It strikes me as a little childish to pick on a nervous candidate for stumbling over her words in the high-stakes environment of a televised debate. But Jan Brewer is no ordinary chief executive. Since taking over in 2009 for the elected Janet Napolitano, who left her post to become President Obama's Homeland Security secretary, Arizona's fill-in governor has signed into law some of the most mean-spirited, race-baiting legislation of the 21st century. Over 20-plus months and counting, she OKd Arizona's transformation into an immigration police state, banned ethnic studies in public schools and took away domestic partner benefits for gay and lesbian state employees.

And she'd rather not talk about it:

Brewer doesn't need much more exposure to win -- she has a nearly 20-point lead over her Democratic opponent. But elections aren’t just about deciding which candidate wins; they’re an opportunity for voters to decide what's best for their state. Brewer, one of the more consequential governors in the country, evidently wants Arizonans to make up their minds the way she does: easily and without much information.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: Matt York / Associated Press

Below are today's installments in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the images above for larger versions.

Civics-bookish as it may sound, the voters of California were well served by Wednesday's debatebetween Senate candidates Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer. (Video clips here.)

Yes, there were cheap shots. Really, what is the relevance to a legislative position of Boxer's crack that Fiorina "made her name as a CEO in Hewlett-Packard laying thousands and thousands of workers off, shipping their jobs overseas, making no sacrifice while she was doing it, taking $100 million." Only slightly more to the point was Fiorina's complaint that "after 18 long years in the Senate, 28 years [in Congress, Boxer] only has four relatively insignificant bills with her name on them." Even if Fiorina is right (and some fact-checkers quibble with the number), success as a senator is about more than affixing your name to reams of bills.

But much of the debate was dominated by clashes over real issues: abortion,  taxes, economic stimulus and gun control. Never mind that the candidates' respective positions mirrored those of their parties. Elections should provide voters, as Barry Goldwater  liked to say, "a choice, not an echo." This debate was anything but an echo chamber. If you support abortion rights, Boxer made the right noises. If you want Roe vs. Wade to be repealed, Fiorina is your candidate. A ban on assault weapons: Boxer for, Fiorina against.  Support gay marriage: Boxer says yes, Fiorina would stop at civil unions. And so on.

It's not exactly novel for a Republican candidate to support tax cuts and less government regulation, or for a Democrat to defend an activist federal government. But the point of an election campaign isn't entertainment; it's elucidation. By that measure, the Boxer-Fiorina debate was a success.

 -- Michael McGough

Is it just me, or is there something irritatingly nanny-state-ish about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to give letter grades to vehicles based on their fuel efficiency? It's one of two competing ideas for updating the window sticker that new cars and trucks must display on sales lots, starting with the 2012 models that arrive next year. The other proposal is just a more detailed version of the current edition.

I'm all for simpler disclosures, but this strikes me as an overreach. It's bad enough that the EPA grades every vehicle against the same absolute standard, so electric cars, hybrids and natural-gas vehicles are the only ones capable of getting A's. What's worse is that the schoolhouse scale is freighted with value -- C might stand for average, but it carries more than a whiff of underachievement and mediocrity. 

My colleague Dan Turner, who's written quite a bit about CAFE standards, says I protest too much:

The government is not interfering with consumers’ ability to choose the car they want, it's simply providing comparative information for consumers who care about such things as fuel economy and pollution. If you don’t care, you’re free to ignore the label, just as car buyers have always done. If you do care, it’s a nice piece of information to have. Who’s hurt?

What about the automaker who goes the extra mile to make a large gas-powered sedan 20% more fuel-efficient than other cars in its class, only to be emblazoned with a big fat C+? Doesn't that imply that the car isn't as good, in some meaningful way, as one of those sleek smaller cars emblazoned with a B+ or better?

Below are today's installments in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

 

 

 

Click on the images above for larger versions.

Below is the 12th installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

It’s always been a political curiosity that red states – the ones that vote Republican and tend to complain more about taxes – generally get the biggest checks from the federal government, far more than what they contribute in taxes, while the blue states – the ones that tend to vote Democratic – get back less in federal perks, projects and programs than the tax dollars they send to D.C.

In other words, red state voters, in the main, depend on blue state voters to keep them afloat when it comes to federal money. Pretty embarrassing, I'd say, for those red-staters who like to complain about federal taxes and federal government. 

This imbalance in the balance sheets constitutes the down-to-dollars facts that underlie part of the story of the expanding American frontier, that people did it all by themselves. Without question it takes  tough types of people to gut it out and cut it in the desert and the mountains and the plains – but the huge amounts of federal money that went into massive water and reclamation projects, soil and agriculture projects, bridges and highways, built the framework and underpinnings that helped to make the settlement and growth possible.

In the latest numbers I could find, from a few years ago, and consistent with patterns of years standing, California gets only 78 cents in services back from every buck it sends to Washington. Uber-blue and super-prosperous Connecticut gets 69 cents; New Jersey, 61 cents. The states often described as rugged and independent, such as Montana and Idaho, get $1.47 and $1.20, respectively, for every $1 of their federal tax money. Oklahoma and North Dakota were tied at $1.68 – you get the idea.

And now we get to Alaska, at $1.84 in benefits for every D.C. tax dollar it sends in. Alaska’s mainly Republican congressional delegation has been regarded as the champ at hauling pork back up Yukon-ward.

Which is why it’s astonishing that, as The Times has reported, Joe Miller, who may topple incumbent Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s Republican Senate primary, is saying "stop the pork." In the interest of addressing the deficit, he told CBS, "I think the answer to this is to basically transfer the responsibilities and power of government back to the states and the people.’’

Well, Mr. Possible Senate Candidate, the people already have the responsibilities and the power; it’s all there in the Constitution. They vote – and directly, now, for Senate candidates, instead of through electors, thanks to an amendment to that same Constitution.

If this is about keeping in each state the tax dollars that now go to D.C. and get redistributed, often blue-state-to-red, the question becomes, how would ''beneficiary'' states like Alaska make up the difference?

California governors, both Republican and Democratic and including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been hammering this point for decades: California would love to get even $1 back for every dollar it sends to Washington. But then how would states such as Oklahoma and North Dakota and Alaska manage on a dollar-for-dollar budget if they were not to get that extra federal boost – in some cases of 150% or 180% more than they pay in – that comes from ‘’donor’’ states such as California and Connecticut?

Miller is being laudably consistent with his political policies and priorities when he says this; the question is, will his fellow Alaskans, who have benefited from and even been proud of the big take-home checks from Washington, be able to live on the budget Miller suggests?

-- Patt Morrison

It's inaccurate to call Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally disarming, because there's no evidence that its basically apolitical program converted his many detractors. Fair enough. One innocuous event can't atone for Beck's day-to-day wackiness or his notorious assertion (which he now has recanted, sort of) that President Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

But give the devil, or rather the demagogue, his due. Beck and special guest star Sarah Palin harbor daffy and divisive political views, but they were largely muted on Saturday. The proverbial observer from Mars (or Atlantis) would have had a hard time discerning Beck's political agenda. 

The rally's appeals to patriotism could have come from any small-town Fourth of July celebration. The heroes saluted by Beck wouldn't be out of place in a mainstream-media feature story or in the balcony at a State of the Union address.

And then there was the pervasive religiosity. The rally often resembled an exuberant service at an evangelical mega-church. (One liberal commentator suggested, bizarrely, that religion had no place on the "sacred" site of the Lincoln Memorial.)

The likely political views of those in attendance aren't my cup of tea, so to speak. If the audience had been allowed to bring signs, I'm sure some of them would have contained extreme, even ugly, sentiments. Nor would Beck and Palin be my choices for grand marshals of an Independence Day parade.  

But I think criticizing the rally itself plays into its impresario's unclean hands by suggesting that liberals disdain patriotism, religious conviction and even diversity.  There will be plenty of other opportunities for Beck-bashing.

-- Michael McGough

Below is the 11th installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

I'm no apologist for Glenn Beck, but I think it's a bum rap to say he has hijacked the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech by scheduling Saturday's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial.  Beck has praised King, if not the "social gospel" that King's son insists is part of his father's legacy.

Moreover, the criticism of Beck is based on the idea that he seeks to substitute his view of race relations (and other issues) for King's. But that assumes there is a clear Beck view on offer, other than that we should honor U.S. military forces. So far the larger meaning of the event is elusive.

Don't go by what I say. Read Beck's stream-of-consciousness description of the purpose of his much-demonized rally. Some highlights:

"[H]opefully, we will mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. At least we will begin to look at those things, start to maybe challenge that we haven't valued those things high enough — honesty, integrity, merit, personal responsibility, family and God. That is why we call it the 'Restoring Honor' event."

