In an editorial today, the Times notes that a federal judge will soon decide what actions should be taken to help the endangered salmon on the Snake River in southeastern Washington. The populations of four types of fish have been endangered or threatened since four dams were constructed on the river, despite billions of dollars spent on fish ladders, hatcheries and even trucks to haul upstream-swimming fish around the dams.

Noting the importance of the northern salmon habitat to the West Coast stocks of the fish, the board concludes:

The Obama administration should call for settlement talks that include all the parties involved -- power utilities, farmers, fishermen and environmentalists. At least some of the dams must be breached, but only in conjunction with helping the region develop new sources of clean energy and transportation for Idaho's grain. In the long haul, it makes more sense to truck wheat than fish.

But what do you think? Leave a comment!

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got his newsweek cover, his Los Angeles Magazine cover and a few others in between -- so now it's the City Council's turn. The full council is featured on the August cover of LAJEMM, the Los Angeles Journal for Education on Medical Marijuana.

I heard several reports yesterday of this very impressive-looking, full-color, glossy-covered 14 x 10 magazine being distributed in stacks around town. As of this posting, the July issue is still highlighted at the Web site, and it has an inset of the council. But holy smokes -- the August cover makes the council members look like poster children for medical marijuana.

Or maybe that should be "medical marijuana" (with quotes), because while some of the full-page ads in the 208-page book emphasize health and healing, many don't bother with the medical niceties and instead discuss their "quality strains," "clones," "friendly staff," etc.

It's an interesting addition to the discussion over whether and how cities should regulate medical marijuana dispensaries. Here's the Times' recent editorial encouraging the council to move forward with regulations, but there is obviously a lot more to be considered: Can or should the city regulate advertising? Can or should the city take any role in verifying the medical use of marijuana? Did Californians, in adopting Proposition 215 in 1996, really intend to roll back all restrictions against recreational marijuana use? Or did they mean, as the ballot measure said, to protect people from prosecution only for medical use of the plant?

And, did the City Council members know they were posing for a magazine cover?

In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, California finally has a balanced budget! Sort of. OK, not really. Fine. Not at all.

That sort of delayed reckoning and outsourced accountability should not be portrayed as forward momentum. The state should not try to take credit for solving the budget problems when in fact it has merely foisted its problems onto local governments. There is no separation, in the minds of voters or in the pangs of those most in need, between state and local government. We'd prefer a little more honesty from both the Capitol and the many city and county halls, all of which should acknowledge that their budget woes are but two sides of the same worn coin.

Editorial writers also take note of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black man who was trying to break into the home of a famous Harvard scholar, best-selling author and professor. Good thing they caught him. The professor's name was ...let's see, it's here somewhere... Oh. Oops. It's Henry Louis Gates Jr. The editorial board writes:

The police say Gates asked if the officer knew "who he was." That may sound arrogant, but many a black man in the same position has asked a similar question. It means: "Can you see who I am, not just what I am?" Because regardless of their achievements, wealth or status, they are vulnerable to the universal black male experience -- finding themselves in handcuffs first and charges dropped later.

Times columnist Tim Rutten has a preview of Thursday's MTA board vote on whether to contract out Metro car construction to Italian firm AnsaldoBreda. David Wise catalogs the CIA's attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and perceived nuisances, and discovers that our spooks aren't very good at bumping people off. Finally, author Christopher Lane walks us through the changes in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which have given us, among other things, Brooke Shields shilling for a liquid to combat the horrors of eyelash hypotrichosis.

But that's just our Opinion.

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP

Here's something that leftish Democrats talked about a lot -- but only quietly, over drinks in back rooms -- when they were trying to decide whether to back Judy Chu or Gil Cedillo to replace Hilda Solis in Congress when President Obama picked Solis for labor secretary.

If we go with Gil, they said, we can hand-pick some reliable Democrat to replace him in the state Senate. But Gil's gone sort of moderate. So maybe we should go with more reliably leftish Judy. Oh, but wait, that will mean Schwarzenegger would appoint her replacement on the state Board of Equalization, and he'd choose someone who's gone sort of moderate.

