 Some reaction in today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages to the coming deeper cuts to the state's higher education system, and to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's assertions about welfare cheats.
Start with the University of California. UC Berkeley professors Robert Cooter and Aaron Edlin say it makes more sense to fire people (presumably their colleagues, not them) than to impose across-the-board salary cuts. Why?
Growth has led to bloat at UC. The bloat and bureaucracy stifle creativity and productivity. The bloat is in unproductive workers and unproductive jobs.Many jobs have little to do with our core missions of teaching and research.
Next, the Cal State system. CSU Long Beach geography professor and department chairman Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. says cuts to his schools are necessary, too, but beware the consequences:
So what is the cost of gutting the Cal State system? Fewer nurses. Fewer teachers. Fewer engineers. Fewer poets and artists. Fewer film and electronic arts experts. Fewer MBAs. Fewer people to drive the future of California, including fewer geographers trained in my department. These reductions in educated human capital will hit California at a time when the state needs 2 million additional college graduates by the year 2020.
Also on op-ed, Douglas MacKinnon shows why he's one of those conservatives that liberals love, when it's convenient, and that conservatives love to hate. He takes on the GOP for hypocrisy and calls on the party to shed the "morally bankrupt leaders who have violated the trust of their families and constituents" (think Appalachians and Argentina) and to embrace a wider base. Read more about MacKinnon here and here, and more from him here.
You've noticed those billboards about your right to have a pet? So has columnist Meghan Daum.
On the virtual pages, like this one, check out a response from Los Angeles County welfare chief Philip L. Browning to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attack, a couple weeks ago in the Times, on the CalWorks welfare-to-work program.
On the editorial page, the Times continues its Rehabilitating Healthcare series with a thumbs-down on the portion of the House bill that would fund reform with tax increases on the rich. Better, the page says, to roll back the tax exemption on health benefits.
The exemption is worth $3.5 trillion over 10 years, so even a modest reduction could raise a significant amount. Trimming the exemption would also discourage gold-plated insurance plans that promote excessive consumption of healthcare services. Such a move would face stiff resistance from unions and President Obama, who promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. But it would send the valuable message that everyone pays for this reform because everyone benefits.
The editorial page also remembers the Apollo 11 moonshot and offers that clean and efficient energy is just as far away, and ultimately just as achievable. And we observe President Obama's brave willingness to acknowledge that he is a White Sox fan.
Photo: Alex Gallardo / LAT
 The Times endorses an unusual idea being considered today by the L.A. Unified School Board: allowing assorted groups inside and outside the district to operate 50 newly built schools over the next four years. Yes, there are pitfalls to this idea, but it's still the most intriguing experiment to reinvent local education to come along in years.
The ongoing crisis in Honduras, meanwhile, is starting to look like it won't be resolved without some "superpower pressure" from the United States, The Times opines. It's time to impose sanctions on those behind the coup that ousted the country's rightful president, Manuel Zelaya, and take other actions aimed at restoring democracy. "Failure to return to constitutional order would send a signal to the rest of Latin America that once again political problems can be solved with an old-style coup."
And we celebrate the nomination of Regina Benjamin as surgeon general. This "angel-like" figure, known for her work bringing clinics to rural areas, rebuilding health centers devastated by Hurricane Katrina and leading medical associations, "has the potential to be one of the strongest voices in public health in decades."
On the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg raises an eyebrow over a recent comment in the New York Times from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
'Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe vs. Wade] was decided,' Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, 'there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.'
Goldberg lists other prominent abortion backers, including former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who appeared to think that abortion was necessary to cull undesirable elements -- like the poor and minorities -- from the population. He'd like to see more questioning of such attitudes in the media.
Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project says the Obama administration is breaking its promise to bring transparency to government surveillance programs. The administration is reportedly proceeding with a Bush-era plan to use the National Security Agency to screen government computer traffic on private-sector networks, a program known as Einstein 3 that has no intrinsic security value -- but will allow spooks to read e-mail communication between the government and private citizens.
And Deborah Doctor of Disability Rights California challenges Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to document all the fraud he claims to have identified in the state's In-Home Supportive Services program, a quarter of whose funds he says are wasted. The governor not only hasn't proven the accuracy of that figure, he has proposed fixes that could well cost more than they would save.
 An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.
It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.
On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:
Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.
As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.
Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images
 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republicans in the Legislature are playing hardball with their Democratic counterparts: No new taxes, balance the budget with cuts and -- as Schwarzenegger ordered earlier today -- force state employees to take a third monthly furlough day, further reducing their pay. According to The Times' article, thousands of public employees plan to show up in Sacramento today to protest the additional pay cut.
The third imposed furlough day opens a deeper divide in one of the more drawn-out battles of this year's budgeting process: the one pitting public-employee unions and their Democratic allies in the Legislature against Schwarzenegger and state Republicans, who seemed to have rekindled their relationship after the May 19 special election. It's a topic being debated in this week's Dust-Up exchange between Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. and John Tanner, executive director of SEIU Local 721, which represents tens of thousands of government employees in Los Angeles County (their third and final exchange, in which they mull ideas to preserve state services in this budget crisis without reducing pay or laying off workers, will be posted later today). In the comments board for Monday's Dust-Up installment, several readers have come down on the side of Schwarzenegger and the GOP, posting comments similar the one left by "Pete": The unions are a major part of the problem. Even as a liberal Democrat
and a former union member, I can no longer support the entrenched
self-interest of the AFL-CIO and in particular the SEIU in California.
The millstone around the State's neck has many contributors to the
weight besides Labor. But the current union contracts and negotiating
positions are a huge impediment for California's [economic] re-development
in today's world, and I hope Gov. [Schwarzenegger] digs his heels in even
if he must suffer short-term political suicide. He will be seen as a
hero in the long run.
What do you think of Schwarzenegger's action on state employees? Leave a comment below, take our poll or throw caution to the wind and do both.
Photo: Service Employees International Union protest Schwarzenegger's proposed furloughs and state employee pay cuts Tuesday, June 30 (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
 Here at the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division, we like to check in on how our editorials and Op-Ed articles are doing -- and where they are going -- in the blogosphere. What follows is a sampling of blogs that have picked up our opinions and generated opinions of their own.
Jerry Roberts' and Phil Trounstine's Op-Ed listing six factors that are at the root of California's inability to be governed caught the attention of several blogs this week. The Housing Chronicles Blog linked to a post about its own theories on California's detrimental changes: When it changed, it just wasn't due to Prop. 13, although that was the
start of it. I remember joining my family to protest the proposition
(my first foray into politics), and when a cigar smoke-smelling Howard
Jarvis waddled by and told my brothers and I, "Why don't you go home
and learn to read?" I'm sure he didn't realize that home schooling
would become the savior for many of today's families.
Bob Burnett of the Huffington Post linked to the piece in his take on California's growing troubles and who's to blame: Nonetheless, while California's decline can be blamed on Governor
Schwarzenegger, the legislature, and the size and complexity of the
state, the primary responsibility falls on the voters.
On FarmPolicy.com, a blog dedicated to news about the farming industry that took particular interest in the climate change bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked to The Times' editorial that supported the bill. It seems the farm industry, based on the blog's long and varied list of supporters and naysayers, is quite conflicted on this issue. The Harvesting Justice blog came out slightly more strongly against the editorial's favorable position on the bill, offering this comment (which I believe is meant to be sarcastic?): The Los Angeles Times agrees in an editorial about the inordinate power that leads to "the theory that heading off
global catastrophe is only worthwhile if agribusiness can profit from
it." Another
example of the excesses of the "greedy growers," as former Wyoming
Senator Alan Simpson used to say. We poison the environment and our
farmworkers and agribusiness continues to lobby for the ability to
continue to do so, while getting paid subsidies not to do so.
On June 26, The Times ran an Op-Ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton -- a controversial figure in the world of diplomacy -- that encouraged the United States to support regime change in Iran. Not surprisingly, several bloggers had a lot to say in response. The Citizens blog said Bolton's argument is a veiled call for war:
What is a "policy" of regime change about? The answer, of course, is
exactly what it was in Iraq: confrontation, building a "case" for war,
then invasion. The imposition of our will on Iran. Sure, Bolton and
others will talk about "support" for pro-democracy movements and such -
the same sort of "support" that has been so successful in Cuba this
past half century. But they mean war. They just are too cowardly to
openly say that they see military force as the only option. So let's
call them on it.
The UN Dispatch blog offered a similar reaction, and added that the target of Bolton's attack was clearly the Obama administration, and even worse, offered no real solution to his goal. It was written for a partisan purpose and little else, the blog said.
Gregory Tejeda, a Chicago-area freelance writer and former UPI reporter, took issue with Zev Chafets' Op-Ed, in which Chafets argued that Latino baseball players are being singled out by the Hall of Fame for their use of steroids. Tejada said he knows just as many non-Latino ball players who were disgraced by their drug use: The same people who now are getting all worked up in saying that Sammy
Sosa’s 600-plus home runs (and three seasons of 60 or more) are no
longer good enough to include the one-time Chicago Cub in the Hall of
Fame seem to get equally vehement in their opposition to either Bonds
or Clemens getting baseball’s version of immortality.
And finally, Noel Sheppard on the NewsBusters blog was quite taken aback by Karen Bass's statement during an interview with Patt Morrison that Republican radio talk-show hosts were "terrorizing" their fellow Republicans in the California legislature.
Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger addresses a joint
session of the state legislature in Sacramento on
Tuesday, June 2, 2009. Schwarzenegger urged state lawmakers to act
quickly to close a $24 billion deficit that opened in the state budget
because of the worst U.S. recession in half a century. Credit:
Ken James/Bloomberg News
 As the California State Assembly adjourned around 11 a.m. today (that's, what, a 3 hour workday?) with no apparent progress made in crafting a budget the Governor would sign by the Tuesday deadline, Assemblymen Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) and Mike Davis (D-L.A.) suggested it was time to buckle down and figure this out.
Er, no, wait. They stood to honor Michael Jackson as the King of Pop that he truly was, and Farrah Fawcett as every man's favorite pin-up girl, before taking the rest of the day off: "Many of us grew up with the music of the Jacksons," said Swanson. "I think it's time for us to recognize him as the king of pop in the most positive way we can." "I think most of all, for a lot of the men around the world, Farrah Fawcett will be remembered for her work as America's
favorite cover girl," Davis said. "There may even be some in the body
here who might remember if they go in the garage to get those old
posters of Farrah Fawcett, one of America's most beautiful blonds." It's all well and good to honor notable Californians who have passed away. Still, I would have preferred to hear such tributes at the end of a normal business day -- or, in the case of this group of legislators, an extraordinary day -- in which some movement were made toward enacting a new budget. Especially considering that the alternative is California issuing IOUs for the next fiscal year. Photo: Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, chair of the budget
conference committee, left, consoles State Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San
Diego, chair of the Senate budget committee after the Senate fell short
of the necessary two-thirds vote to approve a package of budget related
bills at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, June 25, 2009. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
 Putting more than full term's worth of speculation to rest, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced this afternoon that he will not join state Atty. Gen. (and former two-term governor) Jerry Brown and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in seeking the Democratic Party's nomination in 2010 for California governor. Having grown up in Southern California, I can't help but point out the most profound implications of Villaraigosa's decision: The 2010 gubernatorial will lack a viable candidate from Southern California (Newsom's fealty to the Bay Area is obvious, Brown was Oakland mayor from 1998-2006, and Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are both techy gazillionares from the Silicon Valley.) Perhaps we should ask the candidates to promise not to chant "Beat L.A.!" at Giants-Dodgers games.
Apologies; I had to get that out of my system. There's been much speculation on our pages -- online and in print -- about Villaraigosa's extra-mayoral ambitions. A few days before the mayor was re-elected to his second term in March, Marc Cooper implored Villaraigosa to "unequivocally declare he will absolutely, positively not run for governor next year," a position echoed by The Times' editorial board in its endorsement of the mayor for a second term. Weighing on the other side was former state Sen. Tom Hayden, who wrote that in a race against Brown and Newsom, voter demographics favor Villaraigosa. Later this afternoon, The Times will post its editorial on the announcement, in which the paper's editorial board reacts favorably to Villaraigosa's decision. What do you think about the mayor's decision to stay in L.A. (for now, anyway)? Take our poll, leave a comment or both.
UPDATE: The Times' editorial is up; click here to read it. Photo: Stephen Dunn / Getty Images
 The Times editorial board focuses on the failing healthcare system in the United States, urging Congress and all parties involved to start the reform process now before it's too late. Despite sharp disagreements over some of the proposed fixes, the board notes the broad consensus about three main problem areas: rising costs, incomplete coverage and questionable quality:
The cost, quality and coverage problems are intertwined. Healthcare providers pass along the expense
of caring for the uninsured and underinsured, raising costs for those
who have insurance. Insurers respond by raising prices, which leads
more employers and individuals to drop coverage. The low reimbursement
rates prompt physicians to move into more lucrative careers as
specialists, reducing the supply of the primary-care doctors who are
vital to timely, high-quality care. And the perverse financial
incentives in the system deter doctors and hospitals from aligning
their interests with those of their patients. After all, the healthcare
industry profits more from treating ailments than from preventing them.... The U.S. healthcare system isn't a failure. It's extraordinarily good
at some things, such as developing new treatments. But its
inefficiencies and gaps have created flaws so deep, the system cannot
be sustained for long. Not enough people are receiving the care they
need when they need it, and those who are pay too much for it. The
problems are getting bigger and more complex. The longer we wait to
solve them, the more intractable they will become. On the Op-Ed side of the fold, Steven Hill proposes several ways that California can approach a constitutional convention that will potentially remake the state into California, Version 2.0. The problem, he writes, is how to choose delegates. He concludes that random selection -- as done in Canada, among other countries -- may be the best and fairest option. Gregory Rodriguez discusses the danger of urban downsizing and the Obama administration's consideration of a plan to shrink deteriorating cities by bulldozing neighborhoods: The plan makes sense on some level, but it's disturbing on
another. Anyone who's driven by miles of empty lots in Detroit knows
that urban demolition does more than destroy blight. It also erases
history and what a city was. Traces of the past have always been
jumping-off places for the next chapter (think rehabbed Victorians or
sleek post-industrial lofts). And, of course, the back-to-nature plan
-- which could be used in cities such as Memphis, Baltimore,
Philadelphia and others -- is fundamentally an admission and may be an
assurance that these cities will never rise again.
And Susan R. Barry reflects on the beauty of a 3-D world as well as the potential benefits of 3-D movies in spotting visual defects in children. Photo: Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee hold a rally in Washington, D.C., for their healthcare overhaul bill on June 16. Credit: Robert
Giroux / Getty Images
South Pasadenans say "tax me." In the latest in a string of mail-only votes in relatively well-to-do school districts in the Los Angeles area, voters in South Pas apparently have adopted a parcel tax to pay for schools. The ballot deadline was yesterday; votes were counted almost immediately and the finally tally gave Measure S just over the 2/3 supermajority it needed to pass.
The Pasadena Star-News reports that there are still a few absentee ballots to be counted, so the results aren't final. I'm waiting to hear back from the usually responsive L.A. County Registrar-Recorder's Office on this; seems to me that if it was a mail-only election, all ballots are absentee and would have been counted at the same time. I'll update you when they update me.
*UPDATE: The Registrar-Recorder's Office explains that these figures do not include ballots received yesterday, either by mail or dropped off in person. There are enough of those that they could make a difference in the outcome. A fuller tally is expected after 5 p.m. on Friday.
This is a property tax, sort of. Instead of an assessment based on the value of the property, a parcel tax generally bills the owner of each piece of property the same amount. In this case, that's $288 for most parcels, residential and commercial alike, except for multi-unit parcels, which are $95 per unit.
Here are the still-unofficial results: Yes, 3,991, or 67.26%; No, 1,943, or 32.74%.
See our June 2 post on school parcel taxes here. See Times staff writer Seema Mehta's comprehensive June 15 story here.
San Marino approved its school parcel tax proposal last month. Ballots are due Tuesday in the Palos Verdes school district and the following Tuesday in school districts in La Cañada Flintridge and Rowland, which covers all or parts of the cities of Rowland Heights, West Covina, City of Industry and Walnut.
Read on »
 It's Back to the Future day on the editorial page, with the Times board taking up tobacco taxes, gay rights and a controversy involving Sarah Palin. Which makes me wonder -- just as you can reduce every Hollywood film to a handful of plot outlines, does every editorial similarly spring from a crib sheet of topics? But I digress.
In light of the California budget crisis, the board says it's willing to support a whopping $2.10 increase in the tax on cigarettes in order to sustain the state's safety net. That's something of a reversal for the Times board, which usually argues against using targeted taxes to support specific programs, especially when those programs have a broad public purpose. But these aren't usual times. The board also criticizes President Obama for failing to follow through on campaign promises to push for more equal treatment of gays. And it laments how Palin, her supporters and David Letterman have milked the controversy over his tawdry joke last week about one of Palin's daughters:
After emerging from a presidential race in which the taking of umbrage was a constant theme of both campaigns, with each accusing the other of a new outrage seemingly every day, Americans should be thoroughly sick of manufactured controversies. Until they stop paying off for their creators, though, we're likely to suffer through a lot more of them.
Over on the Op-Ed page, columnist Tim Rutten praises California's Roman Catholic bishops for urging Sacramento not to close the state's yawning budget gap by eviscerating programs for the poor, children and the disabled. Iranian dissident and exile Ramin Jahanbegloo notes the schisms within Iran that fuel the current protests. And Abigail Thernstrom, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, recaps the action so far on a major Supreme Court test of the Voting Rights Act.
Finally, in Letters to the Editor, readers weigh in on recent articles and opinion pieces about Guantanamo Bay, animal rights, Chicago's climate of corruption and O.J. Simpson.
Credit: Ed Hall / Artizans.com
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