I thoroughly agreed with Newman at the time -- that much of L.A. is ugly -- and I still do. But having actually signed up for the 2010 L.A. Marathon, my thoughts on the "stadium to the sea" route are mixed; perhaps bipolar would be a better way to put it. As a first-time marathoner, I look forward to the beach finish providing a major psychological boost to those of us pounding our feet on pavement for 26.2 miles. But putting on my lifelong Southern Californian hat -- which comes with a deep "warts and all" affection for Los Angeles -- the new route strikes me as ... just not right.

Despite its Hollywood-inspired reputation, Los Angeles has always struck me as a city unafraid to put its gritty face forward. Past marathon routes -- which started and ended in downtown L.A. -- reflected this attitude. Sure, runners would bisect tonier neighborhoods such as Hancock Park and Larchmont Village. But this is L.A., a city whose wealthy enclaves are often adjacent to or surrounded by working-class neighborhoods. Running in Hancock Park and Larchmont Village practically requires passing through Koreatown or the yet-to-be gentrified areas of Hollywood.

Looking at the route closely, and how magnetically it seems to abut the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains for much of the race, it's hard not to come away with the impression that race organizers deliberately avoided areas some may not consider "nice" (Rodeo Drive -- really?). You can call this the Los Angeles Marathon if you want, and come race day, I'll gladly run. But I won't be surprised if, for much of the race, some Southern Californians viewing the event from home on March 21 wonder what marathon they're watching.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo: The start line at the 24th annual Los Angeles Marathon on May 25, 2009. Credit: Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times.

Below is a Times editorial published on Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the East German politburo lifted emigration restrictions on its own citizens and precipitated the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Though The Times relishes the excitement of the moment, the editorial steers clear of any prognostication about the future of communism in Eastern Europe (much less the Soviet Union, which would cease to exist two years later) and devotes much of its ink to analyzing the realpolitik behind East Germany's actions.

-- Paul Thornton

The full editorial:

Below are audio clips of the session; I've included notable quotes by Beck on each topic. Segments two through eight begin, in order, with questions posed by Times staff members Jim Newton, Patt Morrison, Nick Goldberg, Marjorie Miller, Joel Rubin, David Lauter, Eddy Hartenstein and Newton. The first clip doesn't begin with a question.

LAPD reform, from the ground up

Federal consent decree

"All of the issues that the consent decree was created to address, I agree with, and those will continue. Now, some of the mechanics have become ill-suited because either we've reached universal compliance on them, but that doesn't necessarily declare victory on the issue. There are other ways to do this monitoring that is smart."

Transparency in police oversight

"My core belief is that when you become a police officer -- and you're entrusted with life, liberty and life and death of people in the community -- that you give up some right to anonymity that most other people enjoy. Unfortunately, state law doesn't agree with me on that."

Relationship with the Police Protective League

"I think the union is a huge ally. I think that a manager that ignores the authority and power of a union, such as some of ours have done in the past, ignores a huge opportunity to mold his workforce. So the union is very important. Do I think we're going to agree on all issues? No."

Immigration and drug enforcement

"I believe in Special Order 40. I believe in not just the words on paper, but the spirit of Special Order 40. I think that especially in Los Angeles, that we have to represent everybody, that everybody has the right to quality police service, regardless of status. I don't think that we should be an arm of the federal government in enforcing immigration laws specifically. However, if we make a legal arrest on another charge, and a criminal is monitored by Immigration, then they should have access to him."

LAPD size

"At 10,000 [officers], we can start to address core issues, because you are able to provide that basic level of service and add on the problem-solving piece. So I think that size that we're at right now should be looked at as a floor, the basement."

Beck's leadership team

"The team that got us here in the first place is still here. Nobody is being thrown out; nobody has told me that they're leaving. I intend to use the players that we have."

Work outside Los Angeles

"I'm going to go out a lot more than I would have if Bill Bratton had never been here, but I certainly won't travel as much as he did. This is my home, this is where my family is, this is where all my avocations are, all the things I like to do, so I'm going to be -- I'm a local boy, always have been. So that's the way I'll be as a chief."

Lessons learned from predecessors

-- Paul Thornton

*Update: The Times' editorial on transparency in the LAPD is now online; click here to read it.

*Update 2: A retired LAPD captain kindly wrote to inform me that my previous summary of Special Order 40 -- "the department mandate that prevents officers from obtaining the immigration status of detained suspects" -- was incorrect.

Photo: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAPD Chief-designate Charlie Beck. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

"Extraordinary rendition" is just a dressed-up word for kidnapping in the editorial board's eyes, and it praises Italy for recognizing that fact, if mainly symbolically, by convicting 23 Americans and two Italians in absentia for grabbing an Egyptian cleric in Milan six years ago.

On the other side of the fold, the author of a book on the Cold War argues that former President  Reagan's seemingly bold words to Mikhail S. Gorbachev --"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." -- were for the most part a cover intended to build popular support for the president while he worked on effective diplomatic relations with the then-Soviet president.

And writer Joe Mathews raises his hand for the job of lieutenant governor. It's not that he has ambitions to run anything, he says, and that's exactly what qualifies him for the job. Meanwhile, think of all the spare time he'd have for blogging.

