In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, race. Aren't we past all that? No. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court wants us to be.

But it's not clear how long this conservative court will hold off. In the Austin case, the court noted ominously that "we are now a very different Nation" and hinted that a new look at the constitutional issues surrounding race might be coming. In the New Haven case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the court "merely postpones the evil day" when these issues will be taken up.

Your editorial writers also find themselves wondering what the folks at the Orange County Museum of Art were thinking when they flouted art-world protocol and did a quickie and quasi-secret sale of California Impressionist works.

Though OCMA officials may have meant well -- and Szakacs is a respected director who deserves credit for returning more than 3,000 works to the Laguna museum -- they have done their institution few favors with the sale. At least one museum in addition to Laguna's is miffed at not being offered a chance to outbid the mysterious buyer.

Lots to think about on the Op-Ed side today. Start with Times columnist Meghan Daum's look at Sarah Palin's resigna... -- no, wait! Come back! This is new and different! There's some good stuff here -- Daum checks out Palin through the lens of her Christian conservative Palin-fan friend, and offers some insight:

* Photo: Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images

Here's a look at the blogosphere's reactions to the work of the Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division this week:

The Real Clear World blog responds to Andrew Bacevich's op-ed on the White House's overlooking of strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq in favor of tactics:

Musings, a blog discussing culture, politics, and education, took offense at the Opinion L.A piece about Amnesty International's recent report that accused Israel of "wanton destruction" and Hamas of "war crimes" in the December conflict in the Gaza Strip. The writer disagreed with the post's assertion that both sides were blamed, saying that the report's full text put much more blame on Israel for the war.

The Oy Vay blog, featuring the voice of a self-proclaimed Jewish conservative on various issues, liked Patt Morrison's post on her disgust with the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles' commitment to using taxpayer money to pay for the security detail for Michael Jackson's funeral.

And the Opinion L.A. poll urging fans to boo Manny's return to Dodger Stadium on July 16 made it onto the Major League Baseball's Fanhouse blog:

Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugged blog praised John Bolton's op-ed piece that stated the only way to fix Iran is to institute regime change in the country:

The War Victims Monitor blog re-posted, sans comment, Ahmed Rashid's op-ed on Pakistan's more serious commitment to getting rid of the Taliban and its influences, and the need for strong international support to complete a successful campaign against the militants.

Ron Radosh of Pajamas Media was not a fan of the L.A. Times' coverage of I.F. Stone, both in the op-ed section and the book reviews, implying that the paper overlooked the unsavory parts of the journalist and radical's past.

The Guardian UK's Haroon Siddique included Michael Carey's op-ed on the beginning of Sarah Palin's end in a wrap-up of skeptical articles regarding the Alaska governor's motives for resigning abruptly.

Finally, a few blogs picked up on Jonah Goldberg's column about the Washington Post salon, which charged $25,000 a ticket for dinner at publisher Katharine Weymouth's home and promised networking with top Obama administration officials and the Post reporters who cover them.

The Open Secrets blog linked to Goldberg's piece in their rehashing of the Post's response that claimed they would amend any business practices that weren't clear.

And Chicago Boyz, a blog composed of many different voices, said the following about WaPo after linking to the column:

The Opinion Manufacturing Division squeezes one more piece out of the Michael Jackson Farewell Tour: columnist Tim Rutten's rumination on celebrity. He contrasted Jackson's recent treatment with that of Sarah Palin (Jacko and "Caribou Barbie" in a single piece: double columnist gold!), arguing that the alleged sins of the former were washed away even as the latter was overwhelmed by the scrutiny. My own sense is that Jackson's death actually led to two competing lines of commentary about the man: he was a genius (the sentimental meme), and he was a pedophile (the "you can't libel the dead" meme), as famously enunciated by Rep. Peter King). That's not washing away sins, it more like carving them into his grave marker -- albeit underneath the "King of Pop" banner and the silhouette of Jackson hovering on his toes.

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, columnist Doyle McManus says don't hold your breath for another economic stimulus package. And economists Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale fret about the fiscal problems that are likely to be caused by the growing federal budget deficits:

The deficits projected over the next 10 years will accelerate our arrival at a debt-to-GDP ratio that for most countries would signal impending fiscal collapse. Indeed, Britain, with a debt-to-GDP ratio not appreciably worse than ours, was just warned by Standard & Poor's that its creditworthiness might be downgraded. The United States has traditionally enjoyed a favored status in this regard, as the supplier of the dollar, the world's reserve currency, and as a perceived haven in times of financial stress. But for how long?

In the editorial stack, the board expresses chagrin about the recent return to prominence of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose corrupt dominance of Mexican politics in the 20th century were so damaging to that country. (And by the way, how can you be both "institutional" and "revolutionary"? By advocating change so gradual, no one notices?) It urges the new General Motors, which may emerge from bankruptcy this week, to take lessons in openness and innovation from the computer industry. And it suggests a simple solution to the funding problem at the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center in Watts, which has run afoul of a new House Appropriations Committee dictum against grants for projects named after sitting members of Congress (in this case, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles): the center should drop Waters from its name.

A name change would involve some cost and inconvenience, but the investment would qualify the jobs center for funding now and in the future, while preserving a congressional rule that sets reasonable limits on pork. When Waters retires from public office, the program can honor her permanently.

Credit: Patrick O'Connor / Special to The Times

Gov. Sarah Palin just announced that she will not be seeking re-election for her position of governor of the great state of Alaska in 2010. Her Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will replace her when she steps down on July 26 after the Governor's Picnic, in her effort to reject the "Lame Duck" status.

Is it because she's hoping for a presidential run in 2012? The Washington Post thinks yes:

Recent polls showed that her popularity in Alaska has been faltering, though she was expected to be the front runner for re-election.

So instead of waiting out the end of her term, her final year, she's stopping this month to avoid being a lame duck:

So essentially she's quitting on her state -- a great start to a successful Republican presidential bid, wouldn't you say?

She would counter that her stellar record as governor will carry her though the primaries, and she made sure everyone knew her accomplishments before her departure, just in case they forgot.

Palin has been riding the conservative merry-go-round as of late, making her first out of state appearance after the November election at the largest pro-life fund-raising banquet in the nation, according to the latest Vanity Fair article about the governor. She's most definitely preparing for the candidacy, surrounding herself with her closest friends and conservative allies who will continue to tell her how great of a chance she has for the Oval Office against Barack Obama.

I hope I'm right when I say, "In your dreams."

Photo: US Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin blows a kiss at her family while addressing the Republican National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota, on September 3, 2008. Palin announced July 3, 2009 in Wasilla, Alaska, that she will not seek a second term as governor of Alaska and that she was resigning the office. Credit: PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP / Getty Images

Wow. I didn't see that coming. But I have to say I think it's a great chess move on her part. Honestly, if only Palin's intellectual abilities matched her political instincts she would be truly formidable.

Here's how I read it:

There's a huge void in the Republican Party and she's moving to fill it. So watch out Rush!  Sarah Palin vs. Rush Limbaugh. What can this resignation mean except a frontal assault on talk radio? Because she can't seriously be thinking she can one day win the Republican Party nomination and maybe take on Barack Obama.

Before that happens, Newt Gingrich will savage her. Yes, I know he defended her during the election, but that's when she didn't have a chance of winning. He fully expected her to go back to Alaska and become irrelevant. Psyche! She's making a power play.  Bobby Jindal will talk her into a coma (like he did the rest of us) and Mitt Romney will go toe to toe with her on the issue of who is prettier. And his family is photogenic as all get-out. If she thinks she can out-folksy Mike Huckabee, well, he'll teach her the meaning of 'gosh darn.'" I just don't see her surviving the gantlet.

But it's still a smart move. She got a ton of money with that book deal, so she doesn't need the job. And now she avoids the charge of shirking her duties every time she flees the state to attend a fancy dinner in the lower 48. I bet Alaska didn't have a chance of keeping her after floods forced her to stay home and be gubernatorial while Todd had a ball at the White House Correspondents' dinner.  You know she just hated missing that.

While I simply cannot believe Palin would make a serious run at the presidency, I'm certainly hoping she will. And if she's resigning to start her presidential campaign, then I'm more than pleased. It brings us one step closer to my dream ticket for 2012:

 SARAH PALIN/MICHELE (Obama is going to put us all in re-education camps)  BACHMANN!

Seriously. I can think of nothing that would yield more hilarity.

And speaking of humor, I hope Tina Fey's contract -- the moral one she has with the entire country -- links automatic SNL appearances with Sarah Palin gaffes. I've really missed her.

Photo: Robert DeBerry / AP

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:

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

You've got to feel sorry for those Republicans who truly want to engage the nation in a debate about fiscal policy and the appropriate function of the federal government. Those folks keep getting sabotaged by the party's nutjobs who simply cannot get over the fact that a black family is in the White House. Every time one side of the party tries to have a debate about, say, President Obama's policies the wackos redirect the conversation to his race. Remember, Barack the Magic Negro? Sheesh.

The latest eye-rolling incident comes courtesy of longtime GOP activist Rusty DePass. Commenting on a report on Facebook about an escaped gorilla escape at Columbia, South Carolina zoo, DePass wrote: "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors -- probably harmless."

He was busted by South Carolina political blogger, Will Folks.

DePass has since apologized -- you know, one of those maddening "I'm sorry IF anyone was offended blah blah blah blah." 

The Daily News has a bit more about DePass that makes for good reading. It turns out the  former chairman of the Richland County GOP was co-chairman of Rudy Giuliani's 2008 campaign in Richland County.

Here's a gem from an Op-Ed he wrote endorsing Giuliani:

Most of us, of course, particularly in South Carolina, never gave a damn about New Yorkers, but somehow the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made those people Americans again.

Gee, sounds like DePass is a student of the Sarah Palin school of U.S. geography. There are "pro-America" parts of America and then there are "those people."

Oh, and one more thing. When the next Obamas-as-apes/gorillas/monkeys cartoon or digitally altered photo surfaces, can we all agree to not be shocked, just shocked that many people will see an intended insult?

Silly arguments for and against potential nominees are part of the circus surrounding a Supreme Court selection. So far Judge Sonia Sotomayor's suitability has been questioned because of her weight and diabetes, and there are murmurs about the fact that Jews and Catholics loom large in the talent pool in which President Obama is fishing, raising the possibility that the Supreme Court that convenes in October will have only one Protestant justice (John Paul Stevens).

The nuttiest objection so far is that Obama should think twice before nominating Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm because she was born in Canada. Accoring to the CanWest News Service, "several

U.S. media outlets have speculated that the governor's Canuck roots could create an unwanted political distraction for Obama, who can choose from an abundance of qualified candidates actually born in the U.S.A."

My first reaction was that this was bogus news, a Canadian version of the traditional "Area Man" story localizing a national (or in this case international) story. But CanWest offers examples of truly bizarre musings by American news outlets about the liability representd by Granholm's birth in Vancouver, B.C. A story in the Detroit News, for example,asserts: "Another negative could be that Granholm is not a natural-born citizen, having been born in Canada. The last justice who was a naturalized citizen was Felix Frankfurter, who was born in Austria and served on the court from 1939-62."

It's hard to believe Obama would allow himself to be hosed by this sort of xenophobia. It's not just that America is routinely described as "a nation of immigrants." Canadians, particularly Canadians who have taken on U.S. citizenship, are far less foreign to many Americans than their own countrymen -- assuming, that is, that anyone knows the people in question are Canadians. Twenty years ago, an MTV faux quiz show called "Remote Control" had a category called "Dead or Canadian?" Of course, someone can be both, but living or dead Canadians are often assumed to be Americans -- a sore point for Canadian nationalists, who are always sore in my experience.

If Granholm is nominated and anti-Canadian prejudice rears its head (as Sarah Palin would say), Obama should line up some Canuck-Americans to testify on her behalf before the Judiciary Committee, including Michael J. Fox, some National Hockey League stars, Paul Shaffer, Neil Young, Lorne Michaels, Mortimer Zuckerman and John Roberts (the CNN anchor, not the chief justice). As Bob and Doug McKenzie would say, the Detroit News handicappers should take off, eh.

Oh, man up.

Pageant officials should just have yanked the Miss California USA crown away from Carrie Jean Prejean.

Now they've been bigfooted by pageant owner Donald Trump, who ruled today that Prejean can keep her crown after all, in spite of semi-topless photos that he said he didn't have a problem with [no surprise], and her ''very, very honest answer'' to the ''very tough'' question of same-sex marriage. [She's against it.]

California pageant officials had earlier bowed to The Donald, even though, as they said, Prejean evidently breached her contract by not being available to deliver the Miss California USA message to the world, whatever it is.

What she had been preaching instead was her opposition to gay marriage, and preaching it to her new choir of fans, supposedly including Sarah Palin, and like-minded people who, according to a California pageant official, insulated Prejean with ''handlers and advisers.'' Now everyone's supposedly kissed and made up. Today's announcement by Trump also means that if Prejean wants to speak out on same-sex marriage, as opposed to, as she quaintly put it, ''opposite marriage,'' she has to go through pageant officials.

[I've been thinking that the Miss America pageant reps must be livid. By now most people must wrongly believe this Miss California is part of the Miss America pageant -- which prides itself as a scholarship program -- rather than what she is, a state title-holder within Miss USA, which is a beauty pageant owned by Trump. Surely a Miss California candidate for Miss America would be smart enough never, ever to open her pretty yap enough to say what she thinks about gay marriage. I believe one Miss America, decades ago, was asked which of the presidential candidates was better looking -- Richard Nixon or John F. Kennedy. She demurely demurred.]

Prejean gets to keep her crown and title. As a consolation to the runner-up who would have inherited the bling and the bragging rights, California officials gave the backup beauty queen the portfolio of ''Beauty of California Ambassador.'' Lousy title. Put it on a pageant ribbon and it'd be too big even to swag across Dolly Parton's chest. 

Just give her the backup crown -- there must be one, like a backup Air Force One -- and her own title: Near-Miss California.

Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

One of my favorite lines about the law comes from a professor I had years ago: Referring to famous Supreme Court decisions, he said: "We don't read the great cases; the great cases read us."

So do the not-so-great cases. The Justice Department's agreement to void former Sen. Ted Stevens' corruption conviction has generated an array of interpretations, some more convincing than others, that have seized on the breaking news to make larger points.

I agree with my colleague Jon Healey that Stevens' good luck is not an exoneration of the politics of pork he personified. I disagree with the suggestion by Gov. Sarah Palin that the Democrat who beat Stevens after his conviction should resign to prepare the way for a rematch in which, presumably, Stevens could argue that he should be returned to the Senate because of errors by the prosecution. (Usually Republicans don't like to see defendants set free on legal "technicalities," let alone get another shot at a Senate seat.)

I also think it's a stretch for the New York Times editorial writers to try to connect the ineptitude of prosecutors in the Stevens trial with the Bush Justice Department's supposed conspiracy against Democratic politicians. More plausible (though still a bit contrived) is the argument by former New Jersey Attorney General John Farmer that the bungling of the Stevens prosecution is part of a larger phenomenon of overzealous prosecutors -- including Patrick Fitzgerald -- and loosely written anti-corruption statutes.

My own take is more modest: Stevens' conviction is being set aside because the government goofed.  Any regular viewer of "Law and Order" knows that the prosecution is obliged to give the defense evidence -- like prosecutors' notes of an interview with a witness against Stevens -- that might help the defense. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a screwup is just a screwup.