And:

"It's the same story whether you call it Atlantis, New Jerusalem or Zion. It is the shining example of a place where people work together in peace and friendship and worship God and make things better together. Have we even been striving for that? Have we? Make no mistake, the flame of freedom is dwindling. The shining city on the hill, the sun is setting. If you don't want it to go out on our watch, then you must stand in the blaze. The fire of truth that does not burn those who stand in it, but consumes everything that is not. Point others to the truth."

It's hard to take offense at this spiel, because it's hard to make much sense of what, exactly, Beck wants to happen in the United States of Atlantis. Maybe we'll find out Saturday.

-- Michael McGough

Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Below is a response by Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith to the Aug. 25 Blowback article by UC Berkeley education professors Bruce Fuller and Xiaoxia Newton. In their piece, Fuller and Newton say The Times' "value added" method of evaluating teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District ignores classroom factors beyond an instructor's control.

We’re happy to have credible experts debate the reliability of our statistical approach, but we would hope in doing so they would exercise the same care in their critiques as we have in our publications. Bruce Fuller and Xiaoxia Newton make several points that we’d like to respond to.

The authors say Richard Buddin’s approach “has yet to be openly reviewed by scholarly peers.” In fact, the reason we chose Buddin is because he has published several peer-reviewed studies using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District in major academic journals using the same "value added" approach he employed for us. Buddin’s methods paper is not a formal academic publication. Nevertheless, we asked leading experts to review that work before choosing Buddin, and asked several other experts, including skeptics, to review his methods paper.
 
The authors say our approach and graphic fail “to take into account differences in student background, including English proficiency, parents' education levels or home practices that affect children's learning.”  L.A. Unified did not provide student demographic information for this study, citing federal privacy laws. Demographic factors do have a large effect on student achievement, but these influences are largely included in the students' prior-year test scores. Prior research (including Buddin’s own using L.A. Unified data) has shown that demographic factors are much less important after controlling for a student's previous test scores. The technical report used results from Buddin’s previous Rand Corp. research to show that student demographics had small effects on teacher value added as calculated in this study. This earlier study (Buddin and Zamarro, 2009) ran through 2007 instead of 2009, but this pattern is likely to persist. The approach and results are discussed in the subsection of the technical report "How does classroom composition affect teacher value added” that begins on page 13. The key empirical results are in Table 7.
 
The authors cite the National Academy of Sciences report urging caution. We cited the same report in our story. There is a variety of other research available that suggests these estimates are reliable. See Kane and Staiger’s 2008 random assignment validation of value-added approaches, which found value added were “significant predictors of student achievement” and controlling for students test prior scores yielded “unbiased results.”   
 
The authors claim our analysis “fails to recognize that test score across grade levels cannot be compared, given the limitations of California's standardized tests.” California Standards Test scores have been used by many researchers in peer-reviewed value-added analysis for years. The district’s own researchers concluded the test was appropriate for such estimates, as the story mentioned. See this L.A. Unified report.
 
The authors claim, incorrectly, that The Times plans to “publish a single number, purporting to gauge the sum total of a teacher's effect on children.” In our stories and Q&As, we have repeatedly made clear that value added should not be the sole measure of a teacher’s overall performance. And our database does not present a single number for anyone.
 
Finally, the authors point to various limitations of the value-added approach. These are well known and have repeatedly been disclosed by The Times. What the authors fail to note is that leading experts say value added is a far more thoroughly vetted, peer-reviewed and provably reliable tool than any other teacher evaluation tool currently available. Rather than comparing value added to a Platonic ideal of a perfect teacher evaluation, it should be weighed against classroom observations by principals, student surveys and the other “multiple measures” that are being considered. Under this analysis, most scholars agree that, warts and all, value added shines.

Below is the tenth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Who could have called it in 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the body-building terminator who originally showcased his brutish masculinity as a campaign centerpiece and once called Democrats “girlie men,” could go down in history as California's most gay-friendly governor to date. Sure, Schwarzenegger's done more for gay men and women when he's done nothing: Though he vetoed then-Assemblyman Mark Leno's bill to legalize same-sex marriage in 2005 (legislation that was almost certainly illegal under Proposition 22), he and Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown have refused to defend Proposition 8 in federal court.

What Schwarzenegger can do next is probably the easiest call he'll have to make on equality for gays and lesbians: signing a bill that removes from the books California's official policy of, yes, "curing" homosexuals. From GLTNewsNow.com: 

Sure, the policy is as ignored as it is unenforceable, but Schwarzenegger should sign Lowenthal's bill. Aside from the symbolic value, California doesn't want to have the embarrassing distinction of recognizing marriages its laws say are rooted in a psychosis.

-- Paul Thornton

The government can't bar you from saying things that offend people. But if you happen to be a political appointee of the aforementioned government, it may not be able to continue employing you after you do.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson is being blasted by a spate of liberal groups and lawmakers, senior-citizen lobbyists  and lefty columnists,  with some even calling for him to step down or be ejected as co-chairman of the White House's bipartisan deficit commission. Setting aside for a moment that the job is a thankless one to begin with, Simpson got into hot water  for sending a tartly worded -- OK, snide -- but truthful e-mail  to the head of the Older Women's League, Ashley Carson. In  a Huffington Post piece,  Carson had hyperbolically accused the elderly Simpson of being ageist, sexist and insensitive to poverty because of his criticism of those who routinely resist changes in Social Security. Simpson's e-mail stressed the solvency problems looming in the federal retirement insurance program. But being the sharp-tongued fellow that he is, he couldn't help throwing in a couple of memorable digs at Carson and Social Security recipients in general:

Below is the ninth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Below is the eighth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

 

Click on the images above for larger versions.

Ticketmaster announced Monday that it's peeling back a layer or two of illusion from its prices, revealing up front what a ticket to an event will actually cost. That's not the same as abandoning the pretext of "convenience charges" and "venue fees," but it's a start.

To this point, people buying tickets through Ticketmaster would know only the face value of the ticket when they initially placed an order. They couldn't see how much the surcharges were until they were ready to pay. Those surcharges added 20% or more to the total price, shocking some would-be buyers so much that they canceled their orders.

Under a new system rolling out this week, the initial price displayed  by most venues will include all the fees except the charge for express ticket delivery, which is optional. The new system thus provides full transparency to consumers who are willing to print their tickets at home (a privilege Ticketmaster no longer charges for) or to wait for them to be delivered by snail mail.

The company will still be piling convenience charges and assorted other fees on to the price of a ticket, and consumers will still be able to see a partial breakdown if they're interested. The extra fees are an artifact of the days when venues offered performers 100% (or more) of the face value of the tickets, leaving venues, ticketing companies and promoters to make their money off of service charges. But the dividing line between the fees and the ticket price itself is increasingly a distinction without a difference. As Ticketmaster noted in its blog post, "[T]he reality of the live entertainment business is that service fees have become an extension of the ticket price.  Most of the parties in the live event value chain participate in these service fees either directly or indirectly – promoters, venues, teams, artists, and yes, ticketing companies – and service fee rebates are our largest annual expense at Ticketmaster."

-- Jon Healey

Credit: AP Photo / Paul Sakuma

Elaine Woo's excellent obituary of James J. Kilpatrick noted that the onetime  supporter of school segregation moderated his views on race, pleading in an interview that  "I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930s. I accepted segregation as a way of life. But I've come a long way. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50."

Maybe not, but Kilpatrick made it sound as if his position on segregation  -- that states could override the Supreme Court -- was something of a youthful lark. Instead, it was a considered constitutional theory in service of a social system that many sophisticated and erudite adults defended.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the passage of time is that many young people imagine that segregationists were all potbellied sheriffs and vulgar race-baiters. It's important to know that the obstructionists included a lot of Kilpatricks, which makes the achievement of the civil rights movement all the more radical and remarkable.

-- Michael McGough

Photo: James J. Kilpatrick prepares to debate Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 about the propriety of sit-ins. Credit: AP file photo.

Below is the seventh installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Here's a sampling of some of the views readers had on our articles throughout the week.

Blogger Melissa McEwan of Shakesville commented on Meghan Daum's Aug. 12 Op-Ed about a trend toward girls growing up faster, potentially leading to an age in which males are no longer the dominant gender. McEwan argued that Daum spent too much time worrying about the effects the changing role of males in society may have on young boys. McEwan wrote: "Call me zany, but I don't think eight-year-old boys are owed the right to feel secure about maintaining 'male domination,' anyway."

The Social Security debate found its way into the blogosphere on The Free Thinker. Blogger Jack Davis disagreed with Peter Dreir and Donald Cohen's use of the Enron argument in their Op-Ed on why Social Security will remain solvent despite concerns raised by critics. Davis asserted that the Enron argument is overused in the Social Security debate, saying the use of  "Enron as a debate stopper is unfair."

