Is the left surging? Is the right wrong? Dig this week's Latin America Dust-Up.

In today's exchange, Angelo Rivero Santos, deputy chief of mission at the Venezuelan embassy, say at least three Bush Administration misdeeds are to blame for poor U.S.-Venezuelan relations. New America Foundation senior fellow Andrés Martinez agrees on one of those points but calls the others respectively absurd and hollow.

Yesterday, Martinez said the folkloric leftist authoritarianism of Hugo Chavez is already in eclipse, while Santos said self-regulating markets and economic liberalization have failed in Latin America.

Note on the title: We had initially conceived this exchange as focusing on Colombia-Venezuela-y-norte for a restaging of the great Reagan-era battles over the Caribbean and the northern parts of South America. As the debate seems to be moving toward a broader Latin America discussion, we will correct, and we appreciate commenters for pointing out our imperialistic geography.

Once again, people came from miles around to tell us that they don't read the L.A. Times because of Jonah Goldberg. Once again, they all stopped to read Jonah's column while they were at it, making him the week's top reader draw. A respectable second went to David Fleming and Jim Gray's philippic against the war on drugs. And Joel Stein showed with a late-week surge for his column on high gas prices. In a curtain call for their previous week's Dust-Up, John Stagliano and Barry McDonald led the rest. Here are all the winners, and as always, thank you for reading:

1. Forced servitude in America? By Jonah Goldberg
2. This is the U.S. on drugs By David W. Fleming and James P. Gray
3. The joy of $8 gas By Joel Stein
4. How harmful is porn? By John Stagliano and Barry McDonald
5. McCain's bad G-8 judgment call By Madeleine K. Albright and William J. Perry
6. Working without a net By Peter Gosselin
7. Why is YouTube hoarding data? By the editorial board
8. The end of FARC By the editorial board
9. What's eating the L.A. Times? By Marc Cooper and Patrick Frey
10. A good-enough spy law By Nancy Soderberg

Fairly light correspondence lately. (Send us mail already!)

Amy Payne's Blowback "Porn isn't normal" gets the heave-ho from San Diego's Erich Potruch:

Young Amy Payne may have her opinions about pornography, viewing pornography, etc., but to characterize it as not normal betrays her naivete.  Porn is a huge business -- a multi-billion dollar business, in fact.  More people spend more on pornography than they do on conventional films.  That says it's conventional in and of itself (or "normal," to use Ms. Payne's word).

I don't disagree that power in the business is largely with men over women, but there are plenty of powerful women in the business producing, directing, and distributing adult entertainment, so I don't buy the argument anymore that porn degrades women.  Women can choose to do other things to make money -- they are never left with no choice anymore, otherwise it's rape and kidnapping.

Further, while I certainly understand her moral conviction that the sexual act is sacred, Ms. Payne fails to understand that by porn's very existence, it proves the opposite.  The sex act is not sacred; it is the acting out of a biological impulse as basic as the need to eat.  That humans have the ability to choose the sex act to entertain oneself supports the commonality of the sex act.  It's prudish and moralistic to reserve it for marriage or a committed relationship.

Eric Potruch

And Cy Bolton's Blowback "How does President Bush lie?" is enjoying a longer shelf life than the Downing Street Memo itself. Readers continue to blame the MSM for the Iraq war. From the Hawkeye State comes a smack at media lapdogs:

Whatever else you may say about the L.A. Times and its personnel (and you've already said plenty), I think it's fair to say we're willing to take our lumps in public. Patrick Frey and Marc Cooper's Dust-Up on the future of the Times is winding up. Yesterday they hashed out the differences between ailing old media companies and never-better-served news consumers. Today, they joined forces for a beatdown of The Times so gleeful even I was tempted to circle the wagons in classic dinosaur media fashion. I resisted that temptation, so go and read it, and check out the whole exchange.

Tomorrow, Frey and Cooper will be addressing the possibility that maybe there's more life left in the old paper than people are letting on. I hope you'll tune in, and go on to explore the vast range of topics we've covered — from porn to steroids to dogs to outer space (but no porn with spacedogs on steroids; we're a family newspaper) — in the no-holds-barred arena of the L.A. Times Dust-Up. Thanks for reading and writing.

We hope you're enjoying this week's Dust-Up on the struggles of the L.A. Times.

Yesterday, Patrick Frey and Marc Cooper debated what's causing the paper's troubles.

Today, they take a look at what L.A. would look like without its largest paper. (Survivors, as Krusty the Clown once noted, would envy the dead.)

And tonight they will be part of a whither-the-Times roundtable on KCRW radio's Which Way, L.A.? with Warren Olney. The lineup will include L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton, Dust-Up participants Cooper and Frey and Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum's Emma Schafer, who has canceled her subscription. You can listen by tuning in to FM 89.9 or the KCRW site at 7:00 pm (Pacific), and/or listen to a recording after the broadcast at the Which Way, L.A.? page.

I don't know whether it's just the holiday rush, but the final entry in our Dust-Up on porn is now the number two performer at latimes.com. John Stagliano and Barry McDonald finish up by debating the harmfulness or harmlessness of the adult entertainment industry. Previously they talked about porn economics, Judge Alex Kozinski and obscenity laws. Thanks for tearing off the plain brown wrapper and checking it out and for commenting.

What could be more titillating than a weeklong Dust-Up on L.A.'s $12 billion adult industry? Porn producer John Stagliano and Pepperdine professor Barry McDonald keep it clean while arguing about what's obscene, what's allowed, and what adults should be free to look at. Yesterday, Stagliano and McDonald debated legal definitions of obscenity and the federal case against Stagliano and his company. Today, they take a look at what the Alex Kozinski scandal says about public attitudes toward adult entertainment. 

Kerry Howley and Kay Hymowitz continue their Dust-Up on The Children by asking the biggest question of all: Where do babies come from? Comments are hot.

Barack Obama's upset about disappearing fathers, but will he solve that problem by ending the war on drugs or shaming parents? Kay Hymowitz and Kerry Howley continue their debate on The Children.

In the second installment of this week's Dust-Up on The Children, Kerry Howley and Kay Hymowitz find themselves in agreement on the seriousness of child obesity and the terrific taste of SpongeBob SquarePants Wild Bubble Berry Pop-Tarts.

Kerry Howley and Kay Hymowitz' Dust-Up on teen pregnancy is rapidly climbing the charts. Check it out, leave a comment, praise, criticize or befuddle. And be sure to check back through the week, as Team KH considers obesity, fertility rates and what the hell's wrong with these kids today.

