Here in California, what looked like a potentially disastrous election might not turn out so badly after all. Recent polling gives Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer a good chance of being re-elected, should the GOTV go well. Today’s Field Poll shows Prop 23 trailing and Prop 25 leading, which is good, although Prop 19 is now trailing too, and nobody really knows what the fuck is happening with Prop 26.

There are still some downticket races that really matter, particularly the battle for Attorney General between Kamala Harris and the Karl Rove-backed right-winger Steve Cooley, a race Field yesterday found to be a dead heat.

But the most suspenseful race on Tuesday night will involve a member of Congress who will have no trouble getting re-elected from her district. Nancy Pelosi is the first Speaker of the House from California and the first female Speaker. But after just four years in the Speaker’s office, only two of which came with a Democratic president, she faces the loss of her majority on Tuesday. Nate Silver at 538 projects Republicans will gain 53 seats, enough to give them about a 20 seat majority.

Seats here in California are in play. Democrats face close races in CA-11, where Jerry McNerney may just barely hold off David Harmer; in CA-20, where Jim Costa faces a tough fight against Andy Vidak, and in CA-47 where Loretta Sanchez might finally have met her match in Van Tran. On the other hand, Dems have a real pickup opportunity in CA-3 with Ami Bera challenging Dan Lungren, and could also win a number of Southern California seats: CA-44 (Bill Hedrick challenging Ken Calvert), CA-45 (Steve Pougnet challenging Mary Bono Mack) and CA-48 (Beth Krom challenging John Campbell).

But it’s the worsening national picture that portends doom for Speaker Pelosi. Many of the seats won in 2006 and 2008 are poised to flip back to Republicans in states like Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Combined with a nationwide enthusiasm gap (one that hasn’t appeared on the West Coast), it might be enough to cost Democrats their House majority.

Even if Democrats keep the Senate, however, Republican control of the House will be catastrophic for California’s future. Although Frank Rich believes a Republican House wouldn’t act as radical as it talks, I’m not so sanguine. The teabagger majority will demand massive cuts to important federal programs such as health care, education, and mass transportation. They might not get the 40% cut in spending they demand, but they’ll get quite a lot of the Hooverism they demand, and California will get the brunt of it.

Worse, new initiatives to create jobs will be stalled (not that the White House was doing much about it anyway) and unemployment will either remain steady or rise – as Robert Reich suggests, Republicans will want to keep unemployment as high as possible going into 2012 in order to defeat Obama. California, with 12% unemployment, will struggle to reduce it without federal help, worsening our already dire budget situation.

That’s all bad enough. What is truly unjust about this situation is that Speaker Pelosi did everything right. Under her leadership the past two years, the House of Representatives passed some very strong legislation that mostly fulfilled a progressive agenda. Some of the highlights of Speaker Pelosi’s accomplishments:

• Strong health care bill with a public option

• Cap-and-trade climate bill

• Blueprint for new transportation bill with $50 billion in high speed rail funding

• Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

• Decent (if not great) financial regulation bill

And Pelosi had been frequently calling for a second stimulus after it became apparent that the first one (itself stronger in the House than in the Senate) was failing to end the recession.

What happened to that ambitious agenda? It died in the US Senate, where Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln were enabled to sabotage and ultimately destroy the Democratic House majority by Harry Reid’s failed leadership. The White House also spent plenty of time sabotaging the House’s progressive agenda, either failing to stand up for its priorities in the Senate or by actively collaborating with the DINO bloc to undermine the House’s accomplishments.

President Obama and the Senate Democrats failed their party, failed their base, and failed their country. Yet it is Speaker Pelosi who may pay the price. It’s a monumental injustice, and a disaster that could derail this country for a generation.

If you live in a district where there is even a hint of an incumbent Democrat being in trouble, or even a possibility of a Democrat knocking off an incumbent Republican, we need you to get out there right now and help elect those Democrats. Speaker Pelosi deserves another 2 years to try and force the White House and the Senate to get things right – and the country deserves to be saved from the catastrophe that would be Speaker John Boehner.

We recently heard from a Californian deployed to Iraq that the Courage Campaign’s Progressive Voter Guide – and in fact, our entire website – is being blocked by Department of Defense computers in Iraq, whereas right-wing sites remained available. Today a reporter for The Hill confirmed the story:

Courage Campaign, a 700,000-member grassroots organization, has demanded in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that access to its site be provided before the Nov. 2 Election Day….

In contrast, the group said a number of web sites that espouse conservative views can be accessed on Defense Department computers.

The Hill independently confirmed that the Tea Party Express site can be accessed on Defense Department computers while the Courage Campaign site cannot be accessed. Courage campaign said it has received information that web sites affiliated with the Traditional Values Coalition, California Election Forum and Christian Voter Guide through the Defense Department computers in Iraq.

Courage Campaign acted on a tip from a prospective Californian voter deployed to Iraq.

“It is an enormous problem because the election on California is extremely important,” Rick Jacobs, the founder of Courage Campaign, said in an interview.

Earlier this week Jacobs wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates demanding that access to our website be restored. Courage Campaign has not received a response. The letter was cc’d to President Obama, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and key members of the California Congressional delegation. Click here to view the letter.

The Hill posits a possible explanation for the blockage:

However, there could be other possible explanations for the blocked site, such as an automatic filter that sifts through specific words. The Courage Campaign site uses multiple references to “sex” (as in same-sex marriages) and “gay” (as in anti-gay, or gay rights). The site also contains information and action items on the repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay service members.

However, other sites that also use the words “sex” and “gay” – including the right-wing sites listed above – are not blocked. Hell, if you are going to merely block a site because it has multiple references to “gay” and “sex” you’d be blocking the New York Times, CNN, and Wikipedia, to name just a few.

We at Courage Campaign have been given no explanation for what is going on here. Needless to say, it is extremely troubling. Voters have a right to access our guide, and soldiers and other support personnel in Iraq (or anywhere else, for that matter) have a right to access our site and others like it. If this is a matter of political censorship, it has no place in our armed forces.

With Tuesday’s election looming and our troops filling out ballots in Iraq, we are going to stop at nothing to make the site – and our voter guide – accessible to American soldiers who want to vote.

Note: I am the Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign

Yesterday’s Field Poll showed a 10-point lead for Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman. This comes in the wake of several other polls showing double-digit leads for Brown. Nate Silver at 538 gives Whitman a 6% chance of winning. So how does Mike Murphy, Whitman’s campaign strategist (who makes $90,000 a month) spin the bad news?

Rasmussen moves CAgov to toss-up with new poll. Our track even. Surge for Meg!

Mike Murphy clearly learned his PR skills at the school of “Comical Ali,” Saddam Hussein’s communications flack who gained notoriety for telling the media “all is well” during the 2003 invasion. Despite an avalanche of polling data that shows Meg Whitman is about to get her ass kicked, Murphy cites a poll that is known to have a pro-Republican bias and a vague “internal poll” to try and create a narrative of a late surge. Murphy is only doing this to try and forestall a total collapse of Whitman’s vote, as the right-wing base might just decide to say “fuck it” and stay home on Tuesday.

Of course, we can’t dance on Whitman’s political grave just yet. We need to make sure that we crank the GOTV as much as we can over this coming weekend to ensure that California’s future isn’t dominated by a wealthy right-wing billionaire.

In this election cycle, some ballot propositions have gotten more attention than others. Prop 24 is one that deserves a higher profile. In the 2008 and 2009 budget deals, Republicans demanded and won new corporate tax loopholes worth at least $1.3 billion per year. Because of that, teachers are going to be laid off and other public services cut once those tax breaks go fully into effect next year – all so that the rich can get richer.

The Courage Campaign (where I work as Public Policy Director) doesn’t think that’s right. We put together a new video showing what happens when a voter sleeps through the election – and what happens to all those fired teachers. Watch it:

And if you like it, click here to share it!

In the Attorney General’s race, things have taken a turn for the nasty. The latest incident is a huge television buy opposing San Francisco DA Kamala Harris on the death penalty. Without going into the details, it is an extremely cynical ad, even in a season of such ads. It calls for an unflinching adherence without a consideration of the individual facts.

The ad was paid for by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie’s Republican State Leadership Committee. The group is funded mostly with a variety of tobacco and oil money. However a few entries in their contribution history stand out:

Why are a small group of Silicon Valley companies paying for a cynical attack ad? After all, Google’s slogan is “Don’t be evil.” How else can we describe the politics that brings together tobacco and oil money to do a widespread attack “issue” ad in a county that is 350 miles away from San Francisco?

Google, Yahoo, and the other tech companies should probably consider why exactly they have teamed up with Karl Rove to bring this brand of politics to our airwaves.

There’s just one week left in the election campaign, but we would be remiss if we didn’t comment on a disturbing new development in the ongoing battle to fix California’s broken government. A billionaire investor is dumping $20 million into the effort to “reform” California, but only in the direction of unwanted and undesired corporate-friendly changes that undermine the public sector:

Nicolas Berggruen will give at least $20 million to a group of Californians who long to restructure state government so it is more responsive to voters, more responsible with public funds and ready to reposition the state to meet the challenges of today’s economy….

The members he has chosen for the Think Long Committee for California run the ideological gamut. Reaganite George Schultz and Bush administration veteran Condoleezza Rice will weigh in, as will Democrats Willie Brown and Gray Davis. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad will also serve on the committee. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be a guest at the first meeting.

Actually, that doesn’t “run the ideological gamut” at all. Because look who is missing – that’s right, progressives. Gray Davis is a moderate Democrat; there appears to be nobody at all to his left. The entire progressive movement, which represents at least a third of California, is totally absent from this conversation, whereas the right-wing is there in the form of Condi Rice and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Looking at the proposed agenda, it’s clear why progressives have been frozen out of the process:

Berggruen, whose reading matter tends toward Sartre and Confucius, says in California he will be promoting common sense. For him, that means more constitutional controls on state spending, a halt to runaway pension costs, more authority for local government and new accountability measures for government programs. He also favors the creation of an endowment of sorts for the state university system that would help limit tuition and provide funds to attract and retain top teaching and research talent.

His reading matter ought to include Polanyi, Veblen, Sinclair and Stiglitz. Instead he’s promoting the same old failed corporate-friendly “centrist” reforms that Californians have already rejected, such as a spending cap (rejected twice by voters), slashing pension benefits even further to make retirement insecure, undermining the effectiveness of government programs by making them waste their time and money on ill-defined “accountability measures” and so on.

This is nothing more than the same corporate reform agenda that stalled out in 2009 and early 2010 for lack of public support. There’s nothing here about what people actually want or need, which is a robust public sector able to provide for the basic needs of the population so as to enable them to create new economic value. It’s all about constraining the public sector so that big corporations can do more of what they want to. No wonder progressives are excluded from this process – what we want isn’t what the wealthy “reformers” want.

Further, these proposed reforms are just nibbling around the edges. Joe Mathews and Mark Paul set out a very good set of much more important and useful reforms in their excellent new book California Crackup, and Jeff Lustig also set out not only good reforms but a coherent philosophy to organize them, rooted in a reassertion of the public good (res public) against the rise of corporate power, in his own excellent reform volume Remaking California.

I will have a lot more to say about both books after the election, but they set out the path down which California reform projects need to follow. The “Think Long Committee” takes us further down a very different path, a path Californians are set to reject next Tuesday: a path where the rich decide everything for the rest of us.

The problem with this reform effort, as with others before it, is that it has no place at the table for the people of California. Progressives are primarily interested in promoting democracy, both in politics and in the economy, as a fundamental element of both government reform and of economic recovery. That’s inimical to the goals and methods of the big corporations, and so it should come as no surprise that progressives and the people of this state are shut out of this new reform initiative.

Unless they make room for progressives and for the people of California in the shaping of the reform agenda, and not just as rubber stamps for their pre-ordained plans, this reform effort lacks legitimacy and ought to be another well-funded flop. After the election, it will instead be time for progressives to get serious about charting our own plans for rebuilding democracy and prosperity in the 21st century. At least, that’s going to be my own priority.