Am I the only viewer of Rick Warren presidential forum to cringe when Barack Obama and John McCain offered their bona fides as believing Christians? Granted, the forum was at a church and Warren, who asked them about their faith, is an evangelist. Granted, also, that neither candidate discussed doctrine in detail. Still, consider these professions of faith: Obama avowed that "Jesus Christ died for my sins and that I am redeemed through him." McCain said that being a Christian meant that "I'm saved and forgiven."

These are arguably boilerplate statements of Christian belief, and both candidates quickly segued into the political applications of their faith. Still, given the audience, the professions of faith bordered on pandering. Of course, I still think John F. Kennedy was right when he told Protestant ministers in 1960 that "I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

That statement sounds quaint now. McCain encountered little flak when he he expressed his belief that the president should be a Christian. Reflecting the conventional wisdom  that Democrats must engage "people of faith," Obama has recanted his previous view that "we live in a pluralistic society, and ... I can't impose my religious views on another." I think Obama was right the first time, if by "religious views" one means "Jesus died for my sins" as opposed to a nonsectarian formulation like "all men are created equal [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Also weighing in my reaction is the way religion has been politicized in this presidential campaign. From Mike Huckabee's video Christmas card to McCain's jettisoning of John Hagee to Obama's agonizing over whether to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the "naked public square" has been clothed with some pretty garish vestments.

Los Angeles Times photo by Genaro Molina.

Late hit, but my friend Maria Russo's fine recent piece on the attempted comebacks of Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller as worldwide interweb personalities gives me a rare chance to do something I've always wanted to do: post an item where all the commentary value is contained in the categories:

Evan R. Goldstein writes an excellent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of George P. Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose theory of "frames" became very popular among the Democrats back when they were still failing. Now the Democrats are ascendant, yet Lakoff is oddly out of the winners circle. The basic dramatic structure includes a eureka scene:

In working out his theory, Lakoff found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the right "frames." Consider the phrase "tax relief," an effective staple of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word "relief" elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every time the phrase "tax relief" is heard or read by people, the relevant neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.

The hero's moment of hubris:

"When I entered the room, these senators got up and hugged me," Lakoff says. "It was an awesome situation."

And the tragic fall:

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the "neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings.

Did Lakoff's stock dwindle because he refused to become a Donkey Frank Luntz? Was he too eager to be the Donkey Frank Luntz? How did he end up drawing the ire of the good (Dust-Up contributor Marc Cooper), the bad (Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel) and the hairy (Harvard cognitive psychology prof Steven Pinker)? And where does Noam Chomsky fit into all this? Goldstein gets people speaking for all these positions and more.

I'm not so sure Lakoff's way of thinking is as dead as it appears. What made him a Democratic star was that in the early part of this decade the party went in for a particular brand of self-criticism, which involved convincing themselves that the real problem was in the packaging, not the product. That seems to me still operative: Barack Obama has channeled Thomas Frank's duped-yokel thesis effectively enough that it's clear he or somebody on his staff has read "What's the Matter With Kansas?" with care.

I think there are still plenty of Dems out there persuaded that if not for Karl Rove and his captains of consciousness (or more precisely, if only we had some new captains of consciousness), the American People would realize that taxes are a public good and private enterprise a necessary evil. Fortunately for those folks, in 2008 they may have gotten a pooch that can't be screwed.

* Update: Penultimate paragraph has been rewritten because reading it over even I couldn't understand what I was saying.

Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf "erodes trust of people," vows to fight impeachment proceeding by the ruling legislative coalition led by the Pakistan People's Party.

Last time the ed board weighed in on Musharraf was back in April, during the revolt of the lawyers.

Four questions from asifsaeedmemon.net.

Early reports say that government officials are hands-off, leaving it to Australian airline Qantas to investigate this "explosive decompression" that poked a gaping hole in its fuselage and forced an emergency landing in Manila. Guess it's understandable if the Manila officials dont want to get involved. But wouldn't aviation authorities in England, where the plane took off, and Australia be flying investigators to the site, with orders for Qantas to keep hands off?

If this was crime-related, should amateurs be messing with the scene? If it was a maintenance problem or airplane malfunction, should the people with a vested interest be messing with the scene?

Genocidal tyrant Rubert Murdoch made a smart move by putting Thomas Frank, labor's post-ironic champion, on his roster of columnists — though I don't know what Frank's column title means. (Is the tilting yard where knights joust and ladies swoon to see them? Or does "tilting yard" have some industrial-age, manual-labor, fighting-the-rentiers meaning I don't know about?)

The latest column from the beloved Baffler co-founder summons a figure from a misty, long-ago time: Dickey Flatt, the Mexia, Texas printer who — through the "Dickey Flatt test" — once served as Anaxagoras to Sen. Phil Gramm's Socrates:

Although it seems hard to believe now, it once pleased the press to call Mr. Gramm a "populist." Long before he scolded the common man as a whiner, Mr. Gramm was widely thought to have the common touch himself. He was the sort of politician who could "connect with working people," he said in 1995, and he used to wax righteous about "the people who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon." Mr. Gramm even came up with his own salt-of-the-earth everyman to champion: one Dickey Flatt, a printer in Texas, whose tax burden had to be weighed against the cost of any federal program before it won Sen. Gramm's judicious nod.

To judge by Mr. Gramm's legislative deeds, however, what the Dickey Flatts of this nation wanted most of all—what they longed for right down to the ends of their weary, ink-stained fingers—was the enactment of big money's legislative agenda.

Mr. Gramm invoked the long-suffering family farmer to demand the repeal of the estate tax. He fought New Deal banking rules not in order to clear the way for lucrative corporate mergers, but just to "make things simpler for anyone who has a checking account, car insurance or a share of stock." Subprime lending itself he defended as "one of the blessings" of prosperity, which blessings he illustrated with the story of his own hardworking mother, who had to accept a higher rate for her mortgage but who still paid it off on time.

Since the age-old longing of dirt farmers everywhere was deregulated financial markets, Mr. Gramm gave the people what they wanted. His Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 allowed investment banks to merge with commercial banks and insurance companies. And he helped craft the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed energy trading to go unregulated, making possible certain of Enron's amazing escapades the following year. It also sanctioned an unregulated market in credit default swaps, the financial derivatives that may be the next act in the ongoing credit-market tragedy.

Whole article here (and that "certain of" in the phrase "making possible certain of Enron's amazing escapades" at least reassures me that the WSJ's copy desk is still paying attention).

As noted yesterday, I am not persuaded that trying to roll back the free market is as popular or populist a position as Frank believes. But it's not what I think or Tom Frank thinks that matters. It's what Dickey Flatt thinks. I called up Flatt Stationers Inc. to find out, and I found the 66-year-old printer to be not only the essence of Lone Star cordiality but a staunch supporter of his former senator.

"It couldn't be any more far from the truth," Flatt said of Frank's column. "He got it all wrong. When a reporter just goes by what's out there and doesn't do much research, that's what happens."

Back in the halcyon days of the 20th century, L.A. Times contributor A. S. Hamrah, along with the great illustrator R. Sikoryak, concocted a Hamrahesque gag so recondite it worked: an exploration of the striking similarities between the spare, absurd stage dramas of postmodern pioneer Samuel Beckett and the spare, absurd "Nancy" comic strips of Ernie Bushmiller. Appearing in Issue # 15 of the late, lamented Hermenaut, and scandalously absent from the web ever since (which is the real point of this post), "The Beckett/Bushmiller Letters" purported to be the newly discovered correspondence between the two creators. 

If it was unintentional hoax, it is still proving to be an effective one after nearly a decade. Editor and Publisher reports with a straight face that R.C. Harvey's Rants & Raves newsletter (also apparently with a straight face) has begun a new investigation into this intriguing, and heretofore totally unknown, literary friendship. Once again, though, the story has proven too good to be true. Tom Spurgeon suspects this thing's as fishy as a makeshift rod and reel Sluggo would leave dangling while he catches a nap. Dan Nadel concludes that it's as phony as a three-dollar bill from Rollo's chauffeur. I can also attest that the Beckett/Bushmiller correspondence is entirely a product of the imaginations of bored Gen-Xers, back when they still had those.

The rumor about how Sluggo died from eating Pop Rocks and drinking Pepsi, however, is 100% true.

Update: E&P has updated its article, calling the article a "hoax," which it's actually not, but it's worth it for this observation:

"Nancy" has been perceived as a simple children's strip by some and sort of existential by others.

During my drive in this morning, KUSC personality Dennis Bartel (who is not, I'm afraid, one of my aliases), announced an informal poll result that left me not astounded but disappointed.

The question: Should the station continue using United Kingdom titles such as Sir Edward Elgar, Sir William Walton, Sir Loin of Beef, etc. when announcing musical luminaries?

According to Bartel, either two-thirds or three-quarters of his listeners opted to retain these titles on the air. he didn't provide exact numbers, but it was a landslide in favor of toadying to foreign potentates.

He did mention that folks in the anti-title minority were quite energetic, many of them referring to Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution (though as Bartel noted, correctly in my view, this text only enjoins the U.S. from bestowing titles, not private citizens from accepting or honoring them.) He also invited all and sundry to continue emailing their votes and thoughts to him at dbartel@kusc.org.

Please send him an email. In my America only dominatrixes deserve to be referred to by fancy royal titles, so I'm hoping to flip those poll results around. But it wouldn't be very freedom-loving of me to tell you how to vote. Pro or anti, send your ideas to dbartel@kusc.org.

The Christian Science Monitor says Congress is squirming in its seat, and for good reason:

A recent Gallup Poll confirms what many lawmakers say they're hearing from their constituents: that confidence in Congress has never been lower. Only 12 percent of Americans say they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress as an institution – the lowest level ever for any US institution since Gallup began asking the question 35 years ago. Congressional job approval, a slightly different question, has dropped to 18 percent.

And as the Wall Street Journal points out, "White House officials ... note that approval ratings for Congress are even lower than the president's — at an abysmal 13% in the latest Journal poll." Ouch.

But do they really care? Republican Reps. Tom Udall and Tim Murphy don't hide their concern in back-to-back NPR interviews — but, as the Monitor points out, voters seem pretty happy with their individual representatives.

Even better for Congressional Democrats, the Monitor points out, "Some Republicans worry that the public doesn't know enough about Congress to blame the right party":

"Not only does Congress have an approval rating below bubonic plague and head lice, I saw a recent poll that as many as 40 percent of people still believe that Congress is in Republican hands," says Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas.

Even some Republican groups, points out Robert Novak, have had enough:

The Lincoln Club of Orange County is telling the GOP leaders of both the House and Senate that it is too late to repent. They must go -- or else lose big money.

The message: "Come Nov. 5, should the current GOP leadership in either house survive to lead in a new Congress, the Lincoln Club of Orange County will review the financial backing of all congressional Republicans, and we urge others to do likewise. A GOP caucus that would re-elect such leaders is not one we would likely continue to support. Because, simply put, we refuse to support a permanent minority."

That may be tough love, but Dems are all too happy to blame their record on a stubborn Republican minority. Daniel W. Reilly of Politico reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn't letting the deadlock get him down, and Barack Obama's making sure Congressional Democrats are seen as part of the solution rather than the problem.

While we're at it:

*Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images

The non-profit news startup ProPublica (in whose service we wish former colleagues well) updates its joint "60 Minutes" report on al-Hurra ("The Free One"), the Arabic television network funded by about half a billion taxpayer dollars.

Before getting to the details of ProPublica's case against the network, I want to note that my colleagues and I at another gem of the non-profit news business long ago made the case against al-Hurra as well as other Arabic journalism efforts by the U.S. government. Briefly, al-Hurra and its U.S.-citizen-funded ilk stood (and stand) accused of misreading the local market, failing to win audiences, being stapled to an obsolete Cold War model of propaganda, not pencilling out in even the most modest financials, delivering a product that people already get in better and more accessible forms and committing the mortal journalistic sin of being boring. (A spokesperson for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees several of these entities, replied with vigor. And more recently, when Karen Hughes departed her public diplomacy post, the L.A. Times editorial board, whose humor is more sanguine and less bilious, tried to find a silver lining in the story.)

To this list ProPublica's Dafna Linzer adds another charge: propaganda against U.S. national interests. I'm going to disagree, however, and say that this is the one area where al-Hurra is actually performing up to expectations.

America's most recently re-appreciated Founding Father got it almost-right 232 years ago. Put this one in your firecracker and blow it up:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.

— John Adams, July 3, 1776

Read all about it.

Over at the WashPost, Gene Weingarten is still polishing that Pulitzer they gave him for his widely discussed Joshua Bell busking story from last year, but he's got an embarrassing revelation: Somebody at a long-dead Chicago paper did almost exactly the same story in 1930.

To his credit, Weingarten breaks the story himself, but some commenters are saying, "fiddlesticks!" One demands he give back the prize, and commenter lhooq46 has a critique I can really agree with:

What was more unoriginal than the article was the selection of music that Joshua Bell played. I'm sorry, but I would not have stopped to listen for "Thais" or "Ave Maria" no matter how well they were performed - I've heard these pieces hundreds of times & I'm beyond sick and tired of them!!!

But for my money, the best analysis of the original busking stunt came in this vehement and contemptuous article by Richard Taruskin:

All concerned knew perfectly well that people at rush hour are preoccupied with other things than arts and leisure, and would not break their stride. But the fulfillment of the self- fulfilling prophecy gave Weingarten the pretext he sought, in an article titled "Pearls Before Breakfast," to cluck and tut, to quote Kant and Tocqueville, and to carry on as if now we knew what really happened at Abu Ghraib.

Bloggers took up the refrain. Notice, wrote one, that "all the children wanted to stop and listen. They knew. But their parents kept them moving on. Sadly it reminds me of an occasion when children wanted to stop and listen to Christ but his disciples didn't let them." Saddest for me was that the weblist of the American Musicological Society, my professional organization, added its meed of clucking and cackling. Scholars are supposed to be skeptical of spin and pose, but here we were piling on. My hat goes off to one Ben H., a netizen who saw through it all. "Perhaps the Post could do a whole series of articles about philistines ignoring Joshua Bell's sublime music-making in different locations," he suggested:

1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!)

2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!)

3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!)

4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!)

5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)

Oh, my heaven! (Oh, my Hubbard?) Is Will Smith a secret Scientologist? Is that why he appeared in that dreadful sequel to "Men in Black"? If he is (and he says he's not), why is he being so coy about it? Will the private school that he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith are funding inculcate scientological principles on the impressionable minds of the young students who attend?

And, breathlessly, above all: Why are they being given such a hard time about it?

It's a private school, and Smith & Smith are entitled to fund it according to their educational vision, without having to explain, deny or be coy about their personal beliefs. At least, unlike a celebrity or two we could name, they're not trying to shove beliefs of any sort down our throats. Maybe, as one educator in the know says, the school will cram a lot of Scientology jargon into kids' heads, maybe it actually will make learning more fun by having children learn through experience instead of deadly long lectures, and maybe it will do both.

This is why we have private schools, so that people of any particular belief can frame education according to their own philosophies. Sometimes this means no standardized testing, and sometimes it means Advanced Placement kindergarten.

There is something to be taken from this whole celebrity stew, though. The Smiths' money is the Smiths' call. But what if the taxpayers were called on to pay for kids' education at this school? If the supporters of school vouchers had their way — and they never give up on trying to have their way — this is the kind of question we'd have to confront.

This is why school vouchers are not, as proponents like to frame it, just a way to save students from miserable inner-city schools. Once the public's money is involved, the public should have the right to ask these questions and approve or disapprove of whether a school like the Smiths' would be entitled to a share of that money.

Vouchers aren't just problematic for public schools, or for public expenditure. They're a problem for private schools, too. Once the public is paying, it has the right to demand — and it should demand — good performance from those schools. But how do we measure performance? These days, through standardized tests. So what about schools whose very philosophy runs counter to those tests? The private schools wouldn't just put financial pressure on public schools; the public would be placing subtle financial pressure on private schools to change their ways to make them acceptable for public funding. There goes the beautiful diversity of private schooling.

Is the Smiths' school an example of that beautiful diversity? That's up to the beholder. The important point is that private schooling works best for both private and public schools when it stays private.

Will the honeymoon never end? Gay marriage keeps people talking.

Responding to David Benkof's* Blowback "Marriage ban is not a 'wedge issue'," one reader wonders who needs protection:

It's hard to know where to start responding to Benkof's hate screed, disguised as it is in the cloak of reasonable argument.  First, he announces that efforts to ban gay marriage are not a "wedge issue," offering as proof nothing more than that some marriage-equality advocates have said they are.  Then he decides that anyone who has ever cheated on a wife or husband is unqualified to say what marriage is.  The fact that someone does not have a perfect, or even a good, marriage does not invalidate his or her opinion on the subject.

Then Benkof starts in on how marriage-equality supporters are trying to "redefine" marriage.  In actuality, proponents of gay marriage are simply pointing out the inherent inequity of denying basic rights because of sexual orientation.  It is unconstitutional to create two separate classes of law-abiding citizens and grant to one class rights that are denied to the other.

Benkof also hits the usual pandering notes of "traditional" marriage and "marriage protection," never explaining why marriage needs protection from people who want to get married, and pleads for rationality and compromise while advocating writing discrimination into state laws.

Susan Hathaway

Our news coverage draws this response from frequent contributor Jasmyne Cannick:

Re: "For one same-sex couple, marriage was always the goal" (June 16, 2008)

I'd like to challenge the L.A. Times to for once, feature a gay or lesbian couple in a story that isn't white or one half white.  You wouldn't know it from the Times' coverage of gay marriage in California, but there are Black, Latino, and Asian gays too.  And no, we're not all rushing down the aisle to get married either.  By the way---the story you ran on the two Black lesbians abusing their five year-old doesn't count. 

Just a thought.

Jasmyne Cannick
West Adams, Los Angeles

And another reader says heterosexuals are peeved about definitions, not threats to marriage:

Every article and op-ed I read about gay marriage has the same talking points.  I don’t know why proponents of gay marriage feel that we married heterosexuals feel threatened.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Traditionally, men and women marry.  Unions of gay persons should be called something else because it is something else.  Liberal politicians just want your vote…gay, illegal alien, convicted felon, stray cats...

Mike Mancuso

* This spelling of the name Benkof was corrected after this post was published. Thanks to David Benkof for pointing out my error.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here's the NEA's new report "Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005." While the percentage of self-identified artists, as a portion of the toal workforce, remained constant over the 15-year period, the report suggests a surprisingly robust creative community. Sez NEA Chairman Dana Gioia:

There are now almost two million Americans who describe their primary occupation as artist. Representing 1.4 percent of the U.S. labor force, artists constitute one of the largest classes of workers in the nation—only slightly smaller than the total number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the U.S. military (2.2 million). Artists represent a larger group than the legal profession (lawyers, judges, and paralegals), medical doctors (physicians, surgeons, and dentists), or agricultural workers (farmers, ranchers, foresters, and fishers).

With plenty of state-by-state and profession-by-profession breakdowns, it's an interesting study. Read the full report.

Larry Lessig gives a spirited defense of Chief Judge Alex Kozinksi and a big raspberry to the media coverage of his porn saga:

What I mean by "the Kozinski mess" is the total inability of the media -- including we, the media, bloggers -- to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.

Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let's translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski's have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family -- pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family's stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won't like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: "Hey look," he says, "look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house."

The editorial board defended the judge today, and my own view is that if Kozinski deserves condemnation, it's for being one of those people who forwards you "funny emails," a practice that was universally deplored when Bill Clinton was still in office. But that's always been the weird thing about "funny email" forwarders: Sometimes they're people who in person are perfectly hip and intelligent. They just turn into pushy, forced-laughter-demanding Mr. Hydes when they stumble down the dark and dangerous corridors of the interwebs without proper supervision. I've seen this phenomenon many times over the years.

If you haven't seen Patterico's collection of Kozinskiana, here it is. (Need I note that it's NSFW?) I think it's clear that Kozinski's original defense that he found these "funny" is obviously true, even if the material is obviously unfunny. There's certainly nothing in here that seems designed to stimulate the cloacae, which I think is still one of the critical distinctions in deciding what constitutes obscenity.

The teachers' walkout is going on all over town. I saw walkers at three schools on my way in, including my own kid's school.

These pictures barely suggest so, but there are a suspicious number of kids on the picket line. I counted at least a dozen kids walking the line at Rosewood Ave. Elementary, but did not have my camera. (Which is mine, btw, not the L.A. Time', so you can't blame Sam Zell for the horrible picture quality.) 

As this was a one-hour walkout and it's now 10:20, it may be winding down. Here's how the ed board thought of the strike yesterday:

The district's argument doesn't wash. With some planning, the schools should be able to keep students safe for one hour. Even so, while respecting the teachers' right to stage a high-profile protest, we wish they wouldn't do it in this particular way. The morning walkout likely will result in a lost school day for many students while making little difference to the lawmakers who hold the schools' fates in the balance.

As it is with Catholics and their local priest, as it is with Americans and their local politician, so I have little sympathy with teachers as a group but am fond of my own kid's in loco, who is far from perfect but kept good order during a chaotic morning at the school and even went ahead with a planned field trip. To where I have no idea, because that's the kind of involved dad I am.

So as I'm getting ready to vote this morning, I look through my pile of literature from the state and county to make sure the address of my polling place is the same as usual. The only current piece of mail I find is an absentee voter pack, which does not contain the address and which I then throw away. I head down to the usual polling place and find it's open for business.

But when they check me out on the rolls, I discover I'm marked down as the recipient of an absentee ballot, and thus ineligible for a real ballot. It turns out that the absentee ballot I threw in a dumpster an hour before was the only ballot I was allowed, and I was supposed to drop that off at the polling place. The kind folks at the polling place provided me with a provisional ballot and I was required to fill out a bunch of personal information, including the last four digits of my social. (Is there any activity left in America that does not require you to bear the mark of the beast?)

The trick is that I never requested a vote-by-mail ballot, and would never vote by mail under any circumstances. I vote out of a sentimental attachment to dying ways of life, for the tiny bit of satisfaction I get from taking the trip to the polling place, seeing all the earnest oldsters behind the folding table and going through the rituals of our democratic charade. What could be more pointless than voting absentee, where you miss out on the whole Four-Freedoms vibe of the activity? Today I even brought my camera to get some nice election-day pics, but since I remained the only voter in the Hollywood Neighborhood City Hall throughout my ballot brouhaha, that didn't amount to much. Still, here are some shots of folks hanging out in and around Hollywood.

My questions: 1) Why would I have received an absentee ballot when I didn't request one? The poll workers, who were pretty clearly hoping I would just leave, said it was probably a mixup. On the page that had my name, I and one other person had been marked down as having received a vote-by-mail ballot, so it doesn't seem to be that common to order them. (I wouldn't even know how to order one, let alone how to get off the vote-by-mail list that I seem to be on now.)

2) What are the odds that my provisional ballot will get counted? This is one of the lowest-impact elections I can recall, and as indicated above I'm not a big believer in elections, government or democracy, so I won't get exercised either way, but in her list of reasons for giving provisional ballots, Secretary of State Debra Bowen says I'm entitled to have my vote counted:

• Records indicate that the voter requested an absentee ballot and the voter fails to turn in the absentee ballot at the polls on Election Day. The Elections Official’s Office will check the records, and if the voter did not vote an absentee ballot, the voter’s provisional ballot will be counted.

Of course, that's if some sneaky dumpster-diver didn't grab my absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it sometime today! Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to commit vote fraud, but you never know. Did I mention that more people seem to be on bikes these days?

I love it when you can actually see in your daily life the evidence of one of these big news stories we're always writing about (oil price spike hits Angelenos hardest!). Maybe it's just my imagination, but traffic has seemed a lot lighter in recent weeks, and my slow route in this morning took me past hundreds of alt.transporation users:

See? It's the market, not smart growth or urban planning or any other government activity, that is actually getting people out of their cars. Which is another reason I have to keep harping about this ballot business. Election day is one of the few times that I actually get out and around in the morning, before reporting to the impenetrable fortress of the L.A. Times building. If I haven't got a polling place to go to, I'll be cutting myself off from the wellspring of my success, from the common man.

And speaking of the common man, that first picture above is several weeks old: The Bill Johnson poster became progressively more covered with graffiti and finally vanished entirely from its place at the corner of Beverly and Commonwealth. I wish I could say the graffiti indicated knowledge of our extensive Johnson coverage, but it was all just regular tagging.

Happy election day.

More child-proofing in the red-hot center of American culture: You can get arrested for serving wine at an art gallery opening. Police in East Hampton, N.Y. cuffed and booked 67-year-old gallery owner Ruth Kalb (alias "Ruth Vered") on charges of serving alcohol without a license over the Memorial Day vacation. Partygoers, left to confront, stone-cold sober, an exhibition of photography by movie stars, were shocked.

Courtesy of ArtsJournal.

At the Center for Immigration Studies, David North says foreign students who are too poor to have cars can't be contributing to the U.S. economy:

For several decades in the last century many foreign leaders, particularly from Europe’s former colonies, had been educated in America and were friendly to the United States. That was and is a purely good thing.

Further, at the university level, it is helpful to U.S. students to have non-U.S. students in their classes — particularly in the fields of the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. It makes for a more cosmopolitan experience for the Americans involved. Unfortunately, most foreign students, particularly at the graduate level, are studying science, mathematics, and engineering, fields where the students’ overseas backgrounds are of lesser value.

But foreign students as a plus for the American economy, like soy beans grown in Iowa and exported to China? That’s an argument that does not stand up under examination.

Straw man argument? Not exactly: He's responding to the annual "Open Doors" report from the Institute of International Education, which states: "International students contribute approximately $14.5 billion dollars to the U.S. economy, through their expenditure on tuition and living expenses."

North says that figure's wrong: See what you think of his proof. Still, I'm not sure how important the balance-of-payments argument is among the universities that want to attract more foreign students. The main attraction is that they pay full tuition, isn't it?

