The jury in the Bay Guardian's lawsuit against the SF Weekly finished its second full day of deliberations without reaching a verdict Monday. The 12 members will be back at work tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle weighed in with a nice, fair story by Meredith May Saturday. There were, of course, things I wish May had written, and things I wish she hadn't, but I don't think either side can complain about the piece.

Here's what was most interesting to me:

Both Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Weekly Editor Tom Walsh declined to comment.

Come on, guys. You run newspapers. What's this shit about not talking to the press?

The (hot) prince at war: Where's Jenna?

Yeah, the hype over Prince Harry getting assigned to combat duty in Afghanistan is way over the top. (As the U.K. Independent noted, even gaysocialites.com, not known for its war reporting, jumped in, calling Harry "like the hottest thing ever.")

But the whole thing reminded me that the British have a different standard when it comes to the children of the powerful serving in times of war. The sons of British royalty have always gone to war; it's almost expected. If the country's fighting, the royals don't sit it out.

The children of American leaders are doing just that, of course. You don't hear anything about the Bush twins signing up to fight their father's war. (Of course, Bush didn't fight in Vietnam, either, nor did Dick Cheney.)

Ralph Nader, who shouldn't be running for president, has a great line on this. He suggests that Congress ought to enact a law that

Whenever Congress and the White House take our country to war, all able-bodied military-age children of every member of Congress, the President and the Vice-President will be conscripted automatically into the armed forces.

Makes a lot of sense.

*UPDATE: It's happening in Ohio, too.

Below is a quick post from the Austin American-Statesman. Does the shortage of ballots in some states foreshadow the Dems taking on traditionally Republican sections of the country?

Williamson Democratic ballots running low
By Andrea Lorenz | Tuesday, March 4, 2008, 01:44 PM

So many Democrats have voted in Republican stronghold Williamson County that ballots are already running low in some precincts.

“I have a little bit of concern that (the Democrats) didn’t order enough ballots,” Elections Administrator Rick Barron said.

Democratic election workers in some Williamson County precincts have called the county elections office today to say they’re already halfway through their ballots, and the afternoon and early evening heavy traffic has yet to happen.

The Democrats ordered about 50,000 paper ballots, Barron said, and the Republicans ordered 57,000. Each Williamson County polling location has one electronic voting machine. If precincts run out of paper ballots completely, voters will be directed to the machines, Barron said, which could mean long lines later today.

The location most in danger is Precinct 382 at Cactus Ranch Elementary School in Round Rock. Richard Torres, the chair of the Williamson County Democratic Party, said two more electronic machines are being delivered to Cactus Ranch to make up for it.

Torres said his party ordered 4.5 times as many ballots as the Secretary of State recommended, according to the state formula of how many people to expect to vote.

“People are just coming out all over the place,” Torres said.

Barron also clarified that the problems with the Williamson County election site did not cause a crash of the system, but the site was only allowing 150 people on the site at one time. This created a system down notice to the other people trying to access the site. The problem has been fixed, he said, by allowing more users to visit the site.

The jury in the Guardian's lawsuit against the SF Weekly finished its third full day of deliberations without returning a verdict. The 12 members will be back at it tomorrow morning at 8:30.

Cat Rauschuber, Barack Obama and Julian Davis in Texas.
By Julian Davis and Catherine Rauschuber
(San Antonio, Texas) __ When we arrived here Friday afternoon, we had little idea what our experience of campaigning for Barack Obama would hold. We have several friends who are field organizers for the campaign and have been hopping from state to state, adding to Obama’s string of electoral victories. Now three of them are in Texas, Cat’s home state and the place that feels like ground zero in the presidential campaign right now. We decided to come to San Antonio, where campaign-diva Natasha Marsh was organizing a largely Latino district on the west side. Julian had never been to Texas before.

Since our arrival Friday, this experience has been nothing short of amazing. Friday evening we volunteered at a rally where Obama spoke that drew a crowd of 10,000 people. It was the perfect introduction to what the weekend would hold - the energy in the crowd, the diversity of attendees, the commanding and inspiring message of the candidate. Little did we know at the time that this would be the first of three events we would have the opportunity to see - and even interact with - the Senator.

I guess there's something to be said for term limits. State Senate President Don Perata, who will be out of office next year, said loud and clear yesterday something that's needed to be said for a long time in this state: The governor's budget cuts are unacceptable. And the state needs to find some new revenue.

