Today at 5:01pm, Mayor Gavin Newsom will officiate a private wedding ceremony between Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin.  At 6:00, Mayor Ron Dellums will officiate marriage ceremonies in Alameda County, with Rep. (and new DNC member) Barbara Lee on hand, among others.  All over the state, couples, regardless of gender, will engage in the basic civil right of marriage.  

And all over the state, stories like this are appearing in the morning papers.

It’s 9 a.m. on a Thursday and Paul Waters and Kevin Voecks are paging through photos of cakes at the Vienna Bakery in Thousand Oaks.

“Would you want something like that?” Voecks asked, pausing briefly on one.

“Hmmm,” Waters replied.

It’s 12 days until their wedding.

Voecks, 51, pointed to another, a four-tiered cake, with icing studs running down its side. “This one reminds me of a tuxedo shirt, it’s not effeminate.”

“I think bow ties here,” Waters, 53, said. “And I like the wedding bells on it.”

“Bow ties would be awesome!” Voecks said.

His soon-to-be mother-in-law, Peggy Waters, 80, looked on as her only son and his groom finalized the order.

“Kevin’s a 10,” Peggy Waters said. “All the women Paul brought home, I never liked. This is still a dream come true.”

It’s pretty special to witness this, although my real hope is for the day when this is unexceptional.  These are our neighbors, our mail carriers, our office workers, our waitstaff, our bosses, our dogwalkers, our friends.  And they have their personal lives as do we.  And starting tonight, there are no barriers between us.

There is an enormous political battle ahead.  But today is simple and special.

As we head into e-board (and await Brian’s updates), here’s a few things I’ve noticed around the Web-o-sphere:

• It’s a few days old, but I should mention that AB583, Loni Hancock’s Clean Money bill for California elections, was amended.  The latest is that it will be placed on the June 2010 ballot to enact a pilot program that would provide voluntary public financing in the 2014 Secretary of State’s race.  The original plan was to make the 2010 Governor’s race clean money, along with a selected Assembly and Senate race.  While shifting this to the lower-cost Secretary of State’s race increases chances of passage, it basically puts off any chance at clean money for another four years.  So it’s bittersweet, to me.

• This Alex Kozinski situation has gotten a lot of noise on political blogs – I even linked it up in quick hits.  Kozinski, the chief judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, was presumably caught with pornographic materials he stored on a public website, and now he’s offering himself up for investigation.  But the truth might be more sinister.  As Lawrence Lessig explains, Kozinski may have been the victim of a smear campaign by a lone nut who accessed material that was private but unsecure.  Worth a read.

• At the moment there are ten initiatives which have qualified for the November ballot; the latest would float $5 billion in bonds to subsidize purchases of clean-energy vehicles and research into renewables.  I’m a bit worried that such a long ballot with an what will probably be record turnout is going to bring lots and lots of low-information voters to the polls making decisions on the state’s future armed with little in the way of facts.  In other words, just another California election.

• On Tuesday, all couples in the state will be permitted to marry regardless of gender.  In anticipation, the New York Times ran an interesting article about marriage and gender relationships.  Very interesting stuff.

• Fabian Nuñez endorsed Kevin Johnson in his runoff race for Sacramento Mayor.  That race will happen in November.  No word on Johnson’s position on the allegations that refs gave the 2002 Western Conference Finals to the Lakers over the Kings, which may be a salient issue in Sac-town.

I’m heartened by the fact that there’s a sharp and pronounced move toward mass transit nationwide (the ridership levels are the highest since 1957) in the wake of $4 gasoline.  So heartened, in fact, that I wanted to join the movement.  My current commute to work is a straight line, rare in Los Angeles, where I could conceivably take Santa Monica Boulevard all the way from my house to the office.  I calculated the options for bus service, and figured I could save $2 a day and a gallon of gas worth of carbon emissions (L.A. buses are, for the most part, clean-air vehicles) without an appreciable increase in my commute time.  I went on the Metro website and located the proper bus route, and made out this morning to catch my ride.

It never showed up.  The bus route initially offered on the site was inaccurate, and a separate bus didn’t pick up at the stop offered.  There was no corroborating information at the bus stop, and after about a half-hour I just walked home and got in the car.

