Evan R. Goldstein writes an excellent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of George P. Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics whose theory of "frames" became very popular among the Democrats back when they were still failing. Now the Democrats are ascendant, yet Lakoff is oddly out of the winners circle. The basic dramatic structure includes a eureka scene:

In working out his theory, Lakoff found that people tend to vote not on specific issues but rather for the candidate who best reflects their moral system by evoking the right "frames." Consider the phrase "tax relief," an effective staple of the Republican lexicon. According to Lakoff, the word "relief" elicits a frame in which taxes are seen as an affliction. And every time the phrase "tax relief" is heard or read by people, the relevant neural circuits are instinctively activated in their brains, the synapses connecting the neurons get stronger, and the view of taxation as an affliction is unconsciously reinforced.

The hero's moment of hubris:

"When I entered the room, these senators got up and hugged me," Lakoff says. "It was an awesome situation."

And the tragic fall:

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the "neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings.

Did Lakoff's stock dwindle because he refused to become a Donkey Frank Luntz? Was he too eager to be the Donkey Frank Luntz? How did he end up drawing the ire of the good (Dust-Up contributor Marc Cooper), the bad (Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel) and the hairy (Harvard cognitive psychology prof Steven Pinker)? And where does Noam Chomsky fit into all this? Goldstein gets people speaking for all these positions and more.

I'm not so sure Lakoff's way of thinking is as dead as it appears. What made him a Democratic star was that in the early part of this decade the party went in for a particular brand of self-criticism, which involved convincing themselves that the real problem was in the packaging, not the product. That seems to me still operative: Barack Obama has channeled Thomas Frank's duped-yokel thesis effectively enough that it's clear he or somebody on his staff has read "What's the Matter With Kansas?" with care.

I think there are still plenty of Dems out there persuaded that if not for Karl Rove and his captains of consciousness (or more precisely, if only we had some new captains of consciousness), the American People would realize that taxes are a public good and private enterprise a necessary evil. Fortunately for those folks, in 2008 they may have gotten a pooch that can't be screwed.

* Update: Penultimate paragraph has been rewritten because reading it over even I couldn't understand what I was saying.

At the L.A. Times it often seems that the only kind of colleagues we have are former colleagues, so it's nice to see them turn up in the legitimate media. I couldn't decide whether the most accurate news story of the past month was The Onion's "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In" or The Onion's "'Time' Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece." But I've got to give the nod to the Obama media-crit article, because its roundup of journalistic talking heads includes one of our many former editors:

"The sheer breadth of fluff in this story is something to be marveled at," New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet said. "It's all here. Favorite books, movies, meals, and seasons of the year ranked one through four. Sure, we asked Obama what his favorite ice cream was, but Time did us one better and asked, 'What's your favorite ice cream, really?'"

Whole article. The Onion is a satirical newspaper, even though it is all true.

The New York Times reports recent financial numbers, and they're so horrifying I'm not even sure they're fit to print:

The June performance followed an 11.9 per cent decline in May advertising revenues, and suggested that an already deep erosion in newspaper advertising could be accelerating. Ms Robinson said the company would respond by raising newsstand prices for the New York Times from $1.25 to $1.50 per copy beginning in August, marking the paper’s second increase in a year.

That announcement came as the company reported that second-quarter profits fell 82 per cent to $21m, or 15 cents per share, compared with the same period a year ago, when it benefited from a $94m gain from the sale of television stations.

Excluding that and other one-time events, income from continuing operations was down 5.5 per cent for the quarter. Revenue fell 6 per cent to $742m.

We've got plenty of bad news of our own, and no shortage of people willing to beat up on us about it, but I spend most days paging through my stack of eight or 10 local and national papers, and they're all emaciated. Whether we're looking at “some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world” I can't say, but I sure wouldn't want to be working in an industry that's looking so...oh wait, never mind.

AP reports that the state parole board today ruled against letting the terminally ill former Manson family member out of prison during the final months of her life, as the editorial board urged last month. The board struck a careful balance between its official opposition to the death penalty and its belief that Atkins should stay incarcerated:

Our system of justice attempts three noble aims: punishment, protection of society and deterrence (some would add rehabilitation). Atkins poses no physical threat to society. Her sentence and time in prison undoubtedly have sent a deterrent message to any would-be Mansonite still lurking out there. And she may well have been rehabilitated: While serving her sentence, Atkins has written a book, explored religions, taught classes. Has she been punished? Yes, of course; 37 years is not trivial. But Atkins gravely wounded our collective peace, and society has the right, even the obligation, to exact vengeance. For some criminals, including Atkins, the crime is so great that the price should be imprisonment until death.

The editorial also noted that the board once broke its anti-execution stance by urging the death penalty be imposed on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. For more on the editorial board's death penalty stance, check out this Cold Copy, which takes up everyone from Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

*Photo of Susan Atkins in 1969, courtesy Associated Press.

Whatever else you may say about the L.A. Times and its personnel (and you've already said plenty), I think it's fair to say we're willing to take our lumps in public. Patrick Frey and Marc Cooper's Dust-Up on the future of the Times is winding up. Yesterday they hashed out the differences between ailing old media companies and never-better-served news consumers. Today, they joined forces for a beatdown of The Times so gleeful even I was tempted to circle the wagons in classic dinosaur media fashion. I resisted that temptation, so go and read it, and check out the whole exchange.

Tomorrow, Frey and Cooper will be addressing the possibility that maybe there's more life left in the old paper than people are letting on. I hope you'll tune in, and go on to explore the vast range of topics we've covered — from porn to steroids to dogs to outer space (but no porn with spacedogs on steroids; we're a family newspaper) — in the no-holds-barred arena of the L.A. Times Dust-Up. Thanks for reading and writing.

We hope you're enjoying this week's Dust-Up on the struggles of the L.A. Times.

Yesterday, Patrick Frey and Marc Cooper debated what's causing the paper's troubles.

Today, they take a look at what L.A. would look like without its largest paper. (Survivors, as Krusty the Clown once noted, would envy the dead.)

And tonight they will be part of a whither-the-Times roundtable on KCRW radio's Which Way, L.A.? with Warren Olney. The lineup will include L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton, Dust-Up participants Cooper and Frey and Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum's Emma Schafer, who has canceled her subscription. You can listen by tuning in to FM 89.9 or the KCRW site at 7:00 pm (Pacific), and/or listen to a recording after the broadcast at the Which Way, L.A.? page.

...featuring a command performance by one of Opinion L.A.'s own:

Huge raid targets gang: More than 500 agents storm an insular L.A. neighborhood in a federal racketeering case. By Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones and Molly Hennessy-Fisk

Justices slash Exxon Valdez verdict: Fishermen and others hurt by the oil spill are to share $507 million, a fraction of the initial punitive award. By David G. Savage

State acts to fight global warming: In a pioneering blueprint, the air board proposes to slash greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels. By Margot Roosevelt

Pastor rallies clergy against gay marriage By Jessica Garrison

COLUMN ONE: Do you take this stranger? A visit to India offers a new look at arranged marriage By Swati Pandey

Mandela condemns Mugabe By a Times staff writer

Inside Today's Times:

Hollywood items entering new stage: A touted memorabilia collection is moving to be auctioned.

A sub-prime day? Countrywide shareholders ratify its sale, and the state sues it.

Golfers, this section is for you: Get tips on your game and information on every public-access course in the Southland.

Various sundry bits of immigration news have slipped through Opinion L.A.'s fingers in the past few days, but let's start with today's hits. Fresh off the virtual press, The Times reports that a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department that sought to nix Special Order 40 has been dropped:

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu, granting a motion from the city and the ACLU, said the plaintiff failed to prove that "Special Order 40" was in conflict with federal laws that dictate the flow of information between local and federal agencies regarding people's immigration status.... [The plaintiff's] lawyers called Special Order 40 "essentially a 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy regarding illegal aliens." They said the policy restricts the LAPD's ability to share information with federal immigration officials -- a claim that city attorneys denied.

But even if Special Order 40 is here to stay, L.A. County jails are expanding immigration screenings (Special Order 40 does allow officials to question those accused of or incarcerated for a crime.) As The Times notes, officials have interviewed 20,000 inmates and had more than half of them referred for possible deportation. But even with five extra interviewers (for a grand total of 13), every foreign-born inmate can't be interviewed. And of course, people lie. As the story notes, referring to the case that launched the Special Order 40 scrutiny, even though the order wasn't to blame for the tragic murder:

Pedro Espinoza, an illegal immigrant and alleged gang member, is accused of killing high school football star Jamiel Shaw II in March, one day after Espinoza was released from an L.A. County jail. Espinoza wasn't red-flagged for an interview because he said during booking that he was born in the U.S., sheriff's officials said. A judge ruled last week that Espinoza would be tried for murder.

Meanwhile, advocates of stricter illegal immigration enforcement are doing what they can without a presidential candidate to guide them. The Times reports that they're focusing efforts on state and local governments (where a lot of enforcement measures have already passed). And they're taking it to the streets.

Finally, the editorial board has two immigration editorials today, see our previous post for more.

If you've forgotten Warren Swil's Op-Ed on the hidden power of Sleep Mode from back in October, here's a refresher:

In standby, a machine is not really turned off. It goes into a state of reduced activity that requires only minimal power consumption. The downside is that even at vastly reduced power levels, millions of machines running all day, every day adds up to huge amounts of wasted energy. With oil prices at record highs and the climate under threat from excessive consumption of fossil fuels, this is neither smart nor desirable.

It's not the tiny lights themselves that are at fault — they're a marvelous, energy-saving invention. Rather, it's what they indicate: a seemingly unstoppable proliferation of devices that siphon power even while not in use.

Wondering how to quantify "vastly," "huge," "excessive," "seemingly," and so on? Cambridge professor (and CalTech Ph.D) David J.C. MacKay is trying to do just that in his book "Sustainable Energy — Without the hot air," and he talks to the UK Register about the many alt.energy scenarios for which he's run feasibility studies. There's plenty of material here (and very little that will please the pro-wind, anti-nuke Times editorial board), but this bit tries to put the planet-destroying horror of VCRs that blink 12:00 into context:

MacKay tells The Reg that he was first drawn into this field by the constant suggestion — from the Beeb, parts of the government etc — that we can seriously impact our personal energy consumption by doing such things as turning our TVs off standby or unplugging our mobile-phone chargers.

Anyone with even a slight grasp of energy units should know that this is madness. Skipping one bath saves a much energy as leaving your TV off standby for over six months. People who wash regularly, wear clean clothes, consume hot food or drink, use powered transport of any kind and live in warm houses have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things.

Whole article here. Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.

Tomorrow is the summer solstice, or the first official day of summer (no, it wasn't Memorial Day, or whatever earlier spring day when Californians start dressing and beach-going like it's summer). For those of you sad sacks like me trapped in offices for most or all of today's long daylight hours, you can read what The Times had to say about the weather. Yes, weather was once a constant topic of editorials in The Times (now, it only makes the occasional appearance).

Check out our Cold Copy on California weather for some purple prose. A sampling of old-timey bigotry and weird science from 1909:

If any one is disposed to make an outcry about the only really hot weather of summer, take him aside and advise him to "keep cool." Really we ought to rejoice.... It is better than cold cream and enamel for my lady's complexion. It will bleach her out so that her cheeks will look like peaches and cream, the peaches unpeeled and glorious in their blushes.... Go to the nearest Chinese laundry and see wise John in his two white garments doing the "washee" as careless about the heat as you please.... If we eat here as we did in the cold lands where we were born, and do not exercise, the equable weather fails to open the pores of the skin, and the other organs are overtaxed..... Any wise and conscientious physician will confirm all this...."

Once you're finished reading editorials, get out there, take a book, cook some food.

We start the new Mailbag with two letters that continue the tradition of finding revanchist-counter-revolutionary-kapitalist-rentier assumptions lurking behind the language choices of the L.A. Times. Do these unravelings of our underlying mythologies reveal the unconscious bias of the Times, heightened sensitivity among readers, creeping carelessness with language, or something else? I'm just happy that people are reading carefully.

Replying to Megan McArdle and Ezra Klein's Campaign '08 Dust-Up, a reader in the Twin Cities detects the shadowy hand of the racetrack lobby:

Editor:
 
Regarding "Obamcainia" you write: "Megan McArdle discusses the McCain-Obama horserace with Ezra Klein."  Well I've got news for you.  It isn't a horserace.  And the fact that you and most other media outlets view and report it as such, is the primary reason why the political process has so tragically devolved in America.

BTW, how's circulation?

Lowest Regards,
Mark A Tarnowski
Minneapolis, MN

And from scenic Fort Myers, Florida, a language consultant has some hard words for Allen Jones' recent Blowback "Let nonviolent prisoners out."

"Building beds for the mentally ill is a fine goal" sounds more like a surrealist film than journalism. There is a tinge of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in it. Dali, Ernst. DeChirico, Bosch could probably have painted it well.

You transferred two metaphors to journalism that are not at home there, "building beds," a euphemism of state bureaucracies, and "the" mentally ill, an alley prejudice, the equivalent of "the" Jews in Mel's drunk mouth. The transfer is jarring.

Can you tell me what you were trying to paint with those words?

Harold A. Maio
Advisory Board
American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation
Board Member
Partners in Crisis
Former Consulting Editor
Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal
Boston University
Language Consultant
UPENN Collaborative on Community Integration of Individuals with Psychiatric Disabilities

We'll be back with more biased framing.

The construction of the Los Angeles Police Department's new headquarters, across Spring Street from the L.A. Times, has been a constant source of argument in downtown circles. Is it moving too slow or too fast? Is it a prime example of runaway costs or a model of smart architecture?

For me, the LAPD's next building has special meaning, because it was instrumental in the creation of our Blowback feature. Though we had used the web once before to get a response to an Opinion piece from the late Jack Valenti (the last true gentleman), it was the brouhaha between L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez and LAPD HQ contractor Ron Tutor that really proved the feature could work. After Lopez penned a column (now disappeared from the site) criticizing the project's leisurely pace, standing-around workers and rising expenses, I figured Tutor — who blew up on the phone with Lopez but seemed to have a coherent critique of the media that he was on the verge of expressing —  would be interested in replying. He delivered, a new feature was born, and you can judge for yourself how well Tutor acquitted himself.