In a cover story for the Jewish Journal, Brad A. Greenberg gives a long, fascinating profile of Kevin MacDonald, the Cal State Long Beach professor whose, um, particular interest in The Jews has created a dilemma for the college. The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll just note that praise is due to: 1) Cal State Long Beach, which is doing a creditable job of balancing MacDonald's academic rights (if you believe such rights exist, as I don't) against the need to protect itself against both anti-Semitism and lawsuits; 2. Greenberg, who seems to maintain a perfectly dry tone in the face of some pretty hair-raising stuff (and I only say seems because I'd never heard of MacDonald before reading this piece and have nothing against which to measure it); and in a strange way, 3) MacDonald himself, who blends creepiness, crackpottery and a surprising forthrightness into a weird form of amiability that I can sort of respect. I hate to use such a hoary cliché, but he's a quintessentially American type of oddball, the kind you don't want to listen to because he occasionally makes you say "Hm, he's got a point." In particular, check out his case for why David Irving's biography of Goebbels should be put back on the shelves; if the book is as he characterizes it, then... Hm, he's got a point. (Experts alert: If it's not as he describes it, the comments are open!)

As I said, I'd never heard of MacDonald before this piece, but in the way of such things, once you're aware of him, he starts showing up everywhere. Interestingly, his real pillars of support are not just among white supremacists. (MacDonald, don'tcha know, isn't against other ethnicities; he's just supportive of his own European roots.) Instead, he attracts some pretty broad interest for his particular case on immigration:

MacDonald's core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.

"European people in this country will be a minority in a few years," MacDonald said. "I don't think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs."

Which is weird, because I thought building secure border fences was one of those areas where The Jews and the proud European-Americans were in perfect harmony. This stuff gets so confusing so fast you can drive yourself crazy. And then you get tenure, I think.

Whatever your race, creed, color or religion, enjoy this beautiful weekend.

The California State Supreme Court just overturned the ban on gay marriages.

I'm really happy for all my gay friends, but personal bottom line? This is going to cost me a fortune in wedding presents.

People are talking about the anti-religion comments and sour attitude toward the Chosen People expressed in Albert Einstein's letter to his pal Goodchild, but I think the most interesting phrase is in in a throwaway clause:

And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power.

Einstein produced plenty of random thoughts on the passing scene, most of which strike me more for their banality than anything else. Whether he did or did not believe in Goddess doesn't seem to me probative of much — and like Manley Pointer, I been believing in nothing ever since I was born. In fact, I'm pretty sure appealing to authority to support your disbelief defeats the whole purpose of being a rationalist.

But there's one aspect of Einstein's non-scientific punditry that has always been catnip to me: his abiding, total and frequently repeated hatred of patriotism and the use of force. You can always depend on Albert E. for good anti-bullyism, and his Actonian formulation here is the clearest expression of that philosophy I've seen. What sets it off from sermon-on-the-mount piety is that it doesn't pretend to any great moral position; force and power are bad not because they're wicked but because they're stupid and unhealthy.

Since I'm the resident thought-tormented Ron Paul fan on staff, I've taken a special interest in the Paul supporters who are objecting to the attention we've paid to the white-supremacist past of Paul-connected judicial candidate Bill Johnson.

Thanks, everybody, for commenting. Some clarifications are in order:

Commenter "Tracey," declares that Johnson is not the author of the so-called Pace Amendment. This is incorrect. Johnson confirmed in a phone call with our own Robert Greene that he is indeed the author of the Pace amendment and of the "James O. Pace" book Amendment to the Constitution.

Commenter "blakmira" calls us "lower than scum" for the "smear" on Paul in our editorial about the Johnson campaign, which noted that Johnson had affiliated himself with the Paul-for-president campaign; apparently our mentioning that was clear evidence of counter-rEVOLutionary tendencies. In any event, Paul himself appears to be taking the matter seriously enough that he has renounced his end of the affiliation. Here is an email we just received from Paul's congressional chief of staff Tom Lizardo:

Over the past several weeks, I have also been involved in assisting Dr Paul with the consideration of candidates who are seeking his endorsement for their campaigns.  We have gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements.  During that period, we have also received and reviewed requests from dozens of candidates.

Although Bill Johnson's name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process.  In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.

Several commenters claim that they know Bill Johnson and he couldn't possibly be a racist. We make no judgments on what Johnson believes in his heart, only on what he has publicly advocated. But Paul, whose attentiveness to such matters has not always been impressive, deserves credit for taking quick action in this case. The claim by another commenter that Johnson is part Japanese is also incorrect, though Johnson does speak fluent Japanese as a by-product of his LDS mission in the land of the Rising Sun. We can confirm that "Turning Japanese" by the Vapours remains one of the finest works of rock orientalism ever recorded.

Finally, a commenter at dailypaul.com claims that our staffer is the same Robert Greene who writes self-help books on "How to crush your competitor," "How to secure the corner office," "How to take over your supervisor's position" and "The 48 Laws of Power." I can confirm that Greene is not that person and that if he ever wrote a self-help book it would be about how you can become a better person by scrupulously reading the fine print of voter information packets in obscure municipal elections. Nor is he the Robert Greene who denounced Shakespeare in his "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentaunce." Moreover, Robert Greene confirms that he is a Stratfordian in good standing, though if pressed he would put Pericles, Prince of Tyre in the "disputed authorship" category.

Hope that clears things up.

"Everyone who has tried posting books online has done it again. That's a pretty good indicator it works. An artist's enemy is obscurity, not piracy."

That's the no-introduction-needed Cory Doctorow talking about the brave new freeware-everywhere world with his fellow Canucks at MacLeans.

It's easy enough (and probably premature) to mock the death throes of intellectual property behemoths. Doctorow goes one better by actually making a living in the barter economy, though the details are a bit vague: He says he lives off the advertising at BoingBoing and is getting bigger advances on his novels. All I know of life on earth tells me every time a writer gets a generous book advance a publisher gets a little bit poorer, and it's not clear to me how long such a system can last. But that would be in keeping with Doctorow's contempt for stability as a goal:

The question to ask about any intellectual property rights regime, he says, is "does it encourage or discourage involvement, art-making, information-sharing?" In his opinion, the current system only serves corporate dinosaurs, "big dying institutions." They use copyright to try to regulate technology, to criminalize (or at least turn a profit on) all the peer-to-peer file sharing that is the "Internet's greatest achievement: lowering the cost of mass collaboration, the barriers to innovation."

It adds up to an eternal and futile attempt to throttle the mechanisms of change. Long before sheet-music publishers fought record makers (who later battled radio stations, who complained of TV and so on), monks who produced manuscripts were damning the printing press as the devil's engine. What's particularly galling for Doctorow is that "yesterday's pirate is today's admiral — Sony, the VCR pirate, denounced by moviemakers a generation ago, has come full circle to sue Napster's successors." Of course, institutions — especially wealthy ones — want to live on, even past their times, Doctorow acknowledges. "I used to be a bartender, and there was always somebody who didn't want the night to end. But there comes a time when you have to put the chairs up on the table."

As a fulltime employee of a big, dying institution and as the guy who never wants the bar to close, I can confirm that Doctorow is exactly right. Read the whole story.

...I fell in love with a Mexican girl right before she got busted coming to work in a citrus farm.

From the Star of the Southwest comes an interesting comment on immigration reform from the area's chief Border Patrol agent. Victor M. Manjarrez Jr. tells the Associated Press that the Patrol is being forced to divert attention from catching criminals and potential terrorists to the pursuit of people who are jumping the border in search of work:

"Most of these people are economic migrants but we have to deal with them between the ports of entry because we have not, in terms of a legislative fix, determined what we do with these people," Manjarrez said. "I think it's pretty obvious that the country has a need for economic migrants. To what degree, I don't know. That's for the country to decide and for the politicians to decide."

Full story here.  Manjarrez estimates that of the 75,000 border crossers arrested in the 268-mile El Paso sector in 2007, at least 87% were coming for work. Without this "clutter," he says, agents would be better able to focus on securing the border against actual threats.

This was essentially my point a few years back, when I made the case for visaless exchange among the NAFTA countries. That's a bit more ambitious than the kind of "comprehensive reform" that usually amounts to issuing more guest worker visas. But I don't see the downside in ensuring that all non-criminal traffic into the United States (and out of it: read the story for details about how historically visaless entry has actually encouraged out-migration) is routed through legitimate border crossings where the feds can know who's who.

If you do know of a downside, the comments are wide open.

The Center for Immigration Studies' Norman Matloff comes up with a new measure that, he says, indicates H-1B visa recipients are not in fact the best and the brightest that proponents sometimes suggest they are.

I don't know how persuasive you'll find Matloff's "talent measure," or TM value. I think it fails to prove Matloff's main conclusions: that H-1B holders overall are not noticeably more skilled than native workers and that within the universe of H-1B holders, Western Europeans are more skilled than Asians. But the TM value has one attraction: It uses a marketplace value for making its assessment.

The value is calculated by comparing the ratio of the worker's salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. So if you've got a TM value of 1.0 you're making essentially the average salary for the job you're doing. Since employers can't (officially at least) pay visa holders less than the stated prevailing wage, nobody should show a TM value of less than 1.0. On the other hand, if you're a gifted worker you should have a higher TM value because you can command a higher salary.

The shocking conclusion? One multiplied by one equals one:

• The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.
• The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.
• Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.
• Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that “Johnnie can’t do math” in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc" can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

The breakouts by company and nation of origin are interesting, but I'm not sure they prove anything other than that Microsoft appears to be a generous employer and that immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command higher salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus a little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German brings language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and technological strength, would be worth paying a premium for. 

Or maybe language skills have nothing to do with it, and there are some other variables at work. (For example, suppose most or all of the people in the U.S. doing a particular job are Indian H-1B holders: Then a TM value of 1.0 could just mean that they're all above average, Lake Woebegone-style.) In any event, I don't see how these numbers refute the claims of the hypothetical industrialist or lily-livered immigration supporter who thinks the best person to judge what skills he or she needs is the person doing the hiring.

Prove that I just don't get it or am being intentionally obtuse by reading the whole article right here.

Update: Matloff responds. Good stuff in the comments too...

Lest we think the Special Order 40 controversy is just an L.A. thang, the Arizona state legislature has voted overwhelmingly to prohibit local police departments from instituting similar rules. According to AP:

The bill also would prohibit county and city governments from having policies that prevent or restrict them from receiving or exchanging information about people's immigration status in certain instances. Those cases include determining the eligibility of people for public benefits that are off-limits to illegal immigrants and confirming the identity of arrested people.

The bill also encourages local cops to get federal training in immigration enforcement. Here's the full text.

In Maricopa County, America's Toughest Blowhard Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, isn't waiting for the governor's signature to begin his own campaign of immigration raids.

Richard Rothstein, last seen debating the achievement gap in a Dust-Up with Russlyn Ali, takes to the lackluster Cato Unbound with an interesting take on the 25th anniversary of the report A Nation At Risk, which examined the nation's puported crisis in education. According to Rothstein, the doomsaying of 1983, like most of the doomsaying from that period, turned out to be wrong. But unlike your harmless, garden-variety doomsaying, this one had some negative results:

Because of the report’s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements - the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more of it?

A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. Not thinking that President Reagan’s rule (’if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002.

I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.

Full article.

Keep it in mind next time you're presented with the secular version of Pascal's Wager. (That is, the "Hey, if it turns out we're wrong about the decline and fall of X, all we did was take enlightened action Y" line of argument, which usually precedes the "It's time to stop talking about X and just do something!" argument, and frequently ends up with "Hey, problem X seems to have solved itself, but now what do we do about all these Zs we've created?")

Maybe I'm more broken up than most about the death of Charlton Heston, but it seems to me one of Heston's most important achievements has been missing from the appreciations of his half-century-long career: At an age when most men are sliding into paunch and griping about their bad backs, in an era when barrel-chested Victor Mature types had not yet yielded the stage to more sinewy men, Heston brought the hardbody to America.

This is not to say Heston was the only actor of his time who bothered to stay in shape, but the references in our obit to his "lean-hipped" look and nude scene in Planet of the Apes raise an important question: How many 45-year-olds, then or now, would be comfortable showing that much skin on a giant movie screen? More important, how many would look that good? If you check out the other top box office performers of 1968, you'll find even the svelte Steve McQueen and John Cassavetes letting none of it all hang out, and the rest of the list is filled with lumpish leading men like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Say what you will about Heston's unpopular politics or (allegedly) wooden acting; but you could do your laundry on those abs.

Nor is this just a tour of my own homoerotic inner mind. I'd like to stand up for the trilogy of dystopian science fiction of which Planet of the Apes is merely the first part. The New York Times doesn't even mention Soylent Green or The Omega Man in its obit, and our own coverage is pretty dismissive of both. (Planet of the Apes is now canonical enough that highbrows belittle it at their own risk.) I'd argue that both those movies are touched by greatness and live on for, if nothing else, the insights they provide into the culture of their time.

The Omega Man — which opens with Heston tooling around an empty, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles (the city where the world was meant to end, damn it!) and, in a brilliant touch, watching, over and over again, the only movie still playing, Woodstock — is as full an examination of the relationship between the establishment and the counterculture as any film of its time. It's an olive branch from Heston to the hippies, with the hero repulsed, fascinated by and ultimately in love with the groovy kids he recognizes as the only future for mankind. Who else but Heston could have been at the same time hip enough and square enough to share a hot makeout scene with the late Rosalind Cash, and have that actually mean something? Who else could have rocked that ascot-and-Sgt.-Pepper-jacket look? That Anthony Zerbe's black-robed zombie inquisitor puts a face of intolerance and anti-rationality onto the rhetoric of progress ("Forget the old ways, brother, all the old hatreds") just shows that even when Heston put a hand out to the flower children, he did so recognizing that they shared a common enemy in unreason.

This post was updated at 11:48 am Thursday. See below:

From that great city to the north comes news that some art is so shocking even San Francisco hipsters will censor it. An exhibition by the French artist Adel Abdessemed at the spectacularly located S.F. Art Institute has been shut down following an outcry and threats from pro-animal activists. Kenneth Baker's review in the Chronicle describes the show and notes that complaints also were lodged by folks who in other circumstances might be the ones looking to épater le bourgeois:

The animal rights protesters were inflamed by Abdessemed's six very brief video loops, played on separate monitors, each showing an animal - a horse, a pig, a goat, an ox, a deer and a sheep - being killed, apparently without bloodshed, by a quick hammer blow to the head. Abdessemed shot the videos himself in rural Mexico, merely documenting passages in the town's customary food production.

But text accompanying the videos' presentation at SFAI left Abdessemed's role ambiguous.* A viewer had to wonder whether his hand wielded the hammer rather than the camera, whether he shot the video or merely commissioned it, and whether he commissioned the animals' execution.

The shock of the protest lies not only in its vehemence but also in the fact that it involves the rare spectacle of artists, including many SFAI faculty members, advocating censorship.

You could argue that censorship isn't the proper word here, since the objection raised by Eagle Rock's own Diana Thater and apparently others was to the killing of the animals, not necessarily to the art itself. But Thater herself gives that game away by denouncing the show as a "sick exhibit" that "represents the very worst impulses of the human imagination," fails to "raise people's consciousness"  and "will encourage them to accept animal abuse." Those are objections to expression of ideas, not to the acts themselves. (Whether the strict argument against killing the animals holds up is also open to question, since by general agreement these were all feed animals that were going to be done in whether there was a hoity-toity conceptual artist present or not.) *

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of teasing my long-ago piece "Artists for censorship." Sez me, artists are no more or less censorious than anybody else. Writers and musicians have always believed some ideas needed to be suppressed. The urge to censor is particularly strong when the objectionable ideas show up in a medium other than your own (surprise, surprise). And there may even be some value in the impulse to "take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them."

* According to an SFAI representative, the ambiguity Baker refers to is at most a red herring: the artist merely documented an existing procedure. "These pictures were taken by him in an abattoir and not staged," she says, "and he did not participate in slaughtering the animals." If true, this would eliminate the argument over the welfare of the animals (though you might be able to craft a case that the individual animal has a death-with-dignity right that would protect it from non-consensual documentation of the killing), and leave us only with the argument over expression. It may be helpful at this time to reiterate that the show was closed due to threats of violence against the institute, not due to the objections we've been discussing.

This post updated as of 12:10pm Thursday. See below:

I'm a fan of vestigial cultural survivals, but even I reacted to news of the shutdown of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio Orchestra with an incredulous "There are still radio orchestras?" To give some perspective, the legendary Arturo Toscanini-conducted NBC Radio Orchestra was disbanded way back in 1954, and there may be a reason that the Vancouver-based CBC outfit has long held the dubious distinction of being the sole extant radio orchestra in North America. *

Now the life of a working musician is tough, though arguably no tougher now than it's been for the past, say, 10,000 years. And I get the impression that a belief, realistic or not, that Canada's cultural attainment is high has always been a favorite bragging point for our friends to the north. So a little expression of regret is understandable. But take a look at the protests that followed the announcement of the orchestra's closing and you may ask what eon these people are living in. CBC has a little coverage, with video, and the Globe and Mail gives more detail. "No Kitsch! No Philistines! Don't Mess With Our Music!" reads one protester's sign. A music teacher brags of having canceled her class with the following message to her students: "I said this is the most important assignment you could possibly have; to rescue the great culture of your country."

California Democrats who aren't already some kind of super-duper delegate have until Wednesday at 5 p.m. to apply to become one of 241 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25-28. Despite claims from both the Clinton and Obama camps that their side has the whole thing wrapped up, it is looking increasingly likely that any old off-the-street Democrat who scores a spot at the convention just may have some real power.

The district-level delegates are distributed among California's 53 congressional districts, with 134 going to Hillary Clinton (because she won 42 congressional districts on Feb. 5) and 107 going to Barack Obama (11 congressional districts). Delegates are divided by gender, as well; check here for the numbers.

So with all those Democrats who are sure to apply, who decides who gets to go to Denver? Democrats do -- any registered California Democrat can vote on Sunday, April 13 in caucuses held in each district. Separate caucuses for Hillary people and Barack people, of course.

Keep up to date with elections big and small at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

According to Roman Catholic doctrine, a baptism is valid even if it is performed by a layperson and even if it takes place in private. My sainted mother remembered that when she administered a "kitchen baptism" (head under the spigot) to a grandson she wasn't sure would be dipped by his parents.

So why did Pope Benedict XVI have to baptize Magdi Allam, a journalist from a Muslim background, not just in public but at a televised Easter Vigil service at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome? Was the pope offensively flaunting a prized conversion and giving credence to Osama bin Laden's taunt that Benedict was playing a "large and lengthy role" in a "new Crusade" against Islam? Was this an another affont, intended or not, from a pope who raised Muslim hackles in 2006 when, during a lecture in Germany, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who accused the Prophet Muhammad of commanding that Islam be "spread by the sword"?

I don't think so. First, Allam was one of seven people received into the fold by Benedict, Second, the  baptism of new Christians is an Easter Vigil tradition. In 2005, the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, baptized five new Christians at the vigil, filling in for the ailing Pope John Paul II. Third, even if Allam was chosen because of his prominence, there is nothing new about Christians (or adherents of other faiths) trumpeting the admission of a high-profile convert. Certainly Buddhists take pride in the fact that Richard Gere is one of them. Fourth and most important, Allam's conspicuous conversion was a matter of his own choice, a choice the Roman Catholic Church would have been bound by a decree of the Second Vatican Council to respect even if he had decided to become a devout Muslim.

It wasn't always thus. You don't have to be Osama bin Laden to recognize that Christianity also has been "spread by the sword" or that in the past the Vatican operated on the assumption that "error has no rights." And Allam's voluntary conversion contrasts dramatically with the 19th century case of the kidnapping and Christianization of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna who was seized from his parents by papal police after the local Inquisition discovered that he had been baptized as an infant by a Christian servant girl. Pope Pius IX (whose humongous miter Benedict recently wore) rejected appeals that the boy be returned to his family. Edgardo later was ordained a Catholic priest. (The Catholic League on its website offers a tortured defense of Pio Nono's conduct in this case.)

Intolerance is an occupational hazard for believers of all kinds.   But the Catholic Church of which Allam is now a member eventually joined other Christian bodies in recognizing that belief cannot be compelled and that, in the words of Vatican II, "the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature." It's too much to hope that Osama bin Laden will accept this teaching, but other Muslims do. An increase in their numbers is the best insurance against the "clash of civilzations" between Christians and Muslims.

If you're looking for a little countertonality in the choir of angels praising Barack Obama's anti-disownment speech, Washington Post columnist and former G.W. Bush administration speechwriter Mike Gerson belts it out for you:

The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor...

This accusation [that the government invented HIV as a means of genocide against people of color] does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man...

And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama's speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama's grandmother, which Obama said made him "cringe" -- both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference....

What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

I don't like columns that ask rhetorical questions, then answer them, then invite me to congratulate myself on agreeing with the answer. I have at least one family member who believes the U.S. Government is up to all manner of criminal and murderous activity. And I object to the political prophylactic of denouncing and excommunicating non-violent zealots — in fact I find all attempts to police the borders of acceptable conversation to be self-serving, authoritarian and worst of all boring. So I'm the worst possible judge of this column.

But if there is some theonomist politician out there, considering whether to make a run: You have not yet lost my vote. The odds are you will lose it. (It's not just you; it happens to most guys!) But if you're offering me something good (or better, not offering me anything at all), I won't pull somebody else's lever just because you have some crazy ideas.

Can you shoot spitballs in home school? If so, Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer had better watch out, because home schoolers are fuming about their recent Blowback "Regulating home schoolers."  Commenters are all over the story — you can add your own two cents in the message board — and several readers were motivated to break out the old stone table and send an old-fashioned letter to the editor. Some samples:

Homeschooling Works Well Without State Oversight

As a homeschooling mom I am so encouraged by the many who choose to show their support for homeschooling and  those of us who choose to do so. However, I am surprised by how many of those who think that a proven method of teaching would be "improved" by state oversight.

If one does not wish to to consider the successful people both in history as well as those who are walking among us in workplaces and colleges that were homeschooled, perhaps you might want to consider your pocketbook. 

Regulating Homeschools would cost you big money in taxes that this state cannot afford right now. Do we really need a new section in the department of education to fund?

Wouldn't it make more sense to use all available money on the children currently in public schools?

In January, Education Week's comprehensive report card gave California a grade of "D+" when it comes to funding our schools, a "C-" on the teaching profession, and a "D" on K-12 achievement. Taken along with the California high school drop-out rate I find it odd that so many are calling for homeschoolers to be regulated now.

Do your research! Homeschooling works best without heavy regulation!

Angie Weaver
Garberville

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Editors,

What a shame authors Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer hadn't yet shared their self-professed insights into the motives and intentions of home schoolers some 20 years ago when I began homeschooling for a number of years.  Maybe if they had my homeschooled kid would have been able to know some academic success in her life instead of graduating from UCLA.

Dana Strunk
U.H.S.P. (Uncredentialed Home Schooling Parent) Redlands

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Dear Editor,

In reference to “Regulating Homeschoolers,” Op-Ed page, 3/13/08: To borrow a phrase, “there has always been something decidedly…anti-democratic in” traditional schooling. What could possibly be less democratic than top-down curriculum aimed almost wholly at raising test scores to keep the funds coming in? Ask any public school teacher who has a principal or district curriculum heavy breathing down her neck to make sure that she is on the right page in the language arts text book or is reading from the script in her teacher’s manual. In terms of the students, public school classrooms are at best benevolent dictatorships. With state standards and benchmarks to keep time with how could you possibly let students choose their own course of study? I imagine that the authors would also say that the bullying and teasing that goes on in traditional schools is character building and homeschooled children are missing out on that important part of growing up in a democracy. The fact is, state regulations have put a stranglehold on the public schools. The result is a disaffected populace. I think that Coombs and Shaffer would do well to check with their colleagues, college professors who look forward to having homeschooled students in their classes because those students have not had their passion bulldozed out of them, still can think for themselves, and are self-directed learners. Those, in my opinion, are the kinds of citizens we want in a democracy.

-Susie Stonefield Miller
Sebastopol,

---

It seems to me that Coombs and Shaffer protest too much. Although our older child was public schooled, we chose to educate our younger child at home. We have been able to teach him at the rate and level that fits him. He is ahead of his peers in all subjects, but one, where he we are taking extra time with him.

When my older child with similar abilities was in second grade the teacher told us that she was sorry he was bored; we should provide advanced work for him ourselves at home. We provide a secular education, sans TV, and are both scientists. There are many like us. Just as credentialed public school teachers regularly make the news for various abuses, there are abuses that occur and make the news among all groups of people. This cannot be defended, but neither can it be regulated away.

Our tax dollars pay do not support the schooling of our younger child - they go to the public schools. These same California public schools provide a popular program, abbreviated CAVA, which provides school at home. The children learn from a computer program and their parents.

Please do not promote misunderstanding through stereotypes, professors. There are many, many secular home schoolers who provide top-notch educations to their children. Studies conclude that home schooled children are better educated than their public schooled peers. Public schools admit they are having trouble teaching the children they already have. What would they do with over 166,000 more?

Lisa Whelan
Goleta

---

As a secular homeschooler I strongly resent Professors Coombs & Shafffer's attempt to pigeonhole all homeschoolers as some kind of religious nut cases who leave the education of their children to television. My six year-old daughter is studying American history, geography, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, cursive handwriting, literature, mathematics, and science. In addition she takes ballet and art lessons and has more friends than I am able to keep track of. A child's education, like a child's upbringing ought to be a parent's responsibility and prerogative. In the absence of specific evidence of abuse or neglect the state has no right to interfere.

Gideon Reich
Aliso Viejo

What a two-week punch it's been for New Jersey. First Wall native Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Kristen, proved to be the only sensible character in the Empire State's Spitzer farce. Now the ashes of Dina Matos McGreevey's divorce from former N.J. Gov. James McGreevey have returned to blue, hot life with revelations from an actual graduate of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

By way of both praise for truth-seeking and caution about evaluating claims made by adultery correspondents, please take a look at Andrew Strickler's piece highlighting the sharp dissonance between Kristen's unflattering description of the Jersey Shore and the awesome, awesome awesomeness of the actual Jersey Shore. I don't believe Dupré should feel compelled to deflect or soften or in any way defend her personal reputation, and I wish her hard work and success in whatever path she chooses to take. But just because the bluenoses are ganging up on you is no excuse for dumping on the Garden State.

Theodore Pedersen, the Scarlet Knight now at the center of the toothache-probingly annoying-but-compelling McGreevey saga, emerges as a 29-year-old philosopher. As he tells America's finest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger:

"[Dina Matos McGreevey]'s trying to make this a payday for herself. She should have told the truth about the three of us." Pedersen did not say if he was gay or bisexual and only described having contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts. He also said he never knew for sure if McGreevey was gay.

"I had heard the rumors in circles outside of work," he said. "In hindsight, there might have been light interest (in me), but it didn't seem like he was gay. It did enhance their sexual relationship having me be a part of it."

Even casual Savage Love readers will recognize that the tripartite alignment alluded to here does not dispose of the question of any participant's permanent sexual orientation, if permanent sexual orientation does in fact exist. The Star-Ledger quotes a four-sentence passage from Matos McGreevey's book which is equally nebulous on the matter:

In her memoir, Matos McGreevey says little about the sex life she had with her husband, except to say that it never gave her any reason to doubt he was straight.

"The sex was good," Matos McGreevey wrote.

It's worth noting that both Matos McGreevey and Pedersen could both be telling the truth (at least as quoted here; I have not read Silent Partner, so I don't know if she makes any falsifiable claims about specific romantic activities). In fact, more credit to Matos McGreevey if it is true, for trying to make the most of her mate's special interests — though others may take a less tolerant view than I do, particularly when full custody of a child is at issue. At Matos McGreevey's request, Pedersen has given a sealed deposition in the McGreeveys' divorce case, reports the Star Ledger, which also quotes Pedersen's useful seduction tips:

"The more we spend time with each other, the more we begin to trust each other with non-professional things," he said. "That relationship starts to progress, to transform into subtle hints, flirts."

Yes, Pedersen is fine! But how will this affect James McGreevey's efforts to become an Episcopal priest?

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has resigned.

"I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been," Spitzer lamented.

On behalf of all who sigh in relief that what might have been wasn't, I wish the family the best. Spitzer showed no quarter to his enemies and should expect none now, but for what it's worth I oppose demand-side as well as supply-side applications of force in regulating prostitution. And I hope this vast shame will prove instructive to the parties involved and to the voters of the Empire State.

Will the entire ed board weigh in? Reply hazy, try again.

Samantha Power's "monster" gaffe probably won't turn Barack Obama's primary setback into a full retreat, but it's still great fun. Read the full quotation, with the Pulitzer winner's attempt at an instant backpedal:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

You can practically hear the wrong-buzzer "EEEHHHH!" sound coming from the interviewer for The Scotsman (which by the way is my second-favorite name for a newspaper, after The Hindu), who not only declined to grant the request to keep the comment off the record but made it the lead and headline of the story. Well played!

Power has written for the Op-Ed page periodically. Here's her piece "How to stop genocide in Iraq," from a year ago. Another piece, "Democrats: Get Loud, Get Angry!" cowritten with Morton Abramowitz, has been disappeared from our site but you can still check it out at Common Dreams.

I take a more liberal view of what sorts of language are haram and halal than many of my colleagues, so it's probably not a surprise that I don't see what all the fuss is about. Why shouldn't you be allowed to call your opponent a monster in a no-holds-barred political campaign? It's a completely generic put-down, falling far short of the intricate jibes that some parliamentary systems consider standard. Besides, as Bugs Bunny understood, monsters are the most interesting people.

USA Today has full-cast dossiers on the new crew of the starship Enterprise. As is usually the case with these new-cast spreads, the Star Trek XI feature looks to me pretty much like a deck of SAG trading cards; I recognize only two of the people involved. Of those two, one choice — Simon Pegg as Engineer Scott — is nothing less than inspired. I'm not as encouraged by Lt. Uhura choice Zoë Saldana, who is button-cute but has a pretty serious known Star Trek deficiency that only YouTube commenter LMUli and I appear to have noticed.

In the Steven Spielberg joint The Terminal Saldana plays a CIS officer who is secretly a Star Trek fan. It's a fine plot device, but as you can see from this clip, when called upon to do the nearly universally recognized Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" salute, she completely screws it up! I suppose this problem could be spun in Trek XI into a variation on the hoary old joke about how humans have a hard time making the Vulcan (actually rabbinical) hand gesture. In any event, kudos to Saldana's agent.

This of course is not the end of the worries. There's the odd-number curse to consider. And this teaser trailer is a bit too fond of the dark-n-edgy trend for my taste: If anything needs to be recovered from the original Trek, it's the bright lighting, high-key color schemes and spare set decoration that make so much color TV from the sixties still so delightful to watch. Finally, having lived next door to Paramount pictures for a year and a half, I'm convinced there's nothing The House Popeye Built can fail to ruin. It's ominous that nobody on the mountaintop has thought to roll out the obvious tagline: "This is your father's Star Trek!" And if you really want to fear for the future of the Federation, hop on over to Trekkies Against Torture and sign up!

With an obit, an Op-Ed, an editorial, blog posts and more, we've added our own cannons to the 21-gun salute to the late William F. Buckley, but before we move along, a last word on National Review, or as it was known back in the Kennedy years, "National Review Bulletin."

Our editorial noted that the early NR "had a fair claim to being the foremost cultural magazine of its time," and after two hours of microfiching the 1963-1964 run of the magazine on Wednesday I can expand on that. The cultural sections of the magazine were quite lively, and the sharpness of the overall package still comes across after four decades. Among the big names: Theodore Sturgeon, Arlene Croce (on Resnais and Antonioni!), Steve Allen (yes that Steve Allen), Thomas Szasz (as always channeling either Michel Foucault or L. Ron Hubbard with a piece on "Psychiatry's threat to civil liberties"), John Leonard, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (is that where they met?), Auberon Waugh, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner (on Cleanth Brooks!), John dos Passos (with a piss-take on Edmund Wilson — so far so good, but unfortunately the criticism centered on The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, a book NR probably should have been defending), Myrna Bain and Emilie Griffin (a not-insensitive look at John Osborne's Luther). There was also a pretty good, and prescient, appreciation of Mary McCarthy as a refugee from the left, as well as a critical pan of the movie adaptation of The Cardinal, which Michael McGough references in his Opinion Daily today. And if you think the catalogue of rightwing poetry begins and ends with W.H. von Dreele (who was in there too), cast your eyes on Ezra Pound's "Mindscapes," which appeared first in Buckley's rag in Old '63. I didn't see any Renata Adler but I understand she was in there too back in the day.

Between this and Encounter, you could make a case that the right, or at least the strong-anti-communist coalition, was not only culturally competitive but dominant in the fifties and early sixties. Part of that may be materials selection: At what other time were you going to get Didion writing about Evelyn Waugh or Waugh's own son discussing Muriel Spark? Some ambitious historian ought to do an analysis of NR and Ramparts as the secret Catholic movers of everything in the sixties, the Gallant and Goofus of the Great Disruption.

I make no case for the decline of this or the dumbing down of that, and if all the material above strikes you as an odyssey of boredom, well, I'll fight like hell for your right to feel that way. But I think the soft power of conservatives is in eclipse. The post-Allen Bloom bellyaching about how feminists or queer theorists are brutalizing our culture might be a little more credible if you could believe the people complaining had something interesting to say about the culture themselves. We know what you think of Hillary, Rich Lowry, but what do you think of James Joyce?

Three cheers for Prince Harry, who is now serving with the British army in Afghanistan; and four cheers for British authorities, who managed to keep the world in the dark about the younger prince's December deployment until now. Early last year, Harry was supposedly on his way to Iraq, a move that the editorial board applauded:

Nearly every British war features a version of this drama, in which cautious elders try to dissuade a young noble from putting himself in harm's way but the young noble insists on serving his country without special treatment or advantage. This supposedly private drama of stoic courage inevitably receives extensive press coverage, and Harry's case is no exception. But, in the end, it's hard to gainsay the physical courage required to deploy to Iraq at all.

Replace "Iraq" with "Afghanistan" and remove references to extensive press coverage and you have our position. Last May, when it was announced that the Iraq deployment was off, I  backed away from the earlier praise in a disappointed blog post. Thanks to Tribune's idiotic and suicidal policy of deleting the older stories that make up the overwhelming majority of our traffic (for the umpteenth time, I apologize; supposedly it's going to change soon), you can still read the post but not the original editorial. Anyway, props to the prince.

In the eternal struggle against The Jews, there can be no deserters.

That's pretty much the takeaway from this astounding interview that Norman Finkelstein, the historian, communist provocateur and academic-without-portfolio, gave last month to Lebanon's Future TV. Among many other Finkelsteinian aperçus: Any Arab who fails to resist the Israeli juggernaut to his last bullet will become a "slave of the Americans" reduced to "crawling on your knees"; interviewer Najat Sharafeddine reveals herself as neither a serious nor a level-headed person for suggesting that the 2006 attack on Lebanon could have been avoided; Hitler would have prefered to achieve his goals through peaceful means (I am not making that up); anybody who prefers survival to glorious death in service of the international Shiite jihad deserves no respect; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a "human freak"; any Lebanese who is presently alive has "no self-respect"; and of course, every situation everywhere always is exactly analogous to Hitler and the Nazis.

It's a mind-bogglingly arrogant, condescending, creepy, ill-informed performance. And in fact an overtly imperialist one that erases all marks of local politics and individual choice in order to make room for great-power conflict. In true Leninist fashion, Finkelstein does not believe in bystanders; any Arab who chooses not to engage the international struggle against the Zionist/capitalist enemy is not only expendable but beneath consideration. (Allah only knows what Fink made of Future TV's founder, the late rentier oppressor of the proletariat Rafiq al-Hariri.)

I've never given much thought to Finkelstein, who seems to have done some interesting historical (or at least historical-debunking) work, and my view of his long-running feud with Alan Dershowitz has never gone beyond a vague wish for both sides to lose. But at least Dersh contents himself with being a stateside nuisance of no danger to anybody except the wives of insulin-happy bazillionaires. Finkelstein, however, is speaking in the context of a goodwill tour of Lebanon on behalf of Hizbollah — whose views, don'tcha know, have been too long ignored in the United States. (Speak for yourself, Norm!) This is where the cesspool of leftwing extremism eventually flows, into a full-hearted alliance with any scuzzbucket willing and able to kill people. At Reason, Michael Young (who has had his own apparently bruising exchange with the no-nonsense Sharafeddine) expands on the pathology at work:

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Full interview (courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI) and transcript.

Can anything or anybody replace Barack Obama in readers' hearts? Not this week: Despite a selection of hot topics from Scientology to gun control to torture to the Christian Oscars, and even a surprise return by perennial favorite Stonehenge, Sarah M. Miller's Obama Blowback drew more traffic than the rest of the Top 10 combined. Hats off to Obama for continuing to draw readers and voters, and to you for reading the L.A. Times Opinion pages.

1. Open letter to Barack Obama, by Sarah M. Miller
2. The invasion of America, by Andrew P. Napolitano
3. A leap beyond faith, by Michael Shermer
4. 'Prayers' just won't do, by Tim Rutten
5. Hola, Obama, by the editorial board
6. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
7. Peter Principle of award shows, by Joel Stein
8. Political surge in Iraq, by the editorial board
9. Fidel's slow fade, by Jon Lee Anderson
10. Shame, Sen. McCain, by the editorial board

KUSC ran a richest-classical-composer feature a few days ago, which drew its top-10 list from a 2005 survey by a U.K. radio station. It's unlikely the numbers — which were apparently calculated in adjusted currencies — have changed much since then, so here's the list:

1. George Gershwin
2. Johann Strauss II
3. Giuseppe Verdi
4. Gioachino Rossini
5. George Frideric Handel
6. Joseph Haydn
7. Sergei Rachmaninoff
8. Giacomo Puccini
9. Niccolò Paganini
10. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 

Why is this interesting (to me at any rate)? Because longhair music is pretty much universally recognized as an art form that can't compete in an open market and must be supported through royal or (these days) public patronage. Yet this list is remarkable for the lack of patronage its members enjoyed. All but two of the composers on the list date to the industrial revolution or afterward, and the two who came earlier than that — Haydn and Handel — did plenty of lucrative for-profit work in Britain, which boasted the most liberal economy in Europe. Verdi, Rossini and Puccini were all piece-work producers who were less interested in pleasing the royal ear than in filling up the house with paying customers. Paganini and "Waltz King" Strauss were expert self-promoters and brand builders, Rachmaninoff made much of his fortune on recordings and performances, and Gershwin made it to the top of the list strictly by producing music for a large popular audience. I'm not sure he ever got a dime of public support.

By comparison, Richard Wagner, another 19th-century rock star with a long list of patrons and supporters including a king who built the composer his own mansion and theme-park/mini-city, didn't make the list. That's a special irony given how massively popular Wagner was and still is, not just in opera houses but throughout the popular culture.

You could counter that money earned is no indication of musical achievement, and that wastrels like Wolfgang Mozart and Franz Schubert, or humble workers like J.S. Bach, would top a list of actual composing value. True enough, but hardship and poverty are the default positions of human existence. It's success that's the unusual thing, and the numbers here indicate success becomes a little more likely in a profit-centered environment. Interestingly, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff, who both died before the middle of the 20th century, are the most recent names on the list. Audience indifference has since encouraged classical composers to avoid the uncertainty of the marketplace; but maybe all those composers with academic sits would have been better off trying to make a bigger buck. Maybe classical music needs more market discipline, not less.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Obama-rally-security-standdown story: Shocker? Stone gas? A great Dallas tradition revived for a new era? Much ado about nothing?

Jack Douglas reported Wednesday that security details, on apparent orders from the Secret Service, stopped screening for weapons more than an hour before the candidates took the stage. He followed up a little while ago with a response from the Secret Service and some interesting nothing-to-see-here comments from people who had had similar experiences at other rallies. (More on that in a moment.)

Dan Gifford, who hipped me to this story, sends in a roundup of related items:

"Security surrounding Barack Obama has been stepped up amid fears he could be an assassination target."

"For many black supporters, there is a lot of anxiety that he will be killed, and it is on people's minds. You can't make a prediction like this — like he has 'a 50 percent chance of getting shot.' But the greater his visibility and the greater his access to people, there is a danger."

"Today the phrase 'assassinate Obama' appeared on a list of the top 100 Google search terms."

As Robert Greene noted after the L.A. debates, security is not exactly written in stone at campaign events. Getting into the Democrats' event in the Kodak Theater was quite frenzied, and although I did pass through a metal detector it didn't look to me like there was any systematic security there. I'd be surprised if everybody at that event was screened for weapons: In fact, given the Hindenburg-style chaos inside and outside the theater, I'd say nobody would have gotten into the Dems' debate at all if the security had been regulation-tight. The Republicans didn't search me or even ask for tickets, which I initially took as welcome evidence that I was considered the "right sort" out in Ronald Reagan country, but they didn't seem to be sniffing anybody else either.

It's not exactly comforting that security arrangements don't seem to make any sense at a lot of venues, but it does argue against the idea that there was anything especially fishy in Dallas. Kudos to the local cops for bringing it up, anyway.

Sen. Obama, what would we do without you?

We'd certainly be doing it with fewer readers, as Obama/Clinton material continues to draw our biggest numbers. Readers came for Obama last week, stayed for poor Jeb Bush and some local political color, and finished off with a palate cleanser of celebrity Hindenburgs and supine scribblers. The winners:

1. He's got Obamaphilia, by Joel Stein
2. Chelsea's rant control, by Meghan Daum
3. Obama's rhetoric, American realities, by Jonah Goldberg
4. Californy power, by Joe Mathews
5. NATO at twilight, by Andrew J. Bacevich 
6. Oh, brother!, by Jacob Weisberg
7. Can the world afford a middle class? by  Moisés Naím
8. Between 'crazy' and 'committed', by Patt Morrison 
9. Go with the tough guy, by Max Boot 3,118
10.  What I did during the strike, by Frank Pierson, Tim Long, Larry Gelbart, Wesley Strick, Ken Levine, Linda Teverbaugh, Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller, Chris Provenzano

Editorial board ecommendations clobbered all competition during election week. Out endorsement win-loss results for this election are a solid middling, but our endorsement traffic ran the table. The only thing stopping a clean top-10 sweep by the ed board? More policy and politics from Joel Stein and Michael Kinsley and an unexpectedly strong showing by Philip L. Fradkin's look at the legacy of Wallace Stegner. The tape:

Barack Obama for Democratic nominee, by the editorial board
The real Reagan, by Michael Kinsley
John McCain for GOP nominee, by the editorial board
No on Proposition 92, by the editorial board
Yes on 94, 95, 96, and 97, by the editorial board
Perhaps a bit too stimulated, by Joel Stein
Yes on Proposition 93, by the editorial board
No on Proposition 91, by the editorial board
We recommend, by the editorial board
A classic, or a fraud? by Philip L. Fradkin

In today's Financial Times, the wonderfully named Clive Crook acknowledges Hillary Clinton's edge over Barack Obama in political experience. He just wonders whether it's the kind of experience anybody should be bragging about:

Hillary Clinton, manager extraordinaire? It bears repeating that there is a single point of data to test this claim: her supervision of the healthcare task force set up by her husband during his first term. Opinions differ even now about that exercise – about whether Mrs Clinton was responsible for one of the most celebrated domestic-policy train wrecks in recent American history, a scapegoat for her husband’s misjudgments, or the hapless victim of organised special interests. What is undisputed is that the whole affair was an epic of hubris and mismanagement.

Yes, that was a regrettable episode, she now says – but she is the stronger for it, having learned from her mistakes. That is good to know, but since when was failure, unredeemed by subsequent success, a qualification for the top job? By all accounts, Mrs Clinton has been a fine senator, as has Mr Obama for a shorter time, but this is not an executive role. It is good political experience, to be sure, but (unlike having been the successful governor of a big state, for instance) it tells you little about fitness to manage, and less about fitness to be president.

Ron Paul is scaling back his presidential campaign, conceding the impossibility of having an impact at the GOP convention. His announcement is several shades less absurd, and orders of magnitude more candid, than Mitt Romney's war-is-too-important-to-be-left-to-the-shape-shifting-ex-governors announcement earlier this week.

But it's still disheartening: A month or so of straight-up campaigning between Paul and John McCain would have been hopeless from Paul's perspective, but it would have clarified in stark terms how far the Republicans have drifted from the libertarian core that Ronald Reagan once called "the very heart and soul of conservatism." But as I noted before, one of the particular features of the Paul campaign was that it wasn't conceived, and certainly wasn't executed, as a message-sending effort. For better or worse, the campaign ended up turning on Paul himself, not the broader range of libertarian appeals that overlapped with his platform. Here's what the ten-term congressman from the Lone Star State's 14th district had to say:

With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

Best of luck to Rep. Paul in retaining his congressional seat. The House would be an even poorer place without him.

Another Pauloid tidbit at Top of the Ticket. And for more of what it all meant, check out frequent L.A. Times contributor Brian Doherty's "Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution." 

With the news that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, the late alleged murderer of two police officers and three city officials in Kirkwood, Missori, was a well known city-council gadfly, we set the wayback machine to 2003, for a Los Angeles Times story by Hugo Martin, explaining some of the tensions involved in giving broad leeway to public blowhards. Here it is in full print-spec glory:

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

THE STATE
COLUMN ONE
Freedom's Test, or Just a Pest?
* Gadflies deemed out of order are arrested or ejected from some public meetings. The 1st Amendment and decorum are at odds.

Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
53 inches; 1834 words
Type of Material: Column

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

After greeting the San Bernardino County supervisors with a mock Nazi salute, Jeff Wright, a homeless Air Force veteran, stepped to the public microphone to complain about being arrested at a regional transportation meeting a few months earlier.

Board Chairman Dennis Hansberger told him to stay on the topic under discussion, which was the salaries of county attorneys. Wright then threatened to seal the supervisor's mouth with duct tape, which he had brought with him.

Hansberger responded by ordering sheriff's deputies to eject Wright, who was led out of the building in handcuffs, screaming about police brutality.

It was nothing new -- for Wright or for the board of supervisors.

The March incident was among the more than 100 arrests or ejections deputies have carried out at meetings of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors since 1989, according to an unofficial tally by one local activist.

Although law enforcement officials say they cannot confirm the exact number, they put the tally in the dozens.

In 2000, reports of those arrests earned the Board of Supervisors the "Black Hole" award, a dubious distinction given by the California First Amendment Coalition to public agencies and officials that the group says show disregard for open government and 1st Amendment rights.

In the past year, the pace of arrests and removals at San Bernardino County supervisors' meetings has increased to about one per month, with most speakers being removed for failing to stick to the agenda and then refusing to surrender the lectern.

Hail to thee, Paulites, Paulettes, Pauline Order, Ronettes, Ronnies, Ronalitos, whatever you choose to call yourselves. May the cosmos bless you for posting more than 150 comments on my last piece of chum, which is now updated.

I beg your forgiveness for having let practically all of these comments fester for 16 hours unmoderated, after having put all of you through an onerous verification process. Actually, I do not beg your forgiveness, for that is an insult to the Holy Spirit that cannot be forgiven forever, the sin that not even eternity can wipe out. Cast me without your ranks, Ronites, but do accept my eternal gratitude to you for bringing life to our empty tables.

And on behalf of the L.A. Times thank you for feasting at the more plentiful board of Top o' the Ticket.

Since Amina has nicely laid out the candidates' financial pole positions, and since the paultards have come out in force to upbraid me for an ancient Ron Paul-related post (this is the thanks the L.A. Times gets for providing him a forum to deliver the night's best line at the GOP's Golden State debate?), it's a good time to talk about the campaign cock-up of the fourth-place Republican contender. To wit: Is the Paul campaign guilty of gross fiscal mismanagement? And even if you believe the dollar is worthless without a gold standard, is it really that easy to turn so many millions into so little achievement?

At Reason, Dave Weigel does a little digging into Paul's delegate count, and finds some reason for hope. Paul's campaign makes even more impressive delegate claims, though the staff seems to count delegates on the same obscure sliding scale it uses to make dollars vanish. Paul's fundraising was in its way even more miraculous than Mike Huckabee's polling surge. And there was something heartening, as the Paul surge grew, in the candidate's refusal to frame his campaign as some kind of consciousness-raising effort. Even if you never believed he was really running for president, it was good to know that he believed it.

Did his campaign? The newsletter brouhaha certainly suggests Paul applies a laissez-faire philosophy to all sorts of management areas, but did his campaign really need this many screwups, ballot emergencies, voting snafus and of course conspiracy-minded excuses for its own incompetence?

I expect no quarter from the Paulites, but I say all this with sadness. It's been clear for at least six months that Dr. No's campaign was shaping up to be more than just a novelty. Ron Paul tapped in to a wide array of interests, and his appeal went well beyond the simple "opposition to the war" explanation arrogant journalists favored. But let's just say he could have tapped in a lot deeper and with more lasting results. It's not like we don't need the help right about now. The country is seeing the beginnings of a real leftwing backlash and the Republicans are about to nominate a "national greatness" conservative who is in every respect the anti-Goldwater. (Good luck getting any libertarian leverage from those Paul delegates at the convention.) Couldn't Ron Paul have just spent 12 months focusing on the task at hand?

Update: Welcome, Pauline Order of Ron!

Half the time I feel like you don't even know I exist, Ron Paul fans, so yes, welcome! Please stay and chat, and I'll get your comments through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Sorry for taking the night off, folks, and really, whatever you want to call yourselves -- they wouldn't be so crude at the L.A. Times but I do have friends who use the word "paultards," and only with love -- it's up to you to name yourselves. As long as I caught your eye.

Everybody else, please don't skimp on the comments. Plenty of brilliant stuff, interesting conversations forming, and rave reviews such as these:

"factually inaccurate and sophomorically naive"

"I think you wrote this just to get people to see your article."

"What exactly were you trying to say..."

"Hey Timmy your article was lame, like high school lame..."

"Another attempt by the MSM to discredit an honest and forthright individual..."

"I stopped reading the article after the first sentence, when you referred to..."

"I don't know what you expect Ron Paul to do, take the order, cook the meal, wash..."

"I'm not being sarcastic. I swear on my neighbor's cat I'm not."

"Wanting to stop the murder in Iraq is not incompetence, it is morally justified..."

During our own Republican endorsement campaign, I lobbied first for Rudy Giuliani and then for Mitt Romney, not merely hoping to kill the market for Matt Welch's book, but because I believe opposing The New York Times in all things takes precedence over all other concerns. So I'm the one who should be forthright, gracious and magnanimous and admit that the other Times just beat the pants off us in endorsement power in our own state.

Final score: Times east, two for two; Times west, one for two.

For what it's worth, we removed the candidates' collective and individual probabilities of winning as a factor in determining 2008's semi-finalists, and I call that a wise decision. Nor did my dream race (Richardson-Paul to Obama-Paul to Obama-Giuliani to Obama-Romney, which I think is a song by The Who) differ substantially from that of the board. Why did your dream race change if electability was not a factor? you may ask. I can reply only that we do not live in dreams.

We also attempted to be as forthright, gracious and magnanimous in building our endorsement cases, to think through the meaning of our words and to try to get your input, as well as or better than any paper published on any of the terran planets. We look forward to continuing to serve you in the exciting election year we expect. Thanks for tuning in to Opinion L.A. and the L.A. Times, and we welcome your thoughts.

If you enjoyed John Mueller's recent Rambo charticle, which tracked the pneumatic commando's varied career along a rising death-per-minute axis, you were not alone. The United Kingdom tabloid The Sun got enough of a kick out of the Ohio State professor's math that it decided the most sincere form of flattery would be to make up some fake quotes and attribute them to Mueller. According to The Sun's story on the Rambo chart:

Mr Mueller said the movie, out next month, showed “the most depraved level of man’s inhumanity to man”.

Mueller has a different story. In an email to us, he states, "I just want to say that I never made the statement quoted — to the Sun or to anybody else." In addition to being concerned that the invented quote might allow an inference that he was reviewing the film rather than subjecting it to rigorous scientific testing, Mueller says he's troubled because "the words put in my mouth are so prissy and sanctimonious they make my skin crawl."

In case there's any doubt, Mueller adds, "I  hope I am not overly naive about the journalistic standards of the British tabloids... I have sometimes been misquoted in other papers — but in those the reporter at least actually  talked to me and was clearly TRYING to get it right. Total fabrication is new to me..."

Original charticle here.

Christopher Hitchens remembers Fleet Street in all its squalor here.

Robert Burns laments man's inhumanity to man (a phrase I always thought was invented by Mad magazine) here.

After having heard from scores of Democratic and decline-to-state Democratic voters about their soul-searching quandaries over which bubble to Inka-Vote come Tuesday, I've ginned up a shorthand assessment of their primary dilemma:

They'll hold their noses and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Or they'll cross their fingers and vote for Barack Obama.

At ITWorld, Josh Fruhlinger, the award-winning Comics Curmudgeon (and once an L.A. Times contributor whose article now exists only in fragments in our pages but is still viewable in its entirety here), takes a jaunt through generic-domain-name history to discover a saga of defunct companies, foiled business schemes and web squatters. Sample:

eat.com: If music.com had real geek cred in its earliest incarnation, a cursory look at the 1996 version of eat.com might lead you to believe that it was a similar outpost on the new frontier of the World Wide Web. "Mama's Dining Room" is the page's name, and the text -- charmingly unformatted on a white background on a hideous gray background, apparently unedited by anyone professional, offering a variety of tasty Italian meals. Then you get to the verbiage at the bottom of the page: "Mama's niece Ana, the lawyer, wrote this next part: Copyright 1996 Lipton, Inc. All rights reserved. Ragú, Chicken Tonight, and Pizza Quick are registered trademarks of Lipton, Inc." Yes, eat.com was one of the world's first astroturfing sites! The current iteration of the site is a much more straightforward homepage for the Ragú brand, now owned, like the other Lipton brands promoted by the entirely fictional "Mama", by Anglo-Dutch megacorporation Unilever.

The saddest part is that the outdated nineties aesthetic on display at these old, archive.org-preserved versions still looks cool and hip and now to me. Whole article.

You read in doubt this week: Michael Shermer earned the week's top spot not only at Opinion but for all of latimes.com with his piece on the class jealousies of the economically ignorant. Speaking of which, Hillary Clinton also proved a strong draw. Southern Californians were willing to give the old hip hip to the folks at JPL, while the governor cleaned up. Hanging in for encore Top 10 performances were Robert J. Spitzer and the man guild writers love to hate, John Ridley. Thanks for reading Opinion L.A.:

1. Why people believe weird things about money, by Michael Shermer
2. Hillary's gotta have it, by Meghan Daum
3. The correct Hillary Clinton stereotype, by Susan Faludi
4. The 'pocket veto' peril, by Robert J. Spitzer
5. Inquisition at JPL, by Tim Rutten
6. Change: the empty word, by Timothy Noah
7. A black president? Seen a few, by Joel Stein
8. Conservatism's buzz-kill, by Jonah Goldberg
9. John Ridley goes fi-core, by John Ridley
10. Reform term limits, by Arnold Schwarzenegger

John Ridley responds to our recent Blowback from Frank Pierson. Ridley's original piece on his decision to take the WGA's "financial core" option is here, and Pierson's response is here. A host of WGA-member reactions, of varying degrees of politeness, is here:

Re: Frank Pierson's response to my explanation as to why I've gone financial core within the Writers Guild

I take Mr. Pierson at his word when he says he has no recollection of speaking with me on the phone back in the early nineties. He was, after all, the much-lauded writer of Cool Hand Luke. I was just a junior staff writer for some weblet TV show, and would been talking some crazy talk about diversity. I was probably no more than a name on his call-back sheet, and clearly diversity's not the kind of subject that holds much traction for some.

I will just say the tenor and rancor of his repose was like a trip down memory lane for me.

But never mind the past, if I could just address two assertions made by Mr. Pierson:

Regarding diversity, Mr. Pierson writes: "The guild does not hire or fire."

He is absolutely correct. But in the case of television staffs, it is the show runners who hire and fire the members of the writers' room. Show runners are perhaps the most powerful sect within the guild. When I dissent from the Groupthink, I'm often hectored that the guild is a brotherhood. A family. And this family has to stick together.

If this family can make a priority of such crucial issues as product integration — an issue over which the guild actually engaged in guerrilla actions against the studios — could they not do the same for something as mildly important as diversity in the workplace? Or is equal opportunity for all less critical than having to stick a Buick in one's show? The non-fluctuating stats on diversity in television say no.

Mr. Pierson writes:

... the guild, with our continuing contributions, will take care of Ridley when he's sick, protect him from predatory rewrites, pay him his residuals and support him in his old age, and he doesn't even have to walk for it.

A reminder to Mr. Pierson: Even though I'm financial core, I continue to pay dues to the guild. Our contributions are my contributions as well. And those contributions are paid into the health fund by the producers, based on the amount of work I do. Predatory rewriters? Well, of course, the brotherhood of writers never rewrites each other. And the guild, as I'm sure Mr. Pierson is aware, does not pay my residuals. It collects on my behalf residuals paid by the producers. With regard to supporting me in my old age; like millions of Americans who are fortunate enough to do so, I've chosen to set up my own self-administered pension fund. Call me crazy, but I prefer self-reliance over depending on the largesse of others.

Interesting, a man who doesn't remember speaking with me claims to know so much about me.

And finally, no, I don't have to walk for all that. But I do have to WORK for it. Contrary to the pejorative "parasite" with which Mr. Pierson labels me, I not only work for my meals but bring my own table. A reminder: My membership in the guild is compulsory. If Mr. Pierson doesn't care for parasites such as myself, he should bring his considerable influence to bear so that the leadership will allow myself and all others who so desire to chart our own path.

But really, enough with the name-calling, the nastiness and the negativity. Frankly (no pun), I'm surprised at the level of attention that's been paid to the gadfly I supposedly am. I would encourage everyone at this point to dispense with the vitriol and get back to the truly important issue at hand: bringing to conclusion the labor action which has caused so much pain to so many unintended victims in our community.

The half-life of Ron Paul's racist newsletters, a story that has gained almost as little traction as the Paul campaign itself, gets a new wrinkle as Reason's Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel name the infamous Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. as the pigment- and wrist-strength-obsessed ghostwriter. That was my guess when the identity of Mr. or Madame X became an issue, and the authors have got a host of fellow travelers stating that it was indeed Liberty Lew.

As with so many things that Everybody knows, there's always the possibility that this one is not true. Rockwell himself has denied the charge in other media and refused to comment to Sanchez and Weigel. One commenter says Reason is exaggerating Rockwell's role in order to spare Paul himself.

That doesn't seem to be supported by the article, and S&W surely understand that the negligence defense does nothing to get Paul off the hook. To use the reductio ad absurdum libertarians are said to enjoy, suppose Paul actually became president: Presidential administrations are constantly acting on issues bound up in race. Would any person be willing to give the benefit of the doubt when a Paul appointee to the Justice Department or the Federal Election Commission makes even a valid argument against some race-based policy or dismisses claims about disenfranchising black voters? (That is, in the unlikely event a Paul Administration had an FEC at all.) Nevertheless, the piece allows the inference that the man who would save "the blacks" from unfair drug laws is guilty mainly of sins of omission:

The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

With more interesting ancient history about the Rothbard-Rockwell alliance and their libertarian version of the Southern Strategy. As with most libertarian movement history, the back story is an Illiad of breaks-with, fallings-out, mutual excommunications and hurt feelings, but the specific case is pretty straightforward. Whole article.

Related: Rockwell always feels like somebody's watching him and he's got no privacy.

Not sure why the Lone Star State's own David Morgan is writing to us to voice his objections to William Kristol's hiring as a New York Times columnist, but David, now that you've canceled your subscription and are in the market for a first and main source of news, can I interest you in the Los Angeles Times? Our four-day weekend subscription is a fantastic bargain. Absolutely no William Kristol!

The problem is not that the Times has hired a strong Conservative in Wm Kristol, but that it has brought in a relentless Neoconservative who, with his cohorts in the American Enterprise Institute and the Pentagon's Department of Special Plans, may have deliberately lied us into an unnecessary and murderously brutal invasion of a country that could have done us no harm. Some people might see that as treason.

I've just cancelled my subscription to the Times, the periodical that has been my first and main source of news and other information for over 40 years.

David Morgan
Dallas TX

Malakkar Vohryzek's recent Blowback on the L.A. Trade Tech raid inspired Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to sit right down and write the L.A. Times a letter. We spoke with Cole a few months ago, and he's still fighting to bring the war on drugs to a peaceful conclusion:

As a retired police officer, I want to congratulate Malakkar Vohryzek on his superb analysis of the failed war on drugs (see "drug prohibition doesn't work," Los Angeles times, January 11, 2008).

For years our children have reported it is easier to buy illegal drugs than to buy beer and cigarettes because people selling illegal drugs don't them ask for age identification.

Just in case our editorial on J.K. Rowling's suit against The Harry Potter Lexicon isn't fresh in your mind, our take was: Stupid idea, bad for the brand, bad for Rowling's longterm legacy and bad for the fans, but probably defensible from a legal and a property-rights standpoint:

The most compelling public-interest argument against the steady expansion of copyright duration and power has been that it discourages new work by outsiders without encouraging copyright owners to be more productive -- as was clearly the case when, for example, Margaret Mitchell's estate attempted to block "The Wind Done Gone," Alice Randall's parody of "Gone With the Wind." That is not the case here. Rowling is still alive, still creating material and still in a position to want, and merit, relatively full powers over her invented universe.

Tim Wu in Slate also seems to think the suit is a bad decision, but he says Rowling ought to lose for strictly legal reasons:

The closest relevant legal precedent is the 2002 Beanie Baby decision by Judge Richard Posner (who has a taste for cases involving stuffed animals). Ty, the producer of Beanie Babies, doesn't like unauthorized guides to the Beanie Baby universe and their unflattering tendency to criticize the company, so it sued. Ruling against the company, Judge Posner used the same analogy that I have, comparing the guides to book reviews: "Both," he said, "are critical and evaluative as well as purely informational; and ownership of a copyright does not confer a legal right to control public evaluation of the copyrighted work." That's logic that should control the Potter case as well.

Even if the Beanie Baby case isn't directly controlling, the economics suggest the same result. How, exactly, are we hurt by the existence of competing guides to the Potter universe, one written by fans, the other by Rowling? It would be strange to say that since Fodor has written a perfectly good guide to London, we don't need the Lonely Planet or, for that matter, Wikitravel. Giving Rowling what she wants would be like giving Egypt the power to control guides to the pyramids.

I don't see how the Beanie Baby case is controlling, or even how it's relevant. A book about three-dimensional plush toys isn't taking nearly as much material as a book about another book, is it? All the value adds of descriptions and criticisms of the objects (objects that don't contain any words) are original to the authors of the Beanie Baby guide. Very few are original to the authors of the Harry Potter book — if they were, the book wouldn't be a reliable guide.

Wu argues that there's a threat here to "our collective wisdom" and "what we know." This is more properly understood not as a matter of what belongs to us but of what belongs to J.K. Rowling. A wiki-type online guide to the Potter books is an acceptable fair use because the added value is clear: It provides a reorganization of Rowling's stuff into another medium in a way that is clearly distinct from any of her books. A book is something different: By its nature as a guide it can't depart substantially from Rowling's work; the ratio of copyrighted to new material is so great as to make a fair-use claim very difficult.

Which, again, is not an argument that Rowling should be pursuing an action we called "petty, churlish and, from a business standpoint, probably ill-advised." It's a rare sign of good sense that, for example, Paramount does not go after the proprietors of Memory-Alpha. (And just to be clear, for the very reasons detailed above, I think Paramount would lose if it did; while the ratio of copyrighted to new stuff is still large, the act of describing content from a visual medium is itself transformative in a way that rearranging material from a written medium is not.) But just because sweet reason leads some copyright owners to behave with liberality doesn't mean all copyright owners should be required to do the same. The Harry Potter franchise is Rowling's to screw up any way she wishes.

Reader reactions to our "American Values" series are still pouring in. Share your own thoughts or endorsements in the comments below or via email to opinionla@latimes.com. Without further comment:

One roundup of reader reactions is not enough, it turns out, as readers of our "American Values" series continue to send in their reactions, thoughts on the elections and endorsements. [Update: Still more reactions here.]

If we could draw any conclusion from the raw data, it would probably be this: Los Angeles Times readers love an underdog. With the exception of Barack Obama, the frontrunners in the 2008 presidential race have been getting little support from our readers. If you're looking for a Kucinich/Biden ticket to go up against a Paul/McCain ticket, you may be in luck.

Otherwise, share your own endorsements in the comments below or via email to opinionla@latimes.com, and read on:

Going into an extended holiday week, Opinion L.A. draws its best numbers from politicians, labor strife, teen moms and tales of bad meds and economic woe. Sixth place goes to Craig Mazin and Matt Edelman for the previous week's Dust-up on the writers strike, but if we counted all five of the Mazin/Edelman Dust-up entries that would move their debate way up the list, as these continue to draw a lot of interest lower down in our Top 50 lists. So once again, it's clear that everybody's enjoying the WGA strike, even if nobody will admit it. And speaking of bridesmaids, four out of the 11th-15th-place spots were taken by our American Values editorials. Show your American spirit and read the whole series already.

1. Clintonian triangulation comes full circle by Jonah Goldberg
2. Stop scaring us by Henry Miller
3. Generic drugs' hidden downside by Naomi Wax
4. The polarizing express by Ezra Klein
5. So a fruit fly goes into a bar... by Marlene Zuk
6. Who strikes? by Craig Mazin and Matt Edelman
7. Honey, I shrunk the president by Jonathan Haidt
8. More writers' strike drama by the editorial board
9. Dollar signs by Howard M. Wachtel
10. Knocked up but not out by Meghan Daum

When I was a lad they'd have been burning those cars!

Whatever your thoughts on the WGA strike, the writers deserve some credit for their civility. My route most days takes me past the CBS entrance that forms the fourth turn in the intersection of Beverly Blvd and one of those little streets running north (Orange? Ogden? Genesee?). There's a traffic light, barely required at what is effectively a three-way intersection, yet the writers honor it every time it changes, patiently waiting with their signs on both sides of the driveway, and allowing people to drive on and off the CBS lot. I go by Paramount's Windsor and Bronson entrances too occasionally, and observed the same behavior there this morning. I can't say as how the writers' respect for jaywalking laws is doing much to blast into atoms the remorseless gears of capitalism, but it shows good breeding.

That ought to get to the bottom of it...

If you haven't read Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller's 12/12 piece on the strike, be sure to read through to the end, for an appearance by our man in the Dust-Up Craig Mazin, as well as this bon mot:

[Unionized directors] are expected to be more flexible on terms and more sympathetic to studio arguments that Internet-related businesses are still in the formative stages and that there are many uncertainties about where and how soon those future revenues will pour in.

The Directors Guild has spent more than $1 million to study those very questions, hiring two outside firms to prepare a detailed report on new media. The findings will be presented at tonight's meeting.

Got your own strike observations, hints or allegations? Share your thoughts in the comments or by mailing opinionla@latimes.com.

In the other Times, Bill Carter takes a look at gabshow hosts who are keeping their writers[non-writing staffers] off the public dole. But he leaves what looks to me like a major variable out of his equation:

David Letterman of CBS’s “Late Show” (who has to support two CBS shows because his company, Worldwide Pants, also owns “Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson”), Conan O’Brien of NBC’s “Late Night,” Jay Leno of NBC’s “Tonight,” and most recently Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report,” have all committed to pay their staffs out of their own funds.

Estimates of what it is costing the hosts range from about $150,000 a week to as high as $250,000 a week, depending on the size of the staffs. The question the hosts are struggling with is how long they can continue to stay off the air and subsidize their staffs, and what happens when they decide they cannot do it any longer.

It's not the main focus of the story, but since we're getting the weekly price range for this largess, shouldn't we also get some indication of the size of the staff in question (and if this is writers only or all staff)?

I have no idea what the size of the Late Show or Tonight Show writing staff is, but wWe can make some interesting extrapolations from these numbers.

Assuming the actual weekly payroll throughout the year is somewhere in Carter's range, it appears you could maintain a staff of 250 writers making an average of $52,000 a year, a staff of one writer making $13,000,000 a year, or something between these two.

If you maintain a staff of 20 writers, and you are at the cheapest end of this scale ($150,000 per week), that means your average writer[staffer] is making $390,000 per year. If you're at the generous end ($250,000 per week) with the same-sized staff your average writer's[staffer's] making $650,000 per year. That's the average, not the top-performers. (If Carter's figure is counting all staff, including support, clerical, stagehands, etc., that's another story of course.)

Can these figures possibly be right? Is the world wrong or is Bill Carter?

Update: NO, I can be wrong! Thanks to reader Sam for reading the paragraph I skipped, which explains that the chat shows are in fact paying their nonwriting staffs some figure between $7.8 million and $13 million per year.

What a second, their non-writing staffs? These numbers are getting screwier by the minute. So let's say it takes, not counting the gag writers, the labors of 50 people to fob Craig Ferguson or Jimmy Kimmel off on the insomniacs every night. To get to that roster I think you'd have to include all the artistics, technical staff, clerical, janitorial, security, food prep, etc. and I still think you'd come up short. But let's figure they need that large a non-writing staff. This would put the average salary somewhere between $156,000 a year and $260,000 a year. Something still doesn't make sense here, though it seems more likely to be explained by personnel bloat than by Bill Carter's numbers. Jay, talk to your accountant; you're getting hosed by your own employees.   

Brain scans, Mormonism, the end times, UFOs and the return of Stonehenge. There's a theme to this week's top 10 stories, though it's not clear what it is...

Candidate mental health was the week's big winner, with distant but strong place and show taken by, respectively, the Joel Kottkin/Fred Siegel team and Bruce Ackerman. Hugo's gone, Stonehenge is back, and the rest is silence:

1. Getting inside their heads ... really inside by Daniel G. Amen

2. The gentry liberals by Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel

3. Bush isn't the only decider by Bruce Ackerman

4. We're on the brink of apocalypse! Again! by Gregory Rodriguez

5. Romney's JFK moment by Jonah Goldberg

6. Kucinich's close encounter by the editorial board

7. Stonehenges all around us by Craig Childs

8. Romney better pray he can be Jimmy Carter by Kenneth S. Baer

9. The 9th Circuit's new No. 1 by Carl Tobias

10. GOP's compassionless conservatism by the editorial board

I vowed a long time ago never to refer to the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" with a straight face until the Academy graduates its first class of cadets. But maybe sometimes all that solemn self-regard about Oscar® has its value.

Last week I got a chance to attend a 25th-anniversary screening of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. As I regard E.T. not only as a fine movie but as an essential weapon in America's Cold War soft power arsenal, I was bracing for the worst from this screening to a nearly full house (stocked with parents like me in various stages of disappointment, denial and bargaining at their children's insufficient enchantment with one of the great warhorses of our own youth). The film has been famously modified by its own creator, who in 2002 released a remix filled with bad improvements, including but not limited to some additional footage (in a movie that is not terribly fast-paced to begin with), the obligatory CGI version of the eponymous alien (seamless, flawless and charmless from what I've seen in the trailer) and most notoriously, digital hoodoo that removes the firearms from the hands of the federal-agent characters at the climax.

This last has always struck me as a crucial error in a drama that flirts throughout with tweeness and needs at least a hint of danger to work, but I've never wanted to find out. On the principle that you don't have to smell a whole egg to know it's rotten, I've avoided the re-edited version, but figured I'd swallow that scruple in the spirit of the occasion.

What a pleasant surprise to find I didn't have to do that. In the version screened the other night the feds were armed and dangerous the way God and Steven Spielberg made them. There was no additional footage or digital E.T. either. (I didn't pay attention to whether the word "terrorist" had been undisappeared from one line of dialogue.) And it turns out I have the Academy to thank. All official screenings must be of the version that was originally eligible for Academy Award consideration, which made it necessary to strike a brand new print of the undesecrated E.T. for this screening.

Sure, we could carp about the presumptiousness of honoring a film for its handful of technical awards without mentioning that the movie itself was beaten out for Best Picture by Richard Attenborough's Ghandi (a picture Ben Kingsley himself is unlikely to want to sit through again). But at least the Academy's strict adherence to its own rules resulted, in this case, in a small stumbling block on the path to universal mediocrity.

This also leaves me curious about this whole new-prints-of-old-versions business. It costs between $6,000 and $10,000 to strike a new print from existing materials, and according to a representative of the Academy, studios frequently make new prints for the organization's screenings, then donate them to the Academy's archives. In this case, however, the person I spoke with at the Academy says Universal did not donate the print after the screening. So where did it go? Seems like a simple question, but after a week of trying to find out from spokespeople for Universal and Dreamworks, I have no answer.

That doesn't mean there's anything fishy; the Academy representative I talked with noted that the organization already has several copies of the film in its archive and thus didn't particularly need to keep a new print. A spokesperson for Dreamworks says she believes the print will in fact be donated to the Academy (though for two days now she has been unable to confirm that) so it could just be a miscommunication. And of course, 10 grand is a drop in the bucket to these behemoths. But the rule of thumb is that when people can't get you information, there's something wrong with the information. And you'd think that having re-edited your old work, you'd keep a close watch on 35mm copies of what is now your rough draft.

So I'm positing or hoping that Spielberg has seen the error of his later years and is planning a New Coke/Classic Coke bait and switch, in which the original version of this Hollywood classic will sneak back into circulation, and the 2002 disimprovement will be quietly retired. Maybe this will even build into a groundswell, and all those director's cuts, definitive editions and other misguided remasterings will begin to recede in favor of the versions that actually pleased audiences in the first place. Then again, maybe not. But I'm still happy that the real E.T., rather than a post-9/11 impostor, got one more chance to phone home.

A few years back I was working on a story about gay asylum that never came to anything, partly because I couldn't get any documentation for the juiciest bits I was hearing about — tall tales of immigration bed checks, pamphlets circulating in the "community" that instructed asylum seekers about how to femme up their performances for credulous ICE and CIS agents, and so on. But the bigger problem was that what the story really wanted to be was not a trend piece but a sitcom: A pair of Saudi terrorists pose as a committed couple to get into the United States and blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. They settle in the Castro; a series of ludicrous mishaps keeps thwarting their terror scheme; Andy Dick shows up as a wacky neighbor; Kathy Najima puts in an electrifying performance as the anti-heroes' flamboyant "gal pal;" the two earn the enmity of a fire-breathing, gay-hating local Imam; and so on. In short, wackiness ensues.

Art, life, imitation, etc. CNN reports on how a group of alert soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Iraqi capital foiled the Cary Grant/Ann Sheridan routine of a group of insurgents:

Upon inspecting the convoy, soldiers found a stubbly-faced man, Haider al-Bahadli, decked out in a white bride's dress and veil.

Bahadli was wanted on terror-related charges, as was his groom, Abbas al-Dobbi, the official said.

Are we getting punked by CNN? The photos of the ill-shaven Bahadli (credited to the Iraq Defense Ministry) are ludicrous enough to make you think so. Why didn't he shave? What kind of lazy terrorist would put up such a halfhearted effort? I'm no expert on terrorism, but I know one thing: Men are always finding plenty of pressing, important reasons why they really need to wear women's clothes, and that's because men want to wear women's clothes. Even in Iraq, where the fashion options are so much narrower, and the opportunities for two men to follow their bliss are so few.

Courtesy of Radley Balko.

Today's Blowback by Robert E. Doud, "Why a liberal Catholic is embarrassed," is making some of his fellow Catholic's heartily sorry...that they ever read the thing.

From Hamilton, in the great Canadian province of Ontario, Paul Kokoski says spare us your apologies:

The Catholic church doesn’t need any apologies from modernist Catholics like Robert E. Doud who illegitimately claim to be speaking on behalf of the church. Doud is simply incorrect in claiming that "The church should not behave as a pressure group or political lobby". In coining the phrase "separation of church and state" in 1801, Thomas Jefferson never intended that social and political issues be divorced from codes of morality. He merely meant that the U.S. government be prevented from establishing one or another church as the "official" religion. All governments and religions worthy of their name concur with the Ten Commandments and their prohibition against murder.

Contrary to Doud, morality and faith are not things that can be restricted exclusively to the private sphere. In fact, no politician in any society or government can, in good conscience, rule coherently in the service of the common good apart from one’s own faith or values. The conscience being one and indivisible does not permit the acting out of parallel lives.

The Catholic church thus teaches that those who publically support abortion are already excommunicated and therefore should not, under penalty of grave sin, receive Holy Communion. Those in positions of authority like  Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles who act apart from the pope and do not publically enforce this law are accomplices in the same sin of the communicant. These are the people that especially need our prayers.

Sincerely,

Paul Kokoski.

Hamilton, Ontario. Canada.

From Pasadena, Marc Seanassey chuckles and rejoices:

As a 30-something, "John Paul II" Roman Catholic, I can only chuckle at the Robert E. Doud's of our Church who just don't seem to get that their time has passed, and their schismatic view of the Catholic Church will never come to be.

Instead of "chagrin" Pope Benedict XVI was elected, serious Catholics of my generation rejoiced. The conclave of 2005 solidified the reality that the fuzzy days of "post Vatican II" are mostly behind us. Our prayer is that our Church will return to solid orthodoxy, with a serious liturgy and teaching on a life in Christ. Mr Doud's generation spent it's formative and professional years trying to abolish this orthodoxy. With nonsense like "liturgical dance", woman "priests", watered-down Catechism tailored to the 60's sexual revolution, and the abandonment of important Church doctrines and teachings in the "spirit of ecumenism" - all of which instead of breathing "new life" into the Church, ultimately led to the pervert-priest abuse scandal where thousands of mostly young boys were preyed upon by their less-than chaste clergy.

My generation is far from perfect. However, unlike Mr. Doud's generation who never grew out of their infantile need to "challenge authority", we seek to fully embrace our Church and a life in Christ. We seek not to denigrate our Church but to lift it up as a light to all people's and nations as Jesus intended.

Marc Seanassey

Not everybody's anti-Doud, however. From somewhere on the interwebs, priest educator and retreat director "Gdfc" completely concurs:

Subject: I completely concur

As a priest, educator, retreat director  of 35 years I share these sentiments.  John Paul II and Benedict are an embarrassment to thinking, reasonable, open-minded, dialogical human beings.  They were and are repressive dictators....who preach equality to Muslim nations and yet practice discrimination in their own demoninations by not ordaining women or validating same sex couples.

For a lengthy fisking of Doud's article, check out Robert Kumpel's Valdosta blog. Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

On the front page of our paper today you'll see a glorious full-color photo of Jay Leno handing out donuts on a picket line. You can find it on our site. On the front page of The New York Times you'll find a shot of Tina Fey rocking an earnest look among some other group of picketers.

Now, before you say I'm just letting my plutocratic need to batten on the blood tallow of the proletariat get the best of me, let me affirm that I am very happy the WGA strike is on and I hope the work stoppage lasts for at least one full calendar year.

But I mean, if Jay Leno's aims are the same as those of the writers on strike, then who can be considered management in this situation? Yes, yes, I'm sure he has a WGA card or some such thing, but it's The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He's the boss of the show. He's the person who is ultimately responsible for attracting viewers. He's the one responsible for making sure the program brings in more money than it spends. He answers if the product fails. He's the one responsible for making sure new shows come out and get seen, and he will be, or should be, fire if that fails to happen.

There's a word for that kind of person. It's "boss." Not a union boss — a real boss. Are we supposed to believe nobody under the level of NBC-Universal chairman Bob Wright can be considered management? If Jay's labor, who's management? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question.

It's official -- the Democratic Party has no sense of humor.

In a 13-3 vote, the executive council of the South Carolina Democratic Party denied comedian Stephen Colbert's application to enter the state's Democratic presidential primary, even though the "Colbert Report" star had fulfilled the minimum requirements of submitting paperwork and ponying up $2,500. "He's really trying to use South Carolina Democrats as suckers so he can further a comedy routine," Waring Howe, a member of the executive council, sniffed to the Associated Press. "[He] serves to detract from the serious candidates on the ballot."

Heaven knows we wouldn't want to distract impressionable voters away from the gravitas of Joe "My state was a slave state" Biden! The SC Demos claimed to be heeding "requirements" that a candidate be "viable" and "actively campaigning" in the state, yet somehow they managed to approve Mike Gravel, who is neither.

But at least you could say the party was defending its own narrow, joyless interests in not letting itself be mocked by the best political satirist in America. No such case can be made for the army of grumpusses on the left, who accurately saw Colbert as a dangerous sprinkle of sugar on the day-old bowl of Wheaties that is American politics. "It's a terrible idea on many different grounds. Comedically, it's an extreme gag and an unoriginal one at that," the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar wrote, in a piece whose comedic virtues are purely unintentional. "What has been so great about Colbert is how he uses the character to make the larger point, one which often translates into trenchant (and, let's face it, earnest) political commentary. This way, he's using the character to obfuscate instead of illuminate."

You heard it here first: Earnest political commentary = funny; nuance (i.e., not immediately agreeing with Rachel Sklar) = "weak." But then we get to the real objection: "It's also a terrible idea politically -- that is, for the political process. Now is the time for the fringe players to slip away."

Sez who? It's entirely conceivable this cycle that the major-party candidates will be coronated as soon as March, leaving EIGHT EXCRUCIATING MONTHS of not having any comical "fringe players" to lighten the heavy load of a Giuliani-Clinton death-race 2008. Sklar wants to pat junior on the head and tell him to run along now; the adults need to talk.

Or at least strap on the cilice. Take Jon Friedman, the perpetually sour media observer for Marketwatch.com. Please.

It's depressing to watch respected journalists lower themselves just to tickle Colbert's funny bone. [Maureen] Dowd is the wittiest columnist anywhere, and [Tim] Russert is the best interviewer in television news. They shouldn't be kissing up to a comedian, even one as talented as Colbert.

People seem to forget that Colbert and Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," are entertainers. Forget about the "fake news" label that doggedly follows them around. They're e-n-t-e-r-t-a-i-n-e-r-s. Their job is to make people laugh (and, secondarily, think). They're not journalists

Well, if loving journalism means believing Mo freakin' Do is the "wittiest columnist anywhere," and that your readers are too stoopid to distinguish parody from reality, then sign me up for more of that e-n-t-e-r-t-a-i-n-m-e-n-t.

More intemperance after the jump!

Stalin asked how many divisions the pope had. Hard to tell, but as of Nov. 24 Benedict XVI will have 23 new cardinals to advise him, 18 of whom will be eligible to vote on his successor. With Kremlinology now out of fashion, Vaticanology has taken over, and commentators inside and outside the Catholic fold are deconstructing the latest additions to one of the world’s most exclusive “colleges.”

Is this latest crop proof that Benedict wants to re-Europeanize the College of Cardinals? Is the appointment to the college of the octogenarian leader of the Chaldean Church in Iraq a refection of the pope’s concern that Christians are being driven out of the Middle East, the cradle of the faith? Or maybe a red hat for Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly of Babylon is meant to remind the United States that Christians in Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein. (Remember that Pope John Paul II spoke out against the war.)

Closer to home, the red hat for the archbishop of Galveston and Houston in Texas is being interpreted as an affirmation by the Vatican of the Latino-ization of the American church, although Cardinal-designate Daniel N. DiNardo is an Italian-American from Pittsburgh. More interesting is the absence of a red hat for another former Pittsburgher, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C.

My former colleague Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one of the best-plugged-in religion reporters in the country, notes that Wuerl’s predecessor in Washington, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, is only 76 and still eligible to vote in a papal election, which is one explanation for bypassing Wuerl in this consistory.

But it’s also interesting that Wuerl, who earlier in his career was viewed as an archconservative, has angered conservative Catholics by refusing to deny Holy Communion to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other pro-choice Catholic politicians. In May, in a conversation with reporters en route to Brazil, Benedict seemed to endorse not just denying Communion to pro-choice legislators but actually excommunicating them.

I've never quite been able to disprove Lyndon LaRouche's theory that the United Kingdom is the real hereditary enemy of the United States, so maybe I'm not the best person to track the supposed decline of the trans-Atlantic very special relationship. My first tip came during our ed board meeting with Conservative leader David Cameron, in the following exchange, which you have no doubt already read in our Primary Source:

David Cameron: I think one way — which we've suggested as an opposition party which I don't think the government has fully taken up — is to involve Iraq's neighbors in an international contact group. What we have had are these things called neighbor conferences, but we'd like to see a, you know, official permanent secretariat.

Marjorie Miller: But how would you get the U.S. to sign onto that? We're the ones who have resisted that.

David Cameron: Well, I, I'm a huge believer in the Atlantic relationship. It runs through my DNA and the DNA of my party. But where we have um, disagreements, you know, things where you think things should be done differently, we should, you know, be straight and talk about it. And this is an area where we think the ideas in the Baker-Hamilton report need to be implemented. There needs to be a political solution, not just a military solution.

Marjorie Miller: How would you be more effective than Tony Blair at influencing the U.S. on policy like that?

David Cameron: Huh, I think, um, I think Tony Blair was right in emphasizing the importance of the Atlantic relationship like that. I think it is the most important relationship for Britain; it would be if I was Prime Minister. But I think it needs to be a relationship where we speak frankly, and where when we have things we think really need to be done, we talk about them. And I think there was a danger with Tony Blair where sometimes some of these points really weren't raised enough.

Marjorie Miller: So he didn't stand up enough to Bush?

David Cameron: Huh, I, you know, I don't want to go off the record, ha ha. You know I think the special relationship... We are the junior partner, we'll always be the junior partner. But it should be a relationship based on frankness, based on solidity rather than being too slavish about it. That's what I've said in the past, that's what... I've always thought Britain should be the U.S.'s best friend rather than the newest friend. The newest friend tells you things you want to hear; the best friend tells you things you need to hear.

Was this just posturing by a green-friendly, pro-NHS, government-can-be-your-friend Tory who's under pressure to draw even the most minor distinction between his own positions and Labor's? That's what I thought, but this New York Review of Books story by Jonathan Freedland gave me the impression that current Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown was also drawing a bright line between himself and the White House (which would ironically undermine any plan by Cameron to make himself stand out, but also support the idea that there's a shift toward independence across the pond). Here's Freedland describing Brown's meeting with President Bush at Camp David this summer:

Gone were the chinos, first names, and chummy informality of the Bush– Blair summits. At Brown's request, prime minister and president wore suits and addressed each other formally. Brown wanted to convey that the relationship from now on would be strictly business. Brown's inability to make smalltalk underlined that he did not want to be Bush's buddy and that the "special relationship" would be between Britain and the US rather than between Number Ten and the White House. As one of Brown's allies remarked later: "It was fascinating to watch Gordon turn his pathologies into assets."[3]

Brown gave notice as well that he planned to continue the ongoing "drawdown" of British troops from Iraq. Accordingly, September saw the British withdraw 550 men from Basra city, so that Britain's entire presence in Iraq is now confined to Basra airport. More deeply, Brown conveyed an entirely different understanding of what he didn't call the war on terror. Central to it is proving to world Muslim opinion that the West offers more hope than violent Islamism.[4] Hence Brown's journey from Camp David to the United Nations, where he argued strongly for a blue-helmeted force in Darfur, armed with a muscular mandate, and for action on the Millennium Development Goals. Brown reckons that if the West is seen to be combating AIDS, poverty, and mass slaughter in Africa then the jihadists' denunciations of the decadent imperialist powers will fall on increasingly deaf ears in the Muslim world.

Exhibit A in the case for Brown's moving away from Bush (other than the force reduction in Iraq, of course, which I still think was just done to give Prince Harry an excuse for chickening out of his scheduled deployment) is the widely discussed comment that the Uniteds Kingdom and States would no longer be "joined at the hip," which was made by Foreign Office minister George Mark Malloch Brown — a man who really needs to be called by his full title(s), The Rt Hon. Lord George Mark Malloch Brown, Baron Malloch-Brown, KCMG, PC.

But on closer inspection, Malloch Brown's comments refer more to his own hopes, and to Labor's desparation to separate itself from the legacy of Tony Blair:

"It is very unlikely that the Brown-Bush relationship is going to go through the baptism of fire and therefore be joined together at the hip like the Blair-Bush relationship was," he was reported as saying.

"That was a relationship born of being war leaders together.

"There was an emotional intensity of being war leaders with much of the world against them. That is enough to put you on your knees and get you praying together."

He went on to speak of forging new links with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as with leaders in India and China.

"You need to build coalitions that are lateral, which go beyond the bilateral blinkers of the normal partners," he added.

"My hope is that foreign policy will become much more impartial."

The NYROB's thesis also seems to put a lot of weight onto the following passage from a pre-Camp David OpEd Gordon Brown published in the Washington Post:

Foundations, trusts, civil society and civic organizations -- links and exchanges between schools, universities, museums, institutes, churches, trade unions, sports clubs, societies -- were all engaged. Those in newspapers, journals, cultural institutions, the arts and literature sought to expose the difference between moderation and violent extremism.

So now, as then, the way ahead is to support all communities in developing a strong identity resistant to violent extremists trying to recruit vulnerable young people. We must undercut the terrorists' so-called "single narrative" and defeat their ideas. At home and abroad we must back mainstream and moderate voices and reformers, emphasizing the shared values that exist across faiths and communities. We must expose the contrast between great objectives to tackle global poverty and honor human dignity, and the evils of terrorists who would bomb and maim people irrespective of faith, indifferent to the very existence of human life.

This itself hardly a defiant declaration of independence, and it comes in the context of a yawnfest of historical proportions celebrating the great depth and passion of the Special Relationship.

My conclusion: No change in the special relationship. Sorry I doubted you, perfidious Albion. Send us your pounds. Hell, send us your Loonies!

My old colleague Ron Bailey gives a hip hip to this column by Michael Gerson that takes Israel Lobby authors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to task for crypto-anti-Semitism. FWIW, I have some severe reservations with their argument and their book, which departs from an interesting study of special-interest politics in D.C. to drag out such tired accusations as the supposed "second-class citizen" status of Israeli Arabs. (I have no doubt that Israeli Arabs get picked on as does any minority in any society, but if I were an Arab from whatever you want to call the former British Mandate territory, I'd rather live in Israel than in any Arab country with the possible exception of Jordan.)

Gerson also makes the valid point that Walt and Mearsheimer's case for the Israel lobby's having helped promote the invasion of Iraq is apparently complicated by the hesitation many actual Israeli leaders felt about the invasion — though to be fair they do not argue that the lobby gets orders directly from Jerusalem but that it is its own extreme player, largely unmoored from Israeli governance and in fact frequently counterproductive to the best interests of Israel. (One argument they make, which in other contexts I think both Ron and I would find compelling, is the moral hazard claim: that unconditional support from the U.S. encourages the Israeli leadership to make stupid decisions without feeling the consequences.)

Beyond that, Gerson's piece is pretty heavy on Godwin's-law fouls, caricatures of the argument under review and slopes so slippery you'd need a greased pole just to climb up to them...or something like that. But I was interested in this bit:

Perhaps many Americans actually prefer Israel's flawed democracy to the aging autocrats and corrupt monarchies of the region.

I didn't include this part of the discussion in our original Primary Source from Mearsheimer and Walt's visit, but their failure to appreciate how fond the American people really are of Israel is a central weakness in their argument. So I asked them about, and you get to read the response at no additional charge:

Tim: There's another side to this, though, and I appreciate your question earlier about, if you wanted a political future would you strongly criticize Israel. I wasn't aware of the Brezinksi episode you mentioned, and certainly we all live in 24-hour horror of Alan Dershowitz...

Stephen Walt: Jimmy Carter is another example.

Tim: Yeah, but you know, the American people support Israel, in their hearts, and how convinced are we that they had to be argued into that position?

Susan Brenneman: That's my question too, and does this book look at the kind of grassroots culture, that we all grew up believing Israel was our brother, sister, you know?

Stephen Walt: Well [to Mearsheimer], I'll, I'll add anything that you leave out.

John Mearsheimer: There's no doubt that if you look at American public opinion, Americans support the existence of Israel and think that Israel is a net plus. No question about that. But it's largely a myth that there is broad and deep support for Israel in the American body politic.

Stephen: It's, it's I think a myth that the American people want the United States to give it unconditional support.

John: Well let me unpack the argument. Uh, I mean, I believe that one of the reasons that the lobby works so hard to, to shape the discourse in a pro-Israel direction, and is so concerned about people like me and Steve is in large part because they understand that the support is not that broad and not that deep. As Steve pointed out, we're talking about support for the present policy — we're not talking about support for the existence of Israel. And as Steve pointed out, we're talking about support for the existing policy. Let me say a few words about that.

The Pew Foundation has done polling between 1993 and the present, asking people whether they favor the Palestinians or the Israelis. And although it's clear that most Americans favor the Israelis over the Palestinians, only once in that entire period have more than 50% of Americans said that they favor the Israelis over the Palestinians. In most cases you find a huge chunk of people favor neither side. It's also clear from some polls of the Pew Foundation that a large number of Americans, over 70% of foreign policy people understand that one of the principle causes of global discontent with the United States is Israel. So American elites are well aware that this has gotten us into a lot of trouble. Unconditional support. And again, the American people are not as kneejerk as one might think, in their support for this, uh, present relationship.

With regard to the depth of the commitment, it's quite clear if you look at poll data that most Americans don't support the existing policy of unconditional aid and our one-sided policy in favor of Israel over the Palestinians. In fact polls show that roughly three-quarters of Americans believe that the United States should favor neither side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Including an Anti-Defamation League study from 2005; that's three-quarters of the American people who believe that the United States should favor neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis in settling that conflict. And this runs contrary to what the actual policy is. And one final point on this: 60% of Americans, according to a Pew survey, favor withholding aid from Israel if it resists U.S. pressure to settle the conflict with the Palestinians.

So again, the point here is not that the American people want to jettison Israel, or that Americans don't have respect for Israel, or that Americans don't believe the United States should work to ensure the survival of Israel. That's not in doubt, and it's certainly not in doubt with regard to me and Steve. The point is that the idea that the American people are demanding that we give Israel unconditional aid because they're so deeply attached to it does not mesh with the available poll data.

Mearsheimer and Walt are currently in heavy We're-not-anti-Semites mode, which is pretty much the definition of a no-win situation: Nothing sounds more anti-Semitic than telling people "I'm not an anti-Semite..." You could say that they have only themselves to blame for that, and their broadly distributed claim about how critics of Israel are silenced is self-refuting. Still, attacks like Gerson's fail even to do any damage to the target.

A provocative piece in the Washington Monthly poses (and sort of answers) the question “Why Is Bob Herbert Boring?”  Herbert is the columnist who, along with the brief-exceeding economist Paul Krugman, anchors the left side of the New York Times op-ed page. The author of the Washington Monthly article, T. A. Frank, is pretty brutal about Herbert’s marginalization by the chattering class:

I've spoken to a couple dozen journalists of the center-left variety, and most, after insisting on being off the record or unnamed, confess to reading Bob Herbert rarely, if ever. "I've literally never heard someone say, 'Hey, did you read Bob Herbert today?' Never in my entire life," said one reporter for a Washington political magazine. Said another: "I haven't read him in years." The New Republic may have captured it in a recent headline for a hit piece on John Tierney: "How could a New York Times columnist be more boring than Bob Herbert?"

For the record, I don’t think my Pittsburgh pal John Tierney’s N.Y. Times op-ed column was boring. But I see why Herbert gets accused of failing to interest readers. It’s partly because of the theory floated in the sub-headline on Frank’s piece: "The Perils of Punditry for the Powerless."

One of my favorite quotations, variously attributed to Jean de la Bruyere and Horace Walpole, goes: "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think." Herbert, as Frank notes, feels for "the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America," but not in a way that engages hyper-educated NYT readers who drool over Maureen Dowd’s drollery. Frank suggests that if Herbert were to "think about who his audience is and what he wants it to do, he could be one of the most powerful liberal voices in the country."

Maybe, but as long as Herbert is preaching, even to the converted, he may have to reckon with Sam Goldwyn’s famous observation that, if you want to send a message, call Western Union — or, these days, send an e-mail.

If you haven't taken a gander at our Primary Source from Gov. Schwarzenegger's visit, hop on over and check it out. And if that doesn't fill you up, here's some additional schwarzenschmoozing, in which the governor provides his views on budget discipline, real estate and my weight problem...

Tim Cavanaugh: You just mentioned a lot of Democratic names, and I'm wondering, how far do you think you can continue to push your own party with comments like "Dying at the box office" and things like that. I mean, is there a little bit of buck-stops-here-ism, given that it was your own party that was holding up the budget?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: If it is, if I am the leader of the party, then I take credit for it or I take the blame for it. But that's not the way it works in California. That's the way it works in Great Britain, that's the way it works in Germany and Austria, that's the way it works in other states. You know, if you talk to, you know, Crist, he would say you know, I did this, through the party, then I came in, changed things around, put my guy in, and now they are the party that is in a sense, me, and in a sense my philosophy. Well that's not the way it works in California. Maybe that's the way we should do it, but I mean that's not the way it works.

So what I do is, I do that, if I see you, um, you know, gaining weight, and gaining weight and gaining weight and gaining weight, I will eventually say — if I care at all about you — I would say, You know something? If you continue this way, you may get into serious trouble, and you'll maybe get a heart attack, or maybe, you know, have problems with diabetes and stuff like that and you can't move around as quickly and you will get tired, and, blah blah all those things. But, here's what I'd do if I were you: I would go and exercise every day, stop eating at night, eat only two meals, be disciplined, and blah blah and all those kinds of things, I would give you a plan. I'd say either you can follow that plan or not. So it's not really that I'm criticizing you, it's just that, look, I care about you, and I want you to live and feel good, as good as I do. And do as well as I do.

So that's what I basically did with the Republican Party, is to go to them and say, Look: Here's the, the swing voters, here's the independents, here's the majority of Republican voters, that actually love the health care proposal, that a majority of them voted for, and any of the polls show that they like what we're doing, they like the idea of taking care of the environment and fighting global warming. They like that I signed AB 32. I say, there's an endless amount of situations where the voters, the Republican voters, are with me. But not the politicians and not the party guys. So what I'm saying is, You should start looking at that. So if you want to become the majority party, look at those things, and look at those independents, and you will see: If you will be inclusive, and if you start changing some of the policies, and direct, you know, do things more for California than just for this one group, I think that we could be again the majority party, and that's where the action is.

Keep reading for more from the ed board, and the governor's real estate tips for smart shoppers...

We are very pleased to announce that Erwin Chemerinsky, the Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, has been offered and has accepted the position of founding dean of the Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. As always, the appointment must be approved by the UC Board of Regents. We go forward with excitement and the unqualified belief that working together, we will create a truly outstanding law school.

Throughout the past week, we have maintained an open dialogue. Over the weekend,

Chancellor Michael Drake traveled to North Carolina to meet in person and at length with Professor Chemerinsky. Many issues were addressed in depth, including several areas of miscommunication and misunderstanding. All issues were resolved to our mutual satisfaction.

Our new law school will be founded on the bedrock principle of academic freedom.

The chancellor reiterated his lifelong, unqualified commitment to academic freedom, which extends to every faculty member, including deans and other senior administrators.   

Professor Chemerinsky expressed his excitement at working with campus leadership in founding the new school and in representing and leading the school during its growth and development.

We resolved to put recent events behind us and immediately begin to focus on our shared vision of creating a law school dedicated to providing the best education for future lawyers, to producing the finest legal scholarship, and to helping to address the legal needs of Orange County and the nation. The law school, like all great educational institutions, will be a place of great diversity, where differing viewpoints are nurtured, debated and cherished. 

Our goal is to create nothing less than one of the finest law schools in the country.

We believe that together, and with the many talented faculty and staff at the University of California, Irvine, we will succeed.

Michael V. Drake                        Erwin Chemerinsky

Chancellor                      Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science

University of California, Irvine        Duke University

In the 9:48 p.m. version of our Erwin Chemerinsky story, Times reporters Garrett Therolf and Henry Weinstein drop a bombshell guaranteed to chill the hearts of any newspaper opinion editor:

Chemerinsky and [UC Irvine Chancellor Michael] Drake agreed the new dean's dismissal was motivated in part by an Aug. 16 opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, the same day the job offer was made. In it, Chemerinsky asserted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was "about to adopt an unnecessary and mean-spirited regulation that will make it harder for those on death row to have their cases reviewed in federal court."

But Drake and Chemerinsky split sharply on what role the article played in the decision to fire the incoming dean and whether academic freedom was at stake.

"Shouldn't we as academics be able to stand up for people on death row?" Chemerinsky said.

Drake said "we had talked to him in June about writing op-ed pieces and that he would have to focus on things like legal education in this new role, and then here comes another political piece. It wasn't the subject, it was its existence. What he said doesn't matter."

He would have to focus on things like legal education is the part that really tells me Michael Drake isn't going to win any Manager of the Year prizes any time soon. I guess academic freedom's just another word for "stick to the hyper-narrow confines of your job, at least when communicating with the public." No more Karl Rove pieces for you, Dean Lemann!

The deal-breaking op-ed is here. Amina Khan poured a heaping of historical doubt on Drake's he'll-upset-the-Regents excuse here. Some righty defenses of Chemerinsky here. And check today's editorial, and op-ed by Douglas Kmiec.

Astronauts from Space Shuttle Endeavor, including flight commander Scott Kelly, teacher in space Barbara Morgan and specialist Alvin Drew, stopped by to fill the editorial board in on the shuttle's last days, recapturing the moon, the future of Das Marsproject and more. Some highlights:

Shuttle, we hardly knew ye...

Tim: You mentioned the Orion program. What are your thoughts on the idea that the shuttle is now an idea whose time has come and gone? It's almost like we're back to a capsule model.

Barbara Radding Morgan: I don't think its time has come and gone. I think we're — to get to the moon and go on to Mars, the Orion-type capsule is the right thing to do. But I think people are, you know, you read a lot in the newspapers about how bad the shuttle is, etc., you know, and I think we are all going to look back with great nostalgia for the shuttle, because it truly is a remarkable flying machine. And I think we can now speak firsthand and tell you what a remarkable flying machine it is.

Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr.: I think that things come and go in cycles, as I'm sure you've seen in the press world, where the government focus comes back and forth. In the 1970s the focus was to make sure we got something that was reusable. So like you'd see these — it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars for each rocket, and mostly they'd end up either orbiting the sun or at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. So the goal then was trying to figure out how to build something we could reuse. One thing we found out was that, at least based on that initial concept, that it's really as expensive to reuse these things as it is to start from scratch. So you're looking at using something that's more disposable. Plus, there's no runway on the moon because there's no atmosphere, so there's no sense sending a winged vehicle out to the moon or Mars. That's what drives the capsule, you know; we're not going to be reusing these things, at least not sending them back like airliners, which was the initial concept back in the seventies.

Barbara: I think there will be some use for winged vehicles on Mars because you've got atmosphere. Like Al said, it's cyclic, and it depends on what your next goal is, what you need to get there.

Risk, Russkies and foam:

Paul Thornton: How do all these discussions of safety, because it really seems like all the foam problems are really hard to fix. And you know we're constantly talking about that, and you see these reports of two engineers giving a mission a no-go, recently. How do your discussions go, how do these resonate in the astronaut corps? Because I mean, you guys are still going up. How do you view these safety concerns?

Alvin: It's a risk. It's a known risk. The very first day we interviewed, before we were astronauts — this was just to get on the job — John Young stood up in front of us and whips out a bunch statistics about loss of pilots and loss of aircraft during World War II and Vietnam... And then he whips out their model statistics, the probabilities for shuttle losses. The punch line of the whole thing was that the risk in shuttle missions was equivalent to flying 60 missions over Ploesti or Hanoi. And he said, "This is real risk. This is not just flying across the Atlantic. Keep that uppermost in your thoughts as you go through your interviews this week. I know you all think this is a dream come true, but you need to remember there's real danger involved in this..." So all of us are aware that there are risks, and we are continuing to try to mitigate those risks...

Barbara: I think I can speak to that too. I was the backup, in the teacher-in-space program I was Christa [McAuliffe]'s backup, trained with them, trained with the Challenger crew, wanted to be there. Um, and we had the accident. NASA asked me if I wanted to continue on in the role of teacher in space, and fly within the next couple of years. And I said yes, and it wasn't just that I said yes without thinking, I gave it really, real serious thought. But the thing that kept coming back to me was, there were kids all over the country looking at adults to see what adults do in a bad situation. And I felt it was really important for them to see that we figure out, we go back and figure out what we did wrong, fix it, and we try to make it better... The thing is that space flight, as Al said, is risky, and when you get into the bowels of the orbiter and you look at it and you see how many zillions of wires and how complex all the programs are to make these things work, you almost wonder why we haven't had more accidents...

Tim: Is the country too risk averse? I mean, should we just get used to the idea that if people are going to do this people are going to die, and, and we shouldn't, you know, stop heaven and earth every time it happens?

Al: There's a balance you have to achieve between... You have to take calculated risks but you don't want to take unnecessary risks. So I think it's good that NASA gets this scrutiny every time we do take a risk because it means we don't take those risks cavalierly. But we do... We're definitely more risk averse than the generation previous. Uh, from my perspective, those were the people who had gone through World War II, and seen lots of people dying, and had a sense that that was part of the cost of undertaking risks like that. And we haven't seen anything like that for a generation, so our threshold for what we will accept has gone down a lot. Is that right or wrong? I don't know that there's a good answer to that, but we are more risk averse.

Tim: Does the lack of an economic and military competitor to the United States make us more risk averse?

Al: It's more than that. Back in the 1960s, we were pretty much in a struggle with the Soviet Union to decide who was going to be the dominant nation on this planet. And at that point the space race was a substitute, I consider, for a world war. The nation marshaled its resources and economy to undertake something that was extremely difficult. It's the same thing you do in warfare. Who can marshal their forces the fastest. Whoever could demonstrate that was probably going to be the survivor; whoever didn't was probably going to go away in the following decades, which is what happened. So we had a real sense of urgency about the space race that was much bigger than putting a flag on the moon, whether it was for science or for exploration. Right now we don't see anybody out there — I mean even if we had a competitor like China, who was a direct threat to us — I mean, you don't have anybody in China saying "We will bury you," or having an openly adversarial relationship with the U.S. like it was with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. That sense of fear isn't there the way it was in 1957 with Sputnik. It's just not there right now, so we look at that cost-vs.-risk analysis that we go through and it's just not going to have the same — you're not going to take the same kind of risk...

Coming up: Our copy chief's 13-year-old son grills shuttlers about the ISS, and the commander lays into the Times for media bias...

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of the Community Coalition (for substance abuse prevention & treatment) paid a visit to the Ed Board the other day, and held forth on, among other topics, his organization's history, career tech, LAUSD, cheers and jeers for the Community Redevelopment Agency in South L.A., and his group's evolution from an early-nineties response to substance abuse to an "openly progressive" advocacy organization. One of the most interesting parts of the talk centered on foster care, and his belief that relatives of parent-challenged kids are getting shortchanged by the system:

Marqueece: The county and state really have a two-tiered system that privileges privatized foster care, or what we call stranger care. So, you know, your niece or a nephew shows up at your house and says your sister got locked up. Will you to take the kids? You say yes, the county says great, you got it, we're done; your niece is off our caseload. If you say no, then the county has to take her to a foster care home and say can you take this child? Do you have a bed? The foster care home says yes, the foster care home then gets $3,000 a month to take care of the child. In addition to health care, in addition to educational services, in addition to respite, in addition to transportation assistance.

Tim: $3,000?

Marqueece: Yeah, it can go up to $5,500 if the kids were drug-exposed or, you know, if you've got other problems that can be documented it can go up. It tends not to fall too far below $3,000, just for a straight-up taking a child. The family member on the other hand is in a bit of a bind because they have to qualify in the same way that a group home would. So, you know, you have to have a bed for the child, an individual bed for the child. If it's a girl and a boy they have to have separate rooms. You get an inspection from the county that's the same way the business would get an inspection, except the county doesn't help you get up to par. And every study that’s ever been done on foster care, on the whole, and again, there are anecdotes on both sides of the terrible things that happen to children with family members and in privatized foster care, but on the whole every study that's been done shows children who go into family care have much better outcomes, in terms of completing high school, staying out of prison, avoiding teenage pregnancy, all the things that are important when you're dealing with somebody who's really in child-to-teenage years.

Tim: Can I just, uh... The county, uh. OK, my brother murders his wife. The county takes his kid. So the county goes to me and says, You wanna take this kid? And I say sure. Is that the end of the story, or does the county then come to my place to make sure I have a bed and all that stuff?

Marqueece: If you say yes, the county says OK, let's make sure you're qualified.

Tim: But then they don't give me any money?

Marqueece: No.

Tim: Well then they should mind their own damn business.

Robert Greene: But hasn't that changed now? I mean there was this whole law that — [State Assembly member and Community Coalition founder] Karen Bass got a law...

Marqueece: Karen got some legislation passed last year...

Robert: ... and a huge federal waiver as well that was approved and, and...

Marqueece: Now there are, there are a few things families can get. One is they can get a clothing allowance, which is about $150 per child when the school starts and school ends. You can qualify for that. You can also qualify for something called the Chafee Scholarship which used to be unavailable to kids who went with relatives. Chafee Scholarship is if you are in foster care and you get accepted to a state college or university, your tuition's paid for by the state, your books, your room and board. And you get, you know, a stipend. That became available, as a result of Karen's legislation, to kids who are in family care as well. Some healthcare benefits, limited healthcare benefits became available as well.

Green Dot founder and CEO Steve Barr dropped by the editorial board this afternoon, along with his chief academic officer Sandy Blazer, to discuss his project for taking over Locke High School. Here's a bit of his presentation, with questions from the peanut gallery:

Tim: Am I right in thinking that Locke is a bigger project than you've taken on in the past?

Barr: Yeah.

Tim: Then the first of two pie-in-the-sky questions: How big can your model scale?

Barr: We don't want our model to scale. We want our model to be a model that can enforce change, that all schools adopt that model. So what I'm saying by that is, it's a little bit tricky: We don't want to be, you know, ten years from now, be the only group out there taking over high schools, fighting this fight. We gotta figure out a faster way to get them to ask us, and then take all our tenets within their model. That's always been the idea. So we think what'll happen, and this was the bet at Jefferson, and it's going to be what's going to happen after Locke, at least the way we see the world: What happens when those schools are open and those teachers are making more money under improved work conditions, and they're successful. What do you think the teachers at Jordan are going to do, and at Washington Prep and at Fremont. It's already happened, and Joel [Rubin] reported on it, after the original revolt, is that there are schools lined up, like the planes lined up at LAX, hovering over the city, that want to do this. We don't have the capacity to serve all those schools. We've had to do a lot of pushing off those teacher collectives that want to do it. But we sure as hell want to show you how to do it, and teach you to do the same thing, and help you with your the back office, and we'll give you our union contract. But the idea that this is really some market share issue, that we want ten more schools to prove it... We will keep doing what we're doing until the district looks like us. I think Locke will be, will create a demand. I think it really will. I think there was a demand for it when those teachers revolted that day. That was just... The calls that came in the next week or so were just bizarre. I mean, chapter chairs. It's not like it was just the lunatic fringe of teachers; this was the front line of UTLA's defense.

Joel Rubin: Assuming it takes a year or two for the district to, even, you know, for that break to happen, what is your capacity? Could you do another high school the year after Locke?

Barr: Yeah.

Rubin: And another one after that?

Barr: Yeah.

Lisa Richardson: Could you do a Santee?

Barr: Absolutely. If you have the... See, the reason why, in some ways it seems humongous with, at some point, you look at Locke and Watts and say: My God, look at all the problems. In another sense, especially after this — this was the hardest year of Green Dot. We doubled in size, and we took in attendance area. That was pretty hard. Can we do that with the advantage of not being in the facility business? Which takes up 80% of the bandwidth of the executive team of this organization — converting crappy churches into marginal classrooms is really hard. The C.U.P. process, I mean, tenant improvements — can you get that on time? I mean it's an insane amount of work. And also pulling off what we're pulling off — all of that with 30% less money. So we have meetings where the teachers want this, the teachers want that. I think we've come pretty close to hitting our ceiling for potential on the one-off charter schools. I think the average is 700 [API scores]; I think we could probably get to 750, if we stopped running.

Writer Jennifer Tang tells us how Barbie's butt can teach kids about economics:

In the 1960s, long before outsourcing became rampant in other industries, Mattel and other toy manufacturers opened factories in Asia, employing thousands of poor, single women. My mother was one of them.

She didn't think her employer was exploitative, though low wages were the main reason she wanted to emigrate to the United States....

As it turned out, Barbie didn't stay in Hong Kong either. In the 1980s, Barbie's provenance changed -- most were "Made in the Philippines," with some in made in Malaysia or Thailand.

What happened? Progress.

Writer Garret Keizer offers a developer's guidebook for getting projects past local resistance. Richard Nemec notes that a recent Air Resources Board appointee holds stock in several companies she'll have to deal with in her new post. Columnist Ronald Brownstein gives his post-Labor Day election round-up for the early campaign season.

The editorial board recommends seven bills become law before the state legislature retires for recess. It explains why Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is both wrong and right in his refusal to support a state clean ports plan. And finally it welcomes Iran's release of two Iranian-American prisoners but wonders what message the country is trying to send.

Readers react to the decline of blood banks and the attempts to reach out to Latino donors. Oakland's Chris Morgan writes, "...let's get moving on revising [donation] criteria so that we don't have to rely on Midwesterners during the next earthquake."

Readers give Michael McGough whatfor over his recent Opinion Daily "If Gore had won ... "

Robert Land goes to Godwin's Law hell and back, and becomes the umpteenth person to discover the stunning Moe Howard/Hitler connection:

Clinton was wrong in signing the republicanazi bill 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, under pressure from the Republcanazi Concress.

Bush and his fellow Republicanazi's, supported by stooges like the Times' senior editorial writer. who shamelessly finds ways to excuse the excesses of a government not dedicated to the well being of her citizens, but dedicated to consolidating control over those citizens, are simple profiteers bleeding the USA dry and attempting to establish a HOMELAND like DER FATHERLAND.

Just like a fellow with a funny mustashe did a few decades ago in a small European country, assisted and enabled by people like The Times' senior editorial writer.

Ziggy Heil to you and your new Fuher.

Robert Land

From the Volunteer State, Todd and Deb and Ricky and Tom and Diane, with Carol and Ted and Alice abstaining, vote against revenge:

Dear Mr. Michael McGough,

If Gore had become Prez. instead of the Texacutioner, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. It's as simple as that.

The Dow would be at 15 and the NASDAQ would be a 6.

Everyone knows it. Everyone sees the con, just as we have for the past 7 years.

So let's not screw up and vote for revenge again.

Have a great day...!

Todd/Deb/Ricky/Tom/Diane

Nashville Memphis TN

Jim Hassinger makes it hurt:

In order to come to your conclusions, you just have to ignore every single word that Gore has spoken since 2000. Must hurt to be a Bush apologist when your guy is a complete psychopath.

---

"... the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of  little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Jonathan Swift

Jim Hassinger

From Oak Park, Ill., city of wide lawns and narrow minds, Benjamin Iglar-Mobley gets the restore-Gore movement underway:

Michael McGough stretches credulity to the breaking point in trying to equate a President Gore with our current White House occupant. The very domestic spying programs McGough claims Gore would have sought had he gained the presidency in 2000 are the ones Gore denounces in his book 'The Assault On Reason.'

I feel sorry for those like Michael McGough trying to come up with excuses for the worst president in US history; they have an impossible task. However, he concludes with "We'll never know for sure" how Al Gore would have conducted himself as president. There's a fairly obvious way we can find out: restore Gore to his rightful office in 2008.

Benjamin Iglar-Mobley

Gretchen Kranch says the dead don't need civil liberties:

In response to your article about whether our civil liberties would still have been intact after 09/11 if Gore had won the election. Yes.... of course they would have been. I believe this to be the case since I have no doubt at all that President Gore's work day on 09/12/01 would have been no different from his work day on 09/10/01. Like Mr. Clinton after the first World Trade Center attack he would have responded by telling the nation not to be alarmed since this was no big deal. Then he would have resumed dialing for Buddhist dollars.

Since a Gore Administration would have been loath to term what happened on 09/11/07 as an attack there would have been no follow-up action taken to prevent more of them. Therefore there would have been no resulting 'assault on civil liberties'.

And please don't insult my intelligence by asserting that President Gore would have invaded Afghanistan. At the time, the Democrats were opposed to even doing that much.

Of course, this would only have emboldened the terrorists to level more attacks at us leading to thousands more deaths and injuries. But at least the civil liberties of the dead would have been protected. I'm sure their families would have appreciated that.

g.kranch

The editorial board says the next U.S. Attorney General should be the un-Gonzales:

The next attorney general shouldn't be chosen because of an inspirational life story or because he is a "close friend" of the president (Bush's description). The Senate shouldn't accept anything less than a distinguished lawyer who can be trusted to insulate criminal prosecution from even the appearance of partisan meddling. But Senate Democrats should be careful not to demand more -- a nominee whose policy views match theirs.

The board criticizes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget cuts that favor yacht owners over the elderly, and wonders why, of all the streets in the city, councilman Richard Alarcon chose to re-zone the stretch where his new wife lives.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg offers a less-than-fond farewell to the attorney general, and California Assembly speaker Fabian Nunez explains why his healthcare plan is the best plan there is. Parent of an L.A. Unified second-grader L.J. Williamson doesn't think schools should fund healthcare for part-time cafeteria workers at the expense of kids' already low-budget meals. And Alan M. Collinge asks Congress to stop giving the student loan industry so much leeway in collecting debt and high fees.

Readers offer their thoughts on Moshe Ya'alon's take on the Middle East. Wiley Cunningham of Los Angeles writes, "To suggest that the issue is between ideological Islam and the West is part of a dangerous ideology that will only alienate our allies and turn the entire Muslim world against us."

An Al Gore fan takes issue with my Opinion Daily asking what if Gore had been elected in 2000 and 9/11 had happened? I floated the possibility, based on the Clinton administration's anti-terror initiatives, that a Gore administration might not have been the diametric opposite of the Bush administration when it came to wiretapping and other controversial techniques in the "war on terror."

Unfair, suggested my correspondent. Hadn't I read The Assault on Reason, in which Gore lambastes the Bush administration for, among other sins, subverting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? In the same vein, Media Matters took me to task for not quoting Gore's voluminous criticisms of Bush's surveillance/security policies.

I have read Gore's critiques of Bush's Terrorist Surveillance Program, in his books and elsewhere. (They read as if they were cribbed from L.A. Times editorials!) But the answer to my "What if?" is still blowin' in the wind, because Al Gore the would-be president and Al Gore the actual president are still two different entities.

A President Gore might well have sought congressional approval of NSA wiretapping, but he might also have been moved to the right on this issue by the arguments of intelligence professionals (not to mention Vice President Joe Lieberman). We'll never know for sure. That said, I should have cited non-President Gore's criticism of Bush's policies. 

Elections do matter, and I don't accept Mort Kondracke's dictum that, no matter who wins, the president is always Gerald Ford. But holding office does make a difference, which is why no one pays attention when presidential candidates promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Oh, and remember how candidate George W. Bush trashed nation-building?

He ain't jefe, but he's still Big Brother...

Is Fidel Castro dead? Rumors are flying, once again. One Roger Sterling says U.S. officials are planning to announce the death of the brutal dictator, oh, about 41 minutes ago. Meanwhile, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque says Castro is still recovering like the Beanie Baby secondary market. More on that from Voice of America.

More rumors from the blogs.

More rumors from the MSM.

Related:

I sit shiva with the Castro Death Watch.

Readers hate me for sitting shiva with the Castro Death Watch.

I give a bronx cheer to the new generation of midget Castros.

Readers give me a raspberry right back.

We'll keep watching the rumor...

I don’t know whom the following story would discomfit more: Lou Dobbs or Michael Moore. But the BBC is reporting that a Canadian woman crossed the border into Montana to give birth to quadruplets.

The four Jepp girls — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia (named for my favorite Canadian-born journalist?) — came into the world stateside "because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units," according to the Beeb. Maybe the parents should have tried a Cuban hospital.

These four "border babies" presumably are entitled to claim U.S. citizenship and the jobs that rightly belong to real Americans. Maybe they'll end up in a duplex in Twinsburg. At least the Dionne quintuplets, out of respect for U.S. sovereignty, were born in Canada.

You spoke up; we heard...

I get clawed up like a fieldmouse for my daily "Let the mighty liberal hawks soar"...

From Concordia, MO, Penelope Kuhn delivers a Show-me State dose of skepticism about my terms:

What's the score?

In your article about "liberal hawks" you are STILL talking about victory and defeat, win and lose, as though Iraq and the U.S. were high-school football teams.  They are not.  They are places whose inhabitants' lives -- physical and/or economic and/or moral and/or emotional and/or spiritual lives -- are endangered by this goal-less, show-off war.  Shock and awe, indeed!

To me, "win" is a transitive verb.  Win what?  A medal?  a nice bouquet of flowers to take home to wifey?  a round of applause from everyone who stayed safe at home? 

As long as writers like you insist on throwing around nebulous terms like "victory", there is a danger that people will believe that "victory" is a goal.  Then the carousel stops and we all live happily ever after?  "Stability" would serve us a bit better if anyone could describe, clearly, what it entails.

Penelope Kuhn

From Eugene, Oregon  Patrick G. Gardner says make the madness stop:

You can speak of win and lose in Iraq all you want but it means little to those of us who just want the trillion dollar boondoggle to stop...The best way to stop the mess is to just do that...There was no honor going into this fiasco so why is it so important getting out...If the Iraqis want to find resolution they will...one way or the other...with or without us.

Patrick G. Gardner

On the other hand, Jim Murray writes all the way from La Jolla, the jewel of the Pacific, to give a thumbs up:

Tim, thanks for your great editorial about the mighty liberal hawks. Keep pinching the bloviaters.

Jim Murray

Anne-Marie Slaughter also takes a drubbing for her Blowback item "Bipartisanship is good for both sides." From the city of brotherly love, Paul Lukasiak calls a word-count violation

Dear Editors

Imagine my surprise after reading that the “Blowback Guidelines” required responses to be no more than 700 words, only to find that Ann Marie Slaughter’s response to Matt Yglesias’s column was 879 words.

Now, if Slaughter had actually provided viable solutions and ideas in those 879 words, the exception to the Blowback rules would be understandable.  But Slaughter does nothing of the sort;  she simply repeats the same failed mantra of “bipartisanship” that got us into this war that she supported, and which results in continued bloodshed.

Slaughter needs to spend some time outside of academia, and in the real world, because we are not talking about a theoretical out-of-control executive and a theoretical GOP Congressional minority that marches in lockstep with that President.  We are talking about a very real crisis in this country that has cost us the lives of thousands of Americans, half a trillion dollars, and our reputation on the international stage.    Slaughter wants us to believe that there are actually 11 Republican Senators that are willing to defy George W. Bush, and force his hand on Iraq policy. 

But Slaughter can’t name them.  She lives in an academic fantasy world, rather than the very real world of domestic politics.   Unfortunately, Slaughter’s fantasy world continues to create torrents of very real blood being shed by Iraqis and Americans on a daily basis. 

Ultimately, Slaughter is completely unable to offer anything but bland generalities about the way forward through “bipartisanship”.   And its rather annoying that the Blowback rules were broken because she has an impressive resume, but offered nothing of substance despite being allow to blather on for 179 more words than the rest of us are allowed.   

And that’s all I have to say…and I said it in under 300 words.

Cordially

Paul Lukasiak

Philadelphia, PA

From the Gulf of Mexico, Mike Sweet says stay out the Bushes:

Poor Bill Richardson. The governor of New Mexico gave the wrong answer Thursday at a presidential debate sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group. Asked whether he believes people are born gay or whether it’s a choice, Richardson replied: "It's a choice,” adding: “I’m not a scientist.” Nor does he play one on TV.

Richardson’s comment was widely pronounced a gaffe, and he later retracted it, saying that that he had misunderstood the question and that he does not believe people choose to be gay. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with it,” he could have added.)
    
This episode recalls Timothy Noah’s witty observation that liberals believe everything is caused by environmental factors except sexual orientation, and conservatives believe everything is called by genetics except sexual orientation.
   
OK, it’s not that simple. But it’s a fact that genetic explanations of other factors — such as intelligence or aptitude at math — are anathema to liberals but intriguing to conservatives like Charles “Bell Curve” Murray. Yet, as Noah noted,  some Christian conservatives believe that sexual orientation can be altered through prayer or therapy — and PDQ, if Ted Haggard is any guide. Just don't call it "social engineering."

It isn’t just sexuality and IQ that can be explained genetically. So can world-historical events. Recently Nicholas Wade, a New York Times science writer, offered this precis of a new book called “A Farewell to Alms”:

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Clark, according to Wade,  says these  values could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But the genetic explanation seems to appeal to Wade, who notes that “geneticists, with information from the human genome now at their disposal, have begun to detect ever more recent instances of human evolutionary change like the spread of lactose tolerance in cattle-raising people of northern Europe just 5,000 years ago.” Of course, just because you can digest ice cream doesn’t mean you should spend your hard-earned wages on it!

The idea that genes gave us the Protestant work ethic is likely to creep out both liberals (who will see it as a rationalization of income inequality), and conservatives (who like to preach in reference to the so-called underclass that “it’s the culture, stupid”). My hunch is that, except perhaps as a defense of tolerance for gays, “they were born that way” is an argument most politicians, left and right, will want to avoid, since most political platforms involve behavior modification. If genes rule, why bother voting?

ACLU of Southern California says [pdf] that Pedro Guzman, the 29-year-old developmentally disabled American citizen mistakenly deported to Mexico in May, has been found. Best wishes to Guzman and his family this happy occasion.

Guzman, a Los Angeles native, was picked up on a trespassing charge by L.A. County Sheriffs, who turned him over to immigration authorities who in turn deported him. He subsequently vanished. As the editorial board weighed in:

What that means is that Guzman's trespass has earned him a sentence of banishment and disappearance, a fate common in third-rate dictatorships but abhorred in civilized nations. And the federal government's response has been to evade responsibility and to refuse the family's pleas for help.

ACLU promises details on Guzman's reappearance at a press conference today at 1 p.m. :

ACLU of Southern California
1616 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

This is absitively posolutely your last chance to vote in the Be Joel Stein contest. Before we call the race for Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple, get in there and make your vote count. And watch this space for Stein's wrapup column and a brief online chat about the whole sad story, both coming Friday.

Jean-Luc Godard, watch your back! Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni... Which art-house lion of generations past will be next?

Just kidding, J-L! Next to the 89-year-old Bergman and the 94-year-old Antonioni, the 77-year-old viellard terrible of the New Wave is practically a kid. Two underexplained points about the deaths of the elder filmmakers this week: First, despite their association in popular imagination with the Baby Boom's cultural exfoliation, Bergman and Antonioni both were primarily icons for fifties-era hipsters. As A.S. Hamrah illustrates in his must-read review of Ray Manzarek's Light My Fire, the art-house film had become mainly a nostalgia trip by the sixties:

...dust particles made out of degraded '50s hipsterisms that floated down to college level; ideological positions that must've appeared very out-there but were getting a little shopworn by the time they came into Ray's and Jim's possession. These included—but weren't limited to—Chess Records blues, Ferlinghetti-approved books, Bergman films, Weimar Germany (at one point Manzarek describes something as "so Weimar"), Eastern spirituality, 19th century German Romanticism, even musique concrète...

Second, the reactions I've seen to the two filmmakers' deaths have been remarkably insular: Either they meant a lot to you or they meant nothing to you. There's been very little (beyond noting the connection between The Seventh Seal and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey) to indicate why anybody who never took a film history course should be interested. But there are plenty of relatively recent movies that have continued to draw on two of the late directors' sixties classics. Without Bergman's Persona, you wouldn't have Fight Club, for example. Antonioni's most popular movie, Blow-Up, may be a little underwhelming if you're expecting an Austin Powers-esque romp through the swingin' sixties, as I was when I first saw it. But there's a good argument that it was the most influential movie of the postwar era.

Much of that influence is direct: in virtual remakes like The Conversation and Blow Out, and in the film's alleged breaking of the full-frontal nudity barrier (you'll need to do your own frame-by-frame exploration of that claim). But Blow-Up also continues to be the patron of numberless cheesy did-the-crime-even-happen? thrillers. From David Hemmings making it with two groovy chicks in Blow-Up to Jodie Foster getting all crazy in Flightplan may strike you as a downward slope, but that's the way cultural transmission works. And we're not even counting the ultimate grandchild of Antonioni: the 2000 presidential election.

We're in the home stretch of the Be Joel Stein contest, and turnout's been lower than you'd see in a special election for Maywood commissioner of cat litter disposal. Now's your chance to get behind the hapless Times Friday columnist, pile some more glory on Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple (who is cleaning Stein's clock as of this writing) or vote for any of our underdog finalists. Does Stein stand a chance? Is the bris lobby really that strong? You can make a difference by casting your vote today! And again tomorrow.

As the debate over the debate winds down, I'm gearing up for the debate over the debate over the debate. To wit: How many Second Amendment advocates will it take to give Joe Biden a hiding over his insulting comments toward a gun owner named Jered Townsend?

The First State's senior senator fired up his feisty demeanor twice last night, first by making a nasty crack about a proud gun owner and later by calling the evening's touchy-feely last topic by its true name: "a ridiculous exercise." As you might expect, it's the gun crack that's got people hoppin' mad:

Many thumbs down from bloggers great and small:

Mickey Kaus says the insult shows Biden "lacks even moderately calibrated snap judgment."

Robert of Stony Brook loses bowel control.

Hamstress in the Garden of Eden says Biden "made a complete ass out of himself" and notes that Biden could have simply made his opening crack without belaboring the issue of poor Townsend's mental health.

The Instapundit says all the Democrats will be wounded in this crossfire.

Howard "Extreme" Mortman says get some help yourself, Joe!

