What is a crucial part of a nation’s culture, makes you fearful on your first encounter, hits you with an unexpectedly strong flavor, stays with you for days, compels you to repeatedly shower and brush your teeth just to wash away the scent, makes you swear off trying it ever again, yet leaves you pining for more?

The election, of course. The editorial pages show you no mercy. Deal with it.

First, you don’t get out of voting just because you heard some cable network declare the winner based on exit polls in West Virginia. The editorial board reminds you that you’ve got ballot measures to vote on here, and besides, the polls may be wrong. They’ve been wrong before. And if you don’t vote, we’ll find you.

Civics-bookish as it may sound, voting is a duty as well as a right. Even when the stakes aren't as high as they are in California this year, exercising the franchise only when you think your vote will 'count' is an act of selfishness, not citizenship.

So you better do your duty. Of course, even if you do, everything will probably go wrong. States have to check names against registration databases, but there are no standards, so the double-check may bounce qualified voters in some states while failing to catch fraudulent ones in others. States have differing rules for provisional ballots. And they might not come up with enough poll workers, especially in poor and minority precincts. Congress should do something. But it probably won't.

And in case you haven’t yet gotten the message about who and what to vote for, we'll give it to you one last -- OK, second-to-last -- time.

Now, let Larry M. Bartels of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs explain to you why, whatever your rationale for choosing your candidate, you're wrong. And don't be so sure that things will come out right in the end, just because millions of people are voting.

Unfortunately, "rational" rewarding and punishing of incumbents turns out to be much harder than it seems, as my colleague Christopher Achen and I have found. Voters often misperceive what life has been like during the incumbent's administration. They are inordinately focused on the here and now, mostly ignoring how things have gone earlier in the incumbent's term. And they have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country's well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not.

So after all that election news, it's time to cheer up. H. Gilbert Welch says all that testing for breast cancer may not be the best thing for most women, at least not the way it's done now.

"Look harder, find more" has been the prevailing paradigm in breast cancer screening from the outset. News reports focus on which approach finds more cancer. Conventional versus digital mammograms? Digital is better because it finds more cancer. Mammograms versus MRI? MRI is better because it finds more cancer. But the problem of over-diagnosis means that finding more cancer is not better — it’s the wrong way to measure progress. Real progress would be to find only the cancers that matter.

And now to the kimchi. We certainly couldn't find anything in that to make you worry. Or could we? Gregory Rodriguez points out that South Korea has a deficit of the pungent, fermented national appetizer/condiment. Koreans are eating Kimchi imported from China, and that could lead disaffected citizens to question their cultural hold on something dear to them. Could they be facing confusion, a sense of displacement, anxiety? And who knows where that could lead?

If you think these are silly questions, just remember that it was a feeling of cultural displacement that helped fuel the fundamentalism of Egyptian student Mohamed Atta in Germany.

Happy Monday!

Kimchi photo: Rhee Dong-Min, Reuters

As lawmakers continue dickering with the governor and each other over the 2008-09 state budget, overdue by 44 days, state Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres sent an e-mail plea Wednesday to Democrats calling on them to work for "the ultimate solution": snagging two-thirds of the Legislature and making Republicans superfluous not just during most of the legislative year, but at budget time as well.

With Barack Obama at the top of the ticket and an energized and enthusiastic volunteer base, Democrats are poised to change the political map in California this year. We have an unprecedented opportunity to elect Democrats up and down the ballot everywhere in the state, even in traditionally Republican areas.

Torres asked party loyalists to give money to help grab six seats in which Republicans are being termed out and Democrats have their first shot in years. Closest to home, conservative Republican Tom McClintock is leaving the Ventura County 19th Senate District, which (oddly) abuts perhaps the state’s most liberal Democratic zone, centered in Malibu. Moderate Republican Shirley Horton has been able to keep her 78th Assembly District, south of San Diego, in her party for six years but it hasn’t been easy. Sole legislative Latina Republican Bonnie Garcia – the one Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger once called “very hot”  (and who in turn offered that she wouldn't kick Schwarzenegger out of bed) –- is leaving her Palm Springs-area 80th Assembly seat.  The other three seats targeted by Torres represent the region stretching from the Sierra foothills to the Bay Area and centered on Sacramento itself.

As it is, Democrats are by far the majority in the Capitol and really don’t have to give the minority Republicans the time of day – and generally don’t – until they need 54 votes in the Assembly (they currently hold 48 seats, but one is virtually empty due to illness) and 27 in the Senate (they have 25). That happens in only two circumstances: when they are trying to raise taxes, courtesy of Proposition 13’s two-thirds requirement, or when they are adopting a budget, due to a Depression-era two-thirds law. Then they have to give up much of their platform in a bid to pick off the few Republican votes they need to get across the finish line.

In case you’re keeping score at home on the on-the-ballot, off-the-ballot MTA half-cent sales tax, it’s back on the ballot. Except that it’s not. Yet.

On Tuesday, unless he changes his mind again, Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe will vote to put the tax on the Nov. 4 ballot. Here’s the motion (pdf). Then the Board of Supervisors will vote to oppose the tax. Here’s that motion (pdf), offered by Supervisors Michael D. Antonovich and Gloria Molina. Knabe is expected to vote with them.

So in the space of eight days we will have Knabe leading the board in rejecting the MTA’s somewhat ministerial request to put its item on the county ballot (the vote was 2-2, with Molina abstaining); a report from the county registrar of voters that handling the tax on a separate ballot will cost the county $10.3 million; an attempt by the MTA to get a judge to compel the county to consolidate the tax on the regular ballot (hearing is set for Wednesday and will likely be deemed moot); and an announcement by Knabe that although he voted to keep the tax off the ballot in order to protect taxpayers, he now wants it on the ballot in order to protect taxpayers. But he will still oppose the tax. In order to protect taxpayers.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. for delaying the citizenship application of decorated soldier Julian Polous Al Matchy beyond what's legally allowed (120 days after the applicant passes a citizenship test). Here's more on Polous:

Specialist Polous is a permanent lawful resident of the United States, currently stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas. He is a native and citizen of Iraq. He immigrated to the U.S. in May 2001 and quickly applied for political asylum, which was granted in 2002. In 2005, he became a lawful permanent resident of the United States.

Polous joined the U.S. Army in March 2006 and served, among other duties, as a translator. He was deployed along with his unit to his native country of Iraq. In October 2007, he was seriously wounded when a suicide bomber detonated himself 10 feet from Polous and his fellow soldiers. After partially recovering from his wounds, he agreed to another stint in Iraq until December 2007.

You'd think this is one of those cases Citizenship and Immigration Services would want to speed along, if purely for PR purposes. Or, if it's too controversial to trumpet an Iraqi's decision to become an American citizen, why not stick to the usual timeline for processing a naturalization application? It speaks to the administration's general disregard for Iraqis who've helped the war effort. But mostly it's the backlog -- one that was bad enough before expanded background check requirements, a fee increase, anti-immigrant sentiment, and a historic presidential election prompted a rush of applicants. Fortunately, USCIS is working on the problem by hiring more staff, though it's unclear how much of an effect the increased numbers will have, as the Associated Press reports:

Since October, the agency has added 830 adjudication officers to its ranks, bringing the total working at immigration offices nationwide to 3,775. Another 590 are expected to be trained by the end of the year....

About 1.4 million people applied for naturalization in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2007, nearly double the number of petitions filed the previous year....

Overwhelmed, the agency warned that anyone who had applied after June 1, 2007, would likely wait 15 to 18 months to attain citizenship....

The agency has since said the waits will be shorter, but it won't say by how much.

What do you get the Texas oilman who has everything? Why, a $5 billion ballot measure, of course.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Knowing that it’s better to give than to receive, T. Boone Pickens has given to California Proposition 10, a measure on the Nov. 4 ballot that would authorize the sale of $5 billion in bonds to provide rebates to buyers of hybrids and other alternative-fuel cars. I mean, he spent $3.25 million of his own money just to get this clean-energy measure on the ballot. He’s now on a nationwide campaign to get Americans to give up their gasoline habit and to get their government to invest in alternative energy. You may have seen his TV commercials, or his Pickens Plan website.

But back to Proposition 10, and what to do with all that bond money. Hey, how about handing out rebates to cities and counties to buy fleets of -- oh, I don’t know, I'm just thinking out loud here -- natural-gas vehicles? I mean, Clean Energy Fuels Corp. has a huge network of natural gas fuel stations around the country, so there’s already a refueling infrastructure in place. Gee, I wonder who owns Clean Energy Fuels. Let's look that up…. Why, look here! It's owned by T. Boone Pickens! What a coincidence!

The Contra Costa Times' Steve Harmon has the story. He reports on critics angry over Pickens' "brazen attempt to get Californians to foot the bill" for a measure that will cost them and their descendants $9.8 million billion dollars, including interest, over the next 30 years. Harmon also notes that Proposition 10's campaign manager, Marty Wilson, is was* Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief fundraiser. Another amazing coincidence.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Pickens has been in the ballot measure biz before? As The Times' David Zahniser detailed in this Feb. 1 story, Pickens threw in $150,000 to help Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pass his successful ballot measure to broaden (and shrink) the city telephone tax. At the same time, Clean Energy Fuels was backing Villaraigosa's plan to convert all trucks at the Port of Los Angeles to natural gas.

So is it all a horrible idea? Californians may be OK with paying to get more alternative energy vehicles off the road and more poison and carbon out of the air. The Times' David Lazarus picked apart the Pickens Plan in a column earlier this month, and although Proposition 10 is not discussed, Lazarus correctly points out that what's good for America does not become suddenly bad merely because a rich guy might profit from it.

But people already are back-ordering Priuses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a line forming for the Chevy Volt longer than the one I waited in for Zeppelin tickets outside the Ticketron at the Boyle Heights Sears in 1977. Do taxpayers really have to underwrite alt-vehicle sales?

A mighty tip of the hat to Joe Mathews and his Blockbuster Democracy blog – an indispensable resource for those who follow the world of ballot measures.

*Marty Wilson was Schwarzenegger's chief fundraiser until about a year ago.

*Photo: Chip Somodevilla /Getty Images

The Los Angeles County version of the city's Proposition S may soon be coming to a voting booth near you. But the half-cent sales tax to fund transportation projects may not. It's up to the county Board of Supervisors to decide, on Tuesday, whether phone taxes or sales taxes or both will be on the November 4 ballot.

Let's deal with the MTA sales tax first, because it's shorter. Kind of. Supervisor Michael Antonovich is asking his colleagues to adopt a resolution supporting yet another measure on the November 4 ballot that would prevent the revenue from the sales tax, if it passes -- and in fact any transportation tax revenues -- to be spent equitably. Whatever that means. Those equitable principles have yet to be drafted, but it comes down to this: the MTA wouldn't be able to use its new tax revenue solely for the subway to the sea, also known as the Red Line extension.

Here's how Antonovich puts it in his press release:

County taxpayers deserve to see the tax dollars they generate fund transportation projects in their communities. The "Fair Share" initiative provides fairness for the 60% of the County’s population that live outside of the City of Los Angeles and generates 67% of County sales taxes.

Here's a link to the agenda item (pdf), but if you're in a rush, here's the key language: the initiative would "specify principles for subregional allocation of future sales tax increases." Just how those principles would look in print is a matter for speculation, but I'm guessing it will take more than a couple days to hammer them out.

Can Antonovich pull it off? He'd have to get by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who supports using the sales tax revenue on the projects outlined in a bill by former state lawmaker Kevin Murray. And that's just on the Board of Supervisors. Those five supes make up just over a third of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, where Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is leading the subway-to-the-sea charge. By the way, the MTA board will take up the sales tax plan on Thursday.

Now, to the phone tax or, more correctly, the utility user's tax. Cities around California having been asking voters to ratify and in some cases lower their existing taxes on telephone calls, all in response to lawsuits challenging the legality of applying those taxes to cell phones. The Los Angeles County version sent to the supervisors by Chief Executive Officer Bill Fujioka would reduce the rate from 5% to 4.5%. Of the state's 58 counties, Los Angeles and three others -- Alameda, San Francisco and Sacramento -- also have phone taxes.

Opinion L.A. has documented the recent surge in California cities updating, and in some cases reducing, their phone or utility taxes here, here, here and here. The big one was the city of L.A. on Feb. 5, along with Pasadena and Huntington Park, and April votes in Culver City, Malibu, Sierra Madre and June votes in Covina and Torrance. Each of those measures to ratify the phone tax passed.

Why do voters have to ratify their existing phone taxes? The history is complex and convoluted, but in a nutshell it goes like this: Local governments began applying a tax to phone calls and other utilities in the 1960s, and they modeled it on an existing federal tax that dated back to the Spanish American War. As you may have guessed, there were no cell phones back then, so it was easy to figure out who paid. Callers didn't cross jurisdictions while talking on the phone.

The city of L.A. added its tax in 1967, but other cities and counties really jumped on the bandwagon in the early 1990s in response to the wholesale grabbing of local funds, by the state, to pay for schools.

Los Angeles County adopted its 5% tax in 1991 (If you want to find it, follow the instructions laid out here). It applies to phone calls, natural gas and electricity, but just in the unincorporated areas of the county.

But county officials wrote their law as if telephone deregulation had not yet occurred, so they made no provision for the plethora of new companies and technologies that were already changing the way people make calls. If you're calling on a cell phone instead of a landline, does the person making the call get taxed, or the person receiving it? Do they get taxed the rate in effect where the caller lives? Or where the caller is calling from? Or where the caller gets the bill?

In 2000 a federal law helped clarify how to bill, and cities and phone companies negotiated how to tax cell calls. Local tax laws were updated accordingly. But several years earlier, in 1996, California voters adopted Proposition 218, which required any new local tax to be put before voters. So -- does clarifying the phone tax to make sure it applies to cell phones trigger Prop. 218? It does. Verizon challenged many of the cell phone tax laws, and courts have been ruling that cities and counties must go to the voters.

County supervisors have been trying for more than a year to fight or settle a cell phone tax case brought by Joe Oronoz and other plaintiffs. On July 1, they settled the case in closed session, but they have yet to release the details. But it's a good bet that the settlement and the decision to put the tax on the ballot -- with a reduction -- are somehow related.

