In today's Times editorial and opinion pages, editorial writer Karin Klein drops in on the op side with a reflection on mothering in the era of Online LunchBox, Aeries and other tools for Big Mother.

Who needs the maternal instinct? Today, the school's online data systems tell me everything I need to know about my children's classroom performance. From my desk at home, or work via Wi-Fi, I can find out whether they turned in their homework, whether they cut class, what grades they got on the tests they said they didn't need to study for -- and, in a twist, how many cookies they had for lunch.

Columnist Gregory Rodriguez examines the millennial generation and wonders about their reaction to recession. Pepperdine faculty member Mark Nelson compares the Republicans of the New Deal era, like Federal Reserve chief Marriner Eccles -- who warned FDR he wasn't pumping enough money into the economy -- with the Bobby Jindals of today.

On the editorial page, the Times urges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on the bad guys.

We're not suggesting that ICE should look the other way when it finds illegal immigrants. Rather, we're arguing for a renewed emphasis on the most dangerous criminals.

The page also notes that the Obama administration has sent confusing signals on No Child Left Behind: Will it emphasize funding or accountability? Schools, and perhaps even the economy, could use federal funding, but "nothing will improve if the new money is spent in the same old ways."

We also recap our endorsements for Tuesday's Los Angeles city election.

Someone needs to spank Kellogg's on its sugar-frosted hiney. And If I bought Kellogg’s products I would join the call to boycott them. How does a company devoted to setting little kids on the path to Type 2 diabetes get all sanctimonious about Michael Phelps and a bong hit? His behavior is inconsistent with its image, the company says. Huh? How can that be? Tony the Tiger is generally the first pusher of addictive substances in a child's life. That's the American way.

Take Frosted Flakes. The company recommends a 3/4-cup serving, but come on that's like eating a handful of  sugary air. A real bowl is about two to three times that amount. That means kids can start the day with up to 36 grams of sugar, or about 9 teaspoons per bowl. Multiply that morning after morning.

Then there are Crack-its, or rather, Cheez-its. I don't care what the serving portion is, can anyone stop at anything under half a box? Anyway, the larger point is this: He's a 23-year-old young man who got caught doing what 23-year-old young men do. Phelps has apologized. He can still be president. And most of his other sponsors, like Speedo, seem to be sticking with him.

Why is Kellogg's hyperventilating over this? Frankly, I think the company is shooting itself in its frosted foot. It will never find a better pitch man. The message was streamlined and simple: eat this food and you too will have to swim 17 hours a day.

Anyway, over on Huffingont Post, Lee Stranahan takes a different tack. He argues that Kellogg's is alienating its most devoted adult client base, the stoner crowd. Here are snippets from his petition calling for boycott:

1) Kellogg's is a major manufacturer of cereal and junk food products including but not limited to Frosted Flakes, Pop Tarts, Cheez-Its, Froot Loops, Keebler's Cookies, Rice Krispies, Eggo Frozen Waffles, Famous Amos Cookies and many other products known to be a part of the diet of many marijuana using Americans

2) Kellogg's has profited for decades on the food tastes of marijuana using Americans with the munchies. In fact, we believe that most people over the age of twelve would not eat Kellogg's products were they not wicked high.

3)That Kellogg's has decided to end their relationship with Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps after pictures of him surfaced doing exactly what most Kellogg's customers do right before enjoying a bowl of Rice Krispies mixed with Keebler Cookies with an Eggo on top.

The rest is pretty funny and worth a read.

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

Now that the egg farmers in California have to work on keeping their hens out of battery cages, who's going to work on having financially beset consumers buy the cage-free eggs?

The Humane Society of the United States, the force behind Proposition 2, says it will. If you're one of the vast majority of voters who supported the measure, you'll remember that it gave California farmers several years to get rid of their battery cages, where chickens were packed in so tightly they couldn't turn around. What the measure didn't do was require anyone to actually buy all those cage-free eggs. Now the Humane Society says it will "work with consumers and retailers to promote a robust market for compliant California egg producers."

It's an interesting time for such a sales scheme. Families that already have given up most of their discretionary expenditures because of their shrinking wallets--gardeners, house cleaners, dinners out--find that one of the few areas where they can still cut is food. The mortgage is the mortgage, it's not coming down in size. Neither is the life-insurance premium or, unless you live in the dark, the utility bill. The food budget has more flexibility--less meat, more mac and cheese--so fewer people are reaching for the $3.25-a-dozen organic, cage-free eggs, and more are waiting for the supermarket to have the regular ones, produced from the misery of hens, on sale for 99 cents a dozen. Eggs keep fairly well, so you can even stock up.

One possibility under consideration is legislation that would require that all eggs sold in California be cage-free. That would have been a fairer way to write the proposition. The vote might have gone differently if voters realized they were actually going to have to pay for their decision, and if they were willing to pay the extra money, fine. It also would have encouraged egg producers from outside the state to treat their chickens differently, to get a piece of the California market. But is this a time for jacking up the price of one of the cheapest sources of high-quality protein?

Meanwhile, the California farmers have time to switch to a different way of keeping their chickens, but they do have to get moving on new barns or larger, more humane cages if they want to meet the deadline. That means new investment, which usually means loans for money to invest, in a tight credit market.

I am looking at a Yes-on-Proposition 2 campaign mailer with a picture of a piglet and the line, ‘’you are their only voice.’’

But I am thinking of other piglets, and a hideous story out of an Iowa pig farm, an undercover video of farm hands slamming little pigs down on a concrete floor and beating the piglets’ mothers with iron rods –- abusing pigs, creatures who sometimes live with humans as pets, and who some credit with the intelligence and emotional capacity of a two-year-old human.

There are other hideous stories, some right out of California, like the undercover video of the appalling abuse of sick and lame "downer" cows being shoved and beaten into the butchering maw our food system.... Veal calves being imprisoned in tiny crates for all of their short lives.... California’s egg "ranches," where four, five, six hens spend their lives crammed in the same small wire cage, their feet never touching ground, the living and the dead sometimes stuffed together, the filth falling on them from the hens in the cages above them. Now multiply this times millions of hens and millions of eggs in the same "ranch."

You really want to eat this? Proposition 2 ...

The Opinion Manufacturing Division steers well left of center today as it takes on voting rights, the Cuban embargo, food regulation, research earmarks and next week's election, among other topics. On the Op-Ed page, columnist Tim Rutten declares that the GOP has lost its grip on the Catholic vote, largely because Catholics' views on abortion now mirror the average voter's:

National polls have shown for some time that, although Catholics are personally opposed to abortion, they believe it ought to be legal in nearly identical percentages to the rest of America. Moreover, as a survey by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found earlier this year, only 18% of Catholics "strongly" agree with the statement: "In deciding what is morally acceptable, I look to the church teachings and statements by the pope and bishops to form my conscience."

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, novelist Susan Straight pens a moving tribute to the recently deceased father of her ex-husband, General Roscoe Conklin Sims Jr. Lawrence M. Krauss, director of an Oregon State University research institute, defends three earmarks for scientific projects that John McCain and Sarah Palin have attacked on the campaign trail. And Anchorage Daily News columnist Michael Carey offers a portrait of his state's embattled "senator for life" and sugar daddy (with Uncle Sugar's money), Ted Stevens.

In the editorial stack, the Times board endorses a bill to let ex-cons vote in federal elections, and urges states to follow suit. It rails against the U.S. embargo against Cuba, whose sanctions "worsen poverty and its attendant ills but only strengthen the Castro regime." And in light of the spreading problem of melamine-tainted Chinese goods, the board calls on the U.S. to hold Chinese food imports for testing before it reaches supermarkets and restaurants.

Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

It's easy for California voters to love Proposition 2, the initiative to let laying hens out of their battery cages. And I don't mean that as a compliment.

It's easy because Prop. 2 doesn't cost the consumer a dime. Nobody has to buy cage-free eggs. All the initiative does is force California egg farmers to raise them that way. (Remember that despite the wording, this initiative isn't about veal calves or pregnant pigs, because California has hardly any of those. This is all about chickens.) No wonder Prop. 2 is acing the political polls.

Surprise! Californians buy a lot of their eggs from out-of-state egg farms. And since food prices have not been kind to anyone's wallets lately, and a lot more people don't have spare cash these days, consumers can be expected to go for the cheaper eggs. Not just in California, but nationwide, putting California's egg farms at a perpetual disadvantage. So nothing changes about the way eggs are produced, but a whole lot of eggs --and California egg farmers--can't find a big enough market.

If Californians were serious about humane treatment of chickens, they would put their money where their frittata-munching mouths are. What if this initiative required that eggs sold in California cannot come from battery-cage hens. Voters would, in effect, be taxing themselves and each other, paying for the kind treatment they support. This wouldn't just put the state's egg farms on an even laying field (sorry, couldn't resist), it would have an impact across the nation. California is a huge market for everything, from cars to textbooks. What California demands is what the nation tends to produce.

So why isn't this initiative written that way?  There's the conspiracy theory that the Humane Society types behind the initiative actually want egg farms to go out of business, the better to promote veganism. That sounds a little grassy-knollish to me. But it is worth remembering that this campaign originates with a national organization, not a state one, and the survival of a California industry is not toward the top of the Humane Society's priority list. Probably proponents figured this would be more palatable to the voters, but it's a chicken way to reform agriculture.

Photos by Manjunath Kiran, European Pressphoto Agency, and Mark Boster, Los Angeles Times

Hard to believe, but the Opinion Manufacturing Division goes silent for a day about the presidential race and the Wall Street bailout (with the exception of J.D. Crowe's political cartoon from the Press-Register, at right). Instead, the Op-Ed page leads with an insider account of the politicization of the Bush administration Justice Department. The author is David Iglesias, one of the U.S. attorneys fired for not being sufficiently zealous in pursuing GOP priorities:

Some people have argued that it was acceptable for the Bush administration to fire us because we were "political appointees" hired and serving at the will of the president. The death blow to this school of thought came Monday when the report was made public. The 358-page tome systematically described a "fundamentally flawed" system of slipshod, ad hoc job termination based on rumor and innuendo rather than evidence, one in which no due diligence was ever exercised by Department of Justice leadership before asking my colleagues and me to resign.

Journalist and author Howard Blum recounts the lethal bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, which occurred precisely 98 years ago, by radical union activists. And columnist Tim Rutten excoriates the media for glossing over the menacing, anti-Semitic statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations last week:

He happens to belong to a Shiite sect that believes it can hasten the coming of the Mahdi, the Islamic savior, by the creation of chaos in the world. And like his brethren among the Sunni jihadists, he means what he says.

Over on the editorial page, the Times board urges the new climate-change alliance of Western states to auction carbon credits to the highest bidder, rather than giving them away. It offers cautious praise for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's $5 billion affordable-housing initiative. And it urges the feds to provide consumers more protection against tainted Chinese food, in terms of inspections and information.

There's so much good stuff coming from the Opinion Manufacturing Division today, I'm actually going to resist the temptation to start with O.J. again. The election dominates the pages, starting with the editorial board's call for voters to reject Prop. 4 -- the latest attempt to require minors to notify a parent before having an abortion -- and Prop. 2 -- a measure to regulate the treatment of chickens, pigs and calves in the food supply.

The board argues that Prop. 4's coercive provisions could lead to more illegal abortions, not fewer, and more attempts to conceal pregnancies in ways that harm fetuses:

In fact, under the guise of protecting underage girls, this proposal really is just the latest attempt to impose any obstacle in the exercise of reproductive freedom. This represents the third try in recent years to pass such a measure. California should reject it again.

Similarly, the board says Prop. 2 has a noble goal, but its likely impact is the opposite of its aim:

As much as we support the decent treatment of animals, we doubt that passage of the measure would start a national trend. In fact, we fear that it would have an unintended consequence: Because it only regulates eggs produced in California and not eggs that are sold here, it would likely bolster the market for cheaper out-of-state eggs produced where farmers have no similar bans on cages.

Rounding out the stack, the board urges John McCain to stay on the campaign trail and debate Barack Obama tomorrow night as scheduled, rather than cloistering himself in Washington to work on the crisis in the financial industry. And speaking of the debate...

In addition to featuring an abbreviated Who's Who of prominent conservatives, last weekend's Values Voters Summit at the Hilton Washington offered aisles of conservative merchandise -- including a box of waffle mix that now sits on my desk in The Times' D.C. Bureau. I didn't purchase  "Obama's Waffles" out of ideological solidarity or even a fondness for waffles. Rather, I wanted proof that the Values Voters had undervalued good taste. Not becuse the purveyors of the waffle mix took swipes at Obama on the box -- I admit to chuckling over the slogan "Change you can taste"  -- but because of the gag product's echo of a "real" African-American purveyor of breakfast food.

I'm referring, of course, to Aunt Jemima. (Obama/Jemima -- get it?) The African-American icon for pancake and waffle mix and, later, syrup, is regarded as a beloved figure by her manufacturers. But she makes some consumers uneasy because she evokes black domestics of a bygone era. Recognizing that fact, Quaker Oats in 1989 gave her a makeover, putting her on a diet, removing her headband, and adorning her with pearl earrings and a lace collar. (This may have been overcompensation; who wears pearl earrings while preparing waffles? It's like putting Uncle Ben in a top hat and tails.) Even with her new look, however, Jemima as even a satirical role model for Obama is abysmally insensitive if not insulting.

That was recognized even by the sponsor of the summit, FRCAction, the legislative arm of the Family Research Council. In a statement issued the day after I bought my box of Obama's Waffles, FRCAction conceded that the product represented "an attempt at parody that crosses the line into coarseness and bias." When the waffles were brough to the attention of FRC officials, the statement said, "they were removed and the exhibit was dismantled by the vendor at our insistence. It is our responsibility to fully vet materials that are offered at any event we cosponsor, but we are deeply dismayed that this vendor violated the spirit, message and tone of our event in such an offensive manner." At least they didn't waffle.

Photos of the Obama Waffles box courtesy of AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn't want to test more than 1% of cattle for mad-cow disease, and it doesn't want anybody else to do it either. Who cares about customers and the companies that might want to please them? The USDA won its appellate round in court; justices ruled that the agency had the authority to stop beef producer Creekstone Farms from testing under a nearly century-old law that was intended to keep cattlemen from feeding bad medicine to their animals.

With the feds unwilling to do more consumer protection and private industry unable to, what happens now? The case heads back to the lower court, which could still rule in Creekstone's favor under other arguments -- for example, if it found that the USDA was arbitrary or capricious in stopping Creekstone. Truth is, the agency's decision wasn't really either of those. It's simply wrong-headed and panders to the larger beef industry that doesn't want Creekstone giving it competition that might push other producers into doing the same.

The testing might well be unnecessary, as the USDA argues. But it's not going to hurt the meat, so what's USDA's beef with catering to people who worry about such things and are willing to pay the little extra for peace of mind?