-- Karin Klein

Photo: People stroll by the giant dominoes set up at the site of the Berlin Wall, part of a gala celebration of its toppling. Credit: Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

I thought comedy and fashion would do that for me. So I skipped over to ''Project Runway,'' now with extra added fun in the sighting of L.A. landmarks, inasmuch as this season was shot here.

Lo and behold, there on the Lifetime channel was one landmark I didn't expect to see. Beaming bright in the sunshine, on a hillside above the 405 freeway -- yes, that was indeed the Getty Center, But it was also Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, immaculately suited, with a smile measurable in lumens, welcoming the designers to Los Angeles. Then, boom, faster than you could say ''auf wiedersehen,'' he was gone. As cameos go, though, it was probably more air time than he's used to getting on the six o'clock news..

And then, on Comedy Central, a little more than 90 minutes later, William Bratton, who just left the job of L.A. police chief on Saturday, was in the ejector seat on the "Colbert Report." He was a bit more subdued than we're used to seeing him here, maybe because Colbert only really asked about policing New York, a city Bratton characterized as ''a hellhole'' of broken-window offenders like squeegee pests and turnstile jumpers before he was able to work his police chiefly way on the Big Apple. I'm sorry Colbert didn't ask him anything about L.A.; I already miss Bratton's pungent observations about the sundry scofflaw ''knuckleheads'' and ''loony tunes'' of California.

And then I turned off the television and went to bed. I don't think I could have handled the surprise of seeing Sheriff Lee Baca in a guest spot on the SyFy channel.

-- Patt Morrison

Unless you can't go to someone else. That's the problem TV broadcasters face when they air syndicated programming. They're contractually bound to air the programs they buy with the music that's already in the soundtrack. As a result, they have zero leverage with songwriters when it comes to negotiating for the rights to broadcast those songs. A group of broadcasters has now gone to federal court in New York for help, filing a class-action antitrust lawsuit against SESAC, one of the three performing rights organizations representing songwriters and music publishers. (You can download a copy here.)

The complaint was filed Wednesday afternoon by lawyers from Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and SESAC hasn't offered any comment yet. It singles out SESAC, the smallest of the performing rights groups (the others are ASCAP and BMI), for two reasons: SESAC's stable of composers includes many of the leading music writers for TV and commercials, and the other two rights groups' rates are already overseen by federal courts through longstanding consent decrees with the Justice Department.

Not being a lawyer, I won't try to guess how strong the broadcasters' case is. What's interesting to me about this case is that, unlike many of the lawsuits I write about, it doesn't challenge the breadth of the copyright owners' rights. Instead, it challenges how they're being used. According to the lawsuit, SESAC gives broadcasters the choice between buying a blanket license — the right to make unlimited use of all the music in SESAC's repertoire — or buying rights for songs on a per-program basis. But SESAC increased the cost of the per-program deal so much in recent years, it has become uneconomic, the lawsuit contends. As a result, broadcasters have been stuck buying ever-more-expensive blanket licenses, rendering moot their efforts to shop around for programs with less costly sources of music. In other words, SESAC is accused of eliminating the competition that mitigates the copyright holders' monopoly power. Meanwhile, the lawsuit claims, SESAC has used the higher fees it's been collecting to attract more soundtrack and commercial composers, tightening its grip on the market.

The broadcasters asked the court for a permanent injunction barring SESAC from fixing prices and other anticompetitive behavior. If they succeed, SESAC could find itself in the same court-supervised posture as ASCAP and BMI. But another way to restore the full benefits of competition among songwriters would be to have the producers of TV shows and commercials obtain the performance rights to the music they use, on top of the sync licenses and other clearances they routinely negotiate for. (Most networks obtain the performance rights for the new shows they produce for their stations and affiliates, but not for the same shows when they're sold into syndication.) As it is, the competition among songwriters ends as soon as a soundtrack is picked. That's why SESAC is allegedly in position to make take-it-or-leave-it offers to broadcasters, who have little choice but to take it.

-- Jon Healey

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 are we going to get it through our still-insufficiently evolved craniums [crania, if you like] that environmental concerns ARE human concerns, that we are only as healthy and as likely to survive as are our fellow species and the land and water and air on this planet?

For years, we've been shoved into accepting the false, manipulated choice of jobs versus the environment; now there's the insidious manufactured either-or of "us versus them,"'  the `"them'' being a balanced water system and the habitat and creatures that are part of it. Well, here's some breaking news that should be old news: We ARE them.

-- Patt Morrison

On a less sanguine note, Edward H. Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that neoconservatives transformed the Republican Party into an interventionist, big-government operation with no conservative policy agenda. Them's fighting words! Good thing they came out of Crane's word processor and not, say, Rutten's.

And Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Cal State University Board of Trustees, laments the slow death of the California dream. No, not the one about having a house on the beach. That died a long time ago. He's referring to "the promise of low-cost education that brought so many here, and kept so many here":

Speaking of schools, the editorial board criticizes a bill by Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) that combines some common-sense reforms to the public system with ill-considered ones. And, although it agrees that colleges and universities could do a better job controlling costs, it defends the decision by some to pay top dollar for top-drawer presidents.

