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

The Times editorial board is doing cartwheels over President Obama's order that the Environmental Protection Agency reconsider allowing California to set tough auto emissions standards -- but still doesn't think it goes far enough. What's needed now, the board says, is higher gas taxes. On the same theme, we're thrilled that Obama reversed President Bush's ban on funding for foreign-aid groups that perform or even mention abortion, but think congressional action is still needed to ensure the next administration doesn't change course again. And the board is appalled by the Supreme Court majority's decision in an Alabama search-and-seizure case, which will only encourage sloppy record-keeping by police.

Over on the Op-Ed page, Gail Javitt and Kathy Hudson point out that what nearly happened to President Barack Obama during the campaign -- when breakfast leftovers containing traces of his DNA were offered for auction on eBay, meaning deeply private information might have been disclosed to the public -- is becoming an increasingly common problem even for the non-famous, thanks to improvements in DNA analysis technology and the absence of laws on seizure and disclosure of genetic information.

Jean Ross, head of the California Budget Project, decries a Republican proposal to avoid future state budget impasses by putting a hard cap on annual spending. Such caps don't account for cost increases for services like health care or changes in demographics, and would result in permanent, draconian cuts in California services, Ross writes. And David Ambroz, a lawyer who was himself a foster child, is confused by "people who call themselves pro-family yet would prefer to see [foster] children bounce from home to home" than allow them to be raised by gay couples. Several states, most recently Arkansas, ban unmarried couples from serving as foster parents, largely as a way of keeping gays and lesbians out of the system. "Kids shouldn't become pawns in the nation's culture wars," Ambroz concludes.

* Cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

Drop that pencil! Before you fill out your absentee ballot, you should know about what's in Saturday's pages--a handy election recap that provides you with a quick, user-friendly guide to the major issues, state and in L.A. county, city and school district, on the November ballot. You'll get the Times editorial board's recommendations on how to vote, and why. Confused by the two alt-energy propositions? Wondering about the gamut of bonds, state and local? All will be made crystal clear, sort of. And if you prefer voting the old-fashioned way, this is a great editorial to clip and store in your wallet for your date with the voting booth.

Today's editorial page leads you to that recap with the last two endorsements on L.A. ballot measures. The editorial board registered a regretful No on Measure A, the tax to fund gang-diversion programs. Much as the money is needed, the city has yet to operate and effectively evaluate gang-diversion programs. Once we know the money will actually keep kids out of gangs, the board argues, it will be time to pass the tax. In contrast, the board gives thumbs-up to Measure B ...

The Times' editorial board and columnist Jonah Goldberg typically view the world in very different ways, but they see eye-to-eye today on the House vote against the Wall Street bailout plan. The board blasted the White House, top administration officials and congressional leaders for failing to sell the public on the urgency of the credit crisis and the necessity to take extreme measures. Goldberg spends a bit more time on the roots of the crisis -- not surprisingly, he sees regulatory excess where Democrats see regulatory failure -- but he, too, spreads blame widely for the plan's demise:

The bill failed on a bipartisan basis, but it was the Republicans who failed to deliver the votes they promised. Some complained that Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi drove some of them to switch their votes with her needlessly partisan floor speech on the subject. Of course Pelosi's needlessly partisan. This is news?

Elsewhere on the op-ed page, children's librarian and teacher Regina Powers laments the state public school system's fixation with rating books by how hard they are to read -- a straight-jacketed, enthusiasm-sapping approach to literacy. And Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute think tank, argue that Democrats hurt their own chances in November by heeding the greens' opposition to expanded oil drilling:

The most influential environmental groups in Washington -- the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund -- are continuing to bet the farm on a strategy that relies on emissions limits and other regulations aimed at making fossil fuels more expensive in order to encourage conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. But with an economic recession likely, and energy prices sure to remain high for years to come thanks to expanding demand in China and other developing countries, any strategy predicated centrally on making fossil fuels more expensive is doomed to failure.

