An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.
It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.
On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:
Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.
As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.
Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images
When I was a summer intern at The Times' editorial page in 2004, I expressed some surprise to an editor that, nearly a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor and Sacramento seemed to have passed the peak of its 2003 budget crisis, the state was still in a bad enough spot for the paper to continue publishing editorials under its "Reinventing California" tagline. The editor smiled and replied, "Ah, the naivete of our youth," implying that I was wrong to have ever expected the state's fiscal nightmare to end with the election of a new governor.
How right she was. Nearly five years later, the state's situation remains so dire that many prominent voices have re-calibrated their criticism of the people and interests that control Sacramento, taking aim instead at the very Constitution that sets the rules for governing California. The state needs a constitutional convention, they say, and the Times' editorial board endorsed the idea last week:
There have been calls for months now to convene a state constitutional convention and, in essence, start over. It's a good idea. The state Constitution runs to two fat volumes in print and is padded each year by new voter initiatives or legislative propositions. In the end, it's just a document. It's not the enemy. But retooling is one necessary step to make the state function better....
No convention -- in fact, no statewide fix -- will work if it consists simply of one interest group's shopping list. The Times has made no secret of its position against the two-thirds legislative threshold for tax increases and budgets, and we will keep pushing to overturn it. But the point is to get more ideas on the table.
Prepare for the season of reform and reinvention. A tax reform commission is to release its report in July. Political parties and candidates will focus on next year's gubernatorial election. It's not time to back away from government; it's time to engage it, and change it. Over the coming weeks and months, this page will not be shy about asking questions and offering suggestions. Bring on the ideas. Bring on the convention.
My experience as chairman of a similar convention -- an elected commission created in 1997 to propose a new Los Angeles city charter -- makes me skeptical that a constitutional convention can provide a solution to the serious problems that face the state.
It's not that I disagree about the roots of the crisis. The California Constitution is deeply flawed and desperately needs revision....
But is a constitutional convention the best path to a solution? Even if there is a constitutional convention, and even if it does come up with a coherent and meaningful package of proposed changes, it's uncertain that that package would ever be adopted. There are countless controversial issues that could doom it. For example, if the revised constitution protects a right to marriage equality for gays and lesbians, a significant number of voters will oppose it on that basis alone.
Fellow Anteater Bernard Grofman, a UC Irvine political science professor, suggested in his May 27 Blowback that Californians should be given the chance to vote on ballot measure to repeal "all special-interest budgeting in one fell swoop." In last week's Dust-Up, Tom Campbell and Daniel J.B. Mitchell floated their ideas to end the state's perpetual financial crisis. Forbes columnist Peter Robinson today called for a constitutional overhaul:
Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, a business group, has begun calling for a constitutional convention. The current constitution, Wunderman argues, is so long, convoluted and encrusted with amendments that Californians ought to toss it out and start again from scratch.
To keep the political class from taking over the convention, Wunderman wants to choose delegates from the state jury pool. Does that sound like placing trust in chance? If so, you've got the idea. Ordinary Californians, redesigning the entire state government.
William F. Buckley Jr. once said, "I would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University." Me? I'd rather be governed by a few hundred jurors from Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Irvine, San Diego, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto and Stockton than by all the lobbyists and union officials in Sacramento.
It is, as I said, a beautiful idea.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, as the saying du jour goes, and ideas for fixing California are indeed flowing. Be a part of this conversation by leaving a comment below, taking our poll or both.
Photo: Attorney Gloria Allred writes in the phrase "except for gays and lesbians" on a posterboard showing a portion of the California Constitution Declaration of Rights (Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images).
One of my duties here at The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division is screening the online comments we receive from readers in response to our editorials and Op-Ed articles. Most of the time, the comments on any given story are all over the map and don't reveal a strong consensus on the part of our online readership.
Then there's Proposition 1A (and, for that matter, most of the other five measures on next Tuesday's state ballot).
Judging by reader comments, Proposition 1A, which the Times' editorial board supports, is in major trouble. And yes, I'm vaguely familiar with the science behind extrapolating broad public opinion from a small pool of people, but no, that won't stop me from using our reader comments to speculate on the ballot measure's fate.
Why is 1A doomed? Save for a one-off here or there, the comments to our editorials and Op-Ed articles on Proposition 1A are uniformly hostile to all things Sacramento. Sure, there is some variation in opinion, but it's far more a matter of how angry readers are as opposed to being for or against the measure. The most striking comments have come in response to warnings in our editorials about the consequences if voters reject the budget reform measures, forcing the state to go without the billions of dollars in revenue the temporary fee and tax increases would generate. California would run out of cash and face lawsuits from creditors, and the global recession would only deepen given the de facto spending freeze by the government overseeing the world's eighth-largest economy, The Times has contended.
