By now, you've probably come across the excuses offered by Republican state Sen. Roy Ashburn, outed following his DUI arrest after reportedly leaving a gay bar in Sacramento last week, for his history of voting against gay-rights legislation. The gist is that his voting record merely reflects the wishes of his constituents, and that he thought he could separate his personal life from his political career ("it's not personal, it's political" is something of a gay-basher mantra). Here's exactly what he said, per Queerty:


An obvious question for Ashburn is whether he thinks his district would have sent him to Sacramento had he been honest about his sexual orientation, but that's beside the point. Ashburn essentially suggests  that it isn't the role of legislators to lead. As far as same-sex marriage is concerned, Ashburn's voting record seems in line with the public opinion of his district, which includes Bakersfield. But marriage hasn't been the only front in the battle over the last few years to ensure equal protection for gay men and women. Ashburn opposed bills to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation at workplaces, in housing decisions and so on. As noted by former Times reporter Robert Salladay at California Watch, Ashburn's voting record may actually land much further right of the people who elected him.

Ashburn's other justification -- that he felt his private and political lives could remain separate -- should ring familiar to those of us who feel strongly about equality for gay men and women. I've always seen the debate over marriage equality as proving precisely the opposite: that the political and the personal are deeply intertwined. Ashburn may have been able to separate the two by keeping his sexual orientation a secret, but the out-of-the closet Californians whose personal lives could have been damaged by Ashburn's votes didn't have that luxury.

I'll leave the rest of the debate to you: Was Ashburn wrong to vote against the interest of gay Californians such as himself, or is he right that legislators ought to put their own convictions aside and only represent their constituents' views? The Times' editorial board will weigh in on the Ashburn affair Wednesday; in the meantime, share your views in the comments field below.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo: Sen. Roy Ashburn at the Capitol building in Sacramento on Monday.

Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Iraq has cost this country billions of dollars -- now Iraq's just given me an idea to help out our economy just a smidge in return.

Iraq's election was on Sunday. Under Iraqi law, political parties or candidates or both have just three days to take down all of their campaign signs, or be fined.

Love that. Love, love, love it.

Let's make that the law of the land here.

First of all, it will rid the landscape of all that obnoxious eye clutter; seeing campaign signs weeks after the election is like seeing the empty bottles piled in the trash after a New Year's Eve party that everyone would just as soon forget.

Second, think of the temporary jobs it would create. Campaigns and candidates, local, state and federal, would have to spend some of their political loot to clean up their own messes, which means hiring people to drive around and take down the ''vote for me me me'' ads.

Third, if they don't remove them, then, as in Iraq, they'll be fined. This is wonderful, the notion of transforming some of those millions in campaign moolah into tangible, laudable stuff for the public. How could politicians dare to complain when that money they'd raised at cocktail parties and tribute dinners goes to fixing up some wrecked streets, or paying someone to look after some elderly bed-bound lady?

I love it. The only catch -- before it can happen, politicians have to vote for it.

-- Patt Morrison

Democrat John A. Pérez, sworn in on March 1 as the California's Assembly 68th speaker, stopped by The Times on Friday to discuss with editors and reporters efforts to close California's $20-billion deficit (he noted that, of the $20 billion, lawmakers have already identified about $5 billion to cut) and reform the state's budgeting process for the long term. Most notably, Pérez said he would refuse to "foreclose" on the possibility that the state may have to raise some taxes and spoke at length about reducing the two-thirds super-majority requirement for the Legislature to pass the budget to a simple majority.

Below are streaming audio clips of the editorial board's Q-and-A session with Pérez.

Three priorities: jobs, budget, reform (3:14)

Simple-majority budgeting                 (9:54) 

Re-drawing legislative districts           (2:39)

Where to cut $15 billion                      (5:00)

Taxes and government roles              (4:15)

Evaluating past legislative leaders     (1:05)

Schwarzenegger as a lame duck       (1:19)

Term limits and bipartisanship           (2:48)

Why Maldonado isn't the lt. gov.        (1:43)

Lowering the unemployment rate      (4:23)

Photo: John A. Perez is sworn in as speaker of the California Assembly on March 1.

Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

It’s been something of a Great Dame weekend for me.

First was my Saturday "Patt Morrison Asks" Q and A column with Gloria Steinem, the ground-breaking feminist, which you can read here.

Whatever you think of her -- and judging from the e-mails I’ve been getting, nobody’s lukewarm about Gloria Steinem -- her influence on the nation’s 20th century social history has been substantial.

Then, I was tickled to spend Saturday evening in Palm Springs -- but not for the usual reasons that make people happy to be in Palm Springs.

I was there presenting a Palm Springs Women in Film and Television award to my friend, producer Gale Anne Hurd. She had earned the "Broken Glass" award, I said on Saturday, for giving a whole new meaning to "chick flick," with her fierce and fearless choices that have given us Oscar-honored movies and more. Among them: the "Terminator" films, "Aliens," "The Abyss," a couple of "Hulks" and "Aeon Flux," to the Independent Spirit award-winner "The Waterdance," along with a new film, "The Wronged Man," based on a true story, and one of my small-film faves of Gale’s, "Dick," a movie that Leonard Maltin lists as one of the 151 best films you’ve never seen. And I have. Twice.

And then the triple play: coming home from Palm Springs to see Kathryn Bigelow win not only for best director -- thank goodness it isn’t "directress" -- but also for another best, as  "The Hurt Locker" laid claim to being best picture.

Mark this weekend as one for the girls.

-- Patt Morrison

The March issue of Amber Waves, a U.S. Department of Agriculture newsletter, takes a fascinating look at food availability and consumption trends in America over the last 100 years. It's probably no surprise that availability has gone through the roof, but the numbers, in terms of pounds per person, are sobering. I've included a few snippets from AW.

In 1909, sweetener availability -- sugar, molasses, honey, corn syrup and other syrups -- stood at 83.4 pounds per person. Between 1924 and 1974, that average grew to 113 pounds per capita, not including the sugar-rationing World War II years. Then government policies, including subsidies for corn production and trade restrictions for sugar, helped make corn sweeteners less expensive than sugar, and manufacturers began using the cheaper high fructose corn syrup in everything -- soft drinks, cereals, soups, spaghetti sauce. By 2008, sweetener availability stood at 136.3 pounds per person, with HFCS accounting for 39% of the total.

The information in Amber Waves is fairly neutral, but the politics of sugar are anything but. Here's a Times editorial about the harm caused by the government's insane sugar-corn love affair and the farm lobby's power.

Here's what AW has to say about availability of fats, which grew from 36 pounds per person in 1909 to 87 pounds in 2008:

Increasing availability of fats and oils and cheese reflects their use in processed foods and the growing eating-out market in the second half of the century. ... Much of this increase was in salad and cooking oils used to cook french fries, a mainstay of fast food and other restaurant menus. Cheese availability also skyrocketed -- growing from 11.4 pounds per person in 1970 to 31.4 pounds in 2008. Cheese owes much of its growth to the spread of Italian and Mexican eateries in the United States and to innovative, convenient packaging, such as string cheese for lunch boxes.

-- Lisa Richardson

Photo: The TNT Super Dog, with a 10-inch rippered dog, chili, cheese, bacon, pastrami, fries, grilled onion, and a fried egg, all wrapped in a giant tortilla at the Slaw Dogs restaurant in Pasadena. Credit: Bret Hartman / For The Times

Readers sometimes accuse The Times' editorial board of decrying the filibuster -- and other such procedural obstructions to legislative action -- only when it inhibits Democrats from passing their pet projects (such as healthcare reform). As far as the last five years are concerned, those charges are false. Since 2005, when Republicans in Congress threatened the "nuclear option" to end attempts by then-minority Democrats to prevent President Bush's conservative judicial nominees from coming to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote, the editorial board has consistently and pointedly called for an end to holds, filibusters and the like. The Times made its position clear in an April 26, 2005 editorial:

The editorial board subsequently expressed dismay over a deal in the Senate to allow some judicial nominations to proceed at the expense of nuking the filibuster. 

So that accounts for the paper's current position, but The Times is much older than your average kindergartner. In fact, you don't have to look too far back for an editorial expressing some sympathy for, though not outright endorsing, a threatened filibuster. In 2003, the editorial board blamed Bush for Senate Democrats being "forced" to filibuster (get this) a handful of the president's far-right judicial nominees. From an Oct. 10, 2003 piece: 

For much of the paper's recent history, The Times never had much to say about the filibuster itself as a procedural tactic. The editorial board blasted what it viewed as petty obstructionism (North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms was a frequent target) and, in 1986, praised senators who tried to block the enactment of a federal death penalty for murders committed in the course of drug crimes -- fairly pedestrian stuff for editorial pages.

It's a different story for The Times during its yellow-journalism days. In 1915, The Times headlined a piece, "God Bless the Filibusters"; less than a decade later, the paper declared, "Bust the Filibuster." For images of those editorials and more, click on the jump.

Wednesday morning I asked other members of the Times editorial board to offer their best arguments on the issue of Congress using reconciliation to enact a healthcare reform bill. My colleague Dan Turner dug up this viewpoint from the past:

A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Those are Abraham Lincoln's words, from his first inaugural address, delivered in March 1861 to a country poised on the brink of civil war. He was talking about secession, not healthcare, of course. At the time, seven states had recently seceded and adopted a provisional constitution. Lincoln was trying to walk a fine line in his speech, sounding conciliatory notes about slavery ("I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists") and war ("[T]he property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming administration") but also making a forceful case against the legality and wisdom of secession.

Still, Lincoln's words offer a potent argument against giving congressional minorities the kind of power the Senate's filibuster rule conveys. The Constitution has ample protections against bullying by the majority. (In fact, many readers of this blog argue that the Constitution will prove to be the undoing of Obamacare and its individual insurance mandate, although I think they're wrong about that.) The filibuster rule doesn't just protect members of the minority party; it gives them veto power.

The Times' editorial board has a, shall we say, interesting history on the issue of majority rule, and we'll try to round up some excerpts to show how the board's view has evolved. For at least the last decade, though, we've been solidly anti-filibuster. For instance, during the controversy over Senate Democrats blocking President Bush's judicial appointees in 2005, we wrote:

At the risk of seeming dull or unfashionable for not getting our own intellectual makeover, we still think judicial candidates nominated by a president deserve an up-or-down vote in the Senate. ... But the Senate shouldn't stop with filibusters over judges. It should strive to nuke the filibuster for all legislative purposes.

Today's editorial is in line with that view. There would be no hand-wringing over the propriety of using reconciliation for the healthcare bill if there were no filibuster rule. 

-- Jon Healey

Photo credit: Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images

Regular readers will notice that we no longer require people to sign in to TypePad, Facebook, Twitter or the like in order to post comments on the blog. I had added the requirement late last month for a couple of reasons. First, it was a prerequisite to enabling readers to reply to one another's comments and to display comments as threaded conversations, which is a much better experience for readers (IMHO), and second, because authentication seems to promote more thoughtful comments. I also hoped that people would actually welcome the ability to use an existing sign-in, such as their Facebook or Twitter ID, rather than having to remember one unique to the L.A. Times.

From the look of things, I was spectacularly wrong. The changes appear to have been a massive obstacle to commenting. If there was any doubt about that, the fact that no one had commented on either Patt Morrison's LAX post or our reconciliation poll was proof enough. So we're going back to the old system

If you have ideas for how we might improve the comment system on the blog, fire away! We're limited to some extent by TypePad's software, which is what The Times uses for its blogs. But there are some tweaks we haven't tried. The goals are to promote thought-provoking but civil commentary in ways that put as few hurdles as possible in the path of would-be participants (without enabling spam or advertising). There are, of course, dozens of other rules in our terms of service, but you get the point.

Oh, and before it comes up yet again: "Opinion Manufacturing Division" was coined by a former Opinion department leader, Michael Kinsley. I believe he was making fun of us by comparing what we do to Industrial Age factory workers. In other words, don't read anything Orwellian into it -- Michael isn't that kind of guy. And neither am I.

(A hat tip to reader Andy Nelson for being the first to point out the problem.)

-- Jon Healey

Below is a note from Cheryl Meier, whose sister Marcia Meier wrote a Times Op-Ed article Sunday about their 52-year-old schizophrenic brother's worsening medical and financial woes, including creditors threatening to collect debts by illegally garnishing his Supplemental Security Income checks. Many of the reader comments on the article were supportive, though several offered criticism. A few readers suggested that Marcia Meier wasn't serious about taking responsibility for her brother's debts and actions, and some expressed safety concerns for her brother's trailer park neighbors.

Cheryl Meier writes:

It sucks to suck.

Once again, Los Angeles International Airport is ranked among the lousiest big airports in the country. Only Newark, New Jersey’s airport, saves LAX from taking home the razzberry palm as the very worst airport. Passengers in the J.D. Power survey hated L.A.’s crummy access, wretched services and snail’s-pace security.

I’m sure there was more to gripe about, but we all know what they are. How, after you claim your bag, you have to dodge traffic to get to a shuttle bus. How the only airport food you can find, with rare exceptions, falls into my definition of Americans’ four major food groups: fast, frozen, fried and junk.

LAX was designed in an age even before the "take-me-to-Cuba" skyjackings, back in the day when well-dressed and usually well-heeled people could just step out of their cars and step right aboard their planes.

That’s not how we fly now. The footprint of LAX and other airports wasn’t crafted for the possibility that we’d have to show up three hours before flight time. It wasn’t designed for dreary, complex security screenings or thumb-twiddling waits even when your flight is on time, nor for the tedium and fury when your flight is delayed.

The city of L.A. just began expanding and sprucing up the Tom Bradley International Terminal, again. Already, in my experience, that terminal has better restaurants and services than the other, mostly domestic terminals. At Bradley, they finally fixed that visitor-hostile practice of demanding that people just off planes from interminable flights from Shanghai or Johannesburg have the U.S. bucks to pay for a luggage cart.

The Bradley’s advantages are only comparative, not absolute. Other terminals are dim and grim, or loud and crowded, with a soundtrack of 1970s Muzak and unintelligible loudspeaker announcements. Honestly, one of these days, as I’m trundling down a dingy, marathon-length maze to my gate, I expect to see a hand in a white lab coat sleeve reach down and pluck me out like the lab rat I surely am.

I’m happy about the improvements to the Bradley terminal, but what about the rest of us? What about those other half-dozen-plus terminals? The gate seating (not enough, and feeling like reform school). The alleged food. The gulag lighting, and all the rest. LAX is one crummy place to be stuck, and its very echt awfulness costs the city all the money that travelers aren’t spending there, or the even bigger money because they’re avoiding LAX altogether.

The city needs to lay down the law to airlines and concessionaires and make the place livable – because, at least for some hours with every flight, we do live there. I couldn’t have made better recommendations than those on Slate dot com’s website, as part of its "Ask the Pilot" column. Among them:

• Public transport to the airport. A no-brainer, except in L.A., where urban legend holds that the taxi lobby – yes, there are taxis here and they have leverage – the taxi lobby derailed a right-to-the-airport train line, and the Green Line’s airport stop is still a disgraceful shuttle ride away from LAX. Frankly, it's embarrassingly bush league.


• Wireless Internet, free. Duh. Let’s get some stimulus money there right now. It’s turned me into a bandwidth hoodlum. My laptop and I have slouched right outside the door of those fancy first-class lounges, trying to figure out how to get the free wireless signal I know is inside. Free wireless encourages business and makes waiting less wasteful.


• Play areas for kids. Even if you’re not flying with yours, you will be happy to have the tykes scream and jump and wear themselves out in an airport version of Chuck E. Cheese so they won’t get on your plane and start trying the same thing.


• Information kiosks not run by the airlines – therefore, about services, not sales.


• Real food. Real shops. Bank ATMs and mail drops (what, afraid I’ll squirt my three ounces of hand lotion through the mail slot?).

So, full speed ahead for the Bradley terminal makeovers, sure – but ye masters of LAX, look above you, to the airports at the top of the passenger satisfaction list, and not just in the U.S. but internationally. Make them your model, and make LAX fly for all of us passengers, or we’ll find other rides. I hear that high-speed rail thingamajig will be fantastic.

Photo: Entrance to the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

-- Patt Morrison

The Times' editorial board will weigh in later today or tomorrow on whether Democrats in Congress should use the budget reconciliation process send a healthcare reform bill to President Obama's desk, or attempt to achieve some kind of consensus by giving in to Republicans' calls to start from scratch.

The timeline imposed by starting over would be, well, long, subjecting the legislation to another round of filibuster threats and other tactical maneuvers to wring more concessions from Democrats or kill the bill entirely. Reconciliation, however, would remove the filibuster option. Here's a short primer on reconciliation by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein; a much more exhaustive report for the more wonkish (or masochistic) among us can be found here. 

What are your thoughts? Should the party in power have some, you know, power? Or should Congress and the Obama administration start over from scratch? Take our poll, leave a comment or do both.

Credit: AP Photo / Alex Brandon

-- Paul Thornton

The main Democratic theme at last Thursday's healthcare reform summit was that their proposals weren't all that far from the GOP's position on many core issues. President Obama stayed on message Tuesday, issuing a letter to House and Senate leaders identifying four GOP proposals he hoped to incorporate into the bill. (Download a PDF of the letter here.) These weren't dramatic concessions, though, just small modifications. Specifically, Obama said he was "exploring" these four Republican ideas:

• Using undercover patients to root out fraud in Medicare and Medicaid (an idea suggested by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma);
• Tripling the funding for state experiments in medical malpractice reform;
• Increasing physician reimbursement rates for Medicaid (as requested by Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa);
• Clarifying that high-deductible insurance policies will be available through the new insurance exchanges (a response to a plea by Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming to stop trying to kill health savings accounts).

Obama's letter also said that his proposal discarded the special treatment for Medicare Advantage subscribers in Florida, as Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona had called for at the summit.

The letter offered no timetable, but the White House on Wednesday is expected to unveil a revised version of its 11-page blueprint for bridging the differences between the bills passed by the House and Senate. Republicans, who argued at the summit that those bills ought to be discarded in favor of a much more modest effort, aren't likely to be satisfied with the tweaks. But Obama signaled that he's ready to move forward anyway by rejecting the GOP's call for incremental change:

I also believe that piecemeal reform is not the best way to effectively reduce premiums, end the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions or offer Americans the security of knowing that they will never lose coverage, even if they lose or change jobs.

Lines like that one suggest that today's letter was intended mainly to rebut the GOP's accusations that their healthcare ideas were being ignored, not to attract Republican votes. Regardless, the main challenge for healthcare reform advocates is retaining the support of wavering Democrats in the House, who've made a growing number of concessions to the GOP and moderate Democratic senators.

-- Jon Healey

Is this what Solomon would have decided?

For a baker's dozen of years, ex-sports star O.J. Simpson's former sports agent and Fred Goldman, who won a civil judgment against Simpson in the murders of Goldman's son, Ron, and Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown, have gone round and round in court over ... a suit.

Not a lawsuit. An actual suit. The tannish-looking one Simpson wore the day in 1995 that he was acquitted of the double murders.

The reason that ownership of said garment was a matter of legal dispute is that it could, some say, be worth thousands -- and Simpson still owes Goldman about $33 million and change in the civil suit.

But Simpson didn't have possession of the suit [shirt and necktie included] all these years, His ex-agent, Mike Gilbert, did. 

Today's Solomonic settlement donates the dispute suit to ... the Smithsonian, the nation's attic, repository of all things whimsical and historical, from Archie Bunker's easy chair to the top hat Lincoln was wearing the night he was assassinated. But as the Associated Press reports, nobody's evidently yet checked to see whether the Smithsonian wants it.

Gilbert said outside the courtroom, ``It's part of American history. People should be able to see it and reflect on what went so wrong for someone who had everything."

The man for whom things ''went so wrong'' won't be needing a suit for nine to 33 years, seeing as how he's serving time in a Nevada prison for kidnap and robbery convictions. But I can't imagine he isn't relishing the idea of his ''told you so'' suit on display at one of the most famous museums in the world.

If the muckety-mucks at the Smithsonian are wondering whether they should accept such an exhibition, whether anyone would even care to see such a thing,  I'll donate my vox pop right now: Rather than waste a minute gazing upon the Simpson suit, I'd sooner spend all day visiting an exhibit on the history of the ZIP Code. Even if it didn't have a gift shop. 

-- Patt Morrison

Predictably, the first reader comment on Times staff writer Ari B. Bloomkatz's story today on Chief Charlie Beck's vow to make bike safety a priority for the LAPD notes that cyclists frequently flout the law themselves. Here's the comment, in original spelling, grammar and capitalization:

As a bike/bus commuter myself, this oft-expressed sentiment, a total non-sequitur, infuriates me. Yes, cyclists sometimes do blow through stop signs as if they were riding on a bike path, and I cringe every time I watch a helmet-free rider plow through a red light straight into a busy intersection. Why? Safety concerns aside, the widespread perception that we're a lawless bunch has been used by a few vigilante motorists as an excuse to act aggressively toward me (and I do obey stop signs and red lights, per California Vehicle Code Sections 21200 and 21202).

Which brings me to my point: The widely held view of cyclists' incivility justifies neither the life-threatening rage we sometimes receive from motorists who think we have no right to the road nor the indifference some of us receive from police. None of this is to say that the vast majority of motorists don't treat cyclists with respect. And the same holds true for cyclists: Nearly all of us, for the most part, obey the law in the interest of our own safety. The obvious difference is that the occasional scofflaw bike rider usually results in a brief moment of inconvenience for drivers, whereas the occasional aggressive motorist can mean serious injury -- or worse -- for us.

(And on a side note: Thanks, Charlie Beck.)

-- Paul Thornton

Photo: A cyclist travels on Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley in 2003. Credit: Carlos Chaves / Los Angeles Times

Linda Greenhouse, the former Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, has an interesting column linking the Tea Party movement and populism in general to public disapproval of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That's the ruling in which the court said that corporations have the right to endorse political candidates.

Greenhouse writes: "I’ve been traveling a good deal during the past month, and everywhere I’ve gone, people have expressed shock that the Supreme Court could have deemed corporations to be 'persons,' entitled along with the rest of us to the First Amendment right to free speech. Yet the concept of corporate personhood for certain constitutional purposes is not an invention of the Roberts court; it dates to the 19th century. And the Supreme Court has been giving increasingly robust protection to the rights of corporate and other commercial speakers for decades. Seen in this light, Citizens United . . . was not so much a sharp break with the past as the culmination of long-running trends.

"No matter. The decision, its visibility enhanced by President Obama’s public rebuke of the court during the State of the Union speech last month, is obviously serving as a wake-up call, prompting many people to pay attention for the first time to those very trends. Clearly, they don’t like what they see."

I agree, but there is a contradiction I haven't seen anyone remark on. The "corporations aren't persons" argument is in tension with the view (held by some of the same people, I'll wager) that corporations should be "good citizens," by paying a living wage and getting behind worthy public initiatives, from the Boy Scouts to education reform to any of a zillion good deeds companies feel obliged to support in their home communities. Even those avatars of corporate greed, banks, set up philanthropic foundations.

