Opinion: In today’s pages: The U.S. attorney firings, Ahmadinejad at the U.N., the mayor’s housing plan
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Hard to believe, but the Opinion Manufacturing Division goes silent for a day about the presidential race and the Wall Street bailout (with the exception of J.D. Crowe’s political cartoon from the Press-Register, at right). Instead, the Op-Ed page leads with an insider account of the politicization of the Bush administration Justice Department. The author is David Iglesias, one of the U.S. attorneys fired for not being sufficiently zealous in pursuing GOP priorities:
Some people have argued that it was acceptable for the Bush administration to fire us because we were ‘political appointees’ hired and serving at the will of the president. The death blow to this school of thought came Monday when the report was made public. The 358-page tome systematically described a ‘fundamentally flawed’ system of slipshod, ad hoc job termination based on rumor and innuendo rather than evidence, one in which no due diligence was ever exercised by Department of Justice leadership before asking my colleagues and me to resign.
Journalist and author Howard Blum recounts the lethal bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, which occurred precisely 98 years ago, by radical union activists. And columnist Tim Rutten excoriates the media for glossing over the menacing, anti-Semitic statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations last week:
He happens to belong to a Shiite sect that believes it can hasten the coming of the Mahdi, the Islamic savior, by the creation of chaos in the world. And like his brethren among the Sunni jihadists, he means what he says.
Over on the editorial page, the Times board urges the new climate-change alliance of Western states to auction carbon credits to the highest bidder, rather than giving them away. It offers cautious praise for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s $5 billion affordable-housing initiative. And it urges the feds to provide consumers more protection against tainted Chinese food, in terms of inspections and information.