On Tuesday, May 26, 2009, the California Supreme Court released its ruling on legal challenges to Proposition 8, a California Constitutional Amendment that removed the right of same sex couples to marry in the state of California. Just a year ago, the same Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to invalidate an initiative passed in 2000 by the voters containing the exact same language, with the distinct difference that unlike Prop 22, Prop 8 was a Constitutional amendment and not a statute. Tuesday, by a 6-1 vote, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold Prop 8, disagreeing with legal challenges that stated that removal of the fundamental right to marry constitutes a revision and not an amendment (in California, an amendment can be passed by a majority vote but a Constitutional revision must first be passed by 2/3 votes in the legislature). The lone dissenter was Justice Carlos Moreno. At the same time, they unanimously upheld the validity of same sex marriages performed prior to the passage of Prop 8 last November.

That's what Leon Panetta, the CIA Director, said in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's accusation that the CIA under the Bush administration misled Congress on the use of torture. The Republicans are jumping up and down. How dare Speaker Pelosi criticize the CIA? How dare she say the CIA lied to or misled Congress? They never do that!

No? Let's get at this again. Then CIA Director George Tenet told President Bush that the case for Iraq's WMD's was... what's the word... slam dunk! He did so knowing full well of the dissents and clear doubts within the CIA about the certainty of those weapons' very existence. McClatchy noted,

The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.