The California Supreme Court will issue its long-awaited decision on gay marriage today. Some recent news coverage:

• Hundreds pray on eve of Prop 8 ruling
• Weariness and confidence as foes and backers of Proposition 8 await court ruling
  
• California Supreme Court to issue same-sex marriage decision today
• Gay-Marriage Fight to Persist in California
• California Couples Await Gay Marriage Ruling

Predictions, anyone?

Remember when?

Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday [January 4, 2005].

It turns out Gonzo was approving torture months before the Bybee memo was produced:

The FBI substantially increased its reliance on national security letters last year.

FISA-court authorizations for national security and counter-terrorism wiretaps dropped last year by almost 300, a new Justice Department report to Congress shows. But the FBI’s use of “national security letters” to get information on Americans without a court order increased dramatically, from 16,804 in 2007 to 24,744 in 2008.

National security letters permit the government to demand records from banks, telephone companies, internet service providers, and other businesses without seeking court approval. [more ...]

Update: Here's the text of President Obama's speech.

The crazies are out in force today at Notre Dame to protest President Obama's delivery of the commencement address and receipt of an honorary degree.

Some sanity abounds.

Memo to protesters: If you really are pro-life, and believe that killing is wrong, how about starting with protests against the death penalty?

The Hill reports:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) has called on the intelligence community to declassify documents showing what certain members of Congress were told about harsh interrogation techniques employed in the war on terrorism.

. . . Hoekstra's letter is the latest step in a campaign to associate Pelosi with the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects. The hope is to tie up potential probes into Bush administration officials over what some on the left call wrongdoing during the war on terrorism.

Hoekstra says "The American people should be given the full picture on what was known and agreed to on Capitol Hill on a bipartisan basis about the enhanced interrogation program[.]” Sounds good to me. Time for a Truth Commission.

Speaking for me only

Digby points to the execrable Harold Ford's conversation with Chris Matthews on torture and concludes:

The argument against torture is slipping away from us. In fact, I'm getting the sinking feeling that it's over. What was once taboo is now publicly acknowledged as completely acceptable by many people. Indeed, disapproval of torture is now being characterized as a strictly partisan issue, like welfare reform or taxes.

More . . .

In a federal lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles, the Federal Trade Commission accused Golden Empire Mortgage Inc. of violating the Equal Credit Opportunity Act by charging Latino borrowers higher interst rates and fees than it charged non-Latino whites.

The FTC alleged that the problem stemmed from Golden Empire's practice of giving its employees and branch managers wide leeway to make more money by charging "overages," higher fees and interest rates than the borrowers qualified for. The complaint alleged that the practice resulted in Hispanics being charged more because of their national origin.

In other words, loan officers had discretion to write loans at a higher interest rate or to charge greater up-front fees than the borrower's credit-worthiness and the lender's underwriting risk dictated. The loan officer would keep a piece of the excess charge as compensation. The FTC alleges that Golden Empire made no effort to monitor its loan officers to assure that they weren't targeting Latino borrowers when they used their discretion to charge higher interest rates and fees.

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Bishop John D'Arcy has every right not to attend this year's commencement ceremony at Notre Dame. He is free to ask the university to rescind its invitation to Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address, just as he is free to condemn Obama's "longstanding unwillingness to hold human life as sacred." The antiabortion groups that hired a pilot to fly over Notre Dame towing a "giant photograph of a fetus aborted at 10 weeks" are equally free to deliver their offensive message.

The student body overwhelmingly disagrees with Bishop D'Arcy: 85 percent support Obama's visit. Yet some graduating seniors will protest by wearing "an image of a golden cross between two baby feet on top of their mortarboards." Protesters were arrested Friday while "pushing strollers with dolls covered in fake blood" across campus. Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, wants to encircle Notre Dame with a "political mud pit" so deep that the president won't want to cross it. The First Amendment is alive and well in South Bend.

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It is difficult to square President Obama's proclamation of May 7, 2009 as a National Day of Prayer with the founding belief that the government should be neutral on religious matters. In his proclamation, the president expressly "call[s] upon Americans to pray in thanksgiving for our freedoms and blessings and to ask for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection for this land that we love." With all due respect, Mr. President, whether I choose to pray or not is my business, not yours and not the government's.

Perhaps it it is asking too much to have a president who agrees that lobbying for prayer is not an appropriate exercise of official authority. President Lincoln approved the Senate's request to designate April 30, 1863, "as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer," Congress passed a joint resolution in 1952 establishing the National Day of Prayer, and the president has proclaimed a National Day of Prayer every year since 1975. We may one day have a president willing to buck that trend, but it isn't Obama. [more ...]

Both Jeralyn and I wrote about the Ninth Circuit decision (PDF) in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan (I think it is is unanimous that it is a brilliantly written opinion by Judge Hawkins, no matter what you think of the result, so I again urge you to read it). I want to add the following excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's interview with the victorious ACLU attorney Ben Wizner:

ACLU Staff Attorney Kristy Bennett earned a well-deserved victory when a judge in Jackson, Mississippi acquitted ACLU Public Education Coordinator Brent Cox on charges of disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer. The supposed interference consisted of watching a police officer question an individual in front of a grocery store.

While observing, Cox was told to move further away from the interaction and obeyed that command while continuing to observe. After the questioning of the individual ended, Cox asked for the name and badge number of the officer and was arrested.

The passive observation of public employees doing the public's business isn't a crime. Neither is asking a public employee to identify himself. After all, how are we to identify and protect ourselves from official misconduct if we aren't allowed to observe it? Unfortunately, police officers don't always see it that way. [more ...]

Today's 5-4 Supreme Court decision addressing the FCC's 2004 "Golden Globe Order" -- which "declared for the first time that an expletive (nonliteral) use of the F-Word or the S-Word could be actionably indecent, even when the word is used only once" -- will be of primary interest to practitioners and students of administrative law. It does not address the more interesting question: whether the FCC's tough stance against the use of naughty language is constitutional. (For the record, the F-word in question is not fudge and the S-word is not sugar. Use your imagination.)

The FCC's prudish sense of "indecency" is out-of-step with the reality of modern American life. This isn't surprising since the FCC's new-found puritanism was dictated by the religious right, which is responsible for "the lion's share" of indecency complaints. According to the FCC's revised sense of indecency, not only are the fleeting mentions of common expletives on live broadcasts indecent, so are brief views of female (and presumably male) buttocks, Janet Jackson's n*pple, and even "pixilated body parts."

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