-- Jon Healey

Illustration: Ted Rall / For The Times

In an interview reported by CNN, Bardwell said, "I needed to step down because they was going to take me to court, and I was going to lose."

Actually, the reason he needed to step down is that he's approximately half a century behind the rest of the nation when it comes to civil rights.

The couple were married elsewhere and are now suing Bardwell and his wife, Beth -- who they claim asked them if they were a "mixed couple" and told them they'd have to go to another parish to wed.

Keith Bardwell sees it all as a matter of conscience, and that might be the one point on which he and I agree. "I found out I can't be a justice of the peace and have a conscience," he complained. Conscience does play the key role in this sad, stupid affair: If the man can't obey the law, he should have been honorable enough not to take the job in the first place.

--Karin Klein

This isn't just a really, really, really big cruise ship -- 40% larger than the previous title holder. It looks like my grandparents' Bronx apartment building perched on a barge and topped with a flying saucer. The $1.5-billion ship has entire neighborhoods, seven of them, and no wonder. With capacity for 6,300 passengers and more than 2,000 crew members, this isn't exactly the setting for an intimate cruise. By lowering its smokestacks, the 20-story-high ship was barely able to squeak under a Danish bridge on its way from Finland. And for those who yearn for the biggest and newest in travel, its home port will be Fort Lauderdale, with passenger cruises scheduled to begin in December.

So far, cabins are selling well, reports Royal Caribbean, owner of oasis of the Seas, even with the ship's  urban-development design and curious name. An oasis is a wet, lush part of the desert, and even though it has come to mean a refuge of any sort, I can't help the picture of passengers' feet sloshing in puddles of water on deck in the midst of the Caribbean.

Photo credit: Johnny Holmen / EPA

-- Karin Klein

This is nasty stuff. Yet those of us on staff who regularly moderate comments published it for a couple of reasons. First, we considered BlackSaint's views to be typical of the faction that's most strongly in favor of deporting illegal immigrants. That's not to say they're mainstream or representative of a significant number of people; it's just that we often see similar ideas expressed when we run a piece related to immigration policy. Second, we think it's better to let readers respond with their own comments when they're offended than to have us block anything that might offend someone.

Our site also lets people report comments they think should be taken down, which one reader did not long after BlackSaint's submission was published, calling it, "Another racist screed." After some internal debate, we decided to take the comment down because it violated The Times' policy against “abusive, hateful or objectionable language, threats, violence or inflammatory attacks.” 

How would you have handled this one? Should The Times have blocked BlackSaint's remarks from the get-go? Should it have ignored the objection and left his comment up? Would it be better to publish everything and let readers sort it all out? Or should we go the other direction and set a higher threshold for what gets published? What's the right standard?

-- Jon Healey

Likewise, I relish reading the British papers with their accounts of endless "rows" -- an all-purpose, headline-friendly word that covers everything from mild disagreement to nuclear war -- even though I do keep up with the Times (our Times) online.  From my first visit to Britain as a high school student, coming here has been a trans-dimensional experience.  As they used to say of Earth-Two, the parallel universe in DC Comics, Britain was a world like our own, but with subtle and interesting differences.

That's less and less true in London with its similarities to other cosmpolitan, multicultural cities like L.A., New York and D.C.  But London isn't Britain (or even England) in the way New York isn't the United States. Thus I was chuffed, as they say here, to spend Sunday in the country celebrating (with 90 others) the christening of the son of an old friend. From the Saxon church where the baby was sprinkled by a Central Casting English vicar, we repaired to the manor (no kidding) for a post-baptismal repast.

An Anglophile's dream, but -- Globalization Spoiler Alert -- U.S. politics intruded even in this settiing. I found myself sitting with an American who engaged me in a mostly friendly discussion about whether Obama was really born in the U.S. (and where's that original birth certificate?). The really depressing thing wasn't that a fellow American asked for my view of the Birthers, but that English heads inclined interestedly to hear my answer (which, by the way, was "bunk').

More tea, Vicar? -- and how about that Glenn Beck?

--Michael McGough

If voters defeat Question 1 -- meaning if they affirm the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry -- Maine will become the first state to support same-sex marriage at the ballot box. So far, such marriages have been legalized only through court rulings or legislative action.

Polls have shown an extremely tight race, and supporters of same-sex marriage have been hoping to get a boost from an 87-year-old World War II veteran who has become the Internet face of opposition to Question 1. Close to 600,000 people have watched Philip Spooner on YouTube, recounting in a public hearing earlier this year the wrenching sights of blood and death he saw in action and his belief that the sacrifice was in support of a nation that extends equal rights to all.

Spooner, a lifelong Republican, and his late wife raised four sons, one of whom is gay. It's unthinkable to him, he said in the tremulous voice of old age, that three of his sons will enjoy rights denied to the fourth.

"This is what we fought for in World War II," he said, "that idea that we can be different and still be equal."

Maine residents might be traditionalists by nature, but they also have a reputation as independent sorts who take a live-and-let-live attitude toward life. Spooner is, as gay-marriage supporters see him, the epitome of that fierce independence.

Let's hope Maine voters have been a big part of Spooner's Internet audience.

