America's Roman Catholic bishops aren't completely obsessed by abortion and gay marriage. My former colleague Ann Rodgers, one of the best religion reporters around, reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that bishops have been battling over whether to approve a retro English translation of the Mass with more traditional (and, critics charge, more stilted) language.

The new/old language won out at the recent bishops' conference. So now when the priest says "The Lord be with you," the congregation will reply "And with your spirit," not "and also with you," the current, clunky and inaccurate translation of the response I learned as an altar boy: "Et cum spiritu tuo." Like W.H. Auden, I believe that you can combine conservatism in liturgical language with more progressive political view.

Conservatism is cool even when it leads to technical language. Take the line in the Nicene Creed in which, in recent years, Jesus has been described as "one in being with the Father." Now he will be described as  "consubstantial with the Father." Abstruse? Perhaps. But truer to the Latin rendering of a Greek theological distinction that once led to violence between Christians. Confusion can beget a look into church history.

Even archaic non-theological language can be a spur to education. When Christians used to say that Christ would return to judge the "quick and the dead," parents could explain to their bewildered children that "quick" referred not to marathon runners but to those who were living, who had been quickened in their mothers' wombs. The lesson could then turn to the expression "cut to the quick."

Now that the Vatican has invited restive Anglicans to bring at least some parts of their majestic Book of Common Prayer with them when they cross the Tiber, the "regular" Catholic Church has to worry about non-tone-deaf believers switching  to the new church-within-a-church. The new/old liturgy approved by the bishops could be a bulwark against such defections.

-- Michael McGough

The Times editorial board and columnist Tim Rutten both throw their support behind Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's choice of Charlie Beck to lead the Los Angeles Police Department. The board likes Beck's credentials as a reformer, but notes the work still to be done on that front. Rutten echoes that sentiment, and throws in a few more issues that matter to the City Council.

On a less sanguine note, Edward H. Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that neoconservatives transformed the Republican Party into an interventionist, big-government operation with no conservative policy agenda. Them's fighting words! Good thing they came out of Crane's word processor and not, say, Rutten's.

And Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Cal State University Board of Trustees, laments the slow death of the California dream. No, not the one about having a house on the beach. That died a long time ago. He's referring to "the promise of low-cost education that brought so many here, and kept so many here":

Speaking of schools, the editorial board criticizes a bill by Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) that combines some common-sense reforms to the public system with ill-considered ones. And, although it agrees that colleges and universities could do a better job controlling costs, it defends the decision by some to pay top dollar for top-drawer presidents.

-- Jon Healey

Illustration: Ted Rall / For The Times

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

She was a woman who ''moved mountains in those Manolos'' -- one of the many words of praise Carol Biondi had to say about her old friend Nancy Daly at a memorial celebration on Wednesday evening.

Hundreds of people filed into Royce Hall to honor Nancy's life and her work on behalf of children and the arts. Out in the darkened rows sat the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, from the police chief to a number of City Council members and major philanthropists and arts leaders, as well as some kids from MacLaren Hall, whose lot she worked for 30 years to improve.

It's a testament to how highly Nancy was regarded that for an hour and a half in Royce Hall, you didn't hear a peep or a bleep out of a single Blackberry or cellphone.

Nancy died on Oct. 2 after a long struggle against pancreatic cancer -- a feat in itself, because ''long struggle'' and ''pancreatic cancer'' are usually contradictory.

I call her Nancy because I'd known her for more than 10 years, first as a civic force and then as a friend. Former Assembly speaker Robert Hertzberg got smiles of recognition across Royce Hall when, in his remarks, he noted how many of us have opened our e-mail in the morning to find something from ''lovekidsla,''  Nancy's e-mail address.

''Pom Queen'' and philanthropist Lynda Resnick reminisced with humor about the first time she saw the petite, blond Nancy in the foyer of her house, and how she knew at once that they'd become great friends. LACMA director Michael Govan reflected on what so many had felt: Nancy's persuasive powers. In his case, she showed up on his doorstep and even followed him to Arizona to get him to leave his ''perfect'' life in New York to come to L.A. to head the museum.

