As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor near, my inbox runneth over  with commentary on the nomination from special-interest groups. the latest is a release from the conservative group Committee for Justice (not to be confused with the Committee for Public Safety). Here's the leadoff:

"In a letter released today and attached below, more than two dozen leaders of the Second Amendment community from across the nation urged senators 'not to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,' citing their 'grave concern' over her Second Amendment record."

This irked me for a reason that has nothing do with the merits of Sotomayor's nomination. I'm not surprised that the gun lobby has "grave concern" about the judge (someday I'd love to receive a press release expressing "mild concern"). It's the use of the term "Second Amendment community," the latest in a long line of psuedo-communities.

I still find the term "intelligence community" bizarre, maybe because it conjures up the image of a suburban cul-de-sac where every father playing basketball with his kids is a spy. But there's also the "gay community," the "disability community" and, of special interest to Angelenos, the "entertainment community." 

This perversion of the word "community" has insinuated itself into dictionaries. Webster's online version offers eight definitions of "community." Fittingly, the first is: "A group of people living in a particular local area." But No. 4, with a bullet, is: "The body of people in a learned occupation." (I suppose firing a gun is a learned occupation if you're a sniper.)

"Community" bothers me not just because it's a cliche; the use of the term in political contexts is freighted with the dubious assumption that "communities" are monolithic. What is the "black community,"  invoked so facilely by activists and politicians? Or the "Latino community"? As the liberal-conservative schism over the policies of the current pope demonstrates, a cohesive "Catholic community" is also an illusion.

Our current president was a community organizer, but the ones the young Barack Obama organized were real communities, not constructs. Maybe Obama's experience will rehabilitate the original connotation of the term -- including in the journalistic community.

Photo: Stephen Osman / Los Angeles Times

In the same Nov. 4, 2008 election in which Barack Obama was elected president, Los Angeles voters defeated (but just barely) a $36-per-property parcel tax measure to fund youth and anti-gang programs. Measure A was spearheaded by Councilwoman Janice Hahn; as a local tax, it had to pull in two-thirds, or 66.67% of the vote to win. It got 66.27%. Times endorsements may not have the clout they once did, but I think it's safe to say that our opposition helped make a difference on this one.

Hahn wants to try again, and wants to know what it would take to win us over this time. Fair question.

The subject came up at Tuesday's City Council committee hearing, at which Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr reported on the last six months of the city's still-new Gang Reduction and Youth Development programs.

When the Times called for a "no" vote on Measure A, we said the city had not shown it was ready to use new tax money properly. We explained that Los Angeles had floundered with anti-gang efforts for years, throwing money at programs without knowing whether they were working or even defining what they were supposed to accomplish. Just months earlier, the city had scrapped L.A. Bridges and authorized the mayor to take charge of gang programs and to establish standards and evaluation methods. Carr was a newcomer. It was too early to tell whether the city had improved. Here's a snippet, in case you don't want to click on the link and wade through the while thing:

The universal chestnut about graduation days is that they're about endings and beginnings, joy and sadness.

But the sentiment was framed in a startlingly different way Wednesday at the Locke High School commencement, held on the expansive athletic field of the Watts school. Security was heavy; beefy guys wearing shirts that identified them as anti-gang detail looked out of place next to the beaming students in their pastel blue caps and gowns. Locke has been much safer during its first year as a Green Dot charter school, but a student was shot just outside the campus in April. Surrounded as Locke is by gang activity and violence, school officials were clearly aiming to keep any trouble at bay.

I was sitting in the bleachers next to proud dad Gregory McMiller, snappily dressed for his son Johnathan's big day, hanging on to a gigantic mylar balloon that he gallantly tried to keep from batting me in the head every time the breeze picked up.

"It's happy, but it's also sad," McMiller started. I waited for the predictable next words  -- happy because his child had grown up, sad because ... well, his child had grown up. Instead, he continued, "Because you know after today some of these kids are going to die. Some will go down a bad path and get taken out too young."

Not everything about commencement -- like the belief that the grads are headed to limitless futures -- is universal.

The United States is the only nation in the world in which a child can be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. California has more than 200 inmates who were sentenced to remain behind bars forever for crimes they committed before they became adults. Under a bill that passed today on the Senate floor, they would get a chance to petition the court to have their sentences converted to 25-years-to-life. That wouldn't guarantee parole or eventual release; it would simply give them a chance at a hearing.

The Times editorialized in favor of SB 399, which now moves to the Assembly. It's authored by Leland Yee, D-San Francisco. Read our editorial here, and a follow-up blogpost here. Here is a support blog and site.

This is a worthy bill and deserves to pass and be signed into law. Support is not based on naive or romantic notions about innocent children wrongly locked up for life. This is not a movie. The dozens of people the bill would affect were convicted of committing serious and often brutal felonies. Yes, many were following the lead of criminal adults, and many others were too scarred or traumatized by violent families or neighborhoods to fully grasp the horror of their actions. But punishment makes sense.

