The "Illegal Alien Mask with Hat" costume, which includes an actual racial element in the handlebar mustache, seems beyond on the pale; I can't say the same for the other outfit. If anything, the orange-jumpsuit costume, pictured above, comes across more as a riff on anti-immigrant hysterics -- whose use of the nakedly scaremongering term "illegal alien" betrays a kind of mindless, childlike, sci-fi fear of invaders from outer space -- than actual border-crossing undocumented immigrants. Think of the 2004 comedy flick Team America's portrayal of Arab Muslims, who say little more than, "Derka derka, Muhammed jihad," with an occasional "Allah" thrown in. The targets weren't Arabs, but the hawkish view that Muslims as a whole were little more than jihad-obsessed radicals. I can't speak to the costume-makers' intent, but the activists calling for retailers to stop selling the outfits argue based on their perception; likewise, I'm offering mine. (For the record, I fall on the "path to citizenship" side of the immigration reform debate.)

Is this costume offensive to you? Am I totally wrong here? Feel free to post your comments below.

-- Paul Thornton

Ralph Lauren has apologized, but that doesn't mean blogs or feminist groups are about to let go of the  grotesque retouch job on a fashion shot that makes the model's waist look like it was squeezed into an illegal torture device. Her hips appear narrower than her head, as blog Boing Boing pointed out, and her thighs look like they came straight from a classroom skeleton. The clothing company eventually confessed to the mistake, saying it was having a bad Photoshop day.

But now the National Organization for Women is demanding a further apology, to women everywhere for the company's alleged obsession with portraying extreme thinness, and preferably also to Filippa Hamilton, the model in the ad who was fired by Ralph Lauren after years of being one of its top models. Hamilton said the clothier found her 120-pound girth on a 5-foot-10 body -- translating to a size 4 -- too  bulky to fit into its sample sizes. The company denies that's why she was fired.

Meanwhile, the blogs are gleefully showing off another photo, reportedly also Ralph Lauren, showing a pretty model with a bizarrely thin, elongated, hipless body, like the aliens in "Cocoon." Never fear, E.T. Your short legs and dumpy midsection will never qualify you as a Ralph Lauren model -- that is, not without emergency Photoshopping -- but NOW is holding its fourth annual "Love Your Body" celebration next Wednesday.

Photo: On the left, Filippa Hamilton with digital liposuction; on the right, as she is. Credit: AP

-- Karin Klein 

Columnist Tim Rutten notes the recent complaints about the California initiative process by the state's chief justice and a top fund manager and asks, what to do? The answer is, umm, unclear:

Also on the Op-Ed page, James D. Zirin, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, urges President Obama to hurry up and appoint a cyber security czar because the risks are so great. And hey, you can never have enough czars! And author Barbara Ehrenreich scoffs at a recent study, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," that "purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972." Says Ehrenreich:

On the editorial pages, the board blasts the health insurance lobby for hiring PricewaterhouseCooper to do a hatchet job on the Senate Finance Committee's healthcare reform bill. But it admits that the insurers have a point: The bill falls critically short of the goal of providing universal health insurance. And it argues that the recent botched execution in Ohio, the latest in a string of similar incidents in that state, adds to the evidence that lethal injections don't pass constitutional muster.

Photo credit: Susan Tibbles / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

Not for use with small animals. (EPA/Peter Foley)

Alito's hypo seems a bit less far-fetched when one considers the popularity of WWE, televised hockey games and even The History Channel (which one of my peacenik relatives calls The War Channel). Violence sells, But censors, with support from the courts, usually have  focused on sex instead. What puts obscenity outside the protection of the First Amendment is that it appeals to "prurient interest" -- that is, it's sexually arousing.

Patricia Millett, the lawyer for video vendor Stevens, ratified the "violence OK, sex bad" rationale. She conceded that the law might have survived a First Amendment challenge if it  had been narrowly drawn to punish only the phenomenon that provoked the legislation -- so-called "crush videos" catering to fetishists who are turned on by seeing a woman crush dogs with her high heels. A non-erotic, aesthetic appreciation of dog-fighting, however, is protected.

The sex/violence dichotomy has inspired the familiar joke about the differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to censorship: Conservatives want to ban depictions of sex, liberals want to ban descriptions of violence. But it's rooted in the traditional justification for laws against obscenity: society's interest in preventing debauchery. As a 19th century British judge put it: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In other words, keep reading this and you'll go blind.

That rationale arguably applies to "crush videos," but it's hard to see how it justifies prosecution of the sale of dogfighting videos, which means that Stevens likely will go free. Watching violence against animals is constitutionally protected as long as you don't enjoy it too much. If a Cable TV producer greenlights Alito's idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel, he should be careful to market it to anthropologists, not sadists.

-- Michael McGough

First Rep. Joe Wilson, then Serena Williams and Kanye West.

I think we've got the beginning of a twelve-step program here: Inappropriate Yellers Anonymous.

-- Patt Morrison

Among the famously rude moments of the last week -- and there were a lot of them, weren't there? -- probably only one speaker is really sorry.

Not that Serena Williams necessarily is feeling pain for the line referee to whom she reportedly said some truly, um, over-the-line things about the possibility that a tennis ball would find its way down the woman's gullet via Williams' hand. Though treated as a physical threat -- and to some extent it was -- the outburst sounded more like the tantrum of a woman who feels her stardom elevates her above the rank of mere tennis officials. Make a call against me, the message went, and you will feel how powerful I am and how I can destroy the lives of mere mortals.

Williams notably was without apology after the kerfuffle, though she apologized today. Of course she's sorry. Her loudmouthed queen-bee moment lost her the match and ten thousand bucks in fines.