-- Karin Klein

Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press

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 one another for being so darned swell.

I’ve been to a few dinners at the BW that fit the latter description; the Goodall event fell  into the "do things" category, certainly when it came to two particular honorees. They were sitting at my table, and they’re so young that they drank juice while everyone else drank wine.

Shadrach Meshach lives in Tanzania, where Goodall began her seminal work with chimpanzees. In grade school, he joined up with Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program, grassroots work for animals and the environment. Eventually he began bicycling to Tanzania’s refugee camps for Congolese, persuading hunters to stop killing endangered chimpanzees for meat and showing them how to raise chickens and vegetables instead. He has been breaking other cultural norms, too – he’s an African young man, a teenager, trying to improve women’s lot in life in the belief that that that will improve the world.

He sat quietly on my right, taking in the plush ballroom and the lavish table settings. He has been out of Tanzania twice, once to Orlando, Fla.,last year, for a Jane Goodall young people’s summit, and now here, to Beverly Hills -- not the average visitor’s experience of the United States.

Erica Fernandez came here from Michoacan with her farmworker family when she was a child. Now she’s a full-scholarship sophomore at Stanford; her family still works the fields in Oxnard, she told me, where, as a high school student, she campaigned to keep an LNG facility from being built there. She’s studying matters related to her commitment, environmental justice, and hopes to go to Harvard Law.

Among the grownups honored by Goodall was John Zavalney, already an award-winning LAUSD teacher and science advisor who became a kind of "stand and deliver" hands-on instructor, teaching biology, ecology and environmental science at Foshay Learning Center.

Working with wild creatures rescued by animal welfare workers or confiscated as they were being smuggled into the U.S., Zavalney introduced inner-city students who had never even visited the beach to the wider world of forests and jungles and tidelands and savannas, using these living classroom lessons.

Of course, such awards have to feature some celeb names among the winners – in this case, actress and animal lover Betty White and super-green guy and actor Ed Begley Jr., both of whom delivered the kind of funny remarks that everyone counts on to provide a bit of leavening to other speakers'  serious stuff. 

The public policy award went to mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, "the greenest mayor" L.A. has ever had, announced Begley, who is a big public transit user. Villaraigosa’s was to have been the evening’s first award, but the mayor evidently arrived late, and it was pushed down to later in the program. [Small-world department: The terrific waiter at my table had been a Cathedral High School classmate of Villaraigosa’s.]

The mayor, as I reported in July, met Goodall on his trip to Africa, accompanied by Lu Parker, his girlfriend, KTLA-TV anchor and former teacher and Miss USA pageant winner. On Friday evening, he arrived solo to accept his award. Parker, he said, wasn’t there because she was working.

If you’ve never been to one of these dinners, the silent auction is a regular pre-dinner fundraiser and curtain-raiser. This time, along with the usual wine and hit-DVD and spa packages being offered, guests bid for artwork by chimpanzees.

Later, once people had been softened up by the wine and the vegetarian meal – Goodall told me a few months ago that cutting back on meat eating is one of the most significant things humans can do to improve the globe’s health and survivability -- bidding opened on a one-off item.

For a bid of $25,000, Goodall Institute board member Addison Fischer won the right to name the next primate refugee to arrive at Goodall’s chimpanzee rehab center in Congo. He wasn’t spilling the beans on his choice, but the buzz in the ballroom was weighted heavily in favor of "Jane."

-- Patt Morrison

Back before Villaraigosa announced his non-candidacy in June, former state Sen. Tom Hayden predicted in a Times Blowback piece that Villaraigosa would run but that his chances in a two-man race against Brown weren't good:

Hayden was responding to a Feb. 27 Op-Ed article in The Times by Marc Cooper, who made the case against a run by the mayor:

What do you think? With Newsom out, should Mayor Villaraigosa take a shot at becoming Gov. Villaraigosa? Take our unscientific poll, leave a comment or do both.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Oct.11. Credit: David Cannon / Getty Images.

The board mourns the deaths of more than 100 men, women and children in a Pakistani car-bombing, saying that such terrible events should convince Pakistanis that the fight against violent Islamic extremism is their fight too:

More than anything [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton can say, a series of assaults that have taken the lives of more than 500 civilians this year should serve to convince typical Pakistanis that this is not just a U.S. war. The United States and Pakistan have a common enemy in Islamist extremists, and the Pakistani state is fighting for its survival.

And the board urges President Obama to stand by his deadline for closing Guantanamo:

The legal axiom that "justice delayed is justice denied" applies with special force to Guantanamo. Whether they are dangerous terrorists or, like many of those already released, bystanders caught up in a post- 9/11 dragnet, these detainees have languished for years without adequate due process.

On the other side of the fold, a consultant to a documentary on convicted murderer Leo Frank writes about his 1915 lynching in Georgia. The subsequent campaigns either to vilify him or clear his name echo today, with haves and have-nots viewing the same events from markedly different perspectives.

Bernstein is just plain wrong that the organization's Middle East program focuses on Israel's alleged human rights violations while ignoring those committed by Arab governments and the Iranian regime. Even a quick glance at Human Rights Watch's website, where recent reports are posted, shows that the majority of those on the Middle East relate to countries other than Israel. According to Human Rights Watch, it has produced 1,776 total documents on the Middle East since 2000 -- 250, or 14%, of which were devoted to Israel.