Well, they went with Chu in the special primary, and she won. Today Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed moderate Democrat Jerome Horton to the Board of Equalization, and if he's confirmed, it's a major defeat for leftish Democrats. Even though Horton's a Democrat. Which raises some questions:

Q: What the heck is the state Board of Equalization?

A: It's the nation's only elected tax body. It's in charge of collecting sales and property taxes, and is not to be confused with the Franchise Tax Board, which collects income taxes. We need a separate, elected BOE because -- um, because -- well, because California needs more elected officials. Also, without a BOE, termed-out legislators who aren't yet ready to run for statewide office but who can't get appointed to the Waste Management Board would have no power base and limited fund-raising opportunities. The BOE keeps them in the game.

Q: Horton's a Democrat. And there's nothing wrong with being a moderate. So what's the big deal?

A: In tax policy circles, "moderate" is code for business-friendly, which changes the balance on the five-member board. The state is divided into four districts: 1st (representing the entire California coast, from Oregon to Santa Barbara; automatically a Democratic seat); 2nd (cow counties, tax revolt counties, the desert portion of L.A. county: Republican seat); 3rd (San Diego, Orange, Inland Empire; in other words, Republican seat); and 4th (the non-desert portions of L.A. County. Democrat). The tie is broken by the state controller, who is Democrat John Chiang. But Horton would be expected to mix things up by voting, sometimes, with the Republicans. And those tax policy votes will make a far bigger difference to California, in the short run at least, than anything Chu could possibly do in Congress.

Q: Wait, didn't Chu beat Horton in the last BOE Democratic primary?

A: Indeed she did: Chu got 49.7% of the vote in the 4-person field; Horton got 31.5%. So should we say that Schwarzenegger is flouting the choice of voters, who had a chance to pick Horton and overwhelmingly said no? Or should we say that Schwarzenegger is doing the voters' will by giving them their back-up choice?  

Q: Is Horton even qualified for this job?

A: No, unless you count his two-decade career at the BOE, his six years as a state assemblyman, and his four years on the Inglewood City Council. Some Democrats who oppose Horton likely do so because of his pro-business approach on taxes and his penchant for avoiding Assembly votes to keep lobbyists on both sides courting him until the last possible moment.

Q: What about Chu's husband, Mike Eng? Doesn't the state Constitution require Eng to always succeed Chu in any elected position?

A: No, although it's understandable why someone might think that. Eng succeeded Chu on the Monterey Park City Council, as Monterey Park mayor, and as member of the Assembly from the 49th District.

Q: Is Horton going to be confirmed by the Legislature?

A: Not without a lot of angst and political saber-rattling. If he's not confirmed, and no follow-up appointment is confirmed, a former Chu staffer will fill in until the BOE election next year. Bet you can hardly wait.

Q: If the BOE board is supposed to represent the entire state, how come four of five members come from the L.A. area?

A: District line-drawing at its finest.

Photo: Robert Durell / LAT

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

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

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

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

South Pasadenans say "tax me." In the latest in a string of mail-only votes in relatively well-to-do school districts in the Los Angeles area, voters in South Pas apparently have adopted a parcel tax to pay for schools. The ballot deadline was yesterday; votes were counted almost immediately and the finally tally gave Measure S just over the 2/3 supermajority it needed to pass.

The Pasadena Star-News reports that there are still a few absentee ballots to be counted, so the results aren't final. I'm waiting to hear back from the usually responsive L.A. County Registrar-Recorder's Office on this; seems to me that if it was a mail-only election, all ballots are absentee and would have been counted at the same time. I'll update you when they update me.

*UPDATE: The Registrar-Recorder's Office explains that these figures do not include ballots received yesterday, either by mail or dropped off in person. There are enough of those that they could make a difference in the outcome. A fuller tally is expected after 5 p.m. on Friday.

