Like every journalist, I have kicked myself after conducting an interview for not asking an obvious -- in retrospect -- follow-up question. So I don't want to be too harsh on Brian Williams. Nevertheless,  Williams bungled big-time when he allowed John McCain and Sarah Palin to exploit Joe Biden's knuckleheaded prediction that a new President Barack Obama would be tested by America's enemies.

Contrasting himself with Obama, McCain said: I've been tested." Then he harped on the fact that Obama is "young and untested," and Palin chimed in, calling Biden's comment the "most telling" utterance of the campaign.

Whoa! "Young and untested"? Isn't that also a description of Palin, who as even her supporters acknowledge is a foreign-policy novice? Wasn't the obvious follow-up for Williams this zinger: "If, Senator McCain, you had a fatal heart attack on Jan. 21, would our enemies be tempted the next day to provoke a crisis to test President Palin?"

True, Williams later asked the Republican couple to comment on Colin Powell's criticism of McCain's choice of Palin, which evoked a defense by Palin -- who didn't want to toot her own horn -- of her executive experience. But the subject was foregn policy, wasn't it?

Christopher Buckley, the son of famed editor, columnist and conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., is a fine writer and thinker in his own right, but seems to have achieved maximal fame only after slapping many of his father's biggest fans in the face.

Buckley was forced to resign as a columnist with National Review, the magazine his father founded, after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog post on The Daily Beast. The conservative reaction has been predictable: in a follow-up post, Buckley said the comments received at the Beast, an interactive venture backed by Barry Diller, has been running about 7-to-1 in favor, but at National Review it's been more like 700-to-1 against. A sampling of the reaction on Republican website gopusa.com shows many Republicans think Buckley is a communist and a traitor who should be disinherited from the grave; one commenter eloquently described Buckley's endorsement as "intellectual patricide."

But is it really? William F. Buckley, who died last February, was no fan of George W. Bush, whom he didn't regard as a true conservative, and toward the end of his life he seemed deeply dismayed by the influence of the evangelical movement over the Republican Party. Christopher Buckley, who says he was once genuinely fond of John McCain, switched over to Obama in part out of disgust at the way McCain has conducted his campaign, but largely because of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. "What on earth can [McCain] have been thinking?" Buckley wrote. It seems almost certain that if Buckley's blue-blooded, Yale-educated father were alive today, he would have felt exactly the same way.

* Photo of Christopher Buckley by AP

Are John McCain and Sarah Palin stoking the fires of polarization and bigotry, or are such accusations just a canard that liberals have been using against conservatives for generations? The Times editorial board and columnist Jonah Goldberg take starkly different positions on that issue today.

In the third installment of its "Position Papers for the Next President" series, The Times argues that the next president will be tasked with bridging partisan divisions and slowing the "decline of civility" that afflicts modern American culture. "This campaign is more crass and more virulent because McCain made it so," the editorial states, blaming the GOP candidate for the xenophobic attitudes of some of his supporters. To Goldberg, meanwhile, such notions reflect the hypocrisy of liberals who decry McCain's backers for calling Democrat Barack Obama a terrorist while ignoring the intolerance of Obama supporters who put "Abort Sarah Palin" bumper stickers on their cars.

Speaking of undignified campaigns, English professor Gillian Silverman says modern presidential debates have got nothing on the famous contest between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 -- in those days, politicians really knew how to fire up the crowd. And homeless services expert Joel John Roberts and English teacher Charles E. Diaz give their perspectives on John Robert McGraham, a Los Angeles homeless man who was doused with gasoline and set on fire last week. Roberts says we can avoid such tragedies with better homeless programs, while Diaz remembers the panhandler who taught him a lesson about human dignity. Finally, back on the editorial page, The Times finds for the defense in a Supreme Court case against Philip Morris USA, which it says is being wrongfully accused of unfairly marketing "light" cigarettes.

*Illustration by Roman Genn / For the Times

Justice Stephen G. Breyer (REUTERS/Jason Reed)

The Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative Catholic group, is berating Fordham University Law School for awarding an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer who, among many other rulings, wrote the majority opinion in a 2000 decision striking down Nebraska's ban on "partial-birth" abortions. The society argues that the honor for Breyer defies a directive from American bishops that “[t]he Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Leave aside the question of whether an award for Breyer must be construed as endorsement of every one of his opinions. What's really interesting about this protest is that it involves a judge (and a Jewish one), not a politician. A pro-choice legislator arguably chooses whether to support legal abortion; a judge, however, is supposed to be interpreting what legislators (and the framers of the Constitution) intended. A judicial decision isn't normally considered an "act" in the sense that a vote in Congress is.

This may explain why Catholic bishops generally scold -- and even withhold Holy Communion from -- pro-choice Catholic legislators but not Catholic judges. For example, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who signed a 1992 opinion upholding the "essential holding" of Roe v. Wade, has not received the episocopal opprobrium visited upon John Kerry or even Rudy Giuliani. Nor has Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who testified at his confirmation hearings for an appellate court seat that "nothing in my personal views would prevent me" from applying Roe v. Wade. (On the Supreme Court, Roberts voted to uphold the constitutionality of a ban on partial-birth abortion, but he didn't cite his faith as the reason.)

If the church gives a Catholic judge a pass on the grounds that he is applying the law, not legislating, why shouldn't it make the same dispensation for a Jewish judge? The Jesuits st Fordham should raise this question with the Cardinal Newman Society.

At the weirdly named Silicon Alley Insider, Sean Ryan notes that JohnMcCainDotCom has been trouncing BarackObamaDotCom in YouTube viewership throughout August.

While the shamelessly pro-Obama media have focused on the Democratic nominee's fancy video footwork and the hot, hot hotness of McCain's detractors, McCain has carved out a big YouTube advantage today, this week and this month. All time, Obama still enjoys a commanding lead, and McCain has yet to break the Ron Paul barrier.

McCain's lead is even more commanding in terms of per-screen average: As of right now, he has posted a mere 241 clips, as opposed to Obama's 1,089.

Now consider David Sarno's discovery that there is no Digg "Bury Brigade" that has been conspiring to suppress pieces critical of McCain, and that the burying of anti-McCain material has been a popular, community-wide phenomenon. Could McCain have a higher rating among the web-savvy than is generally believed? That runs counter to the hipster narrative my colleagues all want to believe, but I found out way back in the nineties that hipsters are as useless online as they are in real life.

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

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

The hero's moment of hubris:

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

And the tragic fall:

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

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

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

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

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

Neither columnist Rosa Brooks nor The Times' editorial board is too impressed with the military commission conviction Wednesday of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who confessed to being Osama bin Laden's driver. Brooks wonders if regular federal courts could do a better job of putting the really bad guys (as opposed to those who chauffeur the bad guys) in prison for good:

But are these guys really the worst of the worst, evil terrorist masterminds who so threaten "the continuity of the operations of the United States government" that they couldn't possibly be tried in U.S. civilian courts?

After 6 1/2 years -- after detaining hundreds of people at Guantanamo, after trying interrogation techniques adapted from the Chinese and the KGB, after countless protests from the International Committee for the Red Cross, after alienating close allies and creating a cause celebre for our enemies -- have the military commissions really been worth it? ....

Odds are, if the administration had stuck to the tried and true federal court system, it'd be home now -- and most of the Guantanamo detainees suspected of serious crimes would have been tried and convicted by now too.

The editorial board laments that Hamdan's military trial "fell short of the highest traditions of American justice," given that he wouldn't be set free even if his appeals are successful:

As an enemy combatant, the Pentagon has said, Hamdan and others so designated can be incarcerated until the end of the so-called war on terror. (Hamdan can appeal the verdict under the Military Commissions Act and might also benefit from a Supreme Court decision in June granting habeas corpus rights to detainees, though that decision involved prisoners who had not received a trial.)

This page has argued repeatedly that, given the length of the confinement of detainees at Guantanamo and the open-endedness of the war on terrorism, it would be preferable to try accused terrorists in the civilian judicial system, where an expeditious trial is guaranteed. That system, it should be remembered, produced the conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik" accused of plotting to bomb the United Nations, and a life sentence for Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. But if Congress and the administration insist on maintaining a separate judicial system to try alleged terrorists, it needs to be fairer and more transparent, and an acquittal must mean more than a return trip to a prison cell.

Also on the editorial page, the board assails John McCain for his nuclear-based energy plan (which it calls "an insult to voters' intelligence") and offers cautious praise for a new state law that requires convicted taggers to scrub away their mess:

Judges must be careful. In the upside-down culture of the street, removing graffiti can be deemed a sign of disrespect and draw deadly retaliation from criminal gangs. Taggers can and should be punished -- but not with their lives.

In World Affairs Journal, Georgetown professor Robert J. Lieber takes a thorough look at the decline of the United States of America, and discovers a new version of Zeno's paradox: It turns out the end has been approaching for well more than 100 years, and yet it never seems to get any closer. Here's a taste, treating a round of decline-of-the-Yankee-empyrean talk that surfaced back during Ronald Reagan's morning in America:

In the same year, Paul Kennedy published what at the time was greeted as the summa theologica of the declinist movement—The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which the author implied that the cycle of rise and decline experienced in the past by the empires of Spain and Great Britain could now be discerned in the “imperial overstretch” of the United States. But Kennedy had bought in at the top: within two years of his pessimistic prediction, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union in collapse, the Japanese economic miracle entering a trough of its own, and U.S. competitiveness and job creation far outpacing its European and Asian competitors.

Theories of America’s obsolescence aspire to the status of science. But cycles of declinism tend to have a political subtext and, however impeccable the historical methodology that generates them seems to be, they often function as ideology by other means. During the 1980s, for instance, these critiques mostly emanated from the left and focused on Reaganomics and the defense buildup. By contrast, in the Clinton era, right-of-center and realist warnings were directed against the notion of America as an “indispensable nation” whose writ required it to nation-build and spread human rights. Likewise, much of today’s resurgent declinism is propelled not only by arguments over real-world events, but also by a fierce reaction against the Bush presidency—a reaction tainted by partisanship, hyperbole, ahistoricism, and a misunderstanding of the fundamentals that underpin the robustness and staying power of the United States.

Whole article.

Memín Pinguín, the controversial funnybook character who has caused some U.S.-Mexico friction in the past (most recently in 2005, when President Bush protested Mexico's issuing of a stamp in his honor), is in the news again. Wal-Mart announced earlier this week that it would stop selling Memín Pinguín comics. In an announcement, the retail giant, which had been offering Memín books at stores in Texas, Florida and California, stepped carefully to avoid angering either fans or detractors.

"We understand that Memin is a popular figure in Mexico," said Wal-Mart spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. "However, given the sensitivities to the negative image Memin can convey to some we felt that it was best to no longer carry the item in our stores."

More coverage in our own Hoy.

Most of what I know about these kinds of images I learned from Spike Lee's not-perfect-but-not-to-be-missed 2000 joint "Bamboozled." It's a tall order to try and argue that Memín, whose simian features and hysterical demeanor seem excessive even by genre standards, is actually some kind of progressive figure. Nevertheless, some do make that argument. Adalisa Z says the new controversy reveals the huge cultural differences between the U.S. and Mexico, and during the stamp controversy, historian Enrique Krauze wrote in the WashPost that umbrage at the character was misdirected:

To Americans, the figure, with his exaggerated "African" features, appears to be a copy of racist American cartoons. To Mexicans, he is a thoroughly likable character, rich in sparkling wisecracks, and is felt to represent not any sense of racial discrimination but rather the egalitarian possibility that all groups can live together in peace. During the 1970s and '80s, his historietas sold over a million and a half copies because they touched an authentic chord of sympathy and tenderness among poorer people, who identified with Memin Pinguin.

I generally think dealing in racist stereotypes while arguing that you're attacking racism is like having your cake and eating it too. I mean, in the arm-wrestle between authorial intent and reader response, reader response wins every time: How much difference does it really make whether a particular character is tagged as amiable or villainous within the context of the story? But again, some do make that argument. The Wiki page on Memín details the comic's progressive pedigree.

For the same reason, I'm never sure of arguments from historical context: i.e., you have to remember that this stuff was commonplace in the 1940s. But again, the counterargument: Occasional Superheroine tracks the divergent careers of Memín and Will Eisner's Ebony White, who got a subsequent makeover designed to make him more palatable to modern audiences.

One argument from context that I do find plausible is about the context of our own age. It's possible the history of minstrelsy is becoming so remote that stuff like this will no longer be radioactive simply because nobody knows to be offended by it. I certainly have to reread "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" to remind myself that respectable people thought my own ancestors looked like monkeys back in the day. (And no, I'm not arguing that the Irish had a particulary hard time in America. Just sayin' is all.)

In other words, what do you think:

Photo courtesy of Armando Mota/EPA.

Plenty of blogospheric blowback and some applause for Jonah Goldberg's column today on Barack Obama's national service proposal. First, from Goldberg's column:

There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

For those who don't remember, the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States" ....

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year."

He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory.

Wonkette's reaction: "Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb." Continued:

That is one “dumb” for each paragraph of Jonah Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times column today. For the record, we did not expect it to be “good,” in the traditional sense — we didn’t expect to read it at all! But 18 paragraphs of unmitigated “dumb” has a strangely magnetic appeal during this lazy news season. So let’s check out Jonah’s column, in which he argues that Obama’s plan to offer educational aid as a reward for national service is somehow both (a) welfare and (b) slavery....

He adds, many dumb paragraphs later, the following: “No, national service isn’t slavery. But it contributes to a slave mentality, at odds with American tradition.” Since when is the “slave mentality” at odds with the American tradition, past or present?

More reaction to Goldberg's June 8 column after the jump.

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

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

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

In an abbreviated week when everybody better things to do than look at these here interwebs, readers liked sex and violence. Our Dust-Up on porn dominated the bottom-five, but repeat performances from Brian Doherty and Cy Bolton demonstrated that interest in the Supreme Court's Heller ruling and interest in President Bush is perpetual. Here are the winners:

1. How gun makers can help us By Jeffrey Fagan and Stephen D. Sugarman
2. Can Obama rescue Bush? By Jonah Goldberg
3. How does President Bush lie? By Cy Bolton
4. Cannibal liberals By Neal Gabler
5. What Latinos want from their president By Alberto Gonzales
6. A judge's porn collection By John Stagliano and Barry McDonald
7. L.A. s smut empire By John Stagliano and Barry McDonald
8. The gun-rights fight isn't over By Brian Doherty
9. Swapping live terrorists for dead soldiers By Benny Morris 
10. Stuff so raunchy it's illegal By John Stagliano and Barry McDonald

Is there a July Fools Day I'm not aware of? First, there's a too-good-to-be-true Tunguska anniversary fireball over Southern California. Now the O.C. Register's A section has a look back in sorrow from Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, who laments the "Saddam Hussein mentalities" of his cohorts and pronounces himself "very, very sad, very disappointed" about the project's results:

"There's all kinds of organizations that have spawned from the Minuteman Project and I have to say, some of the people who have gotten into this movement have sinister intentions," he said....

"It's an 'invasion'," Gilchrist said of illegal immigration across the border between the United States and Mexico, "but it's not a war. It is a covert 'Trojan Horse invasion'"....

Sometimes, Gilchrist said he thinks about leaving the debate over illegal immigration and taking on a new issue like urban blight or tax reform. For now, he said he will continue to lobby for more border patrol agents but not from a perch on the border, watching for people trying to cross.

"I have found, after four years in this movement (…) I very well may have been fighting for people with less character and less integrity than the 'open border fanatics' I have been fighting against," he said. "And that is a phenomenal indictment of something I have created."

(On closer inspection, I see the story came out a few days ago, but just made it into the paper today. Interestingly, the single-scare-quotes around the word invasion above have disappeared in the print version.)

Last time Opinion L.A. caught up with Gilchrist, he was opining for our "Forty on 40" feature (and whatever you may think of his attitudes, he was the very soul of graciousness on the phone):

The most expedient way to dismantle domestic terrorism in the United States is to repeal all the Special Order 40s around the country. If you repeal Special Order 40 you'll allow law enforcement to protect the citizens of those communities. This rule smacks of special treatment for people who don't deserve any special treatment other than being arrested and deported. I don't blame the police department; I blame the City Council which does nothing but aid and abet the criminal mentality.

My old pal Ron Bailey notes that today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event, which flattened hundreds of miles in Siberia, and which remains unexplained. The smart money says the explosion was caused by a space rock about 120 feet in diameter, though you can never count out the thunder god Ogdy, and there are strange, and even stranger, countertheories.

A hundred years later, we're still vulnerable to near-Earth objects, and only Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) is willing to do anything about it.

My question: If the rock never hit the ground, why don't we have mini-Tunguska events every time the Space Shuttle re-enters? That is, was it the explosion of the rock or the friction of the entry that caused the detonation?

Update: I spoke too soon. This morning the Kulaks of California got a 100th-anniversary fireball of their very own.

It took a while, but Hillary Clinton finally came around to campaign for Barack Obama. And now, they've taken their show on the road, as The Times reports. The wife of the Man from Hope went to Unity, N.H., today and said, with Obama at her side, "Unity is not only a beautiful place... As we can see, it's a wonderful feeling -- isn't it?" Clinton apparently bore no grudge about Obama's hiring of her former (and unfavored) campaign aide. And Obama, meanwhile, pledged to help Clinton pay off her debts.

Unfortunately some of her female fans haven't quite made it to Unity. In fact, some of them are deriding the whole concept by calling themselves Pumas, to stand for "Party Unity My Ass," and perhaps unintentionally invoking another not-so-complimentary feline term for women. Some insist they'll vote for John McCain, while others plan to abstain, or write in Clinton's name. Rebecca Traister of Salon had the best explanation of their reasoning. (Traister also had a solid explainer of why liberal women were so peeved by the attitude of male Obamaniacs, many of whom, she noted, insisted they would vote McCain if Clinton was the Democratic nominee. In other words, this isn't chicks-holding-grudges, Chris Matthews fans.) On why they're mad at Obama himself:

...for some, there is lingering sting -- about the paucity of women in Obama's top advisory team during the campaign, about the way they feel the Obama campaign stained Clinton's supporters -- and Clinton and her husband too -- as racists, about the patronizing "You're likable enough" comment during a January debate. Perhaps the worst slight, in their eyes, came after Obama had secured the nomination. When he should have been smoothing ruffled feathers, he instead decided to hire Patti Solis Doyle, longtime Hillaryland denizen from whom the senator is now reportedly estranged....

Cy Bolton's Blowback "How does President Bush lie?" is getting a big response.

From the Buckeye State comes a note of thanks and a critique of the Times:

Thank you for running "How does President Bush lie? Let Cy Bolton count the memos."

When the Times decided to originally run James Kirchick's piece I was incredulous. I felt it was a serious disservice to your readership, and it has caused me to question every decision the editorial page editor has made since.

Russell leisenheimer
Cuyahoga Falls, Oh

From Fair Harvard, a lengthy chronology of misdeeds and Tribune Company conspiracies:

To the editors:

The LA Times should be congratulated for publishing Cy Bolton’s Op Ed today.  It was overdue.  It is an unfortunate commentary on the editorial standards fostered by the Times under its new leadership at the Tribune Company, however, that Mr. Bolton’s article was required to correct James Kirchick’s offensively patronizing and demonstrably false article published by the Times on June 16.  Mr. Kirchick’s premise, that “Bush Never Lied,” was so egregiously stupid that no respectable newspaper should have considered printing it.  Perhaps the editors at the Times were given false reassurance by Mr. Kirchick’s position as an editor at the New Republic, which sometimes pretends not to be a mouthpiece for neoconservative views.  It should be remembered, however, that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the New Republic that happily published such articles as “Blood Baath” by former CIA director James Woolsey (issue of 9/24/2001, Vol. 225, Issue 13), where we were offered claims like “the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.”  In recent years, the editors at the New Republic – particularly Peter Beinart -- have publicly recanted their role in fanning the war flames throughout 2002 and 2003.  Because their support for the war was such a devastating embarrassment to the New Republic, and because their later recantation was so cynical and self-serving, it is very difficult to believe anything its editors say, especially when it comes to George Bush and the Iraq war.  Mr. Kirchick’s article of the 16th sounds like a fantasy projected by someone who has spent the last 4 years trying to believe that his attempts to sell the American public on an illegal and disastrous war were the result of an honest mistake.  If you substitute Mr. Kirchick’s own name and those of his fellow editors at the New Republic for that of George Bush, his article has some slight ring of truth.  Otherwise, it’s worthless.