I'm no fan of big, taxpayer-funded buildings under any circumstances, and I've seen a few workers standing around doing nothing (though no more than I see at any workplace, including my own), but I do have to say that for a building that's not scheduled to open until 2009, the LAPD headquarters already looks pretty impressive.

In fact, the only cause for alarm I found while skulking around the project and photographing odds and ends recently was that I briefly got a strong  sense of: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not Greg!"

Then again, don't we all (except for the Gregs among us) get that feeling from time to time?

I'm not sure what the standard of success is when measuring massive public construction projects paid for through our taxes in a city where even the dogs and cats are unionized. I'm not sure there can even be a standard of success in that environment. And I guess anybody would view with dismay a building that will end up blotting out the sun in your second-floor office. But from what I can see, when (or if) the LAPD building gets completed, it will be a pretty nice place to be a cop:

Former ambassador to the U.N. and current American Enterprise Institute fellow John R. Bolton calls Barack Obama naive in today's Op-Ed pages and predicts a Walter Mondale-style flaming defeat. Why? Because, he argues, Obama missed some key Cold War history lessons, particularly the way seemingly tiny threats can be proxies for the big ones. (Blowbacker Raoul Lowery Contreras made a similar argument, in response to J. Peter Scoblic's contrary claim that negotiation isn't appeasement.)

The piece drew hundreds of reader comments ranging the political spectrum. What did bloggers have to say?

Jason on PoliGazette says:

I am not going to argue that Bolton is completely wrong, but rather that he is overgeneralizing in an equally naive way. Bolton’s read on the origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis are in accord with Khrushchev’s own comments about his impressions of Kennedy, so it is not possible to claim that embracing negotiations will not sometimes be taken as a signal of weakness. But Bolton’s claim that any negotiations will be taken as weakness is going quite a lot further — way too far, in fact.

Michelle Malkin chimes in gleefully: "Bolton pins a great big MONDALE sign on him." She also refers to Bolton as "Stache" and does some anachronistic John Kerry-bashing....

So as I'm getting ready to vote this morning, I look through my pile of literature from the state and county to make sure the address of my polling place is the same as usual. The only current piece of mail I find is an absentee voter pack, which does not contain the address and which I then throw away. I head down to the usual polling place and find it's open for business.

But when they check me out on the rolls, I discover I'm marked down as the recipient of an absentee ballot, and thus ineligible for a real ballot. It turns out that the absentee ballot I threw in a dumpster an hour before was the only ballot I was allowed, and I was supposed to drop that off at the polling place. The kind folks at the polling place provided me with a provisional ballot and I was required to fill out a bunch of personal information, including the last four digits of my social. (Is there any activity left in America that does not require you to bear the mark of the beast?)

The trick is that I never requested a vote-by-mail ballot, and would never vote by mail under any circumstances. I vote out of a sentimental attachment to dying ways of life, for the tiny bit of satisfaction I get from taking the trip to the polling place, seeing all the earnest oldsters behind the folding table and going through the rituals of our democratic charade. What could be more pointless than voting absentee, where you miss out on the whole Four-Freedoms vibe of the activity? Today I even brought my camera to get some nice election-day pics, but since I remained the only voter in the Hollywood Neighborhood City Hall throughout my ballot brouhaha, that didn't amount to much. Still, here are some shots of folks hanging out in and around Hollywood.

My questions: 1) Why would I have received an absentee ballot when I didn't request one? The poll workers, who were pretty clearly hoping I would just leave, said it was probably a mixup. On the page that had my name, I and one other person had been marked down as having received a vote-by-mail ballot, so it doesn't seem to be that common to order them. (I wouldn't even know how to order one, let alone how to get off the vote-by-mail list that I seem to be on now.)

2) What are the odds that my provisional ballot will get counted? This is one of the lowest-impact elections I can recall, and as indicated above I'm not a big believer in elections, government or democracy, so I won't get exercised either way, but in her list of reasons for giving provisional ballots, Secretary of State Debra Bowen says I'm entitled to have my vote counted:

• Records indicate that the voter requested an absentee ballot and the voter fails to turn in the absentee ballot at the polls on Election Day. The Elections Official’s Office will check the records, and if the voter did not vote an absentee ballot, the voter’s provisional ballot will be counted.

Of course, that's if some sneaky dumpster-diver didn't grab my absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it sometime today! Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to commit vote fraud, but you never know. Did I mention that more people seem to be on bikes these days?

I love it when you can actually see in your daily life the evidence of one of these big news stories we're always writing about (oil price spike hits Angelenos hardest!). Maybe it's just my imagination, but traffic has seemed a lot lighter in recent weeks, and my slow route in this morning took me past hundreds of alt.transporation users:

See? It's the market, not smart growth or urban planning or any other government activity, that is actually getting people out of their cars. Which is another reason I have to keep harping about this ballot business. Election day is one of the few times that I actually get out and around in the morning, before reporting to the impenetrable fortress of the L.A. Times building. If I haven't got a polling place to go to, I'll be cutting myself off from the wellspring of my success, from the common man.

And speaking of the common man, that first picture above is several weeks old: The Bill Johnson poster became progressively more covered with graffiti and finally vanished entirely from its place at the corner of Beverly and Commonwealth. I wish I could say the graffiti indicated knowledge of our extensive Johnson coverage, but it was all just regular tagging.

Happy election day.

Media Matters reports that the L.A. Times was among many news outlets that have given readers only a partial view of John McCain's immigration views. Here's the gist from the self-described corrector of conservative misinformation in the U.S. media:

In reporting on Sen. John McCain's efforts to woo Hispanic voters, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Politico, and Reuters mentioned McCain's previous support for comprehensive immigration reform but did not note that he has since said he would no longer support a comprehensive reform measure he co-sponsored.

Now McCain's flip-flopping on immigration is a topic we report on with borderline obsessiveness at Opinion L.A., and in particular we watch for shifting definitions of "comprehensive" in the McCain vocabulary. I'd also note that McCain got a special grilling over the whole not-voting-for-his-own-bill topic at the Times-sponsored Republican debate this year. Nevertheless, Media Matters is correct that in the specific story it cites, Times reporters Maeve Reston, Noam N. Levey and Scott Martelle noted only that McCain "has a record of pushing immigration overhaul" in the context of describing his possible advantages in the Western states.

Does that even count as an oversight? As Swati Pandey notes in a blog post a few hyperlinks back, McCain has begun working the comprehensive angle back into the campaign, and the rightwing Republicans who make a point of publicly breaking with McCain have noticed that. In fact, McCain's effort to be seen as Latino-friendly is so critical to his Western strategy that to characterize him simply as somebody who has backed away from immigration reform seems to me to get the story especially wrong. He comes across as weirdly circumlocutory in that clip from the Reagan Library debate, but McCain has always described his decision to abandon comp reform with a sighing, world-weary, they-know-not-what-they-do tone. He's been fairly consistent in not claiming either that he's changed his mind or that he was always for tougher border enforcement; instead, he characterizes his shift as an acknowledgment of the expressed will of the American People, without ever specifying whether he agrees with that will.

You might say (OK, I might say) McCain has pretty deftly positioned himself to be seen as a pro-immigration candidate even though (or because) he pays conditional and grudging lip service to the restrictionists' concerns. Whatever your feelings on immigration, that would seem to be the more interesting story here than some imagined conservative misinformation campaign.

Is North Carolina the fat lady that sang for Hillary Clinton? The editorial board suggested that it's finally over for her, and L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks called it way back in March. The Hill reports that backs are turning on her. What are the other papers saying?

The Washington Post editorial board focuses on Barack Obama even as it comes to the same conclusion on Clinton:

Hillary Clinton may, as she promised yesterday, fight on through the next few weeks of primaries, but after her disappointing showing Tuesday she has no plausible route to victory. So Mr. Obama was sounding themes for the coming battle against John McCain.... These are familiar phrases by now, appealing but also insubstantial.

Its columnists Harold Meyerson and George F. Will agree...

European policy experts John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell look to 'The Godfather' for diplomatic pointers:

[Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather"] is also a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems and global power structure of our time. The don, emblematic of Cold War American power, is struck by forces he did not expect and does not understand, as was America on 9/11. Intriguingly, his heirs embrace very different visions of family strategy that approximate the three schools of thought -- liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism -- vying for control of U.S. foreign policy today.

Freelance writer Lionel Beehner has another proposal for smoother diplomacy: pronouncing foreign dignitaries' names properly. Columnist Tim Rutten tells an L.A. version of "A Tale of Two Cities," and contributing editor Erin Aubry Kaplan explores why poet and long-time Watts resident Eric Priestley is fighting City Hall to keep his home.

The editorial board praises a California Supreme Court decision voiding the death sentence of Adam Miranda, presses for a shield law, and says now isn't the time to scold Myanmar's leaders:

It has been clear for more than a decade -- and especially since last year's suppression of the would-be Saffron Revolution -- that Myanmar's odious junta cannot be shamed into reform. It is too isolated and xenophobic to worry about its image, too paranoid to learn from outsiders and too blood-drenched to believe it can survive any loosening of control over its hapless people. The contradictory combination of U.S. sanctions and an engagement strategy adopted by its neighbors has failed to produce any improvement. Attempts to use the catastrophe of Tropical Cyclone Nargis as leverage to pry open the country will almost surely fail as well.

Though the old jape "I thought he'd died years ago" exactly described my reaction to the death this week of LSD inventor Albert Hofmann, the news was moving nonetheless. First, because the Swiss chemist's death at the age of 102 provides yet more proof — along with the durability of fellow drug icons Timothy Leary (died at age 75) and William S. Burroughs (83) — that winners do use drugs and lead long productive lives. Second, because, as this Times obituary demonstrates, Hofmann was a far groovier figure than I had always thought based on my vague knowledge of his accidental discovery and the famous "bicycle day."

Read through the description of Hofmann's first full-scale trip, during which he believed at first that he was dying but went on to enjoy a pleasant experience, and you'll get a sense of what I've always thought was a great falsehood about acid: that there is some bright-line difference between a "good" and "bad" trip. I've never understood why you'd even want an acid trip without moments of agonizing panic and bottomless despair; it would be like food without seasonings. I'm not suggesting you eat the brown acid; in fact I'm not suggesting you eat any acid at all. But the need to go into the thing with an open mind and some commitment to remain analytical always seemed to me what made LSD so cool: It cuts through such meaningless distinctions as Hoosier/Hawkeye or Catholic/Protestant to reveal the most important distinction of all: curious/incurious.

Hofmann was also more credulous about the drug's spiritual properties than I had thought, putting him (whether he would have agreed or not) more in line with the Leary school of consciousness-expansion than the Ken Kesey school of fun and games.

The third school of thought, of course, is Joe Friday's, in which all trips are bad, and no discussion of LSD would be complete without a viewing of Dragnet's "Blue Boy" episode, which was to LSD prohibition what Exodus was to support for Israel. I hover among all three points: I never saw the point of taking all the fun out of a recreational drug with gloopy pseudo-religiosity, and there comes a point where the value in both fun and spiritual discovery starts to diminish in relation to the real or imagined dain bramage you're inflicting on yourself. Hofmann, like virtually everybody who takes acid, eventually retired from tripping. But his invention made the world a more interesting place. Good luck and happy trips to Rick Doblin and others who continue the research.

Either that or nobody can afford to take a day off in this economy. The May Day march is a total bust. People are finally starting to arrive (police estimate 8,500), but for most of the day It looked like Omega Man outside the L.A. Times building this afternoon.

Well, maybe it looked like Omega Man would have looked if Matthias and his followers had a Latin band and sold hot dogs wrapped in bacon. In fact, if you're around downtown, you may want to try and bargain down the price on some unsold bacon dogs. No matter how much you pay, you'll be participating in a crime, as this fairly stunning Drew Carey video about the war on bacon dogs makes clear.

Previously I noted what the editorial board said of the past two May Days. Today I'm going further back, when May Day was an occasion not for marches, but for labor-bashing, springtime celebrating, and making up new holidays.

On April 30, 1906, the board attacks French anarchists for subverting what would otherwise be a fine celebration of labor:

Every right-thinking man is sincerely desirous of increasing the earnings of the working classes...diffusing comfort, happiness and the sunshine of life over the very widest area that is possible. So when the artisans of Paris march by in peaceful parade, there are only hearty huzzas to greet their passing.
But the trouble lies in the fact that the annual demonstration has been seized on by those members of society who have the least right to call themselves honest workingmen. May first is the chosen day for the anarchists to display their red flags, and for the Socialists to declaim their subversive doctrines.

The following year, the board was a lot crueler:

This is the day that "organized labor" — that is, labor organized not to labor but to put all possible obstacles in the way of peacefully doing the work of the world — has selected as its own. This is the day the totemites have parades as an adjunct of strikes and general disturbance in the labor world....
[A]ll got together on May Day, and vied each with the other in the attempt to show who could make most noise, and show most contempt for law, for order, for industry, for any man's rights.

And it didn't end early in the century. On May Day 1962, the board declared in its editorial headline: "May Day is Law Day U.S.A." That designation — and the creation of a separate American Labor Day — is sometimes considered a direct rebuke to the worldwide celebration Labor Day on May 1. Americans had previously declared it "Loyalty Day" and "Americanization Day," and many presidents past (and one current) have underscored the point.

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Follow the link if you want to be truly bored. This is just to get our technorati profile up and running...

Tomorrow Thursday is May Day, which, depending on your leanings, is a pagan pole-dancing holiday, a day of labor solidarity against The Man, a day off for immigrants and their supporters, or some combination of all three, a grab-bag of un-American activity. (To the latter group, Happy Law Day!)

The last two May Days have been major events in Los Angeles. May 1, 2006 was the Great American Boycott, when legal and illegal immigrants were encouraged to stay away from businesses and schools. The editorial board raised some eyebrows by leaving blank the space where a third editorial would usually run on the page, printing only the words "Pass comprehensive immigration reform now." One million people were said to have participated, and almost all marches were peaceful and law-abiding.

Fast-forward to 2007: no immigration reform, and quite a bit of violence from the Los Angeles Police Department against protesters at MacArthur Park, some of whom threw sticks and water bottles at officers. The boards praised most marchers for a May Day well spent...

Columnist Rosa Brooks plays Hillary Clinton:

Thank you, Pennsylvania! What an incredible margin of victory you gave me! Ten percentage points over Barack Obama. Count 'em! Ten!

