 Some reaction in today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages to the coming deeper cuts to the state's higher education system, and to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's assertions about welfare cheats.
Start with the University of California. UC Berkeley professors Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin say it makes more sense to fire people (presumably their colleagues, not them) than to impose across-the-board salary cuts. Why?
Growth has led to bloat at UC. The bloat and bureaucracy stifle creativity and productivity. The bloat is in unproductive workers and unproductive jobs.Many jobs have little to do with our core missions of teaching and research.
Next, the Cal State system. CSU Long Beach geography professor and department chairman Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. says cuts to his schools are necessary, too, but beware the consequences:
So what is the cost of gutting the Cal State system? Fewer nurses. Fewer teachers. Fewer engineers. Fewer poets and artists. Fewer film and electronic arts experts. Fewer MBAs. Fewer people to drive the future of California, including fewer geographers trained in my department. These reductions in educated human capital will hit California at a time when the state needs 2 million additional college graduates by the year 2020.
Also on op-ed, Douglas MacKinnon shows why he's one of those conservatives that liberals love, when it's convenient, and that conservatives love to hate. He takes on the GOP for hypocrisy and calls on the party to shed the "morally bankrupt leaders who have violated the trust of their families and constituents" (think Appalachians and Argentina) and to embrace a wider base. Read more about MacKinnon here and here, and more from him here.
You've noticed those billboards about your right to have a pet? So has columnist Meghan Daum.
On the virtual pages, like this one, check out a response from Los Angeles County welfare chief Philip L. Browning to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attack, a couple weeks ago in the Times, on the CalWorks welfare-to-work program.
On the editorial page, the Times continues its Rehabilitating Healthcare series with a thumbs-down on the portion of the House bill that would fund reform with tax increases on the rich. Better, the page says, to roll back the tax exemption on health benefits.
The exemption is worth $3.5 trillion over 10 years, so even a modest reduction could raise a significant amount. Trimming the exemption would also discourage gold-plated insurance plans that promote excessive consumption of healthcare services. Such a move would face stiff resistance from unions and President Obama, who promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. But it would send the valuable message that everyone pays for this reform because everyone benefits.
The editorial page also remembers the Apollo 11 moonshot and offers that clean and efficient energy is just as far away, and ultimately just as achievable. And we observe President Obama's brave willingness to acknowledge that he is a White Sox fan.
Photo: Alex Gallardo / LAT
 In today's pages: reform. Reform of the health care system, reform of immigration policy and reform of fire retardant laws. Let's start with health care.
The editorial board today takes a look at how to improve medical care while lowering costs in a reformed health care system, and suggests three ways to do so: invest in primary care, develop treatment standards for medical professionals and promote information technology that tracks patient care. One encouraging thing about healthcare reform, however, is that
improving the quality of care can help slow the debilitating increase
in costs. It's good for all. And although the changes required won't be
easy, they're essential to the crucial third piece of the healthcare
reform puzzle, which is providing coverage to all Americans.
The board is perturbed by the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historical landmark, and the businesses that are affiliated with it on Olvera Street. The site, which claims to be the location where Los Angeles was founded, has been costing the city money instead of paying for itself. The rents on the merchants' stalls along the back alley are much lower than market rate, and the board calls for the city to reset the rents and make this historical landmark cover its costs. On the op-ed side of the pages, health care again! Phil Lebhertz, director of the Foundation for Health Coverage Education, points out that many health care programs exist for lower-income folks, but many just don't know about it: If such a government health insurance option is implemented, will
people who are uninsured sign up for it? The question is valid because
one-third of the 47 million uninsured people in the United States --
that's 15 million people -- are eligible for government coverage plans
already in place but not signed up....
Perhaps a first step in fixing the current healthcare delivery system
is to create legislation that mandates an effective communication
system for any new program as well as the programs already in place.
And reform is again the word of the day, as Jeb Bush, Thomas F. McLarty III and Edward Alden
broach the issue of immigration policy and the outcome of a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force they recently headed. Encouraged by President Obama's call for change of the immigration system, the three politicians propose to make it easier for some illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, reward businesses that use programs such as E-Verify to check applicants' immigration status, and align immigration policy with America's competitive interests. Russell Long, vice president of Friends of the Earth, urges California to stop requiring that fire retardant chemicals be used on baby products. Long says the chemicals are not proven to be fire-proof, and instead could be dangerous to the infant's, and their parents', health: Making matters worse, California's law has meant that baby products are
often treated with the chemicals even in states that don't require such
treatment. To avoid manufacturing two separate lines, one for
California and another for other states, many manufacturers make their
products sold in other states to California standards.
