Opinion: In today’s pages: horses, healthcare, Harvard and more

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Today’s pages are packed with heavy-headed examinations of perennial hot-button items that won’t be solved any time soon (think race, education, healthcare and so on), so I’ll ease you into the week with Monday’s most cuddly topic: wild horses.

The editorial board analyzes a bill that would ban the culling of wild horses despite the fact that there are too many mustangs on the range and it’s getting too expensive to keep the 31,000 horses that are corralled (in an attempt to control the growing herd) fed and happy. The editorial board’s solution? Birth control:

A better solution for the horses would be to create vast but contained wildlife refuges with adequate grassland. Horses have largely been relegated to poorer quality lands, while prime grasslands have been given over to cattle-grazing leases. This would make it easier to monitor the herds and administer birth control. In fact, equine contraception, which is included in the House bill, might offer the best hope of humanely keeping the animals alive while protecting wilderness.

The board also notes that the July 22 deadline for laying out a plan for Guantanamo Bay came and went with no recommendations by the White House-appointed task forces. The editorial board asks President Obama to keep his word and set a date for closing Gitmo.

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that it’s silly for allies of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to use his arrest as proof that Americans haven’t made much progress on race:

Older minorities who have spent their lives defining themselves by the discrimination they have faced can sometimes have a hard time acknowledging that the world has changed, even as they enjoy those changes. Being discriminated against is one way they see their relationship to the world, and they’re unclear how to navigate if they concede its absence. That is what makes Obama’s election so unsettling to some blacks. Even as they rejoice in his victory, it requires them to recalibrate their view of the world and their place within it.

Also on the Op-Ed page, John Stobo and Tom Rosenthal weigh in on the healthcare debate, writing that a plan to cut Medicare costs by extrapolating research data from one region of the country to arrive at conclusions regarding another could leave the urban poor and those who live near pockets of urban poverty without adequate care. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa endorses L.A. Board of Education member Yoli Flores Aguilar’s proposal to allow a variety of school operators to bid on running new L.A. schools. The mayor says the plan encourages new ideas and puts students first.

Finally, pilot Peter Garrison looks back at millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane crash. Garrison writes that although we’ll never know what happened on the day Fossett died in 2007, we do know this:

But if it is the case, as the [National Transportation Safety Board] judged, that Fossett’s plane fell victim to a swirl of Sierra turbulence, it can only have been because he was flying quite close to the ground to begin with. The unhappy outcome wasn’t just an act of God; it must also have been in part an act of Fossett himself.