In today's editorial and opinion pages, the Times editorial board gives former Assembly Speaker Fabuan Nuñez a shout-out for being cleared of ethics charges arising from his lavish spending, and then gives him a shout-down for the underlying actions. No, he's not a crook. But he still relied too heavily on the largesse of donors with issues to press in Sacramento.

And we pair a shout-down of Philadelphia Eagles player Michael Vick's dogfighting operation with a shout-out to Wayne Pacelle of the the Humane Society of the United States -- for going on a, pardon the expression, dog-and-pony tour with Vick to educate communities about stopping cruelty to animals.

And shoutouts and shout downs abound for the food industry's Smart Choices program.

Columnist Meghan Daum weighs in on farming-chic, and two folks sack Sacramento's recent move to waive environmental laws to hasten construction of a football stadium in Los Angeles or, rather, the City of Industry. Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) worries that the Legislature "opened the floodgates" to future exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act. And sports author Dave Zirin sees just the latest in a series of sweetheart deals between unwitting taxpayers and tycoon team owners.

Photo: AP/Nick Ut

Now that covert videos have shown widespread law-breaking at gun shows, the Times calls for a couple of changes, including a federal law like California's requiring that all gun sales be channeled through licensed dealers who must perform a background check. The board also chides Cal State San Luis Obispo for caving in to pressure from the owner of the Harris Ranch beef company, who didn't like the idea of food reformer and author Michael Pollan speaking at the school. The school reduced Pollan's rule to panelist, a craven abandonment of the principle of academic freedom

On the other side of the fold, a senior fellow at the Council of Public Relations argues that there is value to opening dialogue with North Korea, even if that particular olive branch isn't going to bear fruit any time in the near future. And a board member of the Friends of the World Food Program explains why school lunches in developing countries could be our best tool against global violence. The food attracts hungry children to school, where their education contributes to a more rational society.

Finally, Times staffer Paul Whitefield worries about what he should do with the $100 bill he found on the sidewalk. It could have been money for a child's birthday gift from grandparents; it might be someone's last $100, meant to see him or her through for a week. But it's really mine, so Paul can just hand it over and feel at peace.

Photo: Dean Lewins / AFP / Getty Images

-- Karin Klein  

What's not to like about a proposed fee on California hospitals? The hospitals themselves support it, because it would bring in billions of dollars in federal funding to repay the hospitals and other health care providers for the medical care they give to poor people. The Times editorial board urges Gov. Schwarzenegger to see the logic and sign the bill to make it happen.

They call it overdraft protection, but there's little to protect the consumer from the multibillion-dollar flow of money to banks that charge a fee over and over and over again to debit-card users whose accounts can't cover their purchases. Often the fee is bigger than the purchase, but the customer simply doesn't realize the account is overdrawn. The Times calls on the Federal Reserve to fix this with rules that require better consumer information, a choice for customers who don't want the so-called protection and notification for the customer before that costly but unaffordable purchase is made.

And the board calls on Honduras to allow the return of President Manuel Zelaya -- with limited powers -- until the Nov. 29 election, though it also calls on the international community to make sure Zelaya understands he should not attempt to stay in power.

Let's admit this openly: Tuna aren't as awe-inspiring as whales. They don't spout in the middle of the ocean or do a slow dive that ends with the farewell wave of a giant tail. Nonetheless, they need protection after drastic overfishing, writes Joshua Reichert of the Pew Environment Group. On the Times Op-Ed page, Reichert argues that fishing caps haven't worked and that nothing but endangered-species status will save the Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Finally, energy journalist Richard Nemec writes that Los Angeles has been playing political musical chairs in determining leadership for the Department of Water and Power instead of hiring the experts it so desperately needs.

Photo: Gavin Newman / Greenpeace International / EPA

-- Karin Klein

Small-government conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg makes a startling argument on today's Op-Ed page: We should make the House of Representatives bigger. A lot bigger, in fact; Goldberg says a Congress with 5,000 members would shake up our nation's calcified two-party system and more closely approximate the kind of democracy the founding fathers intended.

UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, debunks arguments that the healthcare bills pending in the House and Senate would be unconstitutional. And obesity experts Kelly D. Brownell and David S. Ludwig argue in favor of a tax on sugar-sweetened sodas, which would help fund healthcare reform programs and lower healthcare costs by decreasing obesity and related ailments such as diabetes.

On the editorial page, the board urges the Obama administration to consider backing new elections in Afghanistan or a transitional government, unless monitors can determine that the country's Aug. 20 election was legitimate.

The editorial board also takes up a gun-rights case and argues, surprisingly enough, in favor of stronger protections for gun owners. Though the board favors measures to reduce gun violence, it thinks the Supreme Court should rule that the 2nd Amendment applies to states as well as the federal government. That's because allowing states to ignore this part of the Bill of Rights could undermine the requirement that they abide by others.

Finally, the board notes that Comcast Corp.'s proposal to buy NBC Universal cuts against the grain of recent media deals, and its effect on the marketplace may be limited. But it will be interesting to watch how the combined company's approach to the Internet might change.

* Cartoon by Rob Rogers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I never met Robert "Prince of Darkness" Novak but my association with the columnist who died today goes back to my earliest days in journalism. As a twentysomething copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was responsible for proofreading (and condensing) various syndicated columns, from James Reston to William F. Buckley Jr. to Rowland Evans and Novak.

A lot of obituaries highlighted Novak's scoop about the undercover status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. But in his later career Novak was known less as a reporter and more as an opiner and television talking head. His metamorphosis says a lot about the evolution (or devolution) of Washington journalism.

The title of the Evans-Novak column, "Inside Report," said it all. Like the more decorous Reston column, it was a form of foreign correspondence, initiating Mr. and Mrs. Heartland into the exotic culture of the capital. I remember amusing myself with a parody of "Inside Report" that went something like this: "A whispered conversation at the yellowed urinals of a hotel men's room explains why President Ford's defense budget is in grave trouble." Then came open primaries, C-SPAN and the celebrification of what used to be backroom advisers.

Insider journalism wasn't the only casualty of this transformation. So was the political novel. Potboilers like "Advise and Consent" and "Seven Days in May" depended for their popularity on their familiarity with the hidden Washington of political strategists, lobbyists and reporters for whom everything was off the record. Today those once-shadowy figures blab and blog their way to fame.  Why rely on a novelist's depiction of a fictional James Carville when the real one is all over CNN?

If you want the thrill of a behind-the-scenes potboiler, look for a book like "The Da Vinci Code" or its imitators. As I've written before, the sacred precincts of the Vatican are an even better setting for skullduggery than the Oval Office or the Senate majority leader's hideaway. Conspiracies are still being hatched in smoke-filled rooms, but these rooms smell of incense, not tobacco. (Is that part of the reason Novak converted to Catholicism?)

Photo credit: AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

-- Michael McGough

Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.

We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.

And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.

Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.

The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.

And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.

* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times

The Wall Street Journal today reveals yet another reasonwhy federal legislation is needed to beef up food safety in this country: the Nestle USA plant in Virginia had a history over the past five years of refusing to let Food and Drug Administration inspectors view their records on consumer complaints, pest control and other safety issues.

That would be the same plant that produced the Toll House cookie dough implicated in an outbreak of illness cause by E. coli. Food companies aren't obliged to show their records to inspectors. Some do, others don't.

The so-overdue bill to give the FDA the authority it should have had from the start -- as well as step up inspections and allow the FDA to issue recalls -- recently won the unanimous support of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but Republicans (heeding the complaints of the food and agribusiness industries) have been weakening it all along the way.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Move over, marijuana. A new study finds that adding ginger to food in the days surrounding chemotherapy treatments reduces nausea and vomiting.