--Karin Klein

Photo of the aftermath of the Pakistan bombing, Credit: Arshad Arbab / EPA

And we pair a shout-down of Philadelphia Eagles player Michael Vick's dogfighting operation with a shout-out to Wayne Pacelle of the the Humane Society of the United States -- for going on a, pardon the expression, dog-and-pony tour with Vick to educate communities about stopping cruelty to animals.

And shoutouts and shout downs abound for the food industry's Smart Choices program.

Columnist Meghan Daum weighs in on farming-chic, and two folks sack Sacramento's recent move to waive environmental laws to hasten construction of a football stadium in Los Angeles or, rather, the City of Industry. Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) worries that the Legislature "opened the floodgates" to future exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act. And sports author Dave Zirin sees just the latest in a series of sweetheart deals between unwitting taxpayers and tycoon team owners.

Photo: AP/Nick Ut

Here are excerpts of the session:

How is Citi doing?

How is the economy?

The government's stake in Citi

Citi and Treasury Secretary Geithner

Paying back TARP funds

The housing market's outlook

The ongoing credit crunch

The too-big-to-fail problem

Insuring against huge failures

Bring back Glass-Steagall?

Photo: Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit testifies on Capitol Hill in February. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

On the Op-Ed page, Raphael J. Sonenshein, former executive director of the city's charter reform commission, accuses rookie City Atty. Carmen Trutanich of not understanding what a city attorney is supposed to do in this town. Columnist Tim Rutten gives a highly nuanced defense of the push to reveal who is contributing to efforts in other states to put Prop. 8-style bans on gay marriage on the ballot. Musing about the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles, Peter Garrison, a pilot and contributing editor to Flying magazine, reveals just how boring it is to fly a modern airline jet. And columnist Doyle McManus dissects the Obama administration's decision-making process on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Credit: Ted Rall / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

If he rigs the game so that all Americans have to purchase insurance but insurance companies don't have any competition, surely he will have surpassed the industry's wildest expectations. Five'll get you ten he finds a cushy landing at Aetna or Cigna or some other insurance giant when he's out of office. And if he does, then I will applaud. It would depress me if, after he sabotages the national interest, insurance companies "rescinded" his policy.

But that's just speculation.

Maybe it's not that deep. Maybe he's a power-happy idiot who just likes to see everyone squirm.

--Lisa Richardson

*Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly said Lieberman isn't running for office again. In fact, Lieberman has said he's considering "all sorts of options" for 2012. 

Photo: Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) acknowledges cheers before addressing delegates at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., on Sept. 2, 2008. Credit: Genaro Molino / Los Angeles Times

Also on the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that trying to limit carbon emissions to fight global warming is a pointless waste of money because it can't solve the problem; better to invest in technological solutions and adjusting to a warmer world. And think tank scholars Leo Michel and Robert Hunter argue that U.S. allies are already doing plenty of heavy lifting as part of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, so American officials should do less lecturing and more listening if they want more cooperation.

Speaking of Afghanistan, the Editorial page says the country can't be pacified simply by sending more troops. That has become abundantly clear in the face of increased suicide bombings in Iraq, which like Afghanistan has been slow to build a credible government.

We also send a rare love note to the California Legislature, pointing out two genuinely worthwhile bills that will help cities make better use of water, an increasingly precious resource in this dry and crowded state. And we weigh in on Operation Gatekeeper, the federal effort started in 1994 to tighten border security in a five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Though the program has been successful in reducing crossings in that area, it has had an unintended consequence that must be addressed: Deaths of people trying to cross the desert farther to the east have skyrocketed.

Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

Maria Shriver is not an elected official, but she is married to a renowned one, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and was born into an even more famous family of them, the Kennedys.

So the inevitable outcome when hubris meets hypocrisy can't have been lost on her. Why should the hoi polloi of us feel we need to obey the laws the politicians pass, if the high and mighty themselves won't observe them? It undercuts the repute of politics and the public regard for the rules and regulations we are all supposed to adhere to.

At least twice, Shriver has been photographed using her cellphone without a hands-free device -- a violation of a law her husband signed. When he made it law, he noted that if he ever caught his teenage daughter breaking it, ''she'll be taking the bus.''

After his wife was caught by a gossip site driving while chatting on a cellphone sans legally required device, Schwarzenegger promised, ''There's going to be swift action,'' and Shriver apologized. I wonder whether her daughter, the one who was threatened with the bus if she broke the law, gave her mother a piece of her mind.

But Shriver was not aboard a bus -- although a Cadillac Escalade is certainly of long and lumbering proportions -- when she was seen parking said SUV in a red zone in Santa Monica for nearly an hour. She was reportedly at a doctor's office, which I can't imagine to be official business.

Everybody screws up once in a while, sometimes in bigger ways than not. But a red zone is a big unmistakable crimson no-no that drivers learn even before they're old enough to get behind the wheel. How could she not see it? And if she did see it, what little voice told her, ''It's OK, go ahead,'' especially on the heels of her cellphone transgressions?