The various city tax "updates" have followed one of two paths -- the straightforward (We want to keep taxing you at the same rate but could be stopped in court unless you give us your permission) and the quasi-sneaky (Hey! We have a plan to lower your taxes! Vote for it!). The county's proposal follows the second model. To be fair, it's not the ballot measures that have been sneaky, but the campaigns for them.

Opinion L.A. follows phone taxes far more than is generally deemed to be safe or normal; but check back here, and at Vote-O-Rama, for updates.

Also go to Vote-O-Rama to keep score on the growing November ballot.

... comes tomorrow, when the state Supreme Court decides at its Wednesday conference whether to accept or reject a petition to throw Proposition 8 -- the initiative to ban same-sex marriage -- off the Nov. 4 ballot. Additional possibilities include calling for more briefing or even setting a date for oral argument. But time is of the essence, because ballot materials go to the printer next month.

To recap: On May 15, the Cal Supremes invalidated the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage, adopted by voters in 2000 in the form of Proposition 22. Soon thereafter, an initiative petition to go the other way, enhancing the ban by making it a constitutional amendment, qualified for the ballot and was designated Proposition 8. On June 20, victorious parties in the court's May same-sex marriage decision and other opponents of Proposition 8 asked the justices to strike the measure from the ballot.

There are two main arguments. The first is that in the wake of the court's May decision, Prop 8 would so completely change the meaning of equal protection in the state Constitution that changing it wouldn't just be an amendment, but something far more sweeping -- a revision. Revisions can't go to the voters unless they were put on the ballot by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature or by a constitutional convention.

The simpler argument is that people who signed the petition were told that same-sex marriage in California already was barred. Of course, it was true at the time they signed, but it's not now that the measure is about to go before voters.

Find information about the case before the court tomorrow here. It's entitled Bennett v. Bowen. It is near the top of the list of cases to be considered tomorrow morning in San Francisco. You'll find results posted tomorrow afternoon at he court's site here. For background on the case and links to more detailed analyses of the legal arguments, see last week's Perpetual Election update here.

Is Antonio Villaraigosa really fundraising for the governor’s race instead of his mayoral re-election? Are gay Republicans really trying to get the California Supreme Court to remove the same-sex marriage ban from the November ballot? Did Zev Yaroslavsky actually demand to know whether Dean Logan and the other candidates to be county registrar underwent criminal background checks? Who is Joe Canciamilla and why should you care? When does Jamiel’s law go to voters?

The summer is moving quickly and there has been a lot of election news — not just for November 9, but for next year's mayoral election and the 2010 race for governor (already?) as well. Find it all here, and keep up to date on the facts — with an opinionated twist — on Los Angeles' (and California's) perpetual election at Vote-O-Rama.

First things first. November 4: There’s a chance that your roster of 11 California propositions will get shorter, and you may have a gay Republican research attorney to thank.

Legal experts call it a long-shot, but on June 20, several petitioners asked the state Supreme Court to toss Proposition 8, the initiative to restrict marriage to a man and a woman (find a the one-line text of the initiative in pdf, plus the attorney general documents, here). The justices, fresh from their 4-3 ruling that same-sex couples in this state have an equal right to marry (see a pdf of the opinion here), will now have to decide whether their decision turns the ballot measure from a constitutional amendment into a constitutional revision.

Huh?

In case you thought only actual immigrants suffered by our kooky bureaucracy, give Erik K. Ward's story a read.

A staff member at the Center for New Community, Ward, an African American whose family moved to California over 100 years ago, explains how he went from born citizen to undocumented after losing his passport and social security card in an airport mishap. Lacking a driver's license because of a visual impairment, Ward needed to obtain a copy of his birth certificate. Try to follow along through the (insert your favorite pejorative adjective for bureaucracies) maze:

I contacted the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and was told that in order to receive my birth certificate, I needed to present a copy of my passport, or driver’s license, to verify I was, in actuality, Eric K. Ward.

Since it was obvious, after twenty minutes of discussion, that I didn’t own a driver’s license, a passport, or a social security card, they told me to fill out the proper forms in front of a notary public in Chicago.... But when I got there, the notary public said I needed a passport, social security card, or driver’s license to receive an official notary seal....

[S]ince I had a number of newspaper articles with photos documenting my identity, the notary public accepted my articles with somewhat dubious satisfaction....

Four weeks later my birth certificate arrived!

But when I arrived at the Post Office to pick it up, the attendant asked me to produce a passport, driver’s license and, most ironically, a copy of my birth certificate to obtain my birth certificate. After waiting an hour and pleading with two supervisors, I‘m proud to say that I now possess a certified birth certificate!

I wish I could say everything went smoothly from this point on....

If you can stomach it, there's more where that came from. But the kicker:

As African Americans we should be deeply concerned about the ongoing attack on immigrants and refugees. Why?

We know what it’s like to be second-class citizens -- and it’s about to happen again.

Thanks to the Immigration Law Professors' Blog for the link.

Tired of walking down the street and chewing gum at the same time? Looking for new things to do with your hands when tomorrow's handheld cell phone ban kicks in?

This Christine Rosen essay in The New Atlantis may give you a new reason to fight the power. Bearing the giveaway title "The Myth of Multitasking," the piece focuses with singleminded concentration on the possibility that when you're doing lots of wonderful things at once, you're doing all of them poorly:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players...

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking...

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Read the whole article.

There's some intuitive sense in the argument against the kind of permanent distraction level built into the multitasking culture. But there's a bigger context to the fad: the decline of specialization, and the rise of an amateur, Renaissance-person approach to work.

This shift may be the kind of thing you see more clearly in the field of journalism — where a thousand Mayhill Fowlers bloom and specialized work is being either outsourced or phased out entirely — than you see in, say, neurosurgery. I know I was appalled, upon my arrival at this very newspaper, to discover how rigid the practice of 19th-century division of labor was here. I just hadn't realized there were still places running on industrial-era production models. That has been changing quickly (if 15 years too late) even during my brief tenure, and I suspect you'll see the same thing in many jobs. This means you have more opportunities to learn new skills, to work in fields outside your own and, as Steve Martin advised, to criticize things you don't know about; but it also means you no longer have the leisure to focus on a single task for a great length of time.

So the ability to handle multiple activities, to manage rapid shifts in attention, to organize many different elements that used to be done by different people — to multitask, in other words — will carry more value. A great chunk of specialized skill and artisanship is being lost in the process, but that's not the result of advertising or media exuberance. It's a fundamental change in the way work gets distributed. Most people aren't very good at multitasking, but that's probably because most people weren't very good at single-tasking.

Signs you're too gullible on the job, credited to Barry Maher, of Barry Maher & Associates. Some of them are kind of funny.

You can thank (or malign) the Supreme Court for decreasing the number of illegal immigrants -- not with fancy fencing but with a rule switch.

In a 5-4 decision today, the court decided (pdf) that an illegal immigrant who has agreed to depart voluntarily can instead stick around while trying to get approval to remain in the U.S. (Voluntary departure grants the immigrant some privileges -- they are likelier to be allowed back into the states, for example.) The ruling will make it easier for immigrants who find themselves a few documents short of legal status and want to get their papers in order even as their visas lapse.

Prominent immigrants' rights lawyers and advocates filed in favor (pdf) of the man at the center of this case, Nigerian Samson Dada, who overstayed a tourist visa and married an American, but couldn't get a visa as a citizen's spouse. That story probably won't win sympathy with those inclined to be tough on illegal immigration. But as the advocates note, voluntary departure is a confusing and unclear process for the immigrant agreeing to it (sort of like the entire visa regime). And, regardless of whether an immigrant leaves of his own will or reopens his case, the government avoids deportation costs. Most significantly, with this ruling, the Supreme Court has ensured that the U.S. sticks to the stated goals of its immigration policy: granting valid claims for residence and keeping families together. (As the advocates note, one-third of unauthorized immigrant families have mixed status.) 

You can find some more documents and background here and here.

More than half the vote is in, but Mark Ridley-Thomas has less than half of it. That means he and Bernard C. Parks are in for five more months of campaigning as they head toward a Nov. 4 runoff in their battle to become the newest member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Hey, you members of the campaign donor class -- open your wallets. Again.

It's bad news for the county, as its government prepares to deal with Martin Luther King Medical Center and other health issues in South Los Angeles; and state budget cuts; and a host of other problems -- with a long period of uncertainty about the future.

It also throws a wrench into the works of special elections to fill either Ridley-Thomas' Senate seat or Parks' Los Angeles City Council seat. Which seat will open up? When will the special election be?

There likely will be several runoffs for Los Angeles Superior Court judicial seats. With more than 60% of the vote counted, these runoffs appear likely:

Office No. 72: Hilleri Merritt and Steven Simons

Office No. 82 Cynthia Loo and Thomas Rubinson

Office No. 84 Pat Connolly and Lori-Ann Jones

Office No. 94 Michael O'Gara and C. Edward Mack

Office No. 154 Michael Jesic and Rocky Crabb

Things could change as more votes come in. But don't hold your breath.

A staple of election season is the newspaper story or editorial that laments that no one knows anything about judicial candidates. So it's gratifying to see that some of those stories this year advised voters not to mark their ballots for candidate Bill Johnson.

How do they know about Johnson? How do they know that he wrote a 1985 book under the name James O. Pace, called Amendment to the Constitution, calling for all non-white people to be stripped of U.S. citizenship and deported? How do they know that he led an organization to drum up support for the amendment? How do they know that he ran for Congress in Wyoming as a Republican and Arizona as a Democrat, all while keeping his Los Angeles law practice?

They know because the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a small Los Angeles daily newspaper that covers courts, judges and the legal community, reported on Johnson earlier this year. That report led to a Times editorial and several opinion blog posts, a story on KTTV Fox Channel 11, a story in the Jewish Journal, endorsements for Johnson's opponent in the Daily News and other papers belonging to the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a reference to Johnson's past in a Daily Breeze story, and a story in the Pasadena Weekly. Final election results aren't in, but it seems that at least the word got out, thanks to the MetNews.

To be fair to the Pasadena Weekly, writer Kevin Uhrich had personal experience with Johnson in the Pace days, and he recounted it in his recent story. But the word about Johnson is out in large part because MetNews editor Roger Grace does something that no one at any other publication in the state does -- he digs deep into judicial races and subjects candidates to the kind of scrutiny that other papers complain never is used. I worked with Grace for 11 years at the MetNews and it was a treat to watch him in action at judicial election time.

As far as the complaint that no one knows anything about judicial candidates, I have to say: Not true. MetNews readers know, as do readers of the Los Angeles Times endorsements.

I like to think we at the Times editorial page do a much better job of evaluating judicial candidates, because of what I learned at the MetNews, than we might otherwise. Whether or not that is the case, the Johnson episode shows that a small, independent newspaper still can make a big difference.

Somebody -- anybody -- please just get 50% plus one tonight. Otherwise, like the folktale of the political consultant who comes out of his hole on election day but doesn't see his shadow (that's how the story goes, right?) we have five more months of campaigning.

But it's looking grim in these early hours. With a still-paltry 1.35% of precincts reporting, Mark Ridley-Thomas has a comfortable lead over Bernard C. Parks in the race for Los Angeles county supervisor in the Second District. But it's not comfortable enough. Ridley-Thomas has 47.12% of the vote to Parks' 35.57%, but he needs 50% to avoid a runoff.

That might be tough. There are seven other candidates in this race, and even if none of them captures more than a few thousand votes, it could be enough to prevent anyone getting a majority. As it stands now, even Morris "Big Money" Griffin, the man who came up with the idea of an "ethnic lottery" so that winnings would only go to people of the same ethnic group as those who bought tickets, has 2% of the early vote.

So if the campaign ending now was all about Ridley-Thomas and Parks, the next five months will be, well, more Ridley-Thomas and Parks.

It's that way in any non-partisan race with more than two candidates. There will likely be at least a couple judicial runoffs in November.

It's a good opportunity for the New America Foundation to move forward with its plan for instant runoff voting, in which the runoff takes place simultaneously with the election. San Francisco currently uses IRV, as the insiders call it. Hear KPCC's Frank Stoltze report on New America's presentation yesterday at Los Angeles City Hall.

By the way, this 50% plus one issue doesn't apply to partisan primaries, like state Senate and Assembly. A Democrat just needs one more vote than his or her competitors -- same for Republicans -- to win the primary. There is a general election between party winners in November, but most districts are virtually owned by one party or the other, so it's really all being decided today.

In the course of endorsing District Attorney Steve Cooley for re-election in the June 3 primary, The Times editorial board reminded voters that Cooley promised to serve only two terms (this would be his third). We also expressed alarm at his plan to anoint a successor. If he had kept his promise, we noted, there would be other qualified candidates running to succeed him instead of the two we believed would be worse than Cooley. Here's a link to the full editorial. Here's a brief selection:

As for Dist. Atty. Cooley, it is noteworthy that he criticized predecessor Gil Garcetti in 2000 for seeking a third term and promised that he would serve only two. This year, he is seeking his third.

It's not the first time a politician has broken a promise, but we recall his rationale -- the office benefits from "fresh eyes" on old problems. It held true then, and it holds true today. Under Cooley, the district attorney's office has done a competent job of handling felony prosecutions, and Cooley deserves credit for his principled stand on third strikes -- agreeing to prosecute them as strikes only when they are violent felonies. But if he stepped down now, as he had promised, other lawyers would be stepping up as candidates to reinvigorate the office.

We're especially concerned about Cooley's stated plan to stick around until he has groomed and selected a successor. That's a power that belongs to voters, not to him.

So it's with chagrin and a hint of admiration for his chutzpah that I take note of this Cooley mailer that quotes from the editorial in the lower right-hand corner and puts "Los Angeles Times" in huge letters to show we're on his team. "We go with Cooley." Well, we did say that.

The baggage-fee-proliferation watch goes on, but so far American remains the only airline charging customers a fee for checked bags.

L.A. Times readers are speaking out on the new fee. Some highlights:

With obesity at an all time high, airlines should start charging by the weight of the person flying...

This helps the airline, actually, as fewer families will fly on the airline yet more business people (who norm ally only have a briefcase or such) will fly on the airline...

If they are going to charge for luggage, I say we only pay the charge if we get it back!...

Are the executives at AA not smart enough to just add $15 to the price of a ticket?...

I find this as pure discrimination as well. If you are a man you can easily fly without packing all of your toiletries, but since TSA has their 311 rule most women who care about their appearance and have long hair far exceed this rule...

So much for my not-so-secret desire to start rocking full drag... I've never had much time for complaints about air travel inconveniences. I don't like air travel or think of it as a right. Instead, I hate air travel but respect it as an achievement that should not be considered any less wondrous just because it's been publicly accessible for nearly a century. That's a point I tried to make the last time I editorialized on this topic, in the halcyon days of Ol' '99, when customers were attempting to stage a congressional revolution against the uncaring airlines:

If you keep your sense of entitlement under control, you remember that being able to fly is something you should be grateful for under any circumstances. Anybody who isn't sufficiently impressed by the intrinsic luxury of being packed into a metal tube and whisked across continents in a matter of hours — who insists that the miracle be accompanied by chicken or beef, honey roasted nuts, and uninterrupted screenings of Chairman of the Board — deserves to be wheeled and swung into the sunlit silence without further oxygen.

In fact, the dogfight over in-flight customer service is a textbook example of the principle that service with a smile just makes people miserable in the end. You'll never see a fight over the lack of complimentary cocktails aboard a bus — the mode of transportation that, when all is said and done, most closely approximates the experience of air travel (while being inexplicably more expensive). In fact, we believe the whole issue will be solved not by better customer service but the absence thereof. If passengers are ever to learn the true nature of High Flight, it will be by getting less of what they want and more of what they deserve — no food, no movie, no windows, less leg room, and no service crew (except maybe a security officer who's not shy about using the Taser on anybody who speaks out of turn).

How times have changed (and how history might have turned out differently if the airlines had just followed my taser-armed-security-officer advice back then). Nobody talks about passenger bills of rights anymore, and with good reason: The airlines are going out of business because they're charging less for the service they provide than it costs them to provide it.

That structural problem seems unlikely to be addressed by a $15 fee, but as one of the commenters above notes, it may have the effect of driving away customers who should be taking land transport anyway (I'm looking at you, passengers with kids in tow). Whether you're into reducing the carbon footprint, upholding a rational and transparent market or ending our "addiction" to foreign oil, all trends point in one direction: Air passengers need to be paying a price that more accurately reflects the costs of flying people around in jet airplanes.

On the other other hand, I got this Spirit Airlines spam today...

Your clueless friends and neighbors are waiting for November to vote, which means your ballot in the June 3 election will count for a heck of a lot more. Turnout is expected to be very low, so if you show up, you can run the state. But you don't even have to show up. You can vote by mail -- if you meet the Tuesday, May 27 deadline for a mail ballot.

Some candidates and initiative campaigns send you forms you can fill out and send to the Los Angeles County registrar, or you can use the form on your sample ballot.

Or you can apply electronically for your vote-by-mail ballot here.

Prefer doing it old-school, casting your ballot on voting day at the polling place? Find the right garage, church basement or elementary school auditorium by filling in your address here.

And check in often at the Times' Vote-o-rama site for endorsements and the latest bulletins, news and opinion on the June 3, November 4, and even the March 2009 elections.

Big Sunday founder David T. Levinson reflects on the idiosyncrasies of pop volunteerism, and Ronald Brownstein picks apart John McCain's true views on the U.S. military's future in Iraq. Merrick J. Bob, executive director of the Police Assessment Resource Center, investigates better ways to track racial profiling by LAPD officers, and cartoonist Rob Rogers snarks at Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's problem relationships. Joel Stein finds out that a new citizen's vote is worth $6 and a cookie:

There's an emotional ceremony every month in which 3,500 newly naturalized citizens pledge their loyalty to the United States, and it really feels like they've joined a community of shared values, goals and purpose. Then, as soon as they pass through the gates of the L.A. County fairgrounds and enter the parking lot, they are charged from the right by Republicans and from the left by Democrats, begging them to register to vote. It is a bit like kissing the bride and being told your new father-in-law is a Capulet and your mother-in-law's a Montague and they've each registered you for a Glock.

The editorial board calls for the Supreme Court to let a murder victim's posthumous testimony stand, and wonders how to turn the beleaguered Santa Barbara Plaza project around. The board also whips out its pen to defend taco trucks against a new L.A. County ordinance:

Supervisors may have expected the new law to attract little controversy; after all, it was backed by Eastside restaurateurs and developers, a group with considerably more money and political power than the largely immigrant entrepreneurs who own taco trucks. But it has raised the ire of a far larger group: the thousands of Angelenos who have long gathered at taco trucks, in many cases since childhood, for quick carnitas burritos or mouthwatering cemitas, central Mexican sandwiches filled with avocado, cheese, fried meat and other gut-busting goodness. An Internet-driven movement started by a pair of Highland Park residents has already produced 2,200 signatures on a petition to repeal the law. Sign us up too.

Readers also react to the LAPD's dismissal of all complaints of racial profiling from last year. Leni Fleming writes:

"Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit" is, bar none, the most hilarious sentence I have ever read in The Times.

And I'm white!

The June 3 stealth primary actually starts Monday. That's when voters can pick up (and mark and send in) vote-by-mail ballots. They're often are still called "absentee" ballots, but unlike the old days, you can take care of business early without having to pretend that you won't be around on election day. True "absentee" ballots, for people who can't vote in the regular mail voting because of military or other commitments, began April 4. So hurry up.

Click here to apply for a mail-in ballot if you live in Los Angeles County. Of course, there are other ways to go; you could apply at the registrar-recorder's office in Norwalk, or you could send in one of those applications that you may get in the mail this weekend, courtesy of one of the campaigns with skin in the game.

Campaigns are counting on mailbox voters and will try to reach them with glossy slate cards and brochures starting -- well, it's every campaign's closely-guarded secret, but probably Saturday, with big spurts planned for every weekend in May. Very few people are expected to actually go to the polls next month, so the mailbox is where the action is -- and now is the time the action starts.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. This election was going to be the presidential primary, when a record number of Californians would go to the voting booth to very likely have the final say in whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee. But last year the Legislature decided to strip out the presidential portion of this election and put it on the earlier February 5 ballot -- so our vote would have more impact. Ironic, huh?

The rest of the June ballot goes forward: Proposition 98 to curb eminent domain and phase out rent control, Proposition 99 just on eminent domain, party primaries for state Assembly and Senate, and in Los Angeles county, elections for Superior Court judge, district attorney and county supervisor.

Click here to see the Times endorsements for Superior Court, and here to see our endorsements for district attorney and two of the three supervisorial contests. Endorsements in the other races are coming soon, and of course you shouldn't even dream of voting early until you get the benefit of our guidance. But suit yourself.

And click here for the latest on the June 3 election, the November 4 election, and every election in between.

The Center for Immigration Studies' Norman Matloff comes up with a new measure that, he says, indicates H-1B visa recipients are not in fact the best and the brightest that proponents sometimes suggest they are.

I don't know how persuasive you'll find Matloff's "talent measure," or TM value. I think it fails to prove Matloff's main conclusions: that H-1B holders overall are not noticeably more skilled than native workers and that within the universe of H-1B holders, Western Europeans are more skilled than Asians. But the TM value has one attraction: It uses a marketplace value for making its assessment.

The value is calculated by comparing the ratio of the worker's salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer. So if you've got a TM value of 1.0 you're making essentially the average salary for the job you're doing. Since employers can't (officially at least) pay visa holders less than the stated prevailing wage, nobody should show a TM value of less than 1.0. On the other hand, if you're a gifted worker you should have a higher TM value because you can command a higher salary.

The shocking conclusion? One multiplied by one equals one:

• The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.
• The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.
• Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.
• Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that “Johnnie can’t do math” in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't this last point address hyperbole about how "Johann" or "Jean-Luc" can't do math? I mean, the media self-flagellation about poor math scores concerns American students, not Western European students, right? Is Matloff saying Americans and Western Europeans are interchangeable?

The breakouts by company and nation of origin are interesting, but I'm not sure they prove anything other than that Microsoft appears to be a generous employer and that immigrant tech workers from Canada and Germany command higher salaries than those from India. That seems easily explicable: a Canadian worker would presumably be a native English speaker and thus a little more comfortable at negotiating a good price, while a German brings language skills that, given Germany's continued industrial and technological strength, would be worth paying a premium for. 

Or maybe language skills have nothing to do with it, and there are some other variables at work. (For example, suppose most or all of the people in the U.S. doing a particular job are Indian H-1B holders: Then a TM value of 1.0 could just mean that they're all above average, Lake Woebegone-style.) In any event, I don't see how these numbers refute the claims of the hypothetical industrialist or lily-livered immigration supporter who thinks the best person to judge what skills he or she needs is the person doing the hiring.

Prove that I just don't get it or am being intentionally obtuse by reading the whole article right here.

Update: Matloff responds. Good stuff in the comments too...

Don't be mad. I told you last week that you Democrats could go to Denver and be delegates to the convention August 25-29, if only you get yourselves elected at caucuses this Sunday afternoon. But Hillary and Barack had other ideas. Both of them scoured -- and slashed -- their lists of people who signed up by the April 2 deadline to be considered in Sunday's voting. The Sacramento Bee has the story. No, wait!! Obama relented!! An update from the Bee.

Obama apparently cut more names than Clinton. If you signed up to be with one of them, and your candidate didn't break your heart by cutting you from the list, you still have a shot; get your friends and family to go one of the two polling places in your congressional district (one for Obama, one for Clinton), and vote for you. The Democratic Powers That Be assure me you can just vote and leave; you don't have to stick around for the speeches. But heck, that's half the fun.

Good luck. And remember, you have to pay for your own flight to Denver.

For California Republicans, the work is done until September. Names were submitted in advance of the Feb. 5 primary and distributed based on the vote. The Mitt Romney delegates were released after their candidate dropped out, and now all California Republican delegates are pledged to John McCain at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis Sept. 1-4. If you were selected, you already know to check in periodically here. You can be an armchair delegate by signing up here.

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?")

California Democrats who aren't already some kind of super-duper delegate have until Wednesday at 5 p.m. to apply to become one of 241 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25-28. Despite claims from both the Clinton and Obama camps that their side has the whole thing wrapped up, it is looking increasingly likely that any old off-the-street Democrat who scores a spot at the convention just may have some real power.

The district-level delegates are distributed among California's 53 congressional districts, with 134 going to Hillary Clinton (because she won 42 congressional districts on Feb. 5) and 107 going to Barack Obama (11 congressional districts). Delegates are divided by gender, as well; check here for the numbers.

So with all those Democrats who are sure to apply, who decides who gets to go to Denver? Democrats do -- any registered California Democrat can vote on Sunday, April 13 in caucuses held in each district. Separate caucuses for Hillary people and Barack people, of course.

Keep up to date with elections big and small at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

If the June 3 election is the Stealth Primary, what do you call the election coming up on April 8?

Next Tuesday, voters in 14 Los Angeles County cities will go to the polls to elect city council and school board members. Or they were supposed to, anyway. Our good friends in Vernon (population 90, or thereabouts) canceled their election because they just couldn't get anyone to challenge the two councilmen who are running for re-election. Of course they couldn't. The last time someone challenged an incumbent, the city cut off their power and declared their home unfit for habitation.

There are elections in some democratically run cities as well, such as Avalon, which was featured in the Times on Saturday and in the March Los Angeles Magazine. In addition to city council candidates, the ballot in the small city on Catalina includes a measure to raise a tax on admissions to city attractions from 4% to 6%.

Three cities — Culver City, Malibu and Sierra Madre — are asking voters to sustain, increase or otherwise update their utility users tax, more commonly called the phone tax. This is the same move that the cities of Los Angeles, Pasadena and Huntington Park took on Feb. 5, for the same reasons: lawsuits and changes in federal law have called into question the application of these taxes to cell phones and other more modern communications devices, so in order to keep the taxes the cities must get the voters to ratify or change the laws.

Culver City's Measure W (pdf) would keep the rate at 11%, relatively high in the world of municipal phone taxes. It follows the lead of Pasadena, which called on voters to keep the tax at the existing rate. In Malibu, Measure D follows the Los Angeles model, lowering the tax — in this case, from 5% to 4.5% — while broadening it to new technologies. The Sierra Madre ballot has two measures: Measure U (pdf) would allow the current 6% tax to increase to up to 12%, while Measure UA would require all such revenues raised to go to police and other public safety functions. Very clever — U could be safely passed by a majority vote as a general tax, while UA, as a special tax, must get 2/3 to pass but carries the appeal of public safety.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently passed on the chance to update the county's phone tax, and may revisit the issue in November.

To keep up to date on the region's head-spinning array of elections — April 8, June 3, November 4 and next March — check in frequently at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

Today's the deadline for the 30 Los Angeles Superior Court judge candidates on the June 3 ballot to file their latest fundraising reports, and it will be interesting to see who the big money-raisers are -- and who is funding their campaigns.

Fundraising is part of the perpetual quandary of California judicial races. Candidates don't like asking for money, but of course they want to win, and one of the best ways to won is to send out lots of carefully targeted mail, which in turn costs money.

Judicial candidates often consider themselves above politics and many bristle when one of their number actively raises cash from the same partisan business or labor interests that fund legislative races or ballot measures. But is it any cleaner for judicial campaign money to be donated by attorneys who will later plead their cases in front of the victors?

Warnings of pay-to-play justice have been increasing in volume in recent years, and the alarm was sounded again over the weekend in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by James Sample of New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Sample cites egregious instances of jurists from Illinois and Wisconsin refusing to recuse themselves from cases involving companies that helped put them on the bench. Then there's the current case from West Virginia that sounds like something from a John Grisham novel.

in fact, Grisham was quoted as saying he didn't have to look any further than the Charleston Gazette for an idea from his latest novel. Now "The Appeal" is being cited as an outrageous not not outlandish illustration of the corrupting influence of campaign cash in the courtroom. In the book, a chemical company goes after a favorable ruling by funding a judicial candidate and planning to reap the reward.

Last month, West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher recused himself from a case involving coal company A.T. Massey, Inc. on conflict of interest grounds and called upon a colleague, who Starcher said received $4 million in campaign donations from Massey and associates, to do the same. See the court's press release here, but for the full impact click on the last word of the statement for a pdf of Starcher's full opinion. It's full of anger against his colleague, but here's the key part:

"I know hardly a soul who could believe that a justice who benefitted [sic] to this extent from a litigant could rule fairly on cases involving that litigant or his companies...."

It's different in California, but just how different? on the Supreme Court level, we don't have partisan challenges; appellate justices are appointed by the governor, conformed by a three-member panel, and retained or rejected by voters every 12 years. Still, the 1986 ousters of Justices Joseph Grodin and Cruz Reynoso, and Chief Justice Rose Bord, continue to provoke court-watchers, who debate whether the removal campaign was really spurred by the three jurists' votes to overturn death sentences or whether, instead, it was a business-led drive to end a string of pro-consumer rulings.

Most trial court judges are appointed by the governor (there is no confirmation process). Appointees can be challenged at the end of every six-year term, but if no one files to run against them, they are deemed elected and don't even get on the ballot. This year only one judge has been challenged: Ralph W. Dau. Such challenges usually fail, but remember that in 2006, Judge Dzintra Janavs was defeated by bakery owner Lynne Olson.

Ten other Los Angeles Superior Court seats opened up and will go to voters because the governor did not appoint anyone to fill them. If history is a guide, many, though not all, of those candidates are raising money from lawyers who can be expected to appear before them if they win.

A panel of California lawyers, administrators and judges -- including some who were elected to their seats -- is grappling with the thorny issue of judicial independence and impartiality. Members have zeroed in on judicial elections and campaign  fundraising. A Judicial Campaign Finance Task Force next meets in Burbank on April 28. A companion task force studying terms of office and selection of judges meets the same day in San Francisco.

Someone -- it's not yet clear who -- launched a write-in challenge to six Los Angeles Superior Court judges, making the June 3 ballot just a little bit longer.

The nomination period closed earlier this month with 10 contested races without incumbents and only one sitting judge, Ralph W. Dau, drawing an election challenge. That left the other 144 sitting Los Angeles Superior Court judges (about a third of the bench) who are up for election or re-election this year breathing sighs of relief; since no one filed against them, they were automatically elected without their names even going on the ballot.

But not so fast. A rarely exercised procedural provision for write-in candidates allows challengers extra time to file, and the Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported Friday that a write-in challenge has been lodged against Judges Juan Carlos Dominguez, Hector M. Guzman, Daniel S. Lopez, Daniel P. Ramirez, Jose Sandoval, and Michael Villalobos. All six must now appear on the ballot, even though there will be no opponent listed.

That now leaves 138 judges who were deemed elected in March. Most of them are unknown to people outside the legal profession, unless they were judges who happened to preside over a high-profile case -- O.J. Simpson criminal trial judge Lance Ito, for example, was just deemed re-elected without a vote -- or perhaps related to someone in politics or government, such as May Lou Villar, sister of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, or Fred Fujioka, brother of Los Angeles County chief executive Bill Fujioka. They, too, were among the gross of judges deemed elected this month when no one filed to run against them.

Can you shoot spitballs in home school? If so, Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer had better watch out, because home schoolers are fuming about their recent Blowback "Regulating home schoolers."  Commenters are all over the story — you can add your own two cents in the message board — and several readers were motivated to break out the old stone table and send an old-fashioned letter to the editor. Some samples:

Homeschooling Works Well Without State Oversight

As a homeschooling mom I am so encouraged by the many who choose to show their support for homeschooling and  those of us who choose to do so. However, I am surprised by how many of those who think that a proven method of teaching would be "improved" by state oversight.

If one does not wish to to consider the successful people both in history as well as those who are walking among us in workplaces and colleges that were homeschooled, perhaps you might want to consider your pocketbook. 

Regulating Homeschools would cost you big money in taxes that this state cannot afford right now. Do we really need a new section in the department of education to fund?

Wouldn't it make more sense to use all available money on the children currently in public schools?

In January, Education Week's comprehensive report card gave California a grade of "D+" when it comes to funding our schools, a "C-" on the teaching profession, and a "D" on K-12 achievement. Taken along with the California high school drop-out rate I find it odd that so many are calling for homeschoolers to be regulated now.

Do your research! Homeschooling works best without heavy regulation!

Angie Weaver
Garberville

---

Editors,

What a shame authors Walter P. Coombs and Ralph E. Shaffer hadn't yet shared their self-professed insights into the motives and intentions of home schoolers some 20 years ago when I began homeschooling for a number of years.  Maybe if they had my homeschooled kid would have been able to know some academic success in her life instead of graduating from UCLA.

Dana Strunk
U.H.S.P. (Uncredentialed Home Schooling Parent) Redlands

---

Dear Editor,

In reference to “Regulating Homeschoolers,” Op-Ed page, 3/13/08: To borrow a phrase, “there has always been something decidedly…anti-democratic in” traditional schooling. What could possibly be less democratic than top-down curriculum aimed almost wholly at raising test scores to keep the funds coming in? Ask any public school teacher who has a principal or district curriculum heavy breathing down her neck to make sure that she is on the right page in the language arts text book or is reading from the script in her teacher’s manual. In terms of the students, public school classrooms are at best benevolent dictatorships. With state standards and benchmarks to keep time with how could you possibly let students choose their own course of study? I imagine that the authors would also say that the bullying and teasing that goes on in traditional schools is character building and homeschooled children are missing out on that important part of growing up in a democracy. The fact is, state regulations have put a stranglehold on the public schools. The result is a disaffected populace. I think that Coombs and Shaffer would do well to check with their colleagues, college professors who look forward to having homeschooled students in their classes because those students have not had their passion bulldozed out of them, still can think for themselves, and are self-directed learners. Those, in my opinion, are the kinds of citizens we want in a democracy.

-Susie Stonefield Miller
Sebastopol,

---

It seems to me that Coombs and Shaffer protest too much. Although our older child was public schooled, we chose to educate our younger child at home. We have been able to teach him at the rate and level that fits him. He is ahead of his peers in all subjects, but one, where he we are taking extra time with him.

When my older child with similar abilities was in second grade the teacher told us that she was sorry he was bored; we should provide advanced work for him ourselves at home. We provide a secular education, sans TV, and are both scientists. There are many like us. Just as credentialed public school teachers regularly make the news for various abuses, there are abuses that occur and make the news among all groups of people. This cannot be defended, but neither can it be regulated away.

Our tax dollars pay do not support the schooling of our younger child - they go to the public schools. These same California public schools provide a popular program, abbreviated CAVA, which provides school at home. The children learn from a computer program and their parents.

Please do not promote misunderstanding through stereotypes, professors. There are many, many secular home schoolers who provide top-notch educations to their children. Studies conclude that home schooled children are better educated than their public schooled peers. Public schools admit they are having trouble teaching the children they already have. What would they do with over 166,000 more?

Lisa Whelan
Goleta

---

As a secular homeschooler I strongly resent Professors Coombs & Shafffer's attempt to pigeonhole all homeschoolers as some kind of religious nut cases who leave the education of their children to television. My six year-old daughter is studying American history, geography, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, cursive handwriting, literature, mathematics, and science. In addition she takes ballet and art lessons and has more friends than I am able to keep track of. A child's education, like a child's upbringing ought to be a parent's responsibility and prerogative. In the absence of specific evidence of abuse or neglect the state has no right to interfere.

Gideon Reich
Aliso Viejo

You were always called on last in history class because the teacher went in alphabetical order and your last name is Zyx. Not fair. You didn't even think of running for class president because the ballot, too, went in alphabetical order.

Well, no fear: In California, candidates' names are ordered by random alphabet drawing. They take this stuff seriously; see for yourself in Elections Code Sec. 13112. There are slips of paper, and capsules, and witnesses from the public and the media.

Yesterday Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office conducted the drawing for the June 3 election and, if you accept the theory that you've got a better shot if you're listed higher on the ballot, there's good news for any candidate whose name starts with H: You're on top. See for yourself. That works out nicely for Laurette Healey, who is running in the Democratic primary to succeed Lloyd Levine as Assembly member in the 40th district, in the West San Fernando Valley. Dan McCrory gets listed before Bob Blumenfeld. And pity Stuart Waldman, who got stuck near the end of the alphabet his whole life and now gets pushed even further back, with all the other Ws.

As for you, Mr. or Ms. Zyx, you're still at the end: Z was drawn last. Sorry. I'd give you the full ballot order, but that would be taking all the fun for myself.

Keep up to date on the June 3 stealth election -- and the November election besides -- at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/elections/.

Because the news out of South L.A. often is of crime and poverty, it's easy for those who don't live there to forget that these are neighborhoods, and often beloved neighborhoods. Nothing brings that home faster or more painfully than seeing residents pleading not to have a new school built at a certain location because, through eminent domain, it would displace so many of them. That was the scene at part of Tuesday's school board meeting for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The message, delivered by a parade of older African American residents with strong ties to the neighborhood, was unwavering: We love schools, we support schools, but many of these people are elderly, we are all friends, we are connected, please don't disrupt our lives. The story of one 72-year-old woman, especially, made listeners wince with sympathy. She had been a longtime teacher in LAUSD and had lived in her home for 30 years. Her community was there. Her friends were there. Everyone she interacted with on a day-to-day basis was there.

The change confronting this community was made all the more obvious by the sole speaker in favor of the school — a young Latino woman, holding a preschooler and speaking through an interpreter. The school was necessary, she said. Nearby elementaries couldn't follow normal two-semester schedules because of overcrowding.

There wasn't much the board could do for the first group. It already had delayed its decision to see if there were options. There were no options; no one had been able to locate another suitable piece of land in the neighborhood. If overcrowding weren't reason enough, the district is under a consent decree to restore normal academic calendars to all its schools. The school would be built.

Neighborhoods of older, settled people give way to the future. But then there's that 72-year-old woman. She was probably certain that at this point in her life, after having given years of service to young people in the city, she was settled down to quiet golden years in her neighborhood, with everyone familiar.  Chances are it won't be that way, and it's not easy to chase away imagined images of her in a disorienting new setting, searching for familiar faces.

OK, now it' s getting silly. We were willing to consider that, despite a couple of years of study, the Interior Department might need a few more weeks to decide whether the polar bear should be listed as threatened. It's not a simple case. As the first such decision made on the basis of global warming, it's fraught with all the "how bad will it get?" uncertainty the subject brings up. But the timing — rushing through oil-lease sales in polar-bear habitat before the species decision could be made — sure was convenient.

The "few weeks" has turned into two months with no sign of an impending decision. Some environmental groups predictably have sued — in fact, should the nation get a more environmentally oriented president next time, a few environmental lawyers who have been very busy the past seven years might find themselves job-hunting — and now the department's own inspector general is doing a "preliminary investigation."

Listing the bear would require this country to do something about global warming, and the thought of all those sacrifices we'll have to make (beyond reusing our plastic water bottles a couple of times) can get a little scary. Listing the bear is really just a ruse, to force us to save ourselves.

Last Thursday's primary debate in Texas between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was supposed to provide Clinton a chance to find a chink in Obama's armor. Unfortunately for Clinton, she never really succeeded. And maybe that's why her campaign seems to have grown more aggressive, tossing strategy out the door in favor of shooting blind and hoping something makes a dent. (So far, it's mostly resulted in friendly fire.)

The New York Times calls it a "five-point attack." Politico calls it "highly improvisational". A Clinton aide christened it the "kitchen sink" method. If you want to judge for yourself, here are some gems from the past few days:

The xerox zinger: In the debate, Clinton defended her accusation that Obama plagiarized Massachussetts Gov. Deval Patrick. "Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox," quipped the junior senator from the Empire State, who has never lifted a phrase in her life. That didn't go over so well with the audience, judging from all the boos.

Kiss and make up: Later in the same debate, Clinton practically sang an ode to Obama. "I am honored -- I am honored -- to be here with Barack Obama," she said, offering her hand to her opponent. Awww... But wait, there's more:

Whatever happens, we're going to be fine ... I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about.

A gesture of concession? Hardly. More likely it was a move to undo the damage wrought by the Xerox quote -- and to woo back key demographics, especially white women. That sugarcoated moment earned her a standing ovation.

Oh, oh, do the one of Barack, that's my favorite: The warm fuzzy feeling soon wore off, though -- instead of sticking to her "ready on day one" pitch at a Sunday rally in Rhode Island, Clinton did her best Obama impression (gesticulation included) for an appreciative crowd:

I could just stand up here and say ‘Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified.’ The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.

Straight out of "Karl Rove's playbook": At a rally in Ohio, a supporter handed Clinton pamphlets the Obama campaign was distributing on her healthcare plans -- information she called misleading. "Shame on you, Barack Obama," she scolded afterward, brandishing the offending fliers at reporters. (Who wants to bet that supporter was prompted?)

My best constituents are black! In a more passive-aggressive show of strength, Clinton was the only candidate to appear at the annual State of the Black Union in Louisiana last weekend (Obama offered to send his wife Michelle instead). There's nothing better than courting a reluctant demographic and kicking your rival under the table at the same time.

What's in a turban? Obama staffers wigged out at a Drudge report that Clinton campaign members had been circulating photos of the Illinois senator donning local dress in Kenya. It's not like he's the first public figure to don the local garb -- check out Calvin Coolidge in a Native American headdress. The campaign took hours to deny any role in their distribution, but given the long leash Clinton has given to overenthusiastic staffers (up until she fires them) it's hard to take them at their word.

How many kitchen appliances do you think she's got left for tonight's showdown? Post your thoughts below.

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.

After having heard from scores of Democratic and decline-to-state Democratic voters about their soul-searching quandaries over which bubble to Inka-Vote come Tuesday, I've ginned up a shorthand assessment of their primary dilemma:

They'll hold their noses and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Or they'll cross their fingers and vote for Barack Obama.

Go ahead and write angry letters about how much you can't stand Jonah Goldberg or his book Liberal Fascism. From the New York Times bestseller list to the always hotly contested Opinion L.A. Top 10, America has spoken. Goldberg's tale of his Daily Show appearance is number one with a bullet, and the columnist makes it into the list a second time with his column on new nanny state outrages. Columnist Rosa Brooks places with her Billary takedown, and the editorial board finishes with an ominous view of the Tata Nano. Brian Doherty scores one for libertarianism and Jonah Lehrer apparently draws in both the artistic and the scientific factions of the brain debate. Michael Shermer does an encore after last week's impressive performance. Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman mark an important abortion anniversary, and all the rest is about some election that is rumored to be happening...

