Editor\'s Essays Articles

It was absolutely thrilling yesterday afternoon, from Bilson’s Davis’s opening words, to be sitting in the audience at the Senior Center for the most nearly perfect Martin Luther King Day program I have witnessed.

With a single deft touch, landing the sensationally effective documentarian Orlando Bagwell, Mary Ann Green’s Planning Committee devised a model that deserves Culver City’s gratitude.

It is a beautiful model for the rest of America to study.

The day — mainly because of the brilliant Mr. Bagwell — was a spectacular success. It should be packaged and marketed around the country to communities that stagger as they try to figure out how to organize a proper tribute to Dr. King that also will resonate with their citizens.

My favorite proposed cutback item, as discussed last evening by a community group at School District headquarters, is an imaginative attempt to ding parents when their favorite child skips a day of school.

More substantive, more daunting cuts were reviewed, but this one is intriguing.

As you know, public education is about how much the School District has in its wallet rather than how much your child has in his head.

School District officials and Hillary Clinton find themselves standing in the same red-hot bowl of racial soup this afternoon.

Escaping without being branded a dirty racist for seeming to act bigotedly may not be possible for either party.

Both parties have only themselves to blame. Both spoke foolishly, insensitively and with whopping imprecision.

Too bad an acting coach was not on hand at last night’s City Council meeting.

I have a curiosity about how much truth leaked into the microphone.

I am not sure any of the 34 persons who protested the opening of a homeless shelter deserves a passing grade for what I suspect was slightly disingenuous testimony before the Council.

If only the girl on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, who judges what people really intend by their body language, had been in Council Chambers.

I received a request the other day from Deborah Galambos, the reading specialist at Lin Howe School, to find volunteers who will help students with their reading.

The commitment is for a minimum of one hour a week, says Ms. Galambos. No experience necessary. Just enthusiasm.

I must have overlooked a critical element in this week’s photo-identification-for-voters argument before the United States Supreme Court.

The case involves Indiana’s mandatory photo ID law, which is regarded as the toughest in the nation.

Indiana Democrats filed suit three years ago, claiming the new state law was unconstitutional because — all right, boys and girls, please turn to the chorus in your hymnals — it was unfair to and would disenfranchise thousands of “minorities, poor and elderly voters.”

It is a measure of the shaky quality of the City Council candidates’ field that only three of the eight have completed their paperwork 48 hours before the drop-dead deadline.

Most of them are listed in the telephone directory under Anonymous or I Prefer to be Alone.

Their campaign strategies resemble the Italian Army’s standard 20th century war plan: “What do you want to do this morning, guys?”

When I opened to Page A-9 of The New York Times yesterday morning, I paused in mid-jog to penetratingly reflect in a mirror on the century-long admiration that sensible Americans have held toward labor unions.

Colorful labor leaders were the political heroes, the main social fabric of my parents’ generation. They taught a land weighted down with unschooled immigrants the purely American values of moderation, sensitivity and abiding concern for the welfare of others, especially the teeth-gritting poor.

For one of the few times in the last 400 years, the following words can be sincerely spoken:

This is a great day to be a black man in America.

Maintaining his equilibrium better than the race-obsessed journalists who are chronicling his unprecedented journey, Sen. Barack Obama, by the will of his personality, has awakened the historically dormant pride that blacks genetically are taught to mask.

While former candidates Clinton and Romney donned their favorite jumpsuits and went roof-shopping this morning, the rest of us should exult over the extraordinary significance of Barack Obama’s clear-cut victory last night in Iowa.

His stunning tour de force offered two historic proofs: