This should never have happened. That she’s been rehired is a good thing, but for pete’s sake, how can anyone justify this to begin with?

Off with their heads! May the people responsible be ineligible for another legal position for the rest of their lives! How dare they mess with this attorney’s life like this?

Mormon church officials, facing an ongoing investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission, Friday reported nearly $190,000 in previously unlisted assistance to the successful campaign for Prop. 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Now there’s a huge surprise.

Up until Friday, the Mormon church had denied any direct financial support for the campaign beyond a reported $2,078 spent for bringing church Elder L. Whitney Clayton to California.

The report filed Friday contained few details about how the money was spent.

[...]

While the deadline for the report, which covers the period from July 1 to Dec. 31, is Monday, many campaign contributions by major donors and independent committees must be reported within days after they’re made.

The final reports are due today, because U.S. District Judge Morrison England late last week refused to exempt the yes-on-8 campaign from making their filings today.

If the Prop. 8 campaign was exempted from disclosure because of reports of harassments of individual donors, said Deputy Attorney General Zackery Morazzini, the same case could be made for any controversial initiative. Courts would have to “keep the entire California electorate in the dark as to who was funding these ballot measures,” he said.

Even if there have been illegal reprisals, that would be insufficient reason to grant a wholesale exemption for a multimillion-dollar initiative campaign, England said. He also rejected the Prop. 8 campaign’s argument that the $100 disclosure limit established in 1974 should be increased for inflation, saying some states require reports of contributions as low as $25 and the Supreme Court has never invalidated them.

[ref:Prop. 8 campaign can’t hide donors’ names]

Interesting to see what comes out today that the yes-on-8 campaign was so anxious not to have come out.

In 2001, Chicago Public Radio interviewed then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama about civil rights. Over the weekend, someone posted excerpts of the interview, edited to misrepresent Obama’s statements. The item is now catching national attention.

The twist here is that, when heard in the context of the whole show, Obama’s position is distinctly misrepresented by the You Tube posting. Taken in context, Obama is evaluating the historical successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement—and, ironically, he says the Supreme Court was a failure in cases that it took on a role of redistributing resources.

“The Constitution of California currently sees all of our children and grandchildren as equal … Why would you change that?”

Archer gives a summary of the divorce judgment which is online (lengthy PDF) for all to peruse.

The summary is Classic Archer.

And, yes, I trundled off to read the PDF (well, not thoroughly and not all of it) and Archer did indeed capture the spirit of the Judge’s decision.

Yipes.

(I confess that I’d forgotten who McGreevy was and then it was, oh, yeah. New Jersey. That Governor. The long suffering wife. The confessions of homosexuality. The aide who swore there’d been Friday night threesomes for years. Now I remember. Lovely.)

Yay! Hooray! Equality!

Now onward to November when the California Protection of Marriage Act (a constitutional amendment) will probably be on the ballot to read:

SECTION 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution. to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Bah.

Today’s California Supreme Court decision [PDF]

The florist sez he told her he probably couldn’t match exactly the color she wanted. He provided pastel pink and green hydrangeas when the bride wanted dark rust and green ones.

Ruined her day, it did.

Bride is an attorney and is suing for $400K in restitution and damages.

And get this: the original flower bill was for $27,435.14!

Yikes. I hope her dear husband knows what he’s getting into.

[More complete NYTimes article]

[tons of comments at the SFChronicle]

Nice coupla guys.

Harsh sentencing of Kilbride is credited to his attempts to prevent a witness from testifying at the trial. Kilbride received six years in prison and Schaffer received a 5-1/4 year sentence. Each was fined $100,000 and had to forfeit $1.1 million of their porn spam profits. They also had to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, which claimed 1.5 million of its customers complained about their spam.