And another speaker -- I didn't write down who -- pointed out that one of Nancy's great skills was being able to put forward an idea and not only get some powerful allies but convince them it had been their idea all along. Even Karl Rove, the speaker said, ended a meeting with Nancy believing that the concept of making foster kids' records electronic so they could be immediately accessible as they moved from foster home to foster home and school to school ... had been his own.

Children, art and music were her devotions, and almost every speaker emphasized that she made a national impact, from her United Friends of Children group and the Children's Action Network, which she helped to found, to serving on the President's Commission for Children.

And ranking above all of those pursuits, the audience heard time after time, was her family. Her three children by her first husband, entertainment executive Bob Daly, and her grandchildren listened to plaudit after plaudit, and added their own. Like how she didn't say a word when her daughter got a tattoo, or one son got his ear pierced. Lyricist/songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, now married to Bob Daly, remembered with humor one family dinner with Bob Daly at one end of the table and Nancy at the other -- an extended-family get-together..

The evening began with a slide show of photos of Nancy's life narrated by Alan Alda -- childhood pictures, wedding pictures, mom pictures, Hollywood pictures, pictures of her after her cancer treatment, when her fair, straight hair grew back in as curly as a lamb's. "Do you really like it?" she had asked me, after I told her how becoming it looked.

It ended with a video put together by Nancy's kids of her last days, as she traveled with them in an RV from a visit to John of God in New York, on a ''road trip'' on the way back to Los Angeles.

She died in St. Louis, just one day after a videotaped visit to her old New Jersey home, where she walked around in front of the clapboard house. It's a first home that looked a lot like her last home here in L.A. She reminisced on the tape about growing up sledding on the streets and getting fired from her job at an ice cream parlor for giving away the goodies to her friends.

Onstage, below a screen with a large black-and-white photograph of Nancy, were banks of flowers and a grand piano. Its purpose became clear when Sarah McLachlan walked out and slipped onto the piano bench, where she performed the achingly poignant ``[In the Arms of an] Angel.'' By the time she was finished, some in the audience were dabbing away tears, me among them.

Tenor Placido Domingo had hoped to be there but could not get away from singing commitments, so he sent a video tribute, in song and in words, to the opera-loving Nancy.

As for who was there -- as I said, Police Chief William Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman; council members Bernard Parks, Tom LaBonge (and their wives, Bobbie and Bridget,), Bill Rosendahl and Jan Perry, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Hertzberg said he saw Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, although I did not, but former Mayor Richard Riordan, Nancy's second husband, was there, and I think I did see Richard Zanuck come in.

Lyn and Norman Lear were there, and Robin Kramer, once the right-hand woman to both Villaraigosa and Riordan, and Nancy's right-hand woman, Rita Brown, who had broken her left foot a few days earlier, slipping in the rain as she worked on preparing Wednesday's tribute.

Also there were philanthropists Eli and Edye Broad and Peg Yorkin, and actor Michael York and his photographer-wife Pat, both of them members of the book group that Riordan and I began about 15 years ago. Nancy's friend Wallis Annenberg wasn't there, but her tribute to Nancy was a million-dollar donation to Nancy's children's cause.

And there was Luis. He works with chef Michelle Gan, who had dished up scores of dinners at Nancy's homes and her fund-raising events over the years. He hadn't known this was a memorial for Nancy until he showed up for work on Wednesday, he told me, and his eyes were filled with tears as he talked about her.

Cooking was one of the memories Nancy's daughter, Linda, shared with the hundreds. The Thanksgiving after cancer surgery, Nancy insisted on prepping the turkey all by herself, and stood in the kitchen making the stuffing and basting the bird -- with an IV line running in her arm.

Classic Nancy.

-- Patt Morrison

The Opinion Manufacturing Division straddles the ideological divide today, offering red meat to both sides of the aisle. The Times editorial board blasts ACORN, the community organizers at the heart of conservative talk radio's favorite conspiracy theories, for failing to acknowledge and correct its serious internal problems in the wake of "devastating" hidden-camera exposes. And Op-Ed columnist Tim Rutten peers behind the newfound celebrity of Rep. Joe "You lie!" Wilson (R-S.C.) to find all sorts of fringe-group, umm, creativity. In particular, he examines the roots of the tea party movement and the intellectual underpinnings of the "10thers" -- anti-government conservatives who claim the 10th amendment gives state lawmakers authority to reject many acts of Congress and Supreme Court rulings.

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, David A. Lehrer, president of Los Angeles-based Community Advocates Inc., argues that anti-Semitic attacks are declining -- contrary to dire warnings from the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Similarly, Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection, contends that tragedies such as those involving Dae'von Bailey and Lars Sanchez -- two children killed despite the supervision their families were given by county child-welfare officials -- are the exception, not the norm:

Back among the editorials, the board urges Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign AB 2, a bill by Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate) to limit the ability of health insurers to cancel policies retroactively. And while it praises the announcement that the Irvine Co. would transfer 20,000 acres to Orange County for parks, it calls on the county to reveal more about how it will manage the windfall:

Photo: Police in Nevada gather evidence from an ACORN office in 2008 as part of an investigation into voter fraud. Credit: AP Photo / Jae C. Hong

-- Jon Healey

With a hat tip to John Hodgman, who has pretty well cornered the market on ridiculous solutions to serious problems, I think I've got the answer to climate change: a cap-and-trade program for babies.

As related by the Washington Post, two recent studies have pointed out that the real culprit for global warming isn't cars or coal plants, it's us. There are too many humans on planet Earth, emitting too much carbon. The cheapest cure is contraception, according to a study released last week by the London School of Economics, which points out that each $7 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by more than a ton. Achieving the same result with low-carbon technologies would cost at least $32. What's more, a study from Oregon State University concluded that having children (especially American ones, because Americans use vast amounts of energy compared to people from other countries) is the most environmentally damaging decision you can make.

I can see the answer now: You place a cap of one child on every couple, but set up a market to trade child-bearing credits so low-income couples can sell them to those with the means to support big families. It's eugenic-tastic!

OK, maybe not. But the notion is only a little sillier than the solution being promoted by the London School and its study's sponsor, the British-based Optimum Population Trust. Their model for fighting climate change by promoting birth control in the Third World ignores the fact that such programs almost never work.

There are many reasons for the population explosion, but most of them come down to one factor: poverty. Women in poor countries have little education and almost no power over reproductive decisions, so they go from one pregnancy to the next. In places where infant mortality is high, women have a lot of children because some are expected to die. Agrarian societies need children to work the farm. Programs to promote condoms aren't going to change any of this; if you want to lower birth rates, as Jeffrey Sachs and other scholars have pointed out, you have to reduce poverty. That means investing in development for poor countries.

Of course, with development and industrialization come higher greenhouse gas emissions. There's a solution for that, too: Make sure these societies "grow green." To do that, the U.S. and other rich countries have to develop clean-energy technologies, and mass produce them until solar panels and windmills are cheaper for industrializing nations to install than coal-burning power plants.

As Hodgman would say, "Global warming, solved. You're Welcome."

-- Dan Turner

Photo by Bettmann/Corbis

How about that Marxist/socialist/fascist/radical/mind-control speech President Obama delivered to those defenseless schoolkids, huh?

The most that the off-their-rockers right-wingers can salvage from the president’s remarkable speech is their claim now that it was their hue and cry that made him jettison his original speech and substitute a simple, inspiring one.

Sure, sure. Now, you go have a nice lie-down and rest a bit.

Let’s compare what the president had to say with, say, what Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told the new graduates of USC back in the spring:

Obama:

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.  And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Schwarzenegger: 

Work your butt off. You never want to fail because you didn't work hard enough. I never wanted to lose a competition or lose an election because I didn't work hard enough. I always believed leaving no stone unturned.  Muhammad Ali, one of my great heroes, had a great line in the '70s when he was asked, 'How many sit-ups do you do?' He said, 'I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. When I feel pain, that's when I start counting, because that's when it really counts.'  That's what makes you a champion. And that's the way it is with everything. No pain, no gain. So many of those lessons that I apply in life I have learned from sports, let me tell you, and especially that one. And let me tell you, it is important to have fun in life, of course. But when you're out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard. Someone is getting smarter and someone is winning. Just remember that. Now, if you want to coast through life, don't pay attention to any of those rules.  But if you want to win, there is absolutely no way around hard, hard work.

