I went to the HRC protest event in San Francisco last night.  I will say that I was pretty anti-HRC before it was cool. I mentioned in my last post that they don’t represent a good value proposition in attaining full equality. There are other more efficient and effective groups.  But, the failure of HRC to support an inclusive version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was the breaking point for many others. And by failing one part of the LGBT community, they fail the entire community.

The event itself outside the hotel went quite well.  The keynote speaker, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, canceled this week as he didn’t want to cross a picket line.  The protest was covered by the local media and made a few stories outside of the Bay area.

In the comments of the previous thread, janinsfran noted that there was a bit of controversy inside of the dinner. I’ll see if I can find any information on that.

We have a number of tough fights this year, marriage not being the least of them. However, we can’t drop some issues because there are others on the front burner.  You can give to the Equality for All campaign (No on 8) here, and find out more about the United ENDA campaign here. We can walk AND chew gum!

Swing State Project did the definitive cash-on-hand rankings for House races.  I’ve culled just the California ones from that list, and then used their massive fundraising round-up to add in the other California challengers, and then plowed through the FEC database to find the rest.  I wanted to add in how much money each person raised in Q2 to give you guys an idea of how their recent fundraising is going, but I had no idea how to find those numbers for the other candidates not in SSP’s database.  For example, check out Brian Bilbray.  There’s NOTHING about how much he raised from April 1 to May 14 this year.  Huh.  I have no idea how the SSP guys got their $210,000 figure, so I’m not even going to try and derive those numbers.  Oh well.  (I’ve put McClintock as the incumbent because he belongs to the same party as Doolittle.  Same for Duncan Hunter’s son.)

Cash figures are in the thousands of dollars.  Fundraising table after the fold.

Update: The races David listed have now been added, and I finally figured out how to find the Q2 fundraising numbers for everybody.  Well, almost everybody.

Then I decided to look at some of our own incumbents that are deemed “safe”, just for comparison’s sake.  There are some incumbents missing from this list because their Republican challengers have raised so little, they haven’t even filed FEC fundraising reports.  I believe I’ve gotten every single race where the challenger has an actual FEC report for Q2.  Unlike above, which is ranked by the Cash Power Index, these are arranged by congressional district.

* Hayes’ Q2 number is actually Q1 and Q2 combined.

Notes: That’s not a misprint, Marta Jorgensen has a total of $75 cash on hand.  And that’s not a misprint either, in CA-05, Paul Smith (R) officially raised a total of $0 in his challenge to Doris Matsui (D).

Christina Avalos doesn’t even seem to exist in the FEC’s electronic database.  When I went here and entered the necessary info for CA-40, the only two people listed in the database were Royce and some woman named Florice Hoffman, who seems to have stopped running in 2007.  This may sound harsh, but if you don’t exist in the FEC database, I’m not sure you can be called a serious candidate.  At the very least, get your shit together without making any excuses like Bill Sali did.

Update: Found her.  But it doesn’t help that the last listed contribution to her is from the year 2002, and that her page doesn’t list anything after her statement of candidacy… in 2001.  Trying to search by her candidate ID to get fundraising numbers yields an SQL error 100 for some reason.

I almost feel a little embarrassed by listing some of those races in the first list on there.  It may be one of those cases where we’re almost better off not knowing just how bad the disparity is.

I was a bit surprised at how little money McClintock has left after the primary.  But beware, he was a fundraising monster in Q2, bringing in over $1.26 million.  What happened with the spending limits here?  There’s people like the Bloom family that gave McClintock $6,900 each.  Looks like Doug Ose triggered the Millionaire’s Amendment when he gave himself a whopping $2.8 million loan for his failed campaign.  But that was for the primary.  Now that we’re in the general, is McClintock only allowed to get a maximum of $2,300 from those people?  If so, hopefully we’ll see those Q3 numbers for McClintock drop significantly.  Because raising $1.2 million in one quarter for a House race is sick.

Also, for those wondering about Cindy Sheehan’s independent bid against Pelosi, she never filed a final Q2 report, and whoever filled out that last report wrote that it goes through December 31, 2008.  It looks like they meant 2007, but their filings seem pretty disorganized.  They also got a stern letter from the FEC for not filing their Q1 report properly, and then another one for having several discrepancies in their filing.

As for Diane Watson, what’s going on with her fundraising?  Her Q2 report says that while she has a little under $18,000 in cash on hand, her campaign committee owes over $25,000 in debts and obligations.  WTF?

If you want to go by just the fundraising numbers, John Roberts (no, not the CNN anchor) would seem about as competitive against Joe Baca as Debbie Cook is against Dana Rohrabacher.  Of course, we’ve got the big advantage with the DCCC being able to spend much more than the NRCC.