1. What The Daily Show cut out, by Jonah Goldberg
2. A Clinton twofer's high price, by Rosa Brooks
3. Super delegates may sink the Democrats, by Joshua Spivak
4. 'The better angels' side with Obama, by Joseph Ellis
5. Why people believe weird things about money, by Michael Shermer
6. Abortion's battle of messages, by Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman
7. Tiny Tata Nano, big threat, by the editorial board
8. Taking liberties, by Jonah Goldberg
9. Misreading the mind, Jonah Lehrer   
10. Real libertarianism, by Brian Doherty 

You read in doubt this week: Michael Shermer earned the week's top spot not only at Opinion but for all of latimes.com with his piece on the class jealousies of the economically ignorant. Speaking of which, Hillary Clinton also proved a strong draw. Southern Californians were willing to give the old hip hip to the folks at JPL, while the governor cleaned up. Hanging in for encore Top 10 performances were Robert J. Spitzer and the man guild writers love to hate, John Ridley. Thanks for reading Opinion L.A.:

1. Why people believe weird things about money, by Michael Shermer
2. Hillary's gotta have it, by Meghan Daum
3. The correct Hillary Clinton stereotype, by Susan Faludi
4. The 'pocket veto' peril, by Robert J. Spitzer
5. Inquisition at JPL, by Tim Rutten
6. Change: the empty word, by Timothy Noah
7. A black president? Seen a few, by Joel Stein
8. Conservatism's buzz-kill, by Jonah Goldberg
9. John Ridley goes fi-core, by John Ridley
10. Reform term limits, by Arnold Schwarzenegger

John Ridley took home our top score for the week with his fiery fi-core fussilade. Strike stuff dominated the top 10, in fact, while Patt Morrison's modest proposal and Elizabeth Larsen's adoption article prove that everybody loves a mom in trouble. (Look for former WGA head Frank Pierson to give Ridley whatfor in Blowback, and keep reading for the previous week's top 10, by the way.) Here are the details:

1. John Ridley goes fi-core, by John Ridley
2. Leno writes a wrong, by Meghan Daum
3. Democracy: inevitable no more, by Madeleine K. Albright
4. Britney's law? Not so crazy, by Patt Morrison
5. Writers strike is war, by the editorial board
6. Israel's false friends, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
7. The 'pocket veto' peril, by Robert J. Spitzer
8. How to remember 1968, by Todd Gitlin
9. A sequel with the same ending, by Thom Taylor
10. The adoption quandary, by Elizabeth Larsen

Much more fiber in our previous-week results, with foreign policy, the real estate bust, immigration and even a 2007 know-it-all test dominating. As always, thanks for reading Opinion L.A. and we hope to keep on pleasin'...

1. The great fall of China, by Walter Russell Mead
2. Aunt Benazir’s false promises, by Fatima Bhutto
3. George Allen’s curse, by Dan Schnur
4. A dynasty isn’t a democracy, by Rosa Brooks
5. How to survive the bust, by various writers
6. Beyond Benazir, by the editorial board
7. A year of living dangerously, by Paul Slansky
8. Is anyone listening? by Tamar Jacoby
9. The Benazir I knew, by Amy Wilentz
10. And you don’t want to know what’s going to happen to Britney, by Joel Stein

You perhaps recall Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs, who was defeated for re-election to the bench last year by a woman who had spent more of the previous decade running a bagel shop than practicing law. The defeat outraged many, including those of us at the Los Angeles Times editorial page and, apparently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who promptly reappointed Janavs to the bench.

Janavs' tenure on the court was uninterrupted. But since, on paper, she was starting a new judgeship, she's up for re-election all over again this June. So if it's true that she was targeted because of her  foreign-sounding name, something that made her vulnerable at the ballot box, could she be defeated for the second year in a row? And would the governor again return her to the bench despite the voters' actions?

We'll never know. The Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported today that Janavs is retiring from the bench.

Janavs was the first Los Angeles Superior Court judge defeated for re-election in 18 years. She was trounced by Lynn D. Olson, an inactive attorney who ran Manhattan Bread & Bagel with her husband, Hermosa Beach Councilman Michael Keegan.

The Janavs-Olson race told establishment types everything they don't want to hear about judicial elections: slate mailers count more than newspaper editorials or Los Angeles County Bar Association ratings (the County Bar rated Janavs "exceptionally well-qualified," Olson "not qualified"); voters respond to partisan appeals (Janavs is a Republican, Olson a Democrat); voters like all-American-sounding names better than foreign-sounding ones; and voters are generally clueless when it comes to selecting judges.

In case you don't think that whole foreign-sounding-name thing really makes any difference, check out this review of recent judicial elections by Court of Appeal Justice Rebecca A. Wiseman.

In the end, Janavs was defeated not because she was a bad judge, but because she was beat-able. Schwarzenegger won wide praise (and considerable relief) from Janavs' colleagues when he reappointed her. The Times editorial page, which strongly backed Janavs, was queasy about the governor overriding the will of the voters, no matter how ignorantly they were acting (see the editorial below).

By the way, it's judicial election time again. Incumbent judges and challengers begin filing later this month for the June 3 primary.

Going into an extended holiday week, Opinion L.A. draws its best numbers from politicians, labor strife, teen moms and tales of bad meds and economic woe. Sixth place goes to Craig Mazin and Matt Edelman for the previous week's Dust-up on the writers strike, but if we counted all five of the Mazin/Edelman Dust-up entries that would move their debate way up the list, as these continue to draw a lot of interest lower down in our Top 50 lists. So once again, it's clear that everybody's enjoying the WGA strike, even if nobody will admit it. And speaking of bridesmaids, four out of the 11th-15th-place spots were taken by our American Values editorials. Show your American spirit and read the whole series already.

1. Clintonian triangulation comes full circle by Jonah Goldberg
2. Stop scaring us by Henry Miller
3. Generic drugs' hidden downside by Naomi Wax
4. The polarizing express by Ezra Klein
5. So a fruit fly goes into a bar... by Marlene Zuk
6. Who strikes? by Craig Mazin and Matt Edelman
7. Honey, I shrunk the president by Jonathan Haidt
8. More writers' strike drama by the editorial board
9. Dollar signs by Howard M. Wachtel
10. Knocked up but not out by Meghan Daum

Have the reforms of the 1990s improved California politics? Depends on your point of view — or, according to a Times column, whether you're retired. Former Gov. Pete Wilson, state Senate leader John Burton and former Assembly speaker Willie Brown raised eyebrows on that topic in a policy forum this month:

"The Legislature was far less partisan than today," Wilson recalled of the 1960s. "... when John and Willie and I were all freshmen assemblymen, there was a great deal more drinking in the Legislature. These guys, the teetotalers, need to lighten up a bit."

All half-humorous comments aside, notes George Skelton, "The group also agreed that term limits are too short and that the current Legislature suffers from inexperience."

Now, those term limit rules are being revisited through Proposition 93. The initiative has some high-profile enemies and allies, and for this week's Dust-Up, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Controller Steve Westly spar over the proposition's pros and cons. 

Today, in the defender's corner, Westly argues that 93 "would make the state Legislature more efficient and effective":

Currently, 12 of 34 legislative committees are chaired by first-year lawmakers. These committees determine the laws that affect our schools, housing, jobs, public safety, transportation and the environment. Under Proposition 93, legislators could gain experience before chairing a committee. This would benefit the process and, ultimately, the voters.

Proposition 93's reforms would also slow the constant campaign cycle that exists now. Termed-out legislators start campaigning early to win a seat in the other house or another office. Instead, legislators would continue to work for — and campaign to — constituents in their home district.

But, contends Poizner,

The question asked by The Times today is, why shouldn't the public be allowed to vote for whomever it wants for as long as it wants?

The answer is that the ability of voters to choose in elections is restricted in California — not by term limits, but by the politicians' self-interested gerrymandering of legislative seats. Incumbents simply don't lose, and seats don't switch from one party to another, thanks to these safely drawn districts. [...]

Today, the only way politicians ever leave office in California is because of our existing term-limits law.

Read the whole exchange and discuss the debate here.

Here's a brief exchange I had today with a friend of mine who has a startup company doing event services for the studios (among others). She was doing a little friendly bellyaching about how busy she's been with the Oscars, Golden Globes and other big self-love-fests coming up. I had figured everybody must be looking to pinch their pennies, what with the tough economy, the strike and so on. Apparently not...

Me: Is that stuff even going to happen this year? I mean, don't the awards shows need writers to make up all the stupid jokes and whatnot?

Event planner: They're all proceeding like they're going to happen. And I'm only dealing with the people in the events departments, and they have a budget that they have to spend, or...

In the other Times, Bill Carter takes a look at gabshow hosts who are keeping their writers[non-writing staffers] off the public dole. But he leaves what looks to me like a major variable out of his equation:

David Letterman of CBS’s “Late Show” (who has to support two CBS shows because his company, Worldwide Pants, also owns “Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson”), Conan O’Brien of NBC’s “Late Night,” Jay Leno of NBC’s “Tonight,” and most recently Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report,” have all committed to pay their staffs out of their own funds.

Estimates of what it is costing the hosts range from about $150,000 a week to as high as $250,000 a week, depending on the size of the staffs. The question the hosts are struggling with is how long they can continue to stay off the air and subsidize their staffs, and what happens when they decide they cannot do it any longer.

It's not the main focus of the story, but since we're getting the weekly price range for this largess, shouldn't we also get some indication of the size of the staff in question (and if this is writers only or all staff)?

I have no idea what the size of the Late Show or Tonight Show writing staff is, but wWe can make some interesting extrapolations from these numbers.

Assuming the actual weekly payroll throughout the year is somewhere in Carter's range, it appears you could maintain a staff of 250 writers making an average of $52,000 a year, a staff of one writer making $13,000,000 a year, or something between these two.

If you maintain a staff of 20 writers, and you are at the cheapest end of this scale ($150,000 per week), that means your average writer[staffer] is making $390,000 per year. If you're at the generous end ($250,000 per week) with the same-sized staff your average writer's[staffer's] making $650,000 per year. That's the average, not the top-performers. (If Carter's figure is counting all staff, including support, clerical, stagehands, etc., that's another story of course.)

Can these figures possibly be right? Is the world wrong or is Bill Carter?

Update: NO, I can be wrong! Thanks to reader Sam for reading the paragraph I skipped, which explains that the chat shows are in fact paying their nonwriting staffs some figure between $7.8 million and $13 million per year.

What a second, their non-writing staffs? These numbers are getting screwier by the minute. So let's say it takes, not counting the gag writers, the labors of 50 people to fob Craig Ferguson or Jimmy Kimmel off on the insomniacs every night. To get to that roster I think you'd have to include all the artistics, technical staff, clerical, janitorial, security, food prep, etc. and I still think you'd come up short. But let's figure they need that large a non-writing staff. This would put the average salary somewhere between $156,000 a year and $260,000 a year. Something still doesn't make sense here, though it seems more likely to be explained by personnel bloat than by Bill Carter's numbers. Jay, talk to your accountant; you're getting hosed by your own employees.   

If you're one of those minorities whose ancestors hailed from the eastern hemisphere, figuring out what box to check in the "race/ethnicity" section of any form is a stressful experience requiring a quick soul-searching session. Now, though, the University of California hopes to ease that existential burden for UC applicants, raising the number of Asian/Pacific Islander categories from eight to 23. From The Daily Californian:

...the University of California will increase threefold the number of subgroups under the Asian and Pacific Islander categories on its admission application, officials announced Friday. [...]

Asian American categories will include Chinese, Taiwanese, Asian Indian, Japanese, Pakistani, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian and “other Asian.”

The Pacific Islander category, previously under one heading, will now include Native Hawaiian, Guamanian/Chamorro, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and “other Pacific Islander.”

And no, this is not about being PC. Or at least, not just about that. In between the Asian supernerd stereotype and the fact that Asians now outnumber whites across the UC system, many Asian minorities fall through the cracks.

It's kind of the reverse of the way whites assimilated: Asians are now being officially subcategorized in finer detail, while whites have blended from very distinctive communities — German, Italian, Polish and others — into this monochromatic mash. Part of that has to do with intermarriage: Many people know where their parents and grandparents came from, it's just that none of them came from the same place. That's generally still not the case for Asian Americans. 

Not that this ethnic differentiation is a new phenomenon. Go to any number of California colleges and you'll see the unsanctioned version: Pakistani students sit at one club table and the Pilipino students man their own. (Some Korean-Christian groups, however, do have a tendency to proselytize to unsuspecting freshmen.) Self-contained social networks spring out of those isolated groups, and it's debatable whether that's a good thing -- even if the alternative is the monstrously huge Asian American Association.

Oddly enough, Asian Americans aren't the only ones experiencing diversity/fragmentation issues. A recent Pew poll found that 37% of African Americans surveyed no longer saw blacks as a unified race. The question is, how exactly would they break blacks down by ethnicity? Is it region, or dialect, or country of origin?

Congress passes a bill and the president signs it, but reserves the right not to enforce parts of it that he considers unconstitutional.

Obviously a reference to the imperious George W. Bush, who is notorious for hedging his approval of legislation with “signing statements” like the one he attached to the 2005 McCain Amendment outlawing torture of suspected terrorists.

Actually, the president in this case was Bill Clinton. 

After the death of former Rep. Henry Hyde, Declan McCullagh noted on his  CNET blog that, in addition to pushing for removal from office and leading the charge against taxpayer-subsidized abortions, Hyde was the author of an amendment to the 1996 telecommunications law that made it a felony  to distribute information over the Internet relating to obtaining an abortion. In a signing statement, Clinton said "I...object to the provision in the Act concerning the transmittal of abortion-related speech and information." He noted further that  the Justice Department had advised him "that this and related abortion provisions in current law are unconstitutional and will not be enforced because they violate the First Amendment."

McCullagh notes that the Justice Department under Bush also has declined to enforce the Hyde amendment, a posture unlikely to bring criticism from those who think Bush put himself “above the law” with his signing statements.

California voters, that is. That's according to the Sacramento Bee:

Since passage of a state law in 2002 allowing voters to sign up to cast their ballots by mail in every election, the number of permanent absentee voters has more than tripled.

According to a new Field Poll released Thursday, more than 4.2 million of the state's 15 million registered voters – 27.2 percent – have signed up to cast their ballots by mail. In the June 2006 state primary election, a record 47 percent of the ballots cast came from absentee voters.