All right, 9.2 points if you insist on actually counting. But they said I had to win by double digits to keep my campaign alive, and I think 9.2 points counts as double digits. And I am alive! And kicking! And punching and biting and kneeing my opponent in the groin!

Contributing editor Arianna Huffington says only a media filled with self-loathing could hire the likes of former Bush rep Tony Snow. USC emeritus professor Robert E. Tranquada argues for an independent authority to oversea L.A. county health services. And columnist Patt Morrison reveals what she and other Angelenos would do with the city budget if they had their way. (Coffee poured by the mayor at the Getty House Bed and Breakfast, anyone?)

The editorial board praises three African countries that stopped a Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe, looks to a 1983 report on education for present-day advice, and looks beyond the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania:

The Democratic race only seems interminable; there will be a winner, and he or she will reconcile with the loser and call for party unity. If Republicans can withstand the abrupt alliance of Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, why shouldn't Democrats be united by an enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton by Obama, or vice versa? After all, for all the attacks, the two Democrats aren't far apart on policy.

On the letters page, readers take on the race, as well. Valley Village's Larry Margo has this to say to Clinton-bashers: "Quick! Stop her! Force her out before she wins again!"

Columnist Jonah Goldberg asks how neo the neocons are, economist Bruce Bartlett reveals the truth about GOP tax cuts, and attorney Zachary Bookman says that secrecy is back in style in the Mexican government. Finally, former Times staffer and rural Pennsylvania native Shawn Hubler profiles her home state's bitter bloc:

Had they heard much talk about Barack Obama describing rural Pennsylvanians as "bitter"? Not too much, but thinking about it made my mother laugh.

"Bitter?" she asked. "Well, yes, of course we're bitter. Who wouldn't be?" She giggled until she started to cough.

Here's what I've thought as I've watched my hometown -- and so many others like it -- materialize so improbably at the forefront of this election: As much as the truth may hurt, Obama was right. Maybe he overdid it a bit, but generally, people don't feel secure when you leave them behind.

The editorial board checks in on how Texas is deciding where to place kids removed from a polygamist compound earlier this month, and recaps the pope's trip to the U.S. The board also remembers Ruben Salazar, a one-time Times staffer and columnist killed during the East L.A. riots:

Journalism, by its nature, tends to focus on the immediate. Only a few of any generation leave a bold enough mark to be visible over generations. One such journalist was Ruben Salazar, whom we honor today as the United States Postal Service issues a stamp to commemorate his life and work.

On the letters page, readers react to Richard Dawkins' Op-Ed on intelligent design. Apple Valley's William S. LaSor says, "In the end, he, like everyone else, must confront one of two choices: Either the universe has always existed, or it was created by someone who has always existed. If the latter is improbable, as he claims, then why is not the former also?"

If you have read my Op-Ed on the Vermont/Manchester project (and of course, if you have not, what are you waiting for?), you may be interested in seeing just what the two-block battlefield looks like. The project area today is smaller by about 30% than what it was back in the 1996, when the Community Redevelopment Agency was given its mandate to develop the area. At the time, the project area included the 8300, 8400 and 8500 east-side blocks of Vermont Ave. Most of this area remains unbuilt since 1992, though there are a few strip-mall-type buildings in the area, and a much larger develoment on the 8300 block, about which more in a moment.

This is the view facing southeast from the corner of 84th and Vermont. The vacant lot and the strip mall to the right are now owned by Eli Sasson, who gained virtual control of the 8400 and 8500 blocks in 2005 and 2006.

If we turn slightly to the left, we see the L.A. County Department of Public Social Services building that now takes up the entire 8300 block. It was completed last fall. The L.A. Times' Roger Vincent had that story on September 28, though it has since disappeared from our site. (It's called "In South L.A., hope rises along with concrete, steel" if you want to look it up at your local public library.)

The DPSS building generated enormous controversy when it was being built: Local residents had long been agitating for a large retail development featuring a supermarket, a sit-down restaurant and chain stores. The news that one block of the site would be devoted to a welfare office (leaving two blocks that wouldn't support a very grand development) hit with a resounding thud. Community Coalition executive director Marqueece Harris-Dawson described the building to me as having been "shoved down the throats" of the community.

Nevertheless, L.A. leaders promised that giving this piece of the project over to the county building would be a catalyst for retail development, on the logic that it would bring free-spending county employees into the area during work hours. Vincent's story, for example, quotes Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., calling the building "a magnet for potential customers" that should "provide a solid customer base." Councilman Bernard Parks has made similar suggestions, and the building has definitely increased foot traffic in the area.

Elie Sasson played a supporting role in the DPSS saga too, which didn't endear him to the retail advocates. He sold off four lots on the 8300 block to ICO Development, helping give ICO site control of that block while buying out a handful of other owners in the other two blocks and getting site control (less his brother Joseph's lot) on those.

Sasson says that he too heard a lot of catalyst talk and made his series of sales and purchases only on the promise of CRA assistance with his development. He did enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the agency in 2006, but that expired last year without success. At the time, the CRA's regional administrator Ricardo Nogera minimized the expiration of the ENA, telling me the agency was close to moving toward a Disposition and Development Agreement with Sasson. Nogera left the agency shortly afterward, and his replacement Carolyn Hull would not characterize her predecessor's talks other than to say that they failed to produce a development.

The area already boasts a public building, the Constituent Service Center on the other side of Vermont. This picture shows the service center from across Sasson's lot. I was standing along some parking lots the CRA owns when I took this. These lots have factored into the story as well, since higher parking density allows more ambitious retail development. Sasson negotiated to buy the lots from the CRA, and he claims that he had an agreed-to deal with Nogera that fell through due to a technical snafu -- amusingly enough claiming the CRA failed to take out an ad in the Los Angeles Times in fulfillment of some open-bidding rule. CRA officials refuse to comment. For what it's worth, Nogera did tell me last year that he intended to "contribute" both lots to the project.

This 1992 photo by Robert Rubin, used here with his permission, shows the 8500 block being burned down in the rioting. 

Here's a view of the same block today. The corner lot, closest to us still belongs to Joseph Sasson, the brother with whom Eli Sasson has been in a long-standing disagreement.

Armchair shrinks, movie fans, L.A. billboard zealots and personal detractors, what does the following say about me?

The summer movie season is coming, and the neighborhoods are full of ads. I see them everywhere, sometimes for stuff I should theoretically be interested in seeing: I enjoyed 2.5 of the Indiana Jones films, enough so that a rote, lackluster, unimaginative, uninteresting marketing campaign should not keep me from wanting to see the fourth installment in the trilogy. I also find the idea of Bob Downey as Iron Man vaguely intriguing.

And yet the only movie I have any desire to see is Baby Mama. Let me rephrase: The bus posters for this movie are the only film advertisements around right now that do not fill me with weltschmerz and contempt.

Actually, I just looked up Baby Mama, and I think I don't even want to see that. I initially took it to be some kind of surreal picture with Amy Poehler doing an adult/child performance like Martin Short in Clifford. It turns out it's actually got the dullest concept imaginable, though the following IMDB note still gives me some hope:

Movie Connections: Spoofs Silkwood (1983)

Anyway, am I speaking solely for myself or is anybody else out of sympathy with the lineup of coming attractions? I'm only referring to the marketing. It seems to me we're in a real movie-magic doldrums, but that could just be my own dolorous dullness...

Richard Rothstein, last seen debating the achievement gap in a Dust-Up with Russlyn Ali, takes to the lackluster Cato Unbound with an interesting take on the 25th anniversary of the report A Nation At Risk, which examined the nation's puported crisis in education. According to Rothstein, the doomsaying of 1983, like most of the doomsaying from that period, turned out to be wrong. But unlike your harmless, garden-variety doomsaying, this one had some negative results:

Because of the report’s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements - the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more of it?

A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. Not thinking that President Reagan’s rule (’if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002.

I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.

Full article.

Keep it in mind next time you're presented with the secular version of Pascal's Wager. (That is, the "Hey, if it turns out we're wrong about the decline and fall of X, all we did was take enlightened action Y" line of argument, which usually precedes the "It's time to stop talking about X and just do something!" argument, and frequently ends up with "Hey, problem X seems to have solved itself, but now what do we do about all these Zs we've created?")

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) notes that sexual assaults are frequent -- and frequently ignored -- in the military:

Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq....

At the heart of this crisis is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military. Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through "nonjudicial punishment," which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist.

Writer Andrew Gumbel knows why Hillary Clinton is fighting so hard to stay in the race -- because it works. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez says Americans have a habit of hero-worshipping candidates, and it tends to backfire. Euro Pacific Capital President Peter Schiff argues that we need to hit bottom before we can recover from the housing crisis.

The editorial board wants better beef tracking, and more nuanced exploration of the links between race and gangs. The board praises the FCC for taking a broad view of media competition in approving the XM/Sirius merger.

Readers react to a shift in John McCain's rhetoric. L.A.'s Susan North says:

Listening to McCain's speech before the World Affairs Council made my brain hurt. In the speech, he admonished America to listen to our democratic ally nations. Would that be all those same nations that have been crying out, for months now, "Surge? Are you people nuts?"

On the heels of the Iraq war's fifth anniversary comes another somewhat arbitrary but far more grim milestone: 4,000 American soldiers have now died in the conflict, though casualties have been low so far this year. The editorial board didn't remark on the death toll when it hit 2,000 (in October 2005) or 3,000 (at the end of 2006), even though those points coincided with some other big events -- the ratification of a draft constitution and Saddam Hussein's execution.

The board did write when the death toll hit 1,000, highlighting the randomness of marking a number of dead (sorry, no link):

Six U.S. soldiers were killed, two Italian aid workers were kidnapped and warplanes bombed a Sunni enclave in Fallouja, a city mostly off-limits to coalition troops. It was just another day in the war Tuesday, except for the numbers. By this morning, Iraq time, the Associated Press count of casualties stated that 1,000 U.S. troops had been killed in Iraq, aside from more than 100 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Iraqi noncombatants. And many thousands more have been wounded.

It is an obvious point at which to ask: To what end are U.S. personnel continuing to die? What is it that commanders should tell their troops as they head into lethal streets?

The board noted another, less round number in January...

Columnist Rosa Brooks explains what the Spitzer scandal means for the Clinton candidacy:

This gets to why this scandal has the potential to be more than just distracting and uncomfortable for Clinton. Spitzergate -- and Hillary's ambivalent response so far -- reminds us that Bill wasn't the only member of the Clinton family who let women down when he was in the White House.

Remember 1992? Hillary got in hot water for telling "60 Minutes" that "I'm not ... some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."

But later, as Bill's career became mired in scandal after scandal, it became all too clear that Hillary was willing to tolerate pretty much anything he did.

George Washington University's Patty Kelly thinks Spitzergate could have another effect -- convincing Americans it's time to decriminalize prostitution. Contributing editor Timothy Garton Ash says Britain needs to define what it means to be British. And columnist Patt Morrison argues for our right to gripe.

The editorial board explains the battle of the brass that may have felled Adm. William J. Fallon...

Whatever you've got to say about the murder of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw or the arrest of 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza for the crime, start your engines. Please keep it clean: no threats, bullying, bogarting or unamusing ad hominems will be accepted. I'll approve as fast as I can. Some scenes from Shaw's funeral may give the conversation a little focus.

Something that had been not-quite-missing from my daily routine these past few months was the very mixed blessing of being able to rubberneck movie and TV productions. The Soloist did film on our third floor during the strike, and the cast and crew, in sharp distinction to the tradition of movie-production jackholery, were notably polite and patient, with the Steve Lopez-portraying Robert Downey Jr. personable and sober as a judge at 8:30 in the morning. On the other hand, a Tom Arnold comedy which included a prop van topped with a giant-ant simulacrum ("See, you can tell it's a comedy," one P.A. told me, pointing at the van) was filming late at night in the no-man's-land around the corner from me a few weeks back, and while walking one of my kids to sleep I got a snippy attitude from somebody who was at least acting like a director. (I like to think it was The Skeptic helmer "Tennyson Bardwell," because if you're going to get rudeness you might as well get it from somebody with a cool-sounding name, but the plot synopsis doesn't sound like what I saw shooting.)

Now that the productions are back in earnest, I am again haunted by an economic question: How can an industry with such a dubious future still support such largesse? Shark was filming outside the L.A. Times building a few days back: Seven trailers, ten or so tents, two 18-wheelers, several more six-wheelers, assorted pickup trucks and other vehicles, the usual mountains of food... Now I like pretty much anything with James Woods, who came as close as any American to preventing the 9/11 attacks, but does a second-ten-rated series really generate that kind of economy anymore?

In his op-ed column last Saturday, Tim Rutten analyzed the importance of American Catholics in this election cycle. In fact, the candidate who carried Catholics nationally has won the popular vote in nine consecutive presidential elections. Hillary Clinton carried Catholic Democrats through Super Tuesday, then seemed to lose them — along with the campaign's momentum — to Barack Obama.

Tuesday, according to Rutten, the New York Senator renewed her claim on Catholic loyalties and their votes were critical to her victories.  According to exit polls conducted by CNN and MSNBC, Clinton won 63% of Ohio's Catholic vote and 64% in Texas. She carried 66% of the Catholics in Rhode Island, a state where more than half the population is Roman Catholic. In Vermont, the only state he won Tuesday, Obama carried 52% of the Catholic voters.

More interesting, Catholics across the country are turning out to vote at what appears to be a record pace. So far their percentage of all primary votes cast — both Democratic and Republican — doubles their percentage of the population generally.

Apparently, as Catholics go, so goes the nation . . .at least electorally.

Heather Mac Donald's lightning-rod piece on campus rape takes the top spot this week, with Dallas Weaver's Blowback on copyright a very close second. Readers didn't make this another mostly-Obama week, opting instead for conscience-stricken paparazzi and stubborn sadness. Here they are:

1. What campus rape crisis? by Heather Mac Donald
2. Copyright this, by Dallas Weaver
3. Surge doesn't equal success, by Michael Kinsley
4. The snapper snapped, by Nick Stern
5. Too good to win, by Joel Stein
6. White like us, by Gregory Rodriguez
7. What a little bird told us, by Jonathan Rosen
8. The miracle of melancholia, by Eric G. Wilson
9. Stonehenges all around us, by Craig Childs
10. Food or fuel? by the editorial board

Bored after the War On Christmas ceasefire, I tried in late 2007 to get another civil war going, this one over New Year. To wit: Who are you to wish me well on holidays drawn from your "rational" sun-worshipping eurocentric calendar? My lunar calendar, where holidays show up during high midsummer in some years and the dead of winter in others, where we never know which month is crop-planting month, is no worse than yours, merely different!

