It’s really beyond the point of tolerance for Bush Dog Jim Costa, who represents the district with the worst well-being in America for its residents.  As Republicans dishonestly try to bully Democrats with their meaningless “Drill Now” chant, despite the fact that offshore drilling wouldn’t lower gas prices and would do nothing to secure the energy future of the nation, Costa has joined up with a bipartisan group seeking a “compromise” (read: giving in to Republican fantasies) on energy.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers seeking to craft a compromise on energy legislation includes politically vulnerable members, according to a partial list of members obtained by The Hill.

Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and John Peterson (R-Pa.), who organized the group, have kept the list of participants under wraps since the recent announcement of its formal launch.

Abercrombie and Peterson previously indicated the complete list of members would be released last week but later reconsidered, saying certain members could be face political problems if their names were released.

Reps. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), Gene Green (D-Texas), Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.), Nick Lampson (D-Texas), Jim Costa (D-Calif.), Dan Boren (D-Okla.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) are part of the group, according to the list.

The group met on Wednesday […]

The bill that is being crafted breaks significantly from Democratic leadership on the topic of offshore drilling.

Boren, Costa, Green, Lampson and Nunes twice voted no on the Democratic leadership’s “use it or lose it” energy drilling bill.

It’d be one thing if Costa were actually a “vulnerable member,” but his “opponent” this year, Jim Lopez, has no records with the FEC, hasn’t updated his campaign website in a month and a half and hasn’t had an event in the district since March.  Costa is about as vulnerable as Iron Man.  So one must conclude that he plans to sell out the Democratic Party on energy as a matter of principle.

It is completely absurd to open up the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling when there are over 60 million acres of leased public land lying fallow.  The last people with any interest in lowering gas prices are oil execs; they want offshore leases so they can keep them in reserve and tell their stockholders how much cash they’re sitting on.  So Costa simply wants to enrich oil company bigwigs at the expense of the middle class, and ignore the serious risk to the planet in stalling on departing from the failed energy policy of the past.  This man shouldn’t dare even call himself a Democrat after the work he’s done in the 110th Congress.

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.

We spend an inordinate amount of time on the bad of California politics here on the site.  And with a system this dysfunctional, there’s a lot of bad to go around.  But as the budget hostage crisis continues, and state workers don’t know if they’ll be able to afford their bills come Monday, I wanted to at least recognize some of the positive developments around the city and state:

• The Governor signed a bill today banning trans fats in all state restaurants and bakeries by 2011.  Combined with the law signed earlier this week to crack down on the sale of downer cattle in US groceries, and the LA City Council moving forward on a one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles, this is a good week for food safety, nutrition and public health.

• As mentioned by Shayera, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban plastic bags by 2010, if the state does not mandate a $0.25 charge for every bag by then.  Additionally on the environmental front, there’s also the statewide green building code adopted by the California Building Standards Commission, and another passage for the third year in a row, of a port container fee which would be invested in fighting pollution (Hopefully this time the Governor will sign it).  This too is good.

• Leland Wong was convicted yesterday on 14 counts of public corruption and bribery while he was LA City Commissioner.  Accountability is good.

• In Orange County, the Laguna Beach City Council, which is majority Republican, became one of the first to publicly oppose Prop. 8, the hate amendment.  Saying no to hate is good.

• Unfortunately, not everything is good.  Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing nationwide, more than doubling in the second quarter.  In one incredible example, almost 1 in 20 homes in Merced have been lost to foreclosure, the highest rate in America.  Wow.  Not good.

• A couple more good things: PDLA is kicking off a Legislative Education Project and assigning progressive scores to individual Congressmembers (The first, David Dreier, has a 0).  They’re also going after Lou Dobbs for his criticism of their deeply unserious notion that health care is a human right.

What set off Dobbs’ eruption? Apparently it was his correspondent reporting that PDA “is urging the Democratic Party to adopt a plank at the party’s convention in Denver, guaranteeing accessible health care for all.”

You can help us push back against Dobbs and other media demagogues.

Within a day, you’ll be receiving a follow-up email from Norman Solomon, co-chair of PDA’s “Healthcare NOT Warfare” campaign, about our efforts to bring the principle of guaranteed health care for all into the heart of the Democratic Convention in Denver. And ways you can participate throughout the country.

For now, I want to ask you to click here and help PDA talk back to the media attacks now underway against us.

They should take the lead on Dobbs the way Color of Change took the lead on Fox News.

I have on more than one occasion lamented the fact that our shiny new Democratic Congress in Washington has a hard time getting much more done than renaming post office buidlings and declaring National Asparagus Week.

And, sometimes, I guess, they even have trouble with that.

A bill introduced by Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer would officially change the name of the fourth-highest peak in California to honor longtime Sierra Club leader and Friends of the Earth founder David Brower.

North Palisade, which at 14,242 feet ranks behind Mt. Whitney, Mt. Williamson and White Mountain among the state’s highest points, would be renamed Brower Palisade in recognition of Brower’s contributions to the preservation of much of America’s best-loved and most well-known wilderness areas.

Brower, the Sierra Club’s first executive director, died eight years ago at the age of 88. A tireless crusader who was frequently criticized as arrogant, he led the fight to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon, rallied support for Redwood National Park and the Point Reyes National Seashore, sounded warnings on nuclear energy and, over decades, became one of the nation’s most influential environmental warriors.

A no-brainer, right? Right – unless you, um, actually have no brain. From the same LA Times article:

“I most likely wouldn’t support it,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Visalia) said Thursday. “If you look at a lot of these radical groups that were formed, they’ve cost my district thousands of jobs. Take the timber industry: We let our forests burn up and meanwhile buy all our wood from Canada — it’s kind of a sad deal.”

Yes, he really said that. To a reporter. On the record.

Wonder if there might be a sewage treatment plant Rep. Nunes would like to have his name attached to?

(27 members of the California Congressional delegation weigh in.  Thanks, Rep. Solis.  Slight edit to move things over to the flip. – promoted by David Dayen)

I’m appalled that Governor Schwarzenegger thinks cutting wages for state workers’ is the way to fix our budget.  Today, 26 of my colleagues in Congress joined me in sending the below letter to the Governor and expressing strong opposition to his misguided plan.  Join me in calling on the Governor to leave state workers alone.

July 25, 2008

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:

As Members of the Congress representing California, we write to express our strong opposition to your proposed plan to cut the wages of 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour as a temporary budget savings.  The earnings of hardworking state employees should not be leveraged for political gain in the current budget stalemate.  

(over)

In May 2007, Congress passed the first increase in the federal minimum wage in ten years.  On July 24, 2008, the second phase of the increased federal minimum wage began, raising the federal minimum wage to $6.55.  While the increases to the federal minimum wage are an improvement for hourly workers, they do not make up for the recent and rapid increases in food, energy and healthcare costs, which have risen even higher in California.  In addition, our state has been disproportionately impacted by the nationwide foreclosure crisis and statewide unemployment just reached 6.9 percent.  Working families in California who are employed by the state simply cannot afford to have their salary reduced to the federal minimum wage during these incredibly hard economic times, even with the promise of back pay once the budget negotiations are completed.  

We have always been incredibly proud to represent California because our state sets the standard for fair wages in the United States.  The $8 per hour minimum wage in California, as well as municipal living wage laws, set a benchmark for the rest of the country.  By reducing state workers pay to $6.55 per hour, you would not only hurt the 200,000 workers who serve California, but you would also hurt the reputation of California as one of the best states to live and work in the United States.

As Members of the California Congressional delegation, we understand that our state is facing significant budget challenges.  However, the California state controller has already stated that cutting workers’ salaries will “do nothing meaningful to improve our cash position or help us make our priority payments.”  We strongly urge you to reconsider your plan to cut 200,000 state workers wages to the federal minimum wage.  

Sincerely,

HILDA L. SOLIS

ZOE LOFGREN

GEORGE MILLER

HENRY WAXMAN

ANNA ESHOO

HOWARD BERMAN

LYNN C. WOOLSEY

DORIS O. MATSUI

GRACE F. NAPOLITANO

SAM FARR

LORETTA SANCHEZ

JOE BACA

MIKE THOMPSON

LOIS CAPPS

DENNIS CARDOZA

BOB FILNER

MICHAEL HONDA

BABARA LEE

ADAM B. SCHIFF

LINDA T. SANCHEZ

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER

LAURA RICHARDSON

PETE STARK

BRAD SHERMAN

XAVIER BECERRA

LUCILLE ROYBAL-ALLARD

JIM COSTA

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