In any case, the Los Angeles Times would do well to heed the warnings contained in Mr. Bolton’s brief summary of the various forms of disinformation the Bush regime disseminated in the run-up to war.  It is worth noting, for example, the close parallels between Rafid Ahmed Alwan (“Curveball”) and the man Italy’s intelligence services claimed was at the origin of the forged documents showing Iraq’s fictitious purchase of uranium from Niger.  Much as the LA Times article of June 18 by John Goetz and Bob Drogin portray Curveball as a compulsive liar and cheat who just happened to fool the CIA, in 2002 Rocco Martino’s handlers at SISMI portrayed him as a “swindler” and “liar” whose bumbling accidentally fooled everyone, including analysts at the CIA.  Reporters and editors at the LA Times would do well to take a page from reporters like Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo, whose work carefully examined the web of falsehoods SISMI used to distance itself from the false information it disseminated through Rocco Martino in order to please the Bush administration. As it turns out, Rocco Martino was not a kooky swindler forging documents on his own, without the collusion of SISMI.  Rocco Martino is a scapegoat, and his role as freelance document-forger was a clumsy piece of disinformation designed to hide the true involvement of the intelligence services of Italy, along with its allies in the Bush administration, in the run-up to war.  The timing of the LA Times article revealing Curveball’s name, along with biographical details of his career as a petty con-man and swindler, should raise doubts in the mind of any informed reader about his alleged role in “fooling” the Bush administration into believing Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.  It seems far more likely that “Curveball” is a creature of the Bush administration, a convenient scapegoat designed to hide the campaign of outright lies and manipulation the Bush regime used to sell their war to the American public.

Arriving as they did on the heels of the presentation of articles of impeachment against Bush by Dennis Kucinich, the articles by Mssrs. Kirchick, Goetz, and Drogin have created the unfavorable impression in my mind that the LA Times is now serving as a mouthpiece to the Bush regime’s ongoing campaign of disinformation concerning the lies they told in the run-up to war.

Perhaps I am just imagining things.  But roughly, the plotline goes like this. 

First, Bush lies about the reasons for going to war, in clear violation of international war crimes treaty to which the United States is a party, thereby subverting the Constitution, which easily meets the standards of high crimes and misdemeanors that would justify impeachment. 

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Hathaway

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

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

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

Just a thought.

Jasmyne Cannick
West Adams, Los Angeles

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

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

Mike Mancuso

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

Given Barack Obama's astronomical fundraising numbers, it was only a matter of time before he decided to eschew public funds to finance his campaign. From today's Times:

Democrat Barack Obama today rejected public financing for his presidential campaign, changing an earlier stand and becoming the first major party candidate to drop out of the system since it began after the Watergate scandal....

Early in the primary season, Obama had said he would use public financing if his Republican opponent did. But that was before the presumptive Democratic nominee harnessed the Internet and became a fund-raising powerhouse.

This move not only makes Obama the first major candidate in more than 30 years to reject public funding (which forbids candidates from raising private funds), but also goes back on his very public indications he would agree to public funding. (See an earlier Times' editorial admonishing Obama for waffling on his pledge.)

Needless to say, McCain has been gleefully calling foul all morning — he can afford to point fingers, in part because his fundraising numbers are pretty anemic compared to Obama's.

But McCain is no angel, either. Remember when he allegedly used public funds as backup to apply for a loan, and then tried immediately to withdraw from the public funding system?  (Attempting to escape, ironically, from the very system he helped set up.) The outraged Dems filed suit shortly thereafter. The Federal Election Commission, lacking quorum, couldn't do much about it, either — which probably suited McCain just fine.

That incident aside, there are plenty of other loopholes that allow the private sector to creep in, a point Obama drove home in a video released this morning:

It's not an easy decision, especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections. But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interests PACs. We've already seen that he's not gonna stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.

Swiftboating, anyone?

Tell us what you think:

*Photo: Joshua Roberts / Bloomberg News

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

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

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

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

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

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

The construction of the Los Angeles Police Department's new headquarters, across Spring Street from the L.A. Times, has been a constant source of argument in downtown circles. Is it moving too slow or too fast? Is it a prime example of runaway costs or a model of smart architecture?

For me, the LAPD's next building has special meaning, because it was instrumental in the creation of our Blowback feature. Though we had used the web once before to get a response to an Opinion piece from the late Jack Valenti (the last true gentleman), it was the brouhaha between L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez and LAPD HQ contractor Ron Tutor that really proved the feature could work. After Lopez penned a column (now disappeared from the site) criticizing the project's leisurely pace, standing-around workers and rising expenses, I figured Tutor — who blew up on the phone with Lopez but seemed to have a coherent critique of the media that he was on the verge of expressing —  would be interested in replying. He delivered, a new feature was born, and you can judge for yourself how well Tutor acquitted himself.

I'm no fan of big, taxpayer-funded buildings under any circumstances, and I've seen a few workers standing around doing nothing (though no more than I see at any workplace, including my own), but I do have to say that for a building that's not scheduled to open until 2009, the LAPD headquarters already looks pretty impressive.

In fact, the only cause for alarm I found while skulking around the project and photographing odds and ends recently was that I briefly got a strong  sense of: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not Greg!"

Then again, don't we all (except for the Gregs among us) get that feeling from time to time?

I'm not sure what the standard of success is when measuring massive public construction projects paid for through our taxes in a city where even the dogs and cats are unionized. I'm not sure there can even be a standard of success in that environment. And I guess anybody would view with dismay a building that will end up blotting out the sun in your second-floor office. But from what I can see, when (or if) the LAPD building gets completed, it will be a pretty nice place to be a cop:

New Yorkers are plenty steamed at artist Yazmany Arboleda, whose exhibition "The Assassination of Barack Obama" led to attention from the New York Police Department and the Secret Service. Arboleda was questioned and left to go about his business by an admirably First Amendment-attentive NYPD. The WashPost's David Segal has the best description of the reasoning behind the artist's stunt, which has "many layers," he says:

For the first phase, Arboleda needed a gallery in Chelsea to display "Assassination," with the intention of having it promptly shut down by authorities. The problem: No gallery in Chelsea would display his art, though not because they found it offensive. "They said, 'We discover our artists, they don't come to us,'" Arboleda says.

Not one for waiting, Arboleda and his friends went online and invented two galleries, purportedly in Chelsea, purportedly exhibiting his "Assassination" show. Viewing at these fictitious venues was said to be by appointment only. Anyone who phoned or e-mailed received a callback from Arboleda, who dolefully explained that the show had been closed down.

Inevitably, this led to publicity. Michael Musto mentioned the show in the Village Voice, implying that he liked the outrageousness of the art, and Martin Peretz blogged about it for the New Republic, implying that he didn't. Arboleda was profiled in the Miami Herald with the headline "Artist Makes a Big Leap."

But that pales compared with the ink and pixels generated by the two-day rental at 264 W. 40th. Arboleda said he was a little surprised by the vehemence of the reaction, in part because the idea of the show had been run through the media machine already, even if it had never actually been seen by the public. He's received some death threats, of course.

Interestingly, when Arboleda explains his own motivation, he does so through the kind of why-do-the-media-obsess-about-Britney-and-Lindsay-when-there-are-so-many-important-issues rant you can hear in any bar in America:

"My mission as an artist is to raise dialogue and conversation about substantive things," he says, staring through arty glasses that did not have any lenses. "There's so much media time spent on superficial things -- like celebrities. My point is to bring substance back."

Courtesy of ArtsJournal.

California Progress Report posts a jeremiad called "What’s the matter with Los Angeles When It Comes to Elections?" and it doesn't even mention that there's an election today! But if you've had trouble voting today, you still might want to take a look:

With the largest concentration of voters in the State, 18 Congressional Districts are partly or wholly contained in the County, along with 14 State Senators and 26 Assembly-members.

(The L.A. Times is not responsible for unattached participles in sentences written by other publications.) The Report cites a host of troubles, and lays the blame for most of them on former Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack, who has "close ties to Diebold," and on her sucessor Dean Logan, who "has no college education." (If true, that should be considered a point in his favor.) I think it's time to let up on McCormack and give Logan a chance. They're like Boris and Natasha to Southern California fraudsters.

Still, vote-count enthusiasts have a point. I find Diebold somewhat like Freddy Kruger: scary the first few times but now so familiar as to be little more than a wisecracking old pal. But it's jarring to consider that we accept in voting an ambient level of inaccuracy that would never be allowed in a banking software, a weapons system or any other product the public actually cared about.

No need for a spokesperson for the ex-press secretary. Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan appeared on NBC's "Today" show this morning to discuss his upcoming book, "What Happened." Some of his comments from his interview a few hours ago:

The larger message has been sort of lost in the mix ... The White House would prefer I not speak out openly and honestly about my experiences, but I believe there is a larger purpose.... I had all this great hope that we were going to come to Washington and change it.... Then we got to Washington, and I think we got caught up in playing the Washington game the way it is being played today....

My hope is that by writing this book and sharing openly and honestly what I learned is that in some small way it might help us move beyond the partisan warfare of the past 15 years. There’s a larger purpose to this book. It’s about looking at the permanent campaign culture in Washington, D.C., and how we can move beyond it....

McClellan references the Valerie Plame affair and the president's declassification of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for political purposes (when the administration publicly expressed disdain for leaks that hurt its political image) as two major "turning points" in his transition from loyal Bush flack to disillusioned ex-spokesperson.

Most striking to me is that McClellan appears decidedly soft in his attacks on the administration officials whom he says disillusioned him the most (Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney) and faults mainly Washington politics for corrupting otherwise well-intentioned people. When interviewer Meredith Vieira presses him on why he stops short of saying the administration "flat-out lied" in the run up to the Iraq war, McClellan replies, "Well, actually, I say in the book, I say that this was not a deliberate or conscious effort to do so. What happened was that we got caught up in the excesses of the permanent campaign culture in Washington, D.C."

Continuing on the general theme of evil Washington politics corrupting even the most well-intentioned of presidents, McClellan says of Bush's vision in Iraq:

He absolutely cares very passionately about what he talks about, which is the freedom agenda and spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. It’s a very idealistic and ambitious vision, and that was really the driving motivation that pushed him forward in Iraq -- this chance to, in his view, to really transform the Middle East by making Iraq a linchpin for spreading democracy.

I'm planning on reading McClellan's book, but I know now that I shouldn't count on any thoughtful critique of the administration's policies. Evidently, McClellan hasn't abandoned every inclination to defend his former boss.

Can anyone find Scott McClellan? Following all the Bush administration blowback and media commentary today over the ex-White House press secretary's book on his apparently miserable years serving the president, McClellan and his publisher have responded with a resounding, "No comment." From CNN.com's morning write-up:

In a brief phone conversation with CNN on Tuesday evening, McClellan made clear that he stands behind the accuracy of his book. McClellan said he cannot give on-the-record quotes because of an agreement with his publisher.

The former Bush press secretary "cannot give on-the-record quotes" per his publisher's orders? Sure, writing a tell-all political memoir has become a rite of passage for disgruntled former Bush administration officials, but McClellan was not just another policy-wonk bureaucrat. His job was more or less to make reporters and the public have a positive opinion of the president. Hell, this guy was a hyper-loyal Bushie dating back to the commander-in-chief's days as the likable governor of Texas. Having McClellan out there defending himself against the administration he so vigorously flacked for a few years ago should make any book publisher drool.

Speaking of defending the administration, McClellan had a few words of his own in 2004 for Richard A. Clarke when the former counter-terrorism expert penned his political memoir "Against All Enemies":

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. 

UPDATE: McClellan gave an interview on NBC Thursday morning. Click here to read my observations.

Think we've got too many furriners in this country? Check out what the furriners themselves have to put up with:

Italy: Berlusconi government may be backing away from tough new immigration enforcement — under pressure from what AFP calls an "ironic" alliance (oh yeah?) between the Catholic Church and an ex-communist president. Rome also gives Spain the fig after the deputy Spanish prime minister critizes Italy's anti-immigrant mood.

Canada: New Democrats say they'll use every trick in the book to block changes that would give our neighbor to the north's immigration chief more power to approve and reject pending applications.

Australia: This time it's the left trying to put the brakes on immigration, as New South Wales Senator-elect Doug Cameron wrings his hands and warns about a coming worker backlash against immigration, citing the United States and United Kingdom as negative examples. "In the UK, the British National Party have used this issue of migration to build a support base for an extreme right wing group and I don't want to see that happen within Australia," Cameron says.

New Zealand: The other Down Under coughs up an even weirder story as former head of the Immigration Service Mary Anne Thompson comes under investigation for claiming a doctorate from the London School of Economics that seems to be as fake as Waleed al-Shehri's visa application. On the plus side, New Zealand seems to be better than we are at dealing with errant immigration officials: Thompson resigned last week after the story came to light.

Wait a second: We've got Italians, Kiwis and Italians growing Kiwis? Confusion like this is why we need comprehensive immigration reform now!

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.

No news here, but this strikes me as one of the great unresolved disputes in pop culture history:

I watched the original Star Wars a few days ago, and noted that on the commentary track George Lucas provides a new version of the development of the Obi-Wan Kenobi character. According to Lucas, he decided at some point in the production that Kenobi had to die part of the way through the movie — over the objections of Alec Guinness, who wanted to keep on working. Nothing remarkable there, except that Guinness very famously gave a totally different version of the story: that Guinness himself talked Lucas into killing off the character because he was bored with reciting "those bloody awful, banal lines." As the late actor told the late Talk magazine in 1999, "I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."

That's two incompatible versions of the same event. One witness is dead and the other is a fairly energetic reinventor of his own back stories. Which one do you believe? Against my usual habit of not trusting anything George Lucas says, I'm inclined to say he is telling the truer story.

Guinness built up a great reputation as a Star Wars basher over the years, but he didn't start out that way; there's very little in the contemporary record to suggest the kind of contempt for the movie he later showed. The argument-from-self-interest also works against Guinness' version. Actors want to keep acting, as Guinness himself went on to prove: Well into his career as a Star Wars refusenik, he accepted cameo roles in both sequels. Finally, Lucas earned a small believability credit with me by including the original, blissfully non-remastered version of the original movie in the DVD package, which suggests he has given up on his subtle but persistent campaign to convince everybody that the original Star Wars was always called Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.

Whichever version is true, I'm well satisfied that the entire Star Wars project ran out of steam once Kenobi got killed off. They kept making the movies, but from that point I tuned out, only waking up from time to time out of respect for Lando Calrissian, inter-galactic cock-blocker.

... and soars on hot air from the blogosphere.

After more than a month of studied silence, the reverend has stepped into the public spotlight to defend his controversial remarks on race in America -- and make veiled criticisms of Sen. Barack Obama in the process. On Obama's repudiation of his incendiary statements, the minister had this to say: "He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician."

Obama reacted angrily to his former pastor's comments, calling them "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth." Jonah Goldberg gleefully celebrated Wright's coming-out as "every bit as radical as his detractors claimed."

They're not the only ones with choice words about Wright's recent performances:

The Times' own Top of the Ticket blog asks, "Was Jeremiah Wright's speech set up by a Clinton supporter?"

... we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright's speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at ... who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds ... an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Jeffrey Weiss over at the Dallas Morning News' religion blog wonders why pundits can't take Obama out of the equation:

After the NAACP speech, the all-news networks talking heads were mostly falling all over themselves to do political analysis about whether or not the speech would help or hurt Barack Obama, rather than attempt even a moment of thought about the meaning of what Wright actually said.

The Caucus over at the NY Times does a roundup of its own, observing:

Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding Barack Obama and his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but they certainly keep writing about it.

They also say they’re sick of the expression “thrown under the bus,” but they keep using it.

For some Wright-Obama commentary with both local and international flavor, Ha'aretz's Shmuel Rosner invokes the "Bradley Effect," but also snarks at the minister's comments about Israel:

At moments he came off as mocking and somewhat vain, but made an effort to soften the hardliner perception his speech had left behind. He was also asked about his views on Israel. "Apartheid?" he asked, adding that Jimmy Carter used this term, not him.

Israel, Wright said, "has a right to exist". His only desire was that the Israelis and Palestinians live in peace. He made no reference to the sermon in which he connected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the September 11th attacks, but he did make sure to emphasize his "Jewish friends". As it turns out, Jeremiah Wright also has a couple of those.

Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post compares Wright's position to one of the 2000 presidential election's most beleaguered political players:

Wright has no obligation to put Obama's interest above his own; dragged through the mud for news, the pastor has an opening to make people listen to him and hear the full context of his theology. Those who today profess themselves appalled that Wright would throw Obama under the bus miss the point that Wright does not think of himself as having any allegiance to Obama or to his election, just as Ralph Nader had no any allegiance to the Democratic Party making it hard to understand why 2004 was "a betrayal."

Wonkette agrees, in an offbeat sort of way:

He's blowing open the racial politics that Obama wants to close and claiming that Obama is insincere when he rejects Wright's "extreme sermons"; he's trying to balance a deserved self-defense with the collateral damage that that brings on Obama. He has an ego. Most importantly, he's just some old preacher and not Obama's surrogate father. He can say whatever he wants and Barry will just have to deal with it. Individual people have a right to defend themselves, and politicians have a right to disown them. That's all, goodnight.

While Sen. McCain had the plug pulled on the North Carolina Republican Party's ad highlighting the Obama-Wright connection, it seems the state party leaders will be getting the airtime they wanted for free.

Right-wing Dutch politicos-turned-producers watch out — free speech cuts both ways. From NPR:

A video portraying aggressive behavior by Christians matched with verses from the Bible is gaining traction on the Internet.

Raed al-Saeed, a young businessman from Saudi Arabia, is the creator of Schism, a six-minute video response to Fitna — a short film released last month that portrays Islam as a violent, fascist-like ideology. "Fitna" provoked anger in many parts of the Muslim world.

In case you don't remember, Fitna (a word meaning "ordeal" in Arabic) overlaid verses from the Quran over acts of violence — suicide bombings, beheadings, planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It was produced by Geert Wilder, a Dutch politician who happens to be unabashedly anti-Islam. Some found the film to be an act of bravery — Jonah Goldberg compared it to the Darwin fish — while Dutch Muslims greeted it with disgusted silence.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a response to Wilder's celluloid screed — the point being that you can find nasty bits in many different religious texts, including Christianity. Unfortunately, Saeed didn't find footage of many nasty people saying those verses out loud — and his substitution of the political for the religious (such as images of the bombing of Baghdad and the beating of prisoners) detracts from his point.

But, to my utter surprise, Saeed did strike darkly comic gold with some unassuming Christians whose rhetoric runs pretty close to that of radical Islamists. One woman — who looks like she could have run my preschool daycare — explains , "I wanna see [young people] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, because we have — excuse me, but we have the truth!"

And later, at the center of a roomful of kids, upper arms jiggling with righteousness: "Take these prophecies ... and make war with them .... This means war! This means war!"

But Saeed is quick to point out that this video isn't an attack on Christianity or any other religion. The final text of the video reads,

It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.

A fair observation, spelling errors aside — and yet, according to NPR,

A day after Saeed posted his video on YouTube, it was taken down for having "inappropriate content." He immediately reposted it with a message arguing that if his video was inappropriate, then Wilders' Fitna also should be removed. For now, both videos are available on the site.

And it still is. Go check it out — there are a few versions up, but the most-watched one has racked up more than 350,000 views so far, and more than 4,000 comments. Looking through what people had to say about Islam and Christianity made me wonder: How many viewers who made generalizations about Islam based on 'Fitna' were fully prepared to give Bible-lady's comments a pass?

And while the film means to make a point about not judging a religion by radicalism, I have to say, those angelic-looking children dancing around with what looks like warpaint on their faces is a little too Lord-of-the-Flies for me to handle.

UCLA graduate student and Chow Digest senior editor C. Thi Nguyen bemoans L.A. County's requirement that taco trucks move after one hour, and New York attorney Scott Horton analyzes UC Berkeley professor John Yoo's role in the Bush administration's stance on torture. Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan hopes LAUSD will repair its relationship with charter schools, and Gregory Rodriguez scratches his head at Americans' insistence that politicians act like the average Joe:

Sure, high-ranking politicians of humble origins can lay at least some claim to being "common." But that's really a ruse. Because the best politicians wouldn't get as far as they do if they hadn't already successfully convinced large numbers of people that they were distinct from -- read: better than -- the rest of us.

And therein lies our dilemma. We hold to the belief that we are all equal, yet we yearn for distinctiveness for ourselves and those we choose to represent us. In a nation whose form of government exalts the illusion of uniformity among its citizens, we are collectively engaged in a struggle to be recognized as unique by our peers.