The editorial board also welcomes Attorney General Michael Mukasey's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the decision by his, shall we say, detached predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, to fire nine U.S. attorneys. And it calls on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign four bills passed by the legislature: AB 2447, which would limit development in fire-prone areas; SB 974, which would impose a container fee at the ports to help clean up their emissions; AB 1945, which would bar health insurance companies from retroactively canceling policies to avoid paying for care; and SB 375, which would allow state transportation funds to support plans to limit sprawl.

Photo: Jin Lee/Bloomberg News

Lots of good stuff from the Opinion Manufacturing Division today: sex, spies, lipstick-waving crowds, affirmative action.... OK, so the last one is a little wonky. Let's start with scholar Ronald Radosh, an expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who discusses last week's admission by the pair's co-defendant that he and Julius Rosenberg were, in fact, Soviet agents. That acknowledgment, which has since been accepted by the Rosenbergs' sons, should put an end to the left's long-standing argument that the Rosenbergs were victims of government repression:

To many Americans, Cold War espionage cases like the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases that once riveted the country seem irrelevant today, something out of the distant past. But they're not irrelevant. They're a crucial part of the ongoing dispute between right and left in this country.

Doing his part for said ongoing dispute, columnist Tim Rutten throws an assortment of jabs at John McCain and Sarah Palin in the course of analyzing Palin's appeal. One factor, he said, is the celebrity politics that once helped Obama and now aids Palin:

Celebrities can be distinguished from candidates in a couple of ways. Candidates have a record to examine and a program to propose. Celebrities have a story to tell. In fact, a good story is the essence of celebrity.

Finally, Najmedin Meshkati and James Osborn, engineers and transportation safety advocates, say "human error" is too simplistic an explanation for the many fatalities caused by Metrolink collisions:

We need an overall shift in how we deal with rail design, construction, operation and regulatory oversight. We need to improve the safety culture of this industry and address human and organizational factors.

On the editorial page, the Times' board urges the State Bar of California to release the statistics it keeps on the performance of white and minority law school students. Sought by UCLA professor Richard H. Sander, the statistics may not prove his hypothesis about law school affirmative-action policies hurting would-be lawyers, but that's no reason to block the inquiry, the board argues.It also welcomes Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe's agreement to share power with rival Morgan Tsvangirai, even though the deal effectively blesses Mugabe's theft of the March election. And it says the bill passed by the House this week to expand offshore drilling is little more than political posturing:

In fact, increased drilling and exploration would have no short-term effect on prices and very little long-term impact. Federal legislators would be better off devising ways to get the government's full share of oil and gas royalties and cleaning up the Interior Department, including staffers' cozy personal -- and we mean cozy and personal -- relationships with industry representatives.

With energy (and specifically gas prices) playing such a big role in the presidential campaign, it's not surprising that a good chunk of the recently unveiled Republican Party platform is devoted to energy policy. And while most of the platform's directives are, as usual, a pu-pu platter of dripping red meat served up for the party's conservative base, there are signs that the threat of manmade climate change is starting to resonate even in the red states.

It's tempting to mock the GOP conception of going green. The platform is loaded with such howlers as,  "In the long run, American production should move to zero-emission sources, and our nation's fossil fuel resources are the bridge to that emissions-free future;" or, "No strategy for reducing energy costs will be viable without a commitment to continued coal production and utilization;" or, my personal favorite, this masterpiece of obfuscation, "In caring for the land and water, private ownership has been the best guarantee of conscientious stewardship."

But that's all pretty old hat. What should warm the hearts of environmentalists is that the GOP, whose congressional representatives have stridently fought against improved vehicle efficiency standards for the last two decades, now backs new technologies like lightweight composites that could dramatically improve mileage. The platform takes the courageous step of calling for an end to ethanol mandates, while saying we should hasten development of less-destructive alternative fuels like cellulosic ethanol. It calls for more energy-efficient buildings and appliances and backs "alternative" energy sources. That second part isn't quite as green as it sounds; the difference between "alternative" and "renewable" energy is that the former includes hydropower, which means damming more rivers, with all the environmental damage that entails. But the party is also getting energized by solar, wind and geothermal power and backs long-term tax credits to encourage them. That's progress.

