Opinion: In today’s pages: Atheists, Republicans and Villaraigosa
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Council on Foreign Relations senior fellows Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh advise the U.S. to find a new, nonaggressive strategy to ‘bring Tehran to heel,’ and cartoonist Lisa Benson wonders whether Texas will end up bucking Hillary Clinton in tonight’s Democratic primary. Meanwhile, New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait suggests Clinton admit defeat and ‘go gentle into that good night,’ and Temple University mathematics professor John Allen Paulos wonders why, in America’s shifting religious landscape, atheists are still stuck at the bottom of the totem pole. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley marvels at the manipulations of Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey:
I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action. In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.Such a perfect paradox is no easy task. Most attempts fall apart because of some element of logical consistency.
The editorial board serves up its recipe for streamlining the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, and tells Mayor Villaraigosa’s critics to quit complaining about his globetrotting ways:
Los Angeles had a stay-at-home kind of mayor and didn’t much like it, so the city dumped James K. Hahn and voted in a player. Antonio Villaraigosa told voters they lived in a big city, one worthy of a big-city mayor who could hold his own not just with high-profile mayors from New York or Chicago but with presidents. He said he would go to Sacramento, Washington or anywhere else to put L.A. at the top of the national political agenda. On this point, he was as good as his word. It was no surprise when he went to Asia or Latin America. It should be no surprise now that he is spending so much time out of state in a last-ditch effort to salvage Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Readers react to Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plans to deal with the state’s budget problems. ‘Real Republicans,’ writes Karen Reisdorf, ‘will stand up and declare that educating our children is more important than protecting their playthings, i.e. yachts, airplanes and luxury RVs. In the face of the unfunded mandate in No Child Left Behind, only a selfish juvenile would do otherwise.’