The clean-truck program for the Los Angeles port tries to accomplish too much by mixing the unionization of truck drivers with a worthy environmental agenda, the editorial board complains, saying that the move to eliminate independent truckers is tying up the needed anti-pollution program in court -- where it will probably lose anyway. One city program that shouldn't be lost even in an unthinkably bad budget year is the HALO initiative, which diverts homeless, nonviolent offenders to treatment programs, the board advises. Held together by four staffers, it's one program that not only does good work, but truly saves the public more than it costs.

The board also stands firmly behind California's high-school exit exam after a study found that, among low-performing students, girls and minorities were more likely to flunk the test and thus lose out on a diploma. The answer lies in educating low-performing students so they can pass, the board concludes; they will face other high-stakes tests in life, including increasingly common exams to get jobs and society should not accept that girls and minorities will forever be less able to find well-paid employment.

On the other side of the fold, Bill Maher doesn't get what all the tea-party protests were about, and thinks that Republicans don't get what the concerns of the majority of Americans are about. [Editor's note: If only he'd read the 1,688 comments that Marc Cooper received last week when he wrote a similarly forehead-slapping op-ed.]

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.

Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party?

And a constitutional law professor writes in defense of scrapping the written test for firefighters in New Haven, Conn., after black and Latino firefighters scored lower, cutting them from the ranks of those considered for promotion. A lawsuit challenging the city's decision is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The problem isn't in testing people for promotion, Kimberly West-Faulcon writes, but in using a bad test to measure the qualities needed for advancement -- especially after the city was advised by testing experts that there were better tests around.    
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