* Photo by Al Grillo / AP

Oil -- what it costs and where it comes from -- is a front-and-center topic for Americans, and especially at this convention, where Sarah Palin is being cast as the governor who takes on Big Oil and taxes it until it cries ''uncle.''

Naturally, then, I'm surprised to see oil being literally thrown away here.

In the form of water bottles.

The plastic in water bottles comes from polyethylene terephthalate, which comes from crude oil. And we all know where oil comes from. It's where it's going that's the problem.

Americans use something above 40 billion plastic water bottles a year. It takes a million and a half barrels of oil to make those bottles, at a price of a hundred dollars a barrel.

And we throw away more than 75 out of every hundred bottles. That amounts to tossing out a million barrels of oil every year.

There are recycling bins every 20 yards or so here in the convention halls in St. Paul. But they're almost all empty. The trash bins, however, are loaded with discarded plastic bottles ... with throwaway oil, heading for the landfill.   

Photo of John McCain sipping from his campaign's supply of plastic water bottles (while campaigning in New Hampshire in January) is by the Times' Jay L. Clendenin.

We'll be hearing a lot in the next few days about all the things Sarah Palin brings to John McCain's campaign (anti-abortion cred, status as a reformer, magnet for angry Clinton supporters, yada yada yada), but there's more than one area where she'll do the Arizona senator more harm than good. The obvious one is that she's completely unqualified to be president if anything happens to the 72-year-old McCain, but the less obvious one is that her devotion to Big Oil almost makes Dick Cheney look green.

No Alaskan is really qualified to weigh in on the U.S. energy debate: This is a state whose government budget is almost entirely underwritten by oil companies, which send each resident an annual royalty check to boot. Palin gets some credit for rejecting the suspect relationships with oil companies that have brought down nearly the entire state's Republican old guard -- in fact, her meteoric rise from mayor of Wasilla, pop. 8,000, to the governor's mansion can be traced to the ongoing corruption scandal -- but that doesn't exactly make her a maverick. She is a stalwart proponent of drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge as well as stepped-up offshore drilling, while her major accomplishment as governor so far has been to make Alaskans even more reliant on Big Oil by increasing their "resource rebate" to $1,200 per household.

Even the environmentally challenged Bush administration is too tree-hugging for Palin, who sued the U.S. Department of the Interior for listing the polar bear as a threatened species. She doesn't deny that global warming is happening -- its effects are too obvious in Alaska -- but doubts that it has man-made causes. That doesn't just put her at odds with nearly every credible climatologist on Earth, it puts her at odds with John McCain. And her positions on drilling will only fuel the Obama camp's line that Republicans are too cozy with oil companies to end the country's petroleum addiction.

* Photo by Kiichiro Sato / AP

Hot-button issues dominate Thursday's Letters to the editor: offshore drilling off the California Coast, marijuana laws, global warming, developers and L.A. politicians, and abortion. 

Responding to columnist Jonah Goldberg's piece on Obama's position on abortion, Pasadena's John Rude writes that

...Goldberg seizes on the candidate's reluctant support of abortion as Obama's moral weakness. Wedge politics are the refuge of politicians (and columnists) who lack moral vision.  This is not Obama.

*Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Thursday's letters question the wisdom of a new test for college-bound 8th graders.  Melanie Rome, a college admission counselor in Tarzana, writes:

...the fact that the College Board has come up with yet another way to put pressure on students infuriates me.  If you think 13-and 14-year-old education-savvy kids haven't begun to worry yet about college, think again.

Writers also argued with a Monday op-ed that suggested gas is more affordable now than it was in the 1960s, and with the notion that artificial lawns are necessarily more earth-friendly than the real thing.  Thoughts on end-of-life care, worker's compensation, and building a footpath through the Cahuenga Pass, too.

*Photo: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News