The response? As the title of this post suggests, many readers themselves acknowledge their willingness -- if not desire -- to see what happens if the state hits bottom and runs out of cash. Below is a sample of the reaction we've received to our editorial Monday on the special election (with original grammar and spelling left intact).
"LarryP" writes:
This is the same tired argument used to bail out big banks with taxpayer debt. "Just give us more money to buy some time and everything will be okay," we're told. The unfortunate reality is that the State has made no meaningful attempt to identify and cut what the public knows to be loads of politically-sponsored waste infecting the system. Until that happens the best course of action is to shut down any attempts to plug the rotten dike. Giving more money & time to the same entrenched interests will do nothing but stave off the inevitable a while longer. It's time to make some hard choices.
"Jim" writes:
No, if voters don't vote these props in, cuts will have to take place. Tighten your (seat)belts prople it's going to be a rough ride!
Tim Bowman, a frequent contributor to our comment boards, writes:
Let the vehicle run out of gas, and then tell the drivers in Sacramento to get out and walk back the way we came. The rest of us might have to walk a bit, but we will at least go forward.
"Dan" writes:
There is no reason to pass ANY of these garbage props. The LA Times is as partisan now in advocating their passage as they have been for the last 5 years as their readership has TANKED. Send CA into BANKRUPTCY and let the courts reveiw all the bogus contracts and "manditory" spending of schools, prisons etc... It's the only way to rebuild a working budget.
As for bankruptcy, that isn't an option for California -- which makes the picture so grim for the state if the budget-reform measures fail next week. As The Times wrote in its endorsement of Proposition 1A:
Those populists who urge voters to let the state go bankrupt miss the very important point that, unlike Orange County or Chrysler, California is ineligible for bankruptcy protection. Instead of an orderly retooling, the state would face a slew of creditor lawsuits and consent decrees, none of them geared toward a fiscal fix.
Thank goodness Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann was re-elected to Congress last November. There was a tense moment when I feared her loony support for un-American activities investigations had hurt her chances, but the forces of liberal darkness were held at bay. For that we can all be grateful, because I hate to think of what we would have missed had her special brand of paranoia been uprooted. Under the appropriate hothouse conditions -- Barack Obama's presidency and a Democratically controlled Congress -- Bachmann's nuttiness has truly blossomed.
A few weeks ago, Bachmann fretted on KTLK radio in Minnesota that Obama would create "re-education camps for young people," saying " I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service."
Her most recent gem? The super-subtle link between Democratic presidents and the Swine Flu. And to think the rest of us missed it. Democrat in the oval office? Swine Flu! Swine Flu? Democrat in the oval office!
Here are her musings:
"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."
This would be barmy under any circumstances, but Republican Gerald Ford was actually president during the last outbreak.
Photo: Michele Bachmann, R-Minn, speaks to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
If we stand a chance of being sued and losing all we have, would we still step forward to save someone else's life?
Today the editorial board heartily praises state legislation that would protect good Samaritans from liability if they are sued for acting to rescue someone in danger. It does indeed go very far toward shielding them, but it also introduces exceptions for gross negligence by the rescuer, and willful and wanton misconduct.
The other thing the legislation does is apply those same exceptions to good Samaritans who provide medical care at the scene of an emergency. Those people now have blanket protection as long as they are acting in good faith.
I would never excuse intentional misconduct toward another person, but as a volunteer in a wilderness park who leads people on hikes, I can't help being concerned about the "gross-negligence" phrase. The volunteers in my program take a yearly class in CPR and wilderness first aid. We're better prepared than most people to respond to a variety of the more common emergencies, but we're also more likely to come across those emergencies. The wilderness has inherent dangers; in addition, people's ailments, such as heart problems, asthma or serious allergies, are more likely to be tested on the trail. Usually, it will take longer for paramedics to reach us if there is a problem. And yet, we're far from experts.
There are always a lot of questions in class about our liability. We're also taught some of the less common methods of treating emergencies, such as compression-only CPR (no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation), and use of Superglue to close some wounds (there's a much more expensive FDA-approved version that's generally considered safer). The legal bar for gross negligence is high, but the loss of total protection from liability also means the chances are greater that a case will at least go to trial. And once there, even if the rescuers win, they lose, because the costs of an attorney are financially crippling.
I like to think we'd all act to save first and think about our liability later, but I wonder. Certainly there would be hesitation about performing any procedure at which people didn't feel pretty competent. At moments of doubt, we freeze; the good Sam law keeps us from freeezing. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not.
