(As first diaried on DailyKos by elishastephens)

The dirty trick initiative is NOT dead, say its backers.

The Mercury News has the story.

The activists questioned whether GOP attorney Tom Hiltachk, the author of the initiative, had underestimated the intensity of grass-roots support and failed to tap into it before he quit.

“The issue is so hot, it’s going to continue on,” said Tony Andrade, a Sacramento Republican who had actually submitted his own electoral vote initiative, but then deferred to Hiltachk’s effort. “People are lining up signing these petitions. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this from a political point of view.”

Yes, they’re having trouble raising money.  But all they need is Bob Perry to dump a couple million into the effort, and they’re well on their way.  Can we afford to take the chance of assuming Perry or some other GOP multi-millionaire WON’T help revive this?

To me, that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.

Maybe we should continue what we’re doing, in terms of raising awareness and gathering ideas on what would be the most effective TV ad to run against this.

(We need to stay on top of the education aspect of this. There are already reports that low-information voters are getting bogus explanations of what’s in PERA. – promoted by Lucas O’Connor)

UCLA is about to begin classes this week.  That’s right, this week.  I know, it’s almost October.  That’s how we roll.  😎

So in the inaugural issue of the Daily Bruin, they generally have submissions from both the Bruin Republicans and the Bruin Democrats.  So what does the president of Bruin Democrats have to talk about in the first issue?  Iraq?  Global warming?  Health care?  Our kick-ass quarter-opening barbecue?

No, he uses it to educate the UCLA student body about the GOP’s dirty trick to steal California’s electoral votes.

He ends it with this flourish.

The upcoming academic year at UCLA will be extraordinarily political.

You will be asked to sign all sorts of things on behalf of various causes, but remember your mother’s advice about going to parties: watch your cup closely; you never know what someone might put in it when you’re not looking.

As cheesy as your mom’s advice may be, it certainly applies here. Be careful about which petitions you sign when you’re on Bruin Walk. If you don’t pay close attention, your signature might contribute to this ruthless Republican power grab.

Now that’s something you will wake up regretting in the morning.

Keep in mind his audience is college students who are probably more concerned with when the next frat party is than some bizarre ballot initiative.  You have to break through that wall to really reach them.  Likening it to a bad hook-up seems more than appropriate for this crowd.  🙂

We’re gonna be getting the message out to the student body this year at UCLA.  Of course, that means also educating the many conservative students at UCLA too about it, who may be inclined to support it after learning what it does.  Ah well.  Such is life.

BTW, as for the conservative point of view in the paper, it was given by this girl, who complains the pro-life voice isn’t being heard.  You may recognize her name as the same girl who secretly taped a Planned Parenthood session where she pretended to be a 15-year-old girl, and got an employee to tell her to pretend she was 16 so she wouldn’t have to report her boyfriend for statutory rape.  She put it on YouTube, and the controversy exploded.  Got invited on Bill O’Reilly and everything.  She also founded the pro-life magazine The Advocate on our campus.  Her op-ed includes gems like this:

In 1973, the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy.

Goodness gracious sakes alive!  (John Wooden reference.)  You mean, you can just go and get an abortion at 8 1/2 months, like that??  Who knew??? She is clever, though.  She won’t come right out and make a blanket statement that she’s against abortion.  She knows there’s too many ways to destroy that argument.  So instead she goes for the plea of letting her people be heard.  Yes, why aren’t they being heard, the voice of the enfranchised?

Yeah, we have to deal with that kind of shit at UCLA.  Anyway, I’d like to hear about what’s going on in terms of trying to stop the GOP’s power grab at other universities across California.  Anyone hear other things going on there?

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

Bradley Whitford, the actor who played Josh Lyman on the beloved show “The West Wing”” is riled up about the dirty tricks initiative.  Rick Jacobs asked him to film a video for Courage Campaign. 

Brad sat down and wrote his own heartfelt script and they filmed it in his house surrounded by all of his children’s toys. As Brad says: “I don’t know about you, but my children cannot afford another Republican president.”

