In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, race. Aren't we past all that? No. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court wants us to be.

But it's not clear how long this conservative court will hold off. In the Austin case, the court noted ominously that "we are now a very different Nation" and hinted that a new look at the constitutional issues surrounding race might be coming. In the New Haven case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court "merely postpones the evil day" when these issues will be taken up.

Your editorial writers also find themselves wondering what the folks at the Orange County Museum of Art were thinking when they flouted art-world protocol and did a quickie and quasi-secret sale of California Impressionist works.

Though OCMA officials may have meant well -- and Szakacs is a respected director who deserves credit for returning more than 3,000 works to the Laguna museum -- they have done their institution few favors with the sale. At least one museum in addition to Laguna's is miffed at not being offered a chance to outbid the mysterious buyer.

Lots to think about on the Op-Ed side today. Start with Times columnist Meghan Daum's look at Sarah Palin's resigna... -- no, wait! Come back! This is new and different! There's some good stuff here -- Daum checks out Palin through the lens of her Christian conservative Palin-fan friend, and offers some insight:

* Photo: Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images

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:

Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.

We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.

And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.

Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.

The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.

And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.

* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times

On the Op-Ed page today, John P. Hannah, security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney during President George W. Bush's second term, evaluates whether Iraq is ready for the looming withdrawal of U.S. troops from its cities. His conclusion is that President Obama is effectively giving up on Iraq before the job is done:

While Hannah argues that Obama's focus in the Middle East has shifted to Iran and he'd rather be done with Iraq, isn't the pulling out of troops and the handing of power to a government we helped build part of getting the job done? Even Bush was not planning on staying in Iraq forever, but that's the track we've been on since the 2003 invasion. Retreating our troops so the Iraqi police can take over the security of Iraqi cities may be the right step to the conclusion for which Hannah is calling.

Criminal Justice Professor Eric J. Williams writes to another aspect of the Bush administration's legacy: Guantanamo Bay. Williams specifically responds to the surprise expressed by many Republican politicians over a myriad of rural towns asking for the Gitmo detainees, as prisons have become an economic remedy for such towns that have lost staple industries.

The two other Op-Eds today offer more hopeful ruminations.

The long-distance reporting about Michael Jackson’s death, and the swarm of press people soon descending from elsewhere, inevitably made for some goofy geography. The mansion Jackson rented was in Holmby Hills, but who in most of the rest of the world knows Holmby Hills?

So the exact location of the Jackson house that appeared on the TV screens and Web sites ranged and changed, almost all over the map. It was the broadcast version of rushing frantically, like Keystone Kops, from Bel-Air to Hollywood to Los Angeles to … what’s that place again? Holmby Hills?

The default assumption by some out-of-towners seemed to be that a) all rich people live in Beverly Hills, and b) Michael Jackson was rich, therefore c) Michael Jackson lived in Beverly Hills.

L.A. is so vast that even some residents admit they don't know what city they live in. Even harder for outsiders to appreciate is just how much territory L.A. actually encompasses, from poor neighborhoods of the northeast end of the San Fernando Valley, to the harbor at San Pedro, to Holmby Hills, which is just one more neighborhood -- albeit a very rich one -- within the limits of the City of Los Angeles. Would it help to know that Walt Disney lived there? Or this hint -- the Playboy Mansion is there. But Beverly Hills, its own city, is not part of the city of L.A. Perfectly clear now?

Our elusive geography makes for some amusing mistakes. After the space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force base in October 1994, the New York Times headline was "After Detour to California, Shuttle Returns to Earth." The newspaper’s magazine asked a month later whether the new place to rival New York’s 42^nd Street as a world capital could be ‘’the intersection of the Hollywood and Santa Monica Freeways.’’ Maybe -- if that intersection existed. (The closest you could suggest to it is the East L.A. interchange, where, somewhere in the complex, the 101 Freeway slides into the Golden State/Santa Ana Freeway, the 5, as the San Bernardino Freeway takes flight to the east -- but not to the west, to Santa Monica.)

The most egregious Michael Jackson geo-error of the story: A colleague watching one of those instant canned network documentaries the night of Jackson’s death heard Neverland Ranch, in Santa Barbara County, relocated by the magic of network television to ‘"Northern California."

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 Op-Ed page revisits the turmoil in Iran, with Stuart A. Reid, an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, endorsing President Obama's "muted response" to the regime's blatant election-stealing. Reid's piece offers a counterpoint to yesterday's Obama-torching column by Jonah Goldberg, but he appears to have been overtaken by events -- note how the president sharpened his rhetoric Tuesday, possibly after considering Goldberg's ever-helpful words of advice. Meanwhile, columnist Tim Rutten writes about the "hybrid journalism" coming out of Tehran, i.e., the blend of grass-roots reporting and professional analysis. It's a perceptive piece about the impact of new technologies for gathering and sharing information, especially coming from a guy who neither blogs nor Twitters.

Elsewhere in Op-Ed, journalist Harold Meyerson promotes the indefensible position that the federal government should bail out California:

The feds should approach California as they did General Motors -- demanding a fundamental restructuring of state finances as a condition for loans. In return for proffering, say, $8 billion in loans, the White House should demand $8 billion in tax hikes and $8 billion in cutbacks. It should also demand changes to the state's Constitution that would upend California's dysfunctional system of finances, sweeping away the two-thirds requirement for passing budgets and raising taxes, restoring local governments' ability to fund themselves through property taxes and putting a stop to budgeting by initiative. The feds' loan could be conditional on the state's voters ratifying these changes in November.