Obama:

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.  But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.  That’s OK.  Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, 'I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.' These people succeed because they understand that you can't let your failures define you -- you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn't mean you're a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying. No one's born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work.

Schwarzenegger:  

So, like I said, I decided to run, I didn't pay attention to the rules. And I made it and the rest is history. Which, of course, brings me to rule number three: Don't be afraid to fail. Anything I've ever attempted, I was always willing to fail. In the movie business, I remember, that you pick scripts. Many times you think this is a wining script, but then, of course, you find out later on, when you do the movie, that it didn't work and the movie goes in the toilet.  Now, we have seen my movies; I mean, 'Red Sonja,' 'Hercules in New York,' 'Last Action Hero.' Those movies went in the toilet. But that's OK, because at the same time I made movies like 'Terminator' and 'Conan' and 'True Lies' and 'Predator' and 'Twins' that went through the roof. So you can't always win, but don't afraid of making decisions.  You can't be paralyzed by fear of failure or you will never push yourself. You keep pushing because you believe in yourself and in your vision and you know that it is the right thing to do, and success will come. So don't be afraid to fail. Which brings me to rule number four, which is: Don’t listen to the naysayers. How many times have you heard that you can't do this and you can't do that and it's never been done before? Just imagine if Bill Gates had quit when people said it can't be done.

Obama: 

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.  Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. And even when you're struggling, and you feel like other people have given up on you -- don't ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

Schwarzenegger: 

I recognized very quickly that inside my head and heart were a burning desire to leave my small village in Austria -- not that there was anything wrong with Austria, it's a beautiful country. But I wanted to leave that little place and I wanted to be part of something big, the United States of America, a powerful nation, the place where dreams can come true. I knew when I came over here I could realize my dreams. And I decided that the best way for me to come to America was to become a bodybuilding champion. ... And I went home and I said to my family, 'I want to be a bodybuilding champion.'  Now, you can imagine how that went over in my home in Austria, they couldn't believe it. They would have been just happy if I would have become a police officer like my father, or married someone like Heidi, had a bunch of kids and run around like the von Trapp family in '[The] Sound of Music.' That's what my family had in mind for me, but something else burned inside me. Something burned inside me. I wanted to be different; I was determined to be unique. I was driven to think big and to dream big. Everyone else thought that I was crazy. … But I didn't care. I wanted to be a bodybuilding champion and use that to come to America, and use that to go into the movies and make millions of dollars. … I wanted to become a champion; I was on a mission. So rule number one is, of course, trust yourself, no matter how and what anyone else thinks.

You get the idea. Now, perhaps the rockers will too. This is a speech a Republican president could have given. Laura Bush, who was married to one, thought it was a good idea. Newt Gingrich, who’d like to be one, gave it his endorsement.

Right, move along now, nothing to see.

-- Patt Morrison

In the same Nov. 4, 2008 election in which Barack Obama was elected president, Los Angeles voters defeated (but just barely) a $36-per-property parcel tax measure to fund youth and anti-gang programs. Measure A was spearheaded by Councilwoman Janice Hahn; as a local tax, it had to pull in two-thirds, or 66.67% of the vote to win. It got 66.27%. Times endorsements may not have the clout they once did, but I think it's safe to say that our opposition helped make a difference on this one.

Hahn wants to try again, and wants to know what it would take to win us over this time. Fair question.

The subject came up at Tuesday's City Council committee hearing, at which Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr reported on the last six months of the city's still-new Gang Reduction and Youth Development programs.

When the Times called for a "no" vote on Measure A, we said the city had not shown it was ready to use new tax money properly. We explained that Los Angeles had floundered with anti-gang efforts for years, throwing money at programs without knowing whether they were working or even defining what they were supposed to accomplish. Just months earlier, the city had scrapped L.A. Bridges and authorized the mayor to take charge of gang programs and to establish standards and evaluation methods. Carr was a newcomer. It was too early to tell whether the city had improved. Here's a snippet, in case you don't want to click on the link and wade through the while thing:

The Times editorial page today comes to the end of the first year at Los Angeles Unified School District's troubled Locke High School under charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and finds progress, disappointment and hope. And change:

What makes Locke different under Green Dot...isn't that the charter operator has the magic formula for successful schools. It's that the people in charge don't spend years obfuscating, defending and delaying when things don't work. They do something to fix it.

The Times has been following the Locke Green Dot experiment closely. See reporter Howard Blume's articles from earlier this week here, here and here, and the editorial page's year-long series, A Year at Locke, here, and its earlier editorials like this one at the birth of the Green Dot experiment here. And don't miss editorial writer Karin Klein's many blog posts, including yesterday's post from the graduation, with its chilling quote:

 "It's happy, but it's also sad," [a parent said]. I waited for the predictable next words - happy because his child had grown up, sad because...well, his child had grown up. Instead, he continued, "Because you know after today some of these kids are going to die. Some will go down a bad path and get taken out too young."

In Op-Ed, this just in from calbuzz.com's Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine: California government is hard to handle. The two bloggers probed and have discovered that the problems include Proposition 13, voter initiatives, gerrymandering, term limits, a volatile tax structure, and the two-thirds rule for adopting budgets and taxes. Who knew? And guess what? It turns out some people are calling for a constitutional convention.

They made me look up the word bibulous, and now I'm embarrassed I didn't know it before, so I deny it.

Roberts, by the way, is the former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the embattled editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press before his well-chronicled battle with owner Wendy McCaw. He wrote about one episode here.

He and Trounstine last wrote for the Times Opinion page here in March on whether Dianne Feinstein would run for governor.

Trounstine is former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University.

Elsewhere in the page, filmmaker Todd Darling writes in favorof the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, but says it's not enough. By the way, catch the trailer from his film, "A Snow Mobile for George," on YouTube here.

And columnist Meghan Daum wonderswhat the deal is with J.D. Salinger, who went to court to block publication of a book in Sweden about his Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield. Say what you will about Salinger, who Daum points out has dabbled in (gasp) Zen Buddhism. But even at 90, he's no phony.

Photo: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

And you thought you were through with elections for a while. No such luck, at least for voters in several fairly wealthy Los Angeles County communities. School districts in South Pasadena, Palos Verdes, La Cañada, West Covina and adjacent areas are going to the ballot this month with parcel taxes to make up for deep state cuts to education.

They are following in the wake of tiny and tony San Marino, which conducted a mail-only vote that began in April and concluded May 5. Voters there agreed overwhelmingly to a whopping $795 tax on each parcel of property. Measure E needed two-thirds of votes cast to pass; it got more than 71%.

South Pasadena voters have already begun sending in their ballots on Measure S, which would impose a $288 tax on parcels, or $95 a unit on multi-unit parcels. Deadline for returning ballots is June 16.

Voters in the four cities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula that make up the school district there face a parcel tax of $165 (for four years only); deadline for Measure V ballots is June 23. In La Cañada, it's Measure LC, $150 per parcel for five years, with a deadline of June 30. Same deadline for the Rowland Unified School District's Measure E, a five-year, $120 parcel tax covering property in West Covina, Rowland Heights, La Puente and City of Industry.

In each of these communities, Republican registration is high (for Los Angeles County) and anti-tax sentiment is strong. But they also have some of the best public schools in the state, and residents like it that way. It's a good bet that they will follow the lead of their San Marino counterparts and tax themselves to ensure that state cuts don't undermine their educational achievements. Note the restrictions on most of the ballot measures -- there is a citizen oversight panel,  the money may not be used for administration and the tax comes up for review periodically (in Palos Verdes, this would be a third tax renewal).

Expect to see this model repeated across California, especially in communities where trust in state government is low but regard for high-quality education is high. The problem is that, as rich districts support themselves, poor ones are left with their diminished state funding. Now, layered on top of the complex and bizarre school finance structure is the prospect of a widening education and achievement gap.

Could this be the coming model for other city services as well? More local control, more local decision-making on taxing and spending? And, perhaps, more segregation of wealth and poverty?

Photo: David McNew / Getty Images