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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On Monday's editorial page, The Times takes a look at LAPD Chief William J. Bratton's campaign commercial for city attorney candidate Jack Weiss and doesn't like what it sees.

Bratton, thankfully, is no [Daryl] Gates, but his political activity on behalf of his boss, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is unbecoming, just as the Christopher Commission warned. His endorsement of Weiss for city attorney is worse — not because Weiss is an unworthy candidate but because of the office he is seeking. Should Weiss win, he would be responsible for representing the Police Department and its officers and for negotiating with plaintiffs who bring lawsuits against the LAPD. That argues for a respectful but arm’s length relationship, not one of political debts. Bratton should study his history, and stay out of city politics.

The page also calls for the release of Uighurs held improperly at Guantanamo Bay, and notes that the moral argument against the death penalty is only enhanced by the fact that holding condemned prisoners pending execution is prohibitively expensive.

On the Op-Ed page, USC law professor Clare Pastore makes the case for legal services funding and "civil Gideon" -- recognizing a right to provide counsel to the indigent in civil cases just as the Sixth Amendment requires in criminal cases.

Cheryl Benard, co-director of the Alternative Strategies Initiative at the Rand Corp., says the international community isn't helping in Afghanistan when it obsesses about Hamid Karzai, talks about removing him, and plays into the nation's "dysfunctional personality cult."

To venerate new leaders as demigods, only to demote them to villains within the space of a few years, is not a recipe for successful nation-building. Afghans need to honor the laws and the institutions of their new democracy and to stop focusing so excessively on the individuals who govern them. They need standards of conduct, rules obeyed both by the leader and his kin and cronies, pragmatic expectations — and, when they sour on their leaders, an established process of political succession that does not include murder.

And columnist Gregory Rodriguez examines the societal costs of loneliness and alienation.

We have to stop looking at declining civic participation as a primarily political problem that is solvable through increased activism. Although activism may increase participation, which in turn translates into less social isolation, it does not get to the deeper problem of the quality of connections we form with the people who surround us on a day-to-day basis.

*Photo: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Yes, it's raining, but the time has never been more perfect for tighter restrictions on water use, the editorial board suggests. Even stricter limits are coming, so we're better off working out the kinks on this now.

The sooner we get into the habit of using less water, the easier that cutback will be. The DWP estimates that outdoor irrigation -- running sprinklers -- makes up 30% of residential water use in Los Angeles. Limiting sprinkler use to Mondays and Thursdays would be a simple-to-remember (and simple-to-enforce) way to reduce waste. Ideally, we'd like to see Angelenos change their habits in longer-lasting ways, such as landscaping with drought-tolerant plants. But as a means of cutting use and promoting mindfulness, these restrictions make sense.

The board mourns waste in the federal economic stimulus package, saying several of the allocations offer little hope that they will jolt the economy or even provide jobs. And though the board isn't much happier with the state budget deal, it recognizes that the choice right now isn't between this and a better budget, but between this and the state's financial meltdown.

On the other side of the fold, Australian journalist Gerard Wright ponders the lessons to be learned from the disastrous wildfires in his country that killed close to 200 people.

They will examine how a decade of prosperity encouraged suburban families to build dream houses in more rural areas, and how many of those families never learned the self-sufficiency and community spirit that is part of the Australian rural ethos.

And, Facebook or not, columnist Joel Stein doesn't want to know 25 things about you, and he's willing to bet that you don't want to know 25 things about him, even though he's quite willing to tell you all about them, anyway.

Illustration by Lisa Benson/Washington Post Writers Group

The Opinion Manufacturing Division offers two very different views on the birth of octuplets in Bellflower. Author William H. Woodwell Jr., citing the troubles his family experienced with twin daughters born 16 weeks early, throws a glass of cold water on the celebratory coverage of the Bellflower babies. Extremely premature births impose tremendous costs, Woodwell argues, and often lead to less than fully functional children. That's why he calls for a crackdown on fertility treatments and -- here's the ugly part -- culling some of the multiple fetuses they sometimes create:

Fertility doctors must be held more accountable for their actions. The medically assisted birth of triplets or higher should be viewed as the equivalent of malpractice.

In addition, when fertility treatments yield triplets or more, we need to promote responsible decision-making on the part of parents -- chiefly, by encouraging or even somehow requiring them to engage in multifetal reduction.

