Columnist Jonah Goldberg foresees clouds ahead for the Democrats -- in fact, a coming storm so severe that it could end Democratic control of Congress. It's building from the Tea Party movement, which Goldberg sees as an heir to the Ross Perot third-party movement of the 1990s. "If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can't even see."

Also on today's Op-Ed page, scholar Giles Dorronsoro explains why U.S. attempts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas in the south and east are probably doomed to fail. And ACLU National Security Project chief Jameel Jaffer decries an attempt by Congress to circumvent the courts by giving the secretary of Defense the power to withhold photographs of combatants "engaged, captured or detained" by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

On the Editorial page, The Times weighs in on Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's policy change on medical marijuana. Though we're happy that federal prosecutors will make marijuana cases a low priority in states like California that have passed laws approving its medicinal use, we think that's the wrong approach. The administration shouldn't be picking and choosing states in which to enforce federal law -- rather, it should de-emphasize medical marijuana cases in all 50.

We also note that the best place for local health departments to conduct swine flu vaccinations is at public schools -- yet that's not where the inoculations will take place in Los Angeles, thanks to a failure by the school district and the county to properly coordinate.

And we muse on the bizarre spectacle presented by Colorado's Heene family, accused of perpetrating the "balloon boy" hoax in an attempt to drum up publicity for a reality show. "As much as some people will do just about anything for a Hollywood contract, a good number of the rest will lap up the juicy story of their wrongdoing. In reality, perhaps we all get what we wanted."

Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times

Inasmuch as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems incapable of embarrassment at its own actions, I’ll have to do the blushing by proxy.

 

My colleague Garrett Therolf is one of the two or three reporters left who regularly covers the five enormously powerful supervisors and county officialdom. As he reported, even those few are too many for the Supes: they’re being banished from the hallways and back rooms where they have been able to buttonhole the county officials and department heads who buzz about there.

 

The reason for the ban?  Those two or three reporters are creating human ‘’traffic jams.’’

 

The noive. The sheer brass.

 

The county’s backstage is chock-a-block with, as Garrett wrote, ‘’the lobbyists, union representatives and other advocates’’ to whom the memo did not apply....

For the past four years, this nation has waged a sporadic, passionate, hyperbolic debate over how to respond to the presence of millions of people living and working here illegally. That debate has scrambled partisanship -- President Bush was among the foremost advocates of comprehensive immigration reform, joined by Wall Street conservatives and Democratic liberals and opposed by populist conservatives and organized labor. It has featured much rhetoric and anger but precious little of what is most needed: balance.

The need for moderation on this issue -- which for the moment is waiting in line behind healthcare reform and global warming on the ambitious agenda of the Obama administration -- is underscored by a predicament facing Los Angeles County. On one hand, the county’s law enforcement agencies need the cooperation of illegal immigrants to identify and prosecute crimes; no one benefits if people who are in the country illegally are so afraid of the police that they refuse to turn in criminals or resist testifying. At the same time, some of those who enter or stay in the country illegally commit other, more serious, offenses while here, and they deserve aggressive investigation, prosecution and, if convicted, expulsion.

For the debate to progress, those who are angered by the presence of illegal immigrants must acknowledge that draconian enforcement of immigration laws can harm the rest of society, while those who sympathize with immigrants must acknowledge that some deserve to be deported and that every nation has the right to protect its border.

These tensions are highlighted in the latest report on the county jail system by Merrick Bobb, a special counsel who monitors the Sheriff’s Department for the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. It documents the struggles of sheriff’s officials to equitably distinguish between serious offenders and those whose only crime is illegal entry. It recognizes the value of deporting dangerous criminals, while cautioning that the county should not take on the job of enforcing federal laws. It credits the department with managing a clean, well-run detention center in Mira Loma, while warning against turning a facility that houses many asylum seekers into a jail, where those inside lack contact with families and limited access to judges.

Bobb’s report makes a number of recommendations for preserving and extending the protection of those who fall within the country’s custody. These recommendations deserve attention and action by the Board of Supervisors. But in a debate too often characterized by cries of racism, by shouted accusations on the floor of Congress and shrill opprobrium from both sides, the report’s most valuable contribution may be to stand for balance.

-- Jim Newton

Photo: A Los Angeles County Jail officer interviews an inmate about his immigration status. Credit: Brent Foster / Los Angeles Times.

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

Spare a merciful thought, please, for the wild creatures that have suffered so much in this fire, as in all such disasters. They have no evacuation centers, nowhere to go out of the juggernaut of fire that drives them into the concrete spaces that once were not concrete at all, that once belonged to them and their kind.