I got nowhere with that prank. One bored colleague replied, "Eh, our calendar's no better. They can't even do it without adding an extra day every four years."

Too true! To all people who still wonder why the cycles of the day, the lunar month and the year can't be better matched, and to everybody else, I highly recommend Thomas S. Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. "Being able to understand how it looks from the creator's point of view is just great," writes Amazon reviewer A Customer. "My lesson learned: work your tail off and when you win, it always looks easier than it was..."

But don't take Customer's word for it, take mine. Whether you're a history buff or just curious about why people still comprehend so much of the world through meaningless human-scale patterns, Kuhn's book is full of valuable insights and disambiguations.

The editorial board doesn't always get its way, but it, along with local activists, scored a victory yesterday when the City Council declared the former residence of writer Charles Bukowski a historic landmark. The board opined back in September, "To pick one place to officially associate with the man would seem to limit his legacy. But it's still a good way for his hometown to honor him." (No such luck for John Fante.)

Check out the report [pdf] from the city's Cultural Heritage Commission explaining why, of Bukowski's many residences, the De Longpre place merited saving. Also see columnist Al Martinez's take on Bukowski's alleged Nazism (and Opinion L.A.'s), and Book Review editor David L. Ulin's not-so-kind critique of the latest Bukowski poetry collection.

And there's at least one other unofficial Bukowski memorial in town (even if the bedrock of that square, Craby Joe's, is gone).

With the news that Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton, the late alleged murderer of two police officers and three city officials in Kirkwood, Missori, was a well known city-council gadfly, we set the wayback machine to 2003, for a Los Angeles Times story by Hugo Martin, explaining some of the tensions involved in giving broad leeway to public blowhards. Here it is in full print-spec glory:

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday September 24, 2003

THE STATE
COLUMN ONE
Freedom's Test, or Just a Pest?
* Gadflies deemed out of order are arrested or ejected from some public meetings. The 1st Amendment and decorum are at odds.

Home Edition, Main News, Page A-1
Metro Desk
53 inches; 1834 words
Type of Material: Column

By Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer

After greeting the San Bernardino County supervisors with a mock Nazi salute, Jeff Wright, a homeless Air Force veteran, stepped to the public microphone to complain about being arrested at a regional transportation meeting a few months earlier.

Board Chairman Dennis Hansberger told him to stay on the topic under discussion, which was the salaries of county attorneys. Wright then threatened to seal the supervisor's mouth with duct tape, which he had brought with him.

Hansberger responded by ordering sheriff's deputies to eject Wright, who was led out of the building in handcuffs, screaming about police brutality.

It was nothing new -- for Wright or for the board of supervisors.

The March incident was among the more than 100 arrests or ejections deputies have carried out at meetings of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors since 1989, according to an unofficial tally by one local activist.

Although law enforcement officials say they cannot confirm the exact number, they put the tally in the dozens.

In 2000, reports of those arrests earned the Board of Supervisors the "Black Hole" award, a dubious distinction given by the California First Amendment Coalition to public agencies and officials that the group says show disregard for open government and 1st Amendment rights.

In the past year, the pace of arrests and removals at San Bernardino County supervisors' meetings has increased to about one per month, with most speakers being removed for failing to stick to the agenda and then refusing to surrender the lectern.

Hail to thee, Paulites, Paulettes, Pauline Order, Ronettes, Ronnies, Ronalitos, whatever you choose to call yourselves. May the cosmos bless you for posting more than 150 comments on my last piece of chum, which is now updated.

I beg your forgiveness for having let practically all of these comments fester for 16 hours unmoderated, after having put all of you through an onerous verification process. Actually, I do not beg your forgiveness, for that is an insult to the Holy Spirit that cannot be forgiven forever, the sin that not even eternity can wipe out. Cast me without your ranks, Ronites, but do accept my eternal gratitude to you for bringing life to our empty tables.

And on behalf of the L.A. Times thank you for feasting at the more plentiful board of Top o' the Ticket.

My feelings on the fabled Sam Zell f-word exchange with a photographer for the Orlando Sentinel pretty much boil down to: Whatever you say, Mr. Zell! How else may I be of service? I'm not going out on  a limb by saying it's bad form for the chairman of a company to curse out an employee. (Based on our story's indication that Zell was seeking to smooth things over with the employee in question, it would appear he feels the same way.) But I'm with Patterico in finding the photographer's "what readers want are puppy dogs" comment to be far more alarming than the four-letter word. A cuss is just a cuss, but there is a lot of journalistic arrogance embedded in that dismissive comment about readers. People on the wrong end of the plummeting-circulation continuum should show some humility, and maybe even gratitude, toward the customers who are still showing up.

During our own Republican endorsement campaign, I lobbied first for Rudy Giuliani and then for Mitt Romney, not merely hoping to kill the market for Matt Welch's book, but because I believe opposing The New York Times in all things takes precedence over all other concerns. So I'm the one who should be forthright, gracious and magnanimous and admit that the other Times just beat the pants off us in endorsement power in our own state.

Final score: Times east, two for two; Times west, one for two.

For what it's worth, we removed the candidates' collective and individual probabilities of winning as a factor in determining 2008's semi-finalists, and I call that a wise decision. Nor did my dream race (Richardson-Paul to Obama-Paul to Obama-Giuliani to Obama-Romney, which I think is a song by The Who) differ substantially from that of the board. Why did your dream race change if electability was not a factor? you may ask. I can reply only that we do not live in dreams.

We also attempted to be as forthright, gracious and magnanimous in building our endorsement cases, to think through the meaning of our words and to try to get your input, as well as or better than any paper published on any of the terran planets. We look forward to continuing to serve you in the exciting election year we expect. Thanks for tuning in to Opinion L.A. and the L.A. Times, and we welcome your thoughts.

Seven pickets in a row: Survey finds 100% opposition to L.A. Times

Seven picketers on the line outside CBS this morning. I stopped to chat them up. To the following question...

Do you think the L.A. Times' coverage of the strike has been horrible?

...I got seven affirmative responses.

Optimism unbound

Nikki Finki, who has actually covered world issues as a foreign correspondent, hears optimism coming from the labor side of strike negotiations. And more optimism. Nothing but optimism for five days or so. Even the Oscars may go forward.

Who's the only loser in this? I am, the guy who wants the strike to continue for at least one full calendar year.

Not sure why the Lone Star State's own David Morgan is writing to us to voice his objections to William Kristol's hiring as a New York Times columnist, but David, now that you've canceled your subscription and are in the market for a first and main source of news, can I interest you in the Los Angeles Times? Our four-day weekend subscription is a fantastic bargain. Absolutely no William Kristol!

The problem is not that the Times has hired a strong Conservative in Wm Kristol, but that it has brought in a relentless Neoconservative who, with his cohorts in the American Enterprise Institute and the Pentagon's Department of Special Plans, may have deliberately lied us into an unnecessary and murderously brutal invasion of a country that could have done us no harm. Some people might see that as treason.

I've just cancelled my subscription to the Times, the periodical that has been my first and main source of news and other information for over 40 years.

David Morgan
Dallas TX

And here I thought I was the only old-bus fetishist in Los Angele County! Reader Ben Harrison responds to my adventure at the MTA bus auction with a call to investigate the proliferation of Transit TV. As it happens, I did weigh in on Transit TV more than a year ago, with a first-person piece (gone from the L.A. Times web site but still viewable here) that got at some of Ben's questions. My aim was more to consider Transit TV as a technical feat than to condemn it as a violation of my right to a TV-free public-vehicle commute (a right I'm not actually sure I have), but I did mention the volume problem, which in my experience doesn't seem as bad these days. For what it's worth, Transit TV's surveys at the time indicated pretty broad customer support for the devices — take that with as much salt as you like, though I recall the survey was done by some respectable third party. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Ben Harrison:

I ride Metro buses several times a week and the latest aggravation is jabbering TV monitors.  Most Metro buses now have two TV monitors, billed as entertainment and public service, but with a lot of advertising as well.  Some of the time the monitors are merely on visual mode, which is not too bad, but then come the protracted periods of loud, intrusive jabbering (advertising, news, cooking shows, etc.) in English and Spanish.  Most people I have talked to, including most bus drivers, find the noise irritating.  For the most part the volume controls don't work or the drivers don't know how to adjust them.

I would be interested in knowing -

1.  who paid to install these monitors and who will pay to maintain/replace them?

2.  how much revenue the advertising brings in and whom it benefits?

The media takes on itself after Hillary Clinton's win in New Hampshire. Who does it best?

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has the most comprehensive take, calling this a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment before listing what all the major papers said before polls closed:

As the evening dragged on, the commentators had to consider the possibility that Hillary's "showing of vulnerability," as Tom Brokaw put it, might have helped her, and that Bill Clinton might have boosted her chances after all. In other words, that the coverage had missed the point.

This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out.

Brian Williams on MSNBC says pundits missed all the pro-Clinton clues, and that doesn't stop him from doing some more predicting: 

There will be numerous deconstructions over the days to come. Theories about how African-American candidates for office have confounded pollsters (see: Bradley, Wilder, Gant, Jackson) will receive a thorough airing, and deservedly so.  We in the media will beat ourselves (and deservedly so) for reaching conclusions before the voters have spoken. A further prediction?  Give us a few weeks — we will promptly forget the lessons of this debacle in polling, predictions and primary politics. We will all live to screw up another day, though our performance in New Hampshire will be hard to beat.

John Podhoretz had harsh words:

The next day, Obama compared himself to Martin Luther King — and nobody batted an eye. But when Hillary sought to use his analogy to her advantage by pointing out that it took an experienced politician named Lyndon Johnson to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act — thus making her case that there is a place for words and a place for actions — she was deemed desperate, even possibly racist.

A bizarre double standard had emerged in the media, under which Obama could say anything while Hillary could say nothing. Her efforts to get herself a victory in New Hampshire were interfering in the most blatant media effort I can remember to impose a coronation on the body politic.

Tommy Christopher on AOL turns the MSM's favorite phrase for Hillary's emotive episode against it by asking "Is this the media's Muskie moment?"

But who needs the media to question itself when Bill Clinton does it so well?

So I continue my godawful record on making predictions, especially about the future. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, subject of my long-ago Democratic-nominee fantasy (expanded and elaborated with even more bad calls here), has dropped out of the race.

I should blame myself, but it's easier just to blame Bill Richardson. Starting with an armload of positives, he lost no opportunity to make no impression, succeeded again and again in not catching fire and (it can now be told) declined even to generate any enthusiasm from the L.A. Times ed board when he stopped in to see us long ago.

For all that, I thought he would be nuts to drop out before superduper Tuesday, when he might have gotten a California bounce. But given my record of lousy prognostication, maybe I'm the one who's nuts.

I'm unbowed! Here's a new prediction: By the time I'm 50, a NASA astronaut will have been taken to the International Space Station in a private vehicle. (If that seems too wild, consider this: I once believed that by the time I was 50 people would be travelling to Jupiter on a semi-regular basis.)

Sayonara, Bill. I'd say you've let me down, but as the Cavanaughs page at HuffPost's campaign-donor database makes clear, I never actually gave you anything.

Update! Richardson camp denies he's pulling out! I take it all back! Stick with my original predictions. I mean my other predictions, the ones where I turn out to be right.

One career strategy I considered during my happy time at Reason magazine was to become just enough of a bright boy of the libertarian movement to allow me to stage a very public falling out, write a tell-all book with a title like Ex-Friends or Movement Man or Up From Libertarianism or Whose Freedom?, then build a career as a David Horowitz/Michael Lind-style intellectual turncoat, getting paid to warn the masses about the dangers posed by my erstwhile allies. The strategy was unworkable for many reasons: It was a little too dishonest even for me; libertarianism doesn't generate enough public interest to support a longterm market in defection; and as it happens, defectors from and within libertarianism are a dime a dozen.

But the tactic I was planning to use would have been very effective: Simply collect story after story of the moonlight-and-magnolias Confederate nostalgists, stop-the-war-on-men misogynists, traditionalist homophobes, scientific racists and similar fringe characters who seemed to gravitate toward libertarianism, in numbers that I and others found remarkable.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have been very good at this tactic either: I don't do well with policing unacceptable commentary, "kicking" people "to the curb," writing colleagues out of polite society, defining away extremists and all those other things movement types (in all movements) love to do.

Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm not well suited to commenting on the treasure trove of jarring commentary Jamie Kirchik is publicizing from Ron Paul's old newsletters. Virginia Postrel has a fairly succinct reaction that I agree with (though given the timing and Paul's own tepid response to the matter, I'd be inclined to dial back the ho-hum, been-there attitude), and I'm fascinated by Wendy McElroy's call for the true author of the commentaries (apparently a real person) to reveal him- or herself. And I could hardly improve on the coverage by my beloved former colleagues at Reason.

But I do think there's a discussion to be held among libertarians about why this political philosophy seems to draw so many (classically) illiberal figures; and the hubbub over Paul's newsletters, which are revelatory whether Paul wrote them or not, seems like an opportunity.

While you're busy digesting the George Mitchell steroid report, the "serial news conferences" accompanying it and the curious mix of apathy and hysteria with which the nation seems to be greeting this long-expected news, take a look back through the archives of Dust-Up, for our debate on steroid use back in March. Halos Heaven proprietor Mat Gleason took the tough-on-enhancers stance:

The hysteria around privacy issues and drug testing is overblown. For years we were told there was no smoke, proof there was no fire. Jose Canseco changed that. His former teammate Mark McGwire fell from the pinnacle of prestige to perennial pariah in record time. What were they hiding? Lots. Why were they hiding it? There is a culture that protects superstars -- and some of the guys racking up big numbers were juicing, no doubt about it.

New York Sun baseball writer Tim Marchman, on the other hand, said let a thousand mystery-skin-creams bloom:

We don't need to protect ballplayers from themselves and their juiced-up peers. They have a union and other legal mechanisms by which they can do so, to precisely the degree they feel appropriate. If you don't think that's good enough, don't spend any money on baseball. Don't have any illusions, though, that the game is now different from any other sport, any other high-stress profession, or different from the game we all watched when we were kids.

Meanwhile, our former colleague Matt Welch launches into a locker-room-trashing 'roid rage over at Reason:

In any case, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you give a former Senate Majority Leader $2 million a month for more than a year and half, force clubhouse lackeys to testify under threat of $100,000 fine, and have federal prosecutors grant vastly reduced sentences to drug convicts in exchange for cooperating with Mitchell's private investigation, you can indeed produce circumstantial evidence that Nook Logan (career home runs: 2) and nearly four score others may have taken legal supplements without a prescription to help them recover more quickly after working out, many during a time when such supplements were perfectly acceptable according to Major League Baseball's own rules. And as a direct result, your teenage daughter might eventually face drug testing if she plays sports, once Congress goes through another thrilling round of reforming government.

For an editorial I'm working on I've been learning about the process by which the MTA auctions off its retired buses (don't ask, just be glad you're not me).  My journey of spiritual discovery brought me down to a facility in Long Beach where Ken Porter Auctions at 10:00 am tomorrow will get rid of 55 former Metro buses, plus some non-running, no-provenance relics like the one pictured to the right. The MTA auctions off old buses once or twice every year, and according to the auction company there's a pretty brisk business in such liquidations for various municipalities. I was really struck by this plug-ugly vehicle because its interior is in pretty good shape and it seems like a steal for anybody in the set design or construction business. Isn't there a constant demand for vintage stuff like this in period films? For the prices we're talking about (inside dope is that most or all of tomorrow's inventory will be bought by scrap dealers), it would even be worth it for some high school class to buy this baby, strip off one side and use it as the set to do a Rosa Parks school play.

For that matter, who wouldn't want to buy one of the MTA's own, more recent, orange-and-white diesel gems? (See more details at the Ken Porter site.) My pal at Ken Porter Auctions tells me 44 of these babies have full engines and transmissions and could, in theory, still run. Won't they need a dozen or so buses to trash whenever they get around to making the next Die Hard picture? You could pick up a bunch now and sell them to Fox for a tidy profit! Or just buy a running vehicle, get your bus license, do some smog work and put in a port-a-john, and you've got the ideal traveling home.

Anyway, if you're thinking big or just want to keep me company, show up at 10 tomorrow morning (Wednesday) at 970 W. Chester Pl. Long Beach Ca 90813.

The editorial board says Garden Grove's Felix Kha should get his weed back:

The California Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court decision ordering the police to give back the marijuana seized from a driver during a routine traffic stop. This is likely to generate a wave of "Only in California" jokes, but just because it's wacky doesn't mean it's wrong.

In 2005, Garden Grove police officers stopped Felix Kha for failing to yield at a red light. Kha consented to a search of his car, and police found one-third of an ounce of marijuana that Kha explained was for medicinal purposes. Orange County prosecutors dismissed drug charges against him after contacting his doctor, and Kha sought the return of his property. The police refused, saying that returning the drug would violate federal laws against marijuana distribution and possession....

Can a city invoke federal law to justify its recalcitrance in complying with state law? This is where things could have gotten sticky. But the court correctly found that in this case federal law did not take precedence over California law.

The board says Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is still a threat, even if voters said no to his reforms. And the board addresses the FCC's claim that easing the cross-ownership ban won't curtail diversity.

LAPD officer and author Will Beall writes an ode to late daredevil Evel Knievel, and columnist Jonah Goldberg notes Mitt Romney's JFK moment. Author Karen Dawn says seals and people can get along in La Jolla, and U.C. Santa  Barbara senior research fellow Nathaniel Frank argues that we no longer need "don't ask, don't tell."

Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and other luminaries tried last week, but it was Hugo Chavez who drew the lion's share of Opinion's modest traffic. Venezuela stories took two places in the top 10, including Number One. And two others — Michael Rowan and Douglas Schoen's "Will Chavez pull the trigger?" and the Bolivarian Republic's own argument that "Venezuela knows what it's doing" — barely missed making the list. With the can't-lose campaign slogan "Pax Americana, cyber-bullying and Earl Ofari Hutchinson too," we round out the list. And if you want to revive the old argument about the Times' alleged bias against women writers, this he-man woman-haters collection of bylines should give you a start:

1. "Venezuela's path to self-destruction" by William Ratliff

2. "Bush isn't the only decider" by Bruce Ackerman

3. "How to punish a cyber-bully" by Jonathan Turley

4. "My taco with Tancredo" by Joel Stein

5. "Bad for Huckabee, good for America" by Dan Gilgoff

6. "Unheralded military successes" by Robert D. Kaplan

7. "The black-Latino blame game" by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

8. "Ron Paul isn't that scary" by Jonah Goldberg

9. "Venezuela veers toward dictatorship" by the editorial board

10. "At peace with Pax Americana" by Jonah Goldberg

Two views of Swati Pandey's recent Opinion Daily "Tancredo moves the lethal center."

Citing that hypothetical but remarkably popular suicide bomber from Mexico, Richard Eide says one o' these days...

Regarding your article on Tancredo's politics about illegal immigration, everything you said, and everything anybody else has said all goes out the window the moment we have a suicide bombing in this country. If the bomber is found to have come across the southern border the argument is over. The wall will go up ASAP along with the military on the border. Congress will be down there digging the fence post holes themselves, anything to keep their jobs in the face of a furious voter revolt. One suicide bomber and the immigration battle is over.

The tersely named "Raj," on the other hand, feels Pandey is just helping Tancredo demonize poor undocumented workers:

"But if Tancredo's ad — and Barack Obama's speculation — are to be believed, immigration will be a major issue in 2008, along with terrorism. And recent numbers suggest that voters are leaning toward tough-on-illegal-immigrant positions."

Swati Pandey needs to do more research before printing this garbage. This is not what we heard from the voters in Virginia and Kentucky two states where the Dems won handily instead of being a mouthpiece for anti-immigratn folks. For a reality check read Anita Kumar's article in Washington Post...

Swati's is garbage in garbage out, a kind of reporter that Tancredo relies on to spread his lies.

Regards

Raj

Still reeling from the brilliance of Michael McGough's recent Opinion Daily on anti-discrimination discrimination? So are McGough's old fans back in the City of Bridges, who remember his work for the Post-Gazette with affection. One Pittsburgher writes:

Mr. McGough,

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's loss is the Times gain and we in Pittsburgh are the losers.  But, we are still fortunate that we can continue to read your work. I want to relay to you that your discrimination column was discussed at length yesterday during Lynn Cullen's WPTT talk show.   

Thanks, Pat Lhota, Pittsburgh

Columnist Jonah Goldberg says when in doubt, be pro-life:

I confess that I lack passion about debates over RU-486, Plan B and other measures that terminate a pregnancy in the first few hours or days after conception, because that's when I'm least sure that a life is at stake. But when it comes to, say, partial-birth abortion, I am adamantly pro-life. I don't know if a fertilized egg has rights. But I am convinced that a baby minutes, days or weeks before full term is, simply, a baby. And despite what you constantly hear, Roe vs. Wade doesn't recognize that fact.

Foster mom Mary Callahan reconsiders parenting for pay. Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben notes that if you want political power, all you need is a message, e-mail, and a widget. Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan says it's time to either expand or scrap a Cold War era missile ban that's hurting U.S. and Russian security.

The editorial board praises local and state agencies for their quick response to the Newhall Pass crash. The board also says it's time drug makers acknowledged that cough medicines don't work on kids, and asks the House of Representatives to vote yes today on a bill that would protect journalists from having to reveal their sources. 

Readers mostly congratulate Al Gore for his Nobel Prize. Anaheim's Kee Kim says, "Congratulations, Nobel committee; you guys finally caught up with Gore's brilliance. He should have been honored years ago for inventing the Internet."

We've had plenty of cause for celebration lately that we are not bound by Article 301 of the Turkish penal code (which specifies a six-month-to-three year prison sentence for insulting "being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly") or even by Article 125 (three months for offending "honour, reputation, dignity or prestige"), but we're even gladder than usual after a tour through the editorial board's contemporaneous coverage of the Armenian genocide.

The blunt instrument of a penal code will never have much to say about writing style, and there's plenty of evidence that the Times' sympathy with the Armenians — a sensibility widely shared by Americans at the time — was genuine. But somehow the expressions of pity for the Christian peoples of a far-off land seem perfunctory; it's only in denunciations of the Turks, or as the board preferred at the time, "the Turk," that those nameless, faceless writers of yore rose to anything like poetry. Or actually, that's only half-true: The wartime eds are brimming with couplets and quatrains and someties whole stanzas from Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Bible and occasionally the doggerelists of the ed board themselves, and I'm making it my mission to work more Byron into future editorials. Anyway, let's go to the tape:

Dec. 18, 1917: THE END OF TURKEY
There is as much cause for including Turkey and Bulgaria in our declaration of war as there is for including Austria Hungary. There are as good reasons for the extinction of the Ottoman empire as there are for the overthrow of the government of the Kaiser. For 500 years the Turks have been a curse to Christendom, engaged in war after war and massacre after massacre. During the early middle ages there was built in the Balkans large and prosperous cities on the ruins of the civilization of Rome. The Turks found there a fertile and cultivated country. The cities which they seized became ruined and deserted villages. "Wherever they have trodden," said Henry Cabot Lodge, "trade, industry, commerce and the arts and civilization have withered away..." [...]

At least half of the Armenian people have been slaughtered in cold blood and the remnant is only preserved now because a large part of Armenia has falled under Russian control and the other Armenians have taken refuge there.

Feb. 26, 1918:

MARTYRED PEOPLES
When a peace of victory is finally achieved Germany must answer for her inhumanities in Belgium; Austria for the depopulation of Serbia, and Turkey for the almost total annihilation of the Armenians. [...]

If the war continues for another year with Serbia in possession of its arch enemies, it will be impossible to repatriate the Serbian people, for it will have ceased to exist. The same is true to an equal extent with Armenia; but the slaughter has been greater there because the population was greater. In six years the native population of Armenia has sunk from 16,000,000 persons to less than 800,000. Those who have approved this policy of extermination must be made to settle. The German, Austrian and Turkish peoples have approved and taken part in this wholesale murder; they should be forced to pay a huge indemnity.

March 3, 1918:

THE STAND OF UNCLE SAM
When the President said the peoples should not be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty, he had in mind the combined force and intrigue by which Germany holds Alsace-Lorraine today, by which Austria continues to dominate and enslave Hungary, and by which Turkey is depopulating Armenia and Arabia. [...]

When President Wilson declared that all well-defined national aspirations must be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them, he indicated clearly that Armenia must be relieved of the crushing yoke of Turkis oppression...

Nov. 10, 1919 (apparently a West Coast first-reaction to the Armistice):

THE HAND OF GOD
When we think of Armenia, safe after more than a thousand years from the incessant butchery of the filthy and unspeakable Turks, [...] we behold miracles not less than any told in holy writ.

Therefore, the inevitable conclusion must be that God is still in his heavens. His hand is still upon us.

It's in the postwar settling up, however, that things begin to get murky. A tone of unease seeps into the ed board's wartime bravado. From May 28, 1919:

CAN OLD WRONGS BE RIGHTED?
Armenians for centuries have been ceaselessly disinherited and destroyed. So today even in Armenia proper they are hopelessly outnumbered by the Turks and Kurds. Either these Turks and Kurds would have to be violently deported or some stronger nation would have to keep a permanent army of occupation in this inhospitable country to insure the Armenians against daily revolutions. In the first case you are writing one injustice by perpetrating another. In the second you are passing a decree on the young men of a country that was wholly innocent of the original wrong.

Europe, in a dubious compliment to the United States, has picked our self-sacrificing country as the mandatory power for the new Armenia. But our young Americans who would have to be drafted into this large army of occupation (for no American would willingly leave the United States to go and dwell in distant Armenia) might have something cogent to say about the justice of such an arrangement.

That second paragraph may not ring any bells, but it's the opening of an interesting seesaw campaign for the editorial board. The postwar debate over the Armenian mandate (described by Wikipedia in one sentence: "There was even consideration of possibly making Armenia a mandate under the protection of the United States") seems inconsequential now, but while it was live the issue cost the Times years of foment, and led to a variation on the great American debate between pragmatic non-intervention and reckless idealism. On June 6, 1919, the ed board is all for the mandate:

SHOULD ACCEPT THE ARMENIAN MANDATE
The United States should unhesitatingly accept the mandate of the League of Nations for Turkey and Armenia. [...] Unquestionably the United States is best qualified to handle the affairs of Turkey and Armenia. First, we have no national "ax to grind." No European nation has the slightest reason for jealousy of us or for suspicion as to our intentions and motives. Second, the Turks and Armenians themselves would both prefer us as rulers to any other nation. While unsparingly condemning his atrocious crimes, to the Turk we have been friendly as it is possible to be. American missionaries and Robert College, established by them at Constantinople, have given the Turk a large share of the limited culture and civilization which he has been capable of assimilating. To the Armenian we have been the best of friends. We have fed him in the hour of need; we have often protected him from atrocities at the hands of the Turks. To the Armenian, fleeing from the Turk, the United States is the Land of Promise, his hope and refuge.

Moreover, the ed board was persuaded that this military action could be done on the cheap. From the same editorial:

The government of the former Ottoman dominions would impose no burden whatever upon us. There would be a small army of occupation composed entirely of adventure-seeking volunteers who might adopt the military profession for life. No man would be drafted for such service. If perchance not enough Americans volunteered friendly aliens of good character could be accepted and many soldiers from the disbanding Allied armies would doubtless be glad to serve for the higher rates of pay in the American army.

By the end of that summer, the Times was conspicuously less confident on this point. Sept. 11, 1919:

THE SAME OLD TURK
Shall America accept the mandate to administer Armenia? This question is a hard one to answer and the discussions beyond the Rockies on the subject show a wide cleavage.