It's a shame that paparazzi follow her hither and yon, but one definition of morality is doing the right thing even when no one's looking, isn't it? I am pretty sure that if I'd tried to get away with the same thing, I'd have come out of my doctor's office to see my car on the way to the tow yard.

What ''swift action'' will her husband insist upon this time? Another apology will ring a bit hollow on the heels of the other one. In the meantime, maybe we should all chip in and buy her a bus pass.

-- Patt Morrison

Read the whole article by AP here.

Using G-rated jingles from childhood is a curious method to break suspected terrorists, not so much because the songs are meant to sooth and entertain children than because of the feeling that this practice doesn't come across as very surprising. There seems to be a point in our lives when our toddler-years immersion in kiddie media gives way to a wholesale rebuke of this entertainment, sometimes going so far as to result in a phobia. After all, who doesn't know at least one fully grown adult who suffers from coulrophobia? (Perhaps we can just chalk that one up to the clown scenes in the TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's "It.")

But I'd like to know: What's on your torture playlist? What list of songs, played repeatedly at high volume, would make you cry,"Stop!"? Would Barney and Big Bird break you? Post your list of songs as a comment below.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: AP

The company says this is just its usual satisfaction-guaranteed sort of deal. Not exactly. The videos for this refund could have been purchased at any time and used till they wore out. Receipts not required.

The videos have been the subject of complaints and a threatened lawsuit by an advocacy group called Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, which contended that contrary to the company's early claims that Baby Einstein would enhance child development, watching TV is actually detrimental to children younger than 2. The campaign had more going for its argument than Baby Einstein did, with the American Academy of Pediatrics taking a dim view of the under-2 set as a TV audience and several studies to back that up. The pitch for the videos' benefits softened in the last couple of years. 

Personally, I don't think an occasional half hour here or there of watching colorful images on TV does major harm to a baby. In fact, I see the value of video babysitting. Let's face it, the pediatrics academy isn't spending the entire day with a fussy infant. Parents need a break now and then, and if Baby Einstein keep Mom and Dad from totally losing it, I'll chalk that up as helpful to a child's development, though human interaction, play and an occasional really good burp probably do more for an infant's well-being. If anyone believed Disney had cued into a magic, painless way to create babies guaranteed to test into the Gifted and Talented Education program by third grade, their children's bigger problem wasn't in how many videos they watched, it was in their parents' DNA.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

Manny Garcia's AP photo on the left, Shepard Fairey's poster on the right.

For those who just tuned in, Fairey's the guy who created a poster supporting Barack Obama's presidential bid that was an impressive bit of retro iconography -- a cross between Andy Warhol and mid-20th century propaganda. Not sure why Obama supporters thought this was a good thing, but then, Mao's been dead for a long time (insert sarcastic emoticon here). Anyway, the Associated Press objected to the poster, saying Fairey had violated a copyrighted photo shot by the AP's Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in Washington, D.C. Fairey, who asked a judge to declare that the poster was a fair use (the AP later countersued), maintained for months that he'd used just a portion of a larger image that featured Obama sitting next to George Clooney. That's important, legally, because one of the four fair-use tests is whether the new object uses the entire original or just a portion of it. But the AP argued from the outset that Fairey's work reproduced virtually an entire close-up that Garcia had shot at the event.

This month, Fairey disclosed that he'd lied about which photo he had based his poster on. It was, as these things go, a whopper of an admission. This is from Fairey's website:

While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong.

In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.

In retrospect, Fairey's initial contention just wasn't credible. I mean, how many times has George Clooney been cropped out of a shot? More important, Fairey's case raises a great issue: how far does one have to go in transforming a photo for the use to be considered fair? Garcia's photo is easily recognizable in the poster, yet the latter has a completely different context. The original is a headshot of a politician. Fairey's poster, on the other hand, invokes the idol worship of Dear Leaders of yore. It's both hagiographic and, to me, subversive. The copyright lawyers I've talked to say that there's not a lot of case law regarding fair use and photographs. Although each fair-use claim is decided on its own merits, Fairey's has the potential to help clarify the boundaries for remixers, collage artists and others who make new works out of existing photographs without licensing them. But Fairey's lies already have weakened his case -- his legal team told the AP that it will ask the court's permission to drop out. That's just the start of the possible fallout, which may be severe enough to prevent the interesting legal questions his work raises from being answered.

-- Jon Healey

At one point, when I was trying to negotiate the massive gap between what the out-of-network anesthesiologists charge and what my insurance would pay, I finally said that I’d just bite down on a wooden spoon during the surgery –- and I’d bring my own spoon, so I wouldn't get charged for that, too.

Whatever the doctor thought, I figured I couldn’t get the surgery until I’d figured out how much I’d have to pay, and whether I could afford it –- or whether I should just wait until things got so bad I’d just check into the emergency room, and they’d have to pay for it.

But all of it gave me an idea.

"House" is a rare TV show I’ve watched with pleasure, in part because there’s the splendid Hugh Laurie, and in larger part because it’s so much like my beloved Sherlock Holmes: House/Holmes, aided or on occasion challenged by Wilson/Watson, solves the most mystifying conundrums in the world of medicine/crime.

