I'm in on a conference call with the lawyers for the Democratic plaintiffs suing TRMPAC. State district judge Joe Hart ruled today that TRMPAC owes the 5 plaintiffs $196,666.

Harvey Kronberg is leading the discussion, and *Wayne Slater* is in on the call, too. I'm star struck in my own dorky news-person way.

The ruling was pretty clear that TRMPAC acted illegally. This civil trial was against the treasurer, Mr. Ceverha, for failing to report the corporate contributions which he was required to do if they were used for anything other than "administrative purposes." Use of corporate campaign contributions for anything other than "administrative purposes" is also illegal, but that is for the next phase of the civil proceedings.

Those are stalled until the criminal trials go forward.

TRMPAC's lawyers may seek to sever this judgement from the rest of the civil proceedings in order to expedite the appeals process to the Texas Supreme Court however. Until the criminal proceedings are over, Democrats won't see any of the money. Long story short, this is a bad fundraising idea.

But no one asked the question everyone wants an answer to: What was Ceverha wearing?

PDBlogger is new to conference calls with Wayne Slater (he's so dreamy) so I did not pipe up and ask. You would think all the 40-plus other people would want to know, too. The MSM really dropped the ball on this. Even the producer from CNN missed it. She asked about the Republican "spin machine" and how Democrats are going to rebut their "sour grapes" label. I was drinking so all I heard was that Judge Hart may have been appointed by Republican governor Bill Clements.. or something.

I don't want to know if the 100-year-old statute against corporate campaign contributions survived a test of its constitutionality; I want to know who shops at Brooks Brothers. Get with the program.