Finally, columnist Gregory Rodriguez tries to find a link between the recession and the declining divorce rate. His conclusion? Our society has yet to find (or create) a marriage model that incorporates all of society's changes and the choices both men and women have: This fits right into the fact that we're divorcing less in hard times.
In the context of this recession, we have fewer choices, and fewer
choices means we're back to a good fit with the marriage model of old.
Still -- and a little paradoxically -- the fact that there are
untraditional marriages may also be helping husbands and wives
withstand some of the emotional and financial stress of economic hard
times. During the Depression, the ego blow to a man who lost his job
caused marital problems. Today, if a man loses his job -- and his wife
is the breadwinner -- it's less likely to create as much unhappiness.
Photo: U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden (C) speaks as Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (L), and President and CEO of
Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) Carol Keehan (R)
listen as Biden makes an announcement on health care at the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building of the White House July 8, 2009 in
Washington, DC. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images
 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
 Oh, countries listen to the International Whaling Commission all right -- as long as they want to. Most nations observe the international ban on whale hunting because they agree with it. As for the rest -- well, of the big three that continue to kill whales, Iceland and Norway simply ignore the ban. And for years, Japan has operated under an exemption allowing it to take whales for scientific research. But with each whale worth tens of thousands of dollars in meat and other products, you can bet a lot more than research is going on, like whale dinners served in upscale restaurants. And does it really take close to 1,000 whales to conduct this research, which is the quota that Japan sets for itself?
The whales that the Japanese hunt, mostly minke, are considered to be at "lower risk" of extinction. Now Greenland wants to hunt 50 endangered humpback whales over the next few years, saying this would be subsistence hunting for its indigenous people. There's certainly precedence for this: The Inuit have been allowed to take several dozen bowhead whales for years. This kind of subsistence hunting is an ancient part of their tradition. But there's more to it. Under the Inuits' tightly managed hunt, the bowhead comeback in the eastern Arctic has been a conservation success story. Adding an endangered species like the humpback whale to the list, though, raises a new set of complications -- which the International Whaling Commission put off dealing with at its recent meeting.
Another issue that has to be addressed is which individual whales are selected out for hunting by the Japanese whalers. A study presented at the IWC meeting found that nearly a third of the whales killed were pregnant. Assuming those whale calves would otherwise have been born and survived, this means a lot more whales are being killed than the number being counted as part of Japan's research.
* Photo of humpback whale by Greenpeace
 Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.
We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.
And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.
Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.
The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.
And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.
* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times
 On the Op-Ed page today, Paul VanDevelder, author of "Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory," discusses an impending ruling by U.S. District Judge James Redden in Oregon that may determine the fate of salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers. VanDevelder argues that dam removal is the best option for the salmon's survival, but it's also the most politically turbulent:
The Columbia-Snake corridor is the salmon's only option for survival,
and Redden is probably their last hope. He is the one person in this
entire drama who is legally obligated to use science and the law to
protect the fish from extinction and from the whims of politicians. If
the law and science are unable to trump politics to save this fishery
-- a fishery that was the most productive in the world just two
generations ago -- how will we ever meet the towering challenges posed
by global climate change?
Read on »
 The climate-change bill has, under the hands of various Congress members, become a weak cousin of what it could have been, the editorial board complains. Sections have been reshaped to benefit the farm industry, while other important sections have simply been gutted. Still, it represents the first real effort by the United States to grapple with global warming, and should pass, as the board concludes:
The House should pass the Waxman-Markey bill, and the Senate should speedily follow suit. Even congressional Republicans can't generate as much hot air as the billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide it would eliminate.
The board also bemoans a court ruling that badly weakens the powers of the Los Angeles controller's office. Under Laura Chick, the office produced important watchdog reports on the operations of city government; now it is in danger of becoming weaker than it was even in the days before Chick. The board calls on the City Council to restore these powers legislatively but doubts, considering that council members also could find themselves the butt of the controller's investigations, that it will.
On the other side of the page, thoughts on Iran dominate the page. Renowned former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky advises the West to listen more closely to the dissenters in oppressive regimes such as Iran. They might lack money, power and sophistication, Sharansky writes, but they know more about the evolution of the national mindset.
People in free societies watching massive military parades or vociferous displays of love for the leaders of totalitarian regimes often conclude, "Well, that's their mentality; there's nothing we can do about it." Thus they and their leaders miss what is readily grasped by local dissidents attuned to what is happening on the ground: the spectacle of a nation of double-thinkers slowly or rapidly approaching a condition of open dissent.
And John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, criticizes President Obama for soft-pedaling his response to Iran. The president will never succeed in persuading Iran to forgo its nuclear initiative, Bolton argues, so there's no point in playing nice.
Photo by Giuseppe Cacace/ AFP/Getty Images
 The Times editorial page today comes to the end of the first year at Los Angeles Unified School District's troubled Locke High School under charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and finds progress, disappointment and hope. And change:
What makes Locke different under Green Dot...isn't that the charter operator has the magic formula for successful schools. It's that the people in charge don't spend years obfuscating, defending and delaying when things don't work. They do something to fix it.
The Times has been following the Locke Green Dot experiment closely. See reporter Howard Blume's articles from earlier this week here, here and here, and the editorial page's year-long series, A Year at Locke, here, and its earlier editorials like this one at the birth of the Green Dot experiment here. And don't miss editorial writer Karin Klein's many blog posts, including yesterday's post from the graduation, with its chilling quote:
"It's happy, but it's also sad," [a parent said]. I waited for the predictable next words - happy because his child had grown up, sad because...well, his child had grown up. Instead, he continued, "Because you know after today some of these kids are going to die. Some will go down a bad path and get taken out too young."
In Op-Ed, this just in from calbuzz.com's Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine: California government is hard to handle. The two bloggers probed and have discovered that the problems include Proposition 13, voter initiatives, gerrymandering, term limits, a volatile tax structure, and the two-thirds rule for adopting budgets and taxes. Who knew? And guess what? It turns out some people are calling for a constitutional convention.
They made me look up the word bibulous, and now I'm embarrassed I didn't know it before, so I deny it.
Roberts, by the way, is the former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the embattled editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press before his well-chronicled battle with owner Wendy McCaw. He wrote about one episode here.
He and Trounstine last wrote for the Times Opinion page here in March on whether Dianne Feinstein would run for governor.
Trounstine is former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University.
Elsewhere in the page, filmmaker Todd Darling writes in favorof the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, but says it's not enough. By the way, catch the trailer from his film, "A Snow Mobile for George," on YouTube here.
And columnist Meghan Daum wonderswhat the deal is with J.D. Salinger, who went to court to block publication of a book in Sweden about his Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield. Say what you will about Salinger, who Daum points out has dabbled in (gasp) Zen Buddhism. But even at 90, he's no phony.
Photo: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times
 The Times editorial board focuses on the failing healthcare system in the United States, urging Congress and all parties involved to start the reform process now before it's too late. Despite sharp disagreements over some of the proposed fixes, the board notes the broad consensus about three main problem areas: rising costs, incomplete coverage and questionable quality:
The cost, quality and coverage problems are intertwined. Healthcare providers pass along the expense
of caring for the uninsured and underinsured, raising costs for those
who have insurance. Insurers respond by raising prices, which leads
more employers and individuals to drop coverage. The low reimbursement
rates prompt physicians to move into more lucrative careers as
specialists, reducing the supply of the primary-care doctors who are
vital to timely, high-quality care. And the perverse financial
incentives in the system deter doctors and hospitals from aligning
their interests with those of their patients. After all, the healthcare
industry profits more from treating ailments than from preventing them.... The U.S. healthcare system isn't a failure. It's extraordinarily good
at some things, such as developing new treatments. But its
inefficiencies and gaps have created flaws so deep, the system cannot
be sustained for long. Not enough people are receiving the care they
need when they need it, and those who are pay too much for it. The
problems are getting bigger and more complex. The longer we wait to
solve them, the more intractable they will become. On the Op-Ed side of the fold, Steven Hill proposes several ways that California can approach a constitutional convention that will potentially remake the state into California, Version 2.0. The problem, he writes, is how to choose delegates. He concludes that random selection -- as done in Canada, among other countries -- may be the best and fairest option. Gregory Rodriguez discusses the danger of urban downsizing and the Obama administration's consideration of a plan to shrink deteriorating cities by bulldozing neighborhoods: The plan makes sense on some level, but it's disturbing on
another. Anyone who's driven by miles of empty lots in Detroit knows
that urban demolition does more than destroy blight. It also erases
history and what a city was. Traces of the past have always been
jumping-off places for the next chapter (think rehabbed Victorians or
sleek post-industrial lofts). And, of course, the back-to-nature plan
-- which could be used in cities such as Memphis, Baltimore,
Philadelphia and others -- is fundamentally an admission and may be an
assurance that these cities will never rise again.
And Susan R. Barry reflects on the beauty of a 3-D world as well as the potential benefits of 3-D movies in spotting visual defects in children. Photo: Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee hold a rally in Washington, D.C., for their healthcare overhaul bill on June 16. Credit: Robert
Giroux / Getty Images
 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
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