Today begins the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger in US District Court in San Francisco, the beginning of a process that will most likely end up in the Supreme Court, and which could be the vehicle to deliver marriage equality rights to the United States. I will be reporting today from the Richard H. Chambers United States Courthouse in Pasadena, CA, one of several closed-circuit remote viewing locations for the trial.

• What Reid said is awful, but he’s no Trent Lott.
• Trouble at home?
• Banks: Reid should not step down.
• It’s gossipy and shallow, but at least we’re not still talking about Undiebomber.
• But…but…the Democrats want to turn us into Europe.
• Terra, terra, terra.

Turns out those civilian courts, soon to try the undie-bomber work a lot better and more efficiently than those military tribunals conservatives love so much.

Featuring videos by tUnE-YaRdS and Sweet Jane.

People can be pushed a lot farther than simply having to accept a 50% tax on their multi-million-dollar salaries, and Americans who are struggling in the economy created by these pirates can show you just how far.

It sure would help folks to better understand the perspective and life experiences of the chairman of the “Fair and Balanced” network if NYT reporters had provided key information while covering Ailes’ twenty years spent as a “… communications consultant for politicians and executives…” don’t ya think?

Classes start this week for Dawn Johnsen at IU’s Maurer School of Law, and also for John Yoo at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. But before classes start for either of them, Yoo is sitting down tomorrow night with John Stewart to chat about his new book.

That should make the first class session on Tuesday quite something at both schools.

This is a story about duplicitous collection agencies.

Firedoglake has been researching the relationship of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber with the Obama administration with regard to health care reform. We’re still looking at the money – yes, follow the money, as Deep Throat once said – paid out to Gruber by the government. OUR MONEY, our tax dollars, paid out to Gruber under three administrations.

Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (Holt, 2008) is a remarkable and very relevant book. The author spent more than a year working with an icon from the second half of the twentieth century, McGeorge Bundy, as he struggled to compose his memoirs. Bundy was one of the most influential figures in a postwar generation of smart, energetic, confident, well-born men who transformed universities, politics, and foreign policy in Cold War America. As Goldstein explains, Bundy was the central character in David Halberstam’s rueful parable of The Best and the Brightest. He was one of the Masters of the Universe who brought the United States into a terribly self-defeating and enormously destructive war in Vietnam. Readers today might naturally wonder about the parallels with the architects of the twenty-first century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the investment strategies and corporate management philosophies that brought the world economy to its knees.