Some in other states are even thinking about turning to a system like Oregon's, which is solely vote-by-mail. But that's not likely to happen in California until SoCal shapes up:

Twenty-nine percent of voters in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area and 20 percent of voters in the Central Valley have signed up as permanent absentee voters. But only 10 percent of voters in Los Angeles County and 11 percent in Orange County have chosen to vote permanently by mail.

Just one more reason the Bay Area rocks.

Most permanent absentee voters seem to be rich, white homeowners. The original drive to make "absentee voting" easier was led by Democrats trying to counteract higher turnout by Republicans. In the 1982 race for governor, the GOP turned the absentee vote around, however, and Republicans still hold a 1% edge over Democrats among the mail-in crowd. The San Francisco Chronicle takes this opportunity to hate on both Republicans and Los Angeles:

The mail ballot numbers are skewed, however, by Los Angeles County. Although the county has 25 percent of the state's registered voters, it includes only 10 percent of the state's permanent mail voters. Election officials in that county, concerned that a flood of mailed-in ballots could overwhelm the system, have been reluctant to encourage people to sign up for permanent mail status.

Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1 in Los Angeles County, which means the low number of permanent mail voters there gives the GOP a statewide boost. While Democrats outnumber Republicans 42 percent to 34 percent among all California voters, the GOP holds a 41 percent to 40 percent edge with permanent mail voters.

It's too bad LA hasn't really rolled out the mail-in vote. California's been trying (in vain) to increase its influence among the state presidential primaries, and this could be one way to up the ante. After all, with a month-long voting period, people could be voting as early as January.

The California Progress Report also tries to think positive:

The extended voting period also should reduce the effectiveness of last minute "hit pieces." Expect to be bombarded once those ballots arrive.... Field reports that some county registrar of voters are encouraging VBM "as a way of reducing election costs." It should take some of the pressure off of having to assemble a large army of Election Day workers at polling places. The downside, however, is fewer polling places at greater distances for voters.

Hey, don't knock the silver lining. What with our dashed dreams of primary influence, we'll take what we can get.

Remember California's short-lived experiment with open primary elections? After Proposition 198 passed in 1996, Californians were allowed to vote for any presidential candidate in a primary election regardless of party registration. Understandably, partisans found this a headach. State Democratic, Republican and other parties sued, and the U.S. Supreme Court nixed the California open primary in 2000, ruling that Prop. 198 violated a party's freedom of association.

Virginia has its own version of an open primary, and it too is a thorn in the side of the party establishment. So how does the state GOP respond? Vote Republican in the primary, and promise to vote Republican in the general election:

If you're planning to vote in Virginia's February Republican presidential primary, be prepared to sign an oath swearing your Republican loyalty.

The State Board of Elections on Monday approved a state Republican Party request to require all who apply for a GOP primary ballot first vow in writing that they'll vote for the party's presidential nominee next fall. There's no practical way to enforce the oath.

Virginia doesn't require voters to register by party, and for years the state's Republicans have fretted that Democrats might meddle in their open primaries.

Tit for tat — very creative. Perhaps California could've come up with a similar solution to save its open primary: You get to violate parties' freedom of association in February, and parties get to violate yours in November. Everyone's rights are violated. Or upheld. It's a wash either way.

Hat tip to the New York Times' Opinionator.

Granted, it's no Super Tuesday — elections are taking place in more than a dozen cities in Los Angeles County, and the most interesting story at the polls is really how dull San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's election day is, given his recent personal scandals. But it marks a countdown to the real deal — November 4, 2008 — when local, state and federal elections all collide and voters have to sort them out on a highly inconvenient weekday.

Speaking of which, why DO we have elections on Tuesday?

That's the question NPR's Alex Cohen seeks to answer. It turns out, ironically, that the day was chosen for practical purposes. Elections couldn't be held on weekends because good Christian folk couldn't work or travel on the Sabbath, and since it could take more than a day to get to the nearest town with a poll, Monday was cutting it too close.

The U.S. government adds,

Lawmakers wanted to prevent Election Day from falling on the first of November for two reasons. First, November 1 is All Saints Day, a day on which Roman Catholics are obligated to attend Mass.

See? Who says this WASPy nation wasn't tolerant of other faiths? Never mind that it was apparently moved to Nov. 2 to be lumped with All Soul's Day.

"Also," — minor detail — "merchants typically balanced the accounts from the preceding month on the first of each month." That makes Nov. 1 one of the few times when politics and money didn't mix.

Of course, with the invention of cars, the weekend restriction has become almost irrelevant. In fact, it's become a hurdle for millions of overworked Americans — which may help to explain at least part of our abysmally low turnout compared to other nations.

Some are trying to take a page out of other countries' playbooks, be it expanding the voting period or holding elections on holidays. Either way, we need a change, since early voting can only do so much, and some question the effectiveness of Vote by Mail. It's likely too late for next year's election day — but perhaps the three main Democratic presidential contenders, all claiming to bring reform to the White House, will do more than just tack it onto their to-do lists.

Remember last year when a flock of hipster towns were promising to provide free citywide wireless networks? Apparently financial issues have forced that idea out of fashion. From Sacramento and San Francisco to Houston and Chicago, Wi-Fi plans have been hitting snags or falling apart altogether.

That's a shame, since total coverage in our high-tech age would be a pretty valuable service. Is there a way for cities to provide wireless coverage?

But, as Tim Wu of Slate.com points out,

The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven't thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won't be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they'll have to pay for it.

Establishing a citywide wireless hotspot is a matter of scale. Wu goes on to point out that Wi-Fi has succeeded not in high-tech metropolises, but in smaller municipal venues:

St. Cloud, Fla., a town of 28,000, has an entirely free wireless network. The network has its problems, such as dead spots, but also claims a 77 percent use rate among its citizens.

Business models and laws of scale aside, the San Francisco Chronicle says that clear purpose and tangible benefits also help:

The most popular uses that are motivating municipalities are public safety, remote worker access, meter reading and surveillance cameras. The city of Ripon (San Joaquin County) recently installed 71 Wi-Fi-enabled video cameras that allow police to monitor intersections and trouble spots remotely. Police officers using the city Wi-Fi network can pull up pictures from their cars and also broadcast live from cameras in their vehicles, allowing other officers to get a sense of what's happening at a specific location.

"What you'll find is cities are now selling the networks on things that are quantifiable, like public safety or public works," said Craig Settles, a Wi-Fi consultant. "You've got to establish that before you can pursue other social goals."

And apparently, in Minneapolis, the city's public safety wireless network took pressure off cellular networks and made rescue efforts easier following the August bridge collapse.

So perhaps, in the near future, those cities will be able to build public-access service from existing networks like these. Before giving up on the muni-Wi-Fi dream, cities should consider models like these. According to the Chron, leaders in the Wi-Fi industry

are backing off some of the talk of broad public access and bridging the digital divide. The more immediate goals are concrete applications and services that can be sold to cities looking to go Wi-Fi.

Despite the slowdown in the municipal Wi-Fi space, leaders say there is still a bright future ahead, especially with the introduction of new Wi-Fi-enabled devices such as the Apple iPhone. Metro-Fi CEO Chuck Haas said 6 percent of Metro-Fi users last month accessed the network through an iPhone. [...]

Here's a thought: If you have an iPhone, you're already on the right side of the digital divide, and you don't need a city government to provide you with free wireless. Muni Wi-Fi was meant to be a public service; under this model, it becomes another way for private enterprise to benefit the privileged. Let's hope that as plan Bs for municipal Wi-Fi evolve, cities remember why they took to this idea in the first place.

Craig Mazin, who in his Artful Writer blog and elsewhere has been a vociferous pro-strike voice among Writers Guild members, recounts a funny/creepy story about how the Guild managed to sap even his enthusiasm. Mazin, consciously or not, did the cost/benefit analysis and came to the only logical conclusion: that there is no period of time in your life that wouldn't be better spent doing something other than voting. In other words, he didn't bother to vote, but he was intending to do so before today's deadline. Then he got an email from the WGA:

It was from a member who I shall not name. She’s my “strike captain.” And she told me that the Guild had informed her that I had not yet voted, and she urged me to vote.

What…

…the…

……hell????

For as long as I’ve been a member of this union (12 years and counting now), every single vote we’ve ever taken has been a secret ballot. No one knows who votes or who doesn’t vote, and no one shares that information with other members. Furthermore, there was absolutely no indication in the voting materials that this ballot would be handled in any different way than any ballots before it.

Secret ballotting is, in my opinion, a fundamental requirement for a properly functioning democratic election.

As it happens, I disagree with this last point. Or at least, I reject anonymity where my own vote is concerned, have never been persuaded that a secret ballot is necessary for a legitimate vote and think the benefits of doing all votes openly are vastly greater than the costs. (I also believe that major media companies should require journalists, as a condition of employment, to make their own ballots public, which is, philosophically, pretty much the opposite of the way they do things now.)

However, the Writers Guild has a duty to its members to conduct its voting in a way that is clear to those members and consistent. Mazin posits a not-hard-to-imagine nightmare scenario in which enemies lists are drawn up of people who either didn't vote or voted against authorization; I say if you have to fear retribution from your union because of something like that, you've got bigger problems than just the secrecy of your ballot, but then I'm not a big fan of unions. The point is that the members have a right to know how their votes are being treated, and legitimate reason to be concerned when their voiced or unvoiced opinions are being manipulated by the leadership in some kind of same-regiment-circling-the-block parade of fake support. That holds even truer for members like Mazin who actually share the goals of the leadership:

In principle, I support a high turnout, and I was absolutely intending to vote. And of all the members in the union, I’m probably one of a dozen who have taken a widely public stance in support of a “yes.”

But now I’m not voting.

I will not be coerced by my union to vote. Nor will I support any union election that violates the privilege of a secret ballot. If the staff is tallying who voted, then what’s stopping them from seeing who voted how?

So that's one Yea vote lost. With so much apparent popular support for authorization, this kind of strongarm tactic by the WGA can only be seen as evidence for every producer's secret suspicion that writers are dumb. Somehow I still think the final balloting will produce that big ol' authorization. Take your pick: 90% or unaminous. Or better yet, let the WGA take your pick for you.

Will he do it? He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t dare.

But he did. This morning, President Bush shot down a bill that would pay for the insurance of millions of children whose families don't qualify for Medicaid but can't afford health insurance.

It shouldn’t be a surprise. In spite of the bill's wide popular support and bipartisan approval, Bush had vowed to veto the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which he and other Republicans have attempted to depict as a step toward socialized medicine — a claim the Times editorial board dismissed as absurd.

All the same, the president's follow-through came as a shock. With such a successful, popular and worthy program on the line, wouldn’t the president, at the last moment, his pen poised over the paper, honor the finest traditions of theatrical politics and see the light?

Like his arguments against SCHIP, Bush's stubbornness defies logic. He’s certainly got few backers—states support the program, key Republicans have backed the legislation, and insurance companies have spoken up for it enthusiastically. Democrats certainly mastered their spin on the conflict, bringing in children on SCHIP to speak for the program.

If Congress had passed SCHIP with a veto-proof majority, Bush’s threat wouldn’t have carried much weight. But while the Senate version of the bill garnered two-thirds approval, the House vote remained some two dozen votes short.

So now what? Some say the Dems will give it another go. Others think they might raise the stakes and roll a bunch of healthcare issues, from SCHIP to Medicare, into an omnibus bill. Democrats are certainly gearing up for a fight, launching a savvy ad campaign in key states, and working to secure the more votes from Democrats and Republicans.

Either way, it looks like this whole episode is escalating from a simple round of chicken to a more dangerous double-dare. And with less than four weeks left on a temporary extension of the program (which lapsed on Sept. 30), it’s anyone’s guess whether SCHIP will survive this political drudge match.

Bush is a man of his word. He said he wouldn’t sign the bill as it was, and lamentably, he made good on that promise. If he doesn't make any bold statements before Congress sends a "new" bill to his desk, perhaps this time he’ll be able to see reason.

Hundreds of California lawyers who gathered in Anaheim for their annual convention got an earful from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who told them that these days their profession often stands in the way of progress and equal protection. His chief exhibit: the two court rulings, one last year and one this year, that invalidated the legislation that would have transferred substantial control over the Los Angeles Unified School District from the school board to him.

"Let's face the hard truth," he told lawyers Friday. "The legal system no longer leads the way."

Villaraigosa compared the failure of public schools today to the era in which national guardsmen blocked the schoolhouse door to prevent black students from attending previously all-white schools. Treatment of students in Los Angeles schools, he said, is "as insidious as it was in the Deep South, when we see how few of our kids graduate from high school, and how many of them, if they do, are scoring in the bottom 20 percentile in the nation."

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suspended a county supervisor Tuesday for alleged misconduct and immediately appointed and swore in a replacement.

So is that such a big deal? Yes. It's further proof that San Francisco, although physically on the Pacific, is an East Coast city in spirit and law, and not even remotely in the same universe as Los Angeles. The mayor is firmly in charge up there, and can boot another elected official (although, true, only temporarily). That will never happen in L.A., at least not under the laws as they are written today. By culture, history and temperament, residents here would never allow their mayor to kick out a city council member. And that's fine. Still, San Fran may have some lessons for this town.

First, the details: San Francisco is a city. But it's also a county. Everything is wrapped up together. No fights between the city and the county over how to handle homelessness, housing or anything else. The mayor is in charge of the whole thing. The legislative branch is the county board of supervisors, which is also the city council.

S.F.'s city attorney began investigating Supervisor Ed Jew's residence after evidence emerged, as it did here with Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke, that he didn't live in the district he represents. Meanwhile, the FBI had opened a corruption probe on Jew.

Unlike here, the San Francisco mayor can start misconduct proceedings, oust the charged supervisor and appoint someone to replace him pending a final determination. The city's ethics commission will hold a hearing and make a recommendation on whether to permanently remove Jew from office. The Board of Supervisors has the final say.

It's different here, and supposedly less political. Only a court, the voters, term limits or the grim reaper can remove an elected official from office in L.A. (see Article II of the Los Angeles City Charter). The full City Council (but not the mayor) can suspend a member, but only pending a criminal trial. If there are no criminal charges, the best the council do is censure one of its own. If a member isn't living in his or her district, it's the apolitical city clerk, not (as in San Francisco) the elected city attorney, who has the task of asking the attorney general to remove the person from office.

