Opinion: In today’s pages: City and county skirmishes and the good news about gas prices
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The editorial board welcomes the skirmish between Los Angeles Controller Laura Chick and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, not because we like a good catfight (OK, we do), but because it will help define the role of an important city watchdog.
The theater of it -- two politicians going after each other, each willing to spend scarce city money in an attempt to prevail -- can be taken as entertaining, irritating or both, but it is in the end a sideshow. The central question is whether accountability among Los Angeles elected officials really is possible. We assert that it is -- but not without public vigilance, some ponderous and patience-trying discussion, and the occasional constitutional crisis.
The board also takes the indefensible position that we should be at least a little bit thankful for the high price of gas. Really.
There’s more than enough pain to go around, and yet there is no denying it: High energy prices also have an unforeseen bright side, forcing the nation to reduce its carbon emissions and delivering the encouraging message that, although we might not regain the freewheeling way of life that came with cheap gasoline, we have more ability to shape our fates than the caricature of the soft, spoiled American implied.
Meanwhile, the op-ed page revisits Russia’s invasion of Georgia, with doctoral students Thomas Meaney and Harris Mylonas connecting the dots from Kosovo to South Ossetia and beyond. Author Wendy Orent faults Washington for spending too much on protecting Americans against biological weapons and not enough on protecting them from disease. Israeli author Etgar Keret chides his country’s military for showing little concern about a soldier shooting a bound, blindfolded Palestinian detainees in the leg (granted, it was a rubber bullet, but those things leave marks, too). And columnist Tim Rutten dissects the ‘geographic animosities’ and ‘petty personal feuds’ that threaten a proposed sales-tax increase for mass-transit funding.
Laura Chick photo by Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times; Rocky Delgadillo photo by the Times’ Liz O. Baylen