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

Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values" -- insisted on reviewing and tweaking an article about his appearance at a private school in New York. The student newspaper at the Dalton School published a tantalizing editor's note saying: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints."

Then I read the Times article again and discerned some shades of ethical gray. It's true, as Frank D. LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said, that "in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech." But apparently Kennedy's purpose wasn't to vet the article as a whole but to reconsider the felicity of some of his phraseology.

It wasn't clear whether he made this request in advance. But if he did, and the agreement was confined to allowing him to polish his prose, I'm less shocked but still somewhat appalled. My own practice as a reporter was to refuse at the outset to show my completed story to an interviewee. As for quotes, I never would allow someone to retract or rephrase an answer because of second thoughts about its political effect.

But I made an exception when I did a series of interviews with prominent intellectuals. One law professor, in explaining his constitutional philosophy, used an analogy in reference to the Constitution. He later called me to suggest a different analogy that he said more precisely made his point. I let him change it, because the whole purpose of the piece was to let him present his thinking in his own words.

The difference here is that the Kennedy story was an account of an event at which an audience heard the justice's original words. That tips the scales of journalistic justice. Kennedy said what he said; if he wanted to correct it, he should have written a letter to the editor.

Actually, there's a precedent. Last year the court ruled that the death penalty couldn't be imposed for rape. Writing for the court, Kennedy cited as proof that the penalty was cruel and unusual the fact that, while 26 states and the federal government, had the death penalty, "only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for the rape of a child." After the decision, a blogger pointed out that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed the death sentence in the rape of a child, a fact the court had overlooked

The court added a footnote rectifying its omission -- but it didn't blot out the original language.

--Michael McGough

Chances are that Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward in Louisiana will get along just fine without the services of Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace who refused to perform a wedding for an interracial couple. The marriages don't last, Bardwell claimed, and the children are worse off. Bardwell's the one who didn't last on this round; he resigned, the state announced today.

In an interview reported by CNN, Bardwell said, "I needed to step down because they was going to take me to court, and I was going to lose."

Actually, the reason he needed to step down is that he's approximately half a century behind the rest of the nation when it comes to civil rights.

The couple were married elsewhere and are now suing Bardwell and his wife, Beth -- who they claim asked them if they were a "mixed couple" and told them they'd have to go to another parish to wed.

Keith Bardwell sees it all as a matter of conscience, and that might be the one point on which he and I agree. "I found out I can't be a justice of the peace and have a conscience," he complained. Conscience does play the key role in this sad, stupid affair: If the man can't obey the law, he should have been honorable enough not to take the job in the first place.

--Karin Klein

Inasmuch as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seems incapable of embarrassment at its own actions, I’ll have to do the blushing by proxy.

 

My colleague Garrett Therolf is one of the two or three reporters left who regularly covers the five enormously powerful supervisors and county officialdom. As he reported, even those few are too many for the Supes: they’re being banished from the hallways and back rooms where they have been able to buttonhole the county officials and department heads who buzz about there.

 

The reason for the ban?  Those two or three reporters are creating human ‘’traffic jams.’’

 

The noive. The sheer brass.

 

The county’s backstage is chock-a-block with, as Garrett wrote, ‘’the lobbyists, union representatives and other advocates’’ to whom the memo did not apply....

Now that covert videos have shown widespread law-breaking at gun shows, the Times calls for a couple of changes, including a federal law like California's requiring that all gun sales be channeled through licensed dealers who must perform a background check. The board also chides Cal State San Luis Obispo for caving in to pressure from the owner of the Harris Ranch beef company, who didn't like the idea of food reformer and author Michael Pollan speaking at the school. The school reduced Pollan's rule to panelist, a craven abandonment of the principle of academic freedom

On the other side of the fold, a senior fellow at the Council of Public Relations argues that there is value to opening dialogue with North Korea, even if that particular olive branch isn't going to bear fruit any time in the near future. And a board member of the Friends of the World Food Program explains why school lunches in developing countries could be our best tool against global violence. The food attracts hungry children to school, where their education contributes to a more rational society.

Finally, Times staffer Paul Whitefield worries about what he should do with the $100 bill he found on the sidewalk. It could have been money for a child's birthday gift from grandparents; it might be someone's last $100, meant to see him or her through for a week. But it's really mine, so Paul can just hand it over and feel at peace.