And as if to reiterate every old chestnut about the angry bloggers and the aloof MSM, CNN's John King calls Biden the evening's winner.

Wonkette and Delaware Dave Weigel have more here and here.

Although I've never supported Biden, I'll say that last night's controversial comments proceed from the one thing I like about him: his off-the-cuff-itude (which was in much better form when he gathered wool on the topic of the Iraq withdrawal). To expand on the Hamstress' comment above: The initial crack was within bounds. A guy who's that into his rifle and makes a public display of his affection sets himself up as the target of unkind fun-making. It's weird to be that lovey-dovey with any inanimate object; Townsend brought the ridicule on himself. Where Biden steps over the line is in trying to expand his witty barb into a serious point about gun laws and mental illness (which didn't even depart in any interesting way from Bill Richardson's earlier point on the same topic). The rules of courtly insult are quite clear on this: Humiliate your interlocutor and then bring the conversation back around to the only subject that matters — yourself.

[Ed. note: Thanks to our lousy blogware provider, you're getting a post from yesterday morning this morning. Don't think of it as old; think of it as seasoned.]

The editors of the British Catholic magazine The Tablet (full disclosure: I’m an occasional contributor) are passing along to their readers a quotation from Cardinal Mahony that first appeared on the Daily News' opinion blog. The quote is music to the ears of liberal Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The Tablet notes that "while many church conservatives maintain that the increasing societal acceptance of homosexuality — and, sometimes, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council — contributed to the abuse, Cardinal Mahony said that 'many of the priests' accused in his archdiocese 'came out of the [so-called] good old days — Latin-only, cassocks-only.'"

To be fair, Mahony's comment came in response to a question from Chris Weinkopf about whether the scandal resulted from a "lack of discipline and orthodoxy in the seminaries." But both the question and the answer touch on a fault line in Catholic opinion.

I have written before about the way the scandal has been seized on for point-scoring purposes both by conservatives (who blame the supposed "anything-goes" ethos of Vatican II) and liberals (whose preferred explanation is the celibacy requirement for priests).

Each side, moreover, has its own bogeyman. For conservatives, it's Paul Shanley, the defrocked Boston priest and convicted molester who was described by the Associated Press as  a former "long-haired jeans-wearing street priest." For liberals, it's  Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the octogenarian founder of the traditionalist Legionaries of Christ, who was invited by the Vatican to lead  "a life restricted to prayer and penitence, renouncing any public ministry" after he was accused of molesting several men when they were young. (The Legionaries noted that Maciel has long "declared his innocence," but said he decided — "following the example of Jesus" — not to defend  himself.)

Obviously both "liberal" and "conservative" priests can abuse children — as can clergy of other denominations, not to mention teachers, scoutmasters and parents. To find "larger meaning" in the scandal for the purposes of intra-church polemics is another kind of exploitation.

Opinion L.A. all-stars weigh in on recent articles.

Our "Subprime Players" Dust-Up raises rates of interest in interest rate raises. Author Martha Williams stands up for a dynamic market:

The dialogue between Robert Camerota and Paul Leonard is interesting, even when they argue opposing viewpoints from the same statistics. I have to take issue with Mr. Leonard's remark that "[W]ith minorities being much more likely than whites to get sub-prime loans, the recent boom in sub-prime lending could very likely lead to the greatest loss of minority wealth in our nation's history." The italics are Mr. Leonard's.

I don't want to downplay the trauma produced by the foreclosure of one's home, but a major problem with sub-prime loans is that the borrower has little or no initial investment in the property, so it's hard to understand how a defaulting sub-prime borrower will experience a loss of wealth. If anything, the defaulting borrower will enjoy some months in which to consider alternatives while the foreclosure process plays out. If the home foreclosure sale price is less than the amount owed, some states (such as California) protect the borrower by what is call anti-deficiency protection. In other states, the lender may forgive the debt. This can result in the IRS taxing the "phantom income" produced by the debt forgiveness, but Congress is currently considering legislation to eliminate that possibility. Finally, who will buy the foreclosed-on property that has seen a drop in market value and is now more affordable? It may just be a member of the same minority who had to sit out the market a few years ago but today is in a position to buy. Now is the time to educate those prospective buyers on the burdens as well as benefits of home ownership. This is also the time to make clear that federal guidelines are to be followed by mortgage brokers and lenders.

Martha R. Williams, JD
Co-author, California Real Estate Principles,
6th edition update, Dearborn Real Estate Education, 2007

In Los Angeles, Richard Maize says put borrowers in the right categories:

Dear Editor,

In response to Robert Camerota’s July 17 Local Neighborhood, Global Markets article, I believe we must revisit the reasons for the "sub-prime" collapse.  One of the main reasons is that there is no secondary market now for this type of product for the lenders to sell to (remember the junk bonds during the 80's?). With no market for sub-prime paper, lenders stop offering the product. Those looking to buy a house that fits into the sub-prime category can’t buy, thus there is more inventory and prices could fall. The other effect of the dried up market is the expiration of the “teaser rate” and borrowers facing soaring rates. In the sub-prime arena, that teaser period is typically two years. Before the market dried up (sub-prime secondary), those who had this lower teaser rate would then become “serial refinancers” to take advantage of the two-year low rate "clock" hoping some day to become prime borrowers by way of more equity in their homes or improving their credit profile over time.

One major problem is the mortgage originators. They either lack knowledge and experience or are simply lazy, looking for the  higher commission rates sub-prime loans offer. If a potential borrower has a 640 credit score, it is easy to place that borrower into a sub-prime loan. Finding an alternative loan program is the correct approach (this would be in the trade known as an "Alt-A" product which has a slightly higher rate than prime loans, but can be sold in the pool of "prime loans").  Putting a borrower into the wrong category hurts the market and the borrower.
Although it’s more work and less commission dollars for mortgage brokers to put borrowers in appropriate loans, it is the right thing to do and it would eliminate the glut of unsalable sub-prime loans. As a result, we now need to examine the individual loans to see if they actually belong in the sub-prime category.  My guess is that 65% of them do not, so they should be refinanced into the proper category (which is either prime of Alt-A loans neither are sub-prime).  Borrowers will love the change and so will the marketplace.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard Maize

And if somebody says "Alt-A," somebody else must be saying "A is A." The Ayn Rand Institute's David Holcberg says an Objectivist prayer for the embattled lender:

Dear Editor:

Re: "High-risk traps or low-credit tools?" (July 18, 2007)
 
With hundreds of thousands of homeowners defaulting on their mortgage payments, we are increasingly hearing denunciations of lenders for having loaned money to people who had no means of paying it back. But these denunciations reveal a disturbing double standard. For years, politicians pressured lenders to not discriminate against those with poor credit history and shaky finances. Now we have the despicable spectacle of politicians accusing lenders of not having discriminated enough and of having made too many risky loans.

Lenders are damned if they lend--and damned if they don't. Whatever lenders do, politicians seem to always find their practices objectionable, and will take advantage of any excuse to call for more regulations and increased political power over lending. Politicians should leave lenders alone, and instead of damning them, they should acknowledge their crucial role in making home ownership possible for so many people.

David Holcberg
Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, CA

Ronald Brownstein's "First step back to consensus" gets a nod from Prescott Valley, Arizona's own Sam Brunstein:

My first and last thoughts about Brownstein's column are the same.

We, voters, must pressure our next President and the various committee heads in Congress to follow the lead of the Stanley Foundation (and Abraham Lincoln) by getting people with intelligent and opposing viewpoints into the same room, posing the important questions, and listening to what they have to say. The key word here is "Listening."  That means actually expending the effort to understand what each side is saying and why, then acting on the appropriate meld of the two views.

There has been enough partisan debate and law-passing.  We voters are sick of the ideologues on both sides of the aisle in Congress.  Both sides have appropriate ideas but the other side has steadfastly refused to consider them.

And our President?  Listen to opposing views?  Would probably give him a headache!

Regards,

Sam

My tale of tale of swimming-pool tragedy gets local reader Lisa Marlin calling "Polo!"

I appreciate Mr. Cavanaugh's comments regarding the local "free" pool situation.  Here is my story.  Last year I signed my two seven-year old daughters up for swim lessons at the Westchester public pool.    At the first lesson, the instructor, standing on the pool deck, asked each child to perform a variety of swim strokes and floats.  He then told me my children needed to be in the pre-beginner's class, which specialized in getting children comfortable in the water.  So we switched to that class, and in that class the instructor, standing on the deck, asked the children to do a variety of bobs in the water, etc.  I went over to him and asked him when he was going to get in the water and teach the children how to swim.  He replied that he was never going to get in the water, because the LA City pools no longer had the instructors in the water because of liability issues.  He intimated that this was due to the specter of allegations of improper touching during swim lessons in which the instructor was in the water demonstrating strokes.  So the children would get out and lie on the concrete deck and practice their arms strokes , then get in the water and practice them as he taught  them from the deck.  As Mr. Cavanaugh mentioned, the pools are now not only prison-like (no white t shirts, no personal belongings, no parents on the deck unless they are in a swim suit, etc.), but they don't even teach swimming anymore.  We ended up going to the YMCA, where I notice the instructors are in the pool at every moment with the kids, helping little ones do "big arms" and "big kicks".  Surely, the City could get better insurance rates than the YMCA?                                       
                                                                                          
Lisa Marlin

That's it for today. Send us your comments, dagnabbit! We love to hear from you and we love to post your comments, so keep those cards and letters coming. Send them to opinionla@latimes.com. That address again is opinionla@latimes.com.

Bill Fujioka was sworn in this morning as Los Angeles County's chief executive officer, a position invented earlier this year after it turned out no one — really, literally no one — wanted the old job of chief administrator. The difference is that the CEO has authority over most of the county departments; the old CAO worked with them, but could not direct them.

It's a step forward in L.A. County, but an awkward one. The county is still run by five legislative/executive supervisors, and Fujioka is at their mercy. Down the road, perhaps, the county will grow up and acknowledge the need for an elected executive — a true Los Angeles mayor with a jurisdiction covering 88 municipalities stretching from the beaches to the deserts.

Still, as it is Fujioka instantly becomes one of the most powerful local governmental officials in the nation. You don't get to this position without some political skills, and he has them. In his last job, as CAO of the city of Los Angeles, he was fired by then-Mayor Richard Riordan. But so what? He kept on in the job as if nothing had happened, and indeed nothing had. Fujioka rallied members of the Los Angeles City Council, which without a vote made it clear to the mayor that the firing would be ignored. It was.

Several years earlier Riordan pushed for a new city charter that, among other things, was to undermine the city CAO's stature in part by changing the name of the job to director of the Office of Administrative and Research Services. Voters passed it. But on Riordan's first day out of office, and at the urging of Fujioka, the City Council changed the name of the job right back to City Administrative Officer.

Fujioka has spent his entire career working for the city or the county of Los Angeles. Out of college he was a CETA intern for the city in the 1970s and worked as an administrative assistant for the LAPD. At the county, he worked in the personnel office, became human resources director for County-USC Medical Center, led other county hospitals, then in 1997 was hired back to the city — by Riordan — to head the personnel department. He became city CAO in 1999.

Growing up in East Los Angeles, he was involved with a gang, an experience he recounted in detail at an open City Hall hearing on resources for divert youth from gangs. He comes across as a gentle sort, but is known for a strong backbone and a penchant for profanity. "He has a vocabulary that would make a sailor, but not a supervisor, blush," Council President Eric Garcetti said at Fujioka's oath-taking today.

The new CEO is also full of surprises. He was joined on stage by Darlene Kuba, a longtime City Hall lobbyist whose clients include labor unions and property owners. Many of Fujioka's city and county associates were aware unaware that he and Kuba married earlier this year, after his retirement from the city.

"I can get a little feisty," Fujioka said at his swearing in. "And that's a good thing."

After taking the oath, which included pledges to protect the state and federal constitutions, Fujioka joked:

"I think I can do any damn thing I want with the county charter. I didn't swear to protect that."

Not enough attention is being paid to the Bush administration’s appointment of Craig S. Morford, a career federal prosecutor, as acting deputy attorney general. If the seemingly invulnerable Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were to leave office — perhaps after a critical report by the department’s inspector general, who is looking into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, the deputy attorney general would be acting attorney general until Gonzales' successor could be confirmed by the Senate.

Now consider another scenario: Gonzales doesn't step down, but the inspector general's report emboldens the attorney general's critics to demand the appointment of a special counsel (a euphemism for special prosecutor) to investigate the AG and/or White House officials.

Who would name such a counsel? Not Gonzales, obviously, even if he weren't the focus of the investigation. As a former White House counsel, Gonzales likely would recuse himself from a case involving his former colleagues in the office of the president.

The decision would fall to the deputy AG, just as it did when John Ashcroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame leak case and Deputy Attorney General James Comey tapped Patrick Fitzgerald, now famous as Scooter Libby's nemesis.

Given that the deputy attorney general would  play such a pivotal role,  the Bush administration should move quickly to submit Morford’s name to the Senate as soon as a background check is completed. 

The administration can take comfort — or maybe not — in the fact that Morford’s appointment has won praise from one of Bush's harshest critics on the Judiciary Committee, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). ''Mr. Morford starts out with one thing going for him," Schumer told The New York Times. "He's a career prosecutor and not a politician.”"

Get in there and pull the lever for or against Joel Stein. Be a good Samaritan and take pity on the Times columnist who's getting beaten to a bloody pulp by Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple. Or be a joiner and get in on the Stein beatdown while it's in full gory heat. Either way, cast your vote today!

Joel Stein is laying a major neutron bomb in his effort to replace himself as the L.A. Times' Friday columnist. If you haven't voted today, get in there and vote.

To recap: Stein is trying to figure out whether his column can be done just as well by somebody who writes for food free. Many of you good people sent in Steinian columns to show that it can. Now it's time to vote on the finalists, and after a comfortable few days, during which Stein's control column—an anti-Elmo chestnut from days of yore—vied for first place with Suzanne Robertson's submission "Toddler trauma," there's a new sheriff in town.

Say hello to Sam Apple's "America's next top mohel," which has won more votes than Stein's and Robertson's pieces combined. Is Apple closing in on a solid majority, or is this just some pre-sabbath rally by a rabbinical voting bloc? If you're pro-Stein, he needs your vote in this electoral crisis. If you're anti-Stein, now's your chance join in his public thrashing. And if you're pro-mohel, well, you know that every half-inch matters. No matter where you stand, get in there and vote!

After maintaining a comfortable lead throughout the morning, Joel Stein is hitting the skids in the Be Joel Stein reader poll. His 2006 anti-Elmo chestnut has now dropped to second place among the Stein-essay submissions, thanks to a surge by Suzanne Robertson's "Toddler trauma." Robertson's slender lead could change at any moment, but Stein has a shameful new item to brag about: Even in a "Be Joel Stein" contest, he's coming in second place.

Maybe you're a Stein supporter watching the results with dismay. Maybe you're one of those Stein haters and are gleeful over the columnist's looming debacle. Either way, only a few dozen readers have actually bothered to vote. What are you waiting for? Get in there and put your thumb on the Carr-Benkler wager scale of justice! Vote for Stein, vote for Robertson, vote for third place contestant George Waters or for any of our other finalists. But get in there and vote.

Michael McGough's Opinion Daily "Thomas marches to his own tune" draws heaping bags of mail:

From Westchester, Eric H. Potruch speaks over the roar of landing passenger planes:

As "dodgy" and "disingenuous" as McGough characterizes the arguments of those Supreme Court justices who formed much of the majority in the "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case, I believe Justice Clarence Thomas is just as dodgy and disingenuous.  By employing his originalist "technique" to interpret the Constitution, Thomas fails to acknowledge the given fact that societies and their mores change over time.  The framers of the Constitution never believed that slavery would be deemed unlawful, or that women would be allowed to vote, or that consuming wine or beer would be prohibited.  By Thomas' originalist barometer, he'd never have been able to learn to read, let alone attend law school and ascend to the highest court in the country.

Whatever we may think, schools are not parent substitutes.  While it's their job to teach and to provide order to their students during the day, it is not their job to regulate their speech to the point where it limits their ability to express themselves.  Justice Stevens was right that the "Bong Hits" banner was simply an attempt to grab attention.

Further, the First Amendment, as it has been interpreted for generations, clearly establishes that the federal or state governments may not be seen as having any bias toward any particular religious belief, or even religious belief at all.  Since public schools fall under local, state, and federal government oversight, any insertion of religious doctrine, such as those contained in the Pledge of Allegiance and inscribed on our currency, can be construed in a way that the government promotes religious faith, and is therefore unconstitutional.

Dr. Clinton J. Vickers steps forward with a prognosis that no slam is so old you can't use it one more time:

Someone please give Justice Thomas some pornography cases to ponder when the Court hears its next desegregation case.

From Houston, Texas, Ivory Crampton says we're full of tripe:

The article on Thomas is tripe. He is not a great thinker. He doesn't march to a different drummer. He is not a man in touch with who he is. He is not siding with the conservative majority because he shares their worldview. Thomas hates the fact that he is Black. He rejects what he is and thinks his actions on the court will blunt the fact that he hates what he sees in the mirror. To alleviate the obvious racial/self hate pathology he exhibits, he has taken against most things beneficial to minorities. Some of the decisions he has joined, from any point of view, would highlight that this guy would sell his soul to be a WASP. Since that isn't possible, he does what he considers to be the next best thing - to repudiate laws/policies for others that helped him get where he is now.

What idiot, who is a minority, could in any good conscience, vote that race cannot be a factor in where children go to school. Well documented studies with longevity to bolster and provide unassailable proof that most minority neighborhoods, especially those of Blacks and Latinos have basic, economic inequities in resources, facilities, teacher pay rates and tax bases render such a decision by the court as the one handed down today as beyond foolish to land in the ludicrous column. The years since the decisions in the 60's have not been that conducive to rectifying the injustices of the past. This majority is doing its best to ensure that corporate and conservative views on these matters prevail.

You can say say that race and economics on the part of the other four justices did not factor into their decision. I say you are wrong. Race is the greatest underlying factor in their decision and in Thomas's concurrence with economics a very close second. All the concurring justices have the same motivation, keep the minorities as a permanent underclass, using "ringer cases" that cannot be appealed to a higher power. The same strategy has been used throughout the long history of American jurisprudence in matters concerning race, class and economics. I hate that Thomas hates himself enough to pretend he is not like "those people" he is consigning to some difficult days. I agree, he isn't like us, he is worse.

This was a shoddy decision based on amost cavalier reasoning. Just find something to hold up a pre-planned decision.

Our recent King-Harbor hospital Dust-Up between Joe R. Hicks and Earl Ofari Hutchinson gets some second opinions.

From beautiful Glendale, Jim Hassinger expresses dissatisfaction with Joe Hicks, and with the Times for publishing him:

He says his job is to "build bridges across America's quicksand." Evidently, what this KFI radio host thinks is the way to do it is to lie down for every right-wing lie possible, and the Times loves it, in its most recent editorial incarnation, because it puts a black face on something very nasty.

And Dr. Roberta Bruni, who has some experience at the embattled hospital, comes to the place's defense:

Metro Care: reducing the number of beds, making it a community hospital, and placing contract MDs in the ER, where they are limited to 2 attending physicians at any time, instead of the full complement needed for a high risk, busy, crowded ER, but taking away the beds and the subspecialties, leaving the hospital without the ability to handle volume and acuity.  Those King docs that did fight, but were not listened to..., did try to explain the supes why their downsizing was not a good idea. Exactly the result we were forecasting, including the comment that a single bad outcome would be the deathknell for a hospital placed right where it's needed.

At the same time, the heartless leaving a woman writhing on the floor just because she's a repeat visitor, always complaining, obese, homeless, and with a bad history...that's what the medical profession calls burnout: having become insensitive for having seen too much, having been "used and abused" by the people you take care of...Could the nurse have called the MDs present inside the ER for an urgent consult? Sure. Did she, and they would not come - too busy, only 2 hands, 50 people in line ...?  Possible, given the shortage of ER MDs that King has had since the changes. We don't know. Why did she die?

Why would the other patient be kept there for 4 days? King used to have a stellar neurosurgery service, but with only 40-some beds, there's no room to admit to the floor, the neurosurgeons are gone.  The changes, again. Not all for the better. But then, where are those famous 4 ambulances ready to instantly take patients to the other network hospitals?  Are there really at Harbor, or USC, or Califonia, or St Francis, the beds to accept the patients?  Mr Ponce was actually waiting for one of those network beds, but his priority was probably low, coming from another hospital.

We told the supes, and DHS, and administration, that downsizing was not a great idea, because we knew the value of the really good units, and how they would carry the hospital requalification. None of those people would listen, because, as "King docs" we had no credibility. They all knew better. And they silenced those of us who would speak up. I am so sorry. Sorry for the dead and the hurt, more so for those who will come looking for help BECAUSE THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE AND NO REAL OPTION WITHIN EASY REACH AND NO SPACE ELSEWHERE and they will find less and less.

Also:  Do you truly believe that any hospital can survive the level of scrutiny that King has been under? Kaiser patients have to sign agreements of arbitration for bad outcomes, before being treated, and a woman can die in her wheelchair stationed in the waiting room, without being seen for an aortic aneurism… but you did not see that hospital be on the press for the rest of the foreseeable future… just a thought.

Roberta Bruni, MD

You, the FLP, react to recent Opinion Dailies.

My daily "Semper Fidel" draws a hip-hip for Castro from Los Angeles' own Matthew Glesne:

Did I miss the larger point of today's broadside against Fidel Castro, or was it really just about calling the international left "pathetic" as well as naming and shaming those who dare visit Cuba? If so, one could be forgiven for having a different opinion about who is looking desperate and pathetic at this moment in time, particularly given the distortions and things left out of the piece.

As an opening salvo, you inexplicitly call the leaders of Vietnam, Venezuela and Bolivia a "murderous row of left-wing luminaries." While this sort of baseless name calling is not new in the US press, I would not expect it from an editorial page editor of the LA Times. The leaders of the dozens of other nations that have visited Cuba this year are apparently not as exciting to mention. Neither is the fact that Cuba was elected to head the Non-Aligned Movement - still the largest, most important bloc of developing countries in the world.

While you seem to certainly have some fascination with Cuba, it is a shame you apparently do not care to scratch the surface of the events you're commenting on. If so, you'd would have found that the Vietnam visit was long in planning, and from the way Fidel went on and on about their country's successes, it appears both countries see benefit from cavorting with the other. Ortega and Chavez on the other hand, were in Havana for working meetings based around the recent ALBA conference, whereby those country's comparative advantages are able to be put to use. Thousands have sight, health care and affordable energy supplies for the first time out of the deals.

Cuba is said to have produced a "catastrophic economic model." While this is certainly conventional wisdom, an actual glance at statistics might propel one to think otherwise. During the decades of great neo-liberalism, Cuba has been one of the best performing economies (even with a horrendous depression after the fall of the USSR). For three years in a row Cuba and Venezuela have had the top growing economies in the region (the CIA pegs it at 8%, using an outdated formula tailored for capitalist countries. Cuba says 12%).

You call Castro's writing "absurd and paranoid," apparently unimpressed by the US' sordid history on the island or that the US maintains a policy of regime change, has recently spent millions on creating a "plan for transformation" and created a new CIA office dedicated to Cuba and Venezuela. Never mind the illegal and immoral embargo that gets shot down at the UN by a new record landslide each year (184-4 this year I think).

Sincerely disappointed
Matthew Glesne
Los Angeles
aviewtothesouth.blogspot.com

Eric Root takes a gander at Michael McGough's "We're all scandal-plagued attorneys general now," and lays down the law:

Being Hispanic is not enough.  Gonzales has violated his oath of office, the Constitution, the laws and treaties of the United States, and any reasonable standard of administrative competence.  If that record is not enough to have him removed from office, by firing or impeachment, then we are no longer a nation of laws.  Since the Bush Administration's record shows that our President intends turn the United States into something other than a nation of laws, the impeachment process must begin.  Political calculations are not enough; this is not business as usual. 

Eric Root

God knows that George W. Bush mangles the English language. So does David Letterman, who mines Bush gaffes for his “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches” feature. So, presumably, do Pope Benedict XVI and his entourage.

That’s why I’m skeptical about news reports that Bush “drew gasps” at the Vatican for addressing the pope as “Sir” instead of “Your Holiness.” The vaunted Vatican diplomatic corps must have prepared the pontiff for the president’s problems with protocol. And some of the American monsignori are probably Letterman fans.

There are plenty of reasons to beat up on Bush, but dissing the pope isn’t one of them. Besides, Bush is in good company. The great Catholic poet Gerald Manley Hopkins addresses God himself as “sir” in his poem "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord." And "Sir" is a title of respect derived from "sire."

More to the point, since Vatican II it has become more acceptable to dispense with medieval courtesy titles in addressing the clergy, though traditionalist Catholics bewail this practice. At my previous newspaper, the non-Catholic editor consulted me about how he should refer to the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh. I assured him that "Bishop" was appropriate and that he needn't address the bishop as "Your Excellency" (or kiss his ring).

It wasn’t always thus. I remember, as a Catholic schoolboy, being startled when Ralph McGill, the famous editor of the Atlanta Constitution, addressed a Catholic bishop as "Sir" on a Sunday TV talk show. And I recall the trouble visited on one of  my classmates at our Christian Brothers school when he said  "Yes, sir" to Brother Michael, our typing teacher. "I am not a sir," the good Brother thundered. But that was 1965.

The pope has been called worse things than "Sir." I suspect he reacted to Bush's "gaffe" with papal indulgence.

So a few nights ago I'm walking my kids past Mel's Drive-In at Highland and Hollywood, when we get flagged down by a strangely chimerical penguin (a penguin, I later learned, with longer, airworthy wings and the head of an eagle). He's Norky, an all-purpose mascot whose press materials describe him as "the Hybrid Peneagle from the North Pole" and also "'The New Original GOODWILL Character' who appears anywhere any day of the year." Norky and his handler, Brady Farmer, were working bystanders for a free-food offering from a local ad hoc committee to save the Hollywood Christmas Parade. The guy in the Norky suit was pretty good: He successfully engaged my five-year-old for a couple minutes without scaring her, and when Farmer namedropped Mickey Rooney as a supporter of the save-the-parade campaign, I said "Hey, isn't that Mickey in the Norky suit?" and Norky without missing a beat squatted down until his peneagle suit was almost a perfect sphere and began waving: "No this is Mickey in the Norky suit," he said—which wasn't the funniest gag ever but was fairly witty for an on-the-spot reaction.

Anyway, the save-the-parade meeting was sparsely attended. For a story about the campaign in late March, an aide to Councilman Eric Garcetti told the L.A. Times' Bob Pool, "[O]ur office looks forward to learning more about their efforts," but sadly, neither Garcetti nor Councilman Tom LaBonge responded to invitations. Melrose Larry Green, on the other hand, was in attendance, and I wish the activists the best in their efforts. A recent Times Op-Ed mourned the passing of the parade, and it seems strange that the center of the global entertainment complex can't compete in the parade market with Pasadena or Philadelphia: I'd suggest moving the resurrected parade away from the Macy's Thanksgiving competition and into an early-December date—maybe Día de la Inmaculada Concepción (12/8 this year) or even Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (12/12), both of which would seem to fit L.A. to a tee. The Christmas-parade niche is wide open, but not if you hold it on Thanksgiving weekend.

But it's Norky who's really fired my imagination. Just what is the peneagle's status in the lovable-character/mascot pecking order? The enthusiastic Farmer assured me that the character does solid business in Kentucky Derby appearances, has TV deals in 30 countries and, after five years in action, is set to expand into a range of media. Eight-year-old Christian A. Henley, for example, has authored Adventures with Norky: Teamwork. For more documentary evidence, here's a gallery of Norky photo opps. This pic of the peneagle, Santa Claus and L. Ron Hubbard's spirit all supporting the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights is from Norky's site, which ominously warns that Norky "even shows up in your dreams."

The one place Norky hasn't shown up has been on my radar screen, and while I don't like to brag, the last few years have given me more than a passing acquaintance with sub-A-list-level kid-friendly characters. If you're talking Miffy, the strangely deathless Noddy, even Jakers! The Adventures of Piggly Winks, you're talking my language. But Norky? Never heard of him until the other night. And not to put too fine a point on it but it's a seller's market these days for penguin avatars; if anything we're rapidly approaching the saturation point. I'd suggest Norky ditch the half-eagle stuff in a hurry and just start marketing himself as a magical penguin who flies and plays Polar Ball.

Norky's also got an uphill climb in terms of brand recognition. While he tops the Google results for a search on "norky," the first results page also turns up entries on Norky's Peruvian restaurant in Tampa, Florida; a seemingly more swank Norky's in Lima; and most disastrously, several mentions of a character named Norky who showed up on the Ewoks television show in the eighties, and is described by witnesses as "a marsupial-type creature" and "an obnoxious kangaroo-like creature." At the very least, Norky is going to have to close out the competition in the imaginary-creature space, and also distinguish a separate brand identity from the various bulletin-board Norkys who self-identify as Opera browser users, Buddhist guitar fans, and the "King of Kings."

Nevertheless, Farmer, who recently took charge of building the brand as Norky Entertainment's director of entertainment and community affairs, says the company is doing well enough to employ 20 people, including an assistant for himself—and to my rather too blunt question, he replied that yes, they are making payroll. He also promised to send some Norky swag my way, and I will be sure to give my report when that arrives. And in fact, I intend to keep an eye out for Norky in the future. While I hope he can help lead the Hollywood Christmas Parade to a triumphant return to life, I'm mainly just fascinated by the franchising prospects. Every day people are striking it rich on brands you've never heard of—another fascinating region of the Long Tail era, even if penguins don't have very long tails.

So our editorial way back when urging the Walt Disney Co. to sic its lawyers on Hamas for infringing Mickey Mouse's copyright was mostly in the way of a wouldn't-it-be-nice proposal. But apparently it was less outlandish than it may have seemed. As we noted at the time, the company is "understandably reluctant to give extra attention to a news-of-the-weird story," and Disney is under no obligation to start suing terrorist organizations to prove a point about how things are supposed to work in a lawful society. But apparently the company did give some discussion to the idea of taking action against Hamas TV's "Farfur," a knockoff of Disney's trademark mouse (though confusingly, farfur means "butterfly" in Arabic). And the idea received enough attention that Disney has finally addressed it.

Disney CEO Robert Iger is now speaking out about the company's decision to ignore Farfur's blatant mouse-baiting. "We were appalled by the use of our character to disseminate that kind of message," Iger tells AP. "I think anytime any group seeks to exploit children in that manner, it's despicable... I just didn't think it would have any effect... I think it should have been obvious how the company felt about the subject."

Well, yes, that much is obvious: I think all Americans would already agree that Disney is not a Hamas supporter (well maybe not all). But the interesting possibility in this wasn't about American public opinion but about the teachable moment for the Levant: i.e., a chance to stick a pin in the idea that you can pick and choose what you want from modern society and popular culture, without assuming any responsibility. If the author of Air Pirates Funnies is liable for infringing Mickey Mouse, why isn't Hamas? It would have been nice to see the standard applied to one and all.

The news this week is all about less-than-full confidence. While Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still enjoys the President Bush's "full confidence," outgoing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is not so lucky, with the cautious chief telling a press conference gaggle, "I regret that it's come to this... All I can tell you is that Paul Wolfowitz has an interest in what's best for the bank, for making sure that the bank focusses on things that matter." Commentators are making much of Bush's decision not to reiterate his "full confidence" in Wolfowitz, but as Dana Milbank noted a few years back, the Bush Administration's Full Confidence can be as much an expression of support as the kiss of death is a gesture of affection.

How are we supposed to negotiate the tangled lianas of full and less-full confidence? More importantly, why aren't we getting help from the people whose job is to help us put our inchoate thoughts into polished words? Hallmark puts out cards for such uncomfortable situations as "loss of a baby, the death of a child, military death, an unexpected death, a child who has lost a loved one...belief in life after death...'still thinking of you'...anniversary of a death...cards for someone late in learning of a death...pet sympathy cards for both cats and dogs," as well as greetings "marking a half birthday, becoming a U.S. citizen, adopting a baby, joining the military, celebrating a 100th birthday, acknowledging a divorce, getting a child potty-trained, and thanking a daycare provider." Why hasn't the greeting-card giant rushed in to support leaders with weak spines? Some suggestions:

• Cover: Confidence?
• Inside: I'm full of it!

• Cover: In this difficult time...
• Inside: In the face of such pressure, we're troubled by the mistakes you've made. Yet the solace you seek may not come from this office. So we look for comfort in the hope that we'll be missing you soon.

• Cover: Thinking of you...
• Inside: ...but no longer stressing about it.

• Cover: Congratulations!
• Inside: Opportunities come and go, year by fruitful year; so best of luck, and don't let the door hit you in the rear.

• Cover: "Support is like the constant moon...
• Inside: "...You can't actually see it when the weather's bad." — Khalil Gibran

• Cover: Your First Career Debacle
• Inside: The memories you've made today will follow you throughout your life. Unfortunately, I won't.

• Cover: I'm behind you 100%
• Inside: The times when you only saw one set of footprints, my child, those were the times that I was hiding under a rock...

• Cover: There are no words for me to express my confidence in you...
• Inside: So I won't. Good luck with your new girlfriend.

So much for our half-a-huzzah for Harry. When Britain's redheaded prince was getting ready to ship to Basra a few months back—amid much handwringing about putting the royal life in jeopardy—the Times' editorial board gave the pot-smokin', Nazi-impersonatin' young royal a cheer:

Nearly every British war features a version of this drama, in which cautious elders try to dissuade a young noble from putting himself in harm's way but the young noble insists on serving his country without special treatment or advantage. This supposedly private drama of stoic courage inevitably receives extensive press coverage, and Harry's case is no exception. But, in the end, it's hard to gainsay the physical courage required to deploy to Iraq at all.

Not so fast! The prince will not be serving in Iraq after all:

In a statement released on behalf of Prince Harry, the prince said he was "very disappointed" but would not quit the army as a result.

I don't know much about royal protocol or post-Sandhurst commitments, but was quitting the army an option?

General Sir Richard Dannatt says the deployment would have exposed the prince and soldiers serving with him to "a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable," noting that the apparent capture of three U.S. soldiers Saturday had influenced his decision. Then there's this:

Abu Zaid, a brigade commander in Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army—the most powerful of the Shia militias—said they had been circulating pictures of the Prince taken from the internet to other insurgent groups. "We are awaiting the arrival of the young, handsome, spoilt prince with bated breath and we confidently expect he will come out into the open on the battlefield," he was quoted as saying.

Which just shows that the faulty intelligence isn't all on our side: It's the other prince who's the handsome one. The decision makes sense, and there's no getting around the potential for a PR and morale disaster if Abu Zaid got a chance to carry out his dastardly scheme. But from a historical perspective, this puts the danger of Shiite insurgents above that posed by Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, who were opposed in active service by various lords, princes, Mountbattens, and so on—such as the notorious bon vivant Prince George, Duke of Kent—and even the awesome power of the Argentine war machine, which collapsed like a house of cards before the heroics of Prince Andrew in the Falklands War. It's good to know Harry's out of danger, but this one is embarrassing no matter which way it breaks—a timely reminder that the real duty of royalty has never been military service so much as public humiliation.

Fox News Channel's no-spinmeister Bill O'Reilly continues his Diana Ross-level hissy fit over Rosa Brooks' recent column "Sweet Jesus I love Bill O'Reilly!" You'll recall that we generously afforded Wild Bill's producer an opportunity to respond to Brooks' column, but the powerful elite-media insider fumed that our forum was too small to contain the kind of Rumpelstiltskin rages that have made him a superstar. Now O'Reilly puts the ad in ad nauseam by, um, raging about it again:

Most Ridiculous Item: No Fairness in L.A. Times

I don't want to belabor this L.A. Times thing. But you should all know what's going on out there. The Times pays a columnist, Rosa Brooks, who is actually a lawyer representing George Soros's Open Society Institute.

But the L.A. Times has not told its readers that. That's amazing.

Now, Ms. Brooks, obviously a far-left person, used a bogus Indiana University study to attack me. Not fair, not good. So we contacted the L.A. Times with the facts, asking them to run a column explaining the dopey study. The Times agreed. Instead of putting it in the paper, the column wound up on their Internet site. By the way, BillOReilly.com, our web site, has that if you want to check it out.

The bottom line, all we want is fairness from the L.A. Times and every other media organization. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, in L.A. it is. And it's ridiculous. All over the country, these people, they hire people, and they don't tell you who they are. It's just dishonest.

I'm guessing O'Reilly read our response to his previous Ridiculous Item—even though that too only appeared on these here Interwebs—because he's now backpedaled from his earlier, false characterization of Mitchell's column as a "correction," and now lamely (but more accurately) refers to it as "a column explaining the dopey study." But his acquaintance with truth remains doubtful: Here's the L.A. Times not telling its readers about Brooks' affiliation with the Open Society Institute.

And for good measure, here's the Karl Popper-influenced, anti-communist, pro-market, pro-democracy Soros being called not only a leftist but a rightist, a shill for President Bush's forward strategy of freedom and a few things not fit for a family newspaper. And because not enough O'Reilly is always too much, we'll have a response to Mitchell's article coming up shortly, by the authors of the study that started the current round of name-calling. And of course we welcome any response from O'Reilly's camp, confident that the readers will tire of this matter long before we do. Watch this space! 

Update: Here's the response from the professors.

Many of you enjoyed Ron Mitchell's Blowback column "Stop calling O'Reilly names," a rebuttal to Rosa Brooks' column on Bill O'Reilly's name-calling. We figured O'Reilly would also appreciate our giving a soapbox to one of his producers. Alas, it turns out the post-modern hothead is also an internet snob. Here's how he characterized Mitchell's article in his "Most Ridiculous Item" yesterday:

L.A. Times Flubs Correction

I was all set to compliment the Los Angeles Times, and they hosed us, in the end. Last week their far-left columnist, Rosa Brooks—who works for George Soros, if you can believe it, but The Times doesn't tell its readers that—harpooned me about this bogus Indiana University study that says I insult people once every 6.8 seconds.Well, Factor producer Ron Mitchell has blown the lid off that study, and you can see it on BillOReilly.com. I mean, we just destroyed it.

So we called the Los Angeles Times and said this is a bogus study. You've got to print Mitchell's article. They said they would, and they put it on their Internet site. Not good, you guys. You guys have really got to be more honest.

The Los Angeles Times strikes again.

Just when I think I've arrived in the MSM, I get a reminder of how many layers there are above me: At some level of media privilege, you can actually have one of your staffers send in a column about a column—not even bothering to sign it yourself—and expect that a newspaper is going to hop to and make room for it in the tiny news hole it has in its print edition? Bill, I just wish I lived in your world!

For the record, Mitchell's rebuttal would never have run in the paper under any circumstances as it was too long for a letter to the editor and cited no factual errors in Rosa Brooks' column (even if it had cited errors, those would have been handled through our corrections process, not by giving the subject space for an Op-Ed-length reply). We never told Mitchell, O'Reilly or anybody else that "Stop calling O'Reilly names" would appear in the print edition, and in fact I specifically told Mitchell, well ahead of publication, that it would not be appearing in the paper for the reasons cited above.

Happily, the world wide web (a wonderful new medium that Bill O'Reilly should look into one of these days) allowed us to print Mitchell's rebuttal in full, and we were happy to do so. (Regular readers of Opinion L.A. will recall our examination of rejectedletterstotheeditor.com, which touched on some of these matters.)

Again, you can read Mitchell's piece here, and you may also enjoy checking out more of Rosa's columns—there's a new one today.

Whatever diversity of policy, buffonery and crackpottery may have been on display at last night's debate, the real weakness of the current Republican presidential field was summed up in Chris Matthews' natural-born citizen question, which bit the dust faster than a Harold Stassen presidential campaign. Just two out of the ten candidates favored amending the U.S. Constitution to allow naturalized citizens to become president of these here United States.

That's bad news for Gov. Schwarzenegger, who has apparently reached the zenith of his political career the first time out; bad news for the Republicans, who haven't got an eligible candidate with anything like Arnold's electibility; and bad news for Opinion L.A., which not too long ago crusaded for a Schwarzenegger/Granholm amendment that would finally make up for the founders' backhanded slam at Alexander Hamilton.* Despite our best efforts to keep the meme out there and work the California delegation to Washington, D.C. (the nation's capital), that great program fizzled like a Pat Paulsen campaign, and it now seems clear that neither the American people nor their prominent elected officials are overly concerned about an amendment that is statistically unlikely to have any bearing on most of our professional lives. 

* Thanks to reader zdybel for correcting my careless history.

Michael McGough's recent Opinion Daily "So what's illegal?" draws a crowd...

From Empire, MI, Ann Scott-Arnold writes:

I'm  a Quaker, a liberal and, for over 3 decades as a lawyer,  litigated civil rights cases on the behalf of people whose rights were violated.

All those who entered this country in violation of the law and without permission are here illegally.  They broke the law by coming into this country. They continue to regularly and routinely violate the law by driving without a license and, more seriously, by using forged or stolen identification to procure goods, services and money through employment.

They are not "citizens" which means being a lawful resident of a country. They are criminals who should not be allowed to reap the rewards of their crimes which would be remaining in this country. They have already demonstrated that they have no respect for the laws of the land.

They are illegally present in this country. They are aliens as the term is correctly used which means they are not citizens of the country but citizens of an alien land.  By their conduct, they are criminals and lawbreakers.

The law does not becuse a thief for stealing because he needed food or clothing.  There are no excuses for criminal conduct that negate the existence of the crime.

Call them what they are. All of these mealy-mouthed phrases only serve to infuriate those of us who believe in the rule of law and stiffen opposition to anything short of arresting and deporting them.

Julia Reeves writes from West Los Angeles:

Thank you for the opinion in today's LA Times.  I am one of those people who "take the rule of law seriously".  "Undocumented citizen"?  That is an oxymoron, a contradiction of terms, spoken by a moron!!!!  I am sick and tired of all the rhetoric constantly thrown about  by illegal immigrants who have thumbed their noses at the immigration laws by knowingly and willingly entering the country illegally.  They are not citizens.  They violated our laws, thereby classifying themselves as criminals, whether they like it or not.

As I mentioned in a recent post, a lot is being made—too much, I think—of the fact that all five Supreme Court justices in the majority in the "partial-birth" abortion case are Catholics. Predictably, at least one editorial cartoonist was unable to resist the temptation to portray the Catholic five as wearing bishops’ miters. Equally predictably, the head of the Catholic League has jumped on the cartoon.

What was interesting to this former altar boy was that the Catholic League described the miter as a “papal hat.” Yes, the pope can be seen wearing a miter (though not the skyscraper model that went out of fashion after Vatican II). But the miter is not a peculiarly papal chapeau. It is worn by every Catholic bishop—not to mention Anglican ones.

The distinctive papal hat is the bejeweled tiara or "triple crown" that was retired when Pope John Paul I simplified what used to be called the papal "coronation." The tiara hung on in papal heraldry for a while after that, but in Benedict XVI's coat of arms it has been replaced by the relatively humble miter.

Conservative Catholics, who are eagerly awaiting an order by Benedict permitting wider use of the Latin Mass, would love to see the tiara make a comeback, too. So, I suspect, would editorial cartoonists.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa paid us a visit this morning, scorching the Times for its tepid reception to his State of the City address, and providing some more detail on his plans to keep hope alive for AB 1381, the state school-takeover law that has now been struck down and struck down again by the courts. The mayor has vowed to keep fighting, and in his comments to the editorial board today, he outlined his own legal theory on how the decision could be appealed to the California Supreme Court:

ARV: This is what was amazing about their [the California 2nd District Court of Appeal's] opinion: They said all we had to do was a charter change. That just isn't true. They [the plaintiffs, including the L.A. Unified School District] didn't base the lawsuit on the [city] charter; they based it on the [state] constitution. We have to change the constitution statewide, and that's what they said in their opinion. It was amazing, how clearly they didn't understand the essence of this. Some argue that in addition to changing it in the constitution we also have to change it in the charter. We're not completely sure of that because some lawyers say you just have to change it in the constitution, but no lawyer has said you don't have to change it in the constitution.

LAT: Because the district crosses the city limit?

ARV: No. The whole basis of the lawsuit was that the constitution says there's a bifurcation of governance. So we would either have had to do just state or state-and-charter, but not just charter. And hitting your point, if we just change our charter, what about those other 27 cities? So that was another complication. I'm not a lawyer here; I don't understand that. The only thing I did understand as soon as I went through the opinion was that they just completely missed the whole point.

Here's the text of the 2nd District's ruling in Mendoza v. State of California:

The citizens of Los Angeles have the constitutional right to decide whether their school board is to be appointed or elected. If the citizens of Los Angeles choose to amend their charter to allow the Mayor to appoint the members of the Board, such amendment would indisputably be proper. What is not permissible is for the Legislature to ignore that constitutional right and to bypass the will of the citizens of Los Angeles and effectively transfer many of powers of the Board to the Mayor, based on its belief, hope, or assumption that he could do a better job. The trial court’s order granting the writ prohibiting the enforcement of the Romero Act in its entirety must be affirmed.

Is that enough to hang an appeal on? Here's the mayor's own assessment:

LAT: Have you made any decision about whether to appeal the decision?

ARV: We've got great lawyers, and we're making the legal assessment. But I think right now our own lawyers, and also experts we're talking to, say it's a pretty uphill fight. They [the state supreme court] don't have to take the case, and this is a court, as you guys have written in your reporting, that has historically been kind of reluctant to do so... As I said last night, I'm not quitting.  I am passionate about this issue. Which is why I take so much umbrage about your editorials on it, because I am passionate about these kids. And people can say what they want, but what we have now is that everybody agrees we need reform. And while there's not the urgency, they're responding, and they are because I put the heat on them. Lexis search it: You can't find one press conference where I called a person a name. I don't criticize the council and school board members. I talk about the institution and the bureaucracy; I never talk about individuals. I don't even do that with people I don't like. It's just not my nature.

We haven't made an assessment about whether we're going to appeal. We very well may. But obviously, we're moving ahead with the school board elections. I hope to be successful there. And very importantly, trying to engage in some very concrete discussions with the school board about implementing much of what was in AB 1381.

Congratulations to Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon. For my money he's the Bernard Berenson of the funny pages, who not only shares my enthusiasm for the soap opera strips but has shown me the hidden treasures of cartoons I either didn't know about, like Get Fuzzy, or had never paid any attention to, like Slylock Fox. A few months back he diagnosed the disease at the heart of the comics page in a Times Op/Ed that the papers continue to ignore at their  peril.

So nobody is more deserving of The Week magazine's uncoveted Blogger-of-the-Year award, which Fruhlinger took home a few days ago. I especially applaud The Week, for acknowledging somebody who isn't singlehandedly saving the Middle East or organizing election groundswells, but dealing with pop-culture artifacts that aren't immediately recognizable as weighty or important. (Though they did give the award for the CC's work on editorial cartoons rather than his more free-ranging criticism of the daily comic strips.) With the newspapers' increasingly untenable mandate to bring you the world every morning, Fruhlinger's is the kind of smartass, pomo meta-analysis that actually adds value to its chosen subject, and while I'd doubt anybody is hanging on the results of The Week's awards for anything, there are few people who deserve free food and drinks and a trophy more than the Comics Curmudgeon.

My recent meditation on not getting thanked had the desired effect of making Brian Doherty feel really guilty, and the Radicals for Capitalism author sends in a reminder that he has actually given me a round of applause in the past. Here he is quoted in an insanely long and maniacally researched history of Suck.com, in which Doherty makes an extraordinarily kind judgment on the site's final days when, like Hitler in his bunker, I found my dedication to the cause rising in direct proportion to its hopelessness:

"Tim began more or less writing every essay himself," says Brian Doherty. "I thought it was just a bravura performance that should be one of the classics of a writer rising to the occasion and doing superhuman things. It ought to be noted and long remembered."

As it happens, I never read that Suck history because I was so off my game when the writer interviewed me that I was sure I'd sound like a total jackhole in the final article. I have been assured by reliable sources that instead I came off sounding like "the Fitzcarraldo of Suck," which I took to be a great compliment, and now I think I know what that means. So hats off to Brian, hats off to the late lamented Suck, hats off to the history of libertarianism, and most importantly, hats off to me!

Speaking at the South by Southwest Interactive festival yesterday, the former CBS anchor warned that journalism is in a "very perilous state." Excerpt:

"I do not exclude myself from this criticism... By and large, so many journalists -- there are notable exceptions -- have adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude)," he said. [...]

"We've brought it on ourselves," he added, "partly because we've lost the sense that [the] patriotic journalist will be on his or her feet asking the tough questions. My role as a member of the press is to be sometimes a check and balance on power."

What bold, refreshing candor! Until you realize Rather's been giving this same rubber-chicken speech since long before Al Gore invented the World Wide Web. For evidence, more after the jump.

Have you kissed a journalist today? Take a breather from savaging the big media elites; lay off the grotesque biases of the lamestream media; listen with new ears to the gargantuan lies perpetrated by the lapdog press doing the bidding of its corporate masters. Why? Because today is the feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists.

As author of Introduction to the Devout Life, Treatise on the Love of God and countless letters, the doctor of the church had one quality recognized by media types everywhere: He was poor. Here's how the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it:

He had an intense love for the poor, especially those who were of respectable family. His food was plain, his dress and his household simple. He completely dispensed with superfluities and lived with the greatest economy, in order to be able to provide more abundantly for the wants of the needy. He heard confessions, gave advice, and preached incessantly. He wrote innumerable letters (mainly letters of direction) and found time to publish the numerous works mentioned below.

Canonized in 1665, Francis de Sales didn't get picked as the spiritual light of the fourth estate until 1923, when Pope Pius XI assigned him this new task, apparently because nobody else wanted the job. So as you're griping about your local birdcage liner today, or blogging some new offense against decency, or, like reader Donna Turner, writing to let me know that you are "furious," "thoroughly disgusted," and canceling your subscription because our left wing rag didn't put the wounded police officer story on page A1, or even, like reader Thomas Rittenburg, writing to let me know that you're being harrassed by our circulation department (I'm working on it, Thomas, I really am!), say a Glory Be and remember that somebody's watching out for us.

Harriet E. Miers, who has announced that she is resigning as White House counsel, will be no more than a footnote to history (and, if she's lucky, a question on "Jeopardy!").

But it could have been different. Really. If Bush hadn't withdrawn Miers' name from consideration for a seat on the Supreme Court in 2005, she very well might have been confirmed by a coalition of Bush loyalists and hopeful Democrats. In that event, lawyers, journalists and scholars would be poring (or puzzling) over her opinions for years to come.

Alas, the very quality in Miers that appealed to Bush — loyalty to him, sometimes expressed in gushing terms — led her to fall on her sword when her nomination angered social conservatives. Now she has left the counsel's office to be replaced by Fred Fielding, an A list Washington attorney with the right stuff to deal with a Democratic Congress.

But let's take a last look at Miers. Her brief time in the Washington limelight made everyone concerned look bad.

Miers herself had to put up with scathing attacks on her credentials and armchair psychology about her unmarried status and religious odyssey. Then there was the White House’s clumsy attempt to play the religion card by publicizing the fact that Miers belonged to an evangelical church.

Bush, who rightly took pride in nominating über-jurist Judge John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, flip-flopped in his approach to Supreme Court nominations by turning to Miers, a crony from Texas who, while a respected lawyer, was not remotely in Roberts' league. For many women, Bush added insult to injury by suggesting that Miers was the best female candidate available,  ignoring the impressive bench of female federal judges named by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Finally, the Miers episode showed that some Senate Democrats were just as fickle and unprincipled in their approach to Supreme Court appointments as Bush was.

Whatever one thinks of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s philosophy, his professional and academic credentials — like those of Roberts and Bill Clinton’s two appointees to the court — were first rate. If another Supreme Court vacancy occurs on Bush’s watch, he should look for someone (male or female) of similar stature.

And when Bush says goodbye to the woman he once called "a pit bull in size 6 shoes," he should apologize for putting her through this ordeal before yanking the leash.