An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.

It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.

On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:

Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.

Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images

On the Op-Ed page today, Paul VanDevelder, author of "Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory," discusses an impending ruling by U.S. District Judge James Redden in Oregon that may determine the fate of salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers. VanDevelder argues that dam removal is the best option for the salmon's survival, but it's also the most politically turbulent:

The Columbia-Snake corridor is the salmon's only option for survival, and Redden is probably their last hope. He is the one person in this entire drama who is legally obligated to use science and the law to protect the fish from extinction and from the whims of politicians. If the law and science are unable to trump politics to save this fishery -- a fishery that was the most productive in the world just two generations ago -- how will we ever meet the towering challenges posed by global climate change?

Here at the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division, we like to check in on how our editorials and Op-Ed articles are doing -- and where they are going -- in the blogosphere. What follows is a sampling of blogs that have picked up our opinions and generated opinions of their own.

Jerry Roberts' and Phil Trounstine's Op-Ed listing six factors that are at the root of California's inability to be governed caught the attention of several blogs this week. The Housing Chronicles Blog linked to a post about its own theories on California's detrimental changes:

Bob Burnett of the Huffington Post linked to the piece in his take on California's growing troubles and who's to blame:

On FarmPolicy.com, a blog dedicated to news about the farming industry that took particular interest in the climate change bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked to The Times' editorial that supported the bill. It seems the farm industry, based on the blog's long and varied list of supporters and naysayers, is quite conflicted on this issue. The Harvesting Justice blog came out slightly more strongly against the editorial's favorable position on the bill, offering this comment (which I believe is meant to be sarcastic?):

Another example of the excesses of the "greedy growers," as former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson used to say.  We poison the environment and our farmworkers and agribusiness continues to lobby for the ability to continue to do so, while getting paid subsidies not to do so.

On June 26, The Times ran an Op-Ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton -- a controversial figure in the world of diplomacy -- that encouraged the United States to support regime change in Iran. Not surprisingly, several bloggers had a lot to say in response. The Citizens blog said Bolton's argument is a veiled call for war:

The UN Dispatch blog offered a similar reaction, and added that the target of Bolton's attack was clearly the Obama administration, and even worse, offered no real solution to his goal. It was written for a partisan purpose and little else, the blog said.

Gregory Tejeda, a Chicago-area freelance writer and former UPI reporter, took issue with Zev Chafets' Op-Ed, in which Chafets argued that Latino baseball players are being singled out by the Hall of Fame for their use of steroids. Tejada said he knows just as many non-Latino ball players who were disgraced by their drug use:

And finally, Noel Sheppard on the NewsBusters blog was quite taken aback by Karen Bass's statement during an interview with Patt Morrison that Republican radio talk-show hosts were "terrorizing" their fellow Republicans in the California legislature.

Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger addresses a joint session of the state legislature in Sacramento on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. Schwarzenegger urged state lawmakers to act quickly to close a $24 billion deficit that opened in the state budget because of the worst U.S. recession in half a century. Credit: Ken James/Bloomberg News

The climate-change bill has, under the hands of various Congress members, become a weak cousin of what it could have been, the editorial board complains. Sections have been reshaped to benefit the farm industry, while other important sections have simply been gutted. Still, it represents the first real effort by the United States to grapple with global warming, and should pass, as the board concludes:

The House should pass the Waxman-Markey bill, and the Senate should speedily follow suit. Even congressional Republicans can't generate as much hot air as the billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide it would eliminate.

The board also bemoans a court ruling that badly weakens the powers of the Los Angeles controller's office. Under Laura Chick, the office produced important watchdog reports on the operations of city government; now it is in danger of becoming weaker than it was even in the days before Chick. The board calls on the City Council to restore these powers legislatively but doubts, considering that council members also could find themselves the butt of the controller's investigations, that it will.

On the other side of the page, thoughts on Iran dominate the page. Renowned former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky advises the West to listen more closely to the dissenters in oppressive regimes such as Iran. They might lack money, power and sophistication, Sharansky writes, but they know more about the evolution of the national mindset.

People in free societies watching massive military parades or vociferous displays of love for the leaders of totalitarian regimes often conclude, "Well, that's their mentality; there's nothing we can do about it." Thus they and their leaders miss what is readily grasped by local dissidents attuned to what is happening on the ground: the spectacle of a nation of double-thinkers slowly or rapidly approaching a condition of open dissent.