This is a property tax, sort of. Instead of an assessment based on the value of the property, a parcel tax generally bills the owner of each piece of property the same amount. In this case, that's $288 for most parcels, residential and commercial alike, except for multi-unit parcels, which are $95 per unit.

Here are the still-unofficial results: Yes, 3,991, or 67.26%; No, 1,943, or 32.74%.

See our June 2 post on school parcel taxes here. See Times staff writer Seema Mehta's comprehensive June 15 story here.

San Marino approved its school parcel tax proposal last month. Ballots are due Tuesday in the Palos Verdes school district and the following Tuesday in school districts in La Cañada Flintridge and Rowland, which covers all or parts of the cities of Rowland Heights, West Covina, City of Industry and Walnut.

The Times' editorial page today takes President Obama to task for his back-and-forth pronouncements on the destructive practice of mountaintop coal mining. We say the president merits "quiet applause" for new restrictions, but we also note that they come on the heels of approval of two-dozen new projects.

The best approach to mountaintop mining would be to ban it completely. It's cheaper and less labor-intensive than underground mining, but not worth the environmental cost. At a minimum, Obama should address some other highly destructive rule changes imposed by the Bush administration -- a good place to start would be restoring a regulation that forbade mining within 100 feet of a stream, and disallowing the use of mine waste as "fill" material in waterways.

The editorial board also scolds the president about his exception-filled "paygo" plan and the rest of the decisions that may show how comfortable Washington is getting with deficit spending. Growing the debt may have had some merit as a way to stimulate the economy, but where are the plans to restore fiscal balance?

And we take another look at the difficulty in firing bad teachers, and the role that unions play in elevating teacher job security over the welfare of students. The new secretary of Education wants teachers to be paid based on how well their students learn. California isn't close to that, or any other objective measure.

Here, it is considered revolutionary for a school board to beg for relief from a tortuous, money-wasting teacher termination process that is nearly doomed to failure anyway.

On the Op-Ed page, Ben Ehrenreich calls on the U.S. to get down off its high horse on torture. It isn't new, he argues, and it isn't a thing of the past either.

Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. The Bush administration's great act of hubris was not to allow torture -- that was nothing new -- but to attempt to shelter it within the law. Now, when President Obama vows that "the United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know.

Ehrenreich last wrote for The Times in April, when he reviewed "News From the Empire" by Spanish novelist Fernando del Paso.

Author Craig Childs is friends with and lives among private collectors who grab pot fragments and other archaeological artifacts, robbing the bits and pieces of much of their historical value. He opposes the practice -- but describes the mixed feelings he has about recent raids that resulted in the arrest of some of his friends.

Childs last wrote for The Times in February, when he discussed what a recent finding of chocolate in an ancient New Mexico jar has to say about pre-Columbian North American civilization.

And Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders whether the recent murderous attacks on an abortion doctor and the Holocaust museum in Washington mean we have entered the era of the angry old man.

Photo credit: Jeff Gentner / Associated Press

Today's editorial about the new SAG contract tried to summarize more than two years of Hollywood labor talks in a single sentence, a high-risk move that, ahem, was not completely successful. Here's the sentence:

By "residuals intact," we meant that the new contracts didn't change the residuals already established for TV and other traditional outlets. "Albeit less generous" was a reference to newly created residuals for online programming that were minuscule in comparison to the ones paid for TV reruns. But our words didn't necessarily get these points across, and AFTRA National Executive Director Kim Roberts Hedgpeth sent me an e-mail registering her protest:

She's right on all accounts. I would add, though, that many writers and actors don't view the new residuals for programs streamed on Hulu and other online sites as being "more generous" than what they've relied on for years in television. Nor are there any residuals to be paid when a program made for the Internet is resold to other new-media outlets.