As we get this week's Katha Pollitt-Amanda Marcotte Dust-Up on the state of feminism under way, here's a woolgatherer: One of my favorite post-Enlightenment theories is that religions were in some ways proto-feminist institutions. The idea is that, in the days of yore and to some extent even today, religious practice has provided women greater autonomy and more freedom to be left alone than many other lifestyles. Granted, this heady and counterintuitive argument is often made in papers like this one [pdf], which warns the reader:

By discussing from the approach of female agency, constraints and possibilities for individual action and gender role patterns, answers are sought to the question why women opt for monasticism.

Still, I found this lady-saints wall of fame at L.A.'s own St. Nicholas Orthodox Church to be pretty interesting in the types of women it presents:

There are some people who treasure the Orthodox church as a less brutal alternative to Catholicism. I am not one of them. I also agree with Charles Barkley on the topic of role models. But there are some interesting models of femininity here. Dig the crown on the rule-making, life threatening St. Helen and the attractive brooch (not quite discernible through my lousy photography) on St. Christina:

These are hard girls, willing to eschew vanity in the service of God. In the case of St. Mary of Egypt here, they're redefining the cultural meaning of broad shoulders and grizzled features:

Last week's Dust-Up on the future of gay marriage drew many comments from three groups of objectors to the California Supreme Court's ending of the ban on same-sex marriage: Those who quoted Bible passages, those who suggested people start marrying their pets, and those outraged that the court had subverted "the will of the people." Glen Lavy made the case for the people's will on Day 1 of the weeklong debate, though many commenters brought up the counterexample of Jim Crow.

But opponents of gay marriage could be finding themselves on the wrong side of vox populi. According to a Field Poll released yesterday, a majority of Californians now favor giving rights to same-sex couples — and oppose a ban on gay marriage. A Times/KTLA survey conducted earlier this month suggested a somewhat different political climate, but if the will of these "people" we keep hearing about is in fact shifting, that would be bad news for opponents, who are looking to put another ban on the November ballot.

The Sacramento Bee points to explanations for this dramatic shift in opinion, and an LA Times profile on conservative Chief Justice Ronald M. George helps explain what swayed the court:

... as he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

Tim Rutten cites the rising tide of the youth vote, drawn away from their iPods by the baritone of Barack Obama. Perhaps, in a very race-conscious political season, the comparisons to the state court's ruling 60 years ago striking down laws banning interracial marriage — a decision in direct conflict with popular opinion — had a hand in it.

What do you think caused the shift? Post your thoughts below. And, just to see how Opinion L.A. readers break down:

Gregory Rodriguez' politically incorrect look at Hillary Clinton's bare-knuckles white-voter strategy brought together readers of all hues, while gay marriage remained hot and the editorial board placed an unusual number of pieces. Here are our 10 most-read stories for the week. Thanks for reading Opinion L.A.:

1. The fear of white decline, by Gregory Rodriguez
2. Obama's next challenge, by the editorial board
3. It's not personal, by Jonathan Chait
4. McCain: so wrong, but so what? by Rosa Brooks
5. The 'Long War' fallacy, by Andrew J. Bacevich
6. Negotiating isn't appeasement, by J. Peter Scoblic
7. Keep stockpiling oil, by the editorial board
8. Dust-Up, Same-sex marriage: What now? by Jon Davidson and Glen Lavy
9. The church of green, by Jonah Goldberg
10. Bush weighs down McCain, by the editorial board

Once again, readers give us the business at opinionla@latimes.com. Philip L. Christenson gets no love for his Blowback "Defending Thabo Mbeki." From Wellington, South Africa, Claire Alexander writes:

How can you possibly produce articles on Mbeki defending his presidency manners and appraoches, especially with respect to Zimbabwe, by an author who ‘knows’ him. I am completely baffled. As a Scot now living in South Africa, Mbeki is one of the most corrupt and selfish presidents in the world. His people are starving and dying. Not a patch on Mandela. He would rather pocket the millions in bribes than actually feed his voters. He claims there is ‘no crisis’ in Zimbabwe…. Oh really. White farmers are continually being slaughtered with their homes set on fire to rid them of the country – to turn it into a ‘black’ country, when actually this was the only source of food for many. Talk about spiting oneself. He will kill anyone who opposes him, his people are also flocking to South Africa for a better life but most end up jobless and suffering disease. A young Zimbabwean was helping us move offices, he was smart and socially intelligent and told of the horrifying events that are REALLY going on in Zimbabwe, why isn’t the media exposing this??? Please, there is nothing positive about Mbeki nor Mugabe, the are as bad as each other and the worsening state of Southern Africa will not improve until these countries are under proper management.

Claire Alexander

B.T. Birkett, no whereabouts given, says Mbeki is responsible for Zimbabwe's troubles:

The shame is that Christenson seems to be exculpating Mbeki, et al for not sending in the troops and ridding Africa and the world of the miscreant Mugabe.

Any headline or request for financial or food aid is a joke when the world allows a dictator and military strong man to destroy a county in the name of 'black rights', etc.

Mbeki clearly abetted and supported all of Mugabe's policies. Otherwise, there would have been South African troops in there to set things right.

Now the world will be looking to the 'West' to resurrect this ravaged country. Mbeki is directly responsible!

Last week's Dust-Up between Judea Pearl and George Bisharat brought this response from that great city to the north:

Judea Pearl's history bookshelf must indeed be "worn and dusty" if a short journey through it leads him to conclude that "Zionists were both aware and respectful of Palestinian aspirations and made persistent attempts to reach reciprocal recognition and accommodation."

Rather than relying on selected quotes by Zionist leaders meant for public consumption, Pearl, should look to more current and iluminating historical works by so-called new Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappe, who draw on more recently released Israeli military archives and private papers of Zionist leaders in order to reach a vastly different conclusion about the motives of Israel's founders.

In his book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Pappe quotes the following words of Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion from a 1947 speech to senior members of his political party: "There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state.  This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state.  And we have to face this new reality with all its severity and distinctness.  Such demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty … Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state."

It is this mindset that led to the deliberate expulsion of two thirds of Palestinians from what is now Israel.

Ken Galal
San Francisco

References:
See page 48 of "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," by Ilan Pappe, 2006 for Ben-Gurion quote.