And John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, criticizes President Obama for soft-pedaling his response to Iran. The president will never succeed in persuading Iran to forgo its nuclear initiative, Bolton argues, so there's no point in playing nice.

Photo by Giuseppe Cacace/ AFP/Getty Images

The Times editorial page today comes to the end of the first year at Los Angeles Unified School District's troubled Locke High School under charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and finds progress, disappointment and hope. And change:

What makes Locke different under Green Dot...isn't that the charter operator has the magic formula for successful schools. It's that the people in charge don't spend years obfuscating, defending and delaying when things don't work. They do something to fix it.

The Times has been following the Locke Green Dot experiment closely. See reporter Howard Blume's articles from earlier this week here, here and here, and the editorial page's year-long series, A Year at Locke, here, and its earlier editorials like this one at the birth of the Green Dot experiment here. And don't miss editorial writer Karin Klein's many blog posts, including yesterday's post from the graduation, with its chilling quote:

 "It's happy, but it's also sad," [a parent said]. 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."

In Op-Ed, this just in from calbuzz.com's Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine: California government is hard to handle. The two bloggers probed and have discovered that the problems include Proposition 13, voter initiatives, gerrymandering, term limits, a volatile tax structure, and the two-thirds rule for adopting budgets and taxes. Who knew? And guess what? It turns out some people are calling for a constitutional convention.

They made me look up the word bibulous, and now I'm embarrassed I didn't know it before, so I deny it.

Roberts, by the way, is the former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the embattled editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press before his well-chronicled battle with owner Wendy McCaw. He wrote about one episode here.

He and Trounstine last wrote for the Times Opinion page here in March on whether Dianne Feinstein would run for governor.

Trounstine is former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University.

Elsewhere in the page, filmmaker Todd Darling writes in favorof the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, but says it's not enough. By the way, catch the trailer from his film, "A Snow Mobile for George," on YouTube here.

And columnist Meghan Daum wonderswhat the deal is with J.D. Salinger, who went to court to block publication of a book in Sweden about his Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield. Say what you will about Salinger, who Daum points out has dabbled in (gasp) Zen Buddhism. But even at 90, he's no phony.

Photo: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Obviously, some California public services will have to be cut, the editorial board observes, but what sense does it make to eliminate CalWorks, a program funded mostly by the federal dollars that enables people to get jobs and pay the rent? The board also notes that this is the big day for switching to digital TV, and it calls on the Federal Communications Commission to define the broadcasters' public-service obligations for digital channels.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta might be right in saying that he can't possibly make public a single paragraph within 65 documents describing his agency's interrogation techniques, the board says, but that doesn't mean the federal judge in the case should take his word for it. The judge should review the documents personally before making a decision, the board advises.

 On the other side of the fold. a teacher of history and education says the use of the term "Hispanic" to denote an ethnic group is a relatively recent phenomenon in the nation's history, and one that has served to make those of Latin American descent feel more "other" than they used to. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor should be seen as the first person of Puerto Rican descent who might be appointed to the high court, Jonathan Zimmerman argues, rather than as Hispanic. And Bill Maher has had enough with the puppies and the hamburgers; he wishes President Obama were less visible and barking more orders over the phone. The man is in serious danger of cute media overexposure, Maher huffs:

We like you, we really like you! You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady. But so's Lindsay Lohan. And like Lohan, we see your name in the paper a lot, but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something.

Illustration: Pedro X. Molina

The Times editorial board gives a qualified "no" today to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to sell some of the state's real estate. The idea might be worth considering, the editorial board concludes, but it's not going to help with the state's current financial crisis. It would take years to complete Schwarzenegger's proposed sales of such iconic properties as San Quentin and the Memorial Coliseum, which would have to go for bargain prices in today's market, anyway.

The board applauds Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Christine Varney's pledge to hold big business to a tougher antitrust standard than the previous administration did, and points to the European Commission's fine on Intel as an example of how such standards might play out. As for former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cuban President Fidel Castro, both of whom have been busily talking up the policies of yesterday while trying to forestall the progress of new administrations, the advice goes more like: You worked hard, now take a break. Spend more time with your family. And for heaven's sake, quiet, already.

On the other side of the fold, author Lisa Sweetingham, a Manny Ramirez fan brought up short by his suspension for violating baseball's drug rules, reviews the reasons why so many athletes -- and so many others -- have taken hormones and "accessory" medications. And environmental activist Bill McKibben writes that the combined might of environment groups is still too small to push faster government action on global warming. That, he says, will take grassroots action of the type his 350.org group is promoting.

