Here’s something I thought I’d never say: I have to go to court to defend calling myself an “astronaut”.

Last week, Sacramento Republicans with ties to Rep. Denham filed a lawsuit claiming I cannot refer to myself as an “astronaut” on the ballot. That’s no joke – and on Thursday, I’ll have to send a team to fight back against the same old Washington political games Denham and his pals at the CA GOP are playing.

I consider myself so lucky that I was able to go from being a son of San Joaquin Valley migrant workers to an astronaut. It was my American Dream – and I won’t let these right-wing Republicans take it from me.

That’s why I’ve directed my campaign and our attorneys to vigorously defeat these outrageous charges.

Thursday is the day we head to court and make our voices heard that the politics of Washington will fail because the American people are sick and tired of them. I will defend my record, my honor, and the title I earned by launching into space in August of 2009. Will you take a stand and defend our campaign today?

This lawsuit will cost us $20,000 to defeat. Help us cover the cost by giving $5 or more here >>

Thanks for everything you do,

– Jose

Remember back to 2007.  It was the days of George W. Bush, and you had your mullet. Well, maybe not the mullet, but there were some serious Republican Dirty Tricks going on.  In the continuing effort to a) steal power for the Republicans and b) do some seriously dirty tricks, right-wing initiative filer extraordinaire Ted Costa has brought back the Dirty Tricks Initiative.  He filed it with the AG’s office last week. More from Dan Morain:

With no fanfare, Costa last week submitted to the attorney general’s office an initiative he calls the “Electoral College Reform Act.” On its face, the populist proposal would play to voters’ sense of fairness and desire for competition among candidates.

In reality, this initiative would be a Republican power grab with national implications. The change contemplated by Costa and other consultants could push a Republican to victory in a close presidential race.

“It is the kind of thing that puts the metal to the grindstone and sparks fly,” Costa told me.

Under the proposal, California’s 55 electoral votes no longer would go to whoever wins the popular vote. Rather, they’d be apportioned based on the candidate who wins in particular congressional districts(SacBee)

Here’s the thing. Costa loves to put these initiatives out there, and see what he gets.  Normally, it’s nothing.  But on occasion, see the 2003 recall, he catches lightning in a bottle and he’s off to the races.  The scarier part is that if President Obama doesn’t have any challengers in the primary, we are looking at a very Republican electorate in the presidential primary.

It could be something of a perfect storm, if Costa can get Darrell Issa or some other rich Republican to fund this one.  It was a nightmare last time, and it will be a nightmare again.  If the Republicans take 15-20 electoral college votes from California, it becomes extremely difficult to challenge them.  

At this point, there is a long way to go, but if it does grow, we’ll need to rally again to kill the Dirty Tricks once again.

Today’s Los Angeles Times has an article about the dirty trickster’s attempts.

As you may recall, Debra Bowen suggested a deadline of November 29th to get the signatures in. Well, that was Thursday.

According to the article, the campaign manager Dave Gilliard says that they’ll be out all weekend attempting to get people to sign the ballot. And would expect to turn in the signatures by the middle of next week. Gilliard also said that they haven’t raised the $2 million to pay the petition circulators. But he’s sure the money will come along.

I especially enjoyed this bit of the article:

The Electoral College initiative has had a troubled past. Its original campaign team, including its author, Sacramento attorney Thomas Hiltachk, abandoned the measure in October.

Hiltachk and his team had been unable to raise sufficient money. Hiltachk also became angry when the one donation he received — $175,000 from Wall Street mogul Paul E. Singer — took a circuitous route through a Missouri attorney and a hitherto unknown corporation. That route hid, at least for a time, the true source of the contribution.

And they say that if they can’t get it on the ballot for June, well, they’ll just keep trying for the November ballot.

The big Rudy Giuliani supporter Paul Singer is back in the news. The New York Times did a story about the “vulture capitalist” fund manager recounting his plan to steal 20 electoral votes for his main man, Rudy G.  A sneak peak:

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, questioned “Paul Singer’s involvement in this dirty trick aimed at stealing the White House.” A group of Democrats filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that Mr. Singer had been acting on behalf of Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to change the California law – which Mr. Singer and the campaign deny. And the Democratic National Committee drew attention to the part of Mr. Singer’s business that involves buying the debt of poor countries at a discount and then seeking repayment in full – prompting an article in The Times of London labeling his firm, Elliott Associates, a “vulture fund.”
***
Mr. Singer, who has given millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes over the years, said that he met Mr. Giuliani in 2006 and decided to support him. He signed on as one of the campaign’s earliest major fund-raisers. For months, Mr. Singer made a jet leased by one of his companies available to Mr. Giuliani. This June, he said, he stepped down as the campaign’s Eastern finance chairman to become a policy adviser.(NYT via MSNBC 11/22/07)

Click on over for the full read.

(Any other action items you’d suggest? – promoted by Bob Brigham)

[crossposted at Daily Kos.  This is a living document that I’m making continuous updates to – please offer suggestions to improve it.]

The Courage Campaign and the Democratic party establishment are pushing back against the Dirty Tricks Initiative.

What can we as individuals do to help fight this campaign and hopefully prevent it from getting on the ballot?

Let me make a few suggestions:

1. Sign up here  with the CA Dem Party’s group set up to fight this: the FraudBusters.

2. Add your name to Courage Campaign’s No More Dirty Tricks pledge and kick them some money (same page).  (Courage Campaign is bloggers – they are us, so kick ’em some money.)