Photo: Dean Lewins / AFP / Getty Images

-- Karin Klein  

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

 

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

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

Among the famously rude moments of the last week -- and there were a lot of them, weren't there? -- probably only one speaker is really sorry.

Not that Serena Williams necessarily is feeling pain for the line referee to whom she reportedly said some truly, um, over-the-line things about the possibility that a tennis ball would find its way down the woman's gullet via Williams' hand. Though treated as a physical threat -- and to some extent it was -- the outburst sounded more like the tantrum of a woman who feels her stardom elevates her above the rank of mere tennis officials. Make a call against me, the message went, and you will feel how powerful I am and how I can destroy the lives of mere mortals.

Williams notably was without apology after the kerfuffle, though she apologized today. Of course she's sorry. Her loudmouthed queen-bee moment lost her the match and ten thousand bucks in fines.

There are no such consequences for Kanye West after he jumped on stage during the MTV Video Music Awards during Taylor Swift's acceptance speech to announce that really Beyonce's video was way superior. Because of course everything considers West the definitive arbiter in such matters, right? West is all about apologizing today, which gives him yet another day of the publicity he probably wanted in the first place.

And then, of course, there's Rep. Joe Wilson, from whom Democrats can never hear enough apologies for his "You lie!" outburst during President Obama's speech. The South Carolina congressman's apology was insincere, Democratic legislators insist, delivered only at the behest of Republican leaders, and therefore he should have to apologize on the House floor or face censure. Why, because his apology will be so much more sincere if it is forced by Democratic politicians rather than Republican?

We would include former Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who resigned and issued an apology after his inadvertently public comments about sexual exploits, but even he doesn't seem quite clear about what he was sorry for. The day after, he said that even though he had made the comments for which he was sorry, it didn't actually mean he kissed (and supposedly spanked) and told.

Apologies, consequences, whatever, the proof of remorse is in future actions. Will any of these people act differently after their apologies, sincere or not? In at least one case, sure. Duvall will absolutely be checking to see whether the microphone is on.

Photos: Serena Williams. Credit Timothy A. Clancy / AFP / Getty Images. Kanye West. Credit: Noel Vasquez / Getty Images. Michael Duvall. Credit: Hector Amezcua / Associated Press.

-- Karin Klein

 

The Opinion pages mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by looking at two very different aspects. Author Rebecca Solnit writes about the failure of the terrorists to terrorize in New York on that day, as ordinary people reacted with calm, generosity and bravery under the most fearful of circumstances:

A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped and saw the Arabic inscription on Farman's pendant. Then, "with a deep Brooklyn accent, he said, 'Brother, if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let's get the hell out of here.' He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren't for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris."

The editorial board looks at another effort that isn't going all that well: the war in Afghanistan.

But today, the situation in Afghanistan is grim. Taliban insurgents have been regaining ground while U.S. military and Afghan civilian casualties are on the rise and the support of the American public is eroding. Far from vanquished, Al Qaeda is largely residing in the borderlands of Pakistan.

Afghans are increasingly fed up with the corruption and incompetence of President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government. Now Karzai's reelection is in dispute. Government election officials say he won a first-round victory with 54% of the vote in last month's balloting, but the independent Electoral Complaints Commission says it has "clear and convincing" evidence of fraud, and it has ordered a partial recount. Karzai must win fairly or face a runoff. Simply stated, there can be no good argument for risking American lives in support of a government that is considered illegitimate by its own people.

Altogether, the board concludes, the burden of proof is on President Obama to show why we should have a continued military presence in the country.

The board also considers the case of former Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who resigned after his, um, unofficial speech to a colleague about his sexual exploits. It's bad enough that a state legislator was voting in line with the interests of a power company while sleeping with its lobbyist, but why wasn't the assemblyman to whom Duvall was boasting disturbed by the ethical lapses and doing something about it?

Finally, on the Op-Ed page, an environment writer bemoans the loss of Van Jones from the president's environment team. Far from a radical, Jones has evolved into a pragmatic environmentalist, Judith Lewis writes.

Photo: A 2002 memorial for World Trade Center victims shines two columns of light skyward from where the towers stood. Credit: Peter Morgan / Reuters

--Karin Klein