The Wall Street Journal has published on its website the text of the proposed 10-point checklist for determining whether a Republican candidate is orthodox enough  to benefit from the party's endorsement and fund-raising.

The affirmations issues are quite a mixed bag. Some are perennial and cosmic, such as: "We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership." Others are micro-specific and could be obsolescent by the time they are proposed to the Republican National Committee in January.  Take: "We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare." In January, they  might have to change "oppose" to "opposed."

And, even if you're a true-blue conservative, is legislation opposing "card check" as a way to organize unions as big a deal as abortion or the right to keep and bear arms? Presumably not, but all of the propositions are weighted the same. As George W. Bush said of Al Gore's economic proposals, this is fuzzy math.

-- Michael McGough

It's a combination of issues so hot, an op-ed about reopening King-Harbor hospital doesn't even make the top three! Leading off is a pair of op-eds about best-selling memoirist Sarah Palin -- one friendly, one not so much. Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the right-leaning Weekly Standard and author of "The Persecution of Sarah Palin," tops the page with an analysis of the many reinventions of Alaska's erstwhile governor: first culture warrior, then watchdog, reformer, would-be vice president and, now, celebrity:

But Michael Carey, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, retorts that Palin's new book shows her to be more of a whiner than a leader:

(Are you planning to help Palin's publisher recoup its advance? Take our poll!)

Rounding out the op-ed page, Times columnist Tim Rutten urges the University of California Board of Regents to approve a proposed partnership with the county Board of Supervisors to reopen and jointly oversee Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital.

On the other side of the Opinion divide, the Times editorial board gives Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown a dash of sympathy being "trapped in a political cage from which there will be no easy escape." The cause? His office just gave a pass to Brown's former communications director for surreptitiously recording interviews with reporters, and now liberals are pushing him to investigate a pair of independent filmmakers who surreptitiously recorded ACORN employees in California advising them how to set up a prostitution ring (or, in the case of ACORN's Felix Harris in Los Angeles, refusing to help after learning the prostitutes would be minors).

The board also urges the District of Columbia Council not to bow to pressure from the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which has threatened to stop providing social services if the council approves same-sex marriages in D.C.

(True personal story to illustrate how conservative the Archdiocese of Washington is: I'm a Catholic, and I got engaged to be married while I was living in D.C. But when I asked a priest at my church if I could have the nuptials there in five months, he told me I needed to wait at least a year to receive the church's blessing. And if I didn't receive the church's blessing, my soul would be "lost to perdition." In other words, I'd spend eternity in Hell because I'd gotten married the wrong way. As it happened, my future mother-in-law lived outside Baltimore, and the diocese there accommodated us without hesitation. That was 19 years ago, and we're still happily married. Whether I'm on the road to perdition is a wholly separate issue.)

Finally, the board gives its support, with reservations, to the latest version of a proposed federal "shield law" to help journalists shield the identity of confidential sources.

Illustration: Ken Fallin For The Times

-- Jon Healey

The police commission picked three finalists in its search for Los Angeles' new police chief, and the editorial board says each possesses many of the qualities needed to succeed atop the LAPD. Just so there won't be any confusion on that point, the board also describes what those qualities might be. The board also notes that two proposed ballot measures are due to be submitted today to enable and call a state constitutional convention, and it all but endorses them in a near-desperate plea for functional governance in California.

On the Op-Ed page, Raphael J. Sonenshein, former executive director of the city's charter reform commission, accuses rookie City Atty. Carmen Trutanich of not understanding what a city attorney is supposed to do in this town. Columnist Tim Rutten gives a highly nuanced defense of the push to reveal who is contributing to efforts in other states to put Prop. 8-style bans on gay marriage on the ballot. Musing about the Northwest Airlines flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles, Peter Garrison, a pilot and contributing editor to Flying magazine, reveals just how boring it is to fly a modern airline jet. And columnist Doyle McManus dissects the Obama administration's decision-making process on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Credit: Ted Rall / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

Columnist Tim Rutten notes the recent complaints about the California initiative process by the state's chief justice and a top fund manager and asks, what to do? The answer is, umm, unclear:

Also on the Op-Ed page, James D. Zirin, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, urges President Obama to hurry up and appoint a cyber security czar because the risks are so great. And hey, you can never have enough czars! And author Barbara Ehrenreich scoffs at a recent study, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," that "purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972." Says Ehrenreich:

On the editorial pages, the board blasts the health insurance lobby for hiring PricewaterhouseCooper to do a hatchet job on the Senate Finance Committee's healthcare reform bill. But it admits that the insurers have a point: The bill falls critically short of the goal of providing universal health insurance. And it argues that the recent botched execution in Ohio, the latest in a string of similar incidents in that state, adds to the evidence that lethal injections don't pass constitutional muster.

Photo credit: Susan Tibbles / For The Times

-- Jon Healey

Not for use with small animals. (EPA/Peter Foley)

Credit Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the takeaway quote from the Supreme Court's oral argument Tuesday about a law punishing the possession or sale of depictions of animal cruelty. Questioning a lawyer for Robert Stevens, a pit-bull enthusiast sentenced to 37 months for selling dog-fighting videos, Alito asked if her First Amendment theory would protect people who wanted to watch the "Human Sacrifice Channel?" Other justices then riffed on the concept in the hypothetical-mongering for which the court is notorious.

Alito's hypo seems a bit less far-fetched when one considers the popularity of WWE, televised hockey games and even The History Channel (which one of my peacenik relatives calls The War Channel). Violence sells, But censors, with support from the courts, usually have  focused on sex instead. What puts obscenity outside the protection of the First Amendment is that it appeals to "prurient interest" -- that is, it's sexually arousing.

Patricia Millett, the lawyer for video vendor Stevens, ratified the "violence OK, sex bad" rationale. She conceded that the law might have survived a First Amendment challenge if it  had been narrowly drawn to punish only the phenomenon that provoked the legislation -- so-called "crush videos" catering to fetishists who are turned on by seeing a woman crush dogs with her high heels. A non-erotic, aesthetic appreciation of dog-fighting, however, is protected.

The sex/violence dichotomy has inspired the familiar joke about the differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to censorship: Conservatives want to ban depictions of sex, liberals want to ban descriptions of violence. But it's rooted in the traditional justification for laws against obscenity: society's interest in preventing debauchery. As a 19th century British judge put it: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In other words, keep reading this and you'll go blind.

That rationale arguably applies to "crush videos," but it's hard to see how it justifies prosecution of the sale of dogfighting videos, which means that Stevens likely will go free. Watching violence against animals is constitutionally protected as long as you don't enjoy it too much. If a Cable TV producer greenlights Alito's idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel, he should be careful to market it to anthropologists, not sadists.

-- Michael McGough

 

Small-government conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg makes a startling argument on today's Op-Ed page: We should make the House of Representatives bigger. A lot bigger, in fact; Goldberg says a Congress with 5,000 members would shake up our nation's calcified two-party system and more closely approximate the kind of democracy the founding fathers intended.

UC Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, debunks arguments that the healthcare bills pending in the House and Senate would be unconstitutional. And obesity experts Kelly D. Brownell and David S. Ludwig argue in favor of a tax on sugar-sweetened sodas, which would help fund healthcare reform programs and lower healthcare costs by decreasing obesity and related ailments such as diabetes.

On the editorial page, the board urges the Obama administration to consider backing new elections in Afghanistan or a transitional government, unless monitors can determine that the country's Aug. 20 election was legitimate.

The editorial board also takes up a gun-rights case and argues, surprisingly enough, in favor of stronger protections for gun owners. Though the board favors measures to reduce gun violence, it thinks the Supreme Court should rule that the 2nd Amendment applies to states as well as the federal government. That's because allowing states to ignore this part of the Bill of Rights could undermine the requirement that they abide by others.

Finally, the board notes that Comcast Corp.'s proposal to buy NBC Universal cuts against the grain of recent media deals, and its effect on the marketplace may be limited. But it will be interesting to watch how the combined company's approach to the Internet might change.

* Cartoon by Rob Rogers / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Republican members of Congress have started spouting Reason magazine-style arguments against the individual mandate in the healthcare reform bills moving through the House and Senate. For example, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) called the mandate "a stunning assault on liberty," and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) declared that "Individuals should maintain their freedom to chose health-care coverage, or not." Setting aside for a moment the support that Republican lawmakers expressed in the not-too-distant past for the individual mandate (including the Republican governor of a certain large West Coast state), it's just ... unseemly for the GOP to stick a shiv in the ribs of the insurance companies they've been protecting throughout this debate.

Remember, the main proponents of the mandate are private insurers, who like it for at least two reasons. It brings a significant number of young, healthy people into the risk pool, which should improve their margins. And it helps solve the "adverse selection" problem that would be caused if insurers were required to offer coverage to everyone, with no increase in price for those with pre-existing conditions. The insurance industry's trade association has agreed to such regulations as part of a package of changes that includes an individual mandate.

The main argument these days against the mandate is that Congress doesn't have the power to impose it. Slate's Timothy Noah has explored this interesting constitutional question, concluding that it is, in fact, legal. It would be more of a slam dunk, IMHO, if Congress allowed insurers to offer policies across state lines, which the proposal from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would do under certain circumstances. Even without interstate policies, I think there's a good case to be made that requiring people to carry health insurance is akin to requiring them to pay into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds -- it's a forced contribution into a national system of shared risk and cost, albeit one administered largely by private entities.

Nevertheless, I'll freely admit that there are compelling arguments on the other side too. It's just strange to hear that position taken by the same Republican lawmakers who fight even the mildest version of a public-plan option on the grounds that it's bad for private insurers.

Updated on Sept. 24 at 2:50 p.m.: I just came across a thorough discussion of the constitutional issues triggered last month by Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, with a follow-up last week by Adler. The posts are well worth reading, along with the comments, if you want to dive further into the weeds.

Photo: Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and John Kyl (R-Ariz.) debate healthcare legislation at the Senate Finance Committee. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

The Opinion Manufacturing Division straddles the ideological divide today, offering red meat to both sides of the aisle. The Times editorial board blasts ACORN, the community organizers at the heart of conservative talk radio's favorite conspiracy theories, for failing to acknowledge and correct its serious internal problems in the wake of "devastating" hidden-camera exposes. And Op-Ed columnist Tim Rutten peers behind the newfound celebrity of Rep. Joe "You lie!" Wilson (R-S.C.) to find all sorts of fringe-group, umm, creativity. In particular, he examines the roots of the tea party movement and the intellectual underpinnings of the "10thers" -- anti-government conservatives who claim the 10th amendment gives state lawmakers authority to reject many acts of Congress and Supreme Court rulings.

Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, David A. Lehrer, president of Los Angeles-based Community Advocates Inc., argues that anti-Semitic attacks are declining -- contrary to dire warnings from the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Similarly, Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection, contends that tragedies such as those involving Dae'von Bailey and Lars Sanchez -- two children killed despite the supervision their families were given by county child-welfare officials -- are the exception, not the norm:

Back among the editorials, the board urges Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign AB 2, a bill by Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate) to limit the ability of health insurers to cancel policies retroactively. And while it praises the announcement that the Irvine Co. would transfer 20,000 acres to Orange County for parks, it calls on the county to reveal more about how it will manage the windfall:

Photo: Police in Nevada gather evidence from an ACORN office in 2008 as part of an investigation into voter fraud. Credit: AP Photo / Jae C. Hong

-- Jon Healey

The change in administrations has led the Department of Homeland Security to adjust its much-maligned policy regarding laptop searches at the border. It's not going to search fewer laptops, iPods or other electronic devices, necessarily; it's just going to take more care not to disclose any sensitive information it finds on them.

As News.com's Declan McCullagh reported, the Obama administration continues to take an extremely permissive view toward the power of federal agents at the border. The new directives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection reiterate the Bush administration's stance that agents have the authority to search any digital storage device entering the country, even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. They'll need to show probable cause only if they want to seize the device or retain copies of its contents. The primary change in policy is more administrative oversight over how the devices and data are handled after they're seized....