Ed. note: You can find today’s earlier threads, day one’s liveblog, and the rest of FDL’s extensive team coverage at our dedicated Prop 8 trial hub.

Under pressure from Joe Sestak, Arlen Specter is backing Dawn Johnsen, my friend Brian Beutler reports. My own little reporting piece of this: Richard Lugar is not reversing his position in favor on Johnsen, so she’s got 60 votes in the Senate. So Harry Reid just needs to call the vote and she’s in.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in reference to Jonathan Gruber’s failure to disclose his financial relationship with the Obama administration when he was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. It appears that, at the time, Sen. Grassley was unaware Gruber had been given a lucrative, sole source contract by the HHS to do analysis of the “President’s health reform proposal.”

The battle for transparency at the Federal Reserve just ratcheted up a notch. Edolphus Towns, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, just issued a subpoena to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, asking for documents related to AIG and their counter-party payments.

Dan Rather has lost what appears to be his last attempt to keep his civil suit against CBS and Viacom alive.

[Ed. note: You can find today's earlier thread, day one's liveblog, and the rest of FDL's extensive team coverage at our dedicated Prop 8 trial hub.] Defendant-intervenors counsel Thompson resumes cross examination of Professor Cott, plaintiffs expert witness, after the break. The Judge and the witness have now resumed their places, but we don’t have audio [...]

Media blackouts! Backroom deals! Angry teabaggers!

Gay rights advocates, who have waited for this battle in federal court, want to see the Obama Administration take a stronger stand against discrimination and for the rights of minorities.

Today plaintiffs attorney Boutrous will continue his questioning of Professor Cott, who is testifying about the history of marriage in America and her book, Public Vows.

It’s understandable Krugman would be defensive of Gruber. He’s cited him many times. And when Rahm Emanuel touted “progressive” support for the Senate bill in the Wall Street Journal, noting that “what you’re seeing is the progressive backlash against the progressive backlash,” he pointed to a Krugman column as well as “another coming from National Journal writer Ronald Brownstein pressing for passage of the Senate health bill.”