), another detail surfaced today that may give the reality-deniers a recharge.

Obama's MySpace page lists the president's age as 52 years old. Hawaii, the state of Obama's birth (or alleged birth, per the conspiracy theorists), just celebrated the 50th anniversary of its statehood. So if Myspace is right, Obama was born when Hawaii was a U.S. territory, not a state.

Oh no. And it begins again.

A low-on-the-totem-pole White House staffer is most likely in charge of updating the president's MySpace and Facebook pages (though Facebook is correct in listing Obama's birth date as August 4, 1961). Yes, whoever is in charge of the president's social media efforts should be more conscientious of their dates, especially when they know that the birthers will jump on any "evidence" that the president should be ousted.

But the proof is in the pudding, or rather, the birth certificate. Shouldn't that be enough to end all this madness?

-- Catherine Lyons

Photo: This photo provided by the Honolulu Advertiser shows President Barack Obama's birth announcement, left column, center, in the Sunday Aug. 13, 1961 edition of the paper. Credit: AP Photo / The Honolulu Advertiser

Politically incorrect, constitutionally correct. I'm referring to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's "No" vote in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on a constitutional amendment that would strip governors of the power to appoint temporary replacements for senators who die or resign.

The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) was referred to as "Rod's law" in a Times editorial opposing the idea. -- in (dis)honor of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (right), who appointed the clownish Roland Burris to replace Barack Obama. The idea has gained momentum from the freakish fact that four current senators are interim appointees, soon to be joined by unelected replacements for the departing Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) and Mel Martinez (R-Fla.)

Adoption of Feingold's amendment would violate the principle that when it's not necessary to amend the Constitution, it's necessary not to amend the Constitution. But its also falls short on the merits. Feingold likens it to the 1913 change in the Constitution providing for the popular election of senators, replacing the previous practice in which senators were chosen by state legislatures.

But the amendment that accomplished that reform, the 17th, also contained this language: "When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

This is both a principled and practical provision. It allows states to decide whether a Senate seat will remain vacant until either a special or a regular election. Most states have chosen to allow interim appointments by the governor because otherwise the state would be denied half its representation.

"State's rights" has a bad reputation, a hangover from Southern resistance to racial integration, but as long as states exist (and have equal representation in the Senate) they ought to be able to decide whether waiting for an election is worth an empty seat in the Senate.

Photo: AP / Julio Cortez

-- Michael McGough

President Obama threw a party at the White House this morning for new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He shouldn't have invited her, and she shouldn't have come. Her appearance exacerbated the politicization of the court that led so many Republican senators to vote against her.

In celebrating what he called an "extraordinary moment for our nation," Obama didn't pressure Sotomayor to vote in a particular way. Still, it was unseemly for the president to treat Sotomayor's confirmation as a political trophy. The victory party undermined the symbolism of Sotomayor's swearing-in at the court rather than at the White House.

Until her confirmation, Sotomayor was in a sense a creature of the executive branch headed by Obama. Once she was confirmed and sworn in, she was (and is) an officer of an independent branch of government that is often called upon to overturn the actions of the other two branches.  

One of my favorite scenes in "Becket," the biopic about the 12th century saint, is when Richard Burton as Becket realizes that he can't serve simultaneously as archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England.  Never mind that he owes his appointment as archbishop to King Henry II (played by Peter O'Toole). I wouldn't push the church-state analogy too far, but Sotomayor also may be called upon to reprimand her patron. With that in mind, she should have spent this morning poring over briefs.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

-- Michael McGough

Watching Arlen Specter's health-care town meeting on CNN this morning, I experienced the predictable panic of the liberal elitist. Who let these people in?  When did democracy start resembling a Jerry Springer show? When they're finished killing health reform with their paranoid rantings, will these yahoos target the First Amendment?

Then I mentally caught my breath.

Assuming, as I do, that the town-meeting loudmouths aren't all Republican robots, their suspicions of bureaucrats snooping on their medical records and Medicare operating ethical suicide parlors aren't that different from liberals' distrust of the CIA and the NSA.

Suspicion of Big Government always has had its liberal and its conservative incarnations, and sometrimes politics brings the extremes to touch and mean one thing. I think it was Peter Beinart who first pointed out that opposition to the Patriot Act came not just from ACLU-ish liberals but also from right-wing libertarians -- the "black helicopter crowd."  

Liberals don't want the government to hoard and computerize DNA information about people who have been arrested. Conservatives don't want Washington to know who owns a gun.

Anti-statism wasn't the only obsession of the crowd that gave Specter grief this morning. Another theme was the imprtance of denying health care to illegal aliens, who ought to be deported anyway. Then there was the mention of tort reform, not usually a preoccupation of "ordinary Americans." (Here I do suspect  some Republican puppetry.)  But, like it or not, suspicion of government is, as Rap Brown would say, as American as cherry pie.

-- Michael McGough

Bet you thought that the business of your publicly elected California Legislature was, well, public, since your public dollars pay these public servants to make public decisions in the public's Capitol building. Is there a theme in that sentence? There ought to be, especially with the editorial board today bemoaning the Assembly's decision to expunge the record of the individual votes of its members on whether or not to allow drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. In other words, you can't find out how your own Assembly member voted.

Assembly members sometimes complain, privately, that their constituents just don't understand how difficult it is to make laws and balance a budget. But making the very public process of lawmaking into a secret ritual doesn't help matters. On the contrary, it makes Californians feel like they are part of the stuff being fed into the meat grinder.

The board also weighs in on the latest maneuvers to stop a worthy bill that would extend hate-crime laws to cover crimes against gays and lesbians. Since conservative lawmakers in Washington D.C. weren't getting anywhere with the specious argument that halting hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation would somehow impinge on the perpetrators' freedom of speech and religion, they've come up with a new tactic: making certain hate crimes a capital offense, thus changing the congressional conversation from one about equal rights to one about the death penalty.

And though the people of Afghanistan have a million good reasons to mistrust the election process, the editorial board notes the importance of holding new presidential elections and giving voters hope that they can, at least eventually, have an impact on changing the government that has turned out a disappointment to many of them.

On the other side of the fold, Tim Rutten reprimands Police Chief William Bratton for the timing of his departure from Los Angeles and some of the dealings that took place beforehand:

...The manner and timing of Bratton's departure is almost breathtakingly irresponsible. It also raises troubling questions about his relationship with Michael Cherkasky, the court-appointed monitor who evaluated the LAPD's compliance with the federal consent decree, and about Cherkasky's role in convincing the federal judge to terminate oversight of the department.

And a professor in Mexico calls on President Obama to do more than praise Mexican President Felipe Calderon for his courage in the war on drugs; he must also remind Calderon that the human-rights abuses that his army is accused of in that war are unacceptable.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews / AP

The pseudonymous Los Angeles police officer apparently thinks very little of the Angelenos he's paid to "protect and serve." I say this having read Dunphy's dig at The National Review on the Obama administration's flubbed response to the Henry Louis Gates affair. An excerpt (emphasis mine):

Note the italics -- and consider that an armed officer of the law grotesquely warns any innocent civilian who cites his Constitutional protection against unreasonable searches that he runs the risk of being killed. I hope that a cop who pulls me over simply because another guy driving a blue VW Jetta committed a crime would exercise more restraint should I point out that the law is on my side.

In all seriousness, Dunphy is completely out of line here; any officer who considers citizens belligerent for asserting their Constitutional rights is a danger to the public and his department. Chief Bratton take note.

Hat tip to Brian Doherty at Reason magazine's Hit & Run.

Is the Mexican army the solution to battling the violent drug cartels, or part of the problem? The Times editorial board considers the question in light of allegations of rape and other abuses leveled against troops deployed by Mexican President Felipe Calderon in the front lines of the drug war:

Calderon was taking a gamble when he sent combat forces to fight the drug war, which involves police and intelligence work among civilians -- a role the Mexican military isn't fully trained to play. Now, U.S. and Mexican human rights activists say they have documented the murder, rape and torture by soldiers of scores of Mexicans believed to be innocent civilians, and the country's National Human Rights Commission received 559 complaints against members of the army in the first six months of this year. Although Mexican law calls for the military to prosecute its own criminal abuses, advocacy groups note that there has not been a successful military prosecution of a human rights case in the last decade.

The board also notes that U.S. government actions on behalf of religions might be constitutionally banned if performed in this country, but might be a necessary part of foreign relations in nations with state religion--such as repairing mosques damaged in the Iraq War. Still, the board cautions, the government must not see this as an excuse to fund missionary work or in other ways promote religion abroad.

On the other side of the fold, two trade specialists chide resident President Obama for what they call his "de facto protectionism." And the author of a newly published biography of baseball legend Leroy "Satchel" Paige remembers back to when the Negro League player finally won recognition from the Hall of Fame -- and how racism in baseball did not completely die on that day.:

Six months after they announced his election to the Hall of Fame, Paige was in Cooperstown for the induction. The public had weighed in with outrage at the spectacle of a segregated museum, forcing baseball's rulers to agree to hang his plaque alongside the rest. He quieted his competing instincts by siding, as he always had, with moderation over militancy. "Thank you, commissioner, and my fans and baseball players from all around as far as Honolulu, Mexico, and I don't know where the rest of 'em come from. I know they're my friends, I know that," Paige said as he looked out at the mostly white audience.

His remarks were touching and funny. He talked about barnstorming across the country in cars so tightly packed that his knees were "sticking up in front of me. For five years, I didn't know where I was going. I couldn't see."

Photo of Leroy "Satchel" Paige from MLB Photos via Getty Images.