Justice Ming W. Chin raises a point during the hearing that has been much discussed by the editorial   board, as well as posited by our readers: What if the state didn't bother with recognizing or performing marriage at all, but instead performed civil unions for all, recognized them with all the same rights, and left marriage to religious and other private organizations to define and perform as they wished?

The question disappeared rather quickly from the courtroom, but it's one that the editorial board expects to pursue.

If only the state of California had thought to sell advertising for the Thursday morning screening, imagine the money it could have brought into the state budget. Surely one of the most highly rated shows from 9 a.m. to noon, whether on television or the Internet, will be the state Supreme Court's hearing of oral arguments on Proposition 8.

This is more than legal minds having it out for a few hours. The court might well indicate which way it's already leaning on the ban on same-sex marriage.

We'll be tuned in and logged on. Opinion L.A. will be posting commentary throughout the hearing, and welcoming your ongoing comments.

I don't wish for wealth all that often. Just when I'm filling out college financial-aid forms. And according to a story over the weekend in the New York Times, I'm not alone. Right now, with the deadline looming for the second round of financial information (or third, depending on the colleges and circumstances), it's getting crowded in the clueless-parent department.

The paper's story centered on the FAFSA, as doomed parents everywhere call it, which stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The form is so complicated (and repetitious) that President Obama  has promised to eliminate it, parents pay $80 or so to have a company fill it out for them, and people with more money than most of us pay $1.500 to have really smart people fill it out really well, money they should then be forced to match in the form of a donation to the university of their choice.

Actually, the FAFSA didn't strike me as all that terrifying, except for the part where some of the colleges wanted it filled out by Feb. 1 with my 2008 tax data, which is pretty much impossible because employers have until the day before to send out the W-2 forms. That's OK. You're allowed to guess the 2008 data, unnerving as that is. But then you have to update the FAFSA when you get the real information, as well as send your 2008 tax returns to the colleges by March 1 (at least for some universities). That's when parental headaches become tax-preparer headaches.

Many colleges also require the College Board's CSS Profile. Note the name "free" is not in its title, and it is indeed not free because pretty much nothing involving the College Board ever is. I'm not sure what CSS stands for. College Sweat Shop? Perhaps, like the College Board's SAT, it doesn't stand for anything at all. The profile is far more complicated and repetitious than the FAFSA. It also cannot be updated online; parents have to print it out, hand-edit it, hard-copy the new version and mail copies to each college. Colleges don't actually tell you to do this, by the way; they just want it.

Some colleges have additional forms that they alone require. One said on the phone that it needed a special-circumstances form, but when that was sent, they emailed asking why we hadn't sent the verification form instead. Some want all the paper information sent by fax, others by snail mail, and some don't want to muss their hands with paper at all, but want it sent to something called IDOC, another handy service of the College Board.

I'm confused. You're probably confused. But what I keep wondering about are the people who don't have $100 for a financial-aid service, don't have a computer or, for that matter, a college degree themselves to figure all this out. No problem, we provide financial aid to the children of impoverished, uneducated parents. We just make sure there's almost no way their parents can fill out the forms.

If Obama can fix this, curing the economy should prove a snap.

Business Wire photo of a worker at Student Financial Aid Services Inc., a company that helps parents with the FAFSA

This time, ''Mission Accomplished'' really means it.

Back during the presidential campaign -- remember that? -- I busted the place that Sarah Palin said was her favorite shop.

It wasn't Neiman-Marcus or Bloomie's, she said. It was an Anchorage resale shop called ''Out of the Closet.''

''Out of the Closet'' happens to be one of my favorite shops, too -- but  not the Alaska one. '''OOTC'' is a chain of nonprofit thrift stores here, run for nearly 20 years by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which owns the name. Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Burnett have donated stuff to the stores.

I am proud to say that, in this blog and at the Huffington Post, I busted the Alaska shop's chops, right after Palin said it was her favorite boutique. The next day, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, citing Palin's remarks and my post, announced that it was looking into trademark infringement by the Anchorage store.

And now that shop is changing its name. ''We really had no choice legally,'' the owner said today.

The shop's new name is ''Second Run.'' With a name like that, it can still be Sarah Palin's favorite store. She can buy her 2012 campaign wardrobe there. With her own money.

Credit: AP Photo/Al Grillo

Someone needs to spank Kellogg's on its sugar-frosted hiney. And If I bought Kellogg’s products I would join the call to boycott them. How does a company devoted to setting little kids on the path to Type 2 diabetes get all sanctimonious about Michael Phelps and a bong hit? His behavior is inconsistent with its image, the company says. Huh? How can that be? Tony the Tiger is generally the first pusher of addictive substances in a child's life. That's the American way.

Take Frosted Flakes. The company recommends a 3/4-cup serving, but come on that's like eating a handful of  sugary air. A real bowl is about two to three times that amount. That means kids can start the day with up to 36 grams of sugar, or about 9 teaspoons per bowl. Multiply that morning after morning.

Then there are Crack-its, or rather, Cheez-its. I don't care what the serving portion is, can anyone stop at anything under half a box? Anyway, the larger point is this: He's a 23-year-old young man who got caught doing what 23-year-old young men do. Phelps has apologized. He can still be president. And most of his other sponsors, like Speedo, seem to be sticking with him.

Why is Kellogg's hyperventilating over this? Frankly, I think the company is shooting itself in its frosted foot. It will never find a better pitch man. The message was streamlined and simple: eat this food and you too will have to swim 17 hours a day.

Anyway, over on Huffingont Post, Lee Stranahan takes a different tack. He argues that Kellogg's is alienating its most devoted adult client base, the stoner crowd. Here are snippets from his petition calling for boycott:

1) Kellogg's is a major manufacturer of cereal and junk food products including but not limited to Frosted Flakes, Pop Tarts, Cheez-Its, Froot Loops, Keebler's Cookies, Rice Krispies, Eggo Frozen Waffles, Famous Amos Cookies and many other products known to be a part of the diet of many marijuana using Americans

2) Kellogg's has profited for decades on the food tastes of marijuana using Americans with the munchies. In fact, we believe that most people over the age of twelve would not eat Kellogg's products were they not wicked high.

3)That Kellogg's has decided to end their relationship with Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps after pictures of him surfaced doing exactly what most Kellogg's customers do right before enjoying a bowl of Rice Krispies mixed with Keebler Cookies with an Eggo on top.

The rest is pretty funny and worth a read.

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

Now that the egg farmers in California have to work on keeping their hens out of battery cages, who's going to work on having financially beset consumers buy the cage-free eggs?

The Humane Society of the United States, the force behind Proposition 2, says it will. If you're one of the vast majority of voters who supported the measure, you'll remember that it gave California farmers several years to get rid of their battery cages, where chickens were packed in so tightly they couldn't turn around. What the measure didn't do was require anyone to actually buy all those cage-free eggs. Now the Humane Society says it will "work with consumers and retailers to promote a robust market for compliant California egg producers."

It's an interesting time for such a sales scheme. Families that already have given up most of their discretionary expenditures because of their shrinking wallets--gardeners, house cleaners, dinners out--find that one of the few areas where they can still cut is food. The mortgage is the mortgage, it's not coming down in size. Neither is the life-insurance premium or, unless you live in the dark, the utility bill. The food budget has more flexibility--less meat, more mac and cheese--so fewer people are reaching for the $3.25-a-dozen organic, cage-free eggs, and more are waiting for the supermarket to have the regular ones, produced from the misery of hens, on sale for 99 cents a dozen. Eggs keep fairly well, so you can even stock up.

One possibility under consideration is legislation that would require that all eggs sold in California be cage-free. That would have been a fairer way to write the proposition. The vote might have gone differently if voters realized they were actually going to have to pay for their decision, and if they were willing to pay the extra money, fine. It also would have encouraged egg producers from outside the state to treat their chickens differently, to get a piece of the California market. But is this a time for jacking up the price of one of the cheapest sources of high-quality protein?

Meanwhile, the California farmers have time to switch to a different way of keeping their chickens, but they do have to get moving on new barns or larger, more humane cages if they want to meet the deadline. That means new investment, which usually means loans for money to invest, in a tight credit market.

Even though justice should be pursued for the victims of molestation by Catholic priests, the editorial board worries that the legal grounds used for an investigation into Cardinal Roger M. Mahony stretch prosecutorial creativity too far. The board also looks at the curious case of a billboard magnate who claims to be an artist, and comes out in firm support of the Los Angeles Unified School District's exams during the academic year, despite a call by the teachers' union to boycott the tests, as a useful way of keeping students' learning on track:

If a test showed that most of a fourth-grade class couldn't convert fractions to decimals, even though the teacher had covered that material, wouldn't the teacher want to know as soon as possible? .... Teachers who fail to carry out such a basic duty as a required exam should be written up. Student progress is simply not negotiable.

On the other side of the fold, columnist Joel Stein isn't happy that he's being asked to vote again, just a few months after he completed a fatiguing ballot. P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution outlines the way modern war is increasingly fought by machines, and writer Henry Alford tells the story of a 114-year-old woman who can teach us something about not just the quantity but the quality of longevity.

I would argue that man has accorded himself long life because elders serve an important role in society. As an old African saying runs, "the death of an old person is like the burning of a library." These living libraries are among our greatest sources of wisdom.

* Illustration by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader

Any promotion is good promotion, right? So we’d like to thank our friends out their in cyberspace who link to our humble newspaper -- even if the link-love is not always to promote our content, but to condemn it.

As Barack Obama took his oath of office last week, it seemed the whole world was watching the historic moment with bated breath. Then the flub heard around the world happened, and Patt Morrison took to cyberspace to share her thoughts -- and people were reading. FindLaw's Common Law blog discussed whether Obama should retake the oath and noted Morrison's inclusion of the not-known-to-most tidbit that the oath language prescribed by the Constitution does not include "so help me God." Ever since FDR's inauguration, presidents have simply volunteered the phrase themselves. Others referenced us for noting that the Constitution doesn't even require a president to take the oath. But they weren't the only ones to examine the flub.

If the infamous oath incident weren't enough to draw webbies to our blog, Michael McGough's odd discovery that Pope Benedict XVI has his own YouTube channel -- yes, it's true -- got us noticed.

And former Opinion staffer Amina Khan's July 2008 post on whether then-Sen. Obama's vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will come back to haunt him was a picked up recently by Under the Radar Media.

It's not the most dramatic evidence of the PTOP (peaceful transfer of power) hymned by inauguration commentators. It may, however, be the most reflective of the times.

When I clicked on a link to a George W. Bush speech, I ended up with a historic error message. The White House logo was there, but instead of a digest of Bush press releases I found: "Page Not Found. The page you requested wasn't found at this location. The Obama Administration has created a brand new White House website, and it's possible that the page you were looking for has been moved."

Right -- to notthedecideranymore.com.

If you trusted Joe the Plumber as a "plumber," political pundit or pitchman for the digital television conversion, maybe you'll give him a shot as a journalist.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, the man whose 15 minutes of fame seem inexhaustible, is heading to Israel to cover the ongoing conflict in Gaza. He told an Ohio television station he'll spend 10 days as a war correspondent for a conservative website, Pajamas TV.

Though I'm not impressed with the website, I'm willing to wait until his dispatches return before I suggest a new field of employment. If the man is willing to go to Israel and try to penetrate the conflict zones in Gaza, he's more than free. And if he wants to send videos and blog about it, I welcome it. But Joe the Journalist, whose celebrity was created by Sen. John McCain during the presidential campaign, should be judged by the quality of his work.

Journalists aren't accredited or licensed like plumbers. (Sound familiar, Joe?) Whether you're Joe or a random blogger writing from your bedroom, anyone can call himself a journalist. But it's up to the public to believe it. Newspapers, like this one, have an established and distinguished record of telling people's stories, providing valuable public information and holding those in power accountable. And people know that. (Many people disagree -- and they have that right.)

Read more about Joe the Plumb, er, Journalist after the jump.