It's budget season in California and today, my friends at Courage Campaign (for whom I do part time work) launched a new ad going after the California Republican Party for keeping in place a tax loophole whereby yacht owners are able to pay...get this...NO TAX on their yachts. This at a time when the state coffers desperately need replenishing. California is a state where responsibly raising taxes to pay for programs and infrastructure, as opposed to the usual borrow and spend Republican way, requires a 2/3 majority in both houses in the state legislature, which the Democrats don't quite have. The whiners in the vocal minority that is the California Republican Party...excuse me, The Yacht Party...is digging in its heels and I'm pleased to see Courage Campaign pushing back with their effort to influence the debate in Sacramento. Arianna Huffington is helping us out with a fundraiser to get the ad on the air -- $100 or more gets you a signed copy of her book "The Right Is Wrong." Do me a favor and take a look at the ad below, give if you can and check out this nice n snarky page Courage created to explain why the yacht tax loophole is so outrageous.

What else is going on tonight?

Like it or not, the massive pushback against ABC fueled by outrage over Wednesday's debate has been an impressive mobilization of the left, especially online. As Ben Smith puts it:

[The debate] triggered the most furious outrage I've seen from the huge, and growing, Obama activist base, which in this case merged with the liberal Netroots -- which aren't always on the same page -- to generate a volume of complaints about the first 45-minutes of questioning that are pretty impossible to miss.

It's just a small glimpse, I think, of the level of heat the media is going to take in the general election, and John McCain doesn't seem to have any equivalent.

As I've written before, it's really important that the blogs serve as a check against the media no matter who wins the nomination. It was after all out of the vacuum of any media accountability that the blogs emerged. So I'm excited to see the Courage Campaign (for whom I do part time work) launching an action in Los Angeles today. From their e-mail blast:

Did you watch ABC's prime-time character assassination of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton last night?

The day after this disastrous "debate," Americans are shaking their heads in disbelief at what they witnessed, sarcastically speculating whether ABC News decided to launch an early roll-out of the Republican "swift boat" campaign. Editor & Publisher called it "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years."

Their idea: giving ABC a taste of their own medicine.

Please join us at ABC's headquarters in Burbank on FRIDAY to protest and pass out flag pins to ABC employees leaving their Disney corporate office. Your mission: Ask ABC/Disney employees whether they can pass their own flag-pin litmus test: "Are you patriotic enough to wear a flag-pin?" [...]

At 4 p.m. please join the Courage Campaign and your fellow activists at ABC's Disney Studios in Burbank in front of the West Alameda Gate, between S. Buena Vista and S. Keystone Streets. We're going to protest ABC's debate disaster and ask their employees to pass the flag-pin litmus test until about 7 p.m.

If you're in LA and would like to join the protest, please RSVP here.

Personally, while I found the debate cringe-inducing and pretty disgusting the way the moderators disproportionately targeted Senator Obama and that it took more than 45 minutes to get to a substantive question, the fact is these issues, as trivial as they may seem, are on the minds of many Americans and there's value in giving him a platform to address them. Having said that, I think ABC absolutely deserves the drubbing they're getting and I wish I could be there in Burbank to hand out flag pins with the fine folks at Courage Campaign. So join them if you can (RSVP HERE.)

As I wrote HERE, thousands of Decline To State voters (California's version of independents) who had voted in the Democratic primary in Los Angeles County on February 5th were in danger of having their votes not count since they failed to fill in a second bubble on their ballot indicating that they intended to vote in the Democratic primary even though they had already requested a Democratic ballot, a step that is required of DTS voters when voting in the primary. It was a classic case of a really poorly-designed ballot leading to the disenfranchisement of almost 100,000 voters but at least in this case the intent of the voters could be easily ascertained and, if allowed, be counted.

My friends at the Courage Campaign (for whom I do part time work) were the first to flag the potential problem and set into motion some pre-emptive measures as well as some legal challenges to make sure as many DTS voters' votes were ultimately counted.

The issue was ultimately taken up by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors who heard arguments from Los Angeles Registrar of Voters, Dean Logan, who was resistant to counting the votes and Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, who, armed with a petition signed by almost 33,000 supporters urging for the votes to be counted, made the case for letting the voices of thousands of Californians be heard.

You'll never guess who won.

Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said Tuesday his office will try to count about 50,000 improperly marked nonpartisan ballots from this month's presidential primary election. [...]

Logan estimated about a quarter of the 190,000 ballots submitted by decline-to-state voters in Los Angeles County did not have both bubbles filled in. Those were among 1.8 million votes cast altogether in the county's Super Tuesday contest.

Logan told California Secretary of State Debra Bowen that he may be able to determine what some of those independent voters intended and count their ballots before he certifies the election results next week.

He said he can count ballots in precincts where there is no confusion between the two parties because independent voters asked exclusively for either Democratic or American Independent ballots.

This will no doubt result in a slight uptick in Barack Obama's California vote tally, although my friends at calitics tell me there's no way for it to impact the delegate count out of the state. But really, no matter who benefits, this is a huge win for the cause of counting every vote, a value all Democrats should share and a huge win for the power of thousands of names on a petition to make real world change.

The right-wingers pushing the Dirty Tricks initiative here in California are desperate. They've been making a final fundraising and signature gathering push over the past month in hopes of getting the initiative, which, if passed, would deliver 20 or so of California's 55 electoral votes to the Republican candidate, onto the June 2008 ballot. But looks like it's not going quite as planned.

On Saturday, the LA Times reported that they had missed a deadline set by the Secretary of State for turning in signatures because they still lacked enough money to pay all of their signature gatherers and they didn't want to turn in fewer than 700,000 or so for fear that the final count would result in fewer than the 434,000 valid signatures required by law. The actual deadline to qualify for the ballot is January 24 but now that they've missed their submission date, as yesterday's Sacramento Bee explains (h/t calitics):

...backers of an initiative to change how California's electoral votes are counted are at risk of missing the June ballot because it will be difficult to finish counting signatures by a state deadline next month.

Of course, if they do miss the June ballot deadline, they'll still shoot for the November ballot, but in the meantime they're in desperation mode and the tricks they've been resorting to in order to qualify for June have gotten dirtier and dirtier.

As I wrote last week, my colleagues at The Courage Campaign (for whom I do part-time work) caught some Dirty Tricks signature gatherers on tape luring unsuspecting signers with a petition funding children's cancer research. As Courage's intrepid investigative blogger Erik Love reported at the time:

the petitioners said that their petition would "help children with cancer," and then proceeded to instruct well-meaning students to sign several petitions that were attached together on a single clipboard.  The petitioners clearly tried to obscure the language on the petitions, using a rubber band to make it difficult for anyone signing to read beyond the first page.  When pressed, the petitioners described some of the other issues (besides curing cancer) they were advocating, but their descriptions of the petition language on eminent domain and presidential election reform was unclear or inaccurate.

Based on the video footage Erik took, Courage Campaign has requested a formal investigation into the right-wingers' signature gathering practices and now CBS news has picked up the story using the actual footage Erik took.

Watch the report below:

This is a great example of the local netroots taking a local story and pushing it up, not only through the netroots but into traditional media and having a real world impact. This is really at the heart of the power and influence of the netroots. Too bad we weren't around to push back against the recall back in 2003. Of course, we haven't won yet. The Courage Campaign will continue to fight this right-wing power grab (is there any other kind?) and you can join the effort over at NoDirtyTricks.com or help build the CA progressive infrastructure by giving a little to them over at ActBlue.

This past week has seen a real grassroots uprising in California. Frustrated with Senator Dianne Feinstein's constant caving to Bush, whether it be on Attorney General Mukasey, on Judge Southwick or her stated support for telecom immunity in the FISA bill, California Democrats composed a resolution censuring Feinstein to be presented at the CDP executive board meeting in Anaheim this weekend. The therefore clause reads as follows:

[...] Therefore be it resolved that the California Democratic Party expresses its disappointment at, and censure of, Senator Feinstein for ignoring Democratic principles and falling so far below the standard of what we expect of our elected officials.

The beauty of it is that this all came out of a DFA meet-up. An e-mail blast from my colleagues at The Courage Campaign, which has been leading the online charge on this, tells us how it all went down:

On Wednesday night, California Democratic Party Progressive Caucus co-chair Mal Burnstein stood up at an Oakland "Democracy for America" Meetup and read his original censure resolution aloud to dozens of attendees, including several members of the East Bay for Democracy Democratic Club. Inspired by Mal's call to action, East Bay for Democracy officers unanimously endorsed Mal's censure resolution a few days later. The endorsed resolution then went viral over the holiday weekend, as activists across California emailed it to friends, Democratic Clubs, progressive organizations and grassroots groups.

The week culminated with MoveOn.org sending a blast out to its California list yesterday asking people to join the call for the CDP to censure Feinstein. It really was this amazing grassroots/netroots collaboration that expressed with one voice our collective frustration with the ineffectiveness of the Democrats in congress to stand up to Bush. Senator Feinstein gave us a convenient target. As a practical matter, however, it looks like the resolution is dead in the water at the CDP. First of all, it's a late resolution and thus subject to veto by just one member of the resolutions committee, which I'm told is the most likely scenario when it comes before the committee tomorrow. In addition, the establishment within the party is mobilizing behind Feinstein. CDP communications director Roger Salazar:

"This party supports our Democratic senator and will continue to do so. Period."

Steve Maviglio from Speaker Nunez's office at calitics:

Imagine if all that energy and effort was being channeled to attack Republicans or help Democratic candidates.

And Bill Cavala, a veteran of many California Democratic campaigns, hailed Feinstein as a great representative for California, "giving" on certain issues to "get" for her state, although I'm still waiting to hear what all these great compromises she's caved on have gotten us.

So if I were a betting man I'd wager that this resolution goes nowhere, but it was anything but a waste of time or energy. Dave Dayen at Calitics  points to an interesting bit from the NY Times on the FISA bill that came out of committee yesterday. As I wrote yesterday, while Feinstein did vote against Russ Feingold's amendment to strip telecom immunity from the bill, she ultimately voted for a bill that had no immunity because that's what Leahy put up for a vote, deferring the telecom immunity debate for the full senate:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who also opposed Mr. Feingold's measure, pleaded with Mr. Leahy to defer the immunity issue because she wants more time to consider several compromise proposals.

I agree with Dayen's take on Feinstein's newfound enthusiasm for compromise.

Feinstein had no need for compromise earlier in the week.  She was gung-ho for telecom immunity.  Clearly the pushback in the Senate amped up the desire for compromise, even if Specter's is a fig leaf that would still get the telecoms off the hook while effectively stopping lawsuits through an expected invocation of state secrets.  But I have to assume that the heat Feinstein is taking from the grassroots back in California is driving her thinking as well.  If Leahy passed out immunity she would be seen as the biggest cheerleader for it - AGAIN, after Southwick and Mukasey.  It would be the last straw.  So she's trying to get out in front and take credit for some kind of compromise that will eventually come.

So the progressive movement can take a little credit for winning this battle.

There will still be a fight in front of the full senate to win the war, of course, but for the moment, it appears that we've weakened Feinstein's hand. Check in to calitics all weekend for updates on the resolution at the e-board meeting and if you'd like to add your name to the call for accountability for constantly caving to Bush, sign the petition HERE.

Bradley Whitford was good enough to star in this video for the Courage Campaign's No Dirty Tricks campaign to fight the GOP-driven initiative that threatens to steal 20+ electoral votes for the Republican nominee in California and potentially tip the balance in the election to the Republican.

Join us at NoDirtyTricks.com.

I have written extensively about the efforts of my colleagues at the Courage Campaign and the California netroots to kill the GOP dirty tricks initiative here in California, which, if it makes it to the June 2008 ballot and passes, would deliver 20+ electoral votes to the Republican nominee. This is more than just a California issue. The entire election could hinge on a low turnout June primary in California. So we've been fighting this thing tooth and nail with actions both online and off.

To raise awareness about this dangerous initiative, we put together this video featuring a bunch of bloggers whose names you'll certainly recognize:

And to discuss the ramifications of the initiative both locally and nationally, we're going to have a conference call on Monday at 4pm PDT hosted by Courage Campaign's Rick Jacobs, featuring Bradley Whitford (that's Josh Lyman for you West Wing fans,) bloggers Jane Hamsher and John Amato and pollster Ben Tulchin of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Sign up for the conference call HERE and join us in fighting this blatant right-wing power grab.

This is one straight out of Karl Rove's political playbook. A group of Republican political operatives and their powerful special interests have hatched a desperate scheme to rig California's electoral process to their advantage. They're proposing a statewide ballot initiative to change how California casts its electoral votes for President. They've cleverly labeled it the "Presidential Election Reform Act," which would sound credible if it weren't so cynical.

But make no mistake, this wolf-in-sheep's-clothing has nothing to do with reform or protecting voters' interests or preserving the integrity of our Constitution. It's an audacious power grab by the GOP as it spirals into irrelevance leading up to the 2008 Presidential race.