By complaining that state and federal tax hikes are forcing him to make "drastic changes," Phil Mickelson quickly became the poster boy for conservatives and liberals alike. The former said Mickelson epitomizes what happens when lawmakers try to fix their budget problems by soaking the rich. The latter said Mickelson should stop whining and hire a better accountant.

I'm with Deadspin on this issue -- it's hard to imagine someone having trouble adjusting to $24 million in after-tax income.

But regardless of how you feel about "Lefty" (who sounded more like a Righty on this issue), he showed good form (pardon the pun) when he apologized Monday for airing his financial complaints in public. He didn't pretend he was misquoted or misunderstood; he simply said these issues were personal matters and should stay that way.

I also think there are a few lessons to be drawn from this -- some for liberals, some for conservatives. For the former, Mickelson's comments are a reminder that changes in...

The observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, overshadowed somewhat by President Obama’s inauguration, inspired more than a few writers to complain about the “sanitization” of King’s message. The complaint has some validity: King wasn’t just an opponent of segregated public accommodations and Jim Crow laws; he also preached arguably radical ideas about economic equality, and he opposed the war in Vietnam. He was in Memphis, the site of his assassination, to show solidarity with striking sanitation workers.

In a sermon Monday at Boston’s 43rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast, the Rev. Jonathan Walton, minister at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, said that 1965 was the year in which King pivoted from the civil rights campaign for which he is remembered “to human rights, to economic justice” and to promoting peace in Vietnam. “It’s easier to celebrate a dead icon,” Walton said, “than...

I had to look twice at the date on the newspaper to make sure I wasn’t having a time-warp moment.

I’d heard this before. In a way, I’d covered this before.

My colleagues Ashley Powers, Victoria Kim and Harriet Ryan have dropped a doozy on Southern California with their story of memos recounting how, a decade and a half before the scandal emerged about Roman Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of young people, future Cardinal Roger Mahony and an advisor planned to hide these molestations from law enforcement, going so far as to move the suspect priests out of California.

In a word, a cover-up.

But long before those memos that The Times found about concealing priests’ misconduct, the church apparently was doing the same thing in the face of a lawsuit by a young woman named Rita Milla. I wrote the stories about her suit against seven Filipino priests working here, and the archdiocese, for $21 million in 1984. Her suit said that:

• For four years, beginning when she...

About a dozen readers have sent their reactions to The Times' front-page story Tuesday reporting that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 to 2011, plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement. While several of the letters raise legal questions for Mahony, many also call out the former archbishop for his moral failure to protect children. Others blame Roman Catholic Church policy for setting the conditions that led to child sex abuse.

Here is a selection of those letters, some of which may be printed later this week on The Times' letters page. Check latimes.com/letters this week for more reader reaction.

Melonie Magruder of North Hollywood says Mahony acted as if protecting the church was more important that protecting children:

"Mahony's claim that clergy weren't 'legally required to report suspected child abuse until 1997,' and, therefore, he was absolved from responsibility to do so, is staggeringly self-serving. It's as if he's...

Is Joe Biden married to a physician? You might have gotten that impression while watching television coverage of the inauguration. “Dr.” Jill Biden’s doctorate is in education, yet word obviously has been sent out from the White House that she should be accorded the honorific that appears on her White House biography.

The vice president’s wife thus joins  the select group of non-medicos  who are routinely referred to as “Dr.” in much the way that the late singer was denoted “Miss Peggy Lee.” That select company also includes "Dr. Cornell West" (PhD from Princeton) and "Dr. Maya Angelou" (the recipient of a zillion honorary degrees).

Whether to refer to holders of non-medical doctorates as  “Dr.” long has  bedeviled news organizations. Henry Kissinger and former ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick sometimes got the honorific treatment, but not the late Sen. George McGovern, who held a PhD in history.

The New York Times,...

That’s about 40 down and about 37 to go. Candidates, that is -- candidates for city, school board and community college offices in the March 3 Los Angeles election.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board this week hit about the halfway mark in interviewing candidates who are seeking its endorsement. Time is tight. With the November election right behind us, we began interviewing candidates in December, gave ourselves a three-day break after New Year's Day, and then picked up the pace. One mayoral candidate didn't get back to us until last week but, except for him, we've been through that race,  as well as those for city attorney, controller and about half the City Council seats.