And by the following year, the ed board's hesitation had hardened into opposition. Feb. 22, 1920:

It's striking, in looking back over President Dwight Eisenhower's memoirs and the contemporary editorializing that marked the original Sputnik launch, to note not only how unhinged and terror-stricken the American media reaction to the event was but how hard the administration worked to calm people down. As Matthew Brzezinski (whose recent OpEd on Sputnik you oughta read) puts it in his wonderful book Red Moon Rising, "The more the administration told Americans not to worry, the louder the media beat their doomsday drums." Today's editorial on Sputnik cites a very panicky Walter Lippmann column, which is hard not to quote at greater length:

"The few who are allowed to know such things and are able to understand them are saying that the launching of so big a satellite signifies that the Soviets are much ahead of this country in the development of rocket missiles... In short the fact the at we have lost the race to launch the satellite means that we are losing the race to produce ballistic missiles. This in turn means that the United States and the western world may be falling behind in the progress of science and technology... The critical question is how we as a people...will respond to...a profound challenge to our cultural values...to the way in fact we have been living our life... With prosperity acting as a narcotic, with Philistinism and McCarthyism rampant, our public life has been increasingly doped and without purpose... [T]here is no standard raised to which the people can repair." And so on, and on. You really need to work in news to understand how stupid the news is.

One proud exception to the general knicker-twisting? The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, whose primary response to the news of Sputnik's launch was a Pattonesque slap at all the blubbering ninnies. From our Oct. 8, 1957 editorial "Moonshine About the New Moon"...

This week-end's outpourings over the Russian satellite show most of the American spokesmen at their juvenile worst. They act like the alumni who want to fire the coach every time the team loses a game. That is exact: they view the satellite launching as a race which the United States has lost.

With section heds entitled "Sputtering Response," "What We Are Doing" and "Surmise and Facts," the editorial goes on to condemn the "half-cocked explosion of pseudo expertise," chastise one misinformed astronomer for "looking through the wrong end of his telescope," criticize the Eisenhower administration for not sending hearty congratulations to Moscow and thus reminding "the President's fellow citizens that they have a reputation for sportsmanship to maintain," throw cold water on Pentagon efforts to use the crisis to monopolize space development, and dismiss calls for a "crash program" as "the squirrel cage reaction which succeeds only in losing sight of facts." The editorial board also pulls some quotes from Project Vanguard officials who had noted, in the months prior to Sputnik, that the United States was on schedule to launch its satellite early in the next year (which is how things ended up going), and concludes with a list of the handful of facts then available, finally noting:

It is only a half century since man first got a machine off the ground through the application of power. Now they have gotten a thing out of this world. Perhaps it is a symptom of our time that the first reaction should be apprehension rather than exultant wonder. We ought to recover the pleasant use of our eyes and imaginations.

But the ed board wasn't through shaming the Chicken Littles. On Oct. 10, an editorial goes into much greater detail, noting that an article in the July issue of Missiles and Rockets had already made clear that the Russians would probably get the first satellite up and thus nobody should have been surprised. (Eisenhower in his memoirs makes the same point.) "So far," says the board, "there have been opinions without measure but very few measured opinions." (Lippman's piece, which falls into every one of the traps the ed board noted, appeared the following day.)

Has America learned to chill in the half-century since this first outbreak of sublunary lunacy? Hardly. A few days ago NASA administrator Mike Griffin mentioned his belief that China may get to the moon before the United States gets back. The AP's reaction, in an article titled "China May Win New Space Race, NASA Says," was to phrase what would essentially be a footnote in the history of science as an ominous new loss for American prestige:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Soviets beat the United States at getting a satellite, and a man, into space. Now, the Chinese may get to the moon before the U.S. can make a return visit.

Fifty years after Sputnik became the world's first artificial satellite, a new race is under way with the finish line on the moon. NASA, the former lunar champion, already is predicting defeat.

As Gen. Kevin Chilton notes in his OpEd today, when China demonstrates its willingness to endanger the world's civilian and military satellite system, that's a problem. When China gets to the moon, almost fifty years after Apollo 11, that will be a reason to congratulate the Chinese.

The strange thing about space hysterias is that given the lead time involved in getting up there, space breakthroughs almost never come as a surprise. One of my all-time favorite books, Mae and Ira Freeman's You Will Go To the Moon, was published way back in 1959, yet as these illustrations by Robert Patterson make clear, the basic ideas of the Apollo-style (or CEV-style) mission were common knowledge enough at the time to be the material for a kids' book:

The editorial board reflects on six years of the war on terror:

[T]he decision to invade Iraq has proved, in our view, a distraction from the struggle against radical Islamist terrorism, and it has cost us dearly. More than 3,700 American soldiers have lost their lives on foreign sands. Another 27,000 have returned home with injuries, many of them life-altering. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or wounded and about 4 million forced to flee, half of them to uncertain foreign refuge. Their scars will mar the future as anger over the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and its injustices at Guantanamo Bay breedsnew enemies.

Those are harrowing consequences of a war waged by an administration that has misunderstood its enemy and its place in history. But the price of this president's military and domestic overreach has been highest in the loss of faith in America itself, in the values and institutions that have historically defined this nation.

The board offers more reasons why the country needs a federal shield law, and why the Catholic Church's settlements will cost it more than just assets.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that the blowback that created Osama bin Laden came from Russian troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, and our withdrawal would have a similar result. Graham Allison and retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan say the U.S. has no choice but to withdraw given our struggling troop numbers. George Washington University's Jonathan Turley thinks Phil Spector was right to use highly paid expert witnesses. And Eric Weiner advocates slacking.

Readers discuss government response to the mortgage crisis. Los Angeles' John Hutton asks who the government is going to bail out, noting, "There aren't financially irresponsible borrowers, only financially irresponsible lenders."

Not since Frank Gorshin and some other guy played the black/white, white/black haters on Star Trek have space people been as fired-up as they are over Paul Thornton's Opinion Daily "Space program lunacy." And some of the rage is warranted: Our gaffe in the original story about the connections and lack thereof between NOAA, NASA and the QuikSCAT satellite has been corrected, and we apologize for the error. Paul knows he's made some very poor decisions recently, but he can give you his complete assurance that his work will be back to normal. He's still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.

Wendy Dunham gives Paul a Gopher State whuppin':

Yeah, and I can write an article that reports what NASA actually HAS done for the Earth that would blow this article out of the water. Obviously, a good word smith can spin a story like this any way you like, talk about the million dollar toilet, etc, focus on the seeming  wastes, but if you dug down into the facts and saw all the stuff that HAS come from NASA that is improving the real world (and it's a lot more than pens that write upside down or Tang), that list that would eclipse any further "what have they done" articles. Dig, people, dig, The truth is out there.

Wendy Dunham
Minneapolis, MN

Eric LP notes that the budget for NASA is even smaller than Eric LP's last name:

But NASA's idealism is seriously endangering the world's ability to track its own changing and more dangerous climate. Indeed, one of the most popular complaints about space exploration is that it wastes billions of dollars that could be better spent on problems here. With global warming an increasing threat, NASA has a chance to prove what it has long asserted — that a space program provides practical benefits to Earth-bound humanoids.

Yeah, we could spend it here on earth, like in Iraq!  you know the money would be going towards Iraq if any was available.   Global Warming?   GET REAL!!!!!!!!   Bush doesn't even think Global Warming is man made.   What the hell?   We do need to address GW.  But, the budget for NASA compared to Iraq is like a drop in the bucket.  The whitehouse doesn't even have GW in it's vocabulary....

Meanwhile we are at 9 TRILLION with a "T" in debt... Housing market is taking a dump....  Uh.......  We are still sending bush blank checks so that he can do what he wants.   Let's pull this into perspective a bit eh?   I'd much rather see money spent on Science and Research...  It's gonna take a lot of it to fix the GW problem. Problem is where are going to find the scientist?  I guess you didn't get the memo... Science and Math is uncool...  No one wants to look like a dork / geek in school anymore...  They all want to be football hero's and lawyers....   Who has time to be scientist or a computer programmer / engineer?  Those are low paying jobs and get you no where fast.

So back to your dream... While I think we should have a moon base... I think we should be spending the money on a shuttle replacement.... Lets just be happy they don't take all the $$ away and send it to Iraq...

Bruce Bales says Mars ain't the kinda place to raise your kids:

YES! Get NASA back on track toward important things, like Earth.

If Mars and deep space need to be explored, it can be  done much more economically with robots like the Rovers.  A one-way ticket costs only a fraction of a round-trip ticket.  Spend the money on understanding weather and global warming.

Bruce Bales
Andover, KS

Dr. Irv Loh uses the old blame-Ryan-Seacrest trick:

Opinion LA:

As a product of the Sputnik era who educationally benefited from the paranoia that resulted, I could not agree more with Mr. Thornton's assessment.  The cost of redundancy in manned space exploration multiplies the cost to achieve similar benefit with unmanned vehicles, and results in the unavailability of those finite resources for the other projects to which he referred.  Planet earth and all of her inhabitants are in dire shape, and although there is little drama to match manned exploration, we need to refocus our attention to things that truly matter.

Similarly, the tax dollars going out of this country on folly could be so much better spent on obtaining healthcare for our citizens and refurbishing our transportation infrastructure.  Yet none of this will occur until Americans wake up and start to pay more attention to who's at the helm of this country than who's winning on American Idol.

Irv Loh MD
Thousand Oaks, CA

C.P. Shields turns on the light on his miner's helmet and finds some of the overlooked riches of space:

Where to start; A lot of good has come out of the space program, that being said we need to spend our money a little better.

1) I would take 50% of the NASA budget and contract with scaled composites for a new lift vehicle. 

2) More probe work (Remote probes are producing valuable scientific data and it is the part of NASA worth keeping and funding).

3) Partnerships with other nations (except France, I just hate the French) in manned missions.

Justification:

Well here's one: Ore processing and off planet mining, we can do unsafe processes that would contaminate our  atmosphere but not in the vacuum of space and ship processed metal and zero G products earth side and another Medical research  drug production in sterile zero G environment. and last why not reach for the stars?

CPSHIELDS1@aol.com

And speaking of out-of-this-world riches, Brian Topping writes to us from that great city to the north, with greetings for all earth people:

Greetings,

I just read Paul Thronton's opinion about the space program and noted his observation of the apparently misguided trip back to the moon.  I also used to think this was lunacy until I saw something on PBS that was talking about the Helium-3 content of moon rocks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 has a pretty good spread of the information.

What bothers me immensely is that Bush didn't say anything about this when he was signing all that crap with so much fanfare.  What was he thinking?  That people were too stupid to understand that the moon might be an excellent fuel source?  Or was he hiding something about the program so it could be privatized once the government got the program set up?

This latter point may be the bigger story.

Peace,

Brian Topping
San Francisco, CA

Thanks to many readers for informing us that the [Republican Rep. Ron Paul] link in Ronald Brownstein's Friday Opinion Daily column "YouWho?" was actually a repeat-link to the Obama Girl video. The fault is entirely mine, both for incautious pasting and for the crush on Obama Girl my typing slip revealed. Ron had no part in the snafu, but he still takes a shellacking from readers. Read the results:

Nay, nay Mr. Brownstein.  The "uninformed voter" doesn't exist.  He's the one who has been ass-kickin' liberal extemism to death ... including that of the L.A. Times.  He is the one of common sense thought, but why do I continue; you wouldn't understand.

Reg Laite

---

Loyola Marymount's Ruben Martinez remembers the public history of Griffith Park along with his personal memories:

The history of Griffith Park is a faithful mirror for the history of the city. Over the decades, its crowds have been drawn from just about every culture and class -- a curious, sometimes tense mix. When my father was growing up here, the Griffith Park pool was segregated (as were all city pools), with signs announcing the one day of the week that "blacks and Mexicans" could take a dip. On Memorial Day in 1961, a riot began at the merry-go-round when a black youth was accused of getting on the ride without paying; the LAPD ultimately blocked all park entrances and loudspeakers blared orders to disperse.

But over the generations, the people of Los Angeles have made the park their own.... Perhaps what made Griffith Park a great public space in the many decades before the fire can never be captured in a bureaucratic exercise like a master plan.

Columnist Joel Stein offers his tips to Hollywood stars facing an interview with a print journalist. And American University's Stephen I. Vladeck points out the real precedent in the Jose Padilla case.

The editorial board thinks it's about time the Food and Drug Administration took a closer look at kids' cough medicines, which many studies have shown to be ineffective or even harmful. The board also comments on the Padilla verdict, and Google's decision to allow subjects of news stories to comment on them.

Readers consider Gregory Rodriguez's claim that diversity may not be the answer. See why Jeff Poggi of Angelus Oaks says "It seems unfathomable that the normally astute and observant Gregory Rodriguez can get this latest take on diversity's problems so wrong."

The editorial board wonders what to do with the innocent but publicity-seeking pedophile Jack McClellan:

[I]n an age when we are inundated with revelations of child sexual abuse, McClellan, a self-described pedophile, has generated a new category of creep. Trumpeting his sexual interest in little girls on television and the Internet, selecting no individual victim but extending his potential interest to all, McClellan has successfully revolted much of California.

He cannot be allowed to succeed in this act of emotional terrorism. And he will if we contort the laws and statutes created for 36 million residents in order to address one man's twisted publicity spree.

The board is glad Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf didn't declare a state of emergency. The board asks Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to start acting like the state's top Republican and get his party to back a budget.

Columnist Joel Stein realizes that he doesn't hate dogs -- he actually hates dog owners. Former Ronald Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett says Hillary Clinton may be a good choice for GOP members unimpressed by their party's candidates. Gov. Schwarzenegger's Cabinet secretary Dan Dunmoyer wonders why state Republicans would block a budget that undeniably bears the mark of their party. Columnist Rosa Brooks thinks cuts in newspapers' foreign bureaus will leave the world worse off.

Letter writers respond to the Bible being taught in public schools. Seal Beach's Tom Pontac says, "While we're at it, how about teaching -- as literature, of course -- the Koran, the Upanishads, the Torah and the teachings of Buddha to give our students a more complete grasp of this genre of literature?"

This is absitively posolutely your last chance to vote in the Be Joel Stein contest. Before we call the race for Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple, get in there and make your vote count. And watch this space for Stein's wrapup column and a brief online chat about the whole sad story, both coming Friday.

The editorial board welcomes the Supreme Court's openness about Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s health problems:

[T]he public knows not only what occurred -- a brief seizure similar to one Roberts suffered in 1993 -- but also the results of a neurological examination that pronounced him fully recovered. We hope the court will be equally candid about whether, in an attempt to prevent a recurrence, Roberts is prescribed medication that could affect his work or his routine (for example, whether he will have to be driven to the court as a precaution).

The board wants more justification for the state's planned subsidies to filmmakers, and asks Congress to back a solid shield law.

Columnist Ronald Brownstein asks what could make President Bush oppose more medical coverage for kids. UC Berkeley's Jonathan Simon explains why California is addicted to prisons, and what it might do to quit the habit. Salon.com's Heather Havrilesky has found the perfect babysitters -- her two dogs.

Letter writers respond to Bush's latest speech on terrorism. Los Angeles' Mark E. Buchman says: "Thank heaven we have a strong president defending the U.S."

Sound off about recent web-only content from the folks at Opinion L.A.:

Opinion Daily: "Foreclosure heaven" Sometime house hunter Paul Thornton looks at all those defaulting borrowers and longs to give them a Rupert Pupkinesque "Tough luck, suckers; better luck next time." But will Democratic busybodies ruin his only chance to afford a home?

Dust-Up: "Golden state, gay marriage" Lorri L. Jean and Ron Prentice lock horns over same-sex nuptials.

Opinion Daily: "Was Ted Kennedy right about Scotus?" Michael McGough reviews the Roberts-Alito court's record and finds both more and less reason for concern than originally advertised.

Dust-Up: "Rumor romp" Luke Ford and Eric Spillman get to wrasslin' over blogs, ethics, gossip and the fall of the destination media.

Opinion Daily: "Torrent trackers get RAMmed" Jon Healey tracks the indexers, indexes the trackers, and finds a world of confusion in efforts to crack down on online copyright infringement.

Dust-Up: "Subprime players" Should the government bail out bad loans? How many people will lose their homes? Can Paul Thornton ever afford to buy a house? Robert Camerota and Paul Leonard to duke it out on these issues and more.

There's plenty more where those came from, and more coming every day. So make your opinion known in the comments, or email us at opinionla@latimes.com.

We're in the home stretch of the Be Joel Stein contest, and turnout's been lower than you'd see in a special election for Maywood commissioner of cat litter disposal. Now's your chance to get behind the hapless Times Friday columnist, pile some more glory on Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple (who is cleaning Stein's clock as of this writing) or vote for any of our underdog finalists. Does Stein stand a chance? Is the bris lobby really that strong? You can make a difference by casting your vote today! And again tomorrow.

Get in there and pull the lever for or against Joel Stein. Be a good Samaritan and take pity on the Times columnist who's getting beaten to a bloody pulp by Sam "America's next top mohel" Apple. Or be a joiner and get in on the Stein beatdown while it's in full gory heat. Either way, cast your vote today!

Joel Stein is laying a major neutron bomb in his effort to replace himself as the L.A. Times' Friday columnist. If you haven't voted today, get in there and vote.

To recap: Stein is trying to figure out whether his column can be done just as well by somebody who writes for food free. Many of you good people sent in Steinian columns to show that it can. Now it's time to vote on the finalists, and after a comfortable few days, during which Stein's control column—an anti-Elmo chestnut from days of yore—vied for first place with Suzanne Robertson's submission "Toddler trauma," there's a new sheriff in town.

Say hello to Sam Apple's "America's next top mohel," which has won more votes than Stein's and Robertson's pieces combined. Is Apple closing in on a solid majority, or is this just some pre-sabbath rally by a rabbinical voting bloc? If you're pro-Stein, he needs your vote in this electoral crisis. If you're anti-Stein, now's your chance join in his public thrashing. And if you're pro-mohel, well, you know that every half-inch matters. No matter where you stand, get in there and vote!

After maintaining a comfortable lead throughout the morning, Joel Stein is hitting the skids in the Be Joel Stein reader poll. His 2006 anti-Elmo chestnut has now dropped to second place among the Stein-essay submissions, thanks to a surge by Suzanne Robertson's "Toddler trauma." Robertson's slender lead could change at any moment, but Stein has a shameful new item to brag about: Even in a "Be Joel Stein" contest, he's coming in second place.

Maybe you're a Stein supporter watching the results with dismay. Maybe you're one of those Stein haters and are gleeful over the columnist's looming debacle. Either way, only a few dozen readers have actually bothered to vote. What are you waiting for? Get in there and put your thumb on the Carr-Benkler wager scale of justice! Vote for Stein, vote for Robertson, vote for third place contestant George Waters or for any of our other finalists. But get in there and vote.

“Hatred of Christians Leaves LA Times  Nowhere to Turn in ‘08” blares Christian blogger Mike Green, who seems to think that you can’t criticize a “creation museum,” as The Times did, without hating Christians.

Green takes comfort in the fact that  “with all three of the Democrats candidates having an abiding belief and faith in an invisible God, and all three of the top Republican candidates joining them in that belief, it appears that the LA Times...is devoid of a single legitimate religion-free candidate to endorse.”

It's  news to me that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards is a creationist—though all three would probably be happy to press the specially created flesh of patrons at the creation museum. But it is significant that the top-tier Democrats agreed to participate in an event sponsored by the Sojourners/Call to Renewal evangelical organization, a pillar of the Christian left (yes, there is such a thing).

Their various testimonies about the role of religion in their lives contrasted with the perceived pallidness of the faith of Howard Dean, the fleeting front-runner in the 2004 Democratic presidential race. (Dean might have done better if, instead of screaming on the night of the Iowa caucuses  he had spoken in tongues.)

So, yes, those seeking a “religion-free candidate” in ’08—a group in which I would not include The Times editorial board—must contend with pretty slim pickins’. But when was it otherwise? Even Howard Dean was a churchgoer (he switched from Episcopalianism to Congregationalism because of a controversy over a bike path).

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," though many voters don’t see it that way and neither do most aspirants for public office.  But God-fearing candidates are not automatically creationists, even if a lot of the electorate may be.

Why does the L.A. Times' circulation continue to drop? There are as many diagnoses as there are doctors:

Brady Westwater:

While three of the largest newspapers in the country had rises in their circulation figures, the LA Times had the largest drop both in absolute numbers and in percentage drop.

The News Walk:

And then there are the editorials, not quite as knee-jerk leftist as a couple of years ago, but still pretty silly. And the op-ed page: a repository of high-minded ignorance from the likes of Rosa Brooks and Erin Aubry Kaplan and other worthies with little to say, poor writing skills, little information to reveal, few analytic talents, but a column to file each week. Even the ineffable Robert Scheer was worth more space than this crew.

Taxman:

I find it interesting that papers with a reputation for being conservative, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post actually have increases in growth while the liberal papers, the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Minneapolis Star Tribune are all down.

Joseph Mailander:

Five straight years of declining circulation, five straight years of pedophile priest stories, five straight years of Cardinal-bashing, five straight years of burgeoning Catholic regional growth, and still none of the local fishwraps are getting a clue about how sustained Catholic-bashing equals sustained drops in circulation. Good luck with Sam at the joystick!

Hugh Hewitt:

Put aside the long line of Times' scandals—whether the Staples Center special, Michael Hiltzik's sock-puppetry, the leasing of the Sunday opinion section to the editor's girlfriend's boss or the latest, Armeniagate--the real laugher is the paper's sense of importance, its preening about its role even as it became obvious to all that it was the Norma Desmond of Los Angeles media. Patterico is the real expert here, and even an hour spent rummaging through his archives will confirm the very harsh truth: The Times is an awful newspaper that doesn't have a clue about how awful it is or how it happened.

Patterico:

I hate the bias of Big Media in general and the L.A. Times in particular, but I don’t think it’s that bias that is driving these numbers. Rather, it’s the transformation of how people get their news, due to the revolution of the Web.

However, the two issues are not entirely unrelated. With the Internet comes access to a tremendous diversity of information sources—many far more accurate in their specific niches than the newspapers. More and more people are taking note, and faith in the news media, I think, is cratering as quickly as the circulation numbers, as Big Media’s bias is increasingly put on display.

Presto Pundit:

People Hate the L.A. Times

And circulation continues to crash.

L.A. Observed:

Not only did L.A. Times circulation take another hit today — down more than four percent — but Editor & Publisher named N. Christian Anderson III of the Orange County Register its Publisher of the Year. That even though the Register's circulation slipped 5% daily and 7% Sunday.

Res Ipsa Loquitur:

...the latter I reminded the biased reporter asking questions about the LA Times circulation numbers last week, and how the LAT has argely become irrelevant in a city where half the people are functionally illiterate. Their op-ed pages advocate a kamikaze mission for the LAT: support policy which effectively eliminates engish-speakers.

Here are the none-too-pretty numbers:

Columnist Joel Stein grabs his spork and digs into lunch at Garfield High School's redesigned cafeteria with its healthier offerings:

Student Eduardo Escalante Jr. sat next to me and told me he doesn't eat all day until he gets home. "It tastes like cheap microwave food," he said. When pressed about the improvements, he said that "it used to taste like cheaper microwave food." When [School Board President Marlene] Canter asked me what Escalante said, I kind of lied. She's working so hard to do the impossible — serve an edible $2.40 lunch to fast-food-savvy kids from different cultures in a place that doesn't have a real kitchen — that I had to let her dream.

Stein's in-depth work aside, investigative reporting may be a dying breed, according to Greg Palast. But at least the whole country isn't on the verge of extinction, says columnist Rosa Brooks, chiding politicians for assuming Americans live in dire fear of terrorist attacks. Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief Roger Snoble argues that 86 cents a ride won't hurt anyone, either.

The editorial board calls Sacramento's prison reform package a cop-out, chides the federal government for trying to regulate violence on television, and asks the Supreme Court to reconcile free speech with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

On the letters page, Steve Paskay of Marina del Rey is upset that The Times ruined his breakfast: "Are you telling me there's not enough news in the world, both good and bad, that The Times has to fill the front page with a breakfastkilling photo of Phil Spector?"

FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps came by the Los Angeles Times today to share his views about a number of policy issues, including media consolidation and spectrum auctions. Naturally, we were curious how he viewed the proposed sale of the Tribune Co., our employer, to Chicago real-estate tycoon Sam Zell in a debt-laden deal worth $8.2 billion. Copps said he was keeping an open mind, but planned to give the deal "intense" scrutiny. When pressed, he defined "intense" as a 5 on the 1-to-5 scale.

That's not surprising. Copps, after all, is a regulator who believes in regulating, and he's not at all persuaded that the vast changes in the media and information markets have lessened the need to keep local broadcast stations and newspapers from being owned by the same company. The Tribune has received waivers from the FCC to operate TV stations in several of the same markets where it runs major local newspapers, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Before Zell can take over the conglomerate, the FCC would have to approve the transfer of those TV stations' licenses to him. This would be a non-issue if the commission had loosened the TV-newspaper cross-ownership ban, as Chairman Kevin Martin has advocated. But Copps said neither he nor Martin has the data to back his position for or against the current rule; they're both awaiting a new batch of studies that should be completed in the next few months.

In reply to a George Skelton column on the physician-assisted suicide bill bearing the creepily anodyne title "California Compassionate Choices Act," frequent OpEd contributor Geoff Nunberg digs through a stack of dictionaries to find out whether you actually can be "a person of years of discretion and of sound mind" and still kill yourself legally.

Our former editor's Daffy Duck routine has brought with it one benefit: We've been getting some better-than-usual traffic on this blog. So while we still have some eyeballs on us, I'd like to let all-y'all know about the many fabtrabulous new features we've been introducing at Opinion L.A. We have rolled out a variety of new online-only features, which we hope will begin to bridge the gap between "print" stuff and "online" stuff as the newsprint medium continues to wither and these here internets allow for even more and better news coverage.

You can start with our few-months-old Opinion Daily, a column that comes out each weekday, written by alternating members of the editorial board. Recent dailies of interest include Michael McGough's disambiguation of the political bedfellows in the Bong Hits For Jesus case; Andrés Martinez' moving tribute to Hal Rothman; Robert Greene's fascinating study of the future of direct democracy in the cellphone-voting age; and Sonni Efron's defense of economic sanctions.

Straight outta 1995, we've also brought online chat roaring back to life. Dig our recent chats with columnist Rosa Brooks and assistant editor Matt Welch, as well as the SRO blowout with columnist Jonah Goldberg. Look for more of the Opinion L.A. Chat in the weeks to come. 

Dust-up is our almost-newest feature, a weeklong debate between experts, wonks, politicians, blowhards and other luminaries, on topics in the news and/or in our region. This week's dust-up focused on best ways to solve L.A.'s traffic crisis. In recent weeks, we've had debaters go at it on performance-enhancing drugs in sports; the Scooter Libby trial; and Gov. Schwarzenegger's health care initiative.

That health-care debate, by the way, brought a spirited rejoinder from Pacific Research Institute's John R. Graham, which we were happy to run.  This brings us to yet another exciting new feature: Blowback, an opportunity for concerned readers to publish oped-length rebuttals to features that have appeared in the Times. Recent responses have come from the Venezuelan ambassador, a senior State Department official, and others. (Sorry, I just realized as I'm typing this that we don't have a Blowback archive: Will get to that asap!)

In old-fashioned "push" media, we'll be rolling out a daily email newsletter, within the next week I hope, that will keep you informed of what new stuff we've got going on at Opinion L.A.—including old media stuff, new media stuff, and an exciting blend of the two. Signup instructions will show up in this blog and at the Opinion front page, but if you'd like to get in early, email us at opinionla@latimes.com, and we'll set you up.

And of course, we still have all the old print stalwarts: editorials (those unsigned thingees that run on the left page of the print version and speak—more or less—for the board as an institution); opeds (signed columns written by people from oustide the Times opinion section); letters from our readers; the Sunday Current section; and our murderers' row of regular columnists.

I'd like to thank Andrés Martinez for his steadfast and enthusiastic support in guiding our new features and innovations through a work environment where change is frequently less than welcome. If not for Andrés, you would be looking at a much smaller catalogue of new features. I wish him the best, and hope that we can continue his ambition of making maximum use of new media to produce a better and more exciting Los Angeles Times. *

* I made a change to this last graf to eliminate some accurate but stylistically extraneous material. For the original version, see L.A. Observed and Patterico.