Sorry, but that sounds too much like China's brutal one-child policy to me. (Remember, irate letter writers, that Op-Ed writers do not express the Views of This Newspaper.) On the other side of the spread, the editorial board takes a much more equanimious approach to the event. It notes the great challenges that the births pose to the family, yet it doesn't assume the worst:

People might cluck, but then people are always ready to cluck at the parenting decisions of others. We're more inclined, as a society, to define and foresee problems in eccentricity than to think that perhaps it will turn out to be simply extraordinary.

Elsewhere in the editorial stack, the board blasts Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) for trying to make President Obama's choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, promise not to prosecute a set of potential defendants (U.S. intelligence officers who used "enhanced interrogation techniques") before he's confirmed. And it praises President Obama for starting his efforts in the Middle East on the right note, giving his first official television interview as president to the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al Arabiya. Hmm. I wonder if Obama's appearance drew more viewers than Al Jazeera did when it aired its last Osama bin Laden tape.

Back in Op-Ed land, freelance writer Lee Gapay offers a rare bit of unadulterated good news: He's finally found space in a subsidized housing project for seniors after 6 1/2 years spent living in his pickup truck. (You may remember Gapay from his last piece about being homeless, which ran on Thanksgiving Day.) And columnist Tim Rutten writes that the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to rescind the excommunications of four anti-Semitic bishops in a traditionalist Catholic sect wasn't merely an inside-the-Vatican issue, but also a blow to religious liberty and tolerance.

Photo: Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center/Getty Images

When is a budget not a budget? When it's the California Republicans' specious proposal for cutting $22 billion in state spending. The Times editorial board today explains the difference between the GOP's offer and a real attempt to negotiate:

The problem with the $22-billion GOP plan as a starting point is that it doesn't bring the state the cash it needs today. Instead, it's in some sense a shopping list of things the party's lawmakers wish hadn't happened over the last 10 years.

The board urges Washington to give General Motors and Chrysler some short-term help, then come up with a better reason not to let the companies go into Chapter 11. It also calls on California to implement the recommendations in the state EPA's "Green Chemistry" report.

On the Op-Ed side of the ledger, former Screen Actors Guild President Melissa Gilbert exhorts fellow thespians to vote against authorizing a strike. A work stoppage in the midst of a recession is not just a "foolhardy" idea, Gilbert writes, but also a move SAG simply can't afford:

The cost of the current negotiations, which have dragged on since the spring, must be approaching $1 million. The guild reports that it has about $48 million in reserves, but nearly every penny is already allocated for operating costs. Where are the millions more needed to fund a strike, including the staff overtime and travel expenses that are inevitable?

Columnist Tim Rutten looks peers into the staggeringly large Ponzi scheme allegedly perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, a regulated securities broker-dealer, and sees -- gasp! -- the bitter fruits of deregulation. Hmm. I thought Madoff was accused of perpetrating much of the fraud during the years Eliot Spitzer -- Wall Street's self-appointed regulator-in-chief -- was New York's crusading attorney general. Perhaps Spitzer needed more rules in the securities rulebook. Or maybe he was just distracted?

Rounding out the day's brother-can-you-spare-a-dime theme, physician Jan Gurley, who treats homeless patients in San Francisco, calls on the better off among us to spread some holiday cheer to those living on the streets:

When you personally give a gift to a homeless person, you aren't playing Santa -- you are Santa. I'm a doctor who treats the homeless, and I can promise you, no one else is likely to drop off a present out of the blue to the huddle of human misery you pass by every day.

At a loss for what to give a stranger who has nothing and needs everything? Check out Gurley's suggestions here.

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

The Times editorial board weighs in today on President-elect Barack Obama's economic brain trust, especially two top advisors who represent a very different set of constituents. New York Federal Reserve chief Timothy F. Geithner, Obama's pick for Treasury secretary, has helped funnel billions in tax dollars toward financial institutions, while former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, Obama's choice for director of the National Economic Council, favors vast spending on another economic stimulus package. It's an appropriate approach given the extent of our financial troubles, but the new administration needs to do more than just broaden its focus beyond Wall Street: It needs to come up with a better rationale for when and when not to intervene in the market.

We also editorialize on the increasingly bizarre trial of the men accused of killing Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. After a military court decided to open its doors to journalists, they were abruptly shut again by a judge who claimed jurors feared for their safety -- yet one of the jurors subsequently told radio listeners that the jurors hadn't sought a closed court and had refused to sign a statement requesting a media ban. The Russian justice system itself is on trial in this case, so the judge needs to find a way to guarantee both jurors' safety and the security of state secrets.