Watch the video and check out the new official No Dirty Tricks website.  Oh and join the conference call with Brad, Rick, Jane Hamsher (Firedoglake), John Amato (Crooks and Liars) and Ben Tulchin (pollster) at 4 pm today.  They will be answering questions from those on the call and a few submitted ahead of time.

You can support the campaign, and our ability to create these videos and hold these conference calls by contributing via ActBlue.

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Sept 16, 2007:

Given the widespread anger at the record of the Bush administration, few people think it will be easy for a Republican to win a fair presidential election in 2008.

But the backers of a proposed California ballot initiative aim to make it easy – by getting around that inconvenient word “fair”.

Devised by Sacramento political attorney Thomas Hiltachk, the Presidential Election Reform Act is a clever confidence trick, disguised as reform of the Electoral College. The PERA’s true purpose is to guarantee about 20 additional electoral votes to the Republican Party, with the aim of setting up a GOP victory not just in the 2008 presidential election, but in many more to follow.

Here’s how it would work.

Currently, California, like most states, awards its 53 electoral votes as winner-take all. Many voters are unhappy with this system, and quite understandably, since it can serve to override the popular will. If voters in a congressional district elect a representative from Party A, most of them probably also support Party A’s presidential candidate. But the electoral vote from their district may very well end up going to the Party B’s candidate if Party B wins more of their state’s districts overall.

The PERA seeks to take advantage of voters’ frustration over outcomes like this. But it does so in the time-tested manner of the classic con game: distract the mark with bait, then make the switch.

The bait is the promise of reform. The switch is the unmentioned fact that the PERA would amount to a unilateral disarmament by California, a large blue state. Meanwhile, large red states, such as Texas, would continue under the old system.

The PERA’s backers call themselves Californians for Equal Representation. Since Equal Representation is part of their name, you might think they’d also throw their support behind a national reform effort, which could lead to equal representation everywhere – including red states. But that isn’t truly their aim, particularly since Californians for Equal Representation is actually a front for the California Republican Party.

The group’s address is initiative-writer Hiltachk’s law firm. Hiltachk is also Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election lawyer. And, as the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has pointed out, he is a specialist in “initiatives that are the opposite of what they sound like – the Fair Pay Workplace Flexibility Act of 2006, for example” That one was, in fact, designed to slash overtime pay and make it almost impossible to raise the minimum wage.

Unsurprisingly, California Republicans enthusiastically endorsed the PERA at their convention in Indian Wells this past weekend. Interestingly, though, the governor has expressed reservations. As one of the world’s best known self-made men, Schwarzenegger has said he was uncomfortable with the “loser’s mentality” represented by “changing the rules in the middle of the game … saying I cannot win with those rules, so let me change the rules”.

The governor’s fellow Republicans would have done well to heed his advice, because if they win this campaign, it will be at the cost of serious damage both to their party and to democracy itself.

Why, after all, is the public angry at the Republican record in the White House and the Congress? To answer that question is to recite a list of failures and scandals: the falsehoods that spawned the war; the “compassionate conservatism” that brought Guantanamo Bay and the abandoning of New Orleans; the widespread spying on American citizens; the schemes of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Mark Foley and others; the politicization of the Justice Department; and, sadly, so on.

In this context, do Republicans really want to trumpet their endorsement of another slick maneuver around the public interest?

If they do, they will likely pay even more heavily at the polls than they have so far. After all, as Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has shown so dramatically, most Americans are quite tolerant, but not if they conclude you’re a hypocrite.

Nevertheless, given events at its California convention, the Republican Party may well be bent on further self-destruction. But unfortunately, it is not only the party that will suffer. We all will. That’s because these repeated insults to trust erode voters’ basic belief in our laws and institutions. How many times can you play people for suckers before they conclude the whole thing is just a rigged game? Too many Americans have already come to just that conclusion.

We’ve learned this lesson before, in the Dust Bowl. You can exploit and exhaust the soil for so long, and you may even prosper while you do. And then, one day, the wind comes up and the soil blows away.

Well, it’s happening again. Only this time it’s happening to the soil of democracy – the public’s trust.

We call on all people of every party, including the many Republicans of good conscience – many of whom we have heard from who are deeply disturbed by the direction their party has taken – to repudiate the Presidential Election Reform