The other day White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identified Rush Limbaugh as "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." It wasn't meant as a compliment to either Limbaugh or the GOP. Your party is so hard up, Emanuel was suggesting, that it has to seek star power in a blowhard radio personality who preaches to the converted.
But maybe Limbaugh ought to accept Emanuel's tribute at face value and run for public office. It's not as if Americans won't vote for entertainers. Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California, and Minnesota may soon be represented in the U.S. Senate by "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Al Franken -- who is also the author of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot." And a history of drug addiction isn't a disqualifcation for holding public office. Ask Patrick Kennedy.
It would mean a pay cut, but if Limbaugh really wants Obama to fail what better way to accomplish that than run for Congress, where he could vote against Obama's anti-capitalist schemes?
When Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for governor, movie mogul Jack Warner supposedly said: "No, no. Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend." How about Rush Limbaugh as senator, and Ann Coulter as speaker of the House?
Run, Rush, run.
Photo of Rush Limbaugh speaking at "An Evening with Rush Limbaugh" by Brill Pugliano/Getty Images
Enough already with the giant federal bailouts, unless an industry's problems threaten a much broader economic collapse, the editorial board advises. The Obama administration needs to construct a clear set of criteria for government intervention, and the board thinks that the auto companies' return trip for an even bigger pile of money doesn't pass the test. And the board notes thyat a back-room deal that delays new restrictions on diesel emissions isn't just bad for the environment and Californians' health, it's bad for Californian businesses as well.
The board also applauds the deal that led to the passage of a state budget, saying the changes to primaries sought by Sen. Abel Maldonado as part of the package would carry the benefit of giving centrist voters in the state more of an impact at the ballot box. But on the other side of the fold, op-ed writer Steven Hill from the New American Foundation isn't so sure:
A top-two primary certainly would give voters more choice during the primary election, but it would reduce voters' choices in the November election -- to only two candidates, no matter how many parties put up how many candidates in the primary. That means in the general election, which is when most voters participate, the ballot will contain a dramatically reduced field.
But that's not all. In a very liberal district, say an urban area like Los Angeles, the top two candidates in November likely would be two Democrats; in a conservative district, the top two probably would be Republicans. Third-party candidates and independents almost never would appear on the November ballot. Once again, choice is reduced.
And Joel Stein has a plan, of sorts, for how he would run bad banks.
So of course, now that the budget they finally passed has fallen billions of dollars out of balance, and they're all back in the exact same position they were in last summer, they're going to have to let the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama go on without them. Right? Ha. They're going to Washington -- Schwarzenegger, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, new Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg.
Perhaps there's a point at which a California budget is so late and the gap is so huge that it's no longer a crisis, it's just doom, and there's nothing to be done about it. Or maybe they're hoping to catch the new president's eye during the parade or one of the parties and hit him up for a few billion dollars. Or -- this is my final try -- maybe this is an "off-site" for the three of them, allowing them to get away from Sacramento and brainstorm about the future.
The news that surgeons in Cleveland had performed the first face transplant in the United States sounds like the ultimate tabloid story, not to mention the 1997 movie "Face/Off" in which John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swapped mugs. In this case, of course, one of the faces came from a cadaver. I suspect that the "Eew" factor in this procedure will prevent otherwise thoughtful people from realizing that operations like this are not just morally permissible but a blessing.
Let's, er, face it: Human beings imbue the face with extraordinary importance. When someone is described as good-looking, the assumption is that the reference is to her or his face, not to other parts of the anatomy, however alluring. Newspaper articles about prominent personalities are usually illustrated with "head shots," not body shots. A purported family resemblance almost always refers to a familiar (or familial) face, not a lookalike torsos. My nephew Stephen is often told that he's the image of his uncles, but he's 6 foot tall and my brother and I are 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-8 respectively. He's a McGough only from the neck up, but that's all that matters in the family's "Who does he look like?" inquiry.
Your face isn't just your fortune; it's you. That, rather than a generic discomfort with organ transplants, explains why the idea of a face transplant is so disorienting. Yet it's precisely because of the importance we attach, as it were, to faces that this sort of surgery should be welcomed and perfected.
Besides, the patients who will agree to this onerous operation won't be the Botox clientele; they'll be severely disfigured and maybe dysfunctional as well. According to the Associated Press, the patient in Cleveland had suffered injuries so horrific that "she lacked a nose and palate, and could not eat or breathe on her own without a special opening into her windpipe." Why should a taboo, however rooted in our sense of self, stand in the way of relief for someone like that?
This blog is the work of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, the cadre of opinionated reporters and editors responsible for the paper's daily stack of unsigned editorials. Also contributing is Times columnist Patt Morrison, well-known lover of millinery. Please note -- the posts you see here reflect the views of the author, not of the editorial board as a whole.
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