Question for the populists: Can you call on corporations to be "good citizens" and then say they shouldn't exercise a prerogative of citizenship: commenting on issues and candidates?

--Michael McGough

 

What is it with the glut of thinly vetted Bible-thumping beauty queens? We're all familiar with Carrie Prejean (who, if you'll remember, was found to have been videotaped in some pre-"opposite marriage" sexual acts) and Sarah Palin. And now, seemingly out of nowhere, we have the self-styled Miss Beverly Hills,  Lauren Ashley, whose views on homosexuality extend far beyond the relatively narrow realm of state-recognized matrimony:

Beyond the entertaining sideshow ensuing over the legitimacy of Ashley's Miss Beverly Hills tiara, one issue worth addressing is how this woman's flat-Earth views on gay marriage became newsworthy at all. The Fox News story said Ashley was "speaking out" against gay marriage -- but to whom? Only to this reporter? I'd go so far as to say that the story seems designed to lure people into blasting Ashley, feeding the conservative meme of angry gay activists pouncing on innocent souls who dare express their religious convictions.

That, or Ashley -- having witnessed Prejean and Palin ride their infamy on the left to book deals -- made a shrewd business calculation. At least she can't claim her views on gay marriage mirror President Obama's.

-- Paul Thornton

Google has experienced a rough few weeks overseas lately. If you'll recall, the Internet search giant threatened last month to pull out of China entirely after discovering that hackers had breached the the Gmail accounts of several human-rights activists, and the European Commission announced Tuesday it was probing Google for potential antitrust violations.

Comes now more bad -- err, bizarre -- Google-related news from across the pond: An Italian court convicted three of the company's top executives for violating the privacy rights of a boy with Down Syndrome whose bullying session at the hands of a few depraved youngsters had been posted on YouTube. Understandably, the decision has generated a considerable amount of negative reaction from the online tech commentariat. Here's more.

Google noted in a blog post that it did all the things that ordinarily would be expected of a Web hosting company under the circumstances. It removed the video “within hours of being notified by the Italian police.” And it worked with the police in Turin to identify the female student who posted it; she was eventually prosecuted and sentenced to perform 10 months of community service.

But prosecutors weren’t satisfied, so they went after Google. Under that same logic, they could just as easily have hauled into court the company that made the mobile phone that took the video. It’s a “devil made me do it” way of viewing the case, rather than one grounded in what actually happened. Sadly, the same attitude informs many of the legal battles involving content online. Copyright holders sue file-sharing networks and search engines, arguing that because a tool can be used to infringe, its makers must be held responsible when infringements happen. People who are insulted on an online forum sue the company that provides the virtual meeting space. In the U.S., courts have largely resisted holding the intermediaries liable unless they promoted the bad actions or ignored the complaints of injured parties. But that legal regime is under constant attack from those who’d rather attack a big, easy target than the people actually responsible.

The Times will weigh in on the Google verdict on tomorrow's editorial page. In the meantime, tell us what you think about the central question of the case -- whether companies should bear primary responsibility for the content users post on their Web sites -- by taking our poll, leaving a comment or doing both.

-- Jon Healey and Paul Thornton

Photo credit: Ryan Anson / Bloomberg

With no input from Sarah Palin (as far as we know), the American Psychiatric Assn., in its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has replaced the term "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability." Whether this will stop schoolyard taunts of “retard” is another matter.

Speaking of schoolyard taunts, the draft manual employs new terminology for another condition that gives rise to childhood teasing. What used to be called childhood “gender identity disorder” is now also referred to as “gender incongruence.” The definition of this syndrome is “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender." Indicators include “a strong preference for the toys, games, or activities typical of the other gender.” In popular parlance, a boy who prefers fashion to football is called "sissy," a taunt that's a lot older than "retard."

When doing research on a book about the culture wars (including skirmishes over sexuality), I discovered that childhood Gender Identity Disorder is controversial to the point that some activists want it removed from the manual. One argument is particularly interesting: If the APA has deleted homosexuality from its manual of disorders – which  it did in 1973 – it’s inconsistent to retain childhood GID. Why? Because research suggests that most “feminine” boys grow up to be  gay, not transsexual.

A broad generalization? Obviously (and the fact that most feminine boys grow up to be gay doesn't mean that most gays were feminine boys). But this connection informs a program at a Washington, D.C., children’s hospital that helps parents accept  their “gender-variant” kids. A brochure for the program advises parents that although most of these boys will be gay, many will “grow up to be masculine and conventional in their appearance.” Meanwhile, the program counsels parents to question “traditional assumptions about social gender roles and sexual orientation.” “The more that society and their peers may be critical of [these children],” it says, “the more important it is for them to have the support and acceptance of their families.”
 
The question is whether programs like this – or kinder, gentler medical manuals – will prevent other kids from tormenting outcasts with words like “sissy" or  “retard” -- or "fatso," for that matter. Children, unfortunately, are crueler than either parents or psychiatrists.

--Michael McGough

One of the most famous -- and most controversial -- lines in a U.S. Supreme Court opinion comes from a 1969 case in which the justices upheld the right of  students to express political opinions at a public school. The money quote from the decision, which involved kids who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, goes like this: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

The notion that schoolchildren have constitutional rights doesn't sit well with everyone. In a 2007 case, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that society should return to the practice in Colonial days when  public schools "were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas." But even Thomas might have trouble with the alleged practice of a Pennsylvania public school of using webcams on laptop computers to spy on students in their homes.

The family of 15-year-old sophomore Blake Robbins has filed a lawsuit against the Lower Merion School District. The Robbinses claim that a school employee accused Blake of "improper behavior in his home," based on a photo from the laptop issued by the school. The school replies that  the cameras are used only to locate lost or stolen laptops. Time, and perhaps a judge, will decide who's telling the truth, but the Robbinses' allegation makes for (as journalists like to say) a chilling scenario.

Whether or not a student's constitutional rights stop at the schoolhouse gate, they certainly don't stop at his own front door.