Andrés Martinez in L.A. Observed:

The disgruntled news staff is cheering [Jim O'Shea] on as he leads the charge to storm the editorial page and bring it back into lockstep with newsroom, but pretty soon they will remember why those pictures of Dean are still up on their walls and what Jim's mission here really is. With any luck for him, the second floor witch hunt can prove so time-consuming he can get a delay on those firings. 

Read all of the above post, then Jim O'Shea's response to the troops:

I also want to correct some misinformation being published on blogs by Andres Martinez. I don't want to engage in mud-slinging with Andres. He is a good journalist and I feel bad for him, worse today, in fact, than yesterday. But I'm also not going to sit here like some silent lamb while he distorts my record and attacks this newspaper and my newsroom.
   
I am not in charge of the editorial board of this newspaper. The editor of the editorial page reports directly and independently to Publisher David Hiller. That is as it should be. I strongly believe in the principle that separate editors should be in charge of news and opinion. To suggest that I told David Hiller I didn't want the editorial board reporting to me on a "whim" is untrue. He is referring to part of a longer conversation with Nikki Finke, and to take my remarks out of context is unprofessional and sloppy. Moreover, no one in this newsroom is on a campaign to "storm the editorial page and bring it back into lockstep with the newsroom." It is true that we have journalists in the newsroom who don't agree with Andres' views on the ethical problems that led to his resignation. I count myself among them. But these are legitimate, genuine differences of opinion held by people with a passion for the news and this newspaper. To suggest otherwise is pitiful. He also attacked Sue Horton and Julie Marquis for having the audacity to alert the editorial pages to the important work of the staff in case it might make a good editorial. Sun and Julie did nothing wrong.
   
Lastly, Andres suggests I came to Los Angeles as some sort of agent of Tribune Company to quell an "uprising by the imperial subjects." To refer to the journalists at this newspaper in such a manner in an insult to hard-working people who happen to disagree with Andres. I came here because it was an honor to be selected to lead a great newspaper with an excellent staff in one of the most interesting cities in the world. I will stand on my record and credentials as a newsman and journalist. The suggestion that I make decisions simply to curry favor with the staff is also simply untrue. We face hard times.  If I have to make decisions that are unpopular with the staff but in the best long-term interest of this newspaper, I will not hesitate to do make them. That is what leadership is about.  I've said that openly from the day that I walked into this newsroom.
   
I believe in full disclosure.

Other stuff:

Kevin Drum dismisses Grazergate here and here.

Mickey Kaus agrees that the whole unfortunate business is a big nothing.

At Radar, John Cook takes a look into the glass house of Martinez' accusers.

The indispensable Patterico sniffs out a left-wing coup here, here and here.

Coverage from the Times of New York and Los Angeles.

And Nikki Finke puts a tremulous finger on the real infection: "Sanctimonious newsroom reporters and editors acting all holier-than-thou about journalism ethics, even though they never complained about the impropriety of their ousted editor Dean Baquet's behind-the-scenes cozying up to a Billionaire Boys Club of potential local buyers for the LA Times. An editorial editor who oversaw the opinion/Op-ed pages spiralling into irrelevancy, in part because Spring Street's 2nd floor now panders to neo-con and libertarian and other fringe ideologues whose main qualifications for being published there seem be that they're all palsy-walsy with each other." (There's plenty more of this one, but long ago I vowed before God to stop reading any text once I come to the phrase "palsy-walsy.")

At today's very moving funeral for Cathy Seipp, Allan Mayer started off his eulogy by noting his brouhaha with the Times and regretting that longtime Times-watcher Seipp "isn't around to enjoy the festivities."

David Hiller's decision to kill the Brian Grazer section this Sunday makes my continued tenure as Los Angeles Times editorial page editor untenable. The person in this job needs to have an unimpeachable integrity, and Hiller's decision amounts to a vote of no confidence in my continued leadership. 
 
I regret that my failure to anticipate and adequately address the perception of a conflict in this matter has placed Hiller -- whom I like and respect a great deal, incidentally -- and my colleagues on the editorial board in such an awkward position, not to mention Brian Grazer and Kelly Mullens, who did nothing wrong here but have been caught up in all this. Nick Goldberg and Michael Newman are two of the smartest, most talented people I have worked with, and any lapses in judgment here were mine, not theirs. 
 
I accept responsibility for creating this appearance problem, though I also maintain that the newspaper is overreacting today. We are depriving readers of an interesting, serious section that is beyond reproach, and unfairly insulting the individuals we approached to participate in this guest editor program by telling them it is a corrupt concept. How we come about this decision when 24 hours ago the managing editor of this newspaper was assuring me he didn't see a story after I walked him through the facts, and while Hiller maintains we did nothing wrong, is a bit perplexing. In trying to keep up with the blogosphere, and boasting about their ability to go after their own, navel-gazing newsrooms run the risk of becoming parodies of themselves. 
 
Among the biggest possible conflicts of interest a newspaper can enter into is to have the same people involved in news coverage running opinion pages. I am proud of the fact that Jeff Johnson, Dean Baquet and I fully separated the opinion pages from the newsroom at the Times.  I accept my share of the responsibility for placing the Times in this predicament, but I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda, and I strongly urge the present and future leadership of the paper to resist the cries to revisit the separation between news and opinion that we have achieved. 
 
We're a long ways removed from the fall of 2004 when Michael Kinsley and John Carroll lured me out to the West Coast, with promises of investing more resources on the LAT opinion pages and web site. Some of the retrenchment is understandable given the business fundamentals, but I have been alarmed recently by the company's failure to acknowledge that our opinion journalism, central to the paper's role as a virtual town square for community debate and dialogue, should not be crudely scaled back as part of across-the-board cuts.  Decisions being made now to cut the one part of the paper that is predominantly about ideas and community voices go too far in my view, and are shortsighted.

Some questions have been raised in the blogosphere and in our newspaper (on Friday) about the choice of Brian Grazer to guest edit Current this Sunday, and whether our judgment was affected by a conflict of interest. It was not.

I think it’s important to address these questions, and innuendo, head on because our integrity is our most important currency in this business of offering scarce space in the paper to outside voices. This is why in 2005 I instituted anti-nepotism policies barring editors’ relatives from writing for our pages, even if the editor at issue is disclosed. No one I have a personal relationship with would ever dream of approaching me about trying to get something in the paper.

At issue here is my personal relationship with a publicist named Kelly who works for a firm that does some work for Imagine Entertainment, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s firm, as well as most other Hollywood studios. Our worlds rarely overlap since the bulk of her work involves Hollywood clients and I am more interested in stuff like the Mayor’s school plan and Doha Round trade talks.

Given his well-known intellectual curiosity and his track record as a Hollywood producer, Brian is a terrific choice to kick off this quarterly program of guest editors. Brian and his partner Ron Howard have had a hand in bringing such stimulating fare as “Felicity” and “24” to the small screen (as well as my fav sitcom of all time, the tragically short-lived “SportsNight”) and such blockbusters as “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code” to the big screen.

Two senior editors, besides me, agreed that Brian was a good choice, especially after a brainstorming session with him on January 22. And I believe readers on Sunday will also agree with the wisdom of our choice, when they see what Brian, who has long been known for seeking out interesting thinkers across a wide array of disciplines, cooked up.

The idea of a guest editor program dates back over a year. I believe we were already talking about it when the Independent of London beat us to the punch. Former publisher Jeff Johnson and former editor Dean Baquet both signed off on the concept back then. We approached Warren Buffet Buffett and Steve Jobs initially, but they declined.

What we ask a guest editor to do is assign the bulk of one Sunday’s section – four or five stories. The hope in asking intriguing personalities from various walks of life to serve as guest editor is to offer readers some compelling content we might not otherwise run, as well as an insight into the personality and mindset of the particular guest editor. We have approached well-known figures from the realm of politics, sports and philanthropy to follow in Brian’s footsteps.

The apparent conflict in this instance arises from the fact that I called up Allan Mayer early this year to ask if he’d ask Steven Spielberg if he’d be interested in being our first guest editor. Mayer is a well-known former journalist and public relations guru who is Kelly’s boss. Months earlier, Allan had come into the paper for lunch with a number of editors (at a time when I had no contact with Kelly) to talk journalism and some of the preemptive crisis management he’d done on Munich for Spielberg.

Long story short, Spielberg said he was intrigued, but couldn’t do it then. Allan then suggested Brian Grazer, and I quickly decided this was an inspired choice. I told Nick Goldberg, Current’s editor, and Michael Newman, my deputy, that Allan had suggested Grazer, and we all read up on him and met him, and were excited about his involvement.

At no point was Kelly involved in pitching the concept of a guest editor, or any individual. My conversations were with Allan, who himself had no role in our subsequent talks with Brian and Michael Rosenberg, Imagine Entertainment’s president.

The decision to ask Brian to do this was not mine alone, but was taken by three editors here, and then approved by the publisher. The suggestion that my relationship with Kelly had anything to do with this choice is without merit. Suggestions that she or anyone else has favored access to our pages is also absurd. When Allan has pitched op-ed pieces to the Times – and we can only think of two instances this has happened in the last year – he has dealt directly with that page’s editor, Nick Goldberg.

Neither he nor Kelly would dream of approaching me. One of the pieces Allan pitched was about diamond trade, authored by an African head of state. Nick rejected it. Another was about the Oscars, by Harvey Weinstein. Nick accepted it. In both cases, I was unaware the pitch was being made.

Because Kelly does some work for Imagine, we are planning on disclosing this in an editor’s note on Sunday. But I can assure readers she had no role in our decision to choose Grazer, and readers can make up their own minds as to whether this choice was a wise one. Thanks for reading.

Yesterday's sad announcement that Michael Newman, our indispensable deputy editorial page editor, will be headed to the monarch of the D.C. dailies may yet have a silver lining. The Washington Post, in a continuation of the lamentable trend of seeking phantom efficiencies in the funny pages, has cut Mary Worth from its cartoon lineup. Josh Fruhlinger, Comics Curmudgeon and Times OpEd writer, is already leading the backlash.

According to Fruhlinger, you can pitch in by calling the Post's comics hot line at 202-334-4775, sending an angry email to comics@washpost.com, or writing to Comics Feedback, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. There's also a Don't Cancel Mary Worth Coalition already formed. Mary Worth, both in print and on film, has proven to be a durable gem of absurdist theater, a genre that has not otherwise flourished in these United States. But my experiences with past efforts to keep the strip alive have led me to doubt whether anything will come of this latest campaign.

This time, though, we've got an ace in the hole. Although Newman shows few signs of having picked up my Mary Worth contagion, and in fact plays it close to the vest by never showing any interest in the comic at all, I'm sure his presence at the Post will be the key ingredient of good taste and sweet reason, guiding that august institution down a wiser path as the newspaper medium accelerates its forced march toward extinction.

My recent meditation on not getting thanked had the desired effect of making Brian Doherty feel really guilty, and the Radicals for Capitalism author sends in a reminder that he has actually given me a round of applause in the past. Here he is quoted in an insanely long and maniacally researched history of Suck.com, in which Doherty makes an extraordinarily kind judgment on the site's final days when, like Hitler in his bunker, I found my dedication to the cause rising in direct proportion to its hopelessness:

"Tim began more or less writing every essay himself," says Brian Doherty. "I thought it was just a bravura performance that should be one of the classics of a writer rising to the occasion and doing superhuman things. It ought to be noted and long remembered."

As it happens, I never read that Suck history because I was so off my game when the writer interviewed me that I was sure I'd sound like a total jackhole in the final article. I have been assured by reliable sources that instead I came off sounding like "the Fitzcarraldo of Suck," which I took to be a great compliment, and now I think I know what that means. So hats off to Brian, hats off to the late lamented Suck, hats off to the history of libertarianism, and most importantly, hats off to me!

For the deadline-ignoring navel-gazers who haunt Jim Romenesko's Media News, the premiere of Zodiac offers another chance (of many) to ponder a perennial favorite topic: how newsrooms are depicted in the movies. But it's Glenn Garvin, TV critic for the Miami Herald and staunch anti-communist, who wins walking away with a hidden-in-plain-sight observation: In the many years since Cary Grant in His Girl Friday told his typesetter to leave the rooster story alone (because "that's human interest"), the greatest Hollywood version of the newspaper business has been...Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Says Garvin:

Darren McGavin played reporter Carl Kolchak, who week after week busted his butt on investigative pieces uncovering rings of vampires, werewolves and zombies, only to have every single one spiked by his craven, lickspittle editors. Fierce pressure from ASNE and other special-interest lobbies got the show shut down after a single season, and ever since, vampires and their slavering editorial quislings have gotten a free pass from Hollywood.

Glenn is goofing with that reference to pressure from American Society of Newspaper Editors (unless he's really privy to the kind of confidential information only a tireless reporter in a beaten-up straw hat can gather). And honorable people can disagree on whether Simon Oakland's hotheaded Tony Vincenzo qualified as a "lickspittle." But I fully countenance his praise for Kolchak, a classic of seventies television that, despite occasional rediscoveries and a failed remake, has never gotten the cultural-historical attention it deserves. During its initial run, in fact, Kolchak persuaded me that I wanted to be a newspaper journalist—a position that to my six-year-old mind seemed to be a quasi-official position invested with vague powers of subpoena and arrest, but also a fun and dispreputable gig that would leave you free to laugh off the demands of strutting authority figures.

It ended up being neither of those things, of course. Beware of realizing youthful wishes, which come true decades too late, are achieved long after they have lost any meaning, and generally turn out to suck. The challenge for Hollywood is that the ultimate job of a journalist is to sit down and write stuff—a visually uninteresting activity, especially since the end of the typewriter era. Where's the newsroom movie that features a half-hour sequence of the hero staring at a blank screen, repeatedly hitting backspace, using somebody's business card to extract an uneaten piece of lunch from his teeth, and in a bravura Steadicam shot, shuffling down to the supply closet to see if there's any letterhead left? The workplace sequences in Kolchak (listen to the affectless but oddly compelling opening score) did a fair job of capturing the musty, 80/20 environment of a newsroom (populated by brilliant character actors like Ruth McDevitt and John Fiedler), and I should probably blame the show for its small part in bringing me to my current predicament. But I still live in hope that I'm just one manitou or demonically possessed Senate candidate away from winning a Pulitzer, or being fired.

Courtesy of Jesse Walker, who gets an authentic-sounding comment from Tony Vincenzo himself.