This week we're meeting and vetting the 12 candidates for the 13th Council District; then it's the 9th District, and then the school and college board seats.

VIDEO: Interviews with L.A.'s mayoral candidates

Board members are doing some deliberating along the way, but we haven't yet made our decisions. That...

In my zeal Friday to praise House Republicans for dropping their self-destructive stance against raising the debt limit, I neglected to point out that they couldn't bring themselves to do so without picking a new fight with Democrats.

It's as if the House GOP can't stop itself from tilting at windmills.

Republican leaders announced Friday that their membership had agreed to support a three-month suspension of the debt limit, effectively shifting their fight for deeper spending cuts off the debt-limit bill to either (or both) of two looming spending bills: one to adjust more than $100 billion in across-the-board spending cuts due to take effect March 1, and another to provide funding for the federal government after its temporary appropriations run out March 27.

It was a savvy move. Because it doesn't actually raise the debt limit, the GOP can continue to threaten to block future increases unless Democrats agree to deep spending cuts. More important, it shifts the fight from the debt...

In the weeks after President Jimmy Carter lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, when I was a young reporter at the Washington Post, I was assigned to cover a luncheon on Capitol Hill honoring Patricia Derian, Carter’s assistant secretary of State for human rights. Reagan’s inauguration was days away, and Derian was facing a room full of dejected Democrats and longtime human rights activists. Some were nearly in tears. And since Derian was relinquishing her post, she had every reason to be the most bummed in the room.

Certainly she spoke gloomily about what the incoming administration might do to human rights policies. (I recall she used the word “dismantle” at one point.) Then suddenly her voice became calm, almost reverent, as she counseled her audience -- most of whom had more than a passing acquaintance with oppressive and violent regimes -- to marvel at something: the orderly transition of power in the United States. There would be no coup, no military...

It's possible to see President Obama as a flip-flopper on this issue: In a New York Times story about how his first term has changed both him and his family, it's revealed that after initially saying that he wasn't interested in a presidential library, which he viewed as "a tribute to himself costing hundreds of millions of dollars," Obama has changed his mind.

Maybe this is a sign of a president who is more conventional, more establishment and possibly more comfortable with the perks and honors of the job. No matter; he has come around to the right way of thinking about this. Regardless of how you view Democrats in general or Obama in particular, his historic standing as the first African American president of the United States requires a library devoted to serious study of his time and legacy.

Besides, these are interesting times. And as the waters rise around their feet, future historians will try to understand how the nation could have done so little listening, so late, to the...

If President Obama had been casting about through American history for the ideal poet to deliver his inaugural "Song of Ourselves," he could do no worse at this juncture than Walt Whitman. The booming American icon didn't just have a gift for ferreting out the things that make all Americans, indeed all humans, the same regardless of accidents of birth or upbringing -- he had a way of inspiring people to be better than they think they are, to see the puny nature of our differences and work together to appreciate the wonders of democracy. Anybody who's been paying attention to Congress knows we could use a little of that right now. Plus -- and this is icing on the cake from a political standpoint -- he was probably gay.

There's just one problem for Obama: Whitman is dead. But the president seems to have found the next best thing -- in fact, with a bonus.

Richard Bianco, a 44-year-old Cuban American, is not only openly gay but Latino, two groups Obama's Democrats aim to court as their...

They had a nice little Inauguration Day on Monday in Washington. A bit nippy -- mid-20s to mid-40s -- but no Arctic blast of cold air or snow.

That really nasty stuff is expected Tuesday.

And that’s why it’s time to move this whole inauguration deal someplace else; someplace that has great winter weather.

FULL COVERAGE: 57th presidential inauguration

Los Angeles.

Every four years it’s the same in D.C.: They roll the weather dice. Some years, like this one, they win. And sometimes -- as in JFK’s bitterly cold and snowy inaugural in 1961, and Ronald Reagan’s historically cold day in 1985 -- they lose. (Heck, there’s even the oft-told tale of the snowstorm and cold on William Henry Harrison’s inaugural on March 4, 1841. Supposedly, he refused to move the ceremony indoors, and then he delivered a nearly two-hour speech. Shortly afterward he caught cold, then pneumonia. He died on April 4, 1841.)

Enough of this nonsense. A warm, sunny -- and vastly...