Opinion: In today’s pages: Irrational discourse, privacy laws, Afghan elections and Locke High School

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Columnist Tim Rutten returns from vacation to find the ‘birthers’ still discussing citizen grand juries and opponents of healthcare reform bringing guns to President Obama’s town hall meetings. There’s more than the usual dollop of crazy talk in our politics, Rutten warns:

Something has shifted since Obama’s election. Along with the now mindlessly normative red state/blue state polarization and autonomic politicization of even the most trivial incident, there’s a kind of hysteria that seems to be creeping in from the fringes -- a new tenor to our disagreements and a startling attenuation of reason.
Read the column, then leave your comments -- rational or otherwise -- below. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, criminal law scholar J. Kelly Strader warns that courts around the country are essentially ignoring the Supreme Court’s admonition in Lawrence v. Texas that states couldn’t outlaw private behavior that clashes with the majority’s view of morality. And Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers insights on the four front-runners in Thursday’s presidential election in Afghanistan.

In the editorial stack, the Times board blasts the California legislature for its failure to mandate more use of renewable energy by state utilities, despite the support of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, utility regulators and most voters. It pooh-poohs GM’s eBay initiative, questioning whether the carmaker can do anything truly innovative on sales without hurting its dealer network. And it looks past newly released scores on standardized tests to find something encouraging at Locke High School:

By and large, students scored no better than they had under the Los Angeles Unified School District. But Locke is a different kind of charter school, and in its first year it successfully changed other, previously dismal numbers. Truancy was down. Crime and class-cutting were down. The numbers of students staying in school and taking the tests were up dramatically. Those suggest a changed culture at Locke and are the most important indicators of progress.
-- Jon Healey