If you're talking wine you've gotta be talking Bordeax, or maybe Bloomfield. Matt DeBord fans in both cities popped their corks in honor of his Blowback "Terroir-izing California wine."

A message to Matthew DeBord

Dear Californian friend

I have just read your article on Californian wine sent to hell by East coast snobs. I find it very amusing, even more so as I come from the old world and more precisely from Bordeaux itself from which i am writing this. Though I love our wines, but not all of them, I also love American wines, some from the finger lakes and more particularly the great Californian names, and notably your zinfandel, unfound here. I also love the Santa Inez productions, zaca mesa and such names
Be reassured, many Europeans also like your western wines.

The debate you are alluding to is less about wine, I find, than about the old rivalry between your 2 coasts and what "class" is supposed to be. It shows that in spite of great progress Californians have not made it yet completely in the eyes of the Eat coast... wine is just a side object. I still get sneers from easterners (and it is worse in London) when I speak about my loving California.

As a great lover of your state where I studied and go regularly, I just wanted to comfort you!!! and tell you I laughed a lot at your puns on how the French made wine... In fact, as you well know the methods are more and more the same on both sides of the atlantic.
Hope you will come to Vinexpo 2009 where we can meet.
Bye and "cheers".
BRC

Bernadette Rigal-Cellard
Professeur
Etudes nord-américaines
Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux
France

And from the Garden State:

Dear Editor:
Sounds to me like the European vinters are jealous of something we Americans are doing well, namely producing first class California wine.  I'm not an oenophile, just a guy who likes good tasting wine.  I know nothing about the art and science of wine making, nor do I need to.  What I need is a wine that enhances my dining experience, is affordable, and tastes good.  California wines haven't let me down yet.

Samuel Monaco
Bloomfield

Keep those cards and letters coming. Thanks for reading Opinion L.A.

Same-sex marriage has been approved by the California courts for several days now, and I'm still waiting (with a thrilling mix of terror and curiosity) for that nightmare scenario where the government forces me to marry a man.

Is it good for John McCain? Bad for Barack Obama? Is it weird that McCain remains shy about the issue, while Obama is now talking about his own (straight) marriage, and Hillary Clinton stakes out a position of carefully crafted snooze-inducement? For more on the issue, dig the Pew Forum's gay marriage resources page.

But above all, be sure to check out our Dust-Up on gay marriage, which features attorneys on both sides of the California case speaking now and never holding their peace. It's also bringing out a legion of reader comments that are vehement, charged and interesting, even if some of them give you a sense of deja vu (claims that gays want "special rights": check; arch references to how many miserable heterosexual marriages end in divorce: check; people marrying their dogs: check; all the gay couples I know are nice because I'm so open-minded: check). Good stuff all around!

One personal confession: I've always had two journalistic reservations with the whole gay marriage issue. The first is that it's practically impossible to come up with an illustration for a gay marriage story that is not either two men embracing, two women embracing or a wedding cake with two grooms on top. The second is that I've always found the people I agree with on this issue (pro-gay marriage) to be completely boring, and the people I disagree with (anti-gay marriage) fairly interesting.

And I think that's because the restrictionists are the only ones who focus (often to the point of obsession) on sexual desire. They may be hysterical with their warnings that polyamory, bestiality and incest will be coming once gay marriage is approved. But at least they take lust seriously, as something dangerous, destabilizing, contentment-destroying, subversive, uncontrollable, and all the other things we know it to be.

The pro-gay-marriage folks, on the other hand, have a unique skill for making sexual desire seem routine, dull and technical. Framing the issue solely as a matter of group rights leaves out what defines the group in the first place. If your only interest is in a stable and amicable relationship, then the gender of the other partner shouldn't matter at all. The point is to have a relationship with somebody you desire sexually. If your mode of sexual desire seems menacing to the straights, that's a function of the straights' narrowmindedness. But how interested can we be in outsiders whose aim is not to blow up the narrowmindedness of the straights but to join in it? Gay marriage supporters trip over themselves in their hurry to declare that polygamists or polyandrists or other sexual renegades can never be welcome in good society.

As a political tactic, that rush to conformism makes sense, but I fear it's more than just an act. If I learned anything during my long San Francisco sojourn, it's that gays can be every bit as boring and conservative as straights. Now I don't demand that anybody has to become a bomb-thrower just to get the tax breaks and other privileges straight couples enjoy. But it would be nice for somebody to acknowledge that gay marriage would be worth supporting even (or especially) if it did lead to the parade of horribles, or some consenting-adults portion of that parade, that opponents find so scary and so fascinating.

Some recent mail, courtesy of these newfangled interwebs:

Our favorite letter in a long time comes from Pam Anderson (not that one, the one in Glendale), who uses a David Lazarus column as a departure point for a CAPS-HEAVY critique of sky-is-falling circular logic at the L.A. Times:

TOO MUCH LIBERAL WHINING

This letter is prompted by David Lazarus’ article last Sunday in the LA Times business section, " ‘Smart meters’ Aren’t Up to Speed", in which he whines that the utility meters to be installed by Edison, et al, aren’t broadband enabled.  These meters will cost the consumer about $100 he says; while broadband-enabled meters would cost "five times" as much.

We can be sure that if the utilities were forcing consumers to pay for the fancy ones, David Lazarus would whine that it was too costly for lower-income households, when the cheaper one would do the simple job required.

Which bring me to my main point:  there is WAY TOO MUCH liberal whining in this state in general, particularly by LA Times writers such as Steve Lopez, Sandy Banks and David Lazarus.

They whine when house prices are going up: "Poor people can’t afford them!"

They whine when house prices are going down: "A market FAILURE", said one Times writer breathlessly a couple of weeks ago.

They whine when house prices are stagnant: "Home values are not keeping up with inflation!"

They whine if a Wal-Mart is proposed in a small town: "It will drive mom-and-pop stores out of business!"

They whine while the Wal-Mart is being built: "What about the environmental impact!"

They whine while it is operating: "The big corporation doesn’t care about the workers!"

They whine when it’s shut down: "The loss of jobs, jobs, JOBS!"

They whine if it was never built in the first place: "Economic prosperity has passed the town by!"

They whine for socialized medicine:   "People can't afford medical care!"

They [rightly] whine about how bad Social Security, Medicare and government-run hospitals are [such as VA hospitals and County USC], not realizing that this is EXACTLY the way socialized medicine is going to be:   REALLY BAD!!!

STOP THE WHINING, and GROW UP!!

The purpose of government is not to take care of our every problem and stupid decision [like a surrogate parent.] There will always be poor people, rich people, smart people, dumb people, and people down on their luck. Studies have shown that if we took all the wealth and spread it around today, things would be back to the way they are in about five years, because some people are just better at making and keeping money than others.

Education is good, charities are good, but otherwise, you’re pretty much on your own. Grow up and deal with it. It’s better than having government meddling in every aspect of your life.

Pam Anderson
Glendale

So much for all-purpose shaming. Readers have also been weighing in on more specific topics as well. Our back-and-forth Blowback series on the AIDS vaccine continues to get people exercised:

What were people in the mood for last week? Not bromides about good government, public service or political commitment, that's for sure. P.J. O'Rourke's chainsaw tour of liberal platitudes brought in more than four times the traffic of the next-most-popular item — which was itself another bit of PC iconoclasm: Gregory Rodriguez' skeptical piece on the value of "dialogue." Is it time for the candidates to do something about all this cynicism? I hope not, and I thank you for reading Opinion L.A.

1. Fairness, idealism and other atrocities, by P.J. O'Rourke
2. Dialogue isn't the last word, by Gregory Rodriguez
3. Hillary's 'right' isn't the right thing, Rosa Brooks
4. Does your brain have a mind of its own? by Gary Marcus
5. Give voters a clue, by Jonah Goldberg
6. Government in secret, by Russ Feingold
7. Dust-Up: The new scarcity, by Gregory Clark and Gary Gardner
8. California wine? Down the drain, by Alice Feiring
9. Grand Old Party animal, by Joel Stein
10. China's next-generation nationalists, by Joshua Kurlantzick

The best, the brightest, the movers, the shakers and the thinkers came out, but it was a New Jersey high school student who took the Number 1 spot in the week's most popular Opinion stories. But fear not, James Q. Wilson fans: the Pepperdine professor whose textbook Matthew LaClair attacked gave as good as he got, and made the list at Number 9. And the rest of the week's winners? A mishmash of drugs, China, and Jeremiah Wright. See you next week, and thanks for reading Opinion L.A.

1. Give me the lesson without the spin, by Matthew LaClair 
2. Looking for Mr. Wright, by Jonah Goldberg
3. China's powerful weakness, by Francis Fukuyama
4. A commitment problem, by Norman Ornstein
5. The U.S. and China are over a barrel, by Michael T. Klare
6. Dust-up: America on drugs, by Jacob Sullum and Charles "Cully" Stimson
7. Men who explain things, by Rebecca Solnit
8. Rev. Wright deserves some attention, by Rosa Brooks
9. Quit twisting my words, by James Q. Wilson
10. Contrarian McCain, by the editorial board

Paul Leonard goes toe to toe with Christopher Thornberg on forcing lenders to renegotiate with defaulters. More to come later today.

You don't believe FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD Chief Edward M. Davis were uncredited script doctors on the All In the Family pilot? We've got evidence!

Robert Ellis laments what the ruling party is doing to Turkey.

In our most recent installment of the inaptly named Opinion Daily, Jon Healey lays odds on Jango's race to survive in an imploding market for webcasting.

To those of us not threatened by the foreclosure mess (i.e. renters), plans to "save families from losing their homes" sound more like collusion to keep prices permanently unaffordable, thereby dimming any prospect of owning. Economist and Dust-Up alumnus Steven E. Landsburg feels our pain, writing in Slate yesterday that one unlucky owner's eviction is another renter's long-awaited shot at the American Dream:

None of these foreclosed houses is going to disappear. After a foreclosure, one family moves out, and another moves in. We see the sad faces of the people moving out, but we don't as often see the happy faces of the new homeowners moving in. Nevertheless, those happy faces are out there, and we should not discount them.

That's important, and it's important in a larger context. Often when it comes to economic policy, some effects -- in this case, the genuinely moving stories of good people who can't afford to live where they've been living -- are highly visible, while others -- the genuinely moving stories of good people who can now achieve their dreams of home ownership -- are less well-publicized. That doesn't make them any less real.

I'd add another point of frustration to all this talk of "saving" homes and keeping roofs over families' heads: This is a crisis in which owners (if you can even call them that) are becoming renters, not one where a bunch of poor children and parents are ruthlessly forced onto the streets by greedy banks. If families were indeed having to sleep on sidewalks because they couldn't afford to own their homes -- and if renting weren't a choice -- then we'd have a real humanitarian crisis on our hands. But the choice isn't between owning and homelessness, but rather, between owning and renting. If that constitutes a crisis, then as a renter, I expect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to speak up any day now about federal assistance to move me out of my apartment.

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

Have the reforms of the 1990s improved California politics? Depends on your point of view — or, according to a Times column, whether you're retired. Former Gov. Pete Wilson, state Senate leader John Burton and former Assembly speaker Willie Brown raised eyebrows on that topic in a policy forum this month:

"The Legislature was far less partisan than today," Wilson recalled of the 1960s. "... when John and Willie and I were all freshmen assemblymen, there was a great deal more drinking in the Legislature. These guys, the teetotalers, need to lighten up a bit."

All half-humorous comments aside, notes George Skelton, "The group also agreed that term limits are too short and that the current Legislature suffers from inexperience."

Now, those term limit rules are being revisited through Proposition 93. The initiative has some high-profile enemies and allies, and for this week's Dust-Up, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Controller Steve Westly spar over the proposition's pros and cons. 

Today, in the defender's corner, Westly argues that 93 "would make the state Legislature more efficient and effective":

Currently, 12 of 34 legislative committees are chaired by first-year lawmakers. These committees determine the laws that affect our schools, housing, jobs, public safety, transportation and the environment. Under Proposition 93, legislators could gain experience before chairing a committee. This would benefit the process and, ultimately, the voters.

Proposition 93's reforms would also slow the constant campaign cycle that exists now. Termed-out legislators start campaigning early to win a seat in the other house or another office. Instead, legislators would continue to work for — and campaign to — constituents in their home district.

But, contends Poizner,

The question asked by The Times today is, why shouldn't the public be allowed to vote for whomever it wants for as long as it wants?

The answer is that the ability of voters to choose in elections is restricted in California — not by term limits, but by the politicians' self-interested gerrymandering of legislative seats. Incumbents simply don't lose, and seats don't switch from one party to another, thanks to these safely drawn districts. [...]

Today, the only way politicians ever leave office in California is because of our existing term-limits law.

