Opinion: In today’s pages: City limits, county lines, Israeli boycotts, and Meghan Daum
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
They say all politics is (are?) local. So all are political editorials, at least in today’s Los Angeles Times editorial pages. The ed board sees some promise in the proposal to get the county to join with the University of California to form a nonprofit, which would in turn run a new full-service medical center where Martin Luther King Jr. hospital used to be.
The step forward is not simply getting medical care for the county, but also getting a Board of Supervisors to face its limitations and surrender power for the good of county residents:
Some board members and their staffs still grumble about dealing with a huge new executive staff and, more to the point, about losing some of their direct authority over county departments. But if the proposed Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital governance structure proves successful, perhaps they will become comfortable focusing more on oversight and less on day-to-day management.
On the city side, the board calls on the City Council and pension board to either sign off on an early retirement deal or do something else, but quickly:
It may well be that the early retirement plan, for all its flaws, is the most prudent way forward for the city. If the council members who are now getting cold feet have numbers to back up a more responsible course, they should cut short their vacations and make their case. Likewise, if they’re ready to adopt the plan, they must demonstrate that the city can afford it, and that it is something more than a politically expedient way to push fiscal disaster a year or two into the future.
Over on Op-Ed, Israeli author and professor Neve Gordon calls for ‘massive international pressure’ on Israel to end settlements in occupied Palestinian territories and to move forward with a two-state solution.
Author-journalist Donald Kirk marks the passing of former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung with a lament for Kim’s ‘sunshine policy’ of reconciliation.
And columnist Meghan Daum ponders the attraction of ‘bad-parent porn.’