But the series is starting to get a wee bit stale, and I think I know how to fix it, and fix it in a way that will illuminate the problems of our present healthcare system, too.

Every show involves massive amounts of medical diagnostics and treatment –- MRIs galore, CAT scans, arcane tests I’ve never heard of, as the patient lies expensively tethered to monitors and tubes for weeks at a time.

And I don’t think I’ve ever heard any test the doctors have ordered not being done because of how much it costs.

TV isn’t supposed to be realistic, but even a good drama could use a little more drama. So here’s my idea: a new addition to the regular cast. The head guy in the hospital's insurance office.

What insurance policy would pay for all that treatment and hospital time? What hospital could pick up the tab for all of that platinum care? When the opponents of healthcare reform moan about "rationed care," all I can say is that it’s already rationed: I have a lifetime dollar-figure cap. When I hit that, they unplug me and roll me out the door, unless I can pay the tab myself.

So if "House" is going to treat us to real diseases and diagnoses, it ought to show us some real insurance controversies. The cast-member naysayer and House could mix it up, fight over that third MRI in a week, come to blows, make up over beers -– all about deductibles and out-of-network coverage. And you’re welcome, Fox TV –- you can send the check to me right here.

[While I have the attention of the health-minded, I’d like to quibble with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention websites exhorting the potentially flu-stricken to "cough or sneeze into your elbow." This, as the good doctors know, is physiologically all but impossible. In a world where eardrops have to come with instructions to users to put the drops in the ear, better they should be telling people to sneeze or cough into the crook of the arm. And, yes, that either arm will do.]

-- Patt Morrison

Then as soon as the budget got incredibly bad, one of his first ideas was to close a couple hundred state parks, even though the savings were relatively paltry. He backed down on that only after an analysis showed that it could be more expensive to close the parks than to keep them open because of the potential for vandalism, fires and illegal use.

On Thursday, the governor will receive an award from the National Park Trust for his record of supporting and protecting parks. This is a little befuddling, to say the least. Oh, wait, there was that moment when he told the federal government that he wanted California's road-free areas in its national forests to remain road-free.

If this is how awards are given out, we could have fun imagining similar honors. Nadya "Octomom" Suleman for the Zero Population Growth Award? The possibilities are endless.

-- Karin Klein

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The article focused on Georgetown University sophomore who has advertised for a personal assistant who would handle tasks "such as organizing his closet, dropping him off and picking him up from work, scheduling haircuts, putting gas in the car and taking it in for service, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry (although the assistant will be paid only for the time spent loading, unloading and folding clothes, not the entire laundry cycle)." The pay: $10-$12 an hour.

One response was whimsical: "Just this morning I told my mom I needed a PA. She laughed at me. Then [she] saw this article on Facebook and told me about it." (Oh, oh, Parent On Social Media Alert!) But the Facebooker who introduced the subject considered the student's quest  "the most egregious of all insults."

 I weighed in ...

... with editorial-writer-appropriate overanalysis:

 "Remember the pilot of 'Jerry' (the show-within-a-show on 'Seinfeld') in which a judge sentences a guy to be Jerry's butler? Or, on the same show, Kramer's intern? Or Neil Young's 'A Man Needs a Maid'? Or the houseboy on 'Bachelor Father'? With the exception of Kramer's intern, all these people did useful and helpful work -- but the idea of hiring someone to attend to personal responsibilities offends our egalitarian instincts."

We aren't squeamish about hiring someone to do a short-term defined task (plumbing, house painting, wiring) or a long-term one so long as it benefits someone else (child care). But the idea of a Man or Woman Friday, even in the office but especially at home, seems like something out of a between-the-wars British mystery novel or, as I suggested in my FB post, television comedy.

Even if the word didn't have a sexual connotation, no one would follow John Forsythe's example on "Bachelor Father" and advertise for a houseboy. What made Kramer's intern so risible was not just that he was supposedly working for a nonexistent company called "Kramerica," but that he was doing things for Kramer that any self-respecting democrat would do for himself. (He also wasn't being paid, as far as I could tell.)

And yet.... Is it any more elitist or condescending to take your laundry to a cleaner's (as I do sometimes) than to have a personal assistant who does it? Or pay the PA to go to FedEx Kinko's rather than go yourself and pay someone working there to run off some photocopies?

I couldn't afford to hire a  personal assistant (though God knows I need one), and I certainly wouldn't want one to live with me. But is someone who does decadent and self-indulgent? I don't think so. And employers of in-house PAs do provide employment, not an irrelevant consideration in this economy.

When he was at graduate school in New York, a friend of mine took a job as a live-in cleaner/launderer/dog-walker/cook for a busy professional -- I almost wrote "wealthy professional," but that doesn't follow except in the sense that anyone who can afford to live in Manhattan is wealthy.

This non-sexual houseboy job paid my friend well and gave him the proverbial roof over his head (and probably Oriental carpets under his feet). The householder was spared mundane and time-consuming tasks. So why is this a form of exploitation?

Of course, the Georgetown student was the master, not the servant, but isn't that really an aesthetic difference? College is supposed to be an introduction to real life, and in real life we all pay someone else to do something for us.

Photo: A scene from a 2005 rehearsal for "Play Without Words." Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times

--Michael McGough

Hundreds of people filed into Royce Hall to honor Nancy's life and her work on behalf of children and the arts. Out in the darkened rows sat the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, from the police chief to a number of City Council members and major philanthropists and arts leaders, as well as some kids from MacLaren Hall, whose lot she worked for 30 years to improve.

It's a testament to how highly Nancy was regarded that for an hour and a half in Royce Hall, you didn't hear a peep or a bleep out of a single Blackberry or cellphone.

Nancy died on Oct. 2 after a long struggle against pancreatic cancer -- a feat in itself, because ''long struggle'' and ''pancreatic cancer'' are usually contradictory.

I call her Nancy because I'd known her for more than 10 years, first as a civic force and then as a friend. Former Assembly speaker Robert Hertzberg got smiles of recognition across Royce Hall when, in his remarks, he noted how many of us have opened our e-mail in the morning to find something from ''lovekidsla,''  Nancy's e-mail address.

''Pom Queen'' and philanthropist Lynda Resnick reminisced with humor about the first time she saw the petite, blond Nancy in the foyer of her house, and how she knew at once that they'd become great friends. LACMA director Michael Govan reflected on what so many had felt: Nancy's persuasive powers. In his case, she showed up on his doorstep and even followed him to Arizona to get him to leave his ''perfect'' life in New York to come to L.A. to head the museum.

And another speaker -- I didn't write down who -- pointed out that one of Nancy's great skills was being able to put forward an idea and not only get some powerful allies but convince them it had been their idea all along. Even Karl Rove, the speaker said, ended a meeting with Nancy believing that the concept of making foster kids' records electronic so they could be immediately accessible as they moved from foster home to foster home and school to school ... had been his own.

Children, art and music were her devotions, and almost every speaker emphasized that she made a national impact, from her United Friends of Children group and the Children's Action Network, which she helped to found, to serving on the President's Commission for Children.

And ranking above all of those pursuits, the audience heard time after time, was her family. Her three children by her first husband, entertainment executive Bob Daly, and her grandchildren listened to plaudit after plaudit, and added their own. Like how she didn't say a word when her daughter got a tattoo, or one son got his ear pierced. Lyricist/songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, now married to Bob Daly, remembered with humor one family dinner with Bob Daly at one end of the table and Nancy at the other -- an extended-family get-together..

The evening began with a slide show of photos of Nancy's life narrated by Alan Alda -- childhood pictures, wedding pictures, mom pictures, Hollywood pictures, pictures of her after her cancer treatment, when her fair, straight hair grew back in as curly as a lamb's. "Do you really like it?" she had asked me, after I told her how becoming it looked.

It ended with a video put together by Nancy's kids of her last days, as she traveled with them in an RV from a visit to John of God in New York, on a ''road trip'' on the way back to Los Angeles.

She died in St. Louis, just one day after a videotaped visit to her old New Jersey home, where she walked around in front of the clapboard house. It's a first home that looked a lot like her last home here in L.A. She reminisced on the tape about growing up sledding on the streets and getting fired from her job at an ice cream parlor for giving away the goodies to her friends.

Onstage, below a screen with a large black-and-white photograph of Nancy, were banks of flowers and a grand piano. Its purpose became clear when Sarah McLachlan walked out and slipped onto the piano bench, where she performed the achingly poignant ``[In the Arms of an] Angel.'' By the time she was finished, some in the audience were dabbing away tears, me among them.

Tenor Placido Domingo had hoped to be there but could not get away from singing commitments, so he sent a video tribute, in song and in words, to the opera-loving Nancy.

As for who was there -- as I said, Police Chief William Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman; council members Bernard Parks, Tom LaBonge (and their wives, Bobbie and Bridget,), Bill Rosendahl and Jan Perry, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Hertzberg said he saw Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, although I did not, but former Mayor Richard Riordan, Nancy's second husband, was there, and I think I did see Richard Zanuck come in.

Lyn and Norman Lear were there, and Robin Kramer, once the right-hand woman to both Villaraigosa and Riordan, and Nancy's right-hand woman, Rita Brown, who had broken her left foot a few days earlier, slipping in the rain as she worked on preparing Wednesday's tribute.

Also there were philanthropists Eli and Edye Broad and Peg Yorkin, and actor Michael York and his photographer-wife Pat, both of them members of the book group that Riordan and I began about 15 years ago. Nancy's friend Wallis Annenberg wasn't there, but her tribute to Nancy was a million-dollar donation to Nancy's children's cause.

And there was Luis. He works with chef Michelle Gan, who had dished up scores of dinners at Nancy's homes and her fund-raising events over the years. He hadn't known this was a memorial for Nancy until he showed up for work on Wednesday, he told me, and his eyes were filled with tears as he talked about her.

Cooking was one of the memories Nancy's daughter, Linda, shared with the hundreds. The Thanksgiving after cancer surgery, Nancy insisted on prepping the turkey all by herself, and stood in the kitchen making the stuffing and basting the bird -- with an IV line running in her arm.

Classic Nancy.

-- Patt Morrison