In L.A. County, there is no mayor to suspend a supervisor. In the city of Los Angeles, the mayor can't touch a council member. It's less political here. More professional. Less efficient. More convoluted. In San Francisco, the mayor is in charge, and if the voters don't like him, they kick him out. In Los Angeles, it's, well, complicated. Better? Worse? Let's just say it's different.

If you haven't taken a gander at our Primary Source from Gov. Schwarzenegger's visit, hop on over and check it out. And if that doesn't fill you up, here's some additional schwarzenschmoozing, in which the governor provides his views on budget discipline, real estate and my weight problem...

Tim Cavanaugh: You just mentioned a lot of Democratic names, and I'm wondering, how far do you think you can continue to push your own party with comments like "Dying at the box office" and things like that. I mean, is there a little bit of buck-stops-here-ism, given that it was your own party that was holding up the budget?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: If it is, if I am the leader of the party, then I take credit for it or I take the blame for it. But that's not the way it works in California. That's the way it works in Great Britain, that's the way it works in Germany and Austria, that's the way it works in other states. You know, if you talk to, you know, Crist, he would say you know, I did this, through the party, then I came in, changed things around, put my guy in, and now they are the party that is in a sense, me, and in a sense my philosophy. Well that's not the way it works in California. Maybe that's the way we should do it, but I mean that's not the way it works.

So what I do is, I do that, if I see you, um, you know, gaining weight, and gaining weight and gaining weight and gaining weight, I will eventually say — if I care at all about you — I would say, You know something? If you continue this way, you may get into serious trouble, and you'll maybe get a heart attack, or maybe, you know, have problems with diabetes and stuff like that and you can't move around as quickly and you will get tired, and, blah blah all those things. But, here's what I'd do if I were you: I would go and exercise every day, stop eating at night, eat only two meals, be disciplined, and blah blah and all those kinds of things, I would give you a plan. I'd say either you can follow that plan or not. So it's not really that I'm criticizing you, it's just that, look, I care about you, and I want you to live and feel good, as good as I do. And do as well as I do.

So that's what I basically did with the Republican Party, is to go to them and say, Look: Here's the, the swing voters, here's the independents, here's the majority of Republican voters, that actually love the health care proposal, that a majority of them voted for, and any of the polls show that they like what we're doing, they like the idea of taking care of the environment and fighting global warming. They like that I signed AB 32. I say, there's an endless amount of situations where the voters, the Republican voters, are with me. But not the politicians and not the party guys. So what I'm saying is, You should start looking at that. So if you want to become the majority party, look at those things, and look at those independents, and you will see: If you will be inclusive, and if you start changing some of the policies, and direct, you know, do things more for California than just for this one group, I think that we could be again the majority party, and that's where the action is.

Keep reading for more from the ed board, and the governor's real estate tips for smart shoppers...

Radio Hall of Famer Mel Karmazin, co-founder of Infinity Broadcasting, former Viacom COO and now CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, stopped in to see the editorial board Monday. Sirius is in the midst of a troubled negotiation to merge with XM, its only rival in the satellite-radio space. The merger, which would leave Karmazin in charge of the combined company, has been intensely scrutinized by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice and has raised questions ranging from antitrust to content decency. (The ed board has opined that the Houses of Howard and Oprah, respectively, should be allowed to unite.) Sirius now has 7.1 million subscribers to XM's 8 million, and part of the two companies' argument is that their combined power will provide strong competition for terrestrial radio stations. Some highlights from Karmazin's talk:

On whether Sirius and XM are in trouble:

Sallie Hofmeister: There were a lot of people who made the argument that without the merger, both of you would go out of business. Is that part of your argument?

Mel Karmazin: No, because I, I mean I can't make that argument. If I, if I could make that argument I would make that argument, and we'd get the merger approved. Because the...

Sallie: There's no...

Mel: ...the government would say... There's not an argument in there... As a matter of fact the reverse is true, because I can't make an argument that I can't back up, is that if in fact we believe... So let's assume, an epiphany came to us because we suddenly realized our cost structures were just crazy, then we would file comment, and we would be a troubled company, you know, and we'd sit there and say, "The reason you should approve this merger is that if you don't approve the merger — right? — the country would be without any satellite, and isn't it better to have one than..."

David Hiller: Are both companies profitable now?

Mel: Neither company has made a dime.

David: Neither?

Mel: Neither company's made a dime. You know, it's, we are unable to make the failing-company argument so, you know, some people have said, you know, it's ailing but not failing. And I believe it's not failing. And, and I bought personally a whole bunch of our stock, you know, I mean a lot, you know. And um, I believe that the company will be successful without the merger or with the merger. I just don't know why... 

Sallie: You have to say that because if the merger's not approved, your stock would sink I guess.

Mel: Well it's not, it's a real issue but if you take a look at the equity the companies have right now, there's a substantial amount of equity, so below the deck, I mean, you know... 

David: What is the equity?

Mel: $10 billion.

David: Combined, of the two?

Mel: Yeah. So I mean how do you, you know, look at, you know, an equity value of $10 billion — you can sit there and go, Wall Street... It's hard to make the argument that you're failing because you're growing. Our number of subscribers is growing. You know, we're going to have a billion dollars, Sirius will have a billion dollars of revenue this year. Now, you know, I mean in my opinion that's substantial. Now our costs are, we're at high fixed costs. It costs us three hundred thousand — three hundred million dollars for each of the three satellites we have up in the air today.

Tim Cavanaugh: $300 million per year per...

Mel: Per satellite, no. To buy them. Right? You buy a satellite, it costs you $300 million; satellite life is 12-13 years. So if you looked at the investments the company has made: we've invested $5 billion, right? We've spent $5 billion in cash, and we're still not making money. Now, I wasn't here then. I would not ever have gotten into this business, OK? I mean, I came in at the end of 2004, as I saw profitability on the horizon. The reason I'm not expanding into Europe... I mean, just think about it, look: You know, if satellite radio's a good thing in the United States, why aren't you doing it in Asia and China? Because it's going to take you 12 or 13 years of losses before you make money.

On why the satellite radio giants might be able to win:

In a strange turn of events, a bill's supporters are planning to let the legislation get vetoed ... in order to see it pass.

Democrats in Congress can’t come to a consensus over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides healthcare for children whose families can’t afford private healthcare but don’t qualify for Medicaid. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed reauthorization bills this summer (since the program expires in two weeks) but they have to reconcile the two versions and then send a final bill to the White House to sign, or veto.

The problem is, President Bush is set to reject the bill, so Congress needs a compromise version with enough support to override the presidential pen. That's where the trouble starts: While the Senate version flies high over Bush’s veto threat with a two-thirds majority, the House bill is so bogged down by costly Medicare proposals that it just can’t get off the ground.

Senate Democrats (and Republicans) are worried about just that. So, perhaps in an effort to make the House see reason, they’re taking our advice and trying to streamline SCHIP.

Here's where it gets twisty, though: If a weaker compromise bill passes, Senate Dems are actually going to let Bush axe it. But that’s just one layer in the veto strategy, according to the Kaiser Network:

Democrats have acknowledged that a stopgap funding bill for SCHIP will be needed before the end of the month to continue funding for the program, but they want the extension to result from a presidential veto, rather than a stalled conference committee, according to Democratic aides, CongressDaily reports. Under the assumption that Bush will veto any significant expansion of SCHIP, House leaders "will have little choice but to play ball with" [Senate Finance Committee Chair Max] Baucus and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

And if this does cause House Dems to cave and compromise, that reborn SCHIP bill could almost certainly rack up veto-proof support.

So essentially, these legislators are using Bush’s main weapon against him. That’s either a sneaky political trick, or very zen.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of the Community Coalition (for substance abuse prevention & treatment) paid a visit to the Ed Board the other day, and held forth on, among other topics, his organization's history, career tech, LAUSD, cheers and jeers for the Community Redevelopment Agency in South L.A., and his group's evolution from an early-nineties response to substance abuse to an "openly progressive" advocacy organization. One of the most interesting parts of the talk centered on foster care, and his belief that relatives of parent-challenged kids are getting shortchanged by the system:

Marqueece: The county and state really have a two-tiered system that privileges privatized foster care, or what we call stranger care. So, you know, your niece or a nephew shows up at your house and says your sister got locked up. Will you to take the kids? You say yes, the county says great, you got it, we're done; your niece is off our caseload. If you say no, then the county has to take her to a foster care home and say can you take this child? Do you have a bed? The foster care home says yes, the foster care home then gets $3,000 a month to take care of the child. In addition to health care, in addition to educational services, in addition to respite, in addition to transportation assistance.

Tim: $3,000?

Marqueece: Yeah, it can go up to $5,500 if the kids were drug-exposed or, you know, if you've got other problems that can be documented it can go up. It tends not to fall too far below $3,000, just for a straight-up taking a child. The family member on the other hand is in a bit of a bind because they have to qualify in the same way that a group home would. So, you know, you have to have a bed for the child, an individual bed for the child. If it's a girl and a boy they have to have separate rooms. You get an inspection from the county that's the same way the business would get an inspection, except the county doesn't help you get up to par. And every study that’s ever been done on foster care, on the whole, and again, there are anecdotes on both sides of the terrible things that happen to children with family members and in privatized foster care, but on the whole every study that's been done shows children who go into family care have much better outcomes, in terms of completing high school, staying out of prison, avoiding teenage pregnancy, all the things that are important when you're dealing with somebody who's really in child-to-teenage years.

Tim: Can I just, uh... The county, uh. OK, my brother murders his wife. The county takes his kid. So the county goes to me and says, You wanna take this kid? And I say sure. Is that the end of the story, or does the county then come to my place to make sure I have a bed and all that stuff?

Marqueece: If you say yes, the county says OK, let's make sure you're qualified.

Tim: But then they don't give me any money?

Marqueece: No.

Tim: Well then they should mind their own damn business.

Robert Greene: But hasn't that changed now? I mean there was this whole law that — [State Assembly member and Community Coalition founder] Karen Bass got a law...

Marqueece: Karen got some legislation passed last year...

Robert: ... and a huge federal waiver as well that was approved and, and...

Marqueece: Now there are, there are a few things families can get. One is they can get a clothing allowance, which is about $150 per child when the school starts and school ends. You can qualify for that. You can also qualify for something called the Chafee Scholarship which used to be unavailable to kids who went with relatives. Chafee Scholarship is if you are in foster care and you get accepted to a state college or university, your tuition's paid for by the state, your books, your room and board. And you get, you know, a stipend. That became available, as a result of Karen's legislation, to kids who are in family care as well. Some healthcare benefits, limited healthcare benefits became available as well.

Green Dot founder and CEO Steve Barr dropped by the editorial board this afternoon, along with his chief academic officer Sandy Blazer, to discuss his project for taking over Locke High School. Here's a bit of his presentation, with questions from the peanut gallery:

Tim: Am I right in thinking that Locke is a bigger project than you've taken on in the past?

Barr: Yeah.

Tim: Then the first of two pie-in-the-sky questions: How big can your model scale?

Barr: We don't want our model to scale. We want our model to be a model that can enforce change, that all schools adopt that model. So what I'm saying by that is, it's a little bit tricky: We don't want to be, you know, ten years from now, be the only group out there taking over high schools, fighting this fight. We gotta figure out a faster way to get them to ask us, and then take all our tenets within their model. That's always been the idea. So we think what'll happen, and this was the bet at Jefferson, and it's going to be what's going to happen after Locke, at least the way we see the world: What happens when those schools are open and those teachers are making more money under improved work conditions, and they're successful. What do you think the teachers at Jordan are going to do, and at Washington Prep and at Fremont. It's already happened, and Joel [Rubin] reported on it, after the original revolt, is that there are schools lined up, like the planes lined up at LAX, hovering over the city, that want to do this. We don't have the capacity to serve all those schools. We've had to do a lot of pushing off those teacher collectives that want to do it. But we sure as hell want to show you how to do it, and teach you to do the same thing, and help you with your the back office, and we'll give you our union contract. But the idea that this is really some market share issue, that we want ten more schools to prove it... We will keep doing what we're doing until the district looks like us. I think Locke will be, will create a demand. I think it really will. I think there was a demand for it when those teachers revolted that day. That was just... The calls that came in the next week or so were just bizarre. I mean, chapter chairs. It's not like it was just the lunatic fringe of teachers; this was the front line of UTLA's defense.

Joel Rubin: Assuming it takes a year or two for the district to, even, you know, for that break to happen, what is your capacity? Could you do another high school the year after Locke?

Barr: Yeah.

Rubin: And another one after that?

Barr: Yeah.

Lisa Richardson: Could you do a Santee?

Barr: Absolutely. If you have the... See, the reason why, in some ways it seems humongous with, at some point, you look at Locke and Watts and say: My God, look at all the problems. In another sense, especially after this — this was the hardest year of Green Dot. We doubled in size, and we took in attendance area. That was pretty hard. Can we do that with the advantage of not being in the facility business? Which takes up 80% of the bandwidth of the executive team of this organization — converting crappy churches into marginal classrooms is really hard. The C.U.P. process, I mean, tenant improvements — can you get that on time? I mean it's an insane amount of work. And also pulling off what we're pulling off — all of that with 30% less money. So we have meetings where the teachers want this, the teachers want that. I think we've come pretty close to hitting our ceiling for potential on the one-off charter schools. I think the average is 700 [API scores]; I think we could probably get to 750, if we stopped running.

King-Harbor hospital is still with us, even without patients. The emergency room closed weeks ago, but hundreds of people are still staffing it. Why?

"What are they doing," County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky asked at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting, "when they report to work?"

They are taking their annual sexual harassment prevention training, responded health services director Bruce Chernof, or other core training requirements, pending their screening and eventual transfer to county medical centers that actually serve patients.

So when all the training is done, they just come in, punch the clock and hang out?

More Yaroslavsky:

At some point, somebody's going to feel an entitlement to walk in at 8:30 and not even do anything, because they haven't done anything for several weeks, and now they're going to be asked to work. It's a bad situation.

Why, at the urgent care facility that remains open at King-Harbor, are there about 750 on staff while about half that many work in a similar urgent care, with more patient visits, in Antelope Valley? Chernof said he'd have to check those numbers before commenting. Yaroslavsky wasn't having it; he apparently detected the by-now familiar dance that for years allowed King to elevate patronage and employee interests over patient care:

My fear is that we are going to get victimized. Come back to the same routine. That this facility is special. This facility is different. This facility needs to have cost-plus. This facility, this facility, this facility. And we're going to end up rationalizing a bloated organization.

Did Conny B. McCormack retire from her post as Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/clerk, or did she resign in protest? Did she recklessly damage voter confidence in the nation's most populous county by sticking around as long as she did, or is she recklessly abandoning the county just before the 2008 primary? Or all of the above?

All of the above, according to the Brad Blog and other critics of electronic voting systems and of registrars, like McCormack, who defend them. The blog is giving readers a chance to vote (electronically) on where they think McCormack will work next, with the choices including the four allegedly tainted companies: Diebold/Premier, Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart, and Election Systems & Software Inc. All produce voting systems decertified several weeks ago by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

In her retirement statement McCormack said she wanted to shift her "energies and experience to election administration and research and consulting both within the U.S. and worldwide." This evening she said that didn't mean going to work for one of her department's voting equipment contractors. "You won't find me as a Diebold spokesman, or ES&S, or any of them," she told me.

Still, to critics of electronic voting, McCormack will likely continue to be dismissed as a shill for vendors who at best want to foist bad software and faulty machinery onto the public, at public expense, and at worst are part of a cabal to allow conservative Republicans to steal elections.

There is no denying that McCormack foolishly allowed her photo to be reproduced on a Diebold brochure, giving fuel to assertions that she is looking out for the interests of voting companies. She didn't help her case any when she told county supervisors that vendors wouldn't make much money in Los Angeles County if they have to pay for every ballot to be hand-counted.

What McCormack could have said, and should have said, was that the county could be left without vendors of election machines at all if they can't make any money here. That outcome may be just fine, especially if the companies produce systems that are easily corrupted. The point is that McCormack had frontline, practical experience in running elections in the nation's largest county. That may have led her to be too close to vendors; it also provided the county with fairly smooth voting days here, especially considering the number of elections (88 cities, the county, statewide elections) and the volume of ballots. If California's February primary also goes smoothly, McCormack will no doubt be blasted for having complained that Bowen's decertification decision [pdf] would throw voting day into chaos. If there are problems, she'll be branded as the person who left things in disarray.

The Times editorial page noted the severe problems found in Bowen's top-to-bottom review of California voting systems and backed her decision to decertify. But the page also expressed alarm at the politicization, however unintentional, of the process. Bowen, a Democrat, reversed certification decisions made by her predecessor, Republican Bruce McPherson [pdf], six months earlier. The next secretary of state could reverse all over again--unless certification decisions are turned over to a nonpartisan (or at least bipartisan) panel, as they once were in California.

Readers give Michael McGough whatfor over his recent Opinion Daily "If Gore had won ... "

Robert Land goes to Godwin's Law hell and back, and becomes the umpteenth person to discover the stunning Moe Howard/Hitler connection:

Clinton was wrong in signing the republicanazi bill 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, under pressure from the Republcanazi Concress.

Bush and his fellow Republicanazi's, supported by stooges like the Times' senior editorial writer. who shamelessly finds ways to excuse the excesses of a government not dedicated to the well being of her citizens, but dedicated to consolidating control over those citizens, are simple profiteers bleeding the USA dry and attempting to establish a HOMELAND like DER FATHERLAND.

Just like a fellow with a funny mustashe did a few decades ago in a small European country, assisted and enabled by people like The Times' senior editorial writer.

Ziggy Heil to you and your new Fuher.

Robert Land

From the Volunteer State, Todd and Deb and Ricky and Tom and Diane, with Carol and Ted and Alice abstaining, vote against revenge:

Dear Mr. Michael McGough,

If Gore had become Prez. instead of the Texacutioner, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. It's as simple as that.

The Dow would be at 15 and the NASDAQ would be a 6.

Everyone knows it. Everyone sees the con, just as we have for the past 7 years.

So let's not screw up and vote for revenge again.

Have a great day...!

Todd/Deb/Ricky/Tom/Diane

Nashville Memphis TN

Jim Hassinger makes it hurt:

In order to come to your conclusions, you just have to ignore every single word that Gore has spoken since 2000. Must hurt to be a Bush apologist when your guy is a complete psychopath.

---

"... the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of  little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Jonathan Swift

Jim Hassinger

From Oak Park, Ill., city of wide lawns and narrow minds, Benjamin Iglar-Mobley gets the restore-Gore movement underway:

Michael McGough stretches credulity to the breaking point in trying to equate a President Gore with our current White House occupant. The very domestic spying programs McGough claims Gore would have sought had he gained the presidency in 2000 are the ones Gore denounces in his book 'The Assault On Reason.'

I feel sorry for those like Michael McGough trying to come up with excuses for the worst president in US history; they have an impossible task. However, he concludes with "We'll never know for sure" how Al Gore would have conducted himself as president. There's a fairly obvious way we can find out: restore Gore to his rightful office in 2008.

Benjamin Iglar-Mobley

Gretchen Kranch says the dead don't need civil liberties:

In response to your article about whether our civil liberties would still have been intact after 09/11 if Gore had won the election. Yes.... of course they would have been. I believe this to be the case since I have no doubt at all that President Gore's work day on 09/12/01 would have been no different from his work day on 09/10/01. Like Mr. Clinton after the first World Trade Center attack he would have responded by telling the nation not to be alarmed since this was no big deal. Then he would have resumed dialing for Buddhist dollars.

Since a Gore Administration would have been loath to term what happened on 09/11/07 as an attack there would have been no follow-up action taken to prevent more of them. Therefore there would have been no resulting 'assault on civil liberties'.

And please don't insult my intelligence by asserting that President Gore would have invaded Afghanistan. At the time, the Democrats were opposed to even doing that much.

Of course, this would only have emboldened the terrorists to level more attacks at us leading to thousands more deaths and injuries. But at least the civil liberties of the dead would have been protected. I'm sure their families would have appreciated that.

g.kranch

The Wall Street Journal's Brody Mullins, camera in hand, treks out to the badlands of San Mateo County to find the seemingly modest house of the Paw family, who in conjunction with their associate, New York-based wheeler-dealer Norman Hsu, have made generous contributions to the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-New York). The numbers:

Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.

That total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan's Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.

The article takes hypothetical pains not to say that the Paws are being given money by wealthier people to invest in Clinton's political future, but just to note that if, in some alt.reality, they were doing that, it would violate campaign finance laws. The story is far from probative: The Paws have a large family with some seemingly successful children (one manages a mutual fund). Their son Winkle acknowledges the family's association with Hsu (excuse me, Mr. Hsu), and least persuasive of all is the campaign-finance-investigation-by-architecture-review portion of the story:

The Paw's Daly City home is a one-story house in a working-class suburb of San Francisco. On a recent day, a coiled garden hose rested next to a dilapidated garden with a half-dozen dried out plants. The din of traffic from a nearby freeway was occasionally drowned out by jumbo jets departing San Francisco International Airport.

Don't let that "working-class" business fool you, comrade. Daly City, a little slice of Purgatory just below the Heaven of San Francisco, is as outrageously priced as only a town on the Peninsula can be. I know an Orthodox priest who spent nearly $800,000 on a D.C. dump not much different from the one in Mullins' photo — and that was in the late nineties, long before the market peak. I find it not at all surprising that an extended family that can get its paws on this lime-green palace would be able to spend $200,000 becoming "Hillraisers." Still, this is an interesting piece of enterprise journalism, even if you, like me, are one of those crazy people who believe how you spend money in exercising your First Amendment right to express your political views is your own damn business. And with the warning that life ain't easy for a boy named Hsu, I commend you to the full story.

An Al Gore fan takes issue with my Opinion Daily asking what if Gore had been elected in 2000 and 9/11 had happened? I floated the possibility, based on the Clinton administration's anti-terror initiatives, that a Gore administration might not have been the diametric opposite of the Bush administration when it came to wiretapping and other controversial techniques in the "war on terror."

Unfair, suggested my correspondent. Hadn't I read The Assault on Reason, in which Gore lambastes the Bush administration for, among other sins, subverting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? In the same vein, Media Matters took me to task for not quoting Gore's voluminous criticisms of Bush's surveillance/security policies.

I have read Gore's critiques of Bush's Terrorist Surveillance Program, in his books and elsewhere. (They read as if they were cribbed from L.A. Times editorials!) But the answer to my "What if?" is still blowin' in the wind, because Al Gore the would-be president and Al Gore the actual president are still two different entities.

A President Gore might well have sought congressional approval of NSA wiretapping, but he might also have been moved to the right on this issue by the arguments of intelligence professionals (not to mention Vice President Joe Lieberman). We'll never know for sure. That said, I should have cited non-President Gore's criticism of Bush's policies. 

Elections do matter, and I don't accept Mort Kondracke's dictum that, no matter who wins, the president is always Gerald Ford. But holding office does make a difference, which is why no one pays attention when presidential candidates promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Oh, and remember how candidate George W. Bush trashed nation-building?

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

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From beautiful Butler County, PA (home of the Living Dead!), David Brown invokes Godwin's Law in his very first paragraph and presumes that the Dust-Up appears in the print paper (if only, David, if only) but still manages to write a really entertaining and thought-provoking letter:

Dear editor,

I realize that the ultimate point of the "Dust-up" section of your editorial page is not to enlighten anyone, but instead to create straw-man collisions of controversy in the hopes of hustling a couple of newspapers. Goebbels would have been truly grateful for the free publicity you would have provided for the Reich. I can see it now: "Jews: Too pushy for their own good?" "Mormons: Polygamist freaks of nature?" But I digress...

Regarding the sad rant provided by the alleged leader of the "California Family Council" (my stomach turns slightly as I typed this), as a taxpayer and homeowner with no criminal record, here is what I want:

I want the removal of marriage from all laws immediately. As a homosexual, I don't want "equality" with non-homos because their structures and habits disgust and bore me. I don't want them to have their "special rights" anymore. Marriage should truly be for churches and other social structures, not government.

We have enough people on planet earth and don't need to reward people for blind procreation (just because "they can") or marriage for that matter. We hear so much whining from the righteous ones about how their precious existences are somehow in jeopardy just because people like me breathe the same smog and drink the same polluted filth from the tap they do. In fact, they need to have all of their so-called "inalienable rights" removed immediately so we can all taste the same bitterness.

Every section of the tax and legal code that refers to married people in some kind of different light from the rest of us should be disconnected. Do away with legal marriage, divorce and sharing of assets. No more "special" visitation rights at the hospital. No more tax breaks for dumping out more children, or for marrying in the first place. Nada, zippo, zilch.

Marriage was a religious institution for millenia before all these "special interest" groups got involved, and it should be returned to that status. Let's deny them the ammunition for their bigotry today, not tomorrow. How interesting that so many of these wanna-be moral dictators talk out of one side of their mouths about doing away with big government, and out of the other when the privileges and breaks go their way and they want to maintain not parity but superiority.

Pass the sick-bag!

David Brown
Renfrew PA

The last part of this week's Dust-Up on gay marriage will appear Monday. Keep those cards and letters comin'!

It was a pleasant surprise on Tuesday when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors rebuffed its lawyer's attempt to withhold lawsuit settlement information from the public. It was also instructive to closely follow the dialog between County Counsel Raymond G. Fortner Jr., who earlier this year and without telling either the board or the public stopped releasing memos from the county's Claims Board, and the chief supervisorial thorn in his side, Gloria Molina.

Fortner's move was reported in the Times July 6, sparking a raised Op-Ed eyebrow from Marc Haefele and, later, a thumbs-up to Molina from the Times' editorial board. Fortner said at the time that memos from the Claims Board were giving away the store, providing plaintiffs with a road map for suing the county. Molina ordered Fortner to come in Tuesday with an explanation of his decision, and why he made it without consulting the five supervisors. He didn't have what she wanted. Some annotated highlights:

Molina: "Any time there is a change like that, I really would recommend you do it in concert with us."

Yikes. Molina is being excruciatingly polite when she doesn't have to be. Translation: Fortner's in trouble.

Molina: "I had asked for examples of what cases or where do you think that providing this kind of information may have hurt us in this litigation? And I didn't get that as a response."

Translation: You work for me, not the other way around.

Fortner: "Mr. Chairman, Supervisor Molina, I don't have the case names here, but I asked my staff to put together some of the anecdotal evidence that supports this. For example, a case in which we made an offer to settle that plaintiff's attorney was aware of another case that he felt based particularly on the Claims Board memo and strategy."

Translation: You're not getting anything out of me.

After Molina asks, again, for Fortner to come back to explain his justification for withholding information on settlements from the public:

Fortner: "The justification is, it is what it is."

Molina: "Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray, I'm the policy maker here. I've asked you for it and you have not given it to me. I need it."

Four Rays! Not good. Translation (Fortner): You're not getting anything out of me. (Molina): Can you believe this guy?

Supervisor Michael Antonovich backed Molina when she raised the issue several weeks ago, but the others were silent. This week, though, it was board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky who (gently) told Fortner he had to start releasing the information to the public again until the board signs off on a compromise. That's the good news. The bad news is that the board will likely allow Fortner to make whatever presentation he makes, beyond his July 10 memo [pdf], in closed session. So the public will never hear his justification for doing what he did — or the supervisors', if they ultimately sign on.

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.

It's an inside-the-Beltway story in more ways than one: A boring procedural standoff over an issue that itself is of interest largely to political junkies: whether registered lobbyists who play rainmaker for members of Congress seeking re-election should disclose for public inspection how many contributions they have “bundled.”

Both houses of Congress have passed legislation to require disclosure of bundling, a practice that subverts the limits on individual contributions contained in federal election law. But a conference committee to resolve different versions of this and other ethics reforms has been stalled by an objection from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who is afraid that a conference might inter disclosure requirements for another Washington folkway — special-interest “earmarks.”

Now, in an attempt to make an end run around deMint’s “hold,” congressional leaders are talking about skipping a conference and having the House and Senate enact identical ethics bills.

But there’s a catch: Roll Call reports that Senate Democratic leaders are redrafting the bundling-disclosure provision to “shift responsibility for the disclosure from lobbyists to the candidates themselves.” This could make it harder for the public to keep track of which lobbyists are bundling and into whose laps those bundles are being dropped.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing if election law could allow the public to know who’s bundling contributions for which candidates — presidential as well as congressional. But that doesn’t alter the case for bundling disclosure as part of the reporting required of lobbyists, who arguably get a bigger bang from their bundling than other financial angels.