Illustration by Patrick O'Connor for the Times

In anticipation of the upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee endurance test to be faced by President Obama's Supreme Court pick, the editorial board has some advice. To spare everyone involved the Bork-era partisanship, "inane" questions such as whether "the opposite of being dead is being alive?"  (which was posed to John Roberts) and flat-out unbelievable answers  -- Clarence Thomas saying he'd never though much about Roe v. Wade-- the Times editotial board offers some guidelines. It starts by deferring to the president (but not acquiescing).  The board, however,  is far from siding with the president on his recent decision to withhold photos of detainees being tortured.

Over in Op-Ed, contributing editor D.J. Waldie warns that neighborhods will suffer if Sacramento forces already struggling cities and counties to loan the state 8% of their property tax revenue. Meghan Daum ruminates on children's author Judy Blume and how her message urging donations to Planned Parenthood for Mother's Day kicked off a controversy with abortion foes. Rounding out the page, Lori Pottinger of the environmental group International Rivers says U.S. efforts to help Ethiopia would be better spent on climate change adaptation and anti-drought measures than a poorly planned dam.

No one was surprised when it turned out the majority of 19 banks undergoing "stress tests" needed more money. While the editorial board is sorry about their stress, it also says we need a few more rules here before the federal government shells about billions more in rescue funding.

Companies whose solvency is implicitly guaranteed by the government don't have to pay as much for the money they borrow to fund their operations, giving them a competitive advantage, and they're more cavalier about risk. So they have a strong incentive to become so complex and interconnected that the government will be compelled to bail them out if they stumble again.

Our relief that the flu unfairly named for pigs looks much less deadly than first suspected should not stop the government from instituing some common-sense policy changes that will help slow the spread of such disease in the future. the board says, such as requiring employers to provide paid sick time to every employee so that people in contagious phases of illness will stay home. And the board takes a moment to envy the French who not only eat more brie, drink more wine, stay slimmer and work less, but also get more shut-eye. At least, that's what we think they meant when they said they sleep more.

On the other side of the fold, a pediatrician and a professor of education urge voters not to approve Proposition 1D, which would cut funds for pediatric medical care and preschool for the youngest Californians. Former Times columnist Mike Downey mourns the loss of L.A.'s collective baseball happiness this season after Manny Ramirez was suspended for 50 games, discipline for taking a banned female fertility drug.

He apologized to everybody in Southern California except the octomom, the topless Miss USA contestant, Steve Lopez and the dude with the cello.

And Kapil Komireddi, an Indian writer whgo specializes in South Asian affairs calls on the U.S. government to safeguard Pakistant's nuclear weapons arsenal as well as offer the country humanitarian aid.

Credit: Lisa Benson / Washington Post Writers Group

... and other things to get your mind off swine flu.

In today's editorial pages, The Times editorial board examines President Obama's attempt to triangulate on torture. Our conclusion: We can't close this chapter in history without reading it first.

It's now clear that if the country is to move beyond what the president called a "dark and painful chapter in our history," there must be a credible and comprehensive accounting of what went wrong and a serious study of whether the architects of the Bush policy violated the law. Equally important is the need to move strategically to secure two sometimes conflicting goals: punishment for any official who knowingly broke the law and accountability to the public.

On another front, the board builds on its Sunday endorsement of five of the six measures on the May 19 special election ballot by drilling down into Proposition 1C, which would revamp the California Lottery and get some cash out of it without waiting for the state's numbers to come up.

We're not enthusiastic about giving lawmakers the power to borrow against every penny of lottery revenue in perpetuity, because we fear that's what they will do. But if the spending caps in Proposition 1A work as advertised -- admittedly, a big if -- there will be less financial pressure on the state to sell another round of lottery securities after the first one is paid off.

On the Op-Ed page, we're back to torture, this time in a piece by author and KNBC news producer Frank Snepp.He knows what he's talking about. Snepp was a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the war, and by his own account he put his soul "at extreme peril." He draws a link between his actions and those of the Bush administration at Guantanamo.

Controlled brutality is a slippery slope, and once you pass through the moral membrane that should contain our worst impulses, it becomes so very easy to rationalize another step, and yet another, in the wrong direction.

Also in Op-Ed today: Molecular biologist Henry I. Miller chides government for standing in the way of what he claims is one rational and useful response to drought -- gene-splicing. And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes apart Texas Gov. Rick Perry's flirtation with secession.

Photo of Camp V at Guantanamo Bay by Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty Images