Today's Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including friend of Calitics thereisnospoon's excellent take at Daily Kos:

For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South. When truly progressive economics required that all our nation's people have equal opportunity to share in the nation's wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken. But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.

All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.

Krugman and spoon's points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan's 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis' 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson's 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters' resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the /real/ power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.

As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it's worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.

The short version of what I'm going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.

The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.   Read More »

The details of Arnold's budget plan are in and it is even more insane than we thought. His budget includes large cuts to public schools, which are bad enough in their own right. But the specific kinds of cuts are going to trigger a snowball effect that could destroy public schools in California - and I don't believe that's an exaggeration.

California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new plan for solving the state's budget crisis.

Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.

Schwarzenegger's plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.

In and of themselves these cuts are damaging and reckless. California students need MORE science instruction, not less, if they're going to be globally competitive. Cutting instruction isn't going to help students learn more, and will lead to corner-cutting by teachers and administrators alike.

Those damaging cuts become catastrophic, however, in the context of No Child Left Behind. Arnold's proposals are likely to cause numerous schools to fail to meet federal standards set by the law, especially when subsidies to low-performing schools are cut. Because NCLB mandates the closure of low-performing schools, Arnold's budget if enacted as-is would virtually ensure the closure of numerous schools in this state.

Arnold's budget also leaves schools facing their own cash crisis during the school year (and in prime testing season):

The governor has proposed to ease the pain, in part, by accounting transfers involving state transportation funds and by deferring $2.8 billion in school payments from April to July. Wells said the state, by deferring payments for three months, would place an "awful" new burden on school districts to secure short-term loans.

It will be extremely difficult to secure those kinds of loans, but Arnold continues to delude himself into thinking the private sector is interested in lending to state government or its affiliated agencies.

There are plenty of other ridiculous elements to Arnold's budget but the kinds of education cuts proposed are a good example of just how badly Arnold has screwed up our state. One has to wonder whether this is a shock-doctrine style plan to force mass privatization of public schools in California by starving them of revenue and forcing them to close when they inevitably are unable to meet NCLB standards.

Two years from now a new governor will be sworn in. I wonder if California can wait that long.

2008 was the year change came to California. And by that I don't just mean the successful Obama campaign. 2008 was the year the 20th century model finally broke down on the side of the road, as the privatized, financialized, sprawlconomy collapsed. California has been hit harder than almost every other state by the economic crisis, which has shown Californians the desperate need to move in a new direction.

The dominant political development in the state was the battle over that future. The budget crisis, which took up all of 2008 and will likely do the same in 2009, isn't just about taxes and spending, but about what kind of state we will live in.

The one thing all sides agree is that the future will not look like the past. Arnold Schwarzengger wants to roll back 40 years of environmental and labor laws, while his Republican legislative colleagues want to go back to the early 19th century before even public schools, in their desire to destroy state government. The Yacht Party is openly rooting for a Depression, which they believe will enable them to finally destroy their liberal enemies. If that requires sacrificing the middle class, so be it - Republicans only ever saw them as easily manipulated fellow-travelers anyway.

Democrats have not articulated a future as clearly as their opponents, but Californians have done this on their own. In a year that saw some bitter electoral defeats, voters pointed the way forward by approving nearly every mass transit proposal put to them, including those that required a 2/3 supermajority to raise taxes. Whether it's high speed rail, the Subway to the Sea, BART to San José, or the Marin-Sonoma train, Californians showed that anti-tax Hooverism has its limits.

In one of the most important speeches of the year, Van Jones called for progressives to move from opposition to proposition. The only way we can defeat the New Hoovers among us, those who want to despoil our environment and make working Californians suffer worse during this economic crisis, is for progressives to clearly articulate and defend a better alternative. The successful mass transit votes show how powerful that effort can be when it is made.

It also shows that Californians are now ready to redefine the California Dream for the 21st century - they are beginning to understand that the 20th century model of an economy built on sprawl has failed them and cannot provide broadly shared prosperity. Since so much of our politics stems from that sprawlconomy, Californians' willingness to look beyond it is a much-needed shift, even if the old ways die hard.

If that better, sustainable and prosperous future is to be realized, California progressives need to be better organized. The other great lesson, and the most important single political event of the year, was the passage of Proposition 8 - which showed how totally the old ways of politics had failed.

Many Caliticians have dissected the failure of the No on 8 campaign, laying the blame at a top-down consultant-driven media-focused campaign that did not speak clearly about the issue, about who would be impacted, and did not reach out to those Californians we need to reach. *When* we fight this battle again we will fix those mistakes. If Obama showed how a grassroots effort can change the country, Prop 8 showed how the lack of one can hurt the state.

Prop 8's passage also showed the maturation of the gay rights movement, which is the direct descendant of and now the heir to the Civil Rights Movement. It showed that even California is not immune to successful gay-bashing, but also showed how wide and deep support for equal rights has become. Prop 8 has galvanized a new generation to become politically organized, has turned average people into committed activists, and has united the progressive movement around a plan to bring communities together to organize for everyone's right to marry.

2008 was not a good year for California, and we enter 2009 with enormous challenges, with at least one wheel over the edge of the cliff. But 2008 has also shown us the way forward, how a grassroots, bottom-up politics centered on full equality for all and a sustainable model of prosperity can break through the failed politics of the 20th century and renew California's promise as a progressive, free, and beautiful place to live.

In a remarkable column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal right-wingers John Lott and Bradley Smith use the backlash against Prop 8 donors to suggest an end to campaign finance disclosure laws. They cite some of the more well-known examples of voter accountability for Prop 8 backers - Marjorie Christofferson, the Cinemark movie theater chain - to argue that campaign donations should be treated like a secret ballot:

How would you like elections without secret ballots? To most people, this would be absurd.

We have secret balloting for obvious reasons. Politics frequently generates hot tempers. People can put up yard signs or wear political buttons if they want. But not everyone feels comfortable making his or her positions public -- many worry that their choice might offend or anger someone else. They fear losing their jobs or facing boycotts of their businesses.

And yet the mandatory public disclosure of financial donations to political campaigns in almost every state and at the federal level renders people's fears and vulnerability all too real. Proposition 8 -- California's recently passed constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage by ensuring that marriage in that state remains between a man and a woman -- is a dramatic case in point. Its passage has generated retaliation against those who supported it, once their financial support was made public and put online.

This column could only be written in light of persistent media efforts to paint Yes on 8 donors as victims. By erasing the true victims - 18,000 same sex couples and the innumerable other couples who wished to follow them to full equality - folks like Steve Lopez have constructed a situation where the far right can use those supposed victims as a battering ram against campaign finance disclosure rules they've long opposed.

Lott's and Smith's argument is pernicious. They argue that mandatory disclosure limits freedom of speech and of political action, that anonymous donations have protected groups like the NAACP (from government harassment, not public accountability, as the columnists neatly ignore), and that public pressure to disclose donors will accomplish what regulations currently provide (yeah right).

This is not just a wingnut attempt to protect their wealthy allies. It's an effort to lay the groundwork to undermine California's disclosure laws in the event we return to the ballot to repeal Prop 8 in the near future. Without disclosure rules, it is *highly* likely that we will see much larger sums of money donated to the anti-gay cause.

Even before the post-election backlash unfolded, many wealthy donors and companies refrained from donating to the Yes on 8 campaign for fear of alienating customers and Californians. If these rules are relaxed then companies that rely on same sex marriage supporters for their profits could take that money, give it to the haters, without the public knowing or being able to take their business elsewhere. It could provide their side with a significant financial advantage over ours in a future ballot campaign.

That is likely the reason behind this op-ed. Sure, they buried it on the day after Christmas, but you can be assured it's not the last we'll hear of this argument. We would do well to prep our own response - that the public's right to know is sacrosanct, that if the right wants money to be equated with speech that implies disclosure, and that this is nothing but an end run around our laws to allow corporations to dominate our elections.

Infamous prosecutor Ken Starr has filed a legal brief -- on behalf of the "Yes on 8" campaign -- to nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between May and November of 2008.

Yes, they really did go there after promising repeatedly not to do this.

It's time to put a face to Ken Starr's shameful legal proceedings. To put a face to the 18,000 couples facing forcible divorce. To put a face to marriage equality. Because, gay or straight, YOU are the face of the Marriage Equality Movement.

The Courage Campaign just launched "Please Don't Divorce" a community photo project. They will break your heart and have made me cry on more than one occasion.

Please click through the photos in the slideshow below and then submit your own photo, as an individual, a couple or in a group (perhaps with your family over the holidays). Take a picture holding a piece of paper that says "Please don't divorce us," "Please don't divorce my moms,""Please don't divorce my friends, Dawn and Audrey," "Please don't divorce Californians" or whatever you want after "Please don't divorce..." and send it to: pleasedontdivorce@couragecampaign.org.

During this holiday week you may be enjoying your favorite version of Charles Dickens' classic /A Christmas Carol/ (I was always partial to the Muppets' version with Michael Caine).

Unfortunately we in California are actually *living* it. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed Democratic plans to close a $16 billion deficit with a mix of taxes and cuts, in pursuit of his radical right-wing agenda. His veto is a lump of coal in the stocking - we face crippling cuts to education & health care, the erosion of the safety net so he can gut environmental and labor laws to satisfy his corporate and conservative buddies. And the media actively enables him.

We at the Courage Campaign decided to do something about it. We produced this video with Donkey on the Edge, and made possible by Cheri and Naren Shankar, showing Arnold and California the impact of his Scrooge-like ways:   Read More »

Back in 2002-03 it was hard to get away from media coverage of the failing Gray Davis administration. At least, that's how it got framed in the state and even the national press. At the time I was living in Seattle and all the coverage I saw was of Davis screwing up this way or that way. Friends would ask why Californians voted to reelect someone so clearly incompetent. With media coverage like that it was never any doubt that Davis would lose the recall.

Five years later California is in a *worse* situation than we were in 2002-03, when Davis was blamed for everything that had gone wrong in California and was recalled just 11 months after having been reelected. Arnold has given us a $40 billion deficit - larger than anything Davis grappled with. And when Democrats, facing a severe cash crisis, got creative in finding a solution *and* gave Arnold almost everything he demanded, Arnold vetoed the solution anyway. California bankruptcy seems more likely than ever, a direct consequence of Arnold's actions.

But that's not the story the media tells the public. The Arnold that you read about in the newspapers or see on TV is a strong governor willing to make tough choices for the good of the people. An environmental leader who has the people's interests, but who's weighed down by a typically screwy legislature, where Democrats and Republicans (though it's mostly Democrats) are to blame for any problems we face.

Last night's appearance on 60 Minutes was a classic case of media enabling of Arnold's failures:

But now "home" is in trouble. California is the foreclosure capital, and unemployment is above eight percent. The governor proposed to close that budget deficit half with tax increases and half with budget cuts. Republicans and Democrats opposed him.

When 60 Minutes sat down with Schwarzenegger at the Capitol, he had just left the legislative leadership and he seemed in no mood. Before they got settled, Pelley was worried that the last thing the governor wanted to do was talk to him.

"I'm not sure that meeting went all that well. You seem pretty preoccupied. You got the 'Terminator look' on your face," Pelley remarked.

That was basically the extent of the conversation on the budget and the economy - issues that dominate our state right now. The rest of the piece was typical greenwashing of Arnold's environmental record. Arnold is touting green jobs as a solution to economic recovery, and in a hypocritical Newsweek op-ed he called for sustainable infrastructure spending as economic stimulus...just as the state had to suspend ALL infrastructure projects owing to the cash crisis.

That crisis - for which Arnold bears primary responsibility right now - is even jeopardizing crucial planning work on high speed rail, which will create hundreds of thousands of green jobs in California - unless Arnold's efforts to destroy the state succeed in derailing that as well.

Arnold's 60 Minutes interview is an all too typical example of how the media has enabled his failures. The piece didn't mention his role in the budget crisis or how it makes a mockery of his green jobs goals. And because he gets fawning coverage while bold and inventive Democratic efforts to save the state are dismissed as trickery by the media, Arnold gets away with trying to bankrupt the state while talking a big game on the environment.

In fact, *nowhere* in the 60 Minutes interview was it explained that among Arnold's recent budget demands was a gutting of CEQA oversight of development. 60 Minutes doesn't tell its viewers that while Arnold plays an environmentalist on TV, back in Sacramento he is doing everything he can to destroy environmental protections.

And yet there is some evidence that, maybe, just maybe, the traditional media is starting to wake up to that fact. More over the flip.   Read More »

It's not just wrong. It's dangerous. Every time homophobia is left unchallenged, it sends the message to people struggling with their identity that there's something fundamentally wrong with them. It's heartbreaking, it's frightening, and it's flat out dangerous.

And while I can't come up with any satisfying justification for Obama inviting Rick Warren to the Inauguration, the fact is that Rick Warren will still be preaching intolerance, hate and ignorance whether he goes to the Inauguration or not.

But here's the thing. Whenever Warren is pushed to discuss his views on homosexuality- whether in a friendly forum like Beliefnet or a more critical setting like Larry King Live, he demonstrates that his views are harmful and seriously out of step with reality.

Which is why we at the Courage Campaign think it's high time for him to put up or shut up. Does he have the courage and the chops to debate Rev. Eric Lee about gay marriage? Sign the petition challenging him to make his case and let's find out.

If you don't know Rev. Lee yet, all I can say is...Bring it Rev. Warren. Let's just see what you've got.

Earlier today, Rick Jacobs emailed our members about our challenge, highlighting some of Warren's recent outrageous statements in the process:   Read More »

"Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors -- the 'us's' -- without hope the 'us's' give up. I know that you can't live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give them hope." - Harvey Milk, "Hope Speech," 1978

Hope doesn't win elections or change the world by itself. It's all people with hope that do it. The people who believe that not only SHOULD things be better, but somehow, some way, things will be better.

Attending a Milk+Love event on Saturday feeds both halves of the activist. A brief break from fighting for what's right to celebrate what's right and remember how we've gotten here. An extra infusion of motivation and hope before attending a Light Up the Night candlelight vigil.

Robert Cruickshank wrote to Courage members earlier this week explaining his personal connection to Milk and what this weekend can mean:   Read More »

Conservatives have for decades cultivated a politics of victimhood - presenting themselves as victims of some group, usually liberal and often an oppressed minority, in order to gain sympathy for their insane beliefs and to delegitimize progressive ideas and actions. We're witnessing it on Proposition 8 as well, and now the media is playing along. The result is a massive distortion of the true effects of Prop 8, and the normalization of support for discriminatory policy.

The specific case is that of Margie Christofferson, who quit her job as a manager at LA's El Coyote Restaurant under pressure from activists and customers angry at her donation of $100 to the Yes on 8 campaign. Her journey from oppressor to victim has been aided by Steve Lopez of the LA Times, who wrote a deeply flawed column on Sunday casting Christofferson as a sympathetic figure:

Margie Christoffersen didn't make it very far into our conversation before she cracked. Chest heaving, tears streaming, she reached for her husband Wayne's hand and then mine, squeezing as if she'd never let go.

"I've almost had a nervous breakdown. It's been the worst thing that's ever happened to me," she sobbed as curious patrons at a Farmers Market coffee shop looked on, wondering what calamity had visited this poor woman who's an honest 6 feet tall, with hair as blond as the sun.

That sets the tone for a column that blames the victims of Prop 8 for making this poor woman cry, and Lopez isn't above repeating disputed claims that riot police showed up at El Coyote during a recent rally. But perhaps the most troubling part of the column was Lopez' normalization of her support for discrimination:

But I didn't like what I was hearing about the vilification of Margie Christoffersen and others in California being targeted for the crime of voting their conscience.

"Voting our conscience" has been one of the key methods by which Prop 8 supporters have escaped responsibility for their actions or even acknowledging what Prop 8 was - an attack on the legal equality of thousands of Californians merely for their sexual orientation. When framed this way the Yes on 8 position becomes almost unassailable, immune to criticism. "They're just voting their conscience," we're supposed to think, and not be allowed to ask them to face the realities of what they have done, not be allowed to criticize them for voting to take away equal rights and destroy existing marriages, and not be allowed to act with our own conscience by denying those who backed Prop 8 our patronage. Each of those acts is cast as an aggressive and hurtful act, where the oppressed are cast as oppressors.

Lopez mentions almost in passing that "thousands [of gay people] feel as though their civil rights have been violated" but their concerns and views don't get the sob story treatment Margie Christofferson got - even though she knew full well what she was giving money for, and continues to believe that her vote for Prop 8 was the right move. As Lisa Derrick notes she has never apologized to her once-loyal customers for what she did. Obviously she feels no need to offer any such apology.

Lopez' column writes the real victims of Prop 8 out of the story and replaces them with their victimizers. Once again GLBT Californians and their fundamental rights are treated as either deviant or invisible. The only people whose opinions matter are those who oppose gay rights, and if someone dares call it out then they become the oppressors. Standing up for gay rights, for marriage equality, becomes itself an act of hate.

Margie Christofferson is not a sympathetic figure. She is someone in deep denial of reality, who is unwilling to reconcile her relationships with her own intolerance. It's not the rest of Los Angeles's job to play along with it, to enable it, to pretend as if it doesn't exist. Doing so merely continues the decades of injustice that comes when good people do nothing and discrimination is treated as normal.

It would be nice if the traditional media would recognize this. It's not likely that they will. Martin Luther King, Jr. may be venerated today but he was a controversial figure in his day who received FAR more criticism from the media than credit, who was told that the March on Washington was a dangerous provocation that should not be attempted. The Civil Rights Movement rightly refused to let such concern trolling stop them. We who are part of the marriage equality movement would do well to learn that lesson.

As the UCLA Anderson Forecast projects a "nasty recession" with "ugly" unemployment figures that won't turn around until 2010 at the soonest, California Republicans have decided to join their fellow partisans in the US Senate and place pathological hatred of unions and environmental laws ahead of our fiscal and economic survival.

The LA Times reports that Mike Villines was willing to support a VLF increase - but only if Democrats agreed to his insane and possibly illegal demands for cuts in government programs and regulations:

Sources said Villines raised the possibility of GOP support for a higher car fee in budget negotiations last month, saying he thought that he could bring rank-and-file Republicans along if Democrats agreed to steep cuts in government programs and a permanent cap on state spending.

The sources who were in the room said his suggestion came after Democrats offered spending cuts they would reluctantly agree to implement.

Villines denies it of course - he's got to keep up the anti-tax front - but this is typical and unsurprising. Republicans have a habit of promising to finally do what common sense has long dictated - provide a bridge loan to automakers, ensure that California doesn't go bankrupt - but only if Democrats agree to destroy a union, or a government program, or an environmental treasure. And if Democrats refuse to go along with such recklessness, Republicans walk away and let everything collapse.

I suppose I should see Villines' willingness to embrace a VLF increase as a victory, but what this really does is bring into clear view the fact that the Yacht Party has no intention whatsoever in trying to solve this crisis. They genuinely don't care what happens to schools, health care clinics, or the economy as a whole. They're out to break liberalism, whatever the cost.

We're not dealing with rational actors here. The focus of political work in California is no longer about trying to work out a budget deal. It's about defusing a full-blown hostage crisis where every one of us - our economic security - are being used as pawns in Villines' game.

Combined with Dave Cogdill's crybaby move at today's budget talks this suggests a clear strategy for moving forward - show Californians just how reckless and dangerous the Republican Party has become. And if any of these jokers want to have a shot at higher office in 2010 they're going to have to defend their decision to let this state collapse in their desire to settle old scores.

California will pull through this crisis, but the light at the end of the tunnel never seemed so far away.

It would seem an obvious point, one that Dave Johnson made so well - mass layoffs aren't going to solve our budget deficit. Unfortunately that seems to be exactly what many Republicans and some media outlets are suggesting be done to close the gap.

Some of this is outright union-busting, not unlike what Bob Corker and other Republicans are doing by opposing the auto bailout. Just as the 1970s crisis was used by corporate leaders and their right-wing allies to break the unions, so too do Republicans wish to do the same thing.   Read More »

There's been a great deal of introspection in the month since election day over what exactly happened with Prop 8. Obviously we've talked about it here at Courage in some depth, but when I attended a local organizing meeting here in San Diego last week, I was impressed not just by all the energy and commitment in the activist base, but by how naturally everyone "got it." They understood that this time, supporters of equality had to go out to all corners of the community, make their case in person, and most importantly reclaim the rhetorical battleground. In short, stop reacting and seize the initiative.

There are a lot of great ideas percolating at the local, state and national level, and so many of them are happening organically- motivated folks who organize their friends and neighbors and inspire others to do the same. Today, that energy is devoted to Day Without A Gay, organized by Join the Impact. The premise is pretty simple: if you're able, call in "gay" today, and volunteer in your community for marriage equality or other causes.

Yesterday afternoon, Eden James sent a targeted email to supporters asking that they gather signatures for the Courage Campaign Repeal Prop 8 Pledge while working in the community. His pitch was certainly better than mine:   Read More »

Note by Robert: The following was written by Dante Atkins, a blogger at Calitics and Daily Kos and co-creator of the "Home Invasion" ad. It is reposted here with his permission.

This past Wednesday, NRO columnist Jonah Goldberg--who, for some reason, is syndicated in the L.A. Times--wrote an editorial condemning the "Home Invasion" advertisement I co-wrote that the Courage Campaign aired on election day.

Jonah's talking points were the same ones that we've been seeing frequently from religious organizations and right-wing commentators since the protest: that the ad was bigoted, that Mormons were just one member of broad coalition, and that homosexual radicals are suppressing harmless freedom of speech by religious groups.

Well, the Times has a section of their online version named "Blowback"--dedicated to full-length responses to editorial pieces. Today's Blowback features a response by Rick Jacobs, founder of the Courage Campaign.

The full article is worth a read--Rick's piece systematically takes Jonah's editorial to task by showing that:

a) truth can't be libel;
b) The Mormons were the principals behind Prop 8, and have a history of obfuscation of their endeavors on that front;
c) The Mormons have every right to influence the political process through free speech; and supporters of same-sex unions have every right to expose the efforts they make.

Here's the key quote:

The LDS Church or any other organization has every right to use its power to influence elections to any extent that is legal. What it doesn't have a right to do is claim persecution when other organizations do nothing but expose the church's forays into the political arena before a discerning public.

Yeah...honestly. What's up with that? It seems like the "Protect Marriage" folks are really passionate about first amendment rights to free speech, but are really desperate to suppress another first amendment right--the right to free assembly.

And that's really the bottom line. Apparently, certain religious groups think they have a God-given right to impose their viewpoints on state institutions with no blowback. Apparently, every other organization should have to face consequences from unhappy opponents arising from the political causes they support--except for religious groups attempting to impose their agenda.

Thankfully, there are groups out there that are actually dedicated to preventing double-standards like this from taking hold in the public consciousness. The Courage Campaign is one of them.

Also, if you haven't done this yet, please join over 300,000 people in signing the pledge to repeal Prop 8, launched by the Courage Campaign and joined by CREDO Mobile, Join the Impact and MoveOn.org.

Thanks again to Dante Atkins for this post.

The Public Policy Institute of California released a poll today about voter decision-making on Prop 8 (and some other props, including 1A and 4). Their conclusion is that Prop 8 passed because its Republican and evangelical supporters were highly motivated to pass it, whereas Prop 8 opponents lacked a similar sense of urgency. From the PPIC press release:

* Evangelical or born-again Christians (85%) were far more likely than others (42%) to vote yes.
* Three in four Republicans (77%) voted yes, two in three Democrats (65%) voted no, and independents were more closely divided (52% yes, 48% no).
* Supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain were far more likely than those who backed President-elect Barack Obama to vote yes (85% vs. 30%).
* Latinos (61%) were more likely than whites (50%) to vote yes; and 57 percent of Latinos, Asians, and blacks combined voted yes. (Samples sizes for Asians and blacks are too small to report separately.)
* Voters without a college degree (62%) were far more likely than college graduates (43%) to vote yes.
* While most voters (65%) consider the outcome of Proposition 8 to be very important, the measure's supporters (74%) are far more likely than those who voted no (59%) to view the outcome as very important.

The poll also indicated that support for same-sex marriage was split, 47% in favor, 48% against, and 5% opposed. That suggests to me that the Yes on 8 campaign's lying ads about the effects of Prop 8 had some effect on voter behavior.

Still, if the poll's conclusions about voter motivation are accurate, then it adds more fuel to the criticisms of the No on 8 campaign for not having done an effective job in mobilizing its own base to vote, and not doing a good enough job of creating a sense of urgency around the proposition - and in reaching out to other communities, including communities of color. If and when this goes back to the ballot we can expect the anti-marriage forces to be highly motivated to vote. Our side, the supporters of marriage equality, need to be motivated as well.

The PPIC poll has a wealth of other information on state politics, from approval ratings of the governor and the legislature (Arnold fares better than the Legislature - 42% approve of Arnold, 49% disapprove, 9% no opinion; and a whopping 66% disapprove of the Legislature) and public opinion on the initiative process.

As the new Legislature is sworn into office there are hopes that the change in personalities might lead to a resolution of the budget crisis. Many of the new members are hoping to produce exactly that. And while their desire to solve the crisis is admirable, they may not yet have realized that solutions lie outside the Capitol, not inside it.

The San Francisco Chronicle article on the new lawmakers explains their desire to produce change:

Paul Fong, previously a community college trustee, said his first priority will be "to make friends with Republicans and get them to see the light" when it comes to approving new taxes and fees to ease the state's budget shortfall.

I have to guess that's a remark for the media - hopefully Fong realizes that the Republicans are in no mood to "see the light" on the budget. They have shown themselves to be quite happy obstructing the budget and demanding destructive, reckless cuts that will push California deeper into an already severe recession. Many of the new Republican legislators made a show of signing anti-tax pledges, making them even less willing than their predecessors to agree to new revenues.

More importantly, Fong's desire to "make friends with Republicans" is misplaced. It's not Republican legislators he needs to court - it is Republican voters, constituents of Republican legislators. They're the ones who can force the obstructionists to give way to common sense and dire economic necessity.

The most important thing the new class of legislators must learn is that the budget crisis will not be solved in Sacramento. Not in the back rooms, not on the chamber floor. The last few years should have proved that already.

Instead it will be solved in the public - in the streets, at the kitchen tables, at the ballot box. The most consequential budget-related actions in this decade came not from legislators but from the people, whether it was the 2003 recall or the 2005 defeat of Arnold's right-wing agenda.

It's Californians themselves who need to be reached out to, mobilized, engaged. Don't stay holed up in the Capitol - get out there and get the public involved in solving this crisis. Reach out not to obstructionist Republican who will *never* give in, but reach out instead to the decline to state and moderate Republican voters.

Follow the Obama model. Take your message to the places where Democrats have traditionally not organized. Mobilize your base and then use them to reach out to the millions of Californians desperate for change, desperate for solutions.

Democrats have to build a coalition with the people of California. Arnold has been a complete failure as governor, and the Republicans are busy thinking up new anti-labor, anti-environment demands for the hostage crisis they've provoked.

Californians voted overwhelmingly for people-powered change on November 4. It's time for the new legislature to bring that home and engage the public more directly and fundamentally on solving this crisis.

Before Barack Obama, there was Harvey Milk.

A politician who brought a message of hope and empowerment to a place that had suffered under years of conservative rule. Who broke down a major barrier for a group of long-persecuted Americans. Who knew how to reach out to sometimes hostile and different groups to build a coalition for change.

30 years ago today Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual person elected to office in America, was assassinated in San Francisco City Hall by a fellow Supervisor, Dan White. White went on to kill Milk's close ally and another great San Francisco liberal, Mayor George Moscone.

As the new Gus Van Sant/Sean Penn biopic hits theaters this week, it seemed worthwhile to take a look back at Harvey Milk, and remind ourselves why he matters to ALL of us, 30 years later. Especially when we've had our own November tragedy surrounding gay rights.   Read More »

The legislature voted yesterday on the Democratic budget plan and, predictably, Republicans refused to vote for it, unwilling to support a tax increase. Closing a $17 billion hole in the budget with cuts alone would pretty much destroy government, which is of course their goal. In turn that would send California from a recession into an outright Depression, as the safety net would crumble and job losses would skyrocket.

The media's coverage of the budget debate is equally predictable. The Sacramento Bee framed yesterday's vote as a "last ditch effort" and the article opened with phrases like "debated, complained and pointed fingers of blame Tuesday." Arnold compared the legislature to a kindergarten, which I am hoping is not a set-up for some 1990 movie flashback.

The result of such coverage is to further depress public interest in and engagement with the budget process. Reporters make it sound like the Legislature is dysfunctional or doesn't care, conveniently sliding past the fact that the budget delays are *solely* the product of Republican obstructionism.

That means we need to look beyond what the media says to the actual plan the Democrats put forth:

• $8.1 billion in new revenues, from a tripling of the VLF and from freezing the current income tax tables



• $8.1 billion in cuts, including $4 billion to schools and $100 million to community colleges



• $800 million in fund transfers and other gimmicks

It's not a great plan, and the Democrats' united opposition to education cuts from the spring seems to have melted away. That's not a good sign, as the budget fight that began in 2007 seems to move inexorably toward the Republicans.

At the same time, this plan needs to be seen as a first step toward a budget solution. Legislative support for a restored VLF is a big step in the right direction, reversing 10 years of supporting that flawed tax giveaway. Action on the income tax is also a good move, although I would like to see Democrats return to their summer budget plan that called for a restoration of the 1990s tax brackets for higher income Californians.

That dovetails with the winning tax platform Obama used in his campaign. Note the word *campaign*. Sacramento Democrats need to start campaigning on the budget. Too often they have been focused on deal-making inside the Capitol and failed to aggressively sell their plans and their framing to Californians.

Next week dozens of new members will be sworn into the legislature. Their new energy can help take this plan, improve it, and build the public support necessary to implement it by breaking Republican resistance.

Let's hope that the new members bring a fresh attitude to the budget - one that recognizes this thing will NOT be solved inside the Capitol with a vote or a backroom deal.

It's a simple question, but in practice the answer certainly isn't. We've seen tens of thousands of people take to the streets already, and it's been incredible. We've had more than 300,000 people sign our pledge to repeal Prop 8 and we're still growing.

But a sustained campaign to repeal Prop 8 at the ballot, or protect judges from politically motivated recall efforts or just plain old vicious campaigning, or whatever else it may take to restore marriage equality- it requires people in the field. Working to organize and really maximize the political might of this activist army.

Rick Jacobs emailed supporters yesterday asking for help putting organizers in the field to start working towards the restoration of equality and the repeal of Prop 8. He wrote:   Read More »

Yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune has a long article on the failure of Proposition A, a $52 parcel tax for all of San Diego County that would have funded a regional fire authority and help provide badly needed additional resources at local fire departments. Interestingly, it was the most fire-prone areas of San Diego County - towns like Ramona, which nearly burned down in the 2003 fire - that turned in the strongest No votes. Why would they vote against protecting their own property?

"I think the people don't believe the government," said Peter Jorgenson, a Ramona resident who voted for the tax. "They don't believe that they're actually going to do anything with the money."...

It did not win the support of Mary Eaker, 59, a clerk at a Circle K in Ramona.

"With the economy so bad, everybody's voting against anything with taxes," Eaker said. "Nobody wants more taxes. Forget it."

The article describes many other possible reasons for Prop A's failure, including poor leadership from San Diego County Supervisors, but the distrust of government does seem to be at the core of the problem.

Of course, this isn't just some random development. Conservatives have had as a primary focus creating and capitalizing on distrust of government. Conservative politicians, activists, and editorial pages like those at the U-T (which did endorse Prop A) have frequently accused government of being wasteful and reckless with tax money as a way to ensure voters never do support a tax increase. They cried wolf so often that when the wolf finally appeared in the form of a catastrophic firestorm, the good people of San Diego County did what they had been trained to do - be skeptical of government and vote against a tax for services they desperately need.

It dates back to 1978:

Proposition 13 reduced property tax revenue to governments throughout California, leaving fire districts with revenue shortfalls as high as 80 percent.

It's not likely we'll ever see a conservative question Prop 13. But as we saw last year conservative criticism has extended to fire departments themselves. Firefighters in Orange County were frequent targets of right-wing criticism, with the OC Register accusing them of being wasteful and taxpayers as being "weak" for giving fire departments more money.

One of the primary reasons for California's ongoing budget crisis is because conservatives have successfully created and exploited this distrust of government. If we're going to solve the fire crisis or the budget crisis, we need to restore public trust in government.

Showing Californians the consequences of conservative policies is a good way to do that. Just as conservative anti-government policies left New Orleans vulnerable to a hurricane and left the city's residents stranded when that hurricane finally arrived, so too has conservative policy and framing left Californians vulnerable to a similar disaster.