An ounce of enforcement is worth a pound of new laws. Or something to that effect. The editorial board points out today that Los Angeles could more effectively limit the proliferation of marijuana clinics by enforcing existing state law against for-profit operations than by dithering over municipal restrictions.

The board mourns the deaths of more than 100 men, women and children in a Pakistani car-bombing, saying that such terrible events should convince Pakistanis that the fight against violent Islamic extremism is their fight too:

More than anything [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton can say, a series of assaults that have taken the lives of more than 500 civilians this year should serve to convince typical Pakistanis that this is not just a U.S. war. The United States and Pakistan have a common enemy in Islamist extremists, and the Pakistani state is fighting for its survival.

And the board urges President Obama to stand by his deadline for closing Guantanamo:

The legal axiom that "justice delayed is justice denied" applies with special force to Guantanamo. Whether they are dangerous terrorists or, like many of those already released, bystanders caught up in a post- 9/11 dragnet, these detainees have languished for years without adequate due process.

On the other side of the fold, a consultant to a documentary on convicted murderer Leo Frank writes about his 1915 lynching in Georgia. The subsequent campaigns either to vilify him or clear his name echo today, with haves and have-nots viewing the same events from markedly different perspectives.

Bernstein is just plain wrong that the organization's Middle East program focuses on Israel's alleged human rights violations while ignoring those committed by Arab governments and the Iranian regime. Even a quick glance at Human Rights Watch's website, where recent reports are posted, shows that the majority of those on the Middle East relate to countries other than Israel. According to Human Rights Watch, it has produced 1,776 total documents on the Middle East since 2000 -- 250, or 14%, of which were devoted to Israel.

--Karin Klein

Photo of the aftermath of the Pakistan bombing, Credit: Arshad Arbab / EPA

Departing Police Chief William Bratton prods immigration culture warriors today with an op-ed explaining why the LAPD doesn't, and shouldn't, participate in the controversial 287(g) program, which gives local law enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents. Turning police into de facto Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harms community policing and discourages witnesses who might be illegal immigrants from coming forward.

Also on the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that trying to limit carbon emissions to fight global warming is a pointless waste of money because it can't solve the problem; better to invest in technological solutions and adjusting to a warmer world. And think tank scholars Leo Michel and Robert Hunter argue that U.S. allies are already doing plenty of heavy lifting as part of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, so American officials should do less lecturing and more listening if they want more cooperation.

Speaking of Afghanistan, the Editorial page says the country can't be pacified simply by sending more troops. That has become abundantly clear in the face of increased suicide bombings in Iraq, which like Afghanistan has been slow to build a credible government.

We also send a rare love note to the California Legislature, pointing out two genuinely worthwhile bills that will help cities make better use of water, an increasingly precious resource in this dry and crowded state. And we weigh in on Operation Gatekeeper, the federal effort started in 1994 to tighten border security in a five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Though the program has been successful in reducing crossings in that area, it has had an unintended consequence that must be addressed: Deaths of people trying to cross the desert farther to the east have skyrocketed.

Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

Hey parents, your little ones may posses stronger wills than a hardened Guantanamo Bay detainee. Some of the kid-friendly entertainment consumed on a mass scale by children, including Barney the Purple Dinosaur and the Sesame Street puppets, is being used for so-called enhanced interrogation of suspected terrorists:

Read the whole article by AP here.

Using G-rated jingles from childhood is a curious method to break suspected terrorists, not so much because the songs are meant to sooth and entertain children than because of the feeling that this practice doesn't come across as very surprising. There seems to be a point in our lives when our toddler-years immersion in kiddie media gives way to a wholesale rebuke of this entertainment, sometimes going so far as to result in a phobia. After all, who doesn't know at least one fully grown adult who suffers from coulrophobia? (Perhaps we can just chalk that one up to the clown scenes in the TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's "It.")

But I'd like to know: What's on your torture playlist? What list of songs, played repeatedly at high volume, would make you cry,"Stop!"? Would Barney and Big Bird break you? Post your list of songs as a comment below.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: AP

Columnist Jonah Goldberg foresees clouds ahead for the Democrats -- in fact, a coming storm so severe that it could end Democratic control of Congress. It's building from the Tea Party movement, which Goldberg sees as an heir to the Ross Perot third-party movement of the 1990s. "If the GOP can convincingly align with and exploit the growing Perotista discontent, it very well might ride to victory on a tsunami the Democrats can't even see."

Also on today's Op-Ed page, scholar Giles Dorronsoro explains why U.S. attempts to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan's Pashtun areas in the south and east are probably doomed to fail. And ACLU National Security Project chief Jameel Jaffer decries an attempt by Congress to circumvent the courts by giving the secretary of Defense the power to withhold photographs of combatants "engaged, captured or detained" by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

On the Editorial page, The Times weighs in on Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's policy change on medical marijuana. Though we're happy that federal prosecutors will make marijuana cases a low priority in states like California that have passed laws approving its medicinal use, we think that's the wrong approach. The administration shouldn't be picking and choosing states in which to enforce federal law -- rather, it should de-emphasize medical marijuana cases in all 50.

We also note that the best place for local health departments to conduct swine flu vaccinations is at public schools -- yet that's not where the inoculations will take place in Los Angeles, thanks to a failure by the school district and the county to properly coordinate.

And we muse on the bizarre spectacle presented by Colorado's Heene family, accused of perpetrating the "balloon boy" hoax in an attempt to drum up publicity for a reality show. "As much as some people will do just about anything for a Hollywood contract, a good number of the rest will lap up the juicy story of their wrongdoing. In reality, perhaps we all get what we wanted."

Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times

Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard, gets the Op-Ed page rolling this morning by accusing President Obama of being organized labor's Santa Claus. The First Community Organizer may believe that unionization helps lift workers into the middle class, Continetti writes, but the numbers don't support that argument:

Speaking of a unionized workforce, columnist Tim Rutten urges the state Senate to waive some California environmental rules to let developer Ed Roski Jr. build a football stadium in the City of Industry. Why?

Alllll-righty then. Closing out the page, Anna Husarska, senior policy advisor at the International Rescue Committee, laments the "huge human cost" of the Taliban's operations in Pakistan's Swat Valley and the government's counteroffensive. The image above is an illustration of the psychic toll; it's a drawing by a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley named Sheema.

On the other half of the opinion pages, the Times editorial board blasts the L.A. Department of Water and Power for the fabulous parting gifts it's planning to shower on departing chief H. David Nahai. We like how Nahai defied union leaders (the Opinion page's méchants du jour) to bring in more renewable power from outside the district, but we still don't see the need to pay him his salary for the rest of the year:

The board also says the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines for online advertisers could put too much scrutiny on bloggers and amateur product reviewers. And it warns that the Supreme Court's review of a case involving the giant cross in California's Mojave National Preserve threatens to "blow a gaping hole" in the 1st Amendment's wall between church and state.

-- Jon Healey

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva weighs in today with an Op-Ed on the coming G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, expressing his concern that leaders of the developed world are celebrating the recovering economy too early. In particular, he writes, industrialized nations seem reluctant to "reform" the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, combat global warming and reduce trade barriers:

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, columnist Tim Rutten again uses Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) as the muse for a piece on political discourse, this time focusing on the origins of incivility. (It's Don Rickles, you hockey puck!) And novelist and longtime UC Riverside professor Susan Straight sees a teachable moment in the planned systemwide walkout by university workers and faculty Thursday.

On the editorial side of the fold, the Times board argues that China's new commitment to slow the growth of its carbon emissions makes the United States "the most environmentally irresponsible nation on Earth." We're No. 1! We're No. 1! The board also rebukes the Los Angeles district attorney's office for insisting that Bruce Lisker, whose murder conviction was thrown out by the federal courts for lack of evidence after he'd spent 26 years in prison, was guilty even as officials announced they would not put him on trial again. And although the detention center at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is on different legal footing from the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the board contends that detainees seized on the battlefield and held at Bagram should be tried as terrorists "with all the protections and avenues of appeal available to criminal defendants."

-- Jon Healey

Cartoon by Matt Wuerker / Politico

In today's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Los Angeles) writes about the coup in Honduras. There, he said it: Coup.

Luis J. Rodrigez, author of the L.A. classic "Always Running: La vida loca, Gang Days in L.A.," has something to say about City Attorney Carmen Trutanich's vow to crack down on graffiti:

The Times editorial board weighs in on the return of film to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and critiques the Obama administration's failure to depart, sufficiently, from the Bush standard on rendition.

And last, but hardly least, columnist Meghan Daum analyzes the phenomenon of the tea-partying, Whole-Foods-shopping conservative.

The change in administrations has led the Department of Homeland Security to adjust its much-maligned policy regarding laptop searches at the border. It's not going to search fewer laptops, iPods or other electronic devices, necessarily; it's just going to take more care not to disclose any sensitive information it finds on them.

As News.com's Declan McCullagh reported, the Obama administration continues to take an extremely permissive view toward the power of federal agents at the border. The new directives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection reiterate the Bush administration's stance that agents have the authority to search any digital storage device entering the country, even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. They'll need to show probable cause only if they want to seize the device or retain copies of its contents. The primary change in policy is more administrative oversight over how the devices and data are handled after they're seized....

The Times editorial board weighs in today on the prospect of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appointing a special counsel to investigate the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques." The board does not hold much hope for the effectiveness of such a counsel because evidence problems and sympathetic juries could make it impossible to obtain convictions. 

The board comes to this conclusion:

That is not a reason for a prosecutor to throw up his or her hands and refuse to gather as much evidence as possible. But it's a reminder that the criminal justice system is an imperfect remedy for a pervasive policy of subordinating human rights to an unrelenting war on terror -- a policy in which Congress often was complicit.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment!

The Times editorial board offers a mouth-watering stack today, weighing in on the fights over legislation to require restaurant chains to post the calorie counts of menu items and lawsuits to force Denny's to reveal the sodium content of its offerings and hot dog packages to carry warning labels. The board scoffs at the lawsuits, but supports posting the caloric content at chains with more than 20 restaurants of the same name (think McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, etc.). It's already been done in New York and it's now on the books in California. The board notes that it might cost restaurants extra to reprint menus or offer lower-calorie foods, but says, "tough luck."

On the op-ed side of the pages, two top officials in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration -- legal affairs secretary Andrea Lynn Hoch and Department of Finance chief counsel Jennifer Rockwell -- contend that the governor's use of line-item veto to make deeper spending cuts than the legislature approved was well within the law.

Lionel Beehner, formerly a senior writer for the Council on Foreign Relations, gives his insights on tourism in Kurdistan and his recent visit to the region in Northern Iraq:

Finally, columnist Gregory Rodriguez endorses the strategy for combating religious fundamentalism outlined by authors Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. Their approach? Striking a balance between doubt and certainty, and using our democratic freedoms to "fight back" against fundamentalist beliefs. 

Photo credit: Susana Gonzalez / Bloomberg