Opinion: In today’s pages: Obama in California, Sara Jane Olson in Minnesota and jaguars in the Southwest
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The Times’ editorial board notes the latest bit of change President Obama is bringing to Washington: He’s blowing off this weekend’s annual Gridiron Club dinner for the capital’s media mavens -- the first president to do so since the 19th century -- but appearing this evening on ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno’ -- the first sitting president to do so, period. The more important message of the president’s swing through California, however, is that green growth is a win-win:
While conservatives grumble about the high cost of weaning the nation off fossil fuels, California demonstrates that doing so can pay off. The fact that the state led the nation in energy-efficiency regulation, for example, means that Californians pay lower residential power bills, on average, than residents of most states, even though power here is more expensive. A 2008 UC Berkeley study estimated that this efficiency has created more than 1 million jobs since 1972. Meanwhile, the state’s green technology business is booming.
The board also notes a few hopeful signs for increased political stability in Pakistan. And it says state officials made the right decision in letting erstwhile domestic terrorist Sarah Jane Olson return home to Minnesota while on parole....
Taking up the AIG bonus scandal the the board opined on yesterday, columnist Tim Rutten acidly notes how much better Washington treats bailed-out Wall Street executives than bailed-out autoworkers:
What we’re essentially being asked to believe is that employment contracts involving hardworking men and women on Detroit’s assembly lines are somehow less legally binding -- less ‘sacred’ in the current rhetorical argot -- than those protecting a bunch of cowboy securities traders living in Connecticut. When Larry Summers, [President] Obama’s chief economic advisor, piously tells us that the administration’s hands are tied because we all must abide ‘by the rule of law,’ perhaps it’s time to ask: What rule and for whom?
Elsewhere in Op-Ed, Author Lily Burana, whose husband deployed with the Army to two Persian Gulf wars, writes poignantly about military wives’ conflicting emotions over whether to allow photographs of soldiers’ coffins. And Cal State Long Beach Professor James William Gibson urges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use the Endangered Species Act to bring the jaguar (the animal, not the car) back to the Southwest.
Finally, our readers respond to recent articles about Civic Center Park, former Vice President Dick Cheney, China’s misgivings about U.S. debt, Rep. Maxine Waters’ support for a bank that her husband had close ties to, busing to desegregate schools and clinical drug trials.