Lastly, The Times points out that the still-undecided state Senate race between Republican Tony Strickland and Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson doesn't make a strong case for redistricting -- but it's a good idea anyway. Strickland and Jackson ran the kind of polarizing, old-school campaign common in today's "safe" districts, even though their 19th Senate District contains a pretty even match of Republicans and Democrats. The idea of Proposition 11 on the Nov. 4 ballot is to end gerrymandering and make more districts similar to the 19th, with the goal of forcing politicians to listen to a broader cross-section of their constituents and thus encouraging more centrist lawmakers. It's a solid notion, even if it didn't quite work in the case of Strickland and Jackson.

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Jonah Goldberg calls public-school teachers' unions "arguably the single worst mainstream institution in our country today." Goldberg is tired of conservatives accusing President-elect Barack Obama of hypocrisy for sending his children to expensive private schools while rejecting vouchers that would allow poor families to do the same, and even more tired of Democratic politicians in thrall to teachers' unions. Both sides simply need to stop tolerating awful schools.

Also, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jonathan Hafetz, who represents a Qatari man arrested in 2001 and never tried because he was labeled an "enemy combatant," calls his client's detention "a radical departure from America's deepest values, a moment when our country lost its bearings."

For more than 200 years, America has stood by the principle that people can't be imprisoned without being charged. It not only embodies the country's ideals but also reflects a practical understanding that the criminal justice system remains the most effective way of fighting terrorism.

Finally, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urges Americans to do a better job of looking after their veterans and the families of those who have been killed in action.

We live in a country that doesn't force our young men and women to pick up arms and go fight. We don't have to. They do it willingly, even eagerly. Not because they enjoy danger or killing or sacrifice, but rather in spite of those things. They serve and they work so hard so that someday -- maybe -- our children and grandchildren might not have to. All they want in return is our gratitude, 100% of it. It's not too much to ask.

* Illustration by Jonathan Twingley / For The Times

For someone who doesn't seem to get much traction within her own administration, Sheila Bair at the FDIC seems to be having more influence than anyone else in Washington over how to respond to the subprime meltdown and the resulting wave of foreclosures.

Bair started calling last year for lenders to rework potentially troubled mortgages en masse by converting adjustable rate loans into fixed-rate ones. The administration instead promoted the Hope Now Alliance, a voluntary effort by lenders to adjust troubled mortgages on a case-by-case basis. The result: far more homes went into foreclosure each month than loans were modified (according to Hope Now, only recently has the pace of modifications caught up to the pace of defaults). Worse, it took lenders months to start offering meaningful adjustments in interest rates and monthly payments, rather than simply tacking unpaid interest and penalties onto the back end of loans.

This year, Bair set the tone again when the FDIC took over IndyMac Bank and its portfolio of poorly underwritten (and rapidly defaulting) mortgages. It declared a moratorium on foreclosures as it examined the portfolio, determining which mortgages met or could meet a standard level of affordability -- a 38% debt-to-income ratio (that is, monthly payments no greater than 38% of the borrower's monthly pay) -- given certain types of loan modifications, including steep but temporary reductions in interest, longer payback periods and delayed repayment of a portion of the loan balance. About two-thirds of the at-risk borrowers qualified for help, although the agency initially had trouble reaching many of those borrowers. If this kind of plan were implemented widely, the FDIC said last week, about 1.5 million homeowners could be saved from default.

Bair's approach  has been embraced by California lawmakers who've been active on the foreclosure issue, notably Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), as well as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The main difference between the governor and lawmakers is the length of the moratoria they propose -- the Democrats want 120 days, Schwarzenegger proposed 90. That's a minor detail when compared to their agreement on the need to pressure lenders to make more sweeping and aggressive moves to avert foreclosures. Lieu's bill has hit a snag in Sacramento, yet the ideas he and the governor espouse reflect an emerging consensus on how to handle the foreclosure crisis. Sparked by Bair -- outside of Washington, at least -- it reflects how deftly she's handled the moral hazard issue. The FDIC's approach doesn't save lenders or borrowers from the pain of having made bad choices -- none of the borrower's debt would be forgiven (a costly move that has little support among banks), nor would lenders or investors recoup the face value of the loans. But it would help lenders recover more than they would if they repossessed the home, while giving borrowers time to find a less calamatous way out of their troubles.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Times' editorial board gets right to it, blasting President-elect Barack Obama's first choice for his cabinet. According to the board, Eric H. Holder Jr. has the resume to be Attorney General, but not the perceived independence:

[I]n the aftermath of the reckless politicization of the Justice Department under George W. Bush, the wisest course for Barack Obama would be to choose an eminent lawyer who shares the administration's legal philosophy but can't be caricatured as a presidential insider.

For all of his impressive qualities, former Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. doesn't fit that description.

Wow, a two-fer -- going after Obama and Bush in the same piece! Now that's editorial gold. Elsewhere in the stack, the board urges Congress and the incoming administration to start thinking now about how to eliminate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are due to emerge from federal conservatorship in a little more than a year. And with Somali pirates now attacking oil tankers, the board says it's time for the rest of the world to tackle the problems in the buccaneers' home country.

Over on the op-ed page, columnist Tim Rutten writes about a new federal report that confirmed the existence of a chillingly widespread ailment long denied by Republican and Democratic administrations: Gulf War syndrome. Science writer Margaret Wertheim observes World Toilet Day -- oddly enough, it doesn't coincide with World Newspaper Day -- by noting some the benefits that flushable chamber pots have produced for society (while also lamenting that many communities have yet to obtain them). And author Dave Zinn writes about the increasing politicization of U.S. athletes brought about by Obama's campaign against John McCain:

Howard Cosell called it "rule No. 1 of the Jockocracy": the idea that sports and politics must never mix. This last election season though, that iron wall separating the two worlds wasn't merely breached, it was flattened.

2001 file photo of Eric Holder is by Mark Wilson/Newsmakers.

Rescuing homeowners who ventured into their own unwise and unaffordable mortgages isn't a popular  idea, the Times editorial board acknowledges, but it holds real value for all of us:

Such aid also is consistent with the principle of intervening when the market can't help itself. Despite the banking industry's voluntary efforts to help borrowers, statistics compiled by the industry show that the number of loan modifications only recently has caught up to the number of borrowers starting the foreclosure process.

The board also advises the state drop its hasty decision requiring all eighth graders to take algebra by 2011, and begins a series of handy endorsement recaps to help you figure out all those names and issues on the Tuesday ballot.

On the other side of the fold, op-ed writer Jenny Price tells the story of her brother's murder and why this is no reason to approve the "victim's rights" promised by the Proposition 9 campaign.

Punishment for murder should not depend on how angry and bereft survivors are, or how beloved the victim was. It should not be proportional to the size of the victim's family, or to how many family members are willing to go to court or a parole hearing, or to how long they are willing to keep going to hearings.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute is pleased that no one seems to be talking any more about paying reparations to the descendants of slaves in this country, and Joel Stein asserts that he's an erudite kinda guy even if he doesn't know at what temperature water boils, what language they speak in Iraq or--well, a bunch of other things.

Photo by Damian Dovarganes/AP

Are John McCain and Sarah Palin stoking the fires of polarization and bigotry, or are such accusations just a canard that liberals have been using against conservatives for generations? The Times editorial board and columnist Jonah Goldberg take starkly different positions on that issue today.

In the third installment of its "Position Papers for the Next President" series, The Times argues that the next president will be tasked with bridging partisan divisions and slowing the "decline of civility" that afflicts modern American culture. "This campaign is more crass and more virulent because McCain made it so," the editorial states, blaming the GOP candidate for the xenophobic attitudes of some of his supporters. To Goldberg, meanwhile, such notions reflect the hypocrisy of liberals who decry McCain's backers for calling Democrat Barack Obama a terrorist while ignoring the intolerance of Obama supporters who put "Abort Sarah Palin" bumper stickers on their cars.

Speaking of undignified campaigns, English professor Gillian Silverman says modern presidential debates have got nothing on the famous contest between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 -- in those days, politicians really knew how to fire up the crowd. And homeless services expert Joel John Roberts and English teacher Charles E. Diaz give their perspectives on John Robert McGraham, a Los Angeles homeless man who was doused with gasoline and set on fire last week. Roberts says we can avoid such tragedies with better homeless programs, while Diaz remembers the panhandler who taught him a lesson about human dignity. Finally, back on the editorial page, The Times finds for the defense in a Supreme Court case against Philip Morris USA, which it says is being wrongfully accused of unfairly marketing "light" cigarettes.

*Illustration by Roman Genn / For the Times