Traffic was dreamy today.

Can we try this “Day Without [Illegal] Immigrants” thing again tomorrow?

P.S. I’m even willing to try a “Week Without [Illegal] Immigrants.”

P.P.S. Or a “Month Without [Illegal] Immigrants.”

P.P.P.S. Do I hear a year?

To the great surprise of almost no-one, Juan Non-Volokh has announced that he is actually Jonathan Adler.

This Bob Sipchen piece on the immigration protests is a perfect example of why I admire the guy. He has a great sense of humor and the guts to say uncomfortable things. For example:

My wife, Pam, bravely stuck her hand into our 16-year-old son’s backpack and pulled out something even more peculiar than usual.

Signed by the L.A. Unified School District’s executive officer for educational services and printed on Board of Education stationery in English and Spanish, the March 27 letter to parents began:

“We certainly understand the sentiments and motivation behind the protests that have been occurring in the community and at many of our schools in the past several days. And, we respect the right of free speech.

“However, we would much prefer that students would limit voicing their protests to the school campus rather than leaving the campus, possibly endangering their safety and missing classroom time.”

The letter concluded with this inelegant waffle: “We will do everything we can to ensure that those students who do leave the campus are supervised as they leave the campus.”

. . . .

I can’t be the only parent to wonder what young people, struggling with boundaries, discipline and accountability, are supposed to think when an official voice of educational authority speaks with such pandering equivocation.

and this is great:

A couple of weeks ago I attended an immigration rally, heavily hyped as student-led. This one was on a Saturday. Kids didn’t have to skip algebra to protest. At least 39,500 of the students who had walked out in March must have been in the library studying, because the few dozen who showed up to wallop drums and blow plastic horns on the City Hall lawn were outnumbered by those ubiquitous Revolutionary Communist Party folks and white guys with graying ponytails peddling anti-Bush bumper stickers.

As for guts:

The current wave of student demonstrations has been inspired at least in part by the release of an HBO movie about the 1968 Chicano student protests in Los Angeles: “Walkout.”

The point of those mass demonstrations nearly four decades back was to protest the crummy education the school district was palming off on Chicanos. Students were angry that so many Latinos were dropping out of school and so few were being admitted to college. Their gutsy strikes against these and other grievances caught a clueless school board’s attention — in part because each absence cost the district state money.

Thirty-eight years later, the 40,000 Southern California students who abandoned their classes on that March Monday did so over immigration policy.

Whatever you think about that complex and sensitive issue, you have to acknowledge, I think, that Los Angeles’ schools would be closer today to the excellence those Chicanos began fighting for in 1968 if tens of thousands of immigrants hadn’t crossed the border illegally and then added their ill-prepared children to the foundering system.

Bob! Just because something’s true doesn’t mean you can say it!

In the ultra-PC world of the L.A. Times, Bob can get away with such statements because everyone recognizes what a decent guy he is.

I interviewed Sipchen in February 2005. You can read that interview here.

Kevin Roderick has an interesting post about Hiltzik:

Michael Hiltzik came up, of course, during my interview of Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. He beat me to the punch, alluding to the controversy as soon as the discussion turned to the paper’s online struggles. The bottom line is that Baquet called Hiltzik’s undoing a professional tragedy, but said he knew immediately that—regardless of what the blogosphere thought—Hiltzik’s use of pseudonyms to post favorable comments about himself and disparage his critics violated Times ethics. Baquet said he wasn’t certain sure how to punish Hiltzik until he read about Ken Lay’s trial last week and thought how the Enron saga would make great fodder for a business columnist. He realized then, Baquet said, that his business columnist—Hiltzik—could no longer write credibly about duplicity in the business world. There’s no place, he said, for dishonesty under the Times banner.

I’m not sure very many people in the audience other than the dozen or so Times staffers and a handful of bloggers (Cathy Seipp posed the first question from the audience, about the Hiltzik affair) had the slightest clue what we were talking about. Here’s a link to Friday’s news that Hiltzik’s column and blog were discontinued. For what it’s worth, almost every Times staffer and journalist I talked to about it this weekend thought Hiltzik was lucky to keep his job.

Go to Kevin’s post for the links and more Hiltzik reaction.

The media coverage of Michael Hiltzik’s suspension and loss of his column, which I surveyed below in this post, continues with a brief and unilluminating article in the Chicago Tribune.

Other than the brief Editor’s Note from the other day, no story on this issue has appeared in the L.A. Times. Nothing has appeared to explain the background of how Hiltzik’s pseudonyms came to light.

This means that the very readers who are going to lose his column are also the people who are most left in the dark as to why.

Doesn’t that seem odd?