The L.A. Times reports on a Perata press conference:

Perata drew his line in the sand while standing with his successor as Senate chief, Democrat Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, and other Democratic senators and school leaders. Perata said the governor's proposal to cut school spending by 10% is unacceptable, and Democrats will reject any budget that includes less for education next year than this year.

Asked how Democrats propose to make up the difference, Perata said: "Raise taxes. That clear enough? Raise taxes."

Given the state's dire finances, he said, "no one is going to tell me . . . the average Californian would not be willing to pay pennies on the dollar more for an education system . . . that is worth what we believe California is about."

David Dayen at Calitics has the right line on this:

The second statement is exactly the way to play this. California is worth paying for. This state deserves a better education system than it's getting, a better health care system than it's getting, better infrastructure than it's getting. Because of the broken revenue model, we can't even fund the landmark global warming law that got the Governor on the cover of all those magazines. Paying for this state to have the society everyone generally wants is a patriotic act. That's exactly the frame the Democrats are using.

There's a hint of a "go-for-broke" strategy here, which I believe is sped up by the transition in the leadership. We've needed to have this fight for 20 years.

And so, the fight begins.

Shit! Mike Lacey flees the courtroom after losing a huge verdict
Photo by Charles Russo

Click here for full lawsuit coverage.

A San Francisco jury this afternoon found the San Francisco Weekly and its corporate parent guilty of illegal predatory pricing and awarded us $6.39 million.

Under state law, part of that verdict is subject to treble damages, bringing the total award to $15.6 million.

The battle isn’t over; Rod Kerr, attorney for the Weekly, told me immediately afterward that the 16-paper chain intends to appeal.

But the verdict sends a clear signal to small businesses, independent newspapers and the alternative press that a locally owned publication has the right to a level playing field and that a chain can’t intentionally cut prices and sell below cost to injure a smaller competitor.

It's official. The Affordable Housing requirement for the Candlestick Point and Hunters Point Shipyard Mixed Use Development Project Initiative, has qualified for the June 3 ballot.

This means that voters will decide on two BVHP-related measures this summer: the Lennar-led Mixed Use Project for Candlestick Point and the Shipyard, and the community-led Affordable Housing requirement, which demands that 50 percent of housing to be built as part of the Lennar led project, be affordable

Michael Cohen of the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development complained, at a SF4Democracy presentation last night. that the community initiative has been drawn up without an economic feasibility report. Cohen also told the Guardian, when I asked about Lennar's troubled financial picture, that it's not written in stone that Lennar would be the Candlestick/Shipyard project developer.

Either way, it looks like issues around Lennar's less than perfect environmental monitoring performance at the Shipyard won't be going away any time soon.

Last week, during my research into this week's Light Brown Apple Moth story, a couple of sources spoke off the record about research that they intimated will prove that the LBAM risk is overstated. Today that research was released and its authors claim that LBAM is controlled by naturalpredators, a claim based on what the authors describe as a fact-finding tour to New Zealand. (New Zealand is also where the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the US Department of Ag are currently conducting trials on a new, longer lasting, pheromone spray.)

In a press release sent to the Guardian, Dr. Daniel Harder, botanist and Executive Director of the University of California at Santa Cruz Arboretum, and Jeff Rosendale, a Watsonville grower and horticulturalist, said that during a three-week, 3,000-kilometer fact-finding study in New Zealand, they earned that "80 to 90 percent of LBAM larvae are destroyed by natural predators and never mature."

The report's authors also said they also spoke with current research experts on LBAM in New Zealand’s government agricultural agency, HortResearch.

“The success of New Zealand agriculture and horticulture professionals in controlling LBAM and other leaf-roller pests using Integrated pest management techniques and few or no chemical applications is a model of best IPM practices that can be readily adopted in California to control LBAM," the report's authors stated .

Dr Daniel Harder, one of the authors of the report into integrated pest management practices in New Zealand, told me that he was motivated to go to New Zealand to carry out research on the Light Brown Apple Moth, because he is the executive director of UC Santa Cruzs arboretum, which has over 10,000 species in its plant collections that are from New Zealand and Australia, and therefore wants to protect these collections.

"We have a long standing relationship with people in those countries and so we called them and asked, 'what's up with this insect?'" Harder recalls.

He says USCS's arborteum uses integrated pest management techniques and was found to have LBAM when inspected last fall.
"We elected not to use organophosphates," Harder said, noting that while the arboretum sells plants, and likes the revenue from them, it's not in the same situation as local farms and nurseries, who saw significant revenue loss last fall, if they had been sprayed, compared to farmers and growers who could say they were outside the spray 9and therefore quarantine) zone.

Harder said that the main reason New Zealand controls LBAM, which he says is a "minor pest" is because it's a trade barrier to shipping to the United States, just as the US now faces quarantines from Canada and Mexico over LBAM's detection in California.
"China has been considering quarantining California, too" Harder says.

With 17 million people now in CDFA's proposed spray zone, Harder says "The gorilla in the room is the eradication program, which as proposed, won't work."

To read more about the moths in all their fluttering glory, read the report, authored by Harder and Soquel nursery owner Jeff Rosendale, at the website of Assemblymember John Laird, who has been dealing with aerial spraying since last fall, when CDFA did their aerial bombardment of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.
http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a27/pdf/HarderNZReportFINAL.pdf

Opposition to the aerial spraying of Light Brown Apple Moth pheromones continues to grow.

Hard on the heels of a report that claims the moth threat has been overstated comes the news that Sen. Carole Migden will be heading up a protest rally Monday, March 10 in Sacramento, as well as a hearing March 13 in Marin, about state plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with Light Brown Apple Moth pheromones.

The March 10 rally begins at 11 am, on east side of the Capitol, lawn area, adjacent to fishpond (Area 22).

The rally features Sen. Carole Migden, Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), Paul Schramski of Pesticide Watch, Emily Levy of the California Alliance to Stop the Spray, John Russo of stopthespray.org and Albany mayor Robert Lieber. Plus a bunch of community activists bearing signs that protest government plans to spray urban area without first proving that the spray is both safe and effective.

And on Thursday, March 13, Midgen joins forces with Senate Environmental Safety Committee chair Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Santa Cruz) at a oversight hearing in Marin to analyze the state's LBAM plans.

The March 13 hearing takes place at the Marin County Civic Center, 3501 Civic Center Drive, Room 330, San Rafael from 1-3 PM. It will feature state officials who support the spraying alongside scientists who oppose it, and include an opportunity for the public to comment.

It's one thing for Mayor Gavin Newsom to bash the Board of Supervisors, something we're likely to see a lot of this year as he angles to get a few more allies on the board this fall. But it's quite another thing for the city's top elected leader to urge his business community buddies to sue the city, which is just downright irresponsible and could even be considered official misconduct. And how ironic is it that little miss civility, Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, is beating the drum for the most uncivil of acts, a civil lawsuit against a city that's she's taken an oath to serve and protect. Have these people lost their minds?
Maybe so, because this latest outrage comes just two days after Newsom took a facts-be-damned approach to pushing tidal power, which a study concludes would be an expensive and inefficient boondoggle, but Newsom wants to do anyway, probably because it would make such a whiz-bang press release. His quote to the Chron was priceless: "I don't care about the arguments against it. I care about the arguments for it."
George W. Bush couldn't have said it better himself.

The word from the San Francisco Elections Office is that all hell has broken loose as the city's top progressive political leaders file to run for the Democratic County Central Committee in a bold and surprising move to seize control of the political body from moderates like Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. And the word is that Team Newsom was caught flat-footed, able to get only a couple administration loyalists -- Mike Farrah and Catherine Dodd -- to file before today's 5 p.m. deadline.

But the lineup on the left is a who's who list of top progressives: supervisors Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick and Aaron Peskin, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, school board members Eric Mar and Kim-Shree Maufis, likely supervisorial candidates Debra Walker and Eric Quesada, mayoral runner-up Quintin Mecke, and McGoldrick's son Jamie. If elected, they would join incumbent progressives such as Robert Haaland, Michael Goldstein, and Rafael Mandelman.

"I think what you'll see is a more progressive central committee," said Bill Barnes, chief of staff for Assembly member Fiona Ma and a progressive member of the DCCC who is also running for reelection.
Control of the DCCC would allow local progressives, most of whom have endorsed Barack Obama for president, to take advantage of the opportunity to push a more innovative political agenda and try to pressure the party to move to the left.

They are also likely to use a coordinated campaign this year to present progressive policy options to San Franciscans just as Newsom is working to sell a Lennar-sponsored development proposal on the June ballot and using a power grab on city committees to try to take control of the public agenda.

So Eliot Spitzer got nabbed hiring a $1,300-an-hour hooker from New York who met him in a DC hotel room.

That's a lot of money. But only the best for the gov: He went to The Emperors Club, where the top women (with seven diamonds by the names) go for $31,000 a day.

I always wonder: How can someone who has messed with some of the most powerful people in the country and who has legendary enemies both in and out of the public sector be dumb enough to get caught up in a prostitution ring that was under federal investigation?

I don't care who he fucks; I think prostitution ought to be legal. But the political future of someone who was, more or less, one of the good guys is now toast.

As one local official, who I will decline to identify by name, put it to me:

"What's wrong with the old-fashioned discreet affair -- you know, with someone who doesn't work for you and isn't part of a criminal enterprise? It worked for politicians for years."

And what's with dragging his poor wife in front of the cameras with him? Cheap, Eliot. Cheap.

(Oh, and by the way: The Gov appears to be a bit kinky. Check out the documents on the smoking gun . The woman, named "Kristen," who spent several hours with Spitzer, was warned that he might "ask you to do things that you might not think were safe." "Kristen," who is no fool, replied to her handler: "I have a way of dealing with that. I'm like, listen dude, you really want the sex?")

(Oh, and by the way II: Don't the feds have anything better to do than wiretap a prostitution ring and snare Democratic politicians? I mean, Spitzer was an idiot and all, but aren't there terrorists to chase or something?)

Oh, and by the way III: Dailykos notes that it cost less for Spitzer to hire his own call girl than it cost the public to guard Rudy Giulinani when he went off on trysts.

More big news on the Light Brown Apple Moth front:

California Certified Organic Farmers, one of the nation’’s oldest and largest third-party organic certifying agencies, has revoked its support of aerial spraying of organically approved pheromones.

CCOF took this decision due to what its Board of Directors describe as “potential human health and environmental concerns.”

Instead, CCOF will support diversified ground integrated pest management approaches toward LBAM and is urging the California Department of Food and Agriculture to “pursue a diverse and precautionary approach”.

CCOF's decision comes hard on the heels of a report that claims the moth threat has been overstated

Maybe CCOF’s withdrawal of support and Dr. Harder's report will open up the door on the wider policy discussion here: namely, what are truly sustainable policies and practices in a steadily shrinking global economy?

To find out more about the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s spraying plans and the opposition to them, head for Marin on Thursday March 13, where Sen. Carole Midgen joins forces with Senate Environmental Safety Committee chair Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Santa Cruz) for a hearing on the state's LBAM plans.

The March 13 hearing takes place at the Marin County Civic Center, 3501 Civic Center Drive, Room 330, San Rafael from 1-3 PM. It will feature state officials who support the spraying alongside scientists who oppose it, and include an opportunity for the public to comment.

To see CCOF’s Board of Directors full statement, keep reading::

Hundreds of people-- teachers, administrators, school staff, parents, children, union members, state and city officials-- gathered in front of the State Building at McAllister and Van Ness, to demand job security for educators and to put education at the top of California's priority list.
Governor Schwarzenegger's 2008-09 budget proposes a $4.8 billion cut in state education funds. This would create a $40 million deficit for the San Francisco Unified School District and, in anticipation, the City's Board of Education sent out 535 pink slips to administrators and certified teachers this week. Paraprofessionals and support staff wait in limbo to learn how many of their positions are on the chopping block.
Organization and activism were in full effect at the rally: participants wore pink clothes, and carried pink balloons and signs to flaunt their opposition to termination notices; letters were written to Schwarzenegger; people carried signs reading 'Sell a Hummer, Fund a School' and 'Terminate the Terminator'; chants of 'Books Not Bombs!' rang out; car horns blared in support.
Superintendent Carlos Garcia, who was in Sacramento yesterday with 100 state superintendents and 60 City principals to speak out against the cuts, displayed an oversized pink slip addressed to Arnold, and incited the crowd with the statement, "The fight is just starting...let's keep the fight going!"
A number of local politicians offered words of outrage towards Schwarzenegger, as well as support of educators. Mayor Gavin Newson stated, "It goes without saying that we are opposed to the governor's cuts." He added that the city is not going to sit back and wait for the state to solve its woes, noting "There's a $40 million problem, but we have a $30 million solution in our back pocket." This refers to the City's current $122 million rainy day fund that would divert 25% one-time infusion to SFUSD during a crisis.
State Assembly members Mark Leno and Fiona Ma also spoke. Both made specific mention of a bill, to be introduced tomorrow by Democrats in Sacramento, proposing a 6% severance tax on oil production in the state, as well as well as a 2% windfall profits tax on oil companies that could create $1.2 billion in funds to mitigate budget cuts. State Senator Carole Midgen vowed "We will never let them cut our schools", and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi called this endeavor a "Fight against the lack of common sense" of the Governor.
The stars of the day were the teachers, and one who received a pink slip is Tara Ramos. She is a second year probationary teacher of Spanish in 4th and 5th grades at Paul Revere Elementary in Bernal Heights. Revere is one of eight Dream Schools in SFUSD, which face especially rigorous standards in the No Child Left Behind era because a majority of students are at-risk, non-native speakers, and low proficiency.
Ramos said, "100% of the staff told the principal they want to come back," in a recent staff meeting, yet 21 of 30 certified teachers got served notices this week, and many paraprofessionals have job insecurity.
While explaining the 'Program Improvement' requirements of NCLB--where standardized test scores are analyzed by factors such as race--Ramos stated, "Look at our population of kids at Paul Revere...the number of white kids you can count on one hand." The irony of the whole situation is not lost on her or her colleagues: the tough schools that are full of young teachers face the most uncertainty; layoffs and rehirings create a cyle of shortages and voids; teachers are under constant scrutiny to raise test scores, and now have to worry about their jobs.
"It's not fair," Ramos said adamantly. Yet, her priority remains the children. "I'm not so worried about my job. I'm here for the kids...I can get another job."
As Superintendent Garcia stated, the fight is just starting, so pay attention to this important issue. Write, call, or email the Governor's office if you are opposed to his cuts, and hold all the officials accountable to their promises of support and finances. This is a social justice issue at its core.

I had nothing to do with this, I swear. I don't even know who the "non partner track associate at Altweeklydeathwatch LLP" is. But there's a brilliant analysis of the Village Voice Media's grounds for appealing our court victory here.

The blog post goes through a recent SFW/VVM piece on the verdict and takes it apart, line by line. Here's just one example:

Supervisor Tom Ammiano has been all over the news recently and has a couple of major accomplishments, including a restaurant-nutrition requirement and legislation that sets standards for care in homeless shelters.

And yet he’s still getting a beating from the Chronicle, which seems to think that something as basic as asking chain restaurants like McDonalds to tell you how unhealthy their food is could somehow harm the city’s business climate.

The restaurant disclosure bill got a lot of press, but the homeless shelter standards was more of a political challenge – Ammiano had to get the mayor, who has been reluctant to admit that any part of his homeless program is a failure, to sign on to the program.

The conditions in the shelters are, and for a long time have been, deplorable. So this may actually make the lives of a lot of human beings a lot better.

And of course, Newsom made a bit point the other day of talking about how he was going to use the city’s rainy day fund to bail out the city’s schools – without ever mentioning the Ammiano was the one who wrote that bill (without any help from then-Sup. Gavin Newsom.)

Ammiano's going to leave the Board of Supes next year with one of the longest and most distinguished legislative records in memory. He deserves a little more respect.

Does anyone really believe that Geraldine Ferraro was speaking only for herself, and not for the Clinton campaign, when she went after Barack Obama? Because I don’t.

I’ve been watching how the Clintons work for years. They do what it takes – sometimes, whatever it takes – to win. That doesn’t mean Hillary would be a terrible president, and if she wins the nomination, I will happily and proudly vote for her. I like her health-care plan better than Obama’s, and I think having someone in the White House who is tough and fierce and knows how to fight in the streets with the worst of the political hacks is not entirely a bad thing.

But let’s be honest here: This was carefully, and brilliantly, orchestrated.

Ferraro is a veteran politician, and she knows how presidential campaigns work. She knows that you don’t make comments about something as sensitive as race without checking with headquarters. She’d be a fool – and she isn’t a fool – to just blurt that out.

Think about what she did from a political perspective. The key battle now is Pennsylvania, a state with a mixed demographic. Obama will win Philadelphia, with its large African-American population and sizable numbers of students and liberal white people. But there are plenty of more conservative, suburban and working-class areas – and in some of those places, there are no doubt people who are unhappy about affirmative action.

And that’s who Ferrero’s comments were aimed at – the angry white people who want to blame their problems on black people.

Her message was pretty simple, when you get right down to it: Obama got an unfair advantage over a white person (Clinton) because he’s black. She may not have said it in so many words, but in the areas where the Clinton polling shows she can exploit that sort of fear and resentment, people will get the point right away.

Naturally, Clinton could never say anything like that (any more than Obama could say that his opponent was a “monster” who would do anything to win). But both candidates wanted that message out, and in both cases, sophisticated surrogates put it out, then fell on the sword and resigned for the team.

I know this sounds incredibly cynical, but this is how the game is played at this level.

I'm usually the one who talks about how we have to solve financial problems locally, since the state and the feds won't give us what we need. And I still believe that, and I support a parcel tax for the local schools and I support using the rainy day fund and if we were allowed to raise property taxes in San Francisco, I'd support that.

But right now, while teachers and parents and students are flooding school board meetings around the state denouncing cuts, the real problem is in Sacramento, where the governor doesn't seem to care.

So maybe all of those angry people should take a little trip to Los Angeles and march on Schwarzenegger's house. He's home most weekends, I'm told. I think he lives in Brentwood.

50,000 protesters in Brentwood? Maybe he'd have to listen.

Greetings, Californians for a Clean Energy Future! Welcome to the fold of innocuous sounding, pseudo-environmental political front groups. This one is brought to us by our buddies over at Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The group, which doesn't seem to have a Web site or any other physical manifestation outside of filings with the California Secretary of State, already has $340,000 ready and waiting for the upcoming election cycle. According to a Secretary of State spokesperson, the group was born on Dec. 21, 2007. The only contact is the law firm Nielsen Merksamer, which has a history of teaming up with PG&E to break the law for political gain.

So far, they haven't spent a cent -- all of which were dumped into the committee by PG&E in three lump sums. Wonder what they're going to spend all that money on? Since it's calling itself a "coalition of environmentalists, taxpayers, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company," it could go for or against nearly anything -- including boosting Prop 98 on this June's ballot. If passed, the measure would kill rent control and make it illegal for governments to use eminent domain to seize utility infrastructure and use it to provide the services themselves, an idea San Francisco has considered in the past and Stockton is currently pursuing.

By JB Powell

Word has just come down from the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) that State Sen. Carole Migden and her campaign have agreed to pay $350,000 in fines for 89 different campaign finance violations.

Many the violations have to do with failures to itemize credit-card expenditures. Last July, Assemblymember Mark Leno, who is running against Migden, lodged a formal complaint about that spending.

But it appears that FPPC investigators found numerous other violations, above and beyond Leno’s allegations – including several improper transfers from old committees. Exhibit 2, posted on the commission’s website, states that Migden, her campaign aide Eric Potashner, and her volunteer treasurer, Roger Sanders, twice “failed to timely report receipt” of transfers from Migden’s now defunct Leadership Committee.

The violations relating to fund transfers are especially significant because Migden is currently suing the FPPC to free up nearly $1 million in cash the commission says she improperly transferred from an old campaign account. As we report in the upcoming issue, (“Migden sues the FPPC”) commissioners barred Migden from spending that cash last October. In a public statement issued just after Migden filed her suit in federal court, commission chair Ross Johnson asserted that Migden had already spent “nearly $400,000” of that money. That could mean even more penalties for the embattled senator, as the current settlement announced today does not pertain to the cash in question.

In addition to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign credit cards without itemizing the expenditures, Counts 57-65 of Exhibit 2 show that her campaign has now admitted to failing to account adequately for more than $300,000 spent between 2005 and 2007.

Counts 81-88 might be the most eye-raising – they detail how Migden and her aide Potashner spent large sums of campaign money for “Personal Use.” From the settlement: “Respondents admit, and corresponding records indicate, that expenditures by the 2008 Senate Committee totaling $16,317.91 were neither reasonably nor directly related to a political, legislative, or governmental purpose. Instead, these expenditures conferred a substantial personal benefit on Respondents Migden and Potashner.”

Neither Migden nor her attorney could immediately be reached for comment.

FPPC commissioners will meet Thursday, March 20, in an emergency session to vote on whether to approve the settlement agreement. As for Migden’s lawsuit, a hearing is scheduled for April 1st in the US District Court.

UPDATE: Reached for comment later, Migden’s attorney, James Harrison, told us that “in several instances [Migden and Potashner] took out the wrong credit card” when making personal purchases. He said they both reimbursed the campaign for the misused funds.

Harrison also pointed to passages in the settlement documents that show that Migden herself, not Leno, brought these matters to the attention of regulators last year. Leno has been taking credit in recent weeks for exposing Migden’s credit card violations in a complaint he filed last August. But in the conclusion to Exhibit 2, FPPC staff state that Migden “self-reported” her problems after previous FPPC fines prompted her to conduct an audit of her books.

“This is a textbook example of how we want a public official to act.” Harrison argued. “Sen. Migden identified a problem and she worked diligently with the FPPC to resolve it … She’s standing up and taking responsibility.”