--Michael McGough

Even in obituaries, Alexander M. Haig got grief for saying, “As of now, I am in control” after the attempted assassination in 1981 of President Reagan (pending the return to Washington of the vice president).

If that didn’t show Haig to be a megalomaniac, as so goes the conventional wisdom, it showed that he was a legal illiterate. Haig prefaced his supposed power grab with this misstatement of the law: “Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of State in that order.”

Well, a federal statute -- not the Constitution -- did provide for that line of succession from 1886 to 1947. But at the time Haig spoke, the line of succession was vice president, speaker of the House and president pro tem of the Senate.

This means that if President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were to die simultaneously, the president would be a former Ku Klux Klansman, West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd.

At the time Haig spoke, the president pro tem was South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, once a fierce segregationist.

Haig may have been wrong on the facts, but he was right about what should have been.

-- Michael McGough

Comedian Kevin Hart was probably upset about not being invited to the UCSD-area Compton Cookout, where white college kids apparently had a ball acting out their ghetto fantasies. So Hart, who has had roles in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and other stuff, decided to Twitter a little self-hatred Thursday and aimed his “humor” at dark-skinned black women.

Here’s his wit:

Dark skinned women take a punch @ da face better than light-skinned women…u soft as yellow bitches…lol

And:

#handsdown Light-skinned women usually have better credit than a dark-skinned women…Broke ass dark hoes….lol

The man is taking a bashing on websites that write about black news and events, and it’s possible these gems may not have crossed over into mainstream blogs or news media. I don’t mind bringing them to you.

Hart, who himself is quite dark and has talked of his happy marriage to a woman who certainly is not light- skinned, is flabbergasted at the backlash and crying foul -- he’s just a comedian! It’s all in fun!

But I bet that’s just what the frat kids at UCSD are saying too. We were just joking, people, lighten up.

Because this is still Black History Month, I’ll include a bit of background on the beating stereotype. Because Hart is reaching waaaaaaaaay back, back to the turn of the 20th century. Author Zora Neale Hurston captured this traumatic, distorting longing for light skin (and the privileges that come with it)  with style, wit and realism in her 1937 classic, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Here is a man talking to the husband of her main character, light-skinned Janie, after he beat her.

“Tea Cake, you sho is a lucky man. …Uh person can see every place you hit her. Ah bet she never raised her hand tu hit yuh back, neither. Take some uh dese ol’ rusty black women and dey would fight yuh all night long and next day nobody couldn’t tell you ever hit ‘em. Dat’s de reason Ah done quit beatin’ my woman.”

At the time, black male critics hated the book, saying Hurston was creating “pseudo primitives” for people to gawk at. She had had the audacity to write about black attitudes and black life in the South, leaving discrimination implied but not addressed head on, rather than the hell white people were giving them.

Hurston’s book was a love letter to a traumatized people. Her words about the beating are, yes, funny. But they’re also pathetic and tender and reveal a level of scarring and dysfunction that has taken generations (and a few James Brown songs) to combat. And if Hart doesn’t understand why he’s getting lots of criticism, it’s because that stupid little acronym so popular with Twitterers -- LOL -- doesn’t fool anyone. It isn’t really love at all.

Photo: Kevin Hart appearing at the South Beach Comedy Festival in Florida in January. Credit: Mitchell Zachs / Acsoociated Press/South Beach Comedy Festival

-- Lisa Richardson

Was Joseph Andrew Stack, who is presumed dead after flying a small plane into an Austin, Texas, office building today that housed Internal Revenue Service workers, a terrorist?

Stack, who left behind a Web manifesto expressing his rage at the IRS, government officials, insurance industry executives and a host of other villains, chose a final act that was undoubtedly calculated for maximum shock value: Flying a plane into a government building, in the aftermath of 9/11, is a pretty unmistakable symbolic statement. But what was he trying to say?

Webster's defines terrorism as "the act of terrorizing; use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy." A simpler definition is the use of violence to advance a political cause. Stack, one could argue, wasn't a terrorist, because his cause appears to have been personal rather than political. His Web rant never fully explains his beef with the IRS, but it's clear that he was a very angry man who felt he had been screwed by the powers that be and aimed to retaliate.

Yet it's also striking how much his rhetoric resembles that of a very powerful political movement in the United States: the "tea party" crew. He portrays himself as a hardworking engineer beaten down by an overreaching government "full of hypocrites from top to bottom." He's mad at the government's failure to follow the principles of the Founding Fathers, at the federal stimulus that bailed out rich bankers but not the likes of him, and at the failure of politicians to represent his views. The one discordant note from what otherwise sounds like a symphony of Palinism is his complaint about the healthcare system; unlike movement conservatives, he appears to be angry about the failure of reform.

But to the question of whether this can be considered a terrorist manifesto, these passages seem particularly relevant:

"I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I've had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn't limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change... I can only hope that the numbers get too big to be whitewashed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less."

Can anybody doubt, on reading these words, that Stack intended to use violence to advance a political cause, or that he hoped to inspire others by example?

-- Dan Turner

I'm hooked.

It's hard not to be riveted by this account of senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mabhouh's killing in Dubai: Alleged Israeli Mossad agents, donning disguises and using forged passports, slip into a Mideast emirate, methodically stalk their target before quietly killing him in his own hotel room, and escape to safety before the victim's body is even found. Israel reportedly believed Mabhouh traveled to Dubai to broker an arms deal between Hamas and Iran (there's also the intriguing theory that intra-Palestinian rivalry led to the killing). Had Tom Clancy penned an account of the assassination, no one would've believed him.

Though the story provides a thrilling read, it's mostly a sideshow to the unfolding diplomatic drama between Dubai, Israel and the European countries (Britain most notably) whose passports were used fraudulently by the assassins. Also in play are the Israelis whose identities were stolen -- and, consequently, whose lives were endangered -- for the forged passports. There's also a far more fundamental question: Is it OK for a country to carry out extrajudicial killings in the name of state security? It's a question that may be taken up on our Op-Ed pages in the coming days, so in the meantime I'll ask you for your thoughts. Take our poll, leave a comment or do both.