As my colleague Louis Sahagun wrote of the scene near Mt. Wilson, the charred bodies of squirrels lay at intervals along the roadside. A state forestry captain and his team came across a bunny with a broken back, and put the poor thing out of his misery. Disney, so protective of its images and copyright, laudably allowed Bambi -- made motherless by a hunter's bullet and homeless by a wildfire -- to be used in public service TV spot airing and again this week about preventing forest fires.

A friend in the northern part of Los Angeles County reports deer and coyotes showing up, timid and frightened and forlorn, in her garden, forced by fire from their coverts. Someone told me about a black bear in a store parking lot, and I can only hope that locals and rangers understood his fear and did him no harm.

When the fires come, I can never get out of my mind a poem by Robinson Jeffers, the California bard, who wrote this about our dispassionately apocalyptic fires and their innocent, mute victims. Having read it, you may never be able to forget it, either, nor should you. It is called ''Fire on the Hills.''

-- Patt Morrison

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men. 

Photo: A deer walks through charred forest on Mount Gleason in the Angeles National Forest on Aug. 31. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

I headed off to bed on Monday night hoping that the smoke I was breathing and the ash that was accumulating on my car's windshield did not come from any smoldering ruins of the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Much is being made of the radio and TV towers there -- important, certainly -- but the observatory is irreplaceable, a shrine of science past and science yet to come. It is more than 100 years old, its telescopes marvels of astronomy in their times. Its scientists recorded first upon first -- that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy, and that we are not even at the center of it. The first measurement of a star's diameter -- Betelgeuse, as it turned out -- and other firsts beyond my understanding but not beyond my appreciation.

There is an old cane chair at the observatory; Edwin Hubble used it on those cold, cold nights when he sat peering through the eyepiece of a telescope. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited and sat in the same chair. And a few years ago, when I was reporting from the observatory, the staff kindly let me park my rear end on the same hallowed chair. The connection with vital and significant human history -- even via my fundament -- was profound.

I wondered, as the reports of fire on Mt. Wilson became more fearsome -- and where, as a fire official told The Times, ''the fire is boss'' -- what had become of the chair. Had it been evacuated early Monday morning, along with the personnel? The superintendent, Dave Jurasevich, told me on KPCC radio that the chair had been sealed away tight in a special stay-and-defend vault at the observatory, and should survive whatever the landscape chooses to throw at the place.

Which, as of late Monday night, was an awful lot for a centenarian observatory to handle.  

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: The Mt. Wilson Observatory in 2002. Credit: Kevin Casey / Los Angeles Times.

After at first refusing to leave their homes during the evacuation of Gold Canyon, five residents are now asking to be rescued. Right now that's not even a possibility, but fire crews are looking for ways -- or a change in conditions -- that might make rescue possible.

Situations like this crop up in many fires. People feel that they can save their homes; after all, no one will try as hard as they will to keep the flames at bay. But what should this mean in a mandatory evacuation? Should people be allowed to stay? And if so, should fire crews try to bail them out when things get tougher than these stalwart -- or simply stubborn -- folk anticipated?

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

Anytime I'm in the car and there's a fire in these parts, I've gotten used to (metaphorically) twirling the radio dial, AM and FM, searching for news flashes.

So, flash this: KFWB, once the other all-news AM station in LA, is reinventing itself after four decades. It’s been carrying weekend infomercials and advice for some time now, and in about a week’s time, it will pretty much give its weekdays over to talk radio.

In its earlier news days, KFWB came off as the scrappy little news station. Unlike KNX, which was rooted in its network broadcasts of national and international news from CBS, the "Tiffany network’’ of Murrow and Cronkite, KFWB seemed to my ears to be entirely local in reporters and outlook. Sure, it was owned by Westinghouse, but “Westinghouse’’ made me think of appliances, not network journalism. Some of its reporters had the distinctive voices I associated more with character actors than news reporters, like Cecilia Pedroza, and Gary Franklin (sign-off: "Gary Franklin … Car 98 … out.").  

Westinghouse took over CBS radio nearly 15 years ago, yet the two local news stations still battled away at each other. Until now.

Even though I knew the change was coming, not hearing KFWB on the air reporting from the fire-lines was a bit of a shock to my Angeleno ears. Even the veteran KFWB newsman Pete Demetriou, without whom no brushfire or police chase feels complete, now signs off with "KNX."

As of September 8, it'll be a different KFWB, with some local news but a lot of conservative talk radio and KFBW’s new star, national radio fixture Laura Schlessinger, the popular advice and counseling host better known as "Dr. Laura." Angels baseball still rules at game time, at least through the season.

By which I mean the baseball season, not the fire season.

-- Patt Morrison

Today's Times editorial page tells FINA to get a grip. Or, rather, loosen its grip. FINA -- that's Fédération Internationale de Natation Amateur to you -- is the body that governs competitive swimming, and it recently said non to the high-tech, full-body polyurethane suits that have helped swimmers set new world records. Don't fear the modern world and its innovations, the editorial says:

But short of a swimsuit fitted with motorized propellers, or high-jump shoes soled with rocket boosters, there's little reason to reject improved design and materials based on skittishness about the records set and broken in seemingly less time than the 20 minutes it takes to don one of the new swimsuits. Fans like to compare performances of the past with those of the present. Who's the greater golfer, Tiger Woods or Arnold Palmer? Sporting events should be a contest among athletes, not between current athletes and the ghosts of athletes past.

The editorial page also says it's high time for Los Angeles to weed out the medical marijuana joints ... sorry ... dispensaries ... that can't or won't abide by reasonable restrictions. Like not being next door to a school. Or a bong supplier: "If the city doesn't regulate its dispensaries, there's a chance the Drug Enforcement Administration will, with results many Californians would rather avoid."

The page also raises a glass to President Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the guy who arrested him, Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley. See, they're having a beer in the White House today to talk over old times ("Dude, remember that time you came to my house, and I yelled at you, and you arrested me, and the president took my side, and then he backed down? That was cool."). We don't deal with the fact that the president's beer of choice, Bud Light, is now foreign-owned.

OK, turn the page. Op-Ed leads off with Israeli blogger Yisrael Medad and his observation of a Jewish day of lamentation -- and his assertion that the U.S. stance toward the status of Jerusalem has created "another lamentable situation between the two nations."

UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, a persistent thorn in the side of cities trying to "clean up" homelessness rather than help the homeless, takes on Santa Monica for its aggressive enforcement:

The city's budget documents praise "the rigid enforcement of laws and ordinances to discourage" what it calls "encampments." The budget included $250,000 for "homeless intervention" but also $240,000 for a panhandling education campaign, presumably to reduce giving to people perceived to be homeless. And last winter, Santa Monica closed pickup locations from which homeless people could get to cold-weather shelters in adjacent cities.

Read previous Blasi Op-Ed articles in the Times here.

And Jersey girl Meghan Daum compares her state of birth with her new home. Is L.A. New Jersey West?

And yet it's also the way both places are blessed with a commendable lack of smugness about themselves. Just as New Jersey lives in the shadow of New York and Philly, Southern California is forever contending with the sanctimonious posturing of Northern California. We are perpetually being told our coastline isn't as dramatic and our populace not as literate. San Franciscans refer to their town as The City and do a lot of chest-thumping about how the taxi drivers quote Rilke and the sourdough starter dates back to the Gold Rush.

You know, Meghan, the West Coast has the sunshine.

But, I guess, down on the shore everything's all right.

Photo: Martin Bureau / AFP / Getty Images

In Wednesday's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, California finally has a balanced budget! Sort of. OK, not really. Fine. Not at all.

That sort of delayed reckoning and outsourced accountability should not be portrayed as forward momentum. The state should not try to take credit for solving the budget problems when in fact it has merely foisted its problems onto local governments. There is no separation, in the minds of voters or in the pangs of those most in need, between state and local government. We'd prefer a little more honesty from both the Capitol and the many city and county halls, all of which should acknowledge that their budget woes are but two sides of the same worn coin.

Editorial writers also take note of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black man who was trying to break into the home of a famous Harvard scholar, best-selling author and professor. Good thing they caught him. The professor's name was ...let's see, it's here somewhere... Oh. Oops. It's Henry Louis Gates Jr. The editorial board writes:

The police say Gates asked if the officer knew "who he was." That may sound arrogant, but many a black man in the same position has asked a similar question. It means: "Can you see who I am, not just what I am?" Because regardless of their achievements, wealth or status, they are vulnerable to the universal black male experience -- finding themselves in handcuffs first and charges dropped later.

Times columnist Tim Rutten has a preview of Thursday's MTA board vote on whether to contract out Metro car construction to Italian firm AnsaldoBreda. David Wise catalogs the CIA's attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and perceived nuisances, and discovers that our spooks aren't very good at bumping people off. Finally, author Christopher Lane walks us through the changes in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, which have given us, among other things, Brooke Shields shilling for a liquid to combat the horrors of eyelash hypotrichosis.

But that's just our Opinion.

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP