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

The New York Times reports that conservatives  have been drawing up a 10-point checklist -- to be printed on litmus paper? -- against which the Republican National Committee should measure prospective GOP candidates.

There's nothing surprising about the contents of the proposed creed (for example, opposition to government funding of abortion and President Obama's "socialist agenda"). Nor is the idea of a conservative loyalty test. It was implicit in the muscling by true believers of a Republican nominee for a House seat in New York who didn't toe the ideological line.

Never mind that Democrats captured that seat after the withdrawal of the scorned RINO (Republican in Name Only). Conservative Republicans increasingly seem willing to sacrifice electoral success on the altar of philosophical purity, and moderate Republicans are increasingly are an endangered species. That's good news for Democrats, but bad news for those of us who believe that a modicum of diversity in both parties is conducive to compromise and good government.

But back to the surprising thing about the proposed Index of Acceptability: the fact that 70% is a passing grade. Answer seven questions right and you get an endorsement and funding. Get six right and you flunk.  ("Bummer! I messed up that abortion question. Maybe I can do something for extra credit.") If too many candidates fall short, the party may have to start grading on the curve.

-- Michael McGough

Just when you thought the era of bigger-is-always-better was over, the Oasis of the Seas heads on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic to Florida.

This isn't just a really, really, really big cruise ship -- 40% larger than the previous title holder. It looks like my grandparents' Bronx apartment building perched on a barge and topped with a flying saucer. The $1.5-billion ship has entire neighborhoods, seven of them, and no wonder. With capacity for 6,300 passengers and more than 2,000 crew members, this isn't exactly the setting for an intimate cruise. By lowering its smokestacks, the 20-story-high ship was barely able to squeak under a Danish bridge on its way from Finland. And for those who yearn for the biggest and newest in travel, its home port will be Fort Lauderdale, with passenger cruises scheduled to begin in December.

So far, cabins are selling well, reports Royal Caribbean, owner of oasis of the Seas, even with the ship's  urban-development design and curious name. An oasis is a wet, lush part of the desert, and even though it has come to mean a refuge of any sort, I can't help the picture of passengers' feet sloshing in puddles of water on deck in the midst of the Caribbean.

Photo credit: Johnny Holmen / EPA

-- Karin Klein

Vikram Pandit, chief executive of embattled Citigroup, stopped by The Times this morning to answer questions posed by the editorial board and editors from the news pages. He dropped no bombshells -- alas, that rarely happens in these sessions. Instead, he gave a cautiously optimistic view of the economy, the housing market and even Citi's mortgage portfolio, saying that low interest rates are helping even borrowers in risky interest-only loans. He also said that Citi has the capability to buy out the federal government's $20-billion stake in its preferred shares (the feds also own 34% of Citi's common stock, which Pandit said the Treasury Department could sell whenever it wished), but that the company was still talking to regulators about the timing of any exit from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He said the credit crunch felt by small and mid-size businesses stemmed from the problems at regional banks and the shrunken "shadow banking" system. And he offered a few thoughts on what the government should do about financial institutions that are too big to fail.

Here are excerpts of the session:

How is Citi doing?

How is the economy?

The government's stake in Citi

Citi and Treasury Secretary Geithner

Paying back TARP funds

The housing market's outlook

The ongoing credit crunch

The too-big-to-fail problem

Insuring against huge failures

Bring back Glass-Steagall?

Photo: Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit testifies on Capitol Hill in February. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images

-- Jon Healey

Departing Police Chief William Bratton prods immigration culture warriors today with an op-ed explaining why the LAPD doesn't, and shouldn't, participate in the controversial 287(g) program, which gives local law enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents. Turning police into de facto Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harms community policing and discourages witnesses who might be illegal immigrants from coming forward.

Also on the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg argues that trying to limit carbon emissions to fight global warming is a pointless waste of money because it can't solve the problem; better to invest in technological solutions and adjusting to a warmer world. And think tank scholars Leo Michel and Robert Hunter argue that U.S. allies are already doing plenty of heavy lifting as part of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, so American officials should do less lecturing and more listening if they want more cooperation.

Speaking of Afghanistan, the Editorial page says the country can't be pacified simply by sending more troops. That has become abundantly clear in the face of increased suicide bombings in Iraq, which like Afghanistan has been slow to build a credible government.

We also send a rare love note to the California Legislature, pointing out two genuinely worthwhile bills that will help cities make better use of water, an increasingly precious resource in this dry and crowded state. And we weigh in on Operation Gatekeeper, the federal effort started in 1994 to tighten border security in a five-mile stretch from the Pacific Ocean to San Ysidro. Though the program has been successful in reducing crossings in that area, it has had an unintended consequence that must be addressed: Deaths of people trying to cross the desert farther to the east have skyrocketed.

Editorial cartoon by Tom Toles / Washington Post

I don't usually consider Facebook posts to be worthy of transplanting to a (cough cough) professional blog like this one, but I'm making an exception for an FB thread about a Washington Post story.

The article focused on Georgetown University sophomore who has advertised for a personal assistant who would handle tasks "such as organizing his closet, dropping him off and picking him up from work, scheduling haircuts, putting gas in the car and taking it in for service, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry (although the assistant will be paid only for the time spent loading, unloading and folding clothes, not the entire laundry cycle)." The pay: $10-$12 an hour.

One response was whimsical: "Just this morning I told my mom I needed a PA. She laughed at me. Then [she] saw this article on Facebook and told me about it." (Oh, oh, Parent On Social Media Alert!) But the Facebooker who introduced the subject considered the student's quest  "the most egregious of all insults."

 I weighed in ...

New FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, fresh off his speech to a wireless industry conference in San Diego, stopped by the Times this afternoon to talk to the editorial board and several members of the news staff about broadband policy, Net neutrality, media ownership and other items on the commission's plate. He was, shall we say, circumspect. At this point, almost every issue seems to boil down to a process question for Genachowski, who was far less willing than the two previous chairmen (interim and otherwise) to suggest what policies he'd like the commission to adopt. But hey, it's early yet -- he's been on the job for barely three months.

Here's the entire conversation, which lasted about 55 minutes. Many of the questions were asked by me, with Joe Flint chiming in on media consolidation and decency regulation, Jim Granelli on wireless Net neutrality, John Corrigan on the new chairman's view of his predecessors, David Sarno on wireless billing issues and Mark Milian on Google Voice:

The full session

And here are links to segments devoted to specific topics:

The DTV transition

Media ownership and consolidation

His predecessors at the FCC

Net neutrality

Wireless Net neutrality

Wireless broadband

Decency rules beyond broadcast TV

Wireless billing outrages

The Google Voice inquiry

Promoting broadband access, investment and adoption

-- Jon Healey

Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard, gets the Op-Ed page rolling this morning by accusing President Obama of being organized labor's Santa Claus. The First Community Organizer may believe that unionization helps lift workers into the middle class, Continetti writes, but the numbers don't support that argument:

Speaking of a unionized workforce, columnist Tim Rutten urges the state Senate to waive some California environmental rules to let developer Ed Roski Jr. build a football stadium in the City of Industry. Why?

Alllll-righty then. Closing out the page, Anna Husarska, senior policy advisor at the International Rescue Committee, laments the "huge human cost" of the Taliban's operations in Pakistan's Swat Valley and the government's counteroffensive. The image above is an illustration of the psychic toll; it's a drawing by a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley named Sheema.

On the other half of the opinion pages, the Times editorial board blasts the L.A. Department of Water and Power for the fabulous parting gifts it's planning to shower on departing chief H. David Nahai. We like how Nahai defied union leaders (the Opinion page's méchants du jour) to bring in more renewable power from outside the district, but we still don't see the need to pay him his salary for the rest of the year:

The board also says the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines for online advertisers could put too much scrutiny on bloggers and amateur product reviewers. And it warns that the Supreme Court's review of a case involving the giant cross in California's Mojave National Preserve threatens to "blow a gaping hole" in the 1st Amendment's wall between church and state.

-- Jon Healey

• $1.65 trillion added to the national debt, a 28% increase;
• A debt-to-GDP ratio of 11.2%, a post-war record;
• A $4.3 trillion increase in projected deficits over the coming decade, up 300% from the Congressional Budget Office's estimate last year.

CRFB President Maya MacGuineas cut policymakers a little slack, saying that many of the steps that drove up the deficit were needed to strengthen the economy. "But if not accompanied by efforts to reduce the long-term fiscal gap," she added, "they come at the expense of future growth and prosperity."

Lawmakers still have time to establish a bit of deficit-cutting credibility -- 12 of the 13 annual appropriations bills that were due by Oct. 1 are still working their way through Congress. Unfortunately, there are signs that some powerful lawmakers (in the Senate particularly) are more concerned about steering dollars to pet projects than saving money for taxpayers. Granted, earmarks are a minuscule part of the budget problem. But if Congress can't get the small stuff right, how likely is it that lawmakers will take the hard but meaningful steps to close the budget gap?

Incidentally, the liberal Center for American Progress added its voice today to the anti-deficit chorus, issuing a primer on the problem from a left-of-center point of view. Sounding a bit like editorial writers, the authors say that there are no easy choices (No, really?). They also offer a less-than-dispassionate view of how we got in the mess we're currently in, treating the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 as costly deficit boosters rather than acknowledging their role in stimulating the economy. The center's analysis gives short shrift to the growing economy's role in solving the short-term budget problems of the 1990s, and all but ignores the complex interrelationship between taxes, spending and GDP growth.  Nevertheless, the authors paint a clear picture of the structural problems facing lawmakers, and explain why neither spending cuts nor tax hikes alone can close the gap. 

-- Jon Healey

The Times editorial board laments the departure of Guy Mehula, the man who oversaw the recent surge construction for the Los Angeles Unified School District. That program operated with an efficiency and competence rarely found at LAUSD, the board asserts, and those qualities are threatened by Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines' reported plans to supervise the unit more closely:

Elsewhere on the editorial page, the board defends Facebook's handling of a user-generated poll asking whether President Obama should be assassinated. And it urges lawmakers to grow spines and stop blocking the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to maximum security federal prisons in the U.S.

On the Op-Ed side of the fold, columnist Tim Rutten runs through the list of policy challenges facing President Obama -- the jobless recovery, rising health insurance premiums, the war in Afghanistan, the Iranian leadership's nuclear ambitions -- and finds no easy choices. Nina Hachigian, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says the Chinese government is sending mixed signals about its willingness to play ball with international organizations to address global problems: And writer Kathryn Wilkens of Upland muses about the life and death of the mission fig tree that had anchored her garden for decades:

Insert your ironic comment about this article appearing in dead tree media here.

Illustration: Blair Thornley / For The Times

-- Jon Healey