My grandmother could have told them that. Ginger ale was her remedy for all abdominal ills. And ginger has been touted by the alternative-health community in recent years as well.

Will this wipe out the whole debate around use of that other herbal remedy for chemotherapy discomfort? It's hard to imagine "medical ginger clinics" having quite the same ring -- or popularity. Besides, ginger can't possibly do as much to stimulate the appetite.

Photograph of cannabis plant by Richard Pedroncelli / AP

Today's Editorial Page weighs in on a Los Angeles billboard ordinance being considered today by a City Council committee, offering The Times' prescription for how the city could best fashion enforceable and effective sign restrictions. But we'd have more faith that the council could pull off such a feat if it hadn't failed so dismally in the past:

Before the city permits any new billboards or draws any new districts, it must demonstrate its ability and its will to enforce current law, cite and dismantle illegal signs and complete and publicly post its sign inventory. Absent that showing of good faith, over the course of a year or two, no Angeleno can be expected to see any new law as anything other than further concessions to the billboard industry.

We also discuss the Screen Actors Guild's tentative deal with the Hollywood studios, pointing out that SAG's efforts to negotiate a better deal in new media was undermined by the willingness of other unions to accept less. Next time around, the union might want to increase its leverage by negotiating jointly with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Writers Guild of America, whose contracts will expire at about the same time as SAG's.

Over on the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg says the Environmental Protection Agency's decision last week to regulate greenhouse gases should be disturbing to "people who believe in democratic, constitutional government." That's because the agency is taking on sweeping powers to regulate nearly every sphere of economic activity, powers that were never put before the voters.

Neal Bascomb, author of a recent book on the hunt for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, points out that the fledgling nation of Israel's pursuit and prosecution of the notorious operational manager of the "Final Solution" exposed his crimes to the world and served justice against a man who might otherwise have gone free. That's worth noting as the world works on systems, like the International Criminal Court, for trying others who have committed crimes against humanity.

And Dean Florez, chairman of the state Senate Committee on Food and Agriculture, points out the folly of some California pistachio growers, who thought the nuts' thick shells and the methods used to process them would protect them from bacteria. That mistake was exposed when about 3 million pounds of pistachios from a Terra Bella plant had to be recalled because of salmonella contamination. Florez has introduced a bill that he says will reduce the risks.

All that, and Letters, too.

*Photo of Adolf Eichman by Associated Press

Just about everyone who lives in a house in an non-gated part of L.A., renter or owner, comes home to find business cards wedged into a crevice of the mailbox or the front door. Enterprising gardeners seeking work put them there before fire season, when you want to clean up your property for the inspectors. They put them there before the rains come, when you want to see your garden green and blooming a few months later.

This week, the card I found was different. It didn't mention flowerbeds. It was vividly illustrated with delectables like potatoes and artichokes and mushrooms, and it pledged to deliver "organic soil for you to grow your home organic vegetables."

It's the economy, and it's not stupid at all. Anyone with a digestive tract knows how much fresh produce is costing. And any urbanite or suburbanite with a patch of land -- even the minuscule L.A. lawn -- is feeling that temptation to live off the land a little, to preside over your own bumper crop of food instead of flora. The 21st-century victory garden sounds so enticing, so virtuous, so thrifty. The world's biggest seed company, Burpee, hasn't seen demand like this in decades.

For someone who grew up with the family farm, I know that the best use of our limited time and even more limited land isn't cultivating potatoes and mushrooms and even corn. Sometimes economies of scale really do work. You don't even need to read William Alexander's nifty book to learn a lesson about folly from its title: "The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden."

But a nice little patch for tomatoes and zucchini, though -- now you're talking. Agri-dustrial tomatoes run to the taste and texture of baseballs, and zucchini is the comically copious crop that keeps on giving -- to you, the neighbors, to people at work, to perfect strangers. I think I'll limit my home-grown edibles to those.

In the meantime, I'll be sure to put that pretty card, carefully, in the recycling bin.