-- Paul Thornton

Hamas militants stand in front of a photograph of late senior Hamas military commander Mahmoud Mabhouh during a Feb. 17 rally in the Gaza Strip denouncing his killing. Credit: Ali Ali / EPA

I feel a little sorry for the UC San Diego frat boys who last weekend thought it would be funny to throw a little bash they dubbed the "Compton Cookout." Apparently, members of Pi Kappa Alpha corralled a couple of hundred socially tone-deaf friends to celebrate Black History Month by pantomiming ghetto life and the black underclass. Now they're taking a drubbing on television, in newspapers and, of course, in the blogosphere. Poor things. Their beer-addled brains probably don't even know what all the fuss is about.

Here's the dress code for the party, according to the invite:

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes - they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red.

They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as "constipulated", or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as "hmmg!", or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces.

The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these "respectable" qualities throughout the day.

This whole incident might have fallen into the category of frat boys behaving like frat boys if they hadn't made one teensy mistake: posting the event on Facebook. The organizers probably didn't envision the details of their gig ever reaching civil rights groups, the Los Angeles Urban League, Craigslist and even Essence Magazine, which posted an item on its website. The organizer has taken down his profile page, but it's cached. In 5 minutes you can tell not only what his hobbies are (golf) but also where he's from.

Meanwhile, UCSD is scrambling to distance itself from the party, reminding everyone that it was not sanctioned by the university, whose principles "reject acts of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion and political beliefs," height, weight, hair length, food preferences and musical taste.

But it's got to be a drag to be a student there if you're not part of the 98% nonblack population. Personally, I think that 2% needs to transfer the hell out of there immediately. Take my advice, kids, find a school where your classmates aren't prancing around in black-face and asking you dumb questions like whether your skin tans. They're out there.

-- Lisa Richardson

My old newspaper the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette relates that a priest at the memorial for porkmeister Rep. John Murtha committed an act of drollery:

Father William George, a Jesuit priest and president of Georgetown Preparatory School, read from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the portion about how for everything there is a season and time.

"The writer of Ecclesiastes could also have written 'a time to make law and a time to change laws,' "                         Father George said, adding, wryly, "and, yes, a time to earmark."

The good father's affection for Murtha obviously was sincere, because Murtha won't be sending Georgetown Prep any grants.

-- Michael McGough

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10047/1036227-100.stm#ixzz0fk3NEJh5

A few liberal legal scholars have flagged Dick Cheney's remarks on waterboarding during his Sunday morning back-and-forth with Vice President Joe Biden -- the subject of a Times editorial Tuesday -- and raised an interesting point: Should the ex-veep's open embrace of the Bush administration's use of what many consider torture draw the attention of Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.?

Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine writes:


Jonathan Turley, a contributor to our Op-Ed pages, argues that Cheney's "astonishing" remarks stem from the promise President Obama and Holder reportedly made not to prosecute outgoing Bush administration officials. He writes:

That Cheney open declared his support for waterboarding may indeed be an astonishing admission for legal reasons, but it comes across as merely confirming what we already knew about our chest-thumping ex-veep. What's especially interesting to me is the following quote, in which Cheney seems to invite Holder's scrutiny by sticking his neck out for the CIA interrogators the Department of Justice is investigating for possibly going beyond the limits (or, you might say, lack thereof) set by the Bush administration (the emphasis is mine):

As for the entire Biden-Cheney Sunday smackdown, The Times' editorial board dubbed Biden the winner, though it expressed some distress over the vice president's indication that the administration may reconsider its decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists in a federal court instead of a military commission (click here for The Times' news story on the interviews). What do you think? Take our poll, leave a comment or do both.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: Susan Walsh / Associated Press

They're not going to admit it, but a lot of fat people probably smiled at some of the news coverage of Bill Clinton's cardiac emergency last week. Commentator after commentator pointed out that the 42nd president, a former fat kid who once compared himself to Baby Huey, had cleaned up his act. He was eating sensibly and working out, not to mention running around Haiti. And still he had to have stents implanted to unblock a clogged artery!

I had to suppress a bit of that reaction myself, having complained in a column a few years ago that Clinton seemed to have internalized the mockery he endured as a fat kid. Also, former fatties, like reformed alcoholics, can be a pain.

Of course, the fact that Clinton needed heart surgery no more proves that obesity is harmless than the snowfall in Washington proved that global warming is a myth. But there is a serious point to be made about the dangers of the national fixation on the childhood obesity "epidemic."

In my earlier piece, I wrote: "Yes, childhood obesity is correlated with health problems, including high blood pressure and diabetes. But the psychological pain experienced by overweight kids is arguably just as harmful, and the national campaign against childhood obesity runs the risk of legitimizing that pain, without any guarantee that fat kids will be scared skinny. When Clinton and I were boys, fat-bashers on the playground had no excuse. Today they can claim to be striking a blow for the national welfare." (It isn't just politicians who pick on fat kids. So do the media.)

The same point has been made by Paul Campos, the contrarian author of "The Obesity Myth," who has lashed out at First Lady Michelle Obama, Clinton's successor as national obesity scold. I'm not persuaded by Campos' pooh-poohing of the obesity problem ("American children, like American adults, are both bigger and healthier now than they were a generation ago"). But he's surely correct when he writes: "I don't believe Michelle Obama wants to stigmatize fat kids, but a campaign dedicated to eliminating them is guaranteed to do so in a profound way."

As for Clinton: Get well, Mr. President. But Bubba, don't preach.

-- Michael McGough

The Washington Times on Friday has an interesting story about the Obama administration's assiduous avoidance of the terms "Islam," "Islamic" and "Islamist" in two studies of the threat  from terrorists. I know: Consider the source. Conservatives have been railing forever about President Obama's aversion to calling a Muslim a Muslim in discussions of the war on terror. But it's still a fascinating factoid.

I think terms like "Islamofascism" are ahistorical as well as inflammatory. All analogies limp, including the comparison George W. Bush tried to draw between Osama bin Laden and Hitler. It's also true that we are not at war against Islam and that the omission of "Islamic" from official descriptions of terrorist isn't at all misleading. We know who's being talked about, and they aren't Catholics or Scientologists.

Moreover, there is danger of giving aid and comfort to patriotic Americans like the evangelist Franklin Graham, who once said:   "The God of Islam is not the same God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and a very wicked religion." (He later "clarified" his position in a statement that suggested that some of his best friends were Muslims!)

Still,  there ought to a way to acknowledge that the fundamentalism that drives the terrorists we're most afraid of is Islamic fundamentalism -- without encouraging the notion that Islam is the enemy or that most Muslims are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. If nothing else, it would silence conservatives who insist that Obama is clueless about the war on terror.

--Michael McGough

This newspaper, along with much of the mainstream media, has been hammered for ignoring the National Enquirer's reporting about an affair liberal Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was allegedly having during the campaign with his videographer. Those allegations proved to be true, and Edwards' political career is now a historical footnote, which should make his personal life a nonissue, right?

Or not. Thursday, The Times' website is carrying a story (and a video!) from its corporate sibling, KTLA, reporting on the Enquirer's latest Edwards scoop. "If you're into scandals, former Sen. John Edwards is the gift that keeps on giving," KTLA's Victoria Recaño says as she introduces the video piece. The station's reporter, Cher Calvin, then is shown interviewing ... not Edwards or anyone else involved in the scoop but the Enquirer scribe who wrote it (who goes on to speculate about the cost of Edwards' divorce and the outcome of a federal investigation into whether Edwards used campaign funds improperly). So, I guess that means the Enquirer is a reliable source now, huh?

Wild speculation, however, isn't solely the province of supermarket tabloids and the media outlets who quote them. Witness the initial report on ABCNews.com by Emily Friedman about former President Clinton's hospitalization. ABC may have broken the story about Clinton being rushed to the hospital with chest pains; if it did, my hat's off to them. But there's no excuse for Friedman including this statement in one of her first dispatches:

Sources on Capital (sic) Hill tell ABC News that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seen leaving the Oval Office a short time ago and did not seem "too concerned" or "in a rush."

Make that, unidentified sources with mind-reading capabilities. I won't even pretend to know what Friedman was trying to get across, but there are at least two equally valid ways to read that sentence: The former president's medical problems weren't life-threatening, or his wife couldn't care less what happens to him. As it happened, Clinton underwent surgery to prop open a coronary artery, which seems like a pretty serious procedure. And the secretary of State may not, in fact, have been blithely unconcerned about her notoriously unfaithful husband's condition. Here's what Friedman wrote in a later version of the story:

Sources on Capitol Hill tell ABC News that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seen leaving the Oval Office around the same time that Clinton had been hospitalized. Sources told ABC News that Secretary Clinton was "very concerned when told about the President, given his heart history" and that it made everyone "very nervous."

The ABC News website offered no explanation for or acknowledgment of the change in its reporting. Here's a link to the story, in case you'd like to see the latest insight from ABC News about Hillary Clinton's frame of mind.

Top photo of Elizabeth and John Edwards: AP Photo / Michael Dwyer. Bottom photo of Hillary and Bill Clinton: EPA / Andrew Theodorakis / Pool

-- Jon Healey

Jack Valenti, the longtime MPAA chief executive who died in 2007, was fond of telling scary stories to policymakers. Not campfire tales but dystopian visions of a piracy-riddled future. A favorite target of his was Internet2, a considerably faster version of the Net that a consortium of universities is using to develop new networking applications. In one experiment, Valenti told a Senate committee in 2003, more than a DVD's worth of data was transmitted halfway around the world via Internet2 in less than a minute. "What is experiment today will be commonplace in the community three to four years from now. Which means that the glorious enticement of free and easy uploading and downloading movies, with little risk, will be far more intense than it is now," Valenti intoned.

His timetable was off, but at least part of his prediction is finally coming true. Google announced plans Wednesday to deploy an ultra-high-speed Internet access service to as many as half a million people. Many details, including where and when, remain to be determined. But the speed has already been set: 1 Gbps, or 200 times as fast as my current AT&T DSL line. In fact, Google's service would reportedly be more than 20 times as fast as the speediest broadband service available in the U.S. today.

Alas, Google is building the network mainly as a science project, and it may be limited to just one community. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the MPAA's interim chief executive, Bob Pisano, pointing to the Google service as the new boogeyman. At that speed, Google estimated, users will be able to download a high-definition movie in "less than five minutes." But such a breakthrough in bandwidth, if spread throughout the U.S., would also present tremendous opportunities for legitimate online movie businesses.

The potential benefits go well beyond a vast improvement in picture quality for streaming video and the virtual elimination of waiting time for downloads. They also include a cheaper distribution pipeline for content, which would be a boon to independent studios and filmmakers, and enough capacity to stream exotic and immersive sorts of content, such as 3D video or material that relies on multiple, simultaneous high-definition feeds.

It's hard to predict the new services and forms of entertainment that would emerge from such a huge leap in bandwidth. The one certainty, though, is that tech companies and venture capitalists will climb over themselves developing businesses and products that can exploit it. And many of those entrepreneurs will be begging the studios to partner with them in new efforts to make money off of movies online. 

So the entertainment industry can stick with Valenti's fearful view of the future, or it can seize Google's experiment as a chance to test new ways to delight consumers and compete with online bootleggers. Yes, higher speeds can make life easier for illegal downloaders. But they can also help legitimate operators offer more experiences that pirates can't match.

Photo: Former MPAA chief Jack Valenti testifying on Capitol Hill in 2005. Credit: Reuters / Jonathan Ernst

-- Jon Healey