For the second straight year, the L.A. Times is laying people off, according to Kevin Roderick. His post from this morning quotes an e-mail from editor Dean Baquet today, which began:

I very much regret to announce that The Times will have to lose about 85 newsroom jobs before the end of the year.

I pass this along for informational purposes and ask readers not to gloat or take joy in the news. We all want to see the paper improve, but I for one take no joy in seeing anyone lose their job.

Bob Sipchen is leaving his role as the editor of the L.A. Times Sunday Opinion Current section, to work on an unspecified new initiative for the newspaper. I worked with Bob on two “Outside the Tent” pieces this year, and I have nothing but good things to say about him. He is a fine editor and a very fair-minded man. I’m sure that Bob’s new initiative, whatever it may be, will reflect well on the paper. But I worry about what his departure means for the “Outside the Tent” feature, and for the Current section in general.

The Senate vote yesterday, calling on President Bush to hasten the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, strikes me as a very bad move. Of course we want to hasten the withdrawal of troops from Iraq — as long as it doesn’t imperil the mission. But make no mistake about it: passing a resolution like this does, in fact, imperil the mission.

I was always a reluctant supporter of the war. I supported it because I believed that, in light of the clear importance of fighting terrorism after 9/11, we could no longer continue to tolerate Saddam’s pattern of resisting efforts to disarm him and document that disarmament. I continue to believe that the president made the right decision based upon what he knew at the time — but if we knew then what we knew now, we probably would not have gone to war.

No matter. We are there now, and it is critical not to screw it up. Yesterday’s resolution, in my view, does much to undermine the effort. This is now, as much as anything else, a battle of will.

And we just blinked.

I hadn’t really followed the Underneath Their Robes blog until it was almost gone. The New York Times has an article on the blog and its demise.

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