The editorial board publishes its endorsements for 17 seats on the Los Angeles Superior Court, and puts its money behind a House bill to force 401(k) managers to clarify the fees they charge "Jack and Jill Cubicle":

Unfortunately, as this newspaper detailed in a series of articles in 2006, many employees aren't being told how much of their nest egg is being frittered away on fees paid to the companies managing their 401(k)s. Buried in the fine print of incomprehensible forms or not disclosed at all, those fees can consume thousands of dollars over time. To address that problem, several lawmakers have introduced bills that would require mutual funds, insurers and other providers of retirement plans to make complete disclosures of their fees to employers and workers. 

Readers react to the Supreme Court's decision finding legal injections humane. Writes Joy Buckley, "State-sanctioned killing is barbaric, cruel and should be highly unusual. We should join the civilized countries of the world in eliminating it."

Both liberal and conservative Catholics are spinning Pope Benedict XVI’s  visit to America and he hasn’t even landed.

The website of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good offers a pre-visit briefing for journalists (listen for my question) featuring several liberal Catholic luminaries, including Father Thomas Reese, the deposed editor of the Jesuit magazine America. Commonweal magazine on its Website recycles a golden oldie, an analysis of Joseph Ratzinger's theological evolution.

On the right side of the nave, the conservative  Cardinal Newman Society — "dedicated to renewing and strengthening Catholic identity at America’s 224 Catholic colleges and universities" — offers a series of essays looking forward to the pope’s speech on Catholic education, which, depending on whom you believe, will either be an anathema against Catholic colleges that play host to pro-choice speakers and "The Vagina Monologues" or a gentle reminder that colleges should retain their Catholic identity.

A non-ideological but indispensable source for followers of the pope’s visit is Rocco Palmo’s Whispers in the Loggia. And  those who share my eccentric  interest in the pope as a fashion trend-setter can keep up with the pope’s wardrobe at the site of the New Liturgical Movement, which also offers (with disapproval) a snippet from a song you’re not likely to hear the U.S. Marine Corps Band play when the pope visits President Bush:

Long live the Pope His praises sound again and yet again
His rule is over space and time His throne the hearts of men
All hail the Shepherd King of Rome The theme of loving song
Let all the earth in glory sing And heav’n the strain prolong.

I think even the pope would prefer "Kumbaya."

This just in: The White House website has provided the textof the Vatican National Anthem.

Long before he was identified as a mouthpiece for Bill Cinton, James Carville was (in)famous in my home state of Pennsylvania for the “guru ad,” a 1986 campaign commercial for the original Bob Casey  that savaged Casey’s Republican opponent for governor, Bill Scranton III, as a  follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The ad, which showed the image of a younger, long-haired Scranton to the sinister accompaniment of sitar music, was aired only in the conservative midsection of Pennsylvania and not in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.  Casey won.

I thought of the guru ad the other day when The Politico recycled, and desconstructed, a famous Carville exercise in political geograophy. I always thought Carville had described the Keystone State as “Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Mississippi in the middle.” But The Politico’s version was more parochial still: “Carville described the state as Paoli (a suburb of Philadelphia) and Penn Hills (a suburb of Pittsburgh) with Alabama in between.”

Alabama, Mississippi — what’s the difference? Either way, Carville was equating my native state’s Bible Belt — and receptive audience for guru-bashing ads — as Hicksville, a point that sticks in the craw of some Southerners.

I’ve been to both Penn Hills and Paoli, and they are as different from each other as either is from Pottsville, Pa. — or Punxatawney, of “Groundhog Day” fame. Pennsylvania is a big place, and a diverse one, which is why Carville’s caricature was onto something in its crude way.

Pennsylvania is enjoying its day in the political sun now that — for the first  time in my career as a journalist — its presidential primary is actually the object of national attention. If nothing else, this unaccustomed attention will mean some journalistic pilgrimages to the cheesesteak emporiums of Philadelphia, the shot-and-a-beer bars of Pittsburgh and the pecan farms — I mean pretzel factories — of Hanover.

A reader takes exception to my comment in an earlier post that California's constitution lacks the equivalent of a 2nd Amendment "right to keep and bear arms."

But even 2nd Amendment enthusiasts admit (and lament) that California is lacking a guarantee for either a collective or an individual right to keep and bear arms. Commenter Tom points to Article I Section 1 of the state constitution declaring: "All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty..." Tom concludes, "I  seem to have the inalienable right to defend my life."

But Pennsylvania's constitution, which does have a robust (or wacky, depending on your point of view)  right to keep and bear arms also includes boilerplate similar to California's: "All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeasible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing and protecting property and reputation, and of pursuing their own happiness." So, if Tom is right, Section 21 of Pennsylvania's Declaration of Rights — "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned" — is, as Chief Justice Marshall would say, mere surplusage.

Michael Meyers recent Blowback on Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech continues to draw fire, both friendly and unfriendly. Our letters-to-the-editor mailbag is overflowing. Even Flaubert sent in some mots justes:

Hello,

Talk about missing the point, i think your comments are way off base and insulting to many folks who "herd" a different postive message.

Thank you
Ed Faubert

---

Meyers is right. Obama blew it. As a presidential candidate, his speech did miss the mark and by that measure proves he is a man whose depth is too shallow to be president. He is obviously captured in the socio/political black bigotry exemplied by Wright that seeks crutches and excuses while condeming America. As a "genetic Republican" I believe it will be a great crime if Obama and not Clinton is the Democrats standard barrier. That action places the country at risk considering the possibility that he could be elected.

Otis Page 
Arroyo Grande

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Dear Editor:

Mr. Meyer's opinion that Obama Blew It with his speech on race is correct.  Mr Meyers should be a speech writer for Obama.  But, then Obama doesn't believe in his own message because he never walked the talk.  Our culture is so enamored by speeches and words, and sermons.  But after all the talk and great phrases, I ask, what has this person done to give credence to his/her words. St. Francis never gave sermons, he just gave living examples of what he believed.  He put flesh to the word.  This is my main gripe with Obama and his fine sounding words.  In scripture there's a phrase by Jesus, " Not all those who say Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom, but those who do the will of My Father".

In Obama's speech he attempts to give moral equivalence to his White Grandmother's fear of blacks and of her saying some inflammatory remarks about Blacks, He goes on to say, should I then renounce my Grandmother.

To try and make his Grandmother's remarks the moral equivalent with Pastor's Wright is false.  The Pastor was speaking in church publicly to many people. His Grandmother was speaking to him privately.  This is typical of a man with no experience to back up his fine words, and then resorts to weak arguments to make his point.

So, Mr Meyer, you wished he could have said the things you offered in your column. But Obama could never do that because he doesn't believe it.  Does it strike anyone that the two themes of Obama's message -- 1. Time for a Change, and 2. Coming together as One -- have been used time and time again as political rhetoric. Every new administration runs on Change. The coming together as One is nothing but a slogan. All that is needed is bipartisanship and/or a veto congress to get things done.

Obama's one claim of experience is as a Community Organizer. You have to hand it to him, he's taken this one experience and his oratory and will almost become President of the U.S.  One last thing Senator Kerry made a brilliant statement today.  He said, I'm paraphrasing now, Obama can unite the country because he is Black and will encourage the moderate muslims because he is black.  Talk about playing the Race Card and why Senator Kerry has endorsed Obama.  This alone should make the uncommitted Super Delegates think twice before endorsing Obama.

Yes, Mr Meyers,  Obama Blew it. 

John L Cerrato
Rockville Centre, NY

---

Not since Niall Ferguson's response to Harold Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech, that you published in December 2005 (you published the response, not the speech), have I read a more gross misrepresentation and misinterpretaion of a person's words. Meyers cherry-picks the speech Obama delivered, and seems to intentionally miscontrue Obama's words in an apparent attempt to mislead and misinform the newspaper-reading public.  As I did in 2005 in regard to the Ferguson article, I plead with your readers to go straight to the source - read or view the speech before judging it, do not rely on a misleading criticism.  And I request that the latimes editorial staff make some effort to hold their guest writers to at least a minimal degree of accountability.  Even op-ed pieces need to be held accountable or else they become mere propaganda.

joe stanford
venice

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Letter to the editor;

Michael Meyers writes (“Obama blew it,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2008), “We and our leaders -- especially our candidates for the highest office in the land -- must repudiate all forms of racial idiocy and sexism, and be judged by whether we still belong to exclusionary or hateful groups.”  Barack Obama did, but apparently it was not forecuflle enough to suit Meyers---Obama neither being black enough, nor forceful enough, not Uncle Tom enough?

On NPR “Talk of the Nation” Meyers criticized Obama, suggesting that he nuanced the displays of bigotry made by his minister.  I did not think that Obama did---at least not as much as Myers has nuanced his brave new attacks of racial bigotry---Meyers ignores the blatantly bigoted comments on right-wing talk radio  and Fox, and finds fault with a guy the is struggling to make a difference. 

“In my considered judgment,” when all is said in done, Barack Obama will have made more of a difference in advancing better race relations by simply running for the presidency than Michael Meyers will do by shooting off his “considerate” mouth for the rest of his life.  Who the hell needs nuance when bigots have someone like Meyers giving them cover from which to spread their attacks on Obama or “racial idiocy?”

Although Meyers divulged that he is black and that he had heroically canceled his membership in 100 Black Men of America Inc., I have no reason to nuance my own position by divulging the color of my skin.  Does Meyers know when he will appear on Bill O'Reilly’s no spin zone?

Sam Osborne
West Branch

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Regarding your "Obama blew It" article.  I believe that Obama was saying what you profess, but he understands that unless we acknowledge the history first we cannot understand the present, and then move on to the future.  I have heard so many say he should have just disowned his pastor.  Had he always just run away, or if he had disassociated himself with everyone who carries the baggage his pastor does, he could never have been in the position of understanding he is now to be able to lead us forward.  His speech was just the first step...together we will get where you are.  It is a journey worth the pain...and as I have emailed to Bill Press, Peter King, Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson, I would like you to read it too.  Thank you.

Regarding your call for Barack Obama to disown his pastor.  I refer you to Luke 6:37 "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not and ye shall not be condemned: forgive and ye shall be forgiven:"  Perhaps Obama is following those words from Jesus!  John 8:7 He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.  Perhaps you missed the sermons where these words were spoken? 

Jim and Ginny

Hey there, Pennsylvania Democrats: are you sure you're old enough to vote? Because some of you are acting like two-year-olds.

A Franklin & Marshall College poll has found that if Barack Obama loses wins* the nomination, 20% 19% of Hillary Clinton voters — at least in Pennsylvania — say they'll vote for John McCain on election day. Ditto Clinton supporters — an Obama nomination would send 20% of them to the R column, and to John McCain.

For these petulant Democratic voters, it appears it's about personality over policy after all.  They'll choose four more years of Republican appointments of judges, Republican policies in the Iraq war, in environmental matters, in abortion and family planning programs, and tax cuts for the already prosperous ... all this over a Democratic fiscal and social and war agenda.

Nice work, people. If you want to cast a protest vote, why not choose Ralph Nader? This isn't like Florida 2000, where voters were confused by the ballot.  If McCain wins as a consequence of this ''my way or the highway'' sulking, Democrats will know who they have to blame: one another.

* Thanks to commenter Lorie for the correction.

Speaking of impolitic political opinions arising where they should be beside the point -- remember when a venerable Philadelphia cheesesteak shop got into the immigration debate? Back in 2005, Geno's Steaks owner Joe Vento posted a sign that asked customers to speak English when they ordered, right around the time Wisconsin Republican Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner was readying the house bill that would turn Good Samaritans into criminals, and would mobilize a vast pro-immigration movement.

Many immigration bills have have died on the floor since then, but the matter of Vento's sign was only put to rest yesterday, when a city panel ruled that the sign wasn't discriminatory:

In a 2-1 vote, a Commission on Human Relations panel found that two signs at Geno's Steaks telling customers, "This is America: WHEN ORDERING 'PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH,'" do not violate the city's Fair Practices Ordinance.

Shop owner Joe Vento has said he posted the signs in October 2005 because of concerns over immigration reform and an increasing number of people in the area who could not order in English.

Vento has said he never refused service to anyone because they couldn't speak English. But critics argued that the signs discourage customers of certain backgrounds from eating at the shop.

Cheesesteak joints have a habit of entering high-profile national political debates: During the 2004 election, candidate John F. Kerry suffered flak for ordering his sub with Swiss cheese at Geno's rival Pat's, located across the street. (How elitist! How European!) Kerry only narrowly won the state. (It should be noted that President Bush claimed to eat his with classic Cheese Whiz, but one reporter found that Bush actually orders American cheese -- a good cheese for the heartland, perhaps, but not for Philadelphia.)

Why can't taco stands get this kind of action?

Note to Clinton and Obama: to win Pennsylvania, or at least Philadelphia, get the Cheese Whiz, and speak English.

*Photos courtesy Associated Press.

The grim half-decade of the war in Iraq is getting its share of punditry roundups and chest-beating self-criticism, so I guess I'll take a moment to probe my own conscience. I believed then and believe now that the true enemies are the liberal hawks, and in my perfect commentariat they would be banned. Nevertheless, I think my sense of the essential, elemental and incurable lack of seriousness with which the United States went to war has evolved somewhat. If I ever believed blame for the war could be quarantined to any group of thinkers or politicians, I no longer do. There is not a single American who can escape responsibility for this war; that includes Barack Obama, me, and anybody else who did not back up our opposition with any serious efforts to prevent this catastrophe, even at risk to our own safety or freedom. George Bush didn't invade Iraq. The United States of America did. As I said in August:

To put this as delicately as I can: Every non-idiot on the planet knew that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Having publicly argued otherwise should disqualify you from ever voicing any opinion on any topic ever again. Nevertheless, we as a nation went ahead with this war, and once you've made that decision, your only option is victory. Moral seriousness in this context means admitting the monstrous truth that we could continue to lose 1,000 soldiers a year for another 100 years, and that the logic of the original intervention demands we pay that price happily and continue to pay it until we get the results we want.

Just to reiterate, they call it war for a reason. What happened in Iraq is not a catastrophe caused by mismanagement: It's the best result anybody could have hoped for, and it was that long before the surge and the Petraeus miracle began. If you thought it was worth invading then, you have absolutely no right to complain about what's happened since.

For a less unhinged view, here is an editorial from a few years back, reassessing what turned out to be early test results:

So The Times' own Rosa Brooks appears on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC talk show last Friday to defend Barack Obama in light of the senator's affiliation with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Bill O'Reilly slams ... George Soros? I'm not digging in for Obama here, and Lord knows I don't agree with everything Brooks pens in our own pages, but hitting Soros for a few off-the-cuff remarks by Brooks seems like a desperate attempt by O'Reilly to pick a fight for the sake of, well, picking a fight. From O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo segment that aired March 17 on Fox News:

On the pinhead front, radical-left billionaire George Soros has a bunch of mouthpieces placed in the media, and one of them, Rosa Brooks, writes for the Los Angeles Times. Here's what our Ms. Brooks said about the Obama controversy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROSA BROOKS, LOS ANGELES TIMES: He was probably sitting at church and not listening. I hate to tell you people this, but I have heard of people who go to church and don't listen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

They weren't listening. Pinhead. Unbelievable.

Soros, of course, wants Obama elected.

To read about O'Reilly's tangled history with these Opinion L.A. interwebs — and how he helped launch Brooks' gig as a columnist — click here, here and here. Read about Times Senior Editorial Writer Michael McGough's adventure in O'Reilly pinhead-dom here.

Dr. Seuss must be turning in his grave. Pro-lifers are claiming there's an anti-abortion message in Horton Hears a Who, a movie based on his second book featuring the lovably loyal elephant. From NPR:

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant. And an elephant's faithful, 100 percent."

That's one of Horton the elephant's best-known mottoes. But with a movie version of Dr. Seuss' much-loved children's book opening Friday, another Horton saying has drawn attention from activists who see a message in the movie — a message that suits their purpose.

That message: "A person's a person, no matter how small."

"Exactly," say abortion foes.

Using Horton's innocent words to support the personhood-at-conception argument? It's a world gone mad. Frankly, I like it better when they protest popular lit (à la witchcraft in Harry Potter), because an angry social conservative is a lot less irritating than a self-satisfied one. Observe:

In Horton Hears a Who, Horton discovers that there's a whole town (Whoville) full of tiny people (the Whos) on a tiny speck of dust that's come floating his way. His neighbors think he's lost his mind. But Horton decides it's his calling to protect the life on the speck: "A person's a person no matter how small," he insists.

When Jim Carrey, the film's Horton, said those words during the Los Angeles premiere of the film last week, demonstrators who'd slipped into the theater started to yell. It was a surprise, to say the least, for the premiere audience.

"I thought maybe there was a nut loose in the theater or something," says Karl ZoBell.

Just the one? Just checking.

Audrey Geisel, Dr. Seuss' widow, has objected to the demonstrations because the Geisels didn't want to see Seuss characters used to advance any political purpose.

But that argument is a little misleading, because Dr. Seuss has always been about politics. Seuss, né Theodor Geisel, previously tapped his illustrative genius as a left-leaning editorial cartoonist with a razor-sharp pen. And many of his most enduring children's books slip in very liberal political messages. The Butter Battle Book gave grim commentary on mutual deterrence during the Cold War, and The Lorax was a rallying cry for tree-huggers everywhere. Yertle the Turtle, meanwhile, provided a rather proletarian critique of monarchy, or capitalism, or something.

Given the history, you could just as easily argue that Horton Hears a Who is about valuing people who are less economically well-off, who are of a different race, who live in a different part of the world — or who may just be vertically challenged. In short, pun intended, people who are easier to ignore, neglect or even persecute.

The problem isn't that pro-lifers are politicizing children's literature. That happens all the time. It's that they really need to do their homework. Out of ignorance, they're disregarding Seuss' rich liberal legacy  — and in the case of Horton, what could be a very different political message.

Whatever you've got to say about the murder of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw or the arrest of 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza for the crime, start your engines. Please keep it clean: no threats, bullying, bogarting or unamusing ad hominems will be accepted. I'll approve as fast as I can. Some scenes from Shaw's funeral may give the conversation a little focus.

On a reread, I think I may have made the case that Thomas P.M. Barnett is an insufferable windbag a bit too strongly a few years ago. Nevertheless, Thomas P.M. Barnett is an insufferable windbag, and it's disconcerting to see the global-strategy seer so centrally located in the downfall of Adm. William Fallon.

Barnett is not addressing the news at his site yet — though he is recounting his Fallon interview in a self-dramatizing play-by-play that features Chuck Norris-type factoids like the following:

I drove the 160 miles nonstop, changing my suit to travel clothes as I drove.

Barnett did address part of the controversy a few days ago, and in fairness, the idea that Barnett's Fallon profile in Esquire is what drove the Centcom commander to resign strains believability; there must be bigger disagreements at stake — which is the central point Barnett was making in his article. Here's how Barnett, in happier times, described Fallon in a breathless lead paragraph:

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. Forty years into a military career that has seen this admiral rule over America's two most important combatant commands, Pacific Command and now United States Central Command, it's impossible to make this guy--as he likes to say--"nervous in the service."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says Fallon's departure does not portend a change in Iran policy. Kevin Drum notes that Fallon's mellower course on Iran was clear back in September. Lawrence J. Korb sends along the following:

Admiral Fallon's abrupt retirement as the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East is the latest sign that the Pentagon's top brass do not agree with the direction in which the administration is heading in regard to the war in Iraq and the global war on terror.

Hopefully Fallon's resignation will force the administration to listen to his position on Iran and prevent them from ignoring the advice of their respected military advisors as they did with General Colin Powell and General Erik Shinseki when it came to waging the war in Iraq.

Danger Room has more reactions.

Author Paul Slansky analyzes the art of the public apology in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal:

But how sorry would they be if they hadn't been caught? Remorse, one feels certain, would be the furthest thing from their minds. So the apology extorted by such circumstances is by definition meaningless, a perfunctory bleat of contrition designed to buy some time while the damage is assessed. It is never eloquent and never as memorable as the acts being repented. But for apology aficionados, it is that very combination of trite mea culpas for often lurid deeds that makes it all so satisfying.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone wants to do away with McCarthy-era loyalty oaths, and columnist Jonah Goldberg chides liberals for not being comfortable saying the p-word (that's patriot, by the way).

The editorial board has its take on Spitzer's sinnin' too:

We don't mean to imply support for prostitution, smoking or excessive drinking. There is, however, something encouraging in seeing even a self-destructive maverick spirit live on despite the best intentions of public scolds.

The board also says taxpayers end up paying more for California's popular high-interest, underrated bonds. And finally the board takes Bush to task for vetoing the torture ban.

On the letters page, readers react to Leslie Bennetts' Op-Ed on toxic anti-Clinton misogyny. See why Los Angeles' Cynthia Carle says, "I find the misogyny directed at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton loathsome. But I didn't vote for her."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That seems to be the gist of Sen. Hillary Clinton's latest ad, titled "Children":

It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.
It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?

As the voiceover continues you see, yes, a series of children sleeping peacefully. It's like the pre-slasher scene in a horror movie, just moments before they cue the creepy music and you know that shadow with the knife in hand is going to be creeping up the stairway within 30 seconds. The ad is a bold move -- though nowhere near Tom Tancredo's for sheer fear tactics -- but was it a smart one, given that "hope-mongering" is dominating the primaries?

Barack Obama, predictably, reacted to that very weakness. From the Houston Chronicle:

With the pivotal March 4 Texas primary just four days away, Obama said "the question is not who you want to pick up the call, the question is what kind of judgment will you exercise when you pick up that phone."

"In fact we have had a red phone moment when the decision was made to invade Iraq," he said, referring to the crisis line in the White House. "Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer."

Obama, who has taken a lead in most recent Texas polls, including one published today in the Houston Chronicle, said Clinton was trying to "scare up" voters with her latest ad.

Then again, the junior senator from New York wasn't gaining much ground with her "change through experience" pitch, so maybe scare tactics aren't such a bad idea. And of course, this TV spot openly plays on the maternal instincts of all those middle-class women (or the Security Moms, as Reason's David Weigel puts it) she's trying to hold on to for March 4. There's a big fat wad of irony in here somewhere ...

Last Thursday's primary debate in Texas between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was supposed to provide Clinton a chance to find a chink in Obama's armor. Unfortunately for Clinton, she never really succeeded. And maybe that's why her campaign seems to have grown more aggressive, tossing strategy out the door in favor of shooting blind and hoping something makes a dent. (So far, it's mostly resulted in friendly fire.)

The New York Times calls it a "five-point attack." Politico calls it "highly improvisational". A Clinton aide christened it the "kitchen sink" method. If you want to judge for yourself, here are some gems from the past few days:

The xerox zinger: In the debate, Clinton defended her accusation that Obama plagiarized Massachussetts Gov. Deval Patrick. "Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox," quipped the junior senator from the Empire State, who has never lifted a phrase in her life. That didn't go over so well with the audience, judging from all the boos.

Kiss and make up: Later in the same debate, Clinton practically sang an ode to Obama. "I am honored -- I am honored -- to be here with Barack Obama," she said, offering her hand to her opponent. Awww... But wait, there's more:

Whatever happens, we're going to be fine ... I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about.

A gesture of concession? Hardly. More likely it was a move to undo the damage wrought by the Xerox quote -- and to woo back key demographics, especially white women. That sugarcoated moment earned her a standing ovation.

Oh, oh, do the one of Barack, that's my favorite: The warm fuzzy feeling soon wore off, though -- instead of sticking to her "ready on day one" pitch at a Sunday rally in Rhode Island, Clinton did her best Obama impression (gesticulation included) for an appreciative crowd:

I could just stand up here and say ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified.’ The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.

Straight out of "Karl Rove's playbook": At a rally in Ohio, a supporter handed Clinton pamphlets the Obama campaign was distributing on her healthcare plans -- information she called misleading. "Shame on you, Barack Obama," she scolded afterward, brandishing the offending fliers at reporters. (Who wants to bet that supporter was prompted?)

My best constituents are black! In a more passive-aggressive show of strength, Clinton was the only candidate to appear at the annual State of the Black Union in Louisiana last weekend (Obama offered to send his wife Michelle instead). There's nothing better than courting a reluctant demographic and kicking your rival under the table at the same time.

What's in a turban? Obama staffers wigged out at a Drudge report that Clinton campaign members had been circulating photos of the Illinois senator donning local dress in Kenya. It's not like he's the first public figure to don the local garb -- check out Calvin Coolidge in a Native American headdress. The campaign took hours to deny any role in their distribution, but given the long leash Clinton has given to overenthusiastic staffers (up until she fires them) it's hard to take them at their word.

How many kitchen appliances do you think she's got left for tonight's showdown? Post your thoughts below.

USA-193, we hardly knew ye. Per Peter Spiegel's excellent L.A. Times piece this morning, the U.S. Navy's destruction of the rogue satellite last night was a ballistic hit, involving no explosives. With very high confidence that the hydrazine tank apparently at issue was successfully ruptured, we can say at least that this was an impressive technical feat, leaving little in the debris field larger than nectarine-sized Bush-bashing and mircometeoroids of conspiracy theory.

Which isn't to say the Future Imagery Architecture project isn't due for a swift kick. [See update below.] If you're not following Noah Shachtman's Danger Room blog at Wired, do yourself a favor. Shachtman's got what looks like launch-to-impact footage. Well, take a look for yourself:

Also of interest: A simulation from Analytic Graphics that seems to show the satellite was moving in a pole-to-pole orbit. I haven't followed this story that closely: Is that accurate? [No, it was not. See below.] And a history of the ambitious but costly intelligence project that produced the rogue.

Update: In an interview after posting, Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, corrected me on two points: USA-193 was not part of the FIA program. Also, the satellite was not in polar orbit but angled 58.5 degrees to the equator.

For all you collectors out there, a prized piece of Fidel Castro memorabilia is going on the auction block: a signed map of the failed battle plan to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1953. If you don't think there's a market for commie collectables, think again: A lock of Che Guevara's hair sold for more than $100,000 last October.

Granted, Che had a lot going for him in the cultural-icon market that Fidel lacks -- a romantic cause, a life tragically cut short, latin hottie Gael Garcia Bernal playing him in The Motorcycle Diaries. And a killer marketing campaign. Seriously, who doesn't own a Che t-shirt?

Still, nothing says bygone like an auction, and the autographed map is an indication that Americans are ready to assign Fidel Castro to his proper place in 20th-century political and cultural history. Judging by his announced retirement today, Fidel is getting there, too -- even if he is holding on to his opinion column in the state newspaper. And while the presidential hopefuls can't seem to get over their Cuba complex, they'll get the hint once the Antiques Roadshow hits post-Fidel Florida.

Writer Todd Balf wonders if race was a factor in the demonization of ex-Olympian Marion Jones, and cartoonist Nick Anderson takes a shot at Congress and its steroid-use hearings. Israeli novelist Amos Oz argues for a cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza, and Ronald Brownstein gives a play-by-play of Obama's eight-contest sweep. Joel Stein discovers the Christian Oscars aren't so different from the nondenominational ones — except when they are:

Though the Christian Oscars looked just like any other awards show, there were some differences. The Oscars don't start with a prayer. And they don't have a letter in their program from President Bush wishing them a successful event. I stared at it for a long time, wondering if all his correspondence begins, "I send greetings." I got the feeling that Bush expected that, during his presidency, he'd get to meet aliens.

The editorial board gets tangled up in the tussle between free speech and campaign finance law, and wonders why Germany, the erstwhile "sick man of Europe," is beating the U.S. in export rates. The board also cheers on the University of Southern California's 25-year lease deal with the Coliseum Commission:

USC gets to stay at home. And there can be little doubt that the Coliseum is home. The university's consistent presence over the life of the stadium has protected the asset's value. Olympics -- two of them -- came and went, as did two NFL teams, but the Trojans have been a constant and deserve the long-term commitment that the commission has finally provided.

Readers respond to the board's take on charter schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District. "It's important that the charter schools not measure student achievement exclusively in terms of success on a college track," Joyce Wolfe points out, and Dain Olsen shoots back:

The Times is advocating the wholesale abandonment of the LAUSD's secondary schools to the charter movement. If this is not tantamount to a radical dismissal of the foundations of democracy, of equality and access to a free, high-quality education for all, I don't know what is.

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

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

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

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

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Welcome, Pauline Order of Ron!

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

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

"factually inaccurate and sophomorically naive"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My feelings on the fabled Sam Zell f-word exchange with a photographer for the Orlando Sentinel pretty much boil down to: Whatever you say, Mr. Zell! How else may I be of service? I'm not going out on  a limb by saying it's bad form for the chairman of a company to curse out an employee. (Based on our story's indication that Zell was seeking to smooth things over with the employee in question, it would appear he feels the same way.) But I'm with Patterico in finding the photographer's "what readers want are puppy dogs" comment to be far more alarming than the four-letter word. A cuss is just a cuss, but there is a lot of journalistic arrogance embedded in that dismissive comment about readers. People on the wrong end of the plummeting-circulation continuum should show some humility, and maybe even gratitude, toward the customers who are still showing up.

It's tough being Milton Friedman these days. On top of being dead, the Nobel prize-winning economist is getting a posthumous beat-down by popular anti-capitalist Naomi Klein. In her writing and talks on globalization and the free market, Klein often quotes three sentences of Friedman's writing to expose the economist as an evil genius who helped inspire so-called "disaster capitalism." As Klein recently wrote in the L.A. Times:

Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

A smoking gun? See the quote in context and decide for yourself after the jump.

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

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

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

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

Original charticle here.

Christopher Hitchens remembers Fleet Street in all its squalor here.

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

Hillary, Hillary, the return of Stonehenge and more Hillary were your favorites this week. Sure, our old friends Max Boot, Jonathan Chait and Gregory Rodriguez, as well as another batch of Kennedys ('cause you can never get enough) did the actual writing, but it was Hillary's week in Opinion L.A. Without further ado:

1. Is the right right on the Clintons?, by Jonathan Chait
2. Kennedys for Clinton, by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kerry Kennedy
3. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
4. This primary is secondary, by Ethan Rarick
5. When Bill Clinton attacks, by the editorial board
6. Why Clinton can count on Latinos, by Harry P. Pachon and Rodolfo O. de la Garza
7. Iraq's No. 1 problem, by Bing West and Max Boot
8. Clinton's Latino spin, by Gregory Rodriguez
9. Dust-Up: It's the stupid economy, by Steven Landsburg and Jason Furman
10. A bitter pill for Big Pharma, by Melody Petersen

The issue of waterboarding drowned out almost all other concerns about Attorney General Michael Mukasey during his confirmation hearings last year, and it could wipe out today's confirmation hearings for Mark Filip, slated to become the next deputy attorney general. From Congressional Quarterly:

Senate Democrats plan to delay a floor vote on President Bush’s nominee for the No. 2 post at the Justice Department until the department responds to several Judiciary Committee oversight letters.

Mukasey had managed to stay afloat and pass muster by the smallest margin in 50 years. At the time, he hedged wildly on waterboarding, protesting that he didn't know enough to make a judgment.

Yesterday, judgment day came. And the verdict? That he can't issue one.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has a scathing critique of Mukasey's logic:

Mukasey won't speculate about future water-boarding, either, claiming he will not be drawn into "imagining facts and circumstances that are not present and thereby telling our enemies exactly what they can expect in those eventualities." He also refuses to tell "people in the field ... what they have to refrain from or not refrain from in a situation that is not performing."

Just to be clear then, to the extent that there is any purpose to the law, i.e., to punish past bad acts and to alert people as to what types of conduct will be punished in the future, the attorney general has just obliterated that purpose. Unless someone were to actually be water-boarded before Mukasey's eyes at the witness table in the Hart Senate Building, America's lawyer cannot hazard an opinion as to its legality.

But Mukasey calls out the senators as well -- and he has a point, says CBS News analyst Andrew Cohen:

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, especially Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), want Mukasey to do their heavy lifting. They want him to proclaim by legal memorandum what they have so far been unable to accomplish by political power. It would be nice if he were willing to do so. And you can bet that if a majority of Republicans and the President were calling upon Mukasey to say the magic words he’d be game. But they aren’t and he isn’t and it’s time Leahy and Company moved on.

Judging by their toying with today's confirmation hearings, it doesn't seem like they're ready to take Cohen's advice just yet.

Go ahead and write angry letters about how much you can't stand Jonah Goldberg or his book Liberal Fascism. From the New York Times bestseller list to the always hotly contested Opinion L.A. Top 10, America has spoken. Goldberg's tale of his Daily Show appearance is number one with a bullet, and the columnist makes it into the list a second time with his column on new nanny state outrages. Columnist Rosa Brooks places with her Billary takedown, and the editorial board finishes with an ominous view of the Tata Nano. Brian Doherty scores one for libertarianism and Jonah Lehrer apparently draws in both the artistic and the scientific factions of the brain debate. Michael Shermer does an encore after last week's impressive performance. Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman mark an important abortion anniversary, and all the rest is about some election that is rumored to be happening...

1. What The Daily Show cut out, by Jonah Goldberg
2. A Clinton twofer's high price, by Rosa Brooks
3. Super delegates may sink the Democrats, by Joshua Spivak
4. 'The better angels' side with Obama, by Joseph Ellis
5. Why people believe weird things about money, by Michael Shermer
6. Abortion's battle of messages, by Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman
7. Tiny Tata Nano, big threat, by the editorial board
8. Taking liberties, by Jonah Goldberg
9. Misreading the mind, Jonah Lehrer   
10. Real libertarianism, by Brian Doherty 

Green fever seems to have hit the state, the media, or both. Here are some of the verdant shades of California controversies:

Tree-huggers versus sun-lovers: A Sunnyvale couple refuses to cut down their redwoods, even though a neighbor says they're blocking his solar panels. Now that's environmentally awkward.

EPA battle heats up: EPA head Stephen Johnson gets the third degree at a hearing chaired by California's Sen. Barbara Boxer for preventing the Golden State from enacting tougher fuel efficiency standards. Embarrasingly enough, Johnson's mostly on his own, as EPA staff last month issued findings that contradicted his decision.

Off the mean streets, into green sheets: Alameda County is opening an environmentally friendly homeless shelter, equipped with solar panels and water-based heaters.

Green eating hits Sacto: And we're not talking vegetarian.

Thin as plastic: Los Angeles city councilmembers' willpower, that is. The city has given up on following San Francisco's lead and instituting a plastic shopping bag ban. The editorial board said China had a better idea, anyway.

It's not easy smoking green: Even with a doctor's note (and strictly off-hours), a state court rules that using medical marijuana can get you fired. Assemblymember Mark Leno says he'll see about that.

Okay, so maybe that last one wasn't exactly on topic.

In case you hadn't heard, Iraq has finally agreed on changes ot the national flag! Temporarily, of course, until they can figure out a permanent solution next year.

It's not a huge accomplishment: All that's happened is that the three stars (representing Saddam Hussein's Baath party slogan of "unity, freedom, socialism") have been removed. And the lettering is a nice deep hunter green rather than the tacky quasi-neon shade — clearly, an indication of evolving Iraqi tastes.

The de-Baathification of the flag is a little ironic, considering that the  government has just recently eased restristrictions on former low-level party members. It was mostly a Kurdish demand, given that Hussein's forces massacred thousands of Kurds in the 1980s. A previous attempt to change the color of the script from green (a color representing Islam) to yellow (indicating the sun, which holds religious and cultural significance in Kurdish tradition) failed pretty miserably in Parliament.

An interim flag really wouldn't be that big a deal if it weren't for the flag's rocky recent history. In 2006 tensions spiked when Kurdistan's regional president refused to fly the Iraqi national flag from government offices; in 2004 a leaked copy of a design sparked flag burnings in Iraq. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes said it was "an unfortunate shade of light blue — an unfortunate shade because, to many, the color reminded them of the blue-and-white theme of the Israeli flag. You can see why there were problems."

Needless to say, consensus colors just mean all factions are free to disparage it. "It was an organized conspiracy to change the flag," Sunni parliament member Khalaf al-Alayan told the Washington Post.

That's not the only conspiracy theory flying around. From today's Los Angeles Times:

"This is literally a comedy," said Haseeb Mohammed, 33, a Sunni Arab in Mosul. "Is this Iraq's flag? What was wrong with it? What has changed? Nothing has changed. It's just a poor comedy charade to satisfy some sides. It's a conspiracy against Iraq and the Iraqi people."

Given how little the Iraqi Parliament seems able to acomplish, he kind of has a point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Pierson writes:

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

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

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

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

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

Digital media attorney Jonathan Handel eyes the talks between the Directors Guild and the studios, and lays out a Hollywood doomsday scenario:

So the stage is set for a disaster. If the directors accept a lowball new-media deal, the Writers Guild and SAG may well reject it as a template, and pattern bargaining would break down. SAG's position would embolden the Writers Guild leadership to maintain the strike, despite pressure from some writers to end the walkout. Come June 30, when the actors deal expires, SAG would go on strike too.

At that point, the industry would be in all-out civil war, with battle lines drawn ...

Also on the Op-Ed page, cartoonist Nick Anderson comments on tensions between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over race and civil rights. Columnist Tim Rutten berates the federal government for invading civilian scientists' privacy, and former space station exec Jeffrey Manber makes the case for inviting China into outer space. Chuck staff writer Zev Borow provides an off-beat critique of this year's movies: "Most disappointing, though, was 'There will be blood.' Three words: not enough blood."

The editorial board condemns California for sentencing juveniles to life without parole,

Not long ago, scientists thought the human brain was fully developed by early adolescence. But modern technology, allowing more sophisticated brain scans, has shown that isn't true. ... Few go so far as to commit murder, and those who do obviously must face serious penalties, but it is perverse to condemn a minor to prison for life for committing a crime that he or she might find unthinkable on reaching adulthood.

The board also looks to Congress to protect consumers from future Enrons, and turns up the heat on the Interior Department approving oil drilling in a polar bear habitat.

Readers run over Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget proposal. "If California is in a deep financial hole," writes Robert L. Douglass, "raise my taxes. I'm willing to pay." Adds Barry H. Davis,

Like the baby-friendly pit bull that suddenly turns vicious, as I expected, the governor has turned into a Republican.

So as the poor, elderly and disabled get left further behind, yacht owners can sleep calmly and securely in their staterooms. Don't worry, there will be no new taxes.

For all Mike Huckabee's astute image-making -- the funny campaign spots, the clever quips -- the guy can't put together a decent platform.

The Washington Post reports that Huckabee copped his immigration stance straight from the Center for Immigration Studies. Mark Krikorian, head of that hard-on-illegal-immigration tank, didn't mind, but Mitt Romney did. (The camp of John McCain, one-time progressive on illegal immigration, used the opportunity to throw some mud Romney's way: "It's particularly amazing that Governor Romney would attack anyone on immigration when he's on his third position.")

Huckabee's conservative bona fides may serve him well in South Carolina, as they did in Iowa. (He couldn't beat McCain loyalites in New Hampshire or long-memoried Michiganites for Mitt.) But his inability or failure to put together an original plan (or at least one that wasn't quite so clearly copied) on one of the country's most pressing domestic issues doesn't bode well for him as a would-be national candidate.

For more Mark Krikorian, check out our first-ever Dust-Up, a face-off between him and the Manhattan Institute's Tamar Jacoby.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt wrote for us recently, and the impassioned replies are still dropping like the gentle rain from heaven. Mitchell Bard says the special relationship is all about shared values here, and Reps. Artur Davis (D-Alabama) and Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) discuss their own true friendship here. Dig our Primary Source and this extra snippet for the ed board's own conversations with the controversial authors. And here are two more replies.

Grant F. Smith, director of research at an organization called IRmep, says look to the perils of trade:

Trade is a great example of the "benefits" of Israel to the US. But Texas exports prove nothing.

In the late 80's, US-Israel trade was roughly in balance.  In 1984 the US and Israel signed a "free trade agreement" and between 1989 and 2006 the US cumulative trade ballooned to almost a $50 billion deficit with Israel.

The FBI investigated AIPAC in 1984 because it had acquired confidential International Trade Organization documents on the US negotiating position.  Presumably, AIPAC then used that information against the United States.

This unfavorable trade relationship is more symbolic of the huge cost of this relationship to the US and how the lobby does business than Texas exports.

But from San Francisco, Stephen A. Silver says remember the vicious calumny:

Editor:

Thank you for publishing Mitchell Bard's opinion piece "Israel's ties that bind" (Jan. 10), noting that it is shared values, not lobbies and conspiracies, that are at the heart of American support for Israel. However, Bard missed the opportunity to rebut John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's vicious calumny in their Jan. 6 Op-Ed that Israel is to blame for its "control" of Gaza and the West Bank ("Israel's false friends," Op-Ed, Jan. 6).

Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 as a result of a war of self-defense after being besieged and blockaded by its Arab neighbors. During the monthlong siege that triggered the war, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser publicly stated: "our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." Nine days after winning the Six-Day War, Israel offered to exchange captured territories for peace, but the Arabs rejected the offer.

In 2000, Israel offered the Palestinians a state born in peace encompassing all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank. Mearsheimer and Walt laud the proposal, but fail to mention that it was the Palestinians who rejected it and instead launched a war of terror consisting of blowing up Israeli children in schools, buses, discos and pizzerias.

They also fail to mention that in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. Gaza is now controlled not by Israel, but by Hamas. During the past year alone, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza launched more than 2,000 missiles at Israeli cities.

John Ridley took home our top score for the week with his fiery fi-core fussilade. Strike stuff dominated the top 10, in fact, while Patt Morrison's modest proposal and Elizabeth Larsen's adoption article prove that everybody loves a mom in trouble. (Look for former WGA head Frank Pierson to give Ridley whatfor in Blowback, and keep reading for the previous week's top 10, by the way.) Here are the details:

1. John Ridley goes fi-core, by John Ridley
2. Leno writes a wrong, by Meghan Daum
3. Democracy: inevitable no more, by Madeleine K. Albright
4. Britney's law? Not so crazy, by Patt Morrison
5. Writers strike is war, by the editorial board
6. Israel's false friends, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
7. The 'pocket veto' peril, by Robert J. Spitzer
8. How to remember 1968, by Todd Gitlin
9. A sequel with the same ending, by Thom Taylor
10. The adoption quandary, by Elizabeth Larsen

Much more fiber in our previous-week results, with foreign policy, the real estate bust, immigration and even a 2007 know-it-all test dominating. As always, thanks for reading Opinion L.A. and we hope to keep on pleasin'...

1. The great fall of China, by Walter Russell Mead
2. Aunt Benazir’s false promises, by Fatima Bhutto
3. George Allen’s curse, by Dan Schnur
4. A dynasty isn’t a democracy, by Rosa Brooks
5. How to survive the bust, by various writers
6. Beyond Benazir, by the editorial board
7. A year of living dangerously, by Paul Slansky
8. Is anyone listening? by Tamar Jacoby
9. The Benazir I knew, by Amy Wilentz
10. And you don’t want to know what’s going to happen to Britney, by Joel Stein

Voluminous reader mail on our recent Blowback "John Ridley goes fi-core." Support, condemnation, and a controversy over who did or did not tell whom to shut up. If anybody out there has audio or video of the meeting in question, please send it along and we'll try to sort out the controversy. Or at least turn it into a ring tone.

Rick Mitchell, Los Angeles

Dear Editor:

John Ridley's comments about the Writers Guild sound very much like those of Thirties liberals who joined the Communist Party but left in frustration over its fascistic attitudes but were made to suffer for that membership in the late Forties. And it was nice to see a different perspective on this strike for a change. More objective coverage would be appreciated.

Roberto Bacalski, Los Angeles

Dear Editor:

I want to publicly voice my support for John Ridley's decision to stand on principle and tread his own path. Writers have always been staunch defenders of free speech. Telling one of their own to "shut up" is a terrible betrayal. As a SAG member, I support the goals of the writers' strike but the WGA will self destruct if they continue to alienate their own members.

Bernard Lechowick, Los Angeles

Dear Editor, There are nearly 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of American and John Ridley is your choice for Blowback? Justify that, please.

Ken Martin, Los Angeles

John Ridley's entitled to his opinion. No big deal. But his complaints about WGA negotiators not being experienced enough is a dated, dead issue. And it was discussed at the meeting in December. Which he should know since he said he was there. Patrick Verrone answered it directly and without any malice to the writer who asked it. And the crack John made about someone at the meeting commenting that: "Anyone who didn't have anything good to say about the strike should shut up." -- That was a member who stepped up to the mike and simply felt that way following the previous speaker. I'm sorry, but isn't that what he said we should all be okay with - speaking your mind? The leaders never cheered. The membership did. That's what happens in membership meetings like that. No leader on stage went into a 'frenzied' state and declared that this would now be the new theme of the night. Here's the truth: John Ridley is a sensitive guy. That's cool. But what he also is is a selfish member of this creative community by blasting the very guild that is trying to protect his and everyone else's future. The leaders aren't perfect - none of us are. So run for one of the WGA board or leadership positions if you're not happy. But don't shit on the sacrifices they and all writers are making by posting an LA Times Op-Ed piece with things like: "Bargaining chips moved on and off the table in the haphazard manner of a first-time gambler at a roulette wheel; interim agreements arbitrarily granted, without the necessary vote by membership."

Arrogant. Selfish. Mis-leading. And incredibly self-serving. I have no problem with John Ridley disagreeing with WGA tactics and policies. What I have a problem with is him giving up after hitting a few roadblocks. Being intimidated by a few writers who said you shouldn't go into the WGA's Santa Monica meeting in December. Then throwing his hands up like a spoiled, angry child and going by way of the LA Times Op-Ed route. Independent thinker: Maybe. A guy who really stands for something: Absolutely not. Cowardly: Absolutely!

Mike Scully, Los Angeles

While it's flattering to think that I helped inspire John Ridley to leave the Writers Guild of America (the union that has fought to make sure he was paid for his work and to protect his creative rights) and declare Financial Core status, I really don't deserve the credit he has so generously given me. I was the "high-profile (thank you again, John) television writer" who made the remarks at the membership meeting that Ridley referred to in his op-ed piece.

The problem is that John was not listening closely. My words: "tell them to shut the ----- up", was a reference to agents and producers (people who make a very nice living off of the work of writers) who were making public statements about the strike without any regard to the damage they were doing to the very people who pay their salary.

I never told other writers in the room that they could not express dissenting opinions, and that is why the Guild leadership did not feel the need to stand up and defend anyone - because nobody was being attacked.

So long, John. Good luck in "the Core"...

Bonnie Garvin, Los Angeles

Apparently John Ridley knows as little about truth as he does about solidarity. He claims by going "fi-core" in the WGA strike he is taking a neutral action. Ridley is anything but neutral. He is a flagrant opportunist who is using the strike to gain the notoriety that has eluded him as a screenwriter. Ridley has taken a page from Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Ann Coulter and other disgruntled reactionaries who try and achieve success at the expense of those who fought on their behalf. I doubt Ridley refused the health and pension and other benefits his WGA membership afford him. What is most disturbing is that Ridley resorts to absolute and total fabrication to make his argument. I too was at the December meeting where he reports "blood fervor" and "threat" carried the day. Sounds more like a page from a bad Hollywood melodrama than the uplifting meeting I attended. His representation of that meeting is not only factuous, it is a slap in the face to the 3000 plus members who voted in favor of a strike. Apparently he thinks we're all stooges. Only John Ridley knows best.

Jack Kenny, Los Angeles

Please. If Mr. Ridley is "done" with the guild, why must he still plead to make his case, and then add two extra paragraphs just to say he's done? If you are so finished with us, Mr. Ridley, then just walk away like a man. Don't back away whining about nobody loving you. And if you think your 1 1/2 % of gross only pays for your subscription to Written By, you may be even more stupid than you appear. Why don't you keep your dues and negotiate with each future employer to pay for your pension and health benefits. I'm sure they'd happily pony up. By the way, membership in the Guild is as mandatory as the mininums you were no doubt paid when you first joined... oh, boo-hoo, you were forced to join the Guild.

Mark Wilding, Tarzana

Obviously John Ridley's fictional endeavors don't stop at just his screenplays or novels. I also attended the WGA members meeting in December. At NO point did anyone ever stand up and say that if a fellow member didn't have anything good to say about the strike, they should shut up. That NEVER happened. NEVER. John Ridley simply made it up. So in addition to being a screenwriter, blogger, novelist and commentator he can now add the work "liar".

I'm trying to figure out what Mike Huckabee's appearance on the Colbert Report was supposed to accomplish -- spending time with a satire talk show host who tried to run in a Democratic primary and makes fun of conservatives? Maybe he's trying steal away some independents from John McCain's fanbase. Or maybe he just likes breaking picket lines around talk shows.

Huckabee's performance got mixed reviews:

Buzzflash thinks "he might make a decent late-night host." Jonathan Adler at the National Review Online agrees. While he "heard Laura Ingraham griping about Huckabee's appearance on the Colbert Report last night,"

I caught the show, and I had a different take.  The Huckster's Colbert appearance highlighted many of the things that have made him popular. He is extremely likable in such low pressure settings. He has a good sense of humor and comic timing, and it served him well in his back and forth with Colbert. Being an anti-Huck guy, I would have liked him to fall flat, but he didn't.

The New York Times Caucus blog was a little more skeptical:

There is a cardinal rule to being a guest on “The Colbert Report”: Never, ever, ever try to be the funny one. That’s Mr. Colbert’s job. If you break that rule, chances are you will look 1) a lot less clever than he does and 2) like you’re trying too hard.

Last night, Mike Huckabee broke the rule. Several times. Judge for yourself how it worked out. And train your eyes on Mr. Huckabee as he attempts to keep a straight face.

I'm leaning toward the Caucus' view: The former governor from Arkansas tried to start off the funny by praising the "Colbert bump" (which he said came from the last time he appeared on the show) and almost lost it in the process with the Huckaburger recipe. And it took him a split-second too long to react to Colbert's query: "Are we the candidates who think that the devil and Jesus were brothers?"

But I have to admit, it did make me laugh -- though apparently not as much as it did the Oregonian's Idiot Box blog, which called it "brilliant":

I think his visits to the Report really could help get Huckabee on the Republican ticket, as strange and unlikely as that seems. But then will he actually ask Stephen to be his running mate?

A Huckabee-Colbert ticket ... Chuck Norris must be crying into his pillow right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The media takes on itself after Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire. Who does it best?

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has the most comprehensive take, calling this a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment before listing what all the major papers said before polls closed:

As the evening dragged on, the commentators had to consider the possibility that Hillary's "showing of vulnerability," as Tom Brokaw put it, might have helped her, and that Bill Clinton might have boosted her chances after all. In other words, that the coverage had missed the point.

This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out.

Brian Williams on MSNBC says pundits missed all the pro-Clinton clues, and that doesn't stop him from doing some more predicting: 

There will be numerous deconstructions over the days to come. Theories about how African-American candidates for office have confounded pollsters (see: Bradley, Wilder, Gant, Jackson) will receive a thorough airing, and deservedly so.  We in the media will beat ourselves (and deservedly so) for reaching conclusions before the voters have spoken. A further prediction?  Give us a few weeks — we will promptly forget the lessons of this debacle in polling, predictions and primary politics. We will all live to screw up another day, though our performance in New Hampshire will be hard to beat.

John Podhoretz had harsh words:

The next day, Obama compared himself to Martin Luther King — and nobody batted an eye. But when Hillary sought to use his analogy to her advantage by pointing out that it took an experienced politician named Lyndon Johnson to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act — thus making her case that there is a place for words and a place for actions — she was deemed desperate, even possibly racist.

A bizarre double standard had emerged in the media, under which Obama could say anything while Hillary could say nothing. Her efforts to get herself a victory in New Hampshire were interfering in the most blatant media effort I can remember to impose a coronation on the body politic.

Tommy Christopher on AOL turns the MSM's favorite phrase for Hillary's emotive episode against it by asking "Is this the media's Muskie moment?"

But who needs the media to question itself when Bill Clinton does it so well?

One career strategy I considered during my happy time at Reason magazine was to become just enough of a bright boy of the libertarian movement to allow me to stage a very public falling out, write a tell-all book with a title like Ex-Friends or Movement Man or Up From Libertarianism or Whose Freedom?, then build a career as a David Horowitz/Michael Lind-style intellectual turncoat, getting paid to warn the masses about the dangers posed by my erstwhile allies. The strategy was unworkable for many reasons: It was a little too dishonest even for me; libertarianism doesn't generate enough public interest to support a longterm market in defection; and as it happens, defectors from and within libertarianism are a dime a dozen.

But the tactic I was planning to use would have been very effective: Simply collect story after story of the moonlight-and-magnolias Confederate nostalgists, stop-the-war-on-men misogynists, traditionalist homophobes, scientific racists and similar fringe characters who seemed to gravitate toward libertarianism, in numbers that I and others found remarkable.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have been very good at this tactic either: I don't do well with policing unacceptable commentary, "kicking" people "to the curb," writing colleagues out of polite society, defining away extremists and all those other things movement types (in all movements) love to do.

Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm not well suited to commenting on the treasure trove of jarring commentary Jamie Kirchik is publicizing from Ron Paul's old newsletters. Virginia Postrel has a fairly succinct reaction that I agree with (though given the timing and Paul's own tepid response to the matter, I'd be inclined to dial back the ho-hum, been-there attitude), and I'm fascinated by Wendy McElroy's call for the true author of the commentaries (apparently a real person) to reveal him- or herself. And I could hardly improve on the coverage by my beloved former colleagues at Reason.

But I do think there's a discussion to be held among libertarians about why this political philosophy seems to draw so many (classically) illiberal figures; and the hubbub over Paul's newsletters, which are revelatory whether Paul wrote them or not, seems like an opportunity.

Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks California's a pretty big deal this election season. With Iowa and New Hampshire out of the way, papers from around the state (and even one in the U.K.) are looking hopefully for a starring role on Super Tuesday. Here's a roundup:

"California mail-in voters a primary target," The Times punned yesterday.

The Sacramento Bee eyes Golden State independents, who could make or break the Democrats this year:

A twist in California this year will allow the state's "decline-to-state" voters to cast ballots for Democratic Party candidates in the state's Feb. 5 primary – but not for Republicans.

This could make a difference. In New Hampshire on Tuesday, analysts said nonpartisan voters significantly boosted the tallies of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. There, independents can vote for candidates of either party.

"But," today's L.A Times reports, "some strategists believe California's Latino voters could boost Clinton, who is more popular in that group than Obama."

That's good news for Clinton, who may have to place a lot of her eggs in California's basket. According to the Huffington Post:

A panicked and cash-short Clinton campaign is seriously considering giving up on the Nevada caucuses and on the South Carolina primary in order to regroup and to save resources for the massive 19-state mega-primary on February 5.

At the same time, some top independent expenditure groups supporting Clinton have been exploring the creation of an anti-Obama "527 committee" that would take unlimited contributions from a few of Clinton's super-rich backers and from a handful of unions to finance television ads and direct mail designed to tarnish the Illinois Senator's image.

Panicking about Obama's head start with the mail-in crowd?

The San Francisco Chronicle remarks on how the GOP race is shaping up:

At this rate, California Republicans - and only Republicans because those not registered with the GOP are forbidden from voting in the state's primary - will have the chance to cast the decisive vote to crown the party's nominee.

"California will be voting before the nominee is decided," said California Republican Party chair Ron Nehring.

Only two Republican campaigns - Giuliani's and Romney's - have organizations of any size in California. And analysts said McCain had to win New Hampshire to generate enough buzz - and the ensuing campaign donations - to allow him to continue. [...]

McCain won't be able to attract independent voters, or those who register as "decline-to-state" in California. They're not allowed to cast Republican ballots in the state.

Even Britain's Guardian weighs in on the Golden State:

For many Californians, the unusually early date for the primary corrects what they see as a historical wrong: the clout of the "pipsqueak states" over the might of California.

While California has the largest population and the highest number of delegates of any state, it has in the recent past been reduced to the role of bystander as smaller, early-voting states have decided the destiny of the presidency.

To make matters worse, California is also the bankroller of the campaigns, the place where chequebooks are open and supporters ready to endorse with money, not just kind words.

But not this time.

Damn right.

The fight between the University of California and grad students enrolled in 2003 looks like a warped version of the typical underdog story — you know, the one where the little guy keeps getting beat down but bounces back to go for the win? Except, in this case, the little guy (students fighting to recover fees that UC improperly raised) won, but the university (which owes 35,000 graduate students about $40,000,000) just won't give up.

In 2003, UC graduate and professional school students saw their fees shoot through the roof, even though UC documents promised that they would not rise for continuing students. In July, some of the affected students filed suit, and the situation has been tied up in court ever since.

When the appeals court decision came down in November, I figured UC would throw in the towel and exit the ring as gracefully as possible. I was wrong. According to the San Jose Mercury News:

Every month that passes adds more than $300,000 in interest to the award, said an attorney for the plaintiffs. But a UC lawyer said the university believes it can still win the case.

"You have to make a judgment whether accumulation of interest outweighs the legal strengths of the case," said the UC attorney, Chris Patti. "We decided that it did not.

"It's going to be a big ticket, whether we have to pay now or in the future."

Translation: We're screwed either way, so why not spend a few million more, especially when we can take it out of student pockets?

It's kind of like writer's strike syndrome: There's no reason not to settle the whole thing and move on, so that I can get my weekly dose of NBC's Chuck — but the two parties are so embittered that they're going to see the other side buried.

The problem with that attitude? They each dig their own holes, and they both still get covered in crap.

How catching is Barack Obama's theme of 'change'? It's practically an epidemic. Every candidate is all about change now — and always has been, they'll have you know.

It started with the jaw-dropping results in Iowa last week, when Obama and Mike Huckabee swept their respective primaries. On both sides, the second-place finishers — John Edwards and Mitt Romney — saw fit to comment.

John Edwards worked change into his main strategy — bring Hillary Clinton down first, worry about Barack later. From his post-primary speech:

The one thing that's clear from the results in Iowa tonight is that the status quo lost, and change won.

Clinton rolled with the punches in her speech:

Together we have presented the case for change, and have made it absolutely clear that America needs a new beginning.

But in this weekend's ABC-Facebook debate, she countered Edwards' 'status-quo' label the way she has of late — by giving 'change' an 'experience' angle:

I'm not just running on a promise of change, I'm running on 35 years of change.

The Republicans, oddly enough, found themselves in a situation symmetrical to the Democrats...

Here's what you were reading in the last full week of 2007. Our American Values series finally scored, as did our holiday Big Fix feature. The violent deaths of Timothy Johnson and Benazir Bhutto drew attention, but as always, Jesus, dogs and Jonah Goldberg were tops with readers.

1. The cancer drug by Diana Wagman
2. A life and death, raw by commenters
3. Aunt Benazir’s false promises by Fatima Bhutto
4. The common defense by the editorial board
5. Tracking the mild coyote by Meghan Daum
6. A little bit of heaven on Earth by Joel Stein
7. It’s a campaign, not a crusade by Charlotte Allen
8. Domestic tranquillity by the editorial board
9. Politics? We’ll take good cheer by Jonah Goldberg
10. Collar the dogs by Will Beall

Christmas season is closing in, and candidates are splurging on campaign stocking stuffers. Mitt Romney's recent attack ad accused fellow presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee of being 'soft on crime' — but in the passive-aggressive spirit of the season, Huckabee has turned the other cheek with an ad play that sprinkles season's greetings and sweeps the legs out from under Romney. The move was a pretty 'wily' one, says NPR:

On Tuesday, Huckabee shot back with a cheerful holiday ad with the song, Silent Night, playing in the background.

Now there's a trick: You get ahead in the polls, and then you declare Christmas!

Maybe too wily: Check out Michael McGough's post below on the subliminal cross.

But closer to home, a Dec. 11 special election for an L.A.-area Assembly seat brought tidings of discomfort and failure. From the Sacramento Bee:

Stop by the Mike Gipson for Assembly headquarters after voting and you could win a $250 gift card.

That was the none-too-subtle message delivered in a political mailer that has stirred charges of vote buying and has the state's top elections official saying the practice should be illegal.

It's not illegal (since the mailer, made to look like a Christmas Card, states, "you are eligible to win ... no matter who you vote for") and it probably shouldn't be — but it is in bad taste, particularly since some say it targets low-income African Americans.

Regardless, the election ended up with an abysmal 11.4% turnout, and Gipson lost. Which either means people won't vote for love or money, or that Gipson's tacky move lost him the election. I'm guessing it's the former.

*Photo from the Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert

Quote of the Day from the National Journal's Hotline blog:

"I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim."

-- HRC endorser/ex-Sen. Bob Kerrey

Even though he endorsed Clinton, the former Nebraska govenor and senator seems to see this as valuable "experience" that HRC doesn't share. From the Seattle Times:

"There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal," Kerrey said after the kickoff of a five-day tour of Iowa by Clinton. "He's got a whale of a lot more intellectual talent than I've got as well."

It's cute and it sounds open-minded on the surface, but it's also part of a larger trend of people bringing up the "M" word all the time, in any context, frequently in ways that can be twisted around to suit smear tactics and have far more staying power than some old drug-use rumor.

Come on, people. Obama's related to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but that's not alienating Dems or endearing him to Republicans.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) has released a new ad, just as bloody as his last, and the similarities don't stop there. Both spots tie immigration policy to scary and indefensible scourges of American life — first terrorists, now gangs. And both ads conclude with vote-for-Tancredo-or-else-risk-brutal-violence ultimatums. The new spot says only Tancredo "dares say what must be done" (deport 'em all, that is).

The ad came out the same day Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that, in fact, it's actually doing what must be done. ICE fugitive operations teams arrested over 30,000 people in fiscal year 2007 — twice as many "criminal aliens and immigration fugitives" as it nabbed the year before. The Fugitive Operations Program, launched four years ago, targets illegal immigrants whom everyone from Tancredo to The Times agrees should get the boot, like child sex exploiters, convicted violent criminals, and suspected gang members.

Suspected is the key word there, unfortunately — reports have shown that many of those arrested turn out to have no gang involvement. (And The Times said in a 2005 story that deportation has actually helped one of the most dangerous gangs to flourish.)

ICE is, fortunately, softening its policy on raids. After a report showed the negative impact on children of detaining adult illegal immigrants — especially breast-fed babies — ICE drafted new guidelines with Sen. Edward Kennedy's (D-Mass.) help. It's good to see Kennedy, a co-sponsor of the mother of all comprehensive immigration reform bills, getting back in the game, since most every non-legislative effort to fix immigration policy has focused on security concerns, at the expense of humanitarian ones.

Okay, so probably no public personality can compare in influence and power to Oprah, who has thrown in her lot with the unbelievably lucky Barack Obama. But 'tis the season for celebrity endorsements, and it seems like this year anyone and everyone is taking a primary interest in the candidates — who in turn are more than happy to take advantage.

Hillary's still standing tall, even though Oprah passed her over:

The Clinton campaign, in an e-mail to The Associated Press, said of Winfrey: ''We're fans and we think it's great she is participating in the process. Everyone has wonderful supporters, and we're proud of ours'' — such as Steven Spielberg, Magic Johnson and Barbra Streisand, who threw her support behind Sen Clinton on Tuesday.

Then again, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is siding with Obama. You're not out of the woods yet, Sen. Clinton.

It's got to be frustrating, what with so many political celebs shopping around. Earlier this year, the reverend and former White House candidate Jesse Jackson declared, "I reaffirm my commitment to vote for Sen. Barack Obama.... Any attempt to dilute my support for Sen. Obama will not succeed." But in a meeting with The Times' editorial board, he flip-flopped, admitting, "I have very strong feelings for Hillary because we've worked together 30 years." Now, he's even giving a nod to John Edwards, apparently at Obama's expense. In an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote,

"The Democratic candidates — with the exception of John Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and has made addressing poverty central to his campaign — have virtually ignored the plight of African Americans in this country."

Your more garden-variety stars are also prone to sowing their political wild oats. According to the Huffington Post, before she settled on Hillary, Barbra Streisand "covered her bases and [gave] $2300 to Obama, Edwards and Clinton. "

On the Republican side, forget Pat Robertson backing Rudy Giuliani. Mike Huckabee is milking his Chuck Norris endorsement for all it's worth, even as he flaunts one of his most recent prizes — former pro-wrestler Ric Flair, aka The Nature Boy. Meanwhile, according to AP, brothel owner Dennis Hof decided to throw his lot in with Ron Paul, adding, "I'll get all the (working girls) together, and we can raise him some money...I'll put up a collection box outside the door. They can drop in $1, $5 contributions."

For all you pundits wondering what fueled the Huckabee and Paul surges, look no further.   

With the Dec. 14 cutoff for temporary funding looming, it's time to take another look at what's happening to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, since President Bush refuses to sign Congress' reauthorization bills. Remember those worst-case scenarios? Looks like they're close to becoming reality.

According to Congressional Quarterly:

The Congressional Research Service reported Oct. 25 that 21 states face combined shortfalls of $1.6 billion in their children’s health insurance programs this year. The first of those states will run out of money in March.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Unless there's an infusion of cash - and quickly - California will run out of federal money to pay for its program in June. To prepare for the shortfall, state officials will decide in the next two weeks whether to stop enrolling new children and send letters to 56,600 families telling them their children will lose health coverage on Dec. 31.

"These are horrible options," said Lesley Cummings, who manages the state's Healthy Families insurance program for low-income kids. "We never thought we were going to be in this place."

And if you think this state is screwed?

California isn't alone. The Congressional Research Service estimates that 21 states will exhaust their federal money next year - nine will run out of money in March - if Congress simply keeps the program funded at the current levels.

Georgia's program is already running a deficit, and is surviving only with a temporary grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. ...The state is pulling the medical records of kids to determine who are the sickest, so if they have to drop children from the program they'll start with healthier children.

"Georgia is on the edge of the cliff," said Dr. Rhonda Medows, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Health. "We don't want to think about kids having cancer, but how do you schedule someone for six weeks of chemotherapy if they only have four weeks left in the program? Does the oncologist start the therapy or do they wait? How do you plan? You can't."

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Wirkkalas, with an income that for five years has hovered around $70,000 and a home they bought in 2004 for $535,000, are a family many would call middle class. But they have been priced out of the private health insurance market, and their circumstances illustrate the core of a political battle over how much a family can earn for their children to qualify for a federal-state partnership called the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. If the outcome of Washington politics goes one way, the children could remain uninsured. If it goes the other way, the children might get health insurance.

On a larger scale,

If Congress fails to act, or even if funding is held to present levels, or increased to administration-recommended levels, the California HealthCare Foundation estimates that up to 600,000 children in California could lose their health insurance beginning in 2008. Because of healthcare inflation, California and many other states would have to begin closing off new enrollments and disenrolling some insured children, according to the foundation's projections. "The funding wouldn't allow California to maintain its present caseload, and keep up with inflation," Finocchio says.

As The Times' editorial board said last month,

This bears repeating: President Bush's bullheaded insistence on sabotaging reauthorization of the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, better known as SCHIP, will hurt the very people -- poor and middle-class Americans -- he claims he wants to protect.

I'd hope that the bitter realities starting to hit many American families would finally bring Bush around, but seeing as stories of children saved by SCHIP don't seem to have moved many Republicans, I doubt that a few million more kids will make a difference.

Three big papers report this week on three new local studies challenging assumptions about the cost of illegal immigration. The Times writes up a UCLA study finding that in California, Latino illegal immigrants are less likely to visit doctors, clinics, and even emergency rooms compared to U.S.-born Latinos. (That doesn't mean that illegal immigrants healthcare is low-cost, however, particularly because they're less likely to have health insurance than native Latinos — some studies put the cost well over $1 billion.)

The New York Times noted that immigrants (legal and illegal) contribute nearly a quarter of the state's economy (and make up 21% of the state population). The study also found that immigrants pay proportionate federal and state taxes.

And the Washington Post comes in with a report from Fairfax County that shrugs and says it's impossible to figure out the cost of illegal immigration, anyway, because some services illegal immigrants use — particularly public infrastructure like roads and parks — aren't tailored specifically to them. A county official offers a sage and no doubt well-documented explanation for why we don't need to worry about the burden illegal immigrants pose to libraries: "Our libraries are not being rushed by undocumented aliens looking for bestsellers."

The L.A. Times employee formerly known as Matt Welch goes directly to the competition to scream "Go Ron Paul!" before hanging up. In a Washington Post Op-Ed, Welch and Reason editor Nick Gillespie explain Dr. No's cross-cultural appeal. No report on the Ron Paul phenomenon would be complete without swipes at the mainstream media's long silence on his campaign (to which there were some honorable early exceptions) and the really loathsome terms with which the new right has attacked this avatar of the old right:

Yet Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.

And little wonder. In the 1990s, conservative Republicans rose to power by relentlessly attacking Big Government. Yet the minute they took control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they kicked out the jams on even a semblance of fiscal responsibility, signing off on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and building literal and figurative bridges to nowhere. From 2001 to 2008, federal outlays will have grown by an estimated 29 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The biggest Big Government expansion during the Bush era is the one that Americans now despise most: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose direct costs are already an estimated $800 billion, plus 4,000 American lives. Paul's steadfast bring-the-troops-home stance -- not just from Iraq, but Korea and Japan as well -- is the major engine powering his grass-roots success as ostensibly antiwar Democrats in the majority can't or won't do anything on Capitol Hill.

But if war were the only answer for his improbable run, why Ron Paul instead of the perennial peacenik Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic congressman from Ohio whose apparent belief in UFOs is only slightly less kooky than his belief in the efficacy of socialized health care?

The answer, and the rest of the article, here.

Well, we already knew left-leaning softies were to blame for Rush, but it's not just because they give the radio personality someone to rail against. It's also because liberals are actually tuning into his program. That's according to a poll conducted by Zogby International and USC's Norman Lear Center.

Given what the terms liberal and conservative are actually supposed to mean, it may not be a surprise that bluebloods value diverse viewpoints, while the red-blooded prefer programming aimed at reinforcing their beliefs. And granted, this is the kind of finding that seems to be right up Zogby's alley. Nevertheless, it's intriguing that the anecdotal evidence has actually been validated by people who know how to handle statistics.

But the research didn't just show liberals' media sources to be more varied than conservatives'. It found that, based on entertainment preferences, people can be clearly grouped into one of three categories: liberal, conservative and moderate. You are what you watch. And read. And play.

A sample of the findings: Liberals like PBS, conservatives dig FOX News. Moderates, meanwhile, watch talk shows and avoid politics as much as possible. It indicates, Lear's deputy director Johanna Blakley told KPCC's Larry Mantle, that Oprah's endorsement of Barack Obama may turn out to be a crucial victory for him.

The whole thing seems to reflect better on lefties than on right-wingers — though happily, they both love Hugh Laurie. But moderates (or "purples," as the study calls them) come out looking the worst of the bunch. Then again, don't take my word for it — go read Zogby's summary yourself, and tell us what you think.

Opinion L.A.: We blog. YOU decide.

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Paul Kokoski.

Hamilton, Ontario. Canada.

From Pasadena, Marc Seanassey chuckles and rejoices:

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

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

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

Marc Seanassey

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

Subject: I completely concur

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

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

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.

Two views of Swati Pandey's recent Opinion Daily "Tancredo moves the lethal center."

Citing that hypothetical but remarkably popular suicide bomber from Mexico, Richard Eide says one o' these days...

Regarding your article on Tancredo's politics about illegal immigration, everything you said, and everything anybody else has said all goes out the window the moment we have a suicide bombing in this country. If the bomber is found to have come across the southern border the argument is over. The wall will go up ASAP along with the military on the border. Congress will be down there digging the fence post holes themselves, anything to keep their jobs in the face of a furious voter revolt. One suicide bomber and the immigration battle is over.

The tersely named "Raj," on the other hand, feels Pandey is just helping Tancredo demonize poor undocumented workers:

"But if Tancredo's ad — and Barack Obama's speculation — are to be believed, immigration will be a major issue in 2008, along with terrorism. And recent numbers suggest that voters are leaning toward tough-on-illegal-immigrant positions."

Swati Pandey needs to do more research before printing this garbage. This is not what we heard from the voters in Virginia and Kentucky two states where the Dems won handily instead of being a mouthpiece for anti-immigratn folks. For a reality check read Anita Kumar's article in Washington Post...

Swati's is garbage in garbage out, a kind of reporter that Tancredo relies on to spread his lies.

Regards

Raj

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.

Columnist Joel Stein develops Ann Coulter Mad Libs™ and gets the mistress of liberal-baiting herself to play along:

After all these years of Coultering, people still get riled up over her obvious attempts to make us mad. Which makes me horribly jealous. Just how easy is it for Coulter to offend someone? Would any words from her mouth do the trick? To test this theory, I developed the Ann Coulter Mad Libs.™

Coulter -- never publicity shy -- quickly replied to my e-mail request for adjectives, verbs and European cities. She also gave the essay below that little something extra that only she can provide. (For "male Democrat" she filled in "Hillary Clinton," for instance.) Still, the experiment worked. I expect to see these quotes taken out of context on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" tonight.

Former Orange County senior deputy district attorney Brian Gurwitz asks OC Sheriff Mike Carona to resign. Law professor Harlan Protass says it's time to revisit sentencing laws on crack cocaine. And columnist Ronald Brownstein wonders whether labor is stalling healthcare reform.

The editorial board says it's OK for the Valley to get a break on power bills, but not water bills. The board asks LAUSD Supt. David L. Brewer to find a way to move forward with his transformation plan for 44 schools. Finally the board warms to a Senate bill on surveillance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More intemperance after the jump!

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.

Wired Editor Chris Anderson just acted upon the fantasy of long-suffering MSM muckety-mucks everywhere, by publishing a list of unwanted e-mailers on his personal site for purposes of public shaming. Make sure to read the comments for robust counter-arguments.... (Link via Fishbowl LA.)

Rick Perlstein did not much care for my column of yesterday criticizing people like him and Naomi Klein for bemoaning the existence of private, supplemental fire protection. He brings up some interesting viewpoints worth further discussion.

First, a refresher on my Perlstein citation:

You would think that the cheap availability of potent fire retardant, and the creation of supplementary firefighting capability -- with costs borne entirely by the homeowners who choose to live in fire zones, instead of everyday taxpayers -- would be a cause for at least mild enthusiasm. Instead, it was greeted with howls of class warfare.

Liberal journalist/historian Rick Perlstein called it "a sickening indication about how the conservative mania for privatization is beginning to create two Americas: One that is protected from fires, and one that is not." (Never mind that no one within shouting distance of power or influence is calling for the privatization of fire departments.)

Now, a sampling from Perlstein's counter-argument, which comes under the headline "Solidarity in Flames":

Libertarian Matt Welch doesn't get it. He really doesn't get it. [...]

In so doing, he reveals how far down conservative ideology has fallen in grasping the most basic facts of collective security. In case Welch hasn't noticed, fires spread. Laying down fire-proof rings around islands of individual private properties does not stop fires from spreading; they'll just go around the island. Now, if every house was provided with Phos-Check (sic), the fires would not be able to spread. Everyone (and not just those with an extra $995 lying around, which is not "paltry" to someone living paycheck to paycheck) benefits. There would be no wildfire.

Before getting to the second half of Perlstein's complaint, I'll jump in and make a few relevant points:
1) Yes indeed, fires do spread (pretty rich for an east coaster to give a SoCal native a lecture on the local ecology, BTW), but the majority of homes that burn do so because of stray individual embers carried by the wind, not a raging wall of fire. In part, that's because firefighters Phos-Chek the hell out of endangered neighborhoods. During mandatory evacuations, the only people who can defend against embers are the limited number of available firefighters (the ranks of whom do not, for dumb bureaucratic reasons, include all the available firefighting talent from nearby military bases), homeowners who refuse to evacuate ... and a handful of AIG firefighting crews. AIG adds to the net firefighting capacity, and saved non-covered houses during the recent fires. If Perlstein indeed wants to provide every fire-zone home with $1,000 worth of Phos-Chek, well, good on him. Though something tells me that the same people who object to the rich having extra fire protection will squawk even louder when millionaire hillside dwellers get tens of millions in subsidized fire retardant every year.

Also, there is no fire-retardant valhalla in which "there would be no wildfire."

2) While I appreciate the "paycheck to paycheck" sentiment, that really, truly does not accurately describe the vast majority of people who live in Southern California's most fire-vulnerable areas. Recall that AIG's hated insurance, according to the L.A. Times, "is offered only to homeowners in California's most affluent ZIP Codes." (This itself is technically inaccurate -- the insurance is not available at such tony addresses as Palos Verdes Peninsula [90274], Manhattan Beach [90266], San Francisco [94123] and San Jose [95120].) It's a neat trick to begrudge the rich in one breath, and then imagine in the next that their next-door neighbors are living paycheck to paycheck. Recall, too, that one of Mike Davis' great critiques about letting Malibu burn was that the city had way too many fire stations compared to the poor folk in the flats. So if we don't want the rich to get more public assistance, and we don't want the rich to get more private assistance, what is it that we really want here?

Also, I said "lousy," not "paltry," though either can fairly describe the comparative and available cost for a SoCal canyon dweller to provide his/her own personal protection against certain catastrophe. For more disproportionate response, read on!

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.

Ever since the dawn of man, us monkeys have been staring slack-jawed at the awesome sight of flame. For almost as long, we've been making up terrible poetry to describe it. What happens when the doggerel blends with, say, the perennial east coast desire to interpret the land of fruits and nuts for the civilized natives back home? Pure comedy gold, that's what!

From the letters section of the New York Times:

There was an eerie silence as I stood there in the orange smoky haze, ashes falling like snow on Mercury, and blinked two or maybe three times.

By motivation, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fire -- it just seemed like something that would happen in Southern California. As I quietly closed the door, I thought about Joan Didion; she would understand this.
Tom Impelluso

How could you not close the door "quietly" with all those heavy thoughts rattling around your noggin! Letter-writer Martin Kruming also added: "White ashes rain down from blackened skies; residents wear surgical masks outside; estates and homes crumble in seconds and tens of thousands flee."

Lest you think I'm being unkind to Seaboard proles, I give you Janet Fitch of the Washington Post:

All week, it has been like a funeral here in the city. The moon rose orange through the smoke. Although surrounded by miles of concrete, we could feel the million trees burning, taste the fear but even more the sadness in the air [...]

The funeral we Angelenos feel is the periodic funeral of all our illusions about the nature of this place. [...]

California is so dry now, a wet towel hung over a shower bar will be usable within half an hour. Street trees have been looking stressed all summer.

I come not to bury Fitch (or Didion, or Raymond Chandler, or Mike Davis), but to salute the whole lot of 'em for giving it the old college try while fighting an ultimately losing battle -- using the wholly inadequate medium of words to describe a force of nature that's all about the visuals. Like this one, by The Times' phenomenal Wally Skalij:

To see and celebrate the poetry no words can convey, keep on reading after the jump.

Were state, local and federal responses to last week's devastating wildfires above average, adequate or poor? This week, UC San Diego's Richard Carson and San Diego tax fighter Richard Rider debate fire policy, and start by critiquing San Diego's preparedness.

Carson argues the city was "woefully outgunned, with no workable plan to bring in firefighting resources from outside the county in time to stop a runaway fire":

San Diego's pension fund scandal has effectively gutted its ability to increase spending in response to the increasing fire threat. The public bought into belt-tightening as the way to deal with the pension fund issue and believed that public safety was still being protected. Politicians have been afraid to level with the public and reluctant to impose large impact fees on developers, whose ever-growing expansion into fire country is the root source of many of the problems.

Richard Rider counters:

I think you could have shortened your opening essay to two words — "more money." Hardly a new idea, but certainly an ineffective one.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the city of San Diego's professional firefighting force to fight a major fire event that happens once every four to 20 years is madness. As it now stands, professional city firefighters spend only 3% to 4% of their average shift actually fighting fires. What will the hundreds of additional firefighters be doing 24/7, 365 days a year between those rare, huge brush fires? Besides getting paid, that is?

You can read the full, fiery exchange here.

Armadillo Aerospace, John Carmack's Mesquite, Texas-based space startup, has flamed out in the 2007 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge — which was not actually testing competitors' ability to land on the moon but to demonstrate a rocket capable of moon-ready maneuvers. Carmack, whose development of the engines for fabled games Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake qualifies him for consideration as the Orson Welles of first-person shooters, has been an X Prize regular (and so far, bridesmaid) with the so-ungainly-it-looks-almost graceful modular "Pixel" vehicle design. The Northrop Grumman proving was held at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico over the weekend. Here's what pixel was required to do to win this year's prize:

The Competition is divided into two levels. Level 1 requires a rocket to take off from a designated launch area, rocket up to 150 feet (50 meters) altitude, then hover for 90 seconds while landing precisely on a landing pad 100 meters away. The flight must then be repeated in reverse—and both flights, along with all of the necessary preparation for each, must take place within a two and a half hour period.

In its attempt to get that first-level prize, worth a cool $350,000, Pixel went down in flames, according to Wired News:

"After a loud explosion, a pool of fire spread approximately 30 feet away from the rocket, according to one photographer watching through a telephoto lens. Firetrucks were summoned, but the fire was out before their arrival."

The money from this year's prize may be rolled over for 2008, and the big winner will be the developer who can perform not only the takeoff and landing feat described above but a more taxing second level:

The more difficult course, Level 2, requires the rocket to hover for twice as long before landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface, packed with craters and boulders to mimic actual lunar terrain. The hover times are calculated so that the Level 2 mission closely simulates the power needed to perform the real lunar mission.

The awarding of X Prizes and related awards for engineering breakthroughs great and small has become a pleasing hum of progress. You may come down on the other side of the Hickam/Simberg divide in the development of space, but regular competition for incremental  improvements strikes me as a saner and more lasting way forward than massive do-or-die commitments to singular high-value goals. I'm sorry to see the Armadillo didn't pull this one off, but then I'm not sure how you can really simulate lunar-landing conditions on heavy old Earth. Do you just get the thing to fly and figure you'll divide all your specs by six when you get up to the moon?

Fire imp: id software; Pixel: Armadillo Aerospace

"I do not believe in bothering famous people when they are out in public."

That's Rick Jacobs at HuffPost describing how he interrogated and photographed an unwilling Ann Coulter in West Hollywood Saturday night while the xanthochroidal xenophobe tried to dine. Photographic evidence of Coulter dining on a NASA soundstage in a WeHo restaurant included.

Jacobs burns to know what would bring the supposedly gay-unfriendly Coulter to the alleged center of gay living on the West Coast. Maybe she's boy crazy. I suspect she's not there for the food: Jacobs starts his post off with a stemwinder about the restaurant's design and chandeliers, and you know about restaurant reviews that start off praising the decor.

There's been plenty of talk today about a Pew Hispanic report parsing immigrants' ties to their new country and their homeland. The survey figured out how many foreign-born immigrants send remittances, call or travel to their countries of origin, and how often. It also found out whether immigrants see themselves as "American" (relative to naturalized citizens), and whether they intend to return home.

An AP story puts it sunnily in its headline: "Most Immigrants See Future In U.S." It's true — and the number of immigrants who plan on sticking around rises with the number of years they've been here, even if they don't all identify as "American." The Washington Post sees it less simply, saying that the study explored the "complexity" of national ties. The Immigration Prof Blog links it to a New York Times piece finding that remittances have fallen sharply (at least in cash value) this year, possibly due to fear of stricter immigration enforcement. (This despite Pew's findings that 51% of Latino foreign-born immigrants interviewed — albeit in 2006 — send remittances home.)

But as if all the remittance-sending and non-American-identifying weren't enough to rile anti-immigrant conservative types, there's a buried bit that ought to inflame them even more: a third of immigrants think that compared to their countries of origin, the U.S. has worse morals. Or maybe conservatives can finally find common ground with immigrants.

Local and non-local bloggers warm up to the fires raging throughout Southern California. Topics range from bad-taste wildfire cash-ins to who qualifies as a blogger (hang in there long enough and we may even get back to the old who invented blogging controversy), and there's some real public service going on as well.

The Fishbowl points out The Times’ continuous coverage, remarking,

The LAT's fire blog is exactly what newspapers will be doing with all breaking news coverage some day. And that's not a bad thing.

Thanks, we think. Meanwhile, a Times columnist finally gets his weblogging wings courtesy of Central City East:

Steve Lopez is even submitting his own photos, which in my opinion, by doing that, makes him a full fledged blogger.

Twitter Love gets kudos from Big Action for its role as

a valuable emergency communication tool.  People who probably had no clue about Twitter three days ago are using it to stay abreast of fire evacuations and the latest news. [...] Go Twitter.

LA Observed is also staying abreast of fire news, and posts a photo of a phenomenally dismal scene at Long Beach.

LA.com links to a post about a sushi chain that “turns tragedy into publicity”:

A good portion of the state of California might have been burning yesterday, but that doesn’t mean high-end sushi chain Nobu couldn’t turn tragedy into publicity by deciding to selflessly offer their delicious Miso Hamachi to Malibu firefighters looking for a little raw fish break from the flames swallowing the nearby homes. Nobu’s good deed was made even better by their just so happening to mention it to TMZ, who whipped up this cheeky little photoshop, slapped an “EXCLUSIVE!” on it, and gave it a hilarious headline (”Hottest Reservations In Town” - Get It?) for you to enjoy if your internet connection wasn’t on fire. Too bad the Tribeca Grill didn’t think of this during 9/11.

Laist.com wonders whether Orange County’s got the short end of the matchstick when it comes to resources, concluding,

The federal response is so shaky and unreliable that even Michael "heckuva job" Brown had the nerve to offer himself up for interviews on the fire response in a press release last night.

We may really have to reconsider California Secession after this.

While they urge readers to “keep this all in perspective,” the blog hosts another interesting post about the effects on LA sports teams:

- The San Diego Chargers are practicing in Arizona and may have to play their next game there, as over ten thousand evacuees are currently camping out in Qualcomm Stadium.
- Pepperdine's homecoming weekend was wrecked. Practices and games were canceled, and players returning from road games couldn't get back to campus.
- USC practices have been altered by the bad air quality.

Even Craigslist has jumped into the fiery fray, providing an all-purpose forum with everything form emergency information to lost-pet posts. Jason Burns at blogging.la:

Here's one entry that would make anyone tear up:

golden retriever found in santee < evacueedog > 10/23 19:52:47
we found a stray dog in santee golden retriever male looks like possible evacuee it drank three bowls of water and ate a bunch of food. call 858 414 1414.

It's fascinating, because it keeps updating. I can't seem to look away.

On a more human level, signonsandiego.com has also set up a blogspot not for news, but “A list of people, places and things to help San Diego live through and recover from the wildfires.”

From snarking at sushi restaurants to feeding lost pets, witness the power of the Web.

Truly, I did not think we made 'em that dim any more.

I was driving out of a Los Angeles hillside neighborhood today and I stopped for a red light. The driver of the car in front of me was smoking, languidly hanging his cigarette hand out of the window between drags.

The wind was up and dry leaves were stirring in the street. I watched his hand, his cigarette, the way the fellow in the crow's nest on the Titanic must have watched the looming iceberg.

And then he did it. He dropped the burning cigarette butt in the street.

No other word for it: I was gobsmacked. The radio was reporting more houses, more miles of land chewed up by fire. The sun was caramelized by the haze of smoke. The ash was still blowing in wisps off my windshield wipers. And this man flicked his lighted cigarette out of his car.

I leaped out of my car and hurried to stomp on the smoldering butt, grinding it out in the street. ''Are you nuts?'' I asked him. ''The state is burning up around here, and you toss out a lighted cigarette? That's how these fires start! Be careful!''

I half-expected a ''Geez, I'm sorry, I just wasn't thinking.'' Instead, I got a torrent of obscene abuse. Then the light changed.

I called the cops to report it, but they said they couldn't do anything. Yes, it's a misdemeanor, but they had to see it happen.

Something of the same happened to me in February, in stopped traffic on the Golden State Freeway — a man dropped his burning cigarette out of his truck. When I told him that he'd get a ticket if the CHP saw him, he assured me that they'd let him off — he was a sheriff's deputy.

I wonder about that deputy now. Is he out directing traffic as people evacuate their smoky neighborhoods? Does he live in Canyon Country or Santa Clarita, and is his own home threatened by fire?

And what do you suppose he'd do if it turned out some idiot tossing away a glowing cigarette butt had started the fire that burned down his house?

The Malibu Schadenfreude identified by Steve Lopez and others today contains a legitimate public-policy issue within its (even more legitimate?) naked class envy/hatred. Namely, that many rich folk who build mansions in canyons -- and their less-rich compadres who build McMansions in foothills -- do so with subsidized, artificially inexpensive, actuarily unsound, government-secured insurance of last resort, called the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, or FAIR for short (and ironic). FAIR, as I wrote after the last truly awful fire season, came into existence as a direct response to ... horrendous inner-city rioting in 1968. Insurers were refusing to underwrite housing in places like Watts, so Congress passed the Housing and Urban Development Act,

which allowed states to obtain federal reinsurance money if they established property insurance pools of last resort to make homeowner and business policies available to those who lived and worked in areas the insurance companies considered to be too "high risk."

It started in the ghetto, but soon branched out to floodplains, hurricane country, faultline-adjacent housing, and hillside homes in Santa Ana-bedeviled Southern California. I can't tell after a quick Internet search the raw number of California FAIR plans, and the breakdown on categories for uninsurability, but here's what I came up with four years ago:

California FAIR insures around 160,000 homes, 20,000 of which are in brush-fire areas, according to a Sept. 28 Los Angeles Times article. Of those 20,000, "about 80% of the plan's policyholders live in Southern California," the Times reported, "including pockets of Malibu, Bel-Air, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Glendale, Pasadena and Arcadia."

That number is almost certainly higher as a direct result of the 2003 fire season, to which then-state insurance commissioner John Garamendi reacted by easing eligibility requirements.

"I want to send a message to consumers that they should never go without homeowners insurance," Commissioner Garamendi said. "And I want to emphasize to agents and brokers that this plan is now more widely available to property owners that they can't otherwise insure.

"Among the saddest things I've seen during the aftermath of the fires are people who lost their homes and did not have insurance. Not only are their homes gone, but their financial future is now incredibly bleak," the Commissioner continued. "I want to make sure that everyone who wants insurance has access to it in some form."

The order, which is effective immediately, allows homeowners to "self-certify" that they have conducted a diligent search in the private market for insurance, but were unable to secure it. Previously, applicants had to provide three written denials from insurance companies to become eligible.

The order also allows those who live in areas not specifically designated as FAIR Plan regions to more easily become eligible for coverage. The FAIR plan historically has served urban and designated brush areas deemed high risk.

"Many Californians, regardless of their location, are finding it more and more difficult to find homeowners coverage," the Commissioner said. "The FAIR Plan, in its expanded form, will provide a better safety net to help those who can't find a policy elsewhere."

The flaw in this approach is not hard to spot -- if private insurers refuse to underwrite a house because it's in too dangerous an area, maybe that's because it's in ... too dangerous an area. Further, if the state steps in to guarantee reasonably priced fire insurance in a fire zone, that wipes out most of whatever market there is for insurance priced to fit the risk. Top it all off with increased population and more intense fire seasons, and you have a recipe for actuarial failure, bailed out by all taxpayers, not just the ones who build in dangerous country.

Pointing this out, naturally, feels like an inhumane and even sadistic response to a fire that has already wiped out 1,100 homes and forced 500,000 evacuations (including that of my brother's family in northeast San Diego). Still, with the forthcoming public policy debate that is as inevitable as ash from the flames, it's worth pondering the July 2007 congressional testimony of Robert Hartwig, the president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute. A chunky excerpt after the jump.

Washington Monthly blogger and Irvine resident Kevin Drum pours some long-overdue cold water on one of the most celebrated pieces of SoCal writing, Joan Didion's bit on the Santa Ana winds in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Excerpt from Didion:

We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks....The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days....In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.

....It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.

Comments Drum:

I've lived in Southern California my entire life, and this just doesn't bear any resemblance to anything I know about the place. Santa Ana winds are just....Santa Ana winds. They do whip up brush fires, as Didion says, but otherwise her description seems way, way over the top. Sure, the weather feels a little weird when Santa Anas kick up, but teachers don't cancel classes, pets don't go nuts, people don't stay inside their houses, and Los Angeles doesn't get gripped in crime waves.

Amen. The Santa Anas, while always potentially destructive, figure most radically in the imagination of local writers, who are smart enough to recognize a good metaphor and chance for show-offery when they see one. For instance, Raymond Chandler:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Great writing? Unquestionably. True? Aside from the itchy skin, I think not.

This, I believe, gets close to the heart of the Joan Didion Problem. She is such a gifted descriptive writer that she often can't resist the temptation to wrap her otherwise keen observations with some Chandleresque hyperbole, just to see how the language turns out. It's delightful to read, and leaves lasting impressions on your brain, but many of the impressions are, regrettably, not true. Not only that, but they advertise some near-secretive knowledge -- hey wait, all this time I've been living here and I didn't realize that the Santa Anas were the primordial force unleashing the dark side of human desire?? -- allowing readers to congratulate themselves on being among the minority to break the SoCal code. It's like when postgrads first stumble upon the sunshine/noir dialectic, or when yet another searing cultural critic sees a book-length metaphor in the fact that (gasp!) Brian Wilson couldn't surf.

Still, at least Didion was barking up the right tree. As the amusing list of cultural references on this Wikipedia page illustrate, some people apparently hear the phrase "Santa Ana winds" and assume it must be some kind of sweet Spanish lullaby. Stand back in awe at the song poetry of Debbie Boone:

California, where the sun is warm,
where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong

CNN talk show host Glenn Beck today discussing the Southern California firestorm on his syndicated radio show, via William Campbell at blogging.la: "I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."

Who knew those poor homeowners in San Diego, Orange County and the Inland Empire were pinko-commie America haters? Or did Beck forget that Southern California includes more than left-wing movie types who populate fire-ravaged Malibu? At least we can hope that Beck will rest his head on his pillow tonight assured that those devasted families who lost/will lose everything include a "handful of people who hate America." In fairness, he did say "unfortunately;" and, strangely, his comment was part of a larger manifesto on Americans uniting in their mutual respect despite their disagreement over politics. Read more and listen to an audio clip at Media Matters.

For a lesson on how fire burns differently based on the ideology of its fuel, look no further than Monty Python.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columnist Jonah Goldberg says when in doubt, be pro-life:

I confess that I lack passion about debates over RU-486, Plan B and other measures that terminate a pregnancy in the first few hours or days after conception, because that's when I'm least sure that a life is at stake. But when it comes to, say, partial-birth abortion, I am adamantly pro-life. I don't know if a fertilized egg has rights. But I am convinced that a baby minutes, days or weeks before full term is, simply, a baby. And despite what you constantly hear, Roe vs. Wade doesn't recognize that fact.

Foster mom Mary Callahan reconsiders parenting for pay. Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben notes that if you want political power, all you need is a message, e-mail, and a widget. Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan says it's time to either expand or scrap a Cold War era missile ban that's hurting U.S. and Russian security.

The editorial board praises local and state agencies for their quick response to the Newhall Pass crash. The board also says it's time drug makers acknowledged that cough medicines don't work on kids, and asks the House of Representatives to vote yes today on a bill that would protect journalists from having to reveal their sources. 

Readers mostly congratulate Al Gore for his Nobel Prize. Anaheim's Kee Kim says, "Congratulations, Nobel committee; you guys finally caught up with Gore's brilliance. He should have been honored years ago for inventing the Internet."

Times sportswriter Christine Daniels says that the transgender community won't let Democrats leave them out of anti-discrimination bill without a fight:

Big miscalculation. The strategy did not yield the usual we-got-ours run for safety. Lesbian, gay and bisexual activists stood alongside their trans sisters and brothers, and together we raised the roof. It was a beautiful noise, let me tell you.

It was so much noise -- about 140 gay and trans rights groups told Pelosi in no uncertain terms that protection for the transgendered needed to stay in the bill -- that she and Frank consented to delay a House vote until later this month. In these intervening weeks, Congress and America need to hear from the transgender people who live and walk and work among them -- you're reading one now....

Gioia Diliberto explores fashion's piracy paradox -- knockoffs fuel innovation but rob designers. And the University of Virginia's Larry J. Sabato thinks it's time the U.S. had a new Constitution.

The editorial board wonders why Rep. Jane Harman flip-flopped on the Armenian genocide resolution. It tells Gov. Schwarzenegger which of the many bills on his desk deserve approval, and argues in favor of the state's Dream Act, which would help undocumented college students.

Readers react to a first hand account of the Blackwater m.o. Ojai's Kathi Smith says "How much more good could have been done if [Janessa]Gans had written her Blackwater story about careening through the streets of Baghdad, terrorizing the populace, as soon it happened, rather than years later?"

So what's happened in the weeks since the Department of Homeland Security set up an aggressive plan to go after employers of illegal immigrants? The one that would send out "no match" letters for every discrepancy between an employee and a Social Security number, and set high civil and criminal penalties for employers? A lot of legal wrangling, and not a lot else.

The no-match plan was put on hold in late August, and on Monday U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer extended the stay, to the relief of businesses and civil liberties groups. A related, far less harsh effort -- setting up a voluntary online verification system for employers -- has also met resistance. Illinois prohibited its employers from using E-Verify unless they can sort out mistaken claims within three days (the federal law allows for 10). This "impossible to meet" standard (according to DHS chief Michael Chertoff, pictured above) is intended to protect Illinois employees -- probably a good idea since those who receive "no match" letters could well be citizens. To them, the federal government says, tough luck: It's suing Illinois.

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.

Sara Bongiorni tells what it's like to boycott Chinese goods for a year:

China makes 56% of the household kitchen appliances, such as toasters, 86% of the lamps and 80% of the luggage imported into the country, according to 2006 U.S. International Trade Commission figures. The commission may have found that only 56% of small appliances were imported from China, yet when I scoured the store shelves for an ordinary coffee maker, I couldn't find one that wasn't.

During our yearlong boycott, those numbers translated into futile searches for birthday candles, flip-flops and cheap sunglasses. The boycott rearranged our lives in little ways. We boiled water and poured it into a filter over mugs after our coffee maker quit and we couldn't find an affordable non-Chinese alternative. The kitchen junk drawer was jammed shut all year because the part to fix it was made in China. We found the words "Made in China" in unexpected places, such as on a box of discount candy canes and on wedding dresses in the J. Crew catalog.

Jonah Goldberg dissects Rudy Giuliani's attempt to pander to the National Rifle Association. Jamie Court of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights thinks mandatory health insurance isn't true reform. And Georgetown University's David I. Steinberg parses the latest protests in Burma.

The editorial board is all for letting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak at Columbia University because he's his own worst enemy. The board praises San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders for his change of heart on same sex marriage, and notes that a congressional hearing on rap is only going to give the genre more credibility than it deserves.

Readers think Israel should try for peace. Benjamin Solomon of Evanston, Ill. puts it in context: "Israel has gained a valuable slice of the West Bank but at the cost of the intensified hostility of the region and the impossibility of attaining peace."

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 researchers are doing their best to change this unacceptable situation. Thus we have researchers advocating "the development of culturally sensitive public health intervention programs ... to encourage black youth to achieve a healthy and reasonable (sic) body size." Translation: Let's make black and brown girls feel as bad about their bodies as we've managed to make the average white girl feel about hers.

One myth rises above all others. It affects public opinion about what drives America's diet, how politicians respond to increasing obesity, what we permit of the food industry, and the health of the nation.

It is captured in two words -- personal responsibility -- and relies on several assumptions: a) adverse changes in the nation's diet and exercise result from irresponsible behavior; b) there is no social or corporate responsibility; and c) people who suffer from problems such as diabetes bring it on themselves.

The myth has strong, well-funded and politically powerful proponents, most notably the food industry, its trade associations and political figures influenced by industry lobbyists.

So you think you've heard all there is to hear about Chemerinskygate? Wrong again! (For a refresher on the basics, see our previous posts here, in chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.) Since then we've also had a David E. Bernstein Op-Ed about politically correct campus speech-smashing entitled "What about Larry?" (meaning Summers); and wee rant from me called "'Fess up, Chancellor Drake."

Well the big news today is that Chancellor Drake did not fess up in a Wednesday interview published one hour ago in the L.A. Times, aside from acknowledging that he "bungled." Some excerpts:

"This is certainly something that I bungled and I regret it completely and totally," Drake said. "I am always trying to do what I can to enhance the institution and have it move forward. It's awful that all this has blown up like this. I couldn't regret it more." [...]

"The why of it is straightforward, but I think it's going to be unsatisfactory," he said. "It was a personnel issue and there are a lot of things that go into that. We as a university have a policy that we don't talk about personnel decisions.

"First, I don't want to talk about it," he added, "but second, it wouldn't be appropriate to do that." [...]

"This has been an awful period," Drake said during the interview. "I would have wished that I could have avoided it. I'm pleased that we got it back on the right track. The most important thing now really is the school and developing the school going forward. That's really what it's all about ultimately." [...]

Drake declined to comment on allegations that he faced pressure to dump Chemerinsky from well-connected Orange County conservatives and potential donors to the law school.

"There's a lot of information out there that doesn't come from me and I have no comment on that," he said. "No one pressured me. That's all I can say." [...]

"It would be easy to say here's what happened. What we need to do is do it right going forward. We have come to an agreement, and I think it's an exciting agreement for a really outstanding law school."

"There's no particular smoking gun," he added. "I just don't know what to say."

And though the controversy in question has mostly been resolved, the reaction keeps on chugging. To read about anti-Semitism, the L.A. Times' "crusade," and some defenses of Chancellor Drake, click the jump for more!

The editorial board comments on the new O.J. Simpson saga:

The events that transpired Thursday at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas remain murky to all but their participants, who are giving contradictory accounts. The facts were at first murky in June 1994 too, when the only things the world knew were that Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a male acquaintance were found murdered outside her Brentwood condominium and that O.J. was the prime suspect. This time, age and the knowledge that he can get away with anything seem to have mellowed Simpson; rather than lead police on a low-speed chase down the Strip in a white Bronco, he calmly granted media interviews in his hotel room until officers arrived to arrest him Sunday morning.

The board hopes Congress will protect attorney-client privilege no matter who the client is, and also evaluates Bush's nominee to replace Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that Alan Greenspan is no Bush-basher, contrary to liberal claims. Human Rights Watch U.S. program director Jamie Fellner says California's sex offender registries and residency restrictions may make us feel safer, but they don't really work. The University of Iowa's Kembrew McLeod reveals the story of 1970s psychic Uri Geller, who has the power to make embarrassing YouTube clips vanish, but possibly not the power to escape copyright laws. Doshisha University's Philip J. Cunningham visits China and finds that Mao Tse-Tung has become the very thing he worked to ban from China--a brand name.

Readers respond to the editorial board's take on the achievement gap. Los Angeles Leadership Academy executive director Roger Lowenstein says, "...your point that 'race' needs to be acknowledged is unfortunate and dead wrong."

Congress may have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform this summer (and last summer), but at least it's trying to push a few pieces of it, which no one thought possible in this early-onset election year.

The Times' Nicole Gaouette writes today of the variety of proposals pitched so far, including a plan to give conditional legal status to young illegal immigrants (aka the Dream Act); a path to citizenship for farm workers (aka AgJOBS); and an overhaul of the visa program for high-skilled immigrants. And blogs are abuzz about the bits that make them most mad.

Anti-population growth site Numbers USA says Sen. Richard J. Durbin's (D-Ill.) Dream Act would birth a million anchor babies. Ever-vigilant LoneWacko weighs in, claiming that the bills add up to a back-door amnesty. Grassroots agitators Grassfire agree and launch a new anti-amnesty campaign, as do the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Immigration Watch Dog, and Eagle Forum. Tammy Bruce is incensed that $25 million will apparently go to La Raza (she fails to note that it's actually grant money for housing rather than, say, funds to funnel back into pro-immigration lobbying). And lest you think all the activism is on the hardline no-amnesty side, there will be a rally tomorrow in Washington on behalf of high-skilled immigration reform.

Many a conservative blog can't resist taking a crack at the Larry Craig angle of this story. The Republican senator from Idaho was the primary supporter of AgJOBS in his party. Warren Mass at the John Birch Society points to an interesting twist:

Many conservatives in Idaho, as is indicated by those calling in to Paul J. Schneider's talk show on Boise radio station KBOI-AM, seem more concerned about Senator Craig's support of the AgJobs bill than by the latest scandal. And Craig is no reluctant tag-along when it comes to AgJobs, but is among its more strident supporters in the Senate. For example, back in 2004, Craig threatened to attach the Senate version of AgJobs as an amendment to every bill considered in the Senate....

Is Senator Larry Craig guilty of serious immoral behavior? We have no way of knowing, but it is obvious that his judgment and common sense are severely impaired. While this alone should disqualify him from membership in what has been called the "world's most exclusive club," those who would unseat him on behavioral grounds alone might point their accusing fingers eastward towards a certain senator infamous for his inability to navigate an automobile across a narrow bridge.

The voters of Idaho would be justified, however, in deciding that a senator who advocates giving amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in our midst does not represent their best interests.

It may be some small solace that Idahoans will forgive a private matter (a senator's bathroom behavior) and focus on a public one (a senator's behavior in the Senate), even if, either way, they're expressing a desire to keep millions of people hidden -- whether it's in the closet or the shadows.

The big news for us Chemerinskygateologists is that some anti-Erwin right wing bogeyman have now been identified. Actually, they were identified as early as Sept. 12 in the Orange County Register, but I failed to fully notice. From the first OCR story:

Yet as early as Aug. 29, Republican political consultant Matt Cunningham said he received a forwarded e-mail in which Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich asked fellow Republicans how Chemerinsky's appointment could be stopped. [...]

Attorney Scott Baugh, chairman of the county GOP, said Chemerinsky shouldn't have been picked in the first place.

"It's not because he's a liberal," Baugh said. "It's because he's polarizing. You wouldn't hire Jerry Falwell to be the dean of religious studies at Berkeley."

The Associated Press then got the best quote of the scandal so far (I'll bold it):

A conservative Los Angeles County politician asked about two dozen people in an e-mail last month how to prevent the University of California, Irvine from hiring renowned liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as its founding law school dean, a spokesman for the politician said Friday.

Making Chemerinsky the head of the law school "would be like appointing al-Qaida in charge of homeland security," Michael Antonovich, a longtime Republican member of the county Board of Supervisors, said in a voicemail left with The Associated Press.

He was not available for further comment on why he was getting involved in the situation at a campus located outside his jurisdiction in Orange County.

Antonovich's e-mail "expressed his dismay with the choice for the dean of the law school and suggested that this was the wrong decision and it should be changed," said Tony Bell, a spokesman for the supervisor.

Antonovich, a local GOP stalwart, was first elected in 1980. He is a staunch conservative who has supported crackdowns on illegal immigrants, and voted against tax increases and HIV-prevention programs that distribute free syringes.

He clashed with Chemerinsky in the past when the professor supported the removal of a cross from the county seal.

And then today's L.A. Times story puts more details on the Republican anti-Chemerinsky efforts:

Michael Schroeder, one of Orange County's most powerful GOP political players, said a group of 20 prominent Republicans organized against Chemerinsky in recent weeks, believing him to be a "longtime partisan gunslinger" and too "polarizing" for the job.

Another member of the group, who asked not to be identified, said Drake's cellphone number was distributed so the protesters could call the chancellor.

Antonovich said he too worked to derail the appointment by sending an e-mail to a small group of supporters and urging them to contact the university.

And finally, from the same LAT story, is this question-begging section about how California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George, a Pete Wilson appointee, expressed to Chancellor Drake his dismay at Chemerinsky's fateful Aug. 16 op-ed:

The criticism included a letter from the California Supreme Court criticizing a Chemerinsky opinion piece in The Times.

In an interview Friday, George said Chemerinsky made a "gross error" that was "very troubling" to the court in an Aug. 16 article that criticized U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales. Drake offered him the job that same day.

George, an appointee of Gov. Pete Wilson, said that Chemerinsky wrote incorrectly that only one state, Arizona, provided lawyers for death row inmates who want to file a constitutional challenge, known as a habeas corpus petition, to have their sentences or convictions overturned.

George said he was surprised Chemerinsky would make such a mistake. The court asked Court Clerk Frederick K. Ohlrich to write a letter to the editor to The Times to correct the piece.

"None of us could understand how somebody, let alone someone who is very bright and a fine legal scholar, could get that wrong," George said. "It had nothing to do with his philosophy. I certainly feel he is an outstanding legal scholar and a fine advocate."

The Times has no record of the letter being received as a letter to the editor or as a request for correction.

George gave a copy of the letter to [Prominent Orange County attorney Tom] Malcolm.

Malcolm said he gave the letter to Drake. "It disturbed him, but I don't think it was the reason for his decision."

Chemerinsky was angered by the letter when told about it by The Times.

"If the justices sent a letter to UC Irvine with the goal of influencing the dean process, that's inappropriate," he said.

He also stood by his article. "My op-ed was accurate in saying California does not comply with the federal standards for providing counsel to those on death row in their post-conviction proceedings, and Arizona is the only state deemed in federal district court to have met the federal standards."

What does it all mean? What the hell was Antonovich thinking? And did the Republican anti-Chemerinsky lobby actually have any power over Drake's decision? Who knows! But there's lots of embittered commentary after the jump.

What better way to prepare for President Bush's speech tonight than reading our Dust-up about the surge and Sept. 11? Conservative talker Hugh Hewitt and anti-imperialist author Doug Bandow have been going back and forth all week. Today they re-imagine the prosecution of the War on Terror. One-sentence highlights:
Bandow: "The problem is too many missions, not too few people."
Hewitt: "This real [world] is dangerous and becoming more so, and the only solutions are hard ones, extraordinarily costly in the sacrifices demanded."

Yesterday they chewed on the meaning of Osama bin Laden.
Hewitt: "Bin Laden did not see the ferocity of the counter-attack, and he definitely did not count on George Bush, which is why last week's letter bristles with anger at the president and at the Democrats who were supposed to bring about the long-predicted collapse in the American will to fight."
Bandow: "What he says is less important than his survival, which reflects administration failure in the war on terrorism."

Tuesday was the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11.
Bandow: "[T]he Iraq war continues to make us more vulnerable to terrorism."
Hewitt: "[T]he world is also much safer today because Saddam Hussein was overthrown and his mad-as-hatter sons are dead and not in line for the throne; the U.N. oil-for-food-for-dictators-sending-money-and-arms-to-terrorists-while-corrupting-officials-in-other-governments was exposed and ended; Libya's WMD program was dismantled; scores of Al Qaeda's senior leadership are dead or imprisoned (with more ending up that way each week), the A.Q. Khan network has been cabined; and the U.S. military is embedded with new or longtime allies around the world, teaching them the basics of counter-terrorism."

And Monday they debated the Petraeus report.
Hewitt: "Perhaps my debating partner here at Dust-Up will be among the first to ask of MoveOn.org "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and begin what should be a broad rush by the Democrats on the Hill and then across the country to denounce MoveOn.org and to refuse their sponsorships and their money."
Bandow: "[T]he more relevant question is whether the administration will consider critically Gen. Petraeus' views, or simply cherry-pick his report to back its preexisting position."

Tune in tomorrow, when the two discuss (again?) the politicization of national security.

What were our leading local lights reflecting on six years after the Day Everything (or Nothing) Changed? Charles Johnson, the west side jazz musician and web designer who became the Web's most controversial example of a liberal mugged by Sept. 11, links to a moving 9/11 memorial in Poland. Wonkette's Ken Layne showcases a hellscape-gallery worth of "the most insipid, maudlin kitsch in the history of an already very kitschy nation, along with some truly stomach-turning old-fashioned American Huckersterism." Kate Coe runs a list of Southern Californians who died on that day (including my hometown neighbor Christopher Newton). (Warning: All links in this post are potentially not work/child-safe, depending on your tolerance.) Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Amy Zegart details the "top 5 depressing findings about 9/11 from my new book -- all confirmed by unclassified government documents or at least two government sources." Here's Numero Cinco: "The CIA and FBI missed a total of 23 opportunities to potentially disrupt the 9/11 plot."

Joseph Mailander once again visits "one of the City's best public art installations: Robert Millar's Red line Metro station at Vermont and Santa Monica," and also makes this literary observation:

I'm still stunned that the subject of post-9/11 political America has largely been ignored by so many our more usual writers of fiction. The abundant and tragic political mistakes made in the time immediately subsequent to 9/11 and up to the War Resolution have been mistakes from which America has yet to extract itself. Certainly, this is the kind of period that is mandatory for any novelist who would remain relevant as a voice of conscience to engage head-on. [...]

Six years after 9/11, still missing is a recognizably standout post-9/11 national narrative.

Brady Westwater sounds a note of humility:

Tens - if not hundreds - of millions of people are daily told it is not just acceptable but desirable to kill themselves in suicide attacks to protect their religion from anyone who disagrees with it.

And there is nothing we can do - or not do - to fundamentally change this. Change can only come from within and that will only happen once the costs of allowing these teachings to go on becomes too high for the countries and organizations supporting them.

Before then, though, the world will have increasing numbers of terrorist attacks and, eventually, nuclear devices will be exploded throughout the world, including within the United States. And, unfortunately, it will likely have to come before any real change can come.

As for what to do about this? I have no idea.

Tony Pierce declares that "god I hate 911," arguing:

they say 9/11 changed everything and theyre right. pre 9/11 we sat back and we watched them sick a special prosecutor on the clintons way before there was a monica lewinski. we let them attack him and investigate her and sniff up every [censored] and every dead end that they could so they could find something Anything to remove the president of the united states out of office.

well now we have plenty of good reasons to impeach both the president and the vice president yet where are the investigations? nowhere. where are the bloodhounds, wheres the angry mob, wheres the cooperation, wheres the testifying under oath.

youre telling me that 9/11 came and went, lack of wmds came and went, osama is still out there and we're not after him, gitmo is still there and there arent public officials being asked by reps of the people WTF every damn day?

yes 9/11 changed everything. suddenly the executive office is holy and cannot be considered to be investigated and questioned and interrogated and harassed.

Republican Boi from Troy draws a California parallel:

I cannot help but notice how far back the events of September 11, 2001 have slipped to the back of the public consciousness.

The national mood seems analogous to the attitude we Californians have towards earthquakes. We remember them happening, we remember them with grief, but by and large we try to live our lives as if such events won't happen.

That's why, I think, the biggest mistake of George W. Bush's Presidency came while he was at his most popular.

In a similar vein, Roger L. Simon strategically chooses the occasion to review (positively) Norman Podhoretz' new book World War IV:

Podhoretz’s analysis contains a serious omission. In his understandable zeal to defend Bush and his doctrine from admittedly disingenuous opponents, he overlooks an inadequacy on the part of the President and his administration that is nearly fatal. [...]

I am referring to the extraordinary inability of Bush and those surrounding him to understand and to respond to the paramount importance of public relations in asymmetrical war. Indeed, it can be argued that asymmetrical war is in essence about public relations. You would think, given the recent history of our time, the Tet Offensive, indeed the whole story of Vietnam, the administration would have known that, seen the inevitability that a powerful opposition would coalesce in the media and in the political classes (one that Podhoretz describes so well) and moved to head it off, to co-opt their opponents, but they did the opposite. They told us to go shopping.

What a basic misunderstanding or lack of understanding of human psychology is that! In World War II, all Americans were asked to participate, to come together against a common enemy. No such thing was asked of us. We were told to stand aside and let the military and the government handle things. Result? In World War II, we had Rosie the Riveter; in World War IV, we have Rosie O’Donnell. And the Bush Administration is at least in part responsible for this.

Other interesting local posts on this sad day? Leave 'em in the comments.

In our latest Blowback, New Orleans resident Marie Gould takes exception to Jonah Goldberg's column about media malpractice during Hurrican Katrina. Excerpt:

Many of the nation's foremost engineers long ago decided the corps had become technically stagnant and have called for the feds to allow nongovernment engineering firms bid on much of the work now being controlled by the corps -- a very conservative point of view.

Mr. Goldberg could have added some thought to the debate by pursuing that claim. Instead he choose the lazy way out with a column everyone has read a million times: Attacking the liberal media for attacking President Bush.

Gould's not the only one who reacted strongly Goldberg. To see more, both negative and positive read after the jump.

On Tuesday, the school board voted voted 5 to 2

to extend health benefits to more than 2,300 part-time cafeteria workers at an estimated annual cost of $35.5 million.

The move came over warnings from staff and Supt. David L. Brewer that no money was budgeted to pay for the benefits.

It also came over the objection of both the Editorial Board ("The district's budget is already in trouble, and neither the board nor administrators know where to find this money") and op-edder/LAUSD parent L.J. Williamson, who made a similar argument:

Part-time food service employees are seeking the same health benefits -- including coverage for their families -- that their full-time counterparts enjoy. Extending these benefits to cafeteria staff who currently work only three hours a day would cost an estimated $40 million a year, according to school board calculations. [...]

This is fat that the food service's too-lean budget simply doesn't have. If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we'd be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day.

But lefty bloggers, beginning with an uncharacteristically ranty Kevin Drum, smelled a heartless rat:

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes.

It's true that the growing gap between public workers and private workers is a real problem. In the past, there was something of a tradeoff: public sector workers generally got paid less than private sector workers but made up for it with job security and benefits. Today, though, public workers generally get higher salaries and better benefits and more vacation and earlier retirement and more lucrative pension packages compared to comparable private sector workers. And private sector workers are understandably annoyed by this. But their annoyance would be better directed not at the lucky public sector workers, but at the mahogany row executives and conservative politicians who pretend that the only possible use for the mountains of cash generated by decades of economic growth is to give it all to mahogany row executives and the billionaires who contribute to conservative politicians.

More where that came from, and a bit of a response, after the jump.

This week's online dust-up in the Opinion factory is between California Republican Assembly President Mike Spence and Ventura City Manager Rick Cole, debating whether Attorney General Jerry Brown is doing the right thing in fighting climate change from Sacramento. Today's installment ponders the proper role of Brown's office. Spence says "A.G." stands for "aspiring governor," and suggests Jerry's aggressiveness toward counties like San Bernardino amounts to cheap campaigning:

The phrase "climate change" is brilliant; climate is always changing. This issue of "global warming" has become the perfect political issue for Brown. There is no risk in fighting it. You don't need arrests, convictions or trials. All you need are media cameras to show the world and potential voters how hard you are fighting it.

Cole counters that Californians have already made their views on global warming clear, which Republicans can deny at their peril:

There are lots of "feel good" panaceas out there that may distract us from more effective actions. By denying the role of greenhouse gas emissions in the global climate crisis, you risk marginalizing yourself from the mainstream debate. That's not only bad for your party's political fortunes, it's bad for California. Republicans should play a vital role in shaping sensible climate-change policy because the market and business can -- and must -- play a vital role in tackling this shared challenge.

Yesterday they debated the efficacy of citywide general plans, and Monday they marveled at the staying power of Jerry Brown.

Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie says the GOP needs to get government out of the bathroom, so Republicans like Sen. Larry Craig don't look like hypocrites:

It seems nothing short of pathetic that Craig, who had brushed off rumors of homosexual activity for years, would deny the option of matrimony to some of the same men from whom he supposedly sought sex in restrooms. (Craig said Monday that his actions had been misconstrued and denied engaging in any inappropriate conduct.)

But the Craig scandal also provides the Republican Party, battered into minority status in Congress after years of domestic and foreign overreach, a golden opportunity to recover its attractive minimal-government heritage, at least when it comes to using the state to police sexual behavior among consenting adults.

Writer Michael Tisserand discusses how kids comprehend Hurricane Katrina, and columnist Ronald Brownstein offers President Bush lessons from Reagan's productive final years in office.

On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the editorial board remarks on the red tape that has thwarted a full recovery in New Orleans. It also comments on a court battle over land for a synagogue in Hancock Park, and asks Hillary Clinton to release papers from her days as First Lady, since the National Archives says it can't do it till after the election.

Readers react to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales' departure. Mel Powell from Sherman Oaks says, "Don't let the Constitution hit you on the way out."

I realize that I did not say this about Senator Vitter, but Craig's behavior is so reckless and repulsive that an immediate exit is required.

Lots of conservative bloggers, following Hugh Hewitt's lead, have called for Larry Craig to resign even though they didn't call for David Vitter to resign when he was outed for visiting prostitutes last month. [...] Of course conservatives are turning against Craig secure in the knowledge that they're running no actual political risk.

Well, not only are not all gay men engaging in tawdry bathroom sex with strangers, not all gay people think "hate crimes" legislation is good idea, either. Some of us would rather not become the establishment Thought Police, with laws that position some people as more equal, more important, than others.

Meanwhile my straight friends are having trouble understanding that tapping one’s foot would constitute a solicitation of a sexual encounter. I had to explain that from places like Frankfurt Airport in the tunnel beteen terminals B and C on the train station level below the USO to the USC Campus on the second floor of Waite-Phillips Hall, some restrooms have a reputation of being cruisy and any such gestures can be interpreted as such…especially for those who were around before the internets were the main vehicle for arranging anonymous sex.

Human sexuality could be called the world's epicenter of hypocrisy. And the intolerance of this gay man in the Senate toward other gay people is mean and almost sadistic. He should resign, not for his behavior in the bathroom, but for his creepy political phoniness.

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

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

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

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

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

Not since Frank Gorshin and some other guy played the black/white, white/black haters on Star Trek have space people been as fired-up as they are over Paul Thornton's Opinion Daily "Space program lunacy." And some of the rage is warranted: Our gaffe in the original story about the connections and lack thereof between NOAA, NASA and the QuikSCAT satellite has been corrected, and we apologize for the error. Paul knows he's made some very poor decisions recently, but he can give you his complete assurance that his work will be back to normal. He's still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.

Wendy Dunham gives Paul a Gopher State whuppin':

Yeah, and I can write an article that reports what NASA actually HAS done for the Earth that would blow this article out of the water. Obviously, a good word smith can spin a story like this any way you like, talk about the million dollar toilet, etc, focus on the seeming  wastes, but if you dug down into the facts and saw all the stuff that HAS come from NASA that is improving the real world (and it's a lot more than pens that write upside down or Tang), that list that would eclipse any further "what have they done" articles. Dig, people, dig, The truth is out there.

Wendy Dunham
Minneapolis, MN

Eric LP notes that the budget for NASA is even smaller than Eric LP's last name:

But NASA's idealism is seriously endangering the world's ability to track its own changing and more dangerous climate. Indeed, one of the most popular complaints about space exploration is that it wastes billions of dollars that could be better spent on problems here. With global warming an increasing threat, NASA has a chance to prove what it has long asserted — that a space program provides practical benefits to Earth-bound humanoids.

Yeah, we could spend it here on earth, like in Iraq!  you know the money would be going towards Iraq if any was available.   Global Warming?   GET REAL!!!!!!!!   Bush doesn't even think Global Warming is man made.   What the