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

When LA Times readers picked up their newspapers this morning, they were greeted on the front page by the dark, outsized image of a vampire with blood dripping from his mouth.  This striking picture advertised HBO's television series "True Blood" (the point being that the new season starts this weekend) and covered the entire page under the Times masthead.  The ad relegated the top stories of the day to a trivialized insert section. OK maybe trivialized is too strong a word, but the ad still pushed some boundaries. What did you think?

Tea, anyone?  During the week ending April 18, The Times received 669 usable letters, 322 of which were in our Top Five Topics.  More than 100 focused on last Wednesday's Tea Party protests.

• Tea Parties:  102 letters, reacting to Times coverage of the April 15 rallies, including this Op-Ed by Marc Cooper;
• Front page ad:  89 letters, most excoriating our newspaper for running a large advertisement for a new show on NBC on the front page. Also included here are a few letters about a Times ad for "The Soloist," based on the friendship between Times columnist Steve Lopez and musician Nathaniel Ayers;
• Pirates:  65 letters, responding to coverage of the pirate crisis off the coast of Africa;
• John Yoo:  37 letters, reflecting on this Op-Ed and this Op-Ed debating whether former Justice Department official Yoo -- one of the authors of the infamous Bush administration "torture memos" --  should or should not be allowed to teach law at Chapman University, where he's currently a visiting professor; and
• Rosa Brooks:  29 letters, commenting on the columnist's last piece for The Times and her new job at the Defense Department.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart. 

For more on The Times' letters process, visit our Letters FAQ online. 

In case you're wondering why you haven't seen your comment on this piece yet, it's not because we're censoring them. We typically approve 98% of the stuff that comes in, rejecting only things that are profane, threatening or hate speech. We get a fair amount of comments that include words not publishable in a newspaper, and we reject those out of hand. The other two categories, not so much. We also look askance at comments that insult other commenters without adding any substance to the conversation. Go ahead and insult the writer of the piece, that's fair game.

So what's the hold-up? There are two (robotically evil or simply human) forces at work:

1) Our publishing platform online is hideously slow and finicky. We'll approve comments, then they'll wait sometimes for hours -- literally -- to make it onto the page. I'd love to work with a better platform, but we don't have a lot of spare cash these days.

2) We don't monitor the comment boards around the clock. Sorry, but we just don't have the staff for that. I wish it could be otherwise, 'cause lots of people read and comment early in the morning or late at night, and we don't want to cut them out of the discussion. But for now, it least, it doesn't work that way.

UPDATED, 2:13 p.m. The cookies used by our site seem to freeze the comments counter at whatever level it was when you first hit the page. To see the latest comments, click on the link at the top labeled Discuss Article. There's still a time lag between when comments are approved and when they post, alas.

UPDATED, 5:03 p.m. Actually, to see the latest comments, you may have to clear your browsing history -- the temporary copies of the web pages you visit that your browser automatically saves. Go to the Tools menu in IE or Firefox and work from there. (You have to go the Options/Privacy submenu in Firefox to get to the right place.) Yes, that's a pain in the neck, and no, we're not trying to make it that way.

On Wednesday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that "we are a nation of cowards" when it comes discussing race, The New York Post published its now-notorious chimp/stimulus cartoon. Like many editorial cartoonists, Sean Delonas lamely juxtaposed a political story (the stimulus program approved by Congress and signed by President Obama) and a non-political  sensation (the mauling of a Connecticut woman by a chimpanzee, who was later shot to death by police). The cartoon showed two police officers, one with a smoking gun, looking at a chimp lying in a pool of blood. One cop says to another: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The connection between the stimulus bill and the chimp attack was tenuous and tasteless, but was it racist? In my previous existence as an editorial page editor, I spiked a few cartoons because of likely offense to a segment of our readership. I'm not sure I would have killed this one, at least on those grounds. To me it was obvious that the monkey was supposed to represent the Washington establishment that produced the unwieldy legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. If a weasel had been shot for attacking a woman, the cartoonist might have transformed him into a symbol of fiscal trickiness (instead of ape-like stupidity).

When I read that the cartoon was being denounced for representing Obama as a chimpanzee, my initial reaction was that the objection was preposterous. I was confirmed in that reaction when I heard that the Rev. Al Sharpton was calling for a boycott of the Post.

I raised the subject with other members of The Times editorial board and encountered a mixture of angeement and disagreement along with some insights that hadn't occurred to me. One colleague wrote: "Welcome to the brave new world . . .  Criticisms of the president are going to be interpreted as racist attacks (or, in the case of this cartoon, criticisms of policies the president backs are going to be interpreted as racist attacks, if the cartoonist is boneheaded enough to involve a monkey). I’m not sure what the solution to this is, except that critics are going to have to be more careful with their words and images. Ultimately, it may not be a bad thing, because it will lead to an ongoing dialogue about race and symbology. But it’s going to be ugly. . ."

Another colleague, an African-American, pointed me to some truly offensive images of Obama as a monkey, including an ad for a T-shirt showing Obama thinking about a banana. Her argument -- and not just hers -- was that the cartoon had to be viewed in the context of an ugly tradition of likening blacks to apes. She had a point. My problem wasn't with the idea that a cartoonist shouldn't depict the first black president as a chimpanzee -- though that fate befell George W. Bush -- but that it was a ridiculous reach to regard the chimp in the cartoon as an Obama surrogate, let alone an allusion to a racist stereotype. 

Which brings me back to Holder's speech. He's correct that lots of Americans (though not, fortunately, our editorial board) are shy about engaging in interracial discussions about racial attitudes. The hesitation obviously exists among both whites and blacks, but I'll mention an example of what Holder would call white cowardice.

Many white Americans believe that some denuciations of "racism" by figures like Al Sharpton are exaggerated and self-serving, but they won't say so. Sometimes such shyness stems from a laudable recognition that African-Americans have been subjected to so many real outrages that a false alarm here and there should be overlooked. But I fear that some of the silence reflects a belief that the sort of dialogue Holder was urging is impossible and that it's futile to try to convince African-Americans that one of their "leaders" is wrong.  That strikes me as more racist than a silly cartoon.

Eye-colored eyes, a McGough family feature

The Times' oped page ran a compelling article today questioning an offer by the Los Angeles-based Fertility Institutes to allow prospective parents to choose the "eye color, hair color and complexion" of their offspring. Using in vitro fertilization technology to ensure that your kids look like "The Boys from Brazil" is pretty creepy. But what struck me about the pitch for designer babies was the priority given eye color.

I have struggled for years to understand why the color of someone's eyes -- especially if it's blue -- looms so large in journalism, fiction and poetry. Sometimes blue eyes are a synonym for "Caucasian," as in "blue-eyed soul." More often, blue eyes are pulled out of the feature writer's tool box (a disturbing image) to tug at the heartstrings of readers....

When the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist underwent surgery for thyroid cancer in 2004, reporters who covered the court -- me included -- had to decipher an opaque press release about his illness. The release said that Rehnquist had been given a tracheotomy "in connection with a diagnosis of thyroid cancer." But it didn't specify the type of thyroid cancer, forcing reporters to conduct hurried surveys of cancer specialists willing to speculate about the seriousness of Rehnquist's condition.

A similar scavenger hunt occurred in 2007 when Rehnquist's successor, John G. Roberts Jr., suffered a seizure while on vacation. Doctors and journalists alike had to speculate about whether Roberts would be prescribed anti-seizure medicine.

Even so, Americans knew more about these episodes than they  did about the senility of previous members of the court until it was documented by the historian David Garrow.

Which brings me to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose surgery for pancreatic cancer was disclosed Thursday -- the same day it occurred. The statement from the court was brief but detailed, including the information that a "Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan revealed a small tumor, approximately 1 cm across, in the center of the pancreas."

As with Rehnquist and Roberts, Ginsburg was soon the subject of speculative news stories, but in her case there was less of a guessing game. That's as it should be. Justices are known for their love of privacy -- Justice David Souter once said that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body" -- but they're important public officials and the state of their health ought to be a matter of public record.

* Photo of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Getty Images

The Times editorial board was poised Tuesday to advise Tom Daschle to withdraw as President Obama's nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, but then Daschle mooted the issue by pulling his own ripcord. Undeterred, the board advises Daschle today not to let the door hit him on the way out of the Obama inner sanctum. Distinguishing him from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose payroll-tax problems drew a more forgiving response, the board writes:

The problem with Daschle’s nomination ... went beyond his tax returns. After losing his reelection bid in 2004, Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, spent four years doing what many former officeholders do: cashing in on his connections.

Tut tut tut. The board also pooh-poohs the latest hostage release by Colombia's FARC rebels ("a stunt") and urges the House of Representatives to approve a Senate bill to create 700,000 acres of new wilderness in California.

Over on the Op-Ed page...

Any promotion is good promotion, right? So we’d like to thank our friends out their in cyberspace who link to our humble newspaper -- even if the link-love is not always to promote our content, but to condemn it.

As Barack Obama took his oath of office last week, it seemed the whole world was watching the historic moment with bated breath. Then the flub heard around the world happened, and Patt Morrison took to cyberspace to share her thoughts -- and people were reading. FindLaw's Common Law blog discussed whether Obama should retake the oath and noted Morrison's inclusion of the not-known-to-most tidbit that the oath language prescribed by the Constitution does not include "so help me God." Ever since FDR's inauguration, presidents have simply volunteered the phrase themselves. Others referenced us for noting that the Constitution doesn't even require a president to take the oath. But they weren't the only ones to examine the flub.

If the infamous oath incident weren't enough to draw webbies to our blog, Michael McGough's odd discovery that Pope Benedict XVI has his own YouTube channel -- yes, it's true -- got us noticed.

And former Opinion staffer Amina Khan's July 2008 post on whether then-Sen. Obama's vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will come back to haunt him was a picked up recently by Under the Radar Media.

The Times' editorial page concludes its series on the Bush presidency with an editorial cataloging the outgoing chief's few successes and many failures -- such as his alienating go-it-alone response to post-9/11 terror policy and his self-fulfilling prophecy that Iraq would become the focus of the fight against terrorism.

Like the war that came to define it, Bush’s presidency conceivably could be viewed more favorably by historians than it is by the nation that looks forward expectantly to his retirement on Tuesday. But our verdict today is that, despite some important accomplishments, the Bush years were a time of squandered opportunities, shocking abuse of power and cynical abandonment of both legal principles and historical values.

The page also has some more to say about Jessica's Law in the wake of a report by a state panel that the law -- 2006's Proposition 83 -- doesn't work. We don't want to say "We told you so," but -- wait. Actually, we do want to say "We told you so." Because we did, here, here, here and here.

But when being right isn't enough, we can try for a bailout. USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director Geneva Overholser and former USC Annenberg School for Communication professor and former dean Geoffrey Cowan offer some ideas on how the government could help the newspaper industry, or at least journalism, catch up with the rest of the world.

Joe Hicks offers his take on the Oakland outrage against the BART shooting. And Gustavo Arellano fits Rick Warren into the long tradition of Orange County conservative evangelical Bible-thumping.

When Warren endorsed Proposition 8 last year, and seemingly endorsed bombing Iran when he told Sean Hannity that it was fine to punish "evildoers," he shed his sheep’s clothing and bared the conservative fangs long associated with Orange County, much to the detriment of his ecumenical standing.

Arellano says Warren "has the chance to redeem Orange County as a place not of avarice but of altruism, and to show that evangelical Christianity can come free of politicking and show genuine concern for all."

Photo: Ron Sachs/EPA