Life without parole, however, does not -- at least, not in every case. Under this bill, many, perhaps most, of the California inmates sentenced for crimes committed in their youth would remain in prison for life and will eventually die there. But for some who can demonstrate that as adults they have grown, repented and reformed, they may be able to look forward to the possibility of a portion of their adulthood outside prison bars. 

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

The Times published an editorial April 30 criticizing life sentences without parole for California juveniles as young as 14 and supporting a bill by state Sen. Leland Yee that would permit such inmates to eventually seek parole – after they've spent at least a quarter century in prison. The editorial cited the case of South Los Angeles resident Antonio DeJesus Nuñez, who may be the only person in the world sentenced to life without parole for a crime he committed as a minor in which no one died or was injured.

That's not an overstatement. The New York-based Human Rights Watch asserts that the United States is the only nation in which minors are sentenced to life in prison without parole; we have 2,571.

A 2007 report from the University of San Francisco did find some youth outside the U.S. sentenced to life without parole: a grand total of seven of them, all in Israel. [*UPDATED: See below.]

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child bans life without parole for youth, but the United States is one of only two U.N. member nations that have not signed it -- the other being Somalia.

Nuñez was 14 at the time of his arrest. He was convicted of a frightening and brutal crime – kidnapping a man for ransom. And, by the way, he shot at police officers when they gave chase. Prosecuting him made sense. Imprisoning him made sense. But life? With no chance of parole? For a crime he committed when he lacked the judgment and maturity, in society's view, to drive a car, vote, honor a contract, marry without parental consent, join the military or go to an R-rated movie? Should he never get a second look, once he grows up and we can see whether he studied in prison, behaved, repented? Do we believe that some youths are simply irredeemable, and that in our wisdom we can look them over at age 14 and know which ones can be salvaged as adults and which can't?

The same day the editorial ran, California's Fourth District Court of Appeal granted Nuñez's habeas corpus petition and threw out his life without parole (the legal jargon is LWOP) sentence, ruling that it violated constitutional strictures against cruel and unusual punishment and ordering the trial court to resentence the inmate, who is now 22. Read the court's opinion here.

For those who believe it's too costly, too cruel and just plain too bizarre to sentence a teenager to LWOP (more jargon – JLWOP, with the J standing for juvenile), the ruling was good news. But only sort of.

In Thursday's Letters to the editor, readers comment further on the departure of Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer, who announced this week he would leave his job--with a severance package worth over half a million dollars.  Tom Iannucci, of Los Angeles, sums up the tone of much of the mail The Times received about Brewer:

Once again, the students of the Los Angeles Unified School District lose out. Just how many field trips, textbooks, computers and other much-needed educational supplies could more than $517,000 have provided for the underserved students of the district? How many teachers or classroom aids could be provided for the most at-risk students?

In this time of extreme financial crisis for the school system, throwing away half a million dollars to force out Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer just doesn't add up.

But the superintendent does have his defenders.  David Gillespie of Bonita, responds to this Times editorial on Brewer's severance:

I wish I had known Brewer before he took the superintendent job. I would have advised him against seeking or taking it. The position is impossible. It is the perfect storm of parochial interests, petty politics, ethnic and racial animosities, white flight, poverty, immigration failures, outside interference, crushing bureaucracy, incompetent managers, overwhelming and unmanageable size and a school board of nebulous ability beholden to a maze of outsiders. It was a no-win for Brewer the day he started. Now people of lesser abilities have put him into a humiliating downward spiral.

Brewer has offered the honorable thing for all concerned -- including himself -- in leaving the position. But by contract he is entitled to the severance promised, and he should not back down. It is not dishonorable to demand the full severance. The school board should have thought out Brewer's dismissal and accomplished it quietly and without rancor, but it didn't. Brewer should stick to his guns.

Readers write in about Obama's economic plans, this week's Marine jet crash in San Diego.  Daniel J. Lubin, of Rancho Palos Verdes, offers a suggestion for Tribune CEO Sam Zell, too:

Everything we've waited to discover about Sam Zell is revealed in the last paragraph of his letter announcing the bankruptcy: " ... we've reduced costs, gained market share, and laid the groundwork for creating a new business model."

That he'd rank reducing costs first, above all else, says it all.

So, Mr. Zell, to reduce costs, how's about selling The Times to local ownership?

Photo of L.A. Schools Supt. David L. Brewer at the Monday press conference announcing his departure by Nick Ut/AP Photo.

It's an old moan, but a good one, and the Times editorial board makes it again today: There are too few races for the Legislature, in this heavily gerrymandered state, in which the outcome isn't a foregone conclusion. Still, the board finds one of these rarities in the Santa Barbara area and makes an endorsement in it.

The board also suggests that the question of how much racial profiling goes on in the LAPD is more complicated than a recent report conducted for the ACLU reflects, and advises Congress to get rid of the clause in the No Child Left Behind Act that requires schools to give students' personal information to military recruiters unless their parents specifically opt out.

If Congress wants the military to have access to students' home phone numbers, it should openly legislate it, rather than surreptitiously slipping such a provision into an unrelated law.

On the op-ed page, a veteran cop tells a chilling story of the false confession he obtained from a murder suspect. When police are looking for guilt, he discovered, they tend to find it, even when it isn't there. Videotaping interrogations can reveal where things go wrong.

Reviewing the tapes years later, I saw that we had fallen into a classic trap. We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession.

Joel Stein finds that last-minute voter registrants aren't the slackers he'd expected. And for those of you with access to the dead-tree version of the LAT, Ronald Brownstein describes what happens when the formidable campaign resources of the Obama campaign blanket Florida--but meet up with "one of the nation's most effective Republican organizations."

If you haven't registered, hurry up. Only 134 days until the election.

No, I mean it. You have until midnight to register for the historic Nov. 4 presidential election, with its 12 California propositions and its bevy of taxes and bonds. But vote-by-mail ballots for that one have been out for two weeks, and I’ve moved on. If you live in the city of Los Angeles, the days just before and after election day are the ones that count. Nov. 3 begins the five-day period for candidates for city or school office to file a declaration of intention to run in the March 3, 2009 primary election. And Nov. 5 is the deadline for the City Council to put measures before the voters.

Expect five measures on that ballot, along with the election of mayor, city attorney, controller, eight City Council seats, half the school board and half the community college board. And hope those races aren’t close, or else you’re getting a runoff in May. And, a month after that, you’re most likely getting one of the most important California special elections in recent history, with measures to change the way we do budgeting, and maybe taxing, plus perhaps a measure to bail ourselves out of financial disaster. But if the special election doesn't happen in June, it will happen in November. And then, after a couple months off, it will be time for the state primary – governor, attorney general, and all of that.

You can get a leg up on the March election by checking out Wednesday’s Rules Committee meeting at City Hall, where the panel is expected to sign off on four ballot measures. They are:

Extended nighttime hours and family-friendly activities at parks in eight of Los Angeles' most violent neighborhoods led to a 17% drop in crime in those areas this summer and a whopping 86% drop in homicides, according to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office. The program, called Summer Night Lights ran from July 4 to Labor Day, and offered movie nights and other events during peak gang hours, four nights a week. Given that police estimate that each murder, in addition to the anguish it causes families and neighborhoods, costs taxpayers $1 million, it certainly seems like antigang news to celebrate. So kudos to Chief Bill Bratton, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and especially to the mayor's gang czar, Jeff Carr, for working together to make this program a success.

This reminds me of a similar effort made by some women in Boyle Heights a few years ago. When they decided to take back a park that had become a gang hangout, they didn't call the mayor or the police (or get private funding). The neighborhood women simply set up some card tables and sat down to play Loteria and other card games late into the night. Night after night, the women would play cards and eat sandwiches, chatting and laughing, and the gang members would look on, baffled and kind of cranky at this invasion of their turf. But finally, the bangers gave in and found another hangout. When I asked some of the gang members why they ultimately moved, one looked at me like I was crazy and said: "Yo, we had to leave. You can't disrespect your mother."

But back to Summer Night Lights, here's my question. This concept, nighttime recreation as anti-gang strategy, has been around forever. Remember midnight basketball leagues? So if this is such an effective way to prevent gang violence, save lives and even recruit some of the kids into jobs for the city (some of the at-risk kids helped out at the parks), why isn't this an annual program?  City council members could get behind this and raise funds for programs in their own districts without breaking a sweat. And county supervisors certainly wouldn't miss the modest amounts these programs cost.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and William J. Perry say John McCain is wrong to suggest throwing Russia out of G-8. Author Jennifer Block pushes home births to the medical establishment. Columnist Tim Rutten offers a requiem for L.A.'s one-time status as a boxing town, and former "Tonight Show" writer Brad Dickson imagines L.A. as run by The Grove creator Rick Caruso:

Transit: Several MTA buses are replaced with streetcars on faux cobblestone roads going nowhere. After a near-catastrophic collision, Caruso deflects criticism by asserting that the fake roads are, statistically, still safer than the Orange Line.

Economy: Caruso balances the city budget. He accomplishes this in part by eliminating all street parking and building city-owned parking structures that charge $8 for the first hour and $6 for each subsequent 15 minutes, with a maximum rate of $179 a day for a lost ticket.

The editorial board says good riddance to the anti-gang program L.A. Bridges, reminds educators to focus on learning, not testing, if they decide to OK a statewide algebra test, and urges SAG to start negotiating so that the industry can start working again.

On the letters page, readers discuss Colombia's hostage rescue operation, which had government operatives posing as NGO officials. Long Beach's James L. Kilgore doesn't think it was so great a move:

In creating a fake nongovernmental organization, it has given license to insurgents and rogue governments all over the world to treat humanitarian aid workers as enemy combatants. In simpler terms, which the editorial board might understand, it is as though it distributed maps of Doctors Without Borders clinics in the Democratic Republic of Congo marked "bomb them."

*Cartoon by Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate