Opinion: In today’s pages: rape as genocide, Dubai on the brink and Los Angeles needs a new school Superintendent.

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

In editorials today, the board asks two noted leaders to step aside. In its most gracious manner, the board urges Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David L. Brewer to resign. Since Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was hired in April, the board argues, the retired admiral has morphed into a sort of Queen Elizabeth II -- the ceremonial head of government, not the actual leader of the school system -- and an unnecessary figurehead. The board asks less of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: he’s called on merely to reliquish his role as the nation’s leader on global warming. That position, which made Schwarzenegger the nation’s ‘greenest Republican,’ is going to be taken by President Barack Obama.

On the Op-Ed pages, Columnist Rosa Brooks is revolted by Dubai and the ‘cold-eyed Russian oligarchs, coked-out London pop stars and the spoiled princelings of global finance’ who make it their playground. She stops short of feeling good about the economic hard times headed that way, out of sympathy for the massive number of workers who will be impoverished. Peter Navrro, a business professor at UC Irvine, says Schwarzenegger’s proposed tax on Disneyland, Legoland and other amusement parks is goofy. And David Scheffer, the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes and professor at Northwestern University, argues that if the International Criminal Court in The Hague charges Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, with rape as genocide, ‘thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of destroying their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace.’

Cartoon: M. Wuerker/Politico