Jeez, where to start? Do we really want the Treasury Department deciding the appropriate mix of tax hikes and spending cuts? Should Tim Geithner hold an $8 billion gun to the head of California voters, insisting they abandon the major provisions of Proposition 13 as well as the potential for future initiatives about government funding? And if this is such a good idea, shouldn't Meyerson be just as comfortable if a Republican administration in Washington were setting the terms? (For the record, the Times' editorial board has already weighed in against even a limited a federal bailout.)

Finally, baseball historian Zev Chafets sees trouble ahead for the Baseball Hall of Fame in the eligibility of numerous star Latino ballplayers who've been tarnished by steroid allegations.

On the editorial page, the Times board blasts a bill in Sacramento to increase the maximum payday loan from $300 to $500, and bemoans how a dispute over gun control has derailed a bill to give the citizens of Washington, D.C., a voting member in the House of Representatives. It also welcomes the full attention of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa back to our fair city (for the second day in a row!), just in time to deal with a thorny budget problem and an electorate that wants more for less cost:

Three out of four Angelenos polled rated the city's budget difficulties as a serious problem, but majorities oppose slowing down police hiring, laying off city workers or raising fees for city services. Two-thirds oppose a tax hike to pay for fire services, and nearly 60% oppose increased taxes for other services.

But hey, that's why they pay the mayor the big dollars.

Photo: AP/ Jim Buell

The editorial board applauds Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's decision to stay in Los Angeles and forfeit a gubernatorial run (in 2010, at least), calling the decision a second chance for both the newly re-elected mayor and the city of Los Angeles to "prove they were right for each other":

Voters elected Villaraigosa in 2005 in the belief that he would do that. They reelected him -- a smattering of them did, anyway -- this year in part because their mayor was so skilled at getting the most viable challengers not to run. The city now wrestles with a palpable disappointment in Villaraigosa, not just because of budget woes or bad schools but because of his failure to live up to expectations that he helped to inflate. That's a hard way for a mayor to enter a second term. Still, we credit him for deciding to enter it with both feet, instead of one pointed toward Sacramento.

The editorial board also supports President Barack Obama's continued prudent response to the increasingly violent Iranian protests and his refusal to make any strong statements toward the government or the opposition:

A fraught U.S.-Iranian history argues against more direct intervention, starting with the U.S. role in overthrowing elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, and including U.S. support for the shah over the revolutionary forces that brought the Islamic government to power in 1979. Add in the subsequent hostage crisis, plus decades of mutual hostility over regional conflicts and nuclear weapons, and it becomes clear why more forceful action from Obama could backfire. He must continue to protest the bloodshed, but he cannot hand Iranian hard-liners a stick with which to beat the opposition.

And the board welcomes the U.S. Supreme Court's upholding of a key provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the notion of pre-clearance, meaning that states and localities with a history of abridging the right to vote must get clearance by the federal government before changing their election laws.

On the Op-Ed side of the fold, one finds a different take on many of the same issues. Politico-turned-academic Dan Schnur, while not surprised by Villaraigosa's decision not to run in the governor's race, said he expects the mayor to run for the U.S. Senate in 2012. Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that Obama cannot win with his stance on Iran and must give up his "ideological" approach:

As an unnamed Iran expert in contact with White House officials told Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen, "Obama is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological.... He wants to do some stuff in the Middle East over the next eight years. He may not be able to achieve half of them unless he gets this huge piece of the puzzle [Iran] right."

Finally, author Greg Critser warns of the dangeous effects of air pollution not just on heart and lungs but also on brain and fetal development. A solution? Researchers are working on it, Critser writes, but in the meantime, government should enforce the new regulations on truck exhaust as well as those that require improved filtering systems in schools, and map "emissions hot spots" in Los Angeles so people know which areas to avoid.

Putting more than full term's worth of speculation to rest, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced this afternoon that he will not join state Atty. Gen. (and former two-term governor) Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in seeking the Democratic Party's nomination in 2010 for California governor. Having grown up in Southern California, I can't help but point out the most profound implications of Villaraigosa's decision: The 2010 gubernatorial will lack a viable candidate from Southern California (Newsom's fealty to the Bay Area is obvious, Brown was Oakland mayor from 1998-2006, and Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are both techy gazillionares from the Silicon Valley.) Perhaps we should ask the candidates to promise not to chant "Beat L.A.!" at Giants-Dodgers games.

Apologies; I had to get that out of my system.

There's been much speculation on our pages -- online and in print -- about Villaraigosa's extra-mayoral ambitions. A few days before the mayor was re-elected to his second term in March, Marc Cooper implored Villaraigosa to "unequivocally declare he will absolutely, positively not run for governor next year," a position echoed by The Times' editorial board in its endorsement of the mayor for a second term. Weighing on the other side was former state Sen. Tom Hayden, who wrote that in a race against Brown and Newsom, voter demographics favor Villaraigosa. Later this afternoon, The Times will post its editorial on the announcement, in which the paper's editorial board reacts favorably to Villaraigosa's decision.

What do you think about the mayor's decision to stay in L.A. (for now, anyway)? Take our poll, leave a comment or both.

UPDATE: The Times' editorial is up; click here to read it.

Photo: Stephen Dunn / Getty Images