The Times doesn't buy arguments that Jaycee Lee Dugard's 18-year ordeal as a kidnapping and rape victim is a reason to oppose coming reforms to California's parole system. The Assembly passed a bill Monday that would reduce the case rolls of parole officers by mandating less supervision for low-risk, non-violent ex-convicts, while increasing supervision for more dangerous criminals. That doesn't mean Dugard's alleged abductor, Phillip Garrido, and his ilk would be off the hook -- in fact, it means they would get more attention in the future, the editorial page argues.

What's the upside to the Station fire, which has killed two firefighters, burned dozens of homes, fouled L.A.'s air and destroyed thousands of acres of scrubland? It's that fire is a natural part of Southern California's ecosystem that will clear wild areas for new growth and deposit fertilizer. The real problem, The Times points out, is that the frequency of such fires is rising, and continued sprawl into wilderness areas is increasing the costs and the environmental woes.

And Japan's dramatic changeover Sunday, when the party that has ruled the country almost continuously for half a century was booted from power, gets a thumbs up from The Times. Though the Liberal Democratic Party has helped turn Japan into an economic powerhouse, a one-party state seldom makes for good governance; "competition is as important in politics as it is in business," The Times asserts.

On the Op-Ed page, global warming skeptic Jonah Goldberg wonders whether the media are giving short shrift to sunspots. Evidence is mounting not only that we're living through a period of highly unusual sunspot activity, but that such events can have a dramatic impact on Earth's climate -- meaning the current warming we're experiencing might have more to do with solar activity than the greenhouse gases Congress aims to reduce. "I don't know what [this evidence] tells you, but it tells me that maybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to 'solve' a problem we don't understand so well," Goldberg concludes.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, sounds off against one of his faculty members -- Neve Gordon, who published an opinion piece in The Times last month arguing for an economic boycott of Israel. Carmi says he can't fire Gordon for his controversial views under Israeli law, but his explosive anti-Israel rhetoric could seriously harm both the nation and the university.

Finally, Leo Hindery Jr., Leo W. Gerard and Donald Riegle argue that the "buy American" provisions of Washington's economic stimulus package level the playing field with our trading partners and boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. They back legislation that would expand them to cover all national government procurement. "'Buy American' is neither un-American nor anti-globalization. It is simply good, necessary, balanced and reciprocal economic policy."

* Photo: The Station fire as seen from a hill overlooking Tujunga. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

Spare the "Heils" -- he's dead. (Associated Press)

She’s the Nevada woman who yelled “Heil Hitler” at an Israeli Jew last week, apparently infuriated by his praise for that country’s national health care program and gold-plated care for its soldiers. (The Israeli seems to have been concerned about how the U.S. treats its veterans, not the relative merits of nationalized health care.) Pilger, wearing an Israeli defense forces shirt, blasted the speaker (and by extension all those other Nazi-sympathizing Jews in Israel) for failing to realize that universal health care is the first step to a socialist master plan.

Seriously, shouldn't you have to pick one camp and stick with it? Either you get to wear pro-Israel gear or you shout hateful, racist words to Jews. Not both. Anyway, the appropriate reaction to the Pilger video would have been this: recoil, shake head, pass to sane friends, renew commitment to improve nation’s education system. Period.

This is such a bad move. Not only is it counterproductive – it won't further the cause of healthcare reform legislation -- but it is also a terrible misapplication of the power of Internet.

It's using a bomb to attack an ant.

Semi-literate right-wingers have been behaving badly for weeks, hurling all kinds of invective around to see where it sticks. And lefties have been longing to retaliate. Now Pilger, with her confused cruelty, wanders into the crosshairs. Does that make her fair game? An angry mob is still a mob, even in cyberspace.

It may not rank with Winston Churchill's response to Lady Astor, but Rep. Barney Frank's broadside today -- launched at a protester carrying a sign depicting President Obama with a Hitler mustache -- was about as entertaining as comebacks come in today's political scene.

"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked during an appearance to discuss health care reform at a Massachussetts senior center, in answer to a woman who asked him why he supports a "Nazi" effort to extend health coverage to all Americans. If Frank had ended with just this zippy one-liner it would have made a nice clip for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," but there was more: "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining-room table. I have no interest in doing it." Commenting on her Hitler sign, he noted that it was "a tribute to the 1st Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated."

With similar town hall meetings across the country being interrupted by raucous protesters who can't seem to decide whether Obama is a Nazi or a socialist (and clearly failing to understand the meaning of either), this is the kind of response that has doubtless occurred to many reform advocates, but it took the famously scrappy Frank to rip away the filter between his thoughts and his vocal chords.

Is that a good thing? The criticism of pro-reform Democrats is that their wonky, Spock-like approach to this complex issue has been undermined by conservative activists whose simple, emotionally charged slogans are a lot easier to understand than the nuances of the public insurance option. Put another way, the Democrats see the reform movement as a policy debate, while Republicans see it as a political slug-fest. Frank may be the first Democrat to seriously slug back. That will no doubt thrill his Democratic base, but in such a close political battle the stances of people on the left and right don't matter as much as those in the middle. And rudely insulting a protester at a senior center probably isn't the best way to win hearts and minds in the heartland.

-- Dan Turner

Photo: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., leaves a town hall discussion on health care Tuesday. Credit: Darren McCollester / Getty Images

Columnist Tim Rutten returns from vacation to find the "birthers" still discussing citizen grand juries and opponents of healthcare reform bringing guns to President Obama's town hall meetings. There's more than the usual dollop of crazy talk in our politics, Rutten warns:

Read the column, then leave your comments -- rational or otherwise -- below. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, criminal law scholar J. Kelly Strader warns that courts around the country are essentially ignoring the Supreme Court's admonition in Lawrence v. Texas that states couldn't outlaw private behavior that clashes with the majority's view of morality. And Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers insights on the four front-runners in Thursday's presidential election in Afghanistan.

In the editorial stack, the Times board blasts the California legislature for its failure to mandate more use of renewable energy by state utilities, despite the support of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, utility regulators and most voters. It pooh-poohs GM's eBay initiative, questioning whether the carmaker can do anything truly innovative on sales without hurting its dealer network. And it looks past newly released scores on standardized tests to find something encouraging at Locke High School:

Photo credit: AP Photo / John Bazemore

-- Jon Healey

The editorial board still likes a plan that will go before the L.A. school board this month, allowing outside operators to submit proposals for running 50 new schools that will open over the next few years. What it doesn't like are signs that the district isn't acting transparently about the issue, as indicated by a town-hall meeting where opponents were locked out, and the L.A. Unified's decision to give a new school to the mayor's education partnership even though parents and teachers were not consulted:

The board has this much to say about Adolf Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf": It's repetitious, long-winded and evil. But it also argues that Germany should stop banning the book and go ahead with a new, annotated publication of it:

On the other side of the fold, the op-ed page ponders how President Obama's healthcare plan can prevail over doomsayers who claim the government will be taking over Americans' lives. Author Nancy J. Altman offers a possible solution: Take a cue from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's strategy for the passage of Social Security. And folklorist Patricia A. Turner tells the story behind a Ku Klux Klan quilt, and what the quilt's changed ownership says about America.

Photo: Ku Klux Klan quilt. Credit: Cheng Saechow / UC Davis

-- Karin Klein

Watching Arlen Specter's health-care town meeting on CNN this morning, I experienced the predictable panic of the liberal elitist. Who let these people in?  When did democracy start resembling a Jerry Springer show? When they're finished killing health reform with their paranoid rantings, will these yahoos target the First Amendment?

Then I mentally caught my breath.

Assuming, as I do, that the town-meeting loudmouths aren't all Republican robots, their suspicions of bureaucrats snooping on their medical records and Medicare operating ethical suicide parlors aren't that different from liberals' distrust of the CIA and the NSA.

Suspicion of Big Government always has had its liberal and its conservative incarnations, and sometrimes politics brings the extremes to touch and mean one thing. I think it was Peter Beinart who first pointed out that opposition to the Patriot Act came not just from ACLU-ish liberals but also from right-wing libertarians -- the "black helicopter crowd."  

Liberals don't want the government to hoard and computerize DNA information about people who have been arrested. Conservatives don't want Washington to know who owns a gun.

Anti-statism wasn't the only obsession of the crowd that gave Specter grief this morning. Another theme was the imprtance of denying health care to illegal aliens, who ought to be deported anyway. Then there was the mention of tort reform, not usually a preoccupation of "ordinary Americans." (Here I do suspect  some Republican puppetry.)  But, like it or not, suspicion of government is, as Rap Brown would say, as American as cherry pie.

-- Michael McGough

Bet you thought that the business of your publicly elected California Legislature was, well, public, since your public dollars pay these public servants to make public decisions in the public's Capitol building. Is there a theme in that sentence? There ought to be, especially with the editorial board today bemoaning the Assembly's decision to expunge the record of the individual votes of its members on whether or not to allow drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. In other words, you can't find out how your own Assembly member voted.

Assembly members sometimes complain, privately, that their constituents just don't understand how difficult it is to make laws and balance a budget. But making the very public process of lawmaking into a secret ritual doesn't help matters. On the contrary, it makes Californians feel like they are part of the stuff being fed into the meat grinder.

The board also weighs in on the latest maneuvers to stop a worthy bill that would extend hate-crime laws to cover crimes against gays and lesbians. Since conservative lawmakers in Washington D.C. weren't getting anywhere with the specious argument that halting hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation would somehow impinge on the perpetrators' freedom of speech and religion, they've come up with a new tactic: making certain hate crimes a capital offense, thus changing the congressional conversation from one about equal rights to one about the death penalty.

And though the people of Afghanistan have a million good reasons to mistrust the election process, the editorial board notes the importance of holding new presidential elections and giving voters hope that they can, at least eventually, have an impact on changing the government that has turned out a disappointment to many of them.

On the other side of the fold, Tim Rutten reprimands Police Chief William Bratton for the timing of his departure from Los Angeles and some of the dealings that took place beforehand:

...The manner and timing of Bratton's departure is almost breathtakingly irresponsible. It also raises troubling questions about his relationship with Michael Cherkasky, the court-appointed monitor who evaluated the LAPD's compliance with the federal consent decree, and about Cherkasky's role in convincing the federal judge to terminate oversight of the department.

And a professor in Mexico calls on President Obama to do more than praise Mexican President Felipe Calderon for his courage in the war on drugs; he must also remind Calderon that the human-rights abuses that his army is accused of in that war are unacceptable.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews / AP

In my e-mail inbox on Monday was a press release about a rally today at the U.S. Capitol by "hundreds of supporters of Sonia Sotomayor," the Supreme Court nominee whose confirmation by the Senate is as much a sure thing as future "Larry King Live" segments about Michael Jackson. At the top of the release was a phrase that strikes terror into the hearts of newspaper assignment editors: "photo opportunity."

I've reported on  plenty of rallies and demonstrations in my newspaper career, beginning with an "anti-rat" march in a rodent-infested Pittsburgh neighborhood. (Not sure whether the rats got the message.) More recently, I've covered protests outside the Supreme Court which, if the justices were true to their oath, had no influence on their decisions.

Like the Sotomayor rally, those protests were only nominally an exercise of the right guaranteed by the 1st Amendment  "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The not-so-ulterior motive was publicity.

But at least anti-abortion or pro-medical-marijuana demonstrators are seeking a result that is not a sure thing. The pro-Sotomayor campaigners are demanding that the Senate do what it's going to do anyway. They won't take yes for an answer.

A journalist shouldn't bite the handout that feeds him, but demonstrations like this give media events a bad name. Next week: A rally to demand more earmarks.

Photo: Sonia Sotomayor appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 16. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite / AP.

-- Michael McGough

Iran's show trial last weekend of at least 100 reformist politicians, journalists and foot soldiers is part of an ugly trend that will not only weaken the position of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it could derail talks with the United States concerning Iran's nuclear ambitions, according to today's lead editorial.

The Times also weighs in on a proposal for the city of Los Angeles to approve a $30-million loan to renovate the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood so it can accommodate performances by acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil. The city's projections that a 10-year run of the popular attraction would generate 858 jobs seems more based on federal loan requirements than reality; the city should reject the loan.

And Times editorial writer Karin Klein relates her own experience with the "cash for clunkers" law, which has stirred up a feeding frenzy at local car dealerships: "At Hyundai, we watched a family leap into an Accent for a test drive after two other cars were snatched out from under them. We never did find a salesman."

Speaking of which, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks the whole federal car-buying subsidy program is a clunker. Washington's notion that paying people who already own working cars so that they can buy new ones and junk the old is reminiscent of French economist Frederic Bastiat's "broken windows" fallacy, Goldberg says: Though it might benefit bankers and car makers, it doesn't take into account the economic stimulus that would have resulted if the car buyers had instead spent their money on more useful things.

And just when you thought it was safe to get out of Iraq, political science professor Barbara F. Walter asserts that it isn't. History shows that countries that have fought civil wars are likely to do it again, and that countries that end their civil wars with compromise settlements often return to fighting unless there is a third party present to enforce the peace. Most experts believe the U.S. would have to remain in Iraq for five to 10 years past the current 2011 withdrawal deadline to avert another outbreak of hostilities among Iraq's competing factions.

Finally, constitutional law professor Ryan Coonerty thinks the problem with California's government isn't an excess of democracy, but too little. Coonerty favors doubling the size of the Legislature, which could be accomplished without excessive spending by cutting lawmakers' current salaries ($116,000 a year) in half. Smaller districts would allow the people to hold their representatives more accountable, he argues.

Illustration credit: Paul Tong / TMS

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

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

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

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

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