Read the whole exchange and discuss the debate here.

While you're busy digesting the George Mitchell steroid report, the "serial news conferences" accompanying it and the curious mix of apathy and hysteria with which the nation seems to be greeting this long-expected news, take a look back through the archives of Dust-Up, for our debate on steroid use back in March. Halos Heaven proprietor Mat Gleason took the tough-on-enhancers stance:

The hysteria around privacy issues and drug testing is overblown. For years we were told there was no smoke, proof there was no fire. Jose Canseco changed that. His former teammate Mark McGwire fell from the pinnacle of prestige to perennial pariah in record time. What were they hiding? Lots. Why were they hiding it? There is a culture that protects superstars -- and some of the guys racking up big numbers were juicing, no doubt about it.

New York Sun baseball writer Tim Marchman, on the other hand, said let a thousand mystery-skin-creams bloom:

We don't need to protect ballplayers from themselves and their juiced-up peers. They have a union and other legal mechanisms by which they can do so, to precisely the degree they feel appropriate. If you don't think that's good enough, don't spend any money on baseball. Don't have any illusions, though, that the game is now different from any other sport, any other high-stress profession, or different from the game we all watched when we were kids.

Meanwhile, our former colleague Matt Welch launches into a locker-room-trashing 'roid rage over at Reason:

In any case, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you give a former Senate Majority Leader $2 million a month for more than a year and half, force clubhouse lackeys to testify under threat of $100,000 fine, and have federal prosecutors grant vastly reduced sentences to drug convicts in exchange for cooperating with Mitchell's private investigation, you can indeed produce circumstantial evidence that Nook Logan (career home runs: 2) and nearly four score others may have taken legal supplements without a prescription to help them recover more quickly after working out, many during a time when such supplements were perfectly acceptable according to Major League Baseball's own rules. And as a direct result, your teenage daughter might eventually face drug testing if she plays sports, once Congress goes through another thrilling round of reforming government.

In today's Dust-Up, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Brian Katulis take aim at Iraq's fractured politics. With the apparent drop in violence and sectarianism, why haven't Iraq's leaders managed to build a more unified and effective government?

Katulis makes his first move:

The so-called political surge has not happened because of two main reasons — structural flaws in Iraq's political transition and institutions and the Bush administration's unconditional and open-ended commitment of U.S. money and troops fostering moral hazard among Iraq's leaders.

When it's his turn, Rivkin doesn't hold back:

Your musings about the absence of a "political surge" reveal two fundamental mistakes, widely shared among the administration's critics: The first is a serious failure to appreciate why democracy-building in the Middle East, while a slow and painful process, is the only way to advance America's long-term national security interests. ... The second failure is an obsession, widely shared among the critics, with the alleged mistakes and ineptitude of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq.

Read the rest and join in the debate here.

Halfway though this week's dust-up, David B. Rivkin and Brian Katulis are still split on whether there's light at the end of the tunnel. Today they're opining on whether Sunnis have turned away from Islamism, and if Shiites will follow their lead.

Rivkin's reading of the situation:

It would be premature to announce that Iraq's Sunni Arabs have entirely forsaken Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, great strides have been made, and are being made, toward this goal.
[...]

The benefits of this cooperation extend far beyond Anbar province, let alone Iraq. The entire Islamic world can now see traditional, and undoubtedly religious, Sunnis making common cause with the United States military against a terrorist organization that purports to carry the banner of Islam.

But Katulis contends,

The simple fact is that Sunni Arab insurgent groups and tribes in Iraq were never all that close with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its affiliates. Reports of divisions and outright fighting between more local-minded nationalist groups and those aligned with AQI had been bubbling up since 2004.

Read the whole exchange and shoot us your own comments here.

Katulis and Rivkin again cross ballpoint pens, this time regarding troop levels: Should we stay or should we go now?

Katulis says if we stay, there will be trouble:

Iraq cannot stabilize without serious action from Iraq's leadership, and it is self-defeating for the United States to want Iraq to succeed more than the Iraqi leadership does. U.S. troops in Iraq have served with honor and done their share. And the time has long passed for Iraq's leadership to step up and take responsibility for its own affairs.

Rivkin retorts that if we go, it will be double:

Like most critics of the war, Brian, you demand success within an artificial and unrealistic time frame. Wars, particularly counterinsurgency wars, which are fought in small engagements and patrols rather than set-piece battles, take time to win. If the unrealistic time frames the critics impose on the war in Iraq had been insisted upon in any of America's past wars, most of which included periods of terrible setbacks, the results would have been disastrous.

Read the rest and spill some of your own ink here.

This week's dust-up kicks off with White House veteran David B. Rivkin Jr. and author Brian Katulis taking on the numbers coming out of Iraq. Does the good news on casualties in Iraq show the surge is working?

Rivkin takes the first shot, concluding:

Americans should be pleased with the results of the surge.   Iraq's steadily improving security environment gives the United States a lot of flexibility.  Having crippled Al Qaeda, we can now pursue simultaneous efforts to improve Iraq's political process, not only at the central level, but also at the regional and local levels.  By destroying Al Qaeda, the United States has become the indispensable power in Iraq.  If the American public and their leaders keep their nerve, the United States will be perfectly positioned to wield considerable and positive influence throughout Iraq and the broader Middle East over the long term.

Katulis' rapid-fire response:

No one can dispute that the numbers of deaths of both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers are down from their highest level. Nevertheless, overall levels of violence remain dangerously high — 2007 is the deadliest year for our troops since President Bush began this unnecessary war of choice in 2003.

These declines may simply be the dust settling from the latest phase in Iraq’s struggles for power.  As the most recent National Intelligence Estimate noted, declines in violence — particularly in Baghdad — are in large part due to population displacements.  In other words, sectarian cleansing continued even while U.S. troop numbers reached their highest levels since the invasion.  Independent refugee organizations like the International Organization for Migration and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society report that the number of Iraqis displaced by the conflict doubled since the start of the surge, adding to millions already pushed out of their homes from 2003 to 2006. 

Read the rest of the barrage and join in the melee here.

In round four of this week's debate on fire policy, Richards Carson and Rider show no signs of abating — though the two find their views aren't diametrically opposed:

Rider begins, "First, let me say that you were correct when you said I didn’t assess enough blame on FEMA and the feds. I bow to your expertise in this matter. I let ’em off too easy." Nevertheless:

Should the feds be the disaster relief Sugar Daddy? No.

Ideally, disaster relief would be voluntary -- through the Red Cross and other philanthropic institutions best geared to providing aid in times of need. In addition to not requiring force to obtain funding (taxes), such organizations are far more effective in getting the aid to the truly needy in a timely and efficient manner. If we were not forced to “give at the office” (through taxes) for the government aid programs -- and then assuming that the aid problem is taken care of -- most of us would contribute far more to such charitable organizations.

Carson concurs:

Again we agree on several of the key issues. FEMA is still a mess and still has a clean-up-after-the-disaster mentality rather than focusing on how to prevent a situation from turning into a disaster. Local military aircraft should have been allowed into the fight very early, when they would have been most effective. The public was deceived about this issue having been solved.

But with one really big caveat:

Where we are in substantive disagreement is over when the federal government should get involved, and the extent to which voluntary organizations can be relied upon.

Read the rest and fuel the discussion here. 

Richard Rider and Richard Carson answer another burning question today: Is bringing in federal subsidies for insurance in fire prone areas -- on top of what the state already gives -- "three shades of crazy or an important step toward rationalizing fire risk in Southern California?"

Carson gives a nuanced answer using four principles. Here's a sample:

The first is ironclad: Fire insurance should not be subsidized by the government.

The second principle is that fire insurance needs to be available to homes that were already built before the current round of fires.

Rider disagrees with the latter, explaining:

Of all the things that government does, legislated risk management (primarily reflected in government insurance programs) is the one area that government almost always does wrong.

Read the full exchange and join the discussion here.

In round two of this week's Dust-Up, Richard Rider and Richard Carson square off over the differences between local and federal responses to the fires in San Diego.

For Rider, "the real issue is where the coordination and planning did NOT improve — the timely use of Navy, Marine and National Guard air assets":

It's popular to blame just the bureaucrats. But the truth is that the real responsibility rests with Gov. Schwarzenegger, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and especially our San Diego County Board of Supervisors. They were ill-prepared to move quickly to get the air assets active. They were too busy holding press conferences and patting themselves on the back.

Indeed, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, State Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents parts of Orange County, said 24 hours after the fires started that "San Diego was eligible for air support and [local officials] didn't even know it."

Carson contends:

I could not agree with you more that (a) the federal response was disastrously slow; and that (b) the state and local government bears substantial responsibility for this slow response. We are also in agreement that FEMA was practically useless in the early days of the fire, and that the military were anxious to help out and should have been allowed to do so. You are, however, much too quick to let FEMA and the military off the hook, and you left out the U.S. Forest Service altogether.

Sparked your interest? Read today's entry and join the discussion here.

If you haven't been following our Dust-Up on China engagement with Joseph Farah and Andrés Martinez, here's a sample from Tuesday's exchange. Said Farah:

I'm a fan of imports from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. I think most Americans are. These countries are known for producing quality goods at reasonable prices, for paying their workers fair salaries and for sharing many of our most basic values about human rights and liberties.

And Martinez:

I commend you for loving Japanese imports, but I must say a lot of the same people who are so exercised about China taking on the U.S. on the global stage are the same people who worked themselves into a frenzy over Japan's rise in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Remember when Toyotas were chainsawed on Capitol Hill? I don't play the race card lightly, but I do think there is an element of "yellow peril" mongering at issue here. The hysteria has moved from Japan to China, but the point is no one ever rants about German imports or Dutch foreign investment (the way they moaned about Japanese foreign investment).

The youngsters out there may be saying, "What are these two talking about? Isn't Japan that place with all the ganguro or something?" But you'll find a different story in the ever-forgettable first drafts of history...

Set the wayback machine to those zaibatsu-crazy days of chop-suey rock and full-bore Tokyophobia, before the Japenese bubble burst, when our nation's fascination with Japan Inc. (and vice-versa) expressed itself in such short-lived cultural monuments as Akio Morita's The Japan That Can Say No, Michael Crichton's Rising Sun and the Ron Howard joint Gung-Ho. (Jesus, what were we on?)

Believe it or not, back when "Ronald Reagan" was not yet the name of an airport and "George Bush" was still the name of a Dana Carvey routine, this country cowered in existential, yellow-peril horror because American drivers were appreciating the superior gas mileage of the Corolla, or because Sony was buying Columbia pictures, or most of all because the Mitsubishi Group had bought Radio City Music Hall — or as the late Art Buchwald called it in a 1989 column printed in the Los Angeles Times, "Radio City Tojo Hall" (complete with a "Kamikaze Ice Skating Rink").

Channeling the protectionism of the time was no less a figure than The Donald, whom Times reporter Frank Clifford quoted bashing the Rising Sun in New Hampshire in late 1987 (when Trump was still rumored as a possible '88 presidential candidate). "The fact is we don't need a tax increase," Trump told supporters. "We should have a tax decrease. We should have Japan and we should have Saudi Arabia and we should have all of these countries who are literally ripping us off left and right.... They should pay for our $200-billion deficit.... We are supporting — we are literally supporting — Japan, which is the greatest money machine ever created, and we created it to a large extent."

By the middle of the following year, Trump had warmed to the topic, telling Times reporter Nina J. Easton, "There is going to be a tremendous backlash against what Japan is doing in this country  — sucking the lifeblood out of it because of our stupid policies. Our policy is to have free trade, but Japan is not reciprocating."

Were the American People in sympathy with Trump's dimestore demagoguery? You betcha! As the decade Bob Giraldi built drew to a close, La Jolla's own Bob and Ann Gotfredson were hipping the Times' John M. Glionna to their own plan to fight back against the "financial volleys" against "sacred American institutions," with a Japanese-product boycott that would kick in on December 7. Bob Gotfredson explained the message of Akio Morita's book: "'We have a lot of wealth in your country. We employ a lot of your people, and one of these days we're going to show you the samurai sword."

Japanophobia hit full stride with the Rockefeller Center purchase in October of 1989, with disappointed tourists in the Big Apple complaining about our "selling the country away" and losing "some American spirt in the sense of keeping our property." By the end of the year the Times ran a UPI story hinting darkly of a Japanese group's ambition to buy up Chicago's Sears Tower. That rumor ended up in the same limbo as last year's terrorist plot in the Windy City against the perpetual bridesmaid of America's tragic skyscrapers.

As Bryan Caplan noted in a recent Reason article, "During the anti-Japan hysteria of the 1980s, British foreign direct investment in the U.S. always exceeded that of the Japanese by at least 50 percent." But that didn't stop the whole country from going stark, seppuku-inducing mad.

The whole country, that is, except the L.A. Times' editorial board, which, as it had in the days of Sputnik sputtering, maintained an even keel throughout the Crazy Eighties, and brought Gen. Otis' motto of "True Industrial Freedom" to life for a new generation. Some examples:

Clarifying, the first Earth-orbiting satellite (Sputnik 1, right) was launched by the Soviets 50 years ago this week -- October 4, 1957, to be precise. So how do we in Opinion L.A. land commemorate the anniversary? You guessed it -- by hosting a Dust-Up debate!

All this week, author and former NASA designer and astronaut trainer Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal played a teen version in "October Sky") debates the status of space exploration at its golden anniversary with blogger and former aerospace engineer Rand Simberg. Today, Hickam and Simberg discuss NASA's ability to carry out the country's goals for space travel. From Hickam's opening shot:

NASA is a timid bureaucracy that goes crawling to Congress every year for a pittance (less than 1% of the federal budget) and will do anything — anything — to please. The agency even cozied up to the Russians when Al Gore told it to. Yet somehow, even though Washington essentially considers it a jobs program (sometimes for foreigners), NASA manages to accomplish some astonishing work. Let's see. It has some really cool robots on Mars (I love those little guys) and others heading for the far reaches; it's got some great telescopes out there looking almost to the beginning of the universe; it can put humans into orbit on a big old spaceplane; it has managed to bolt together a space station with some pretty good lab equipment aboard; and though most Americans aren't aware of it, it's also cutting metal to take its astronauts back to the moon and maybe beyond. In my opinion, those are some pretty amazing accomplishments for an agency so thoroughly ignored by its masters.

Personally, I've got bigger hopes for NASA. I will stipulate it should keep putting telescopes in space so we can figure out where we fit in the universe, and it should also keep building those little robots that can and do. But I think its purpose should primarily be to invent, test and field the ships that will allow American industry to get out there, look around, and figure out how to make some money (hint: the solar system is awash with energy). Sure, building the big, reliable machines needed for that takes a great deal of money, but I say why not raid the federal budget for it? I mean, it's not like it's spending its annual $3 trillion (!!) of our money on much that's worth anything, anyway. Iraq, anyone? Bosnia?

Simberg:

But you are far too kind to your former employer when you claim that the shuttle or space station are great achievements. Considering the vast national treasure that was expended on them, they were in fact policy disasters if the goal is to have humanity affordably accessing and utilizing space. Despite Mike Griffin's more-recent backtracking against his faux pas of a couple years ago, when he called the shuttle "a mistake," he was right. And no, comparing them to other, even greater perceived wastes of federal expenditures doesn't excuse them — at best, it damns them with faint praise. And in many ways, as we'll discuss later in the week, the very existence of those programs has in fact for decades held back, not advanced, prospects for more cost-effective efforts by the private sector.

...

If the goal is to have large-scale human activities in space, how can a vehicle that can only send a few government employees at a time, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight, or a space facility that can house only half a dozen, at a cost of billions per year, be said to advance such a goal? And how does NASA's current plan of developing and operating for decades to come yet another single (and fragile) means of getting its astronauts (of which it has an oversupply) to orbit, at a cost of billions per lunar mission for a few civil servants, to occur once or twice a year (while the "rest of us" voyeuristically watch on high-definition television) do so?

Be sure to check back all this week, during which Hickam and Simberg will talk about the Mars mission, evolution in space, post-communist space exploration and other far-out topics.

What can we learn from this week's top traffic-getters in Opinion?

• David Ehrenstein and Andrew Breitbart are bigger than The Beatles, taking first, second and fifth places in the ratings, and the last installment in their Dust-Up on Hollyweird's un-American values isn't even counted here.

• The death of dead-tree media has not been greatly exaggerated, as yet another web-only feature — our Primary Source with Jack Cole and David Fleming discussing the failure of the war on drugs — grabs a spot in the hall of fame.

• You may score big numbers with immigration and affirmative action, but you can never go wrong making fun of Dan Rather.

Keep those cards, letters and clicks coming. Here are the numbers:

1) What are Hollywood values? by David Ehrenstein and Andrew Breitbart
2) Antiwar season by David Ehrenstein and Andrew Breitbart
3) Letters to the editor
4) We're losing in Afghanistan too by John Kiriakou and Richard Klein
5) Hollywood reporting for duty? by David Ehrenstein and Andrew Breitbart
6) Drug war takes a flying LEAP with Jack Cole, David Fleming and the Ed Board
7) Does affirmative action hurt minorities? by Vikram Amar and Richard H. Sander
8) Rather's unraveling anchor cult by the Ed Board
9) Fewer migrants mean more benefits by Mark Krikorian
10) O.J., straight and cold by T. Jefferson Parker

If you haven't been reading this week's Dust-Up on Hollywood political values, you've missed one of the most pull-no-punches debates we've hosted. Today, media mavens Andrew Breitbart and David Ehrenstien answer the question, "Where are all those Holly-cons?" A little from Breitbart:

Conservatives do exist in reasonable numbers in greater Hollywood. However, the vast majority hold "below the line" jobs. That's Industry-speak for the less sexy middle-class tasks such as lighting, transportation, bookkeeping, etc. Show business' silent working-class mass exists in a right/left ratio far closer to its split in American society. And because they get paid far less than the "talent," they live in the far suburbs of L.A., including the flats of the San Fernando Valley

...

David, you've been baiting me to mention George Soros and MoveOn.org throughout this weeklong exercise. Here it finally goes: The prominent Hollywood non-liberals that come quickly to your encyclopedic mind are mostly past their prime and opened up about their atypical politics during the popular Reagan era. Bruce Willis has not talked much politics since. He's smart. And Schwarzenegger, the governor, got almost no institutional support from his Hollywood peers during his run.

Ehrenstein:

Returning to the "conservative" pity-party, the most important right-wing writer-director Hollywood has seen since DeMille, John Milius ("Apocalypse Now," "Big Wednesday," "Red Dawn"), has forsaken Tinseltown entirely for the lucrative cyber-shores of video-game creation. Shouldn't he be making "Red Dawn II: Al Qaeda in America"? Give him a nudge, won't you? I'm sure it would be as big a box-office winner as Mel Gibson's "NASCAR Jesus" (a.k.a. "The Passion of the Christ").

Having achieved not only box-office success but Oscar glory with "Braveheart" -- his epic tribute to 13th century Scottish face-painter William Wallace -- Gibson followed up with "Passion." But failing to see the wisdom of yet another film about the founder of Christianity, the major studios gave Gibson a pass on what has turned out to be his signature project. And, all glory to capitalism at its "invisible hand" best, the independently financed result was one of the greatest box-office bonanzas of all-time.

...

As always, money talks, and should Mel elect to make a film out of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," I haven't the slightest doubt he'd get a backer -- even in "liberal" Hollywood.

Click on the jump to read what others are saying about the Ehrenstein-Breitbart battle.

Day Two of this week's Hollywood politics Dust-up is now posted for your amusement, on the topic of Hollywood's proper role in the national discourse. Andrew Breitbart suggests an artistic New Deal of sorts:

Given that you are a gay expert of gays in cinema and an upstanding liberal Democrat, and I'm straight with four kids and have voted consistently Republican over the last 10 years, I propose that we start a bipartisan, bisexual artistic commission to fix the mess we've gotten ourselves into. [...]

It won't be about "identity" politics; it will be about American politics. It will be a publicly funded national artistic reunification project -- like something FDR would've implemented -- where Tim Robbins and his common-law wife will actually get to hear the other side. Maybe she'll even take off her shirt like she does in all her movies. But this time it will be for America!

David Ehrenstein, meanwhile, says we've always been at war with Eastasia:

Let's jump into the Wayback Machine and return to the early 1940s, when the Soviet Union was America's ally (yes, you read that right), and Hollywood was devoted to creating fanciful melodramas of its brave efforts to counter the Nazi menace. One of them was "Days of Glory" (1944), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and starring prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova and (in his motion picture debut) Gregory Peck. The script by Melchior Lengyel (a Hungarian emigre who co-scripted "To Be or Not to Be" and "Ninotchka" for Ernst Lubitsch) and Casey Robinson (a veteran screenwriter whose most famous titles are "Now, Voyager" and "Kings Row") is a fairly standard action-and-romance presenting Russian villagers as really nice people who don't deserve to be attacked by Hitler's armies. Nothing teribly special about it, other than Peck's obvious star potential.

As you might expect, a film like this looked a lot different by the war's end, when the U.S.-Soviet alliance was not only over but being treated as if it never happened, to judge from testimony given by numerous stars and studio chiefs before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This decidedly Orwellian turn of events (sorry, but no other word applies) was made complete by the 1950s with the "Cold War" in full swing. By 1958, "Days of Glory" director Jacques Tourneur could be found at the helm of "The Fearmakers" -- a bizarre little number in which Dana Andrews undoes a plot by evil commies Mel Torme and Veda Ann Borg to create biased opinion polls, the better to influence the media and elections. Interestingly enough, the script was based on an anti-Nazi World War II era novel by Darwin L. Teilhet. With a tap of the typewriter Nazis became commies

Click the whole thing to see stuff like hyperlinks, and to leave comments at the bottom.

What does a fall movie season rich in high-profile movies with antiwar messages say about modern Hollywood politics? Not much, writes David Ehrenstein in the opening shot of this week's Dust-Up debate between him and fellow new-media maven and author Andrew Breitbart. This fall's political movies are more about genre than politics, using the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as subtext, Ehrenstein writes. More:

What the fall season tells us is that Hollywood is a lot faster on the uptake with this war than it was with Vietnam. Back then the first blip of the cinematic radar came in 1967 with Roger Corman's "The Trip," when a stoned Peter Fonda broke into a neighbor's home where the TV was playing actual news footage. Just a reference, but it really counted for something. The following year John Wayne's 21-gun salute, "The Green Berets," premiered and was a big hit. After that audio-visual silence reigned until 1978, long after Vienam had ended. The pro-war "The Deer Hunter" won an Oscar for best picture, while the antiwar "Coming Home" won "Hanoi Jane" (as the right loves to call her) her second statuette. The country was indeed "split" about Vietnam, and so was Hollywood (about 60% against and 40% for). But if the latest polling figures are to be believed (and I for one have every reason to give them credence), the Iraq war is about as popular as AIDS.

Looking at the slate of current and upcoming releases, Hollywood is staying true to cautious form, with "criticism" of the war couched in familiar genre terms. "In the Valley of Elah" is a melodrama about a war vet gone missing after returning stateside, and how it affects his family. "Grace is Gone" concerns a road trip taken by a man (John Cusack) whose wife has been killed in Iraq. In light of the right's brass-knuckles treatment of antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, I expect no end of jokes will be made at the expense of this film by the ever-sensitive Ann Coulter and her ultra-scrupulous confederates.

Breitbart counters that the '07 fall movie season is in line with Hollywood's "40-year streak of working against the United States' strategic objectives at a time of war." More from Breitbart:

To the Hollywood defeat set the Iraq War is painted as Abu Ghraib and a soldier raping an Iraqi 14-year-old girl and killing her family. Anomalous hideous behavior for which the perpetrators are rightfully prosecuted is used to slander the majority in the pursuit of political propaganda intended to demoralize a nation in the pursuit of ending the war. Brian De Palma admitted as much. Shameful. Predictable . . .

For those who see the world through art, my side -- which strongly sees radical Islam as a growing anti-democratic, anti-liberal global threat -- is not represented because our dissent is deemed "hate speech." (War was so much easier when the Nazis were white.) Hollywood acquiesces when CAIR and other pro-Islamist interest groups demand that Muslim extremists not appear in film portrayed as terrorists. If only the Pentagon had the same sway! Sure, my side has talk radio, best-selling books, top-rated cable news shows, blogs, Op-Ed columns and even the presidency to make our points. But we do not have even a minority position to tell the most important stories of our time because of the politically correct architecture of the creative process in Hollywood.

Be sure to check back all this week, in which Ehrenstein and Breitbart will discuss studios' role in the national discourse, "Hollywood values," and whether the movie industry even matters politically.

The fundamental strategy of the war on fat is to universalize the attitudes of middle- and upper-class white American women toward weight, food, dieting and exercise. Such women are taught from a very early age to hate their bodies, to be terrified of fat and to turn eating into an endless moralistic struggle between the imperative to eat appropriately petite portions of supposedly "good" foods while avoiding the quasi-erotic seductions of "bad" foods. [...]

Needless to say, both diet companies and obesity