The ad-supported streaming provisions of the contracts are the real flash-points, because many union members see Hulu and its ilk taking the place of reruns on TV. In their minds, they are trading hefty TV residuals for parsimonious Internet ones. There's no question that the networks are airing far fewer reruns, and that more people are catching those repeats online than before. But it's also true that, at least so far, the shows that air on Hulu et al aren't generating nearly as much revenue for the networks as their reruns used to.

So, that's what we meant by "less generous." Now if only the newspaper offered as much space as the Opinion L.A. blog....

-- Jon Healey

The United States is the only nation in the world in which a child can be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. California has more than 200 inmates who were sentenced to remain behind bars forever for crimes they committed before they became adults. Under a bill that passed today on the Senate floor, they would get a chance to petition the court to have their sentences converted to 25-years-to-life. That wouldn't guarantee parole or eventual release; it would simply give them a chance at a hearing.

The Times editorialized in favor of SB 399, which now moves to the Assembly. It's authored by Leland Yee, D-San Francisco. Read our editorial here, and a follow-up blogpost here. Here is a support blog and site.

This is a worthy bill and deserves to pass and be signed into law. Support is not based on naive or romantic notions about innocent children wrongly locked up for life. This is not a movie. The dozens of people the bill would affect were convicted of committing serious and often brutal felonies. Yes, many were following the lead of criminal adults, and many others were too scarred or traumatized by violent families or neighborhoods to fully grasp the horror of their actions. But punishment makes sense.

Life without parole, however, does not -- at least, not in every case. Under this bill, many, perhaps most, of the California inmates sentenced for crimes committed in their youth would remain in prison for life and will eventually die there. But for some who can demonstrate that as adults they have grown, repented and reformed, they may be able to look forward to the possibility of a portion of their adulthood outside prison bars. 

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

In today's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, the editorial board says it's time to sell the picturesque state-owned castle, pictured at right, perhaps for condos. The castle, by the way, is the prison at San Quentin.

Selling San Quentin and building homes or businesses in its place would boost the state's economy, lower prison operating costs and possibly provide a one-time cash infusion to the general fund, all without costing taxpayers a dime. Lawmakers should get it done, even if it won't solve the budget crisis.

The board also ponders the diminution of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel after a recent Supreme Court opinion, penned by Justice Antonin Scalia, in the case of Jesse Jay Montejo. The ruling overturns a 1986 precedent and blurs what ought to be a bright line: that once a suspect has a lawyer, questioning should stop unless the lawyer is present.

And then there's sexting, the practice of young teens, usually girls, of sending naked and other personal photos of themselves to boys -- who, too often, forward them to the rest of the school, the neighborhood, and all of cyberspace. So are we dealing with sex crimes? Child abuse? The Times calls on everyone to pause and take a breath:

By sexting, to quote one expert, teens are giving themselves "cyber tattoos" for life. So although it may be necessary to bring charges in the most egregious cases, that shouldn't be the rule. Education and attentive parenting will go further toward addressing this worrisome trend than new laws and tough prosecutions.

On the Op-Ed side, historic preservation comes to the moon. No, really. Louisiana State University School of Art graduate student Jill Thomas and professor Justin St. P. Walsh say we should worry about space tourists messing with the Apollo landing sites.

The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to protect them. Armstrong's iconic footprint and the American flag placed by the astronauts may yet be intact -- there is no wind or rain on the moon to damage or destroy them.

Election law maven, blogger, and Loyola Law School professor Richard Hasen calls for Al Franken to be seated in the U.S. Senate. Democrat Franken led incumbent Republican Norm Coleman by 312 votes after a lengthy recount in Minnesota, but Coleman has appealed to the state Supreme Court and may not stop there.

If, as expected, the court rejects Coleman's challenge and confirms Al Franken as the winner, the U.S. Senate should be ready to seat Franken provisionally, even if Coleman vows further legal action and even if the state's governor refuses to sign Franken's election certificate.

And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes up the Latino-ness of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent.

Because the media and the political elites make no distinctions among Latino groups, Mexican Americans may find themselves waiting a very long time for one of their own to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images