3. Check for any “assignments” from the FraudBusters folks (I believe they are supposed to come by email).  If you’ve got nothing, then DON’T WAIT — simply go to the most high traffic places that ballot petition signers frequent to get signatures — Wal-Mart, Target, etc., determine whether Dirty Tricks ballot petitioners are there, and notify the Courage Campaign, the CA DEM Fraud Busters and also the state Dem organization fighting this (Californians for Fair Electoral Reform). When you’re at the location, go up to them, present yourself as someone who they would tend to target (pose yourself as someone uneducated about how ballot petitions work, in a hurry, etc.) and see if they take an illegal or unethical approach with you.
 

4. If you encounter Dirty Trick petition signature gatherers (aka Dirty Tricksters) and they are doing clearly illegal or misleading things, or if you learn from Courage Campaign or the CFER folks about places where such Dirty Tricksters are, go there and see if you experience it yourself.  If you do, go to the store manager and complain as a customer that you don’t want the store to protect lawbreakers.  See if you can get the names of the signature gatherers from the store manager while there.

5. File a complaint against the Dirty Tricksters with the Secretary of State.  Form available here.

6. If you encounter Dirty Tricksters and they are giving incorrect descriptions of the ballot initiatives they are getting signatures for, especially the Dirty Trick initiative, then get a video camera, read the ballot summary to them on camera so that they cannot say they were not aware they were misinforming people of the ballot initiative.  Misleading people about ballot petitions is not a crime unless you can show it’s purposeful – that’s why getting proof they were informed of the ballot initiative is very important. 

7. (For the intrepid) Get lawbreakers on camera or audio doing clearly illegal things — instructing potential signers that they need to sign multiple times, misinforming voters when you have proof they’ve been informed of the actual ballot summary — or even sleazy things which might not be illegal but totally wrong, and get those to the Courage Campaign and the Californians for Fair Election Reform folks.

A couple of suggestions if you are going to use video tape:  use one take, do not cut — even if there are boring parts, it makes it a lot clearer that you are not messing with the timeline.  Also, to establish the place, date, and time, consider making a purchase at the store and then showing the receipt to the camera so that no on call into question the When or the Where of the illegal activity you capture if it’s on the same take as when you’ve shown the timedated receipt.

8. Get on your local progressive local talk radio show, inform folks about the Dirty Trick campaign and encourage them to do the above.

9. Bring up the issue at your local Dem Club or other progressive organization meeting and get people involved there.

Please feel free to comment on or add to the my suggestions above.  I don’t pretend to know a lot about these issues, but I hadn’t seen an effort at a practical “What to Do” list for average folks, so I offer this modest effort…

Buried inside this Politico article about Rudy Giuliani’s many ties to the Dirty Tricks initiative is this nugget:

There are actually two potential ballot initiatives. One would allocate California’s Electoral College votes proportionally, as opposed to the current winner-take-all format. The other affects redistricting.

Where they connect? California Republican Reps. Devin Nunes and Kevin O. McCarthy have asked the Federal Election Commission for a legal opinion on whether they can raise unlimited donations to help the redistricting initiative. But a money-and-politics watchdog group argues that would blow a hole in the 2002 campaign finance reform law that bans federal officeholders from soliciting such big checks – and pave the way for presidential contenders to urge their supporters to shovel money into the proposed Electoral College initiative.

Nunes and McCarthy may be the safest two GoOPers in the state.  They are acting as the battering rams to knock down the walls of campaign finance reform, not just for the Dirty Tricks initiative but a whole host of pernicious ballot measures.

In a way, they’re trying to retroactively immunize people like Rudy and Darrell Issa for their already-questionable efforts.  It’s just a hop, skip and a jump from soliciting for signatures, which both campaigns have done, to soliciting for money.

As for the bait and switch techniques being employed to gather signatures, there’s going to be a LOT more on this to come.

(An interesting personal account of the dirty tricks. – promoted by shayera)

NOTE: cross-posted from DailyKos.

First, I should explain that I’m a graduate student at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Today I witnessed what I think is an incidence of ballot petition fraud relating to the electoral vote apportionment initiative – the proposal to apportion California’s electoral votes by congressional district, unilaterally giving 19 of California’s electoral votes to the Republicans in 2008.

Outside the UCEN (student center plus bookstore plus food court) at UC Santa Barbara, there were a number of people with cardboard clipboards soliciting people to sign ballot petitions for a proposal to spend $1 billion on cancer hospitals for kids. If you agree to sign, they tell you “you need to sign 4 times.” What they do not tell you is that the three pages after the ballot initiative on cancer hospitals are different ballot initiatives: the second proposes to abolish eminent domain, the third proposals to abolish rent control, and the fourth is the proposal to apportion California’s electoral votes by district (the so-called Dirty Tricks Initiative).

I should note that the clipboard is arranged such that a rubber band holding the petitions to the cardboard is positioned on the top of the page, across the actual ballot language in question – thus, partially hiding the text of the ballot initiatives on pages 2-4 unless you actually stop and pull down the top of the page.

I agreed to sign the cancer initiative, but the comment about signing four times raised a red flag, because I’m familiar with the structure of ballot petitions, so I paused before signing and looked at the other initiatives. However, I’m absolutely sure that most of the people signing, young college students on a rush to get their lunches and off to class, did not take this step.

What they are doing is getting people to sign for ballot initiatives without their knowledge or informed consent, using young peoples’ desire to do a good thing and their lack of familiarity with the legal paperwork of initiative petitions. If this is not illegal it is certainly deeply unethical. The moment I realized what was going on, I told the petitioners that they shouldn’t be telling people to sign for ballot initiatives they’re not aware of. Immediately after, I called the school newspaper, the Daily Nexus, the Courage Campaign, the Santa Barbara Democratic Central Committee, and the California Democratic Party. After that, I have sent in a form to the Sec. of State as well, reporting this.

I’m posting this to further get the word out.