I believe I’ve remedied the situation and now see a way clear to using the proper transit system.  But the arduousness of the task is the real point.  At a time when gridlock is literally making Angelenos insane, and the reduction of just a tiny percentage of cars on the road would alleviate it, at a time when gas is so expensive that violence is breaking out as gas pumps and fuel thieves are resorting to siphoning gas out of engines, the structure of mass transit in the nation’s second-largest city is a total embarrassment.  I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford the high cost of gasoline and don’t need to use public transit; furthermore, I am able to stagger my schedule and the commute is not even that taxing.  But I want to ride clean, out of a sense of social responsibility and simple peace of mind.  Somehow the entire Northeast corridor can be lined with all sorts of rail systems and we can’t get a bus to stop every few blocks on a major artery serving multiple communities (Santa Monica, West LA, Beverly Hills,  West Hollywood, Hollywood, Los Feliz).  The city of Los Angeles actually has more density per mile than Portland, Oregon, which has an excellent public transit system.  There’s no ingenuity put into transit, or resources for that matter, and the overlapping jurisdictions of public officials just dissolve any policy prescription into a squabble among supervisors and city councilmen and the like.  They don’t even bother to update the signs; guess it’s too costly.

On the other hand, there’s a freeway in Marina del Rey that’s 2 miles long.  It’s probably the most unused freeway in America.  But it had a federal stamp of approval and was an accomplishment local pols could point to, so up it goes.

What character remains in L.A. is being crushed by endless parades of cars and the honking of horns.  The society has become hyper-local out of necessity (and actually the best transit systems, like the Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica, serve a small, local area).  But that could all change so easily, with a little personal responsibility and a bus that runs on time.

There was an extremely disturbing editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post by Harold Meyerson, who used to be the executive editor of the LA Weekly, and thus understands the journalism scene here in Southern California.  What is being done to the flagship newspaper, the LA Times, by real estate magnate Sam Zell, is nothing short of a dismantling of the biggest print outlet in the state and one of the biggest in the country.  Zell was not the only owner willing to buy the Times last year; in fact, Eli Broad and Ron Burkle wanted to purchase it, spin it off from the Tribune Company, and return local ownership to the Southland.  Instead, the Chicagoan Zell made the deal, and he’s taking apart the newspaper bit by bit.  It’s a familiar story we’ve seen as the print journalism industry struggles through a disruptive time, and its top managers are responding in all the wrong ways.

During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn’t working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don’t want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.

As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers’ performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell’s smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell’s chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army’s treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they’d be prime candidates for termination.

Which is precisely, unfortunately, what’s been happening at the Times. Voluntarily or not, large numbers of highly talented editors and reporters have left. The editorial staff is about two-thirds its size in the late 1990s, with further deep cuts in the offing. A paper that is both an axiom and an ornament of Los Angeles life, that helps set the political, business and artistic agenda for one of America’s two great world metropolises, is being shrunk and, if Zell continues to get his way, dumbed down.

This is really hideous, and ultimately this will reduce even further the level of coverage on our state and its politics at this crucial juncture, in the midst of a housing crisis, a widening budget gap, and soaring energy prices.  There are numerous problems here – bringing a businessman unused to the rigors of journalism in to run a newspaper, the effective elimination of the concept of the public interest, the commercialization of that which informs a citizenry, and all the rest.  Conglomerates which control what news is disseminated and how it is presented not only interfere with the truth (really, read that Ruth Rosen article about her time on SF Chronicle editorial board in the run-up to war), but they have little ability to even manage the situation by their own narrow standards and turn a profit.  Again and again we see major cuts to newsroom staffs, reductions in space for news, shrinking column inches, and the only result is that readers are turned off to the product and they drop their subscriptions.

We in the blogosphere slam the news media early and often, but we actually can’t do what we do without them.  And the electorate can’t make the decisions in their political and personal lives that lead to progress when their sources of information are being chopped one column inch at a time.  Sam Zell is a cancer on the body politic.

I’ve always thought that the repeated assertions by the McCain campaign that California is somehow in play, despite all polling to the contrary, was just bluster, an effort to get Democrats to throw money at a perceived problem, reminiscent of George Bush campaigning in the state in 2000 as a way to unnerve Al Gore.  And the Huffington Post has obtained a Power Point presentation from the McCain campaign that suggests this is exactly what they’re going to try.  This slide includes the states McCain thinks he can contest in November.

The fine print reads: “McCain’s unique appeal to independent voters creates opportunity in CA.”

Those must be the independent voters that have a 42/48 favorable/unfavorable rating of McCain, compared to 72/19 for Obama in the latest Field Poll.  The independents who preferred Obama by 30 points in the last LA Times poll.

This is a common trick by the Republicans, trying to bait Democrats into spending money here.  All I can say is, please, please, John McCain, come campaign in the Golden State early and often.  I’ll do the advance work for you.    And be sure you go up with a week or two of commercials at about $3 million per.  I can think of no better way for you to waste your money back up your bold statements about victory in California than to focus all your efforts on this electoral prize.

And while you’re at it, pay a little attention to your own home state of Arizona, which you acknolwedge might be a loss.

It’s hard to overstate how pathetic national Republicans have been so far this cycle.  Some of their top challengers can’t get on the ballot, and the leader of their campaign efforts in the Senate said recently that keeping the Democrats to a gain of eight seats would be a moral victory.

Now there’s news about Dean Andal, one of the few challengers Republicans are counting on nationwide, the guy who’s supposedly working hard to take down Rep. Jerry McNerney.  Only he raised a paltry $11,000 in the pre-primary filing period, and now Congressional Republicans are worried that their golden boy is made of iron pyrite.

Dean Andal, recruited by the GOP with great fanfare to challenge freshman Rep. Jerry McNerney (D) in California’s 11th district, is now coming under attack from Republicans in Washington, D.C., for running what they contend is a flawed campaign.

Andal, a former state Assemblyman, is facing increasing criticism for his fundraising and general campaign strategy, with the grumbling emanating from Republicans in the consulting and lobbying communities. Privately, Republicans on Capitol Hill are also expressing concern.

The handful of sources interviewed for this story on Tuesday declined to discuss their concerns on the record. But all are Washington, D.C.-based Republican strategists who had until recently been singing Andal’s praises and are intimately familiar with the GOP-leaning 11th district.

“I think the fundamentals are there to pull this off,” said one GOP operative. “But Andal still has to run a fundamentally sound race. He hasn’t done that so far.”

At least he’s making all the right hires.  Andal’s top campaign strategist is Richard Temple.  He was last seen as the top strategist to Doug “I Don’t Know How To Use A Ballot” Ose, who got smoked in the 4th District primary by Tom McClintock after spending millions of his own personal fortune.  Andal won’t even have that kind of scratch to work with when he gets pounded in the fall.

This is my favorite quote:

Andal’s critics insist that he is not doing enough to win, particularly in the current political environment.

“He’s dialing it in,” said a native Californian and Republican operative who is now based in D.C. “He’s got the attitude of a Member of Congress. He doesn’t have the attitude of a challenger fighting to get elected in his district.”

Hilarious.  

What we’ve seen over the last few years, as wingnuts stumble to codify discrimination into state constitutions, is that the laws inevitably have adverse benefits well beyond limiting marriage to between a man and a woman.  In Michigan, the state ban on same-sex marriage eliminated domestic partner benefits, for example.  Here in California, because partners will be allowed to marry starting June 17, if the constitutional amendment passes in November it’s completely unclear what would happen to those legal marriages.  But there’s another possibility that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Should voters approve the measure, (USC con law expert David B.) Cruz said, offering another potential outcome, it could inadvertently affect traditional marriages. That’s because the amendment would undo only part of the court’s decision — allowing gay couples to marry — but not the rest, which says that same-sex couples cannot be recognized differently than opposite-sex couples, he said.

“If you’ve got those two rules — that you can’t let them marry, but you can’t give different options to gay and straight couples — then one possible outcome, if the amendment were to pass, is that no one could get married in California,” Cruz said.

Some experts found that scenario highly unlikely, saying such a reading of the decision would be much too technical — and cause too much chaos.

I don’t find that to be technical – in fact you would have to give an intellectually dishonest reading of the law NOT to come to that conclusion.

One county is taking this “no more marriages” thing quite literally – and it’s shameful.

Kern County Clerk Ann Barnett has announced that her office will stop performing all weddings a few days before June 17, the date that same-sex couples can legally apply for marriage licenses.

Barnett’s staff processes marriage licenses for hundreds of Kern County residents each year and it will continue to do, for both straight and gay couples, beginning June 17 as required by law, she said in a written statement. But as of June 13, the staff will no longer officiate at civil ceremonies for an extra $30 fee.

Officials cited financial reasons for the decision. But internal memos between a high-ranking official in Barnett’s office and a conservative Christian legal defense fund, published in the Bakersfield Californian this week, indicate that Barnett may have acted on principle rather than for financial reasons.

As long as Barnett is officiating no marriages instead of only straight ones, it’s not discriminatory.  And the same goes for the state, according to the most honest reading of the relevant statutes.

The idiots who think they’re defending marriage by trying to narrow its definition to one man and one woman are actually trying to do nothing but eliminate it.