"The Playful Walrus" blogged on The Opine Editorials about an editorial of ours that ran on Aug. 18 regarding the appeals court in the Proposition 8 case. The blogger disagreed with our stance that an equal right to marry is an essential part of equal protection under the law. The Playful Walrus concluded that although homosexuals do have the right to be protected, "marriage licenses aren't needed for that."

Jerry Critter of Critter's Crap agreed with the position we took in our Aug. 19 editorial about Dr. Laura's recent run-in with racial tension. We wrote that Dr. Laura should take some of her own advice and grow a thicker layer of skin, and Critter matched that view, commenting on the right wing's "twisted logic" when it comes to issues such as the 1st Amendment.

-- Emilia Barrosse

Below is the sixth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Oh look, a poll revealing the shocking fact that 20% of Americans are delusional about Imam Barack Obama's religious fealty. Let's see how long it takes for the Washington Post to blame the dastardly Internet:

Buried in the third graf. Not bad.

I say this because blaming the Interwebs has become a cop-out for those wondering why people believe crazy things about Obama. George Washington and John Adams were accused of secretly harboring loyalties to the British crown, a poisonous charge in early post-Revolutionary America. More recently, George W. Bush's entire presidency was clouded by accusations that he stole the 2000 election, a contest in which his primary opponent, John McCain, endured rumors in South Carolina that he fathered an African American baby. Unprovable accusations and conspiracy theories are more believable when they're about the guy you didn't vote for, Internet or no Internet.

And if they're out to show how badly informed a good chunk of Americans are, the Pew Research Center may as well ask other questions -- Is Trig really Sarah's son? Did Neil Armstrong really walk on the moon? -- that would probably produce similar results.

-- Paul Thornton

Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images

Below is the fifth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

I don't suppose this AP writeup on the myths and facts of the so-called ground zero mosque in New York will muzzle the cynical Islamophobes hoping to parlay the hysteria they've generated into electoral gains in November. Inarguable facts aside (which are easy to dismiss in an emotional debate), the piece contains something that generally doesn't appeal to those so unshakable in their opinions: nuance.

Take, for example, the following few paragraphs on the boogeyman behind this whole project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf:

The whole piece is worth a read. It points out, notably, that Muslims pray inside the Pentagon, a building that was itself attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

-- Paul Thornton

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry sent us the following response to The Times' recent Project 50 series and Dennis P. Culhane's Aug. 13 Blowback:

Below is the fourth installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Below is the third installment in cartoonist Ted Rall's series of dispatches from Afghanistan. Click here for previous cartoons by Rall.

Click on the image above for a larger version.

Below is the second installment in Ted Rall's series of cartoons filed from Afghanistan, which we introduced here on Sunday. Check back for further updates throughout the week.

 

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In November 2001, I went to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. invasion. I witnessed the end of the beginning of America's longest war, the Battle of Kunduz. Now I'm going back for the beginning of the end.

I'll head first to Taloqan to try to track down the man who worked for me in 2001 as a driver-translator-facilitator. The town has recently fallen under Taliban control several times, and I'm not sure what I'll find when I get there.

Then it's off to the most rugged and remote parts of the county, where few Western reporters venture. Even the Lonely Planet Guide doesn't cover this area. We'll travel through the western deserts along the border with Iran and the northern Mazar-to-Herat road, reputed to be “the worst road in Afghanistan.” Our goal is to try to see the war from the standpoint of ordinary people in Afghanistan.

Accompanying me will be two fellow cartoonists, the editorial cartoonist Matt Bors and the Web cartoonist Steven L. Cloud (“Boy on a Stick and Slither”). Cloud is a veteran of hard travel, having driven across Asia from eastern Europe to Mongolia. On the other hand, this will be Bors' first trip outside the United States.

During the trip, I will be filing cartoons from the field, every day, by satellite. It's live-action cartoon reporting.

I am nervous but excited.

-- Ted Rall

Follow Ted Rall's Afghanistan adventures daily here at http://opinion.latimes.com. Click on the cartoons above and below for larger versions.

 

Is Republican U.S. Senate nominee Carly Fiorina moving to the Latino (or maybe just to the center) for the general election? She told the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce on Thursday that she opposes conservative calls to alter the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all people born in the United States.

Fiorina and Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman both appealed to conservative voters with a tough stance on illegal immigration during the primary. Fiorina backed Arizona's new law. Now they're wooing the state's large number of Latino voters, in part by opposing calls to end birthright citizenship.

[For the record, 2:42 p.m.: An earlier version of this post stated that Whitman also backed Arizona's immigration law. According to her campaign, she has never supported the legislation.]

-- Marjorie Miller