I guess you have to give them points for trying. Just don't give them any of my money.

Porn mogul Larry Flynt and a fellow named Joe Francis, who dreamed up those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, are asking Congress for a $5-billion bailout for the porn industry.

Now, I've always read that when times get bad, porn prospers. When times are good, porn prospers. Porn, in sum, is a foolproof economic performer. These two admit that the porn industry isn't exactly facing the perils of Detroit, or even California and its budget, but as they declared in their press release, "Why take chances?"

Just in case anyone's even thinking of taking this seriously, please, Congress, don't put a $20 or any other public money in their thongs. Heck, Francis is scheduled to go on trial in a couple of months in L.A. on felony federal tax-evasion charges. That's the only kind of relationship he should have with the federal government.

But I do think that porn's lobbyists could take their case to Congress, just for the entertainment value. Back in 2001, the California porn industry went to Sacramento to lobby over taxes and Internet privacy.

Nearly two dozen porn performers, strip club operators and others campaigned office by office, handing out fliers showing just how much money their business makes in California; one of them, Nina Hartley, said, "We are a revenue generator, and we'd like a little respect."

It  was a trifle ... what's the word? Awkward. But persuasive. One conservative lawmaker was "dour" when the adult industry group first showed up in his office, but after 20 or 25 minutes, he'd warmed up so much that he invited the head of the Free Speech Coalition to play golf with him.

Imagine if that act went to Capitol Hill. Trying to josh with John Kerry, maybe trying to get a laugh out of Oklahoma's Tom Coburn with a naughty joke.

One exotic performer made a huge splash in D.C. years ago. Democrat Wilbur Mills ran the House Ways and Means Committee in 1974, at least until he ran up against some cops.

They stopped him as he drove a bit woozily around the Tidal Basin at 2 o'clock in the morning, a month before the 1974 election. Drinking and driving, not such a big deal back then. But it didn't stop there. His passenger leaped into the water to get away. Her name: Fannie Fox, a.k.a. the Argentine Firecracker, a top-drawer stripper. Fox changed her stage name to the Tidal Basin Bombshell and wrote a book, "The Stripper and the Congressman."

Mills won reelection a month later -- there's no accounting for some voters' taste -- and then called it quits.

And they call those the good old days.   

 

Too late for Michael  Crichton, scientists reported this week that they have recovered a good deal of the woolly mammoth's DNA from tufts of hair. Before you could say "Jurassic Park,"  journalists were speculating about the possibility of reviving the species by tinkering with the ova of elephants to replicate the mammoth's DNA sequence.

John McCain didn't like the federal government paying for research involving bear DNA, but even he might warm to the idea of bringing back the mammoth for a mere $10 million in federal funds. Stampeding mammoths probably wouldn't be as terrifying as a flock of velociraptors. And the Treasury could recover its investment by nationalizing Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

Still, is this trip really necessary? It isn't just that scientists have better things to do. A successful quasi-cloning of a mammoth would tempt scientists to try the same thing with other extinct species, including Neanderthals, those hunky hominids whose possible interbreeding with humans has figured in prurient speculation for years.

On its blog, New Scientist magazine notes: "With a  rough draft of the Neanderthal genome due around Christmas season, some reports speculate on the prospect for a Neanderthal-human hybrid or the more ethically palatable chimpanzee-human mashup." New Scientist provides this quote from genomicist George Church:  "The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it."

Enough people? All it would take is a few mad (or mischievous) scientists and a rich patron, a la "Jurassic Park." Then, when the resulting Neanderchimp reached marriageable age, all the speculation about human-Neanderthal mating could be put to the test, perhaps on the Maury Povich show. Creationists could picket outside the studio, joined by PETA and the SPCA.

On second thought, maybe the mammoth should be allowed to rest in peace. With global warming, the hirsute beast would probably go extinct all over again.

When things go wrong in the L.A. public schools, they go so depressingly wrong. And the reasons they go wrong are just as depressingly predictable -- either the extreme politics and hidden agendas that shouldn't be part of running schools, or worse, the crushing weight of an immovable bureaucracy in which no one is really responsible and no one is held accountable.

And so the investigation on how a suspected child molester came to be assigned to a middle school, where he allegedly molested two students, ended with a report written to the tune of: People made mistakes, but no current employee is to blame. (This tune should be familiar. It was played repeatedly after the payroll fiasco in which thousands of teachers were getting either wildly overpaid or underpaid for months on end.)

That's their story and they're sticking to it, even though the superintendent of the local district, Carol Truscott, violated district policy by not initiating an investigation of Steve Thomas Rooney before assigning him to Markham Middle School. She didn't realize it was the policy, she said. And the district didn't tell her to do an investigation.

Yet Truscott, like all top administrators, must certify twice a year that she's up on all the policies. Paperwork, the district can do. Accountability for the paperwork actually meaning something is another matter.

But with or without a policy, why was Truscott (and other administrators who were faulted in the Rooney case) waiting for orders to act? The point of having managers in local districts is so that they can take the initiative to respond to the needs of their schools and students. At least she could have asked the central office, "Are children safe if I reassign this guy to a school with vulnerable preteen girls?" Or something like that.

Truscott has a solid reputation as a caring and capable administrator. But if people are never held accountable in the schools, no one will ever act. It's so safe to wait for directions - -safe for staff, that is. Not for students.

They're back.... The current issue of National Geographic magazine cover features Neanderthals, the human-like race who inhabited the Near East and Europe until 25,000 to 30,000 years ago, when they were wiped out either by the elements or by lither Homo sapiens from Africa --  i.e., us.  Neanderthals are almost as ubiquitous in the media as the GEICO cavemen, who are at least arguably Neanderthals. (They might be Cro-Magnons, but I have a feeling the ad men who invented them weren't interested in anthropological taxonomy.)

Alas, the NG article has only a brief reference to the question that excites most of the non-specialist interest in Neanderthals: Did they, um, do it with us? As I have mentioned before, this question is of more than prurient interest; one scientist has theorized that humans got their smarts from canoodling with our beetle-browed cousins.

For years, advocates of the interbreeding hypothesis have pointed to Neanderthal-like features in some modern-day people, like prominent brow ridges, weak chins and a fondness for sleeveless undershirts. But the NG article by Stephen S. Hall mentions the interbreeding hypothesis in the process of debunking it on the basis of DNA evidence.

Hall does include a rebuttal by Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "There were very few people on the landscape, and you need to find a mate and reproduce," Trinkaus said. "Why not? Humans are not known to be choosy. Sex happens."

The NG article also suggests that Neanderthals possessed a gene associated with speech, which means that Neanderthal men had no excuse when their human girlfriends complained, "We never talk."

Photo: AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

Drop that pencil! Before you fill out your absentee ballot, you should know about what's in Saturday's pages--a handy election recap that provides you with a quick, user-friendly guide to the major issues, state and in L.A. county, city and school district, on the November ballot. You'll get the Times editorial board's recommendations on how to vote, and why. Confused by the two alt-energy propositions? Wondering about the gamut of bonds, state and local? All will be made crystal clear, sort of. And if you prefer voting the old-fashioned way, this is a great editorial to clip and store in your wallet for your date with the voting booth.

Today's editorial page leads you to that recap with the last two endorsements on L.A. ballot measures. The editorial board registered a regretful No on Measure A, the tax to fund gang-diversion programs. Much as the money is needed, the city has yet to operate and effectively evaluate gang-diversion programs. Once we know the money will actually keep kids out of gangs, the board argues, it will be time to pass the tax. In contrast, the board gives thumbs-up to Measure B ...

If Tuesday's presidential debate had been more compelling, I might not have noticed two peculiarities about the event: the bizarre behavior of moderator Tom Brokaw and the inertness of the audience of "real people" from Nashville.

Brokaw already has been scolded for a schoolmarmish insistence on holding Barack Obama and John McCain to the arcane rules of the format, lest they actually engage each other in a debate. But the oddest aspect of his moderation was an insistence on introducing the questioners at the "town hall" by referring to the section of the hall in which they were seating as if it were a town.

At the beginning of the debate Brokaw said that "we're going to have our first question from over here in Section A from Allen Shaffer." Later he introduced "Oliver Clark, who is over here in section F." Later still: "The next question does come from the hall for Sen. McCain. It comes from Section C over here, and it's from Ingrid Jackson." And so on. So often did Brokaw mention sections that he sounded like a Broadway usher.

Odd as it was, Brokaw's obsession with where people were sitting was out-weirded by the audience. Regardless of the section they occupied, they were to a person eerily immobile and expressionless, so much so that I was surprised when a seemingly stiffened teenager actually blinked his eyes. The pod people from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" were more animated than this group. Maybe the drinking water at the debate was spiked with curare. Or the debate staffer who wrangled the audience "undecided" with "undead."

Photo: AP Photo/Jim Bourg, Pool

Because counties don't keep a tally of whether the couples who get marriage licenses are of the same gender, it's been impossible to know how many gay and lesbian weddings have occurred since the state Supreme Court ruling took effect in mid-June. All of these marriages would probably be declared invalid--a kind of mass divorce by state initiative--if Proposition 8's ban on same-sex marriage passes in November.

The Williams Institute at UCLA came out today with a number, or at least an estimate: 11,000 same-sex weddings from June 17 to September 17. They did this by totting up, county by county, the number of marriages last year during that time and comparing it with this year, assuming that most of the increase would have been a result of the Supreme Court ruling. That seems like a pretty good assumption, since the biggest increases were seen in counties like L.A. and San Francisco that are known to have big gay populations.

This fits in neatly with the big delay to the big Proposition 8 sign-planting. Remember how in late September, a possible 1 million religionists were supposed to march out of their homes, at roughly the same time, and plant a Yes on Proposition 8 sign on their front lawns? Seems the printing of a number of those signs was outsourced to another country or countries--the campaign isn't saying which, but the blog rumor mill has been saying China--and the signs were somehow delayed. I see that the bumper stickers, which showed up in a more timely fashion, exhort people to "Restore Marriage." But what does this mean in the context of 11,000 same-sex marriages that stand to be undone by the initiative, a 17% increase in the number of all marriages in the state? Whose bumper stickers are these, anyway? Seems like the anti-Prop. 8 folks could use the same slogan; maybe there should be a few last-minute changes to those lawn signs before they arrive, whenever that is.

Photo by Ben Margot/AP

In honor of Gloria Steinem's appearance in The Times oped pages this week, I figured I'd stoke gender issues and call attention to a study by Swedish researchers that says some men are hard-wired to be unfaithful. Apparently, guys with one or two copies of a gene variant (allele 334) are more likely to have fidelity and commitment issues.

Not surprisingly the study, conducted by the Karolinska Institute, also found that women married to allele 334-bearing men aren't as happy as those married to men without it.

"There are, of course, many reasons why a person might have relationship problems, but this is the first time that a specific gene variation has been associated with how men bond to their partners," Hassem Walum, one of the researchers, said in Science Daily.

Women all over the planet are murmuring: "I knew it. It's not that I've gained weight, he's just a mutant!"

The Times editorial board formulates its positions on ballot measures not only by research, but by inviting representatives of both sides to (separate) meetings with the board. It's a good forum for probing an issue, and the results sometimes are surprising.

So it went with the supporters of Proposition 8, which would amend the state constitution so that gay and lesbian couples no longer could marry. The board already has published its stand on the measure, but the editorial left out some interesting turns in the conversation.

The measure's supporters are generally careful to avoid appearing anti-gay, probably because they realize that, for all the voter split on same-sex marriage, Californians generally support gay rights. They professed in our meeting to have no ill will toward gay people...until the talk went deeper.

At one point, the conversation turned to the "activist judges" whose May ruling opened the door to same-sex marriage, and how similar this case was to the 1948 case that declared bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. According to one of the Prop. 8 reps, that 1948 ruling was OK because people are born to their race and thus are in need of constitutional protection, while gays and lesbians choose their homosexuality. So much for the expert opinions of the American Psychological Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics that people cannot choose their sexuality. Oh, those activist doctor types.

In any case, one Prop. 8 supporter said, gay rights are not as important as children's rights, and it's obvious that same-sex couples who married would "recruit" their children toward homosexuality because otherwise, unable to procreate themselves, they would have no way to replenish their numbers. Even editorial writers can be left momentarily speechless, and this was one of those moments. Aside from this notion of a homosexual recruitment plot -- making it understandable where the word "homophobia" came from -- this made no logical sense at all. Same-sex couples. whether married or not, already have children. Marriage wouldn't change a thing about this picture except, perhaps, to model for children that parents tend to be married.

So much for that speaking engagement at the Democratic National Convention. John Edwards is admitting to an affair with Rielle Hunter, AP reports:

Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair but said that he didn't love the woman. He said he has not taken a paternity test but knows he isn't the father of her child because of the timing of the affair and the birth.

Uh, wow. So, if he doesn't love the other woman, that makes it okay? And he said this to the media? Out loud?

Okay, we've heard enough about John. Here's my question:

Tell us why below.

-- Amina Khan