There are no such consequences for Kanye West after he jumped on stage during the MTV Video Music Awards during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech to announce that really Beyonce's video was way superior. Because of course everything considers West the definitive arbiter in such matters, right? West is all about apologizing today, which gives him yet another day of the publicity he probably wanted in the first place.

And then, of course, there's Rep. Joe Wilson, from whom Democrats can never hear enough apologies for his "You lie!" outburst during President Obama's speech. The South Carolina congressman's apology was insincere, Democratic legislators insist, delivered only at the behest of Republican leaders, and therefore he should have to apologize on the House floor or face censure. Why, because his apology will be so much more sincere if it is forced by Democratic politicians rather than Republican?

We would include former Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who resigned and issued an apology after his inadvertently public comments about sexual exploits, but even he doesn't seem quite clear about what he was sorry for. The day after, he said that even though he had made the comments for which he was sorry, it didn't actually mean he kissed (and supposedly spanked) and told.

Apologies, consequences, whatever, the proof of remorse is in future actions. Will any of these people act differently after their apologies, sincere or not? In at least one case, sure. Duvall will absolutely be checking to see whether the microphone is on.

Photos: Serena Williams. Credit Timothy A. Clancy / AFP / Getty Images. Kanye West. Credit: Noel Vasquez / Getty Images. Michael Duvall. Credit: Hector Amezcua / Associated Press.

-- Karin Klein

The unctuous solemnity of some of the television coverage of the Michael Jackson funeral made me want to hurry and shower off the sentiment, metaphorically, with a re-read of Jessica Mitford's master work on the American funeral industry, ''The American Way of Death.''

She hammered the business for opaque, high-pressure, guilt-trip-inducing practices (reminiscent of the ''ups'' and ''extras'' that car dealerships used to be accused of pitching mercilessly) that turned the sendoff for the dear departed from the modest and intimate death ritual of home and family into an expensive, all-the-trimmings, hands-off proposition -- and for sanitizing the language of death, as if dying were nothing more than another lifestyle choice. Where Mitford's countryman Evelyn Waugh found humor in California's lavish and elaborate cemeteries and said as much in his novel ''The Loved One,'' Mitford was appalled by the costly excesses.

Annoyingly, some of the funeral jargon -- ''funeral director'' for ''undertaker,'' ''floral tribute'' for ''flowers'' -- has been adopted by journalists. Chief among these is ''casket," a fussy word that really describes a small, ornate box for jewelry or other valuable objects, instead of the plain, somber, and altogether proper word ''coffin.''

So it was during Jackson's funeral that I found myself muttering ''coffin'' ... ''coffin'' ... every time some TV talking head said ''casket.'' I wonder whether the people around me thought I was mumbling a prayer. I guess that in a way I was: ''Please, stop saying 'casket.' "

Amen!

Handout photo of Michael Jackson's casket coffin provided by Harrison Funk and The Jackson Family. Credit: EPA.

At the risk of being accused of complicity in a bogus trend story, I pass along two confirmations of the notion of "helicopter parents" who hover over their college-student children.

Waiting in line at the bookstore at the university where I teach part-time, I marveled at the number of people my age waiting to have their purchases rung up. Maybe the parents didn't trust their kids with credit cards, but I'm afraid the actual explanation is that they couldn't pull away from their children when they dropped them off. If my mother had lingered on campus when I was in college in the 1970s, I would have been resentful. If she had accompanied me to the bookstore, I would have been as mortified as the girl in the Verizon commercial whose mother posts "I Love You" on her Facebook wall.

A couple days later I heard from one of my sisters, recently returned home to Denver after driving her son to college in Iowa. One of the orientation activities was a jokey quiz called "Are You a Helicopter Parent?" If so, the college provides the propellers.

On its website is a checklist of "Six Ways Parents Can Help Students Have a Successful First-Year Experience."  No. 1 is not (as it would have been when I was a student): "Go home." Instead, it's: "Encourage them to establish guidelines with roommates early, and to talk regularly with each other about how they are getting along." My favorite is No. 3: "Stress the importance of effective time management, and discuss the dangers of spending too much time online."

The anthem of my generation, accurate or not,  was that college students were adults. I remember protests against sign-in books in opposite-sex dorms and the practice of sending report cards to parents (even though parents paid the bill). In general, if grudgingly, parents acquiesced in this liberation. Not anymore -- not on Facebook, and not in the flesh. That whirring sound you hear is the loss of the independence we Baby Boom students fought so hard for.

Photo credit: Emilio Flores / For The Times

We're all against censorship of books in this country, right? Especially by libraries. Sexual content, unpopular viewpoints, even true stories of male penguins who partner to raise a chick.

But the New York Times today reports on the decision of the Brooklyn Public Library to relegate one of the books in the cartoon-adventure Tintin series to its back room where it is kept unavailable to the public, even upon request. Some library patrons have objected to "Tintin au Congo," first published 69 years ago, feeling that it depicts Africans as mentally simple and physically like monkeys. Those who find the book offensive might have found an ally in author and Belgian cartoonist Herge, who died in 1983 but in his later years said he regretted this early work and that he had been overly influenced by an editor who wanted to depict the glories of colonialism.

So like many a public figure, Tintin, who will make a modern-day appearance in a forthcoming Steven Spielberg movie, continues to be haunted by his past. The question is how to view that earlier work now. Is it truly offensive, and if so, should it be hidden away or available as a relic of another day, another way of thinking?

Photo: A tourist takes a picture of Tintin at a 2006 exhibit in France. Credit: Jacques Demarthon / AFP / Getty Images 

-- Karin Klein