Wondering what to expect in 2009? Here are a few of the headlines you are most likely to see...

GOD DECLARED BIGOT- rik jakobs of the scourage campaign declared today that God is actually a bigot. said jakobs, "...the problem is that god has shown he disciminates against gays by keeping their numbers to only about 2% of the population. who else does god do this to? this is unacceptable and shows a real intolerance. also, god has chosen to make the womb the ONLY place (besides a petri dish) for human conception & limited a womb to the female gender. need i say more. something must be done immediately and we will boycott god until he makes the needed changes."

EVOLUTION IS FALSE SCIENCE- richurd jacabs of the coward campaign called on the Supreme Court to ban all schools from teaching creationism or evolution in schools. jacabs stated that "...evolution is as false as creation. darwin was a complete & utter bigot. the entire theory is a bunch of hogwash. if darwinism were true then we would have evolved in a much more just & tolerant way. why is it that after all this time a sphincter is still not a vagina? there can be only one explanation. this man was a true evil charlatan & his theories have no place in the world today, let alone being taught to young and impressionable children."

The right too choose is a fundamental right. As a co-creater of my destiny, I feel it to be my right as a free, conscious, human being to decide what is best for me and my way of life. The right to choose is a fundamental fight for humans to take control of their lives and pursue the right to be free. As is written in the declaration of independence, we are created equal and are endowed by our creator to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I really don't know what to think ~ do you? I really don't know what to do ~ do you? Shall I watch Philadelphia again or go see Milk again? I lived through the Life and Times of Harvey Milk. When can we just breathe and call this place home?

I started this campaign season just being anti-Bush. I made a button that said, "Vote Democratic." John Edwards seemed to really care about the poor, so do I. Hillary Clinton's Beijing 1997 speech was all I could hope from any woman who made it that far up the political ladder. Biden, Kucinich, Richardson, Dodd ~ okay, okay. Obama was interesting but too young, too unknown, no record in Illinois on my issues. So I got on the Hillary train and was increasingly thrilled, day after day, imagining what it would mean to my life and the lives of every woman in the world for her to be POTUS.

Obama won the nomination and, while the press pressed Hillary to concede, while past conquered nominees took weeks to step aside, it appeared that three days was too long for Hillary to concede in the minds of the media. From my hindsight, I wish she had taken longer. Three days was not enough to wash away the hopes and dreams of a Hillary Clinton Presidency. I felt robbed. Love being what it is, she asked and I supported Obama. My younger friends were buoyant. My centrist friends were smug. My tried and true feminist friends were abandoned.

So what could we do? Lets wait and see. Oh yes, wait and see, though during the campaign he was cautious and measured; he will be progressive, pro-minority, pro-diversity, pro-woman, pro-social justice and it will all take shape once elected. Let me be really clear here: this was his electorate telling me this. These are the people with Obama stickers on the car, buttons on lapels and poised for an historical celebration. These are the prophets of change and predictors of massive global consciousness.

What has happened so far? Not much. "He is not in office yet." (I can hear you) But actually, he has made dozens of decisions. The cabinet is five women out of fifteen seats. (fewer than Bill Clinton did 16 years ago) He appointed Larry Summers to his economic advisory board. This is the man who was fired from Harvard for saying that women may not have an aptitude for math and science. Please note that you can find language about advancing women in math and science on both the Obama website (under women issues) and the Democratic Party Platform.

Take a look at the "shovel-ready' work and weigh it with three factors; 1) women are paid 77 cents on the dollar, when they have work, 2) most of these jobs are traditionally male and by a very large percentage are held by men and 3) many of the middle and lower class homes are headed by women. Creating all of these jobs is great but, to be of use to the whole country, they must include a preponderance of work for women, the passage of the fair-pay act and balanced benefits for families such as paid sick leave, affordable health insurance, maternity leave, day care and family justice.

The media may be having a hay day with the ridiculous circus surrounding Governor Blagojevich as it unfolds day to day but this is not the meat of the matter. Widen the lens and note that this continuous cavalcade of unscrupulous idiots, who have been at the helm of Illinois for decades (Ryan, now in prison, was Speaker of the House in 1982) have held up a federal amendment which would include women in the US Constitution. Silly hair-dos, foul language, a wife who is in on the street talk - that is not the story. Appointing Burris to be the Junior Senator for Illinois is not the story. The overwhelming damage to the advancement of humanity, the parade of leaders who care nothing for social justice, the suffering of the citizens of Illinois and the US is the story. JESUS CHRIST ~ SOMEBODY TELL THE STORY AND IMPEACH THIS GOVERNOR AND END HIS LINNEAGE.

So I entered the contest to be one of the ten people to attend the inauguration as Obama's guest. Now that simultaneously seemed ironic and proper. Here is what I said,

"I am 60, I am a Democrat and I voted for you. I hope you choose me to attend the inauguration and celebrate your presidency. If you do not choose me, I will be at the Saddleback Church with a sign protesting the appointment of Pastor Rick Warren to lead our country in prayer and to mark the beginning of your eight years in office. He says that I am liken to a nazi and my womb is the comparable to Auschwitz, as I had an abortion many years ago. He says that since I am bi-sexual, I am equivalent to a pedophile. I suggest you ask Pastor Warren to hold a Parliament of Religion like the one held in Chicago 1923. It is time for all of the religions of the earth to have a meeting."

So either way - you know where to find me on the 20th.

Don't believe the Hype, lets keep an eye on Obama.

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.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a straight male who was born in Texas and raised in Indiana. While normally I wouldn't define myself by my sexuality or my residency I think it has to be done to give credence to the plan that I hope to outline.

Overturning Prop 8 won't be easy, we are kidding ourselves if we think we can simply walk to the polls in 2010 and have enough voters to overturn it. This is uncharted territory not just for California, or just the United States but it is uncharted for the entire free world. The world is watching. Here are my proposed steps:

1. Let the lawyers do their job. This nation is ripe with intelligent lawyers who see the injustice behind Prop 8. We need to rally and unite them under a common belief and clear goals.   Read More »

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.

Today I went to a knitting store in Orange County, my county. I asked the clerk about a certain yarn, did it have to be doubled. She showed me her splendid rainbow shoulder bag which looked tie-dyed like something from a Grateful Dead concert. I jokingly asked if she was on acid at Woodstock when she made it. She whispered, "some people ask me if I am gay." I said, "You should tell them yes, it could be fun." Lowering her voice even further, she said it would not be funny as it was a Christian store. I relied, "It wouldn't stop me."

I live in the infamous OC. Home of St James Anglican Church, which does not allows gays. Home of Disneyland which offers insurance to gay families. Home of the Angels, the Mighty Ducks, the Clippers. Home of Loretta Sanchez and Dana Rohrabacher. The epicenter of the NO ON 6 Campaign, temporary safe-haven for Anita Bryant, home of Rick Warren's church in Lake Forest.

There is no mistake about the world famous OC; mega conservative, fundamentalist Christian, republican with great beaches and world-class waves. If you visit the website of Rick Warren's church you will find teachings promoting the submission of the wife to the husband. In addition to classifying gay people with pedophiles and practitioners of incest, he has been very vocal that women who have had abortions are no different than the Nazis and their uterus, he likened to Auschwitz.

It is nice that Melissa Etheridge wants to have a détente with Pastor Rick. She thinks that it is important that he meets some gay people who have families and family values. I hope they have a prosperous exchange. But here's the point. Why not pool your resources, gay and straight, Christian and compassionate and have a Summit of Understanding. Why not hold a Parliament of Religion like the one in 1923 in Chicago. Invite people of all faiths to promote understanding and demonstrate the ability to sit and talk and be civil(ized). Invite some women who have had abortions, some doctors who have done abortions, some gay families, some gay ministers and, even, some of those super conservative Anglicans and super-liberal Unitarians.

That is where all of this should be going. That is the organic coalition that would truly demonstrate CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. But you DON'T offer this renown bigot, outspoken hate-monger, homophobic, misogynistic man in the Western world, the biggest pulpit in history and say it is just a gesture of inclusion and goodwill. We are not that stupid and, frankly, neither are you Mr. Obama. You know this is an outrage.

So here's an idea ~ put together a team for the invocation; three or four people who actually represent and LOVE the diversity of America. Please do not put forth the worst of us who needs to be educated, explained and apologized for; this man who can validate every family who judges and condemns their gay relatives. Put forth a face, or set of faces which tell all the world who we are, who we hope to be, who inspires the change we can believe in.

After watching the little "Christmas Card video" it is apparent that this site is by the state employees and for the state employees. Taxes cannot and should not be raised. All of the cuts in spending are justified, especially now when the states revenues are at the lowest. This website is an example of the impact of larger than necessary government. A group that is not a majority, but also large, tries to influence the majority by suggesting that loss of state jobs during a budget crisis automatically results in loss of NEEDED services. Schools, it they close, will be closed because they are not needed. Many state employees may be facing cuts in hours and/or benefits. JOIN THE REST OF THE WORLD. Where did this confused notion come from that government employees are more important that private sector employees. I don't believe the I have seen any websites suggesting that large private companies that are laying people off by the truckload should find a way to tax the public to retain those jobs.

If you look at the history of taxation in this state, the budget has risen steadily over the last 30 years at a rate 2 1/2 to 3 times the growth of the GSP. If you look at an egg, you have a pretty good idea of the size of the yoke relative to the white. Government in its present form is the yoke getting larger and larger while the taxpayer available dollars,(the white) does not. How long can this go on.

Many of the great thinkers in history (including Plato and Aristotle) supported small government and realized the danger of allowing the government to grow to a point where those that fear for their givernment jobs could influence those who pay for those jobs.

Don't buy into this absurd argument. If you ask a state employee how much money is enough, they could not answer this question. There is never enough. Government is a giany consumer and it's the taxpayer that needs to determine how much is enough. If everyone else is tightening their belts, so should the state.

Several States that have much smaller education budgets (per student), for example, are out-performing california. Our problems are complex and throwing more money at them will not improve the state government and it definitely won't improve the lives of already strapped taxpayers.

Dear President Elect.

I have been a fervent supporter and past contributor to your historic campaign. I believe you will usher in badly needed reform and thoughtfulness into our government and society as a whole. Whatever else happens, I believe you are the right man for the job, and I will continue to support you in the years to come. I believe in you.

So it is with a heavy heart that I must respectfully resign from your organization under protest because of your selection of Rick Warren to speak at your inauguration.

I am a married heterosexual male, and yet many people in my life are gay, and I am not blind to their struggle for respect and equality in America. That is why I am dismayed that such an exclusive and derisive figure as Rick Warren will speak on your behalf.

Warren's assertion that gays are defacto as heinous as pedophiles and gay sex is as abhorrent as incest is just the kind of backwards thinking and discriminatory rhetoric that I would hope would start to disappear under your stewardship. Just ask the next generation, they understand that our parents generation, and regrettably many of us still cling to medieval mores that seek to brand homosexuals as deviants and affronts to God. Kids don't care, they know many gay folks and realize that blanket condemnations are the result of fear and lazy thinking. These are the young people whose votes you so courted, the same people who you should have shown some respect for when you selected a spiritual figure to bless your inauguration.

You know, sir, it isn't as if you couldn't have found a religious person who believes in an inclusive, Christian attitude toward all of God's children. People who don't judge, after all, are the real Christians.

I will always relish the day I cast my ballot for you, but alas I will always remember the day when you dealt me my very first major disappointment.

respectfully,

James Dimitrios Fourniadis

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.

California Democrats have been excessively lazy in attending to California's finances and the state of our democracy. What they should have been doing all these years is building a campaign for basic reforms such as 50% vote being sufficient to raise taxes, splitting the Prop 13 tax rolls so that business pays its fair share, and perhaps most important creating a system for elections where opponents are more closely matched and the outcome of elections can no longer be so easily predicted, because when most of the outcomes are predictable, there is no real democracy and no real elections. Hopefully Prop 11 will take care of electoral reform, but without the people pushing for all they're worth, there will be no reform.

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 »

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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 »

I completely disagree with those of you who posted their support in Warren doing the invocation at Obama's Inauguration. Warren is speaking hate speech and that should never be tolerated. The shoe was on the other foot when Rev. Wright spoke out against white Americans, people were upset. Well guess what, this is the same thing even if it does not affect you directly. For Warren to be a part of the Inauguration is equivalent to a president prior to the civil rights act being passed asking a preacher to speak that claims people of color are 4/5 human. That is what was preached and believed not very long ago. In no way should the homosexual community abide by Obama's actions, it breaks my heart that he and his administration do not care about the ramifications of giving voice to a bigot like Warren. This is 2008 people, time to let go of hate and fear. Divided we fail and in the words of Lennon, "You say you want a Revolution" bring it on cause I for one will not back down when anyone is allowed to speak hatred against any people group. It is still legal in many US states to be fired on the grounds of being a homosexual, also in many states there are not hate crime laws. You think Warren should be allowed to speak at the Inauguration? Give me a break! Really? Supporting discrimination of any form is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I watched a very interesting movie tonight, Gandhi, My Father. It is the tragic story of Harilal Gandhi who could not please his father and died a beggar, a drunk, a widower who left his children. No matter how much we might elevate M.K. Gandhi, he was just a man whose vision operated within the confines of his exquisite lens. Harilal wanted everything his father had and had the luxury to renounce. Bapu, the Father of India, was strict, unforgiving and could not let his son drink deeply from life to make his own decisions on what to embrace or renounce. It was as if Gandiji expected his son to merely adopt his hard-earned lessons; rather than learn them himself. He seemed to think that since he learned something, Harilal could/should just accept the outcome without learning it himself.

But make no mistake, Harilal wanted father-love, mother-love, wife-love, child-love ~ family. He wanted family. I wonder if children of famous people might really find this story maddening ~ not comforting at all. In the light of the news today I cannot help but make layered parallels with that of the gay son or daughter wanting father-love, mother-love, a lover, children ~ family. Isn't that really what all of the prop 8, Rick Warren, gay issue is about?

There is a group of people who want to just be welcome at the table of humanity. They want to have a partner, children, dinner, a productive life (could I be so deliberate as to say a "purpose driven life"?). And there is push back from people whose tables have no room for difference. Gandhi named the unwanted Indians, the lowest caste, the harijan ~ the children of god. He inversed their fate of being born as an untouchable, not welcome at any table but their own, by naming them god's favored.

Rick Warren's Saddleback Church is that table which wants no harijan. Homosexuals may not join. Does he really think that his god will not invite homosexuals to the heavenly banquet? If Rick does have some inside line on that, I am certain that lots of people would not want to be at that table by their own choice.

My own seeking soul has traveled the world through a library card; searched religions, faiths, beliefs, for years and years. If Barack had asked me, or YOU had asked me, who would be a great choice to offer the invocation at this historic inauguration, I would have answered to chose someone whose table is wide, magnetic, inviting, universal and, most importantly, excludes no one.

The Tao Te Ching states that beginnings set the pace for all that unfolds in its wake. Please do not give up asking that Rick Warren be replaced as the international bell ringing in the Obama years. It could not be more important.