Opinion: In today’s pages: Reagan Republicans, the FBI and predatory lenders
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The editorial board wonders what happened to the Reagan Republicans it loved (err, OK, maybe ‘admired in principle’ would be closer to the truth) in Sacramento:
There was a time, not too long ago, when the state’s GOP lawmakers would engage with Democrats to craft sustainable spending plans that helped the state pay its bills without simply pushing its problems onto future generations. But as Republicans veer toward endangered-species status in the Capitol, in terms of raw numbers, those who remain appear to have rebranded themselves. The prior insistence on fiscal conservatism has been replaced by a willingness to accept fiscal chaos -- as long as taxes never go up.
Click here to post your angry comments while the steam is still pouring out of your ears. Elsewhere in the stack, the board urges state legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who on fiscal issues does a pretty good imitation of a Reagan Republican) to support a compromise version of a bill to bar predatory lending practices. And it finds a silver lining for democracy in Pakistan amid the chaos likely to ensue now that Pervez Musharraf has stepped down as president.
Over on the op-ed page, columnist Tim Rutten urges the FBI to dispel the rumor and innuendo swirling around City Attorney (and occasional Times op-ed scribe) Rocky Delgadillo, whose wife reportedly has caught the bureau’s interest. The editors compare 40-year-old snapshots that photographer Marketa Luskacova took during the Soviet invasion of her native Czechoslovakia with images from this month’s Russian drubbing of Georgia. And author Andrew Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, defends the indefensible proposition of inviting Russia into the NATO fold. Who was it that said he wanted to keep his friends close and his enemies closer? Here’s a snippet from Meier, on Russia’s need for a group hug:
The end of the U.S.S.R. opened an era of unprecedented promise. But while Russians openly yearned for closer ties, the West only pushed back -- expanding NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet states.