Pick your metaphor for California budget stupidity. We're eating our seed corn. We're destroying California in order to save it. Any parallel to self-destructive behavior will do.
Now it's recycling centers. California wisely charges customers a few cents' refundable deposit on those plastic and glass bottles we otherwise toss away so [...]
1) I was struck traveling on Wednesday by how many uniformed soldiers clotted my planes and the airports, and how young they were. (A couple of reservists were carrying skateboards.) It put faces to all the TV talk about our "brave young men and women in uniform." Not in itself [...]
The Wall Street Journal has published on its website the text of the proposed 10-point checklist for determining whether a Republican candidate is orthodox enough to benefit from the party's endorsement and fund-raising.
The affirmations issues are quite a mixed bag. Some are perennial and cosmic, such as: "We support [...]
Lou Dobbs is not ruling out running for president. But if the past is any guide (remember presidential candidate Joe Biden?), he may be willing to take second place on the ticket. Palin-Dobbs, anyone? The only condition that Lou might impose on the deal would be for [...]
The New York Times reports that conservatives have been drawing up a 10-point checklist -- to be printed on litmus paper? -- against which the Republican National Committee should measure prospective GOP candidates.
There's nothing surprising about the contents of the proposed creed (for example, opposition to government funding of [...]
With the fuss we make over Thanksgiving, I’d bet most Americans believe the Pilgrims were the first nonnative American settlers in North America.
Put aside the putative Norse landfall, and the certainty of the Spaniards in Florida and on the Pacific Coast; it’s the Anglo-American narrative that captains a big part of early American [...]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, [...]
Good news today from the backstage maneuverings on the Senate Democrats' healthcare reform bill. As The New Republic reported, Democratic leaders have agreed to give more flexibility to millions of Americans who get their health insurance today through their workplace.
First, a little [...]
I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his [...]
We've seen taxes on death, luxury and sin, and now the Senate is poised to impose one on vanity. To help cover the cost of health insurance subsidies for the working class, the bill cobbled together by [...]
That's $26,000 for a single year at a University of California campus, not the four usually needed to graduate. The UC Board of Regents voted today to increase basic education fees for undergraduates by 32% to more than $10,000 for the 20010-11 academic year. [...]
The California Energy Commission unanimously approved a proposed regulation today capping the power consumption of televisions sold in California, starting in 2011. Although the Consumer Electronics Assn., which represents the world's largest TV makers, was apoplectic about the ruling, The Times' Marc Lifsher reports that one faction -- [...]
It's a combination of issues so hot, an op-ed about reopening King-Harbor hospital doesn't even make the top three! Leading off is a pair of [...]
The frat boys at Newsweek were probably chugging some brewskies when they came up with the idea for this cover. How pathetic. I don't care whether this is done to a woman who is conservative or moderate or liberal. A Democrat, a Republican, a Green Party [...]
A new Associated Press poll, done by Stanford University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provides more evidence that the public wants comprehensive healthcare reform but rejects just about everything that implies. Although you should take a moment to [...]
Top of the morning, Opinion L.A. followers! I thought I'd start off the day by gathering a snapshot of our readers' feelings on Sarah Palin's book, "Going Rogue: An American Life," which comes out today.
Take our unscientific poll, leave a comment or do both (my [...]
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is, in a sense, having a similar argument thrown in its [...]
Perhaps CNN was growing tired of Lou Dobbs lying about those dirty, leprosy-infected illegals from Mexico, or railing against newspapers for being so distracted by May Day immigration protests that they neglected to notice -- when they actually did notice -- that May [...]
A Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday seems to confirm a point The Times made in an editorial last month on a California regulation that would ban large-screen TVs from being sold because they consume too much energy: Leave it up to the market [...]
Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment [...]
I've encountered a fair amount of confusion about the abortion language the House actually adopted on Saturday. Read it for yourself here -- it's a little more than three pages in large type, much of it spent removing abortion-related provisions in the underlying bill. The amendment by Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) [...]
Lots of folks are writing these days about Rupert Murdoch's recent statement that News Corp. plans to stop its newspaper stories from being indexed by Google when it throws up a more comprehensive pay wall next year. His comments came days after the American Press [...]
It was a blow to Roman Catholic liberals when the Vatican announced last month that it would welcome, en masse, conservative Anglicans who share the pope's opposition to female clergy and traditional views about homosexuality. But there was a silver lining for liberals: The fact that in welcoming married Anglican priests [...]
After signing up for the 2010 L.A. Marathon early this morning and studying the course map -- which was unveiled today -- I remembered a piece on the 2007 race by then-Times Deputy Editorial Page Editor Michael Newman, my boss at the time. [...]
When I say "our," I mean the collection of Times editorial writers and editors who worked in the same department 20 years ago as I do now (for the record, I was 9 years old when the then-undead German Democratic Republic announced on Nov. [...]
Charlie Beck, chief-designate of the Los Angeles Police Department, visited with reporters, editors and members of The Times' editorial board Wednesday, the day after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced his nomination of Beck as the next LAPD chief. In some areas, Beck distinguished himself (though [...]
Public option, shmublic option. If you really want to get people worked up about healthcare reform, start talking about whether it should cover abortions and illegal immigrants. Today, the editorial board tackles both those issues, saying that abortion opponents are looking to "extend federal prohibitions [...]
I'd deliberately stopped watching the news late Thursday evening after being overwhelmed by the horror out of Ft. Hood and the daylong tsunami of news in general. Sometimes, you've got to switch brain hemispheres.
I thought comedy and fashion would do that for me. So I skipped over to ''Project Runway,'' [...]
Federal law gives copyright owners a legal monopoly over public performance of their works, among other uses. But their market power is supposed to be limited by the competition from other copyright owners. Consider the case of songwriters. Paul McCartney can make you pay for the privilege of including "Jet" [...]
This won't take long to spell out. How long it'll take to fix, I don't know.
Spinning around the radio dial Wednesday, I alighted on a news story about the water deal reached in Sacramento. The announcer said something to the effect that the deal balances both ''human and environmental'' concerns.
What? Stop! When [...]
The Times editorial board and columnist Tim Rutten both throw their support behind Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's choice of Charlie Beck to lead the [...]
Chances are that Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward in Louisiana will get along just fine without the services of Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace who refused to perform a wedding for an interracial couple. The marriages don't last, Bardwell claimed, and the children are worse off. Bardwell's the one [...]
Just when you thought the era of bigger-is-always-better was over, the Oasis of the Seas heads on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic to Florida.
This isn't just a really, really, really big cruise ship -- 40% larger than the previous title holder. It looks like [...]
The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division moderates readers' comments on editorials, Op-Ed articles and blog posts to filter out anything that's not germane or that's inappropriate. The former is an easy standard to apply; the latter can be devilishly hard. Today we received several boundary-pushing responses to Gregory Rodriguez's column explaining [...]
LONDON -- Like most Anglophiles, I feel cheated when I cross the pond and find myself listening to American accents or walking past Burger King and McDonald's in search of a British pub, only to find the bar cluttered with Rolling Rock and Bud taps. What we want is contrast [...]
An unlikely folk hero has emerged from the debate over same-sex marriage in Maine. On Tuesday, voters will decide whether to go along with the Legislature's legalization of same-sex marriage in the state or whether to kill it via a "people's veto."
If voters defeat Question 1 -- [...]
Comedian Craig Ferguson pretty much got it right Friday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, when he told the folks at the Jane Goodall Institute’s global leadership awards:
"It’s nice to be here with people who actually do things rather than just tell jokes on television."
Or who just throw dinners congratulating [...]
Let the speculation over recently reelected L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's gubernatorial ambitions resume, beginning with this blogpost. He already said he wasn't interested in the job (at least this time around), but that was before San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the race [...]
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 [...]
In today's editorial and opinion pages, the Times editorial board gives former Assembly Speaker Fabuan Nuñez a shout-out for being cleared of ethics charges arising from his lavish spending, and then gives him a shout-down for the underlying actions. No, he's not a crook. [...]
Vikram Pandit, chief executive of embattled Citigroup, stopped by The Times this morning to answer questions posed by the editorial board and editors from the news pages. He dropped no bombshells -- alas, that rarely happens in these sessions. Instead, he gave a cautiously [...]
The police commission picked three finalists in its search for Los Angeles' new police chief, and the editorial board says each possesses many of the qualities needed to succeed atop the LAPD. Just so there won't be any confusion on that [...]
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 [...]
California's "three-strikes" law is about truly heinous crimes. But in politics, it's a serious breach of behavior and self-interest to commit a ''do as I say, not as I do'' violation.
Maria Shriver is not an elected official, but she is married to a renowned one, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was born [...]
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 [...]
For any parents who are truly shocked and dismayed that propping their babies in front of a TV didn't result in child prodigies, the Walt Disney Company has good news: It is offering a $15.99 refund for Baby Einstein videos, up to four per [...]
Paul Thornton, Patt Morrison, Jon Healey, Michael McGough, Lisa Richardson, Karin Klein
