Opinion: In today’s pages: Veepstakes, race, risk
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Columnist Jonah Goldberg handicaps John McCain’s vice president choices (in chart form!) and columnist Gregory Rodriguez looks at how Barack Obama seems to be dropping audacious hope for plain old realism:
A Barack Obama presidency could end the Iraq war, transform our national energy policy, revive America’s standing in the world -- but please don’t expect the first black man in the Oval Office to move us above and beyond the civil rights era. At least that’s what Obama himself suggested last Monday in his speech to the NAACP. In a campaign fueled by high expectations, Obama seemed to be trying to lower his audience’s hopes that the election of the first black president would be anything more than a symbolic milestone.
The editorial board advocates a measure that would spread the costs of protecting houses in fire-prone areas, and asks the governor to OK a much-revised bill to reduce pollution and traffic problems stemming from the ports. The board also encourages SAG to let its membership vote on a deal:
What this party needs, if not gland treatment (as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s characters recommended), is a dose of reality. The studios seem to think that SAG’s negotiators have lost touch with the rank and file. And SAG’s leadership seems to think it has the leverage to extract more from the studios on several critical issues than the writers, directors and other actors unions could. A good way to test those assumptions is for SAG to let its members vote on the contract offer.
On the letters page, readers discuss a Column One on the grade gap between races. Camarillo’s Shiu Man Lee says:
My best friend in medical school was black. My best friend during residency was Hispanic. I asked both of them what made them successful. They both said it was because of their parents kicking their butts if they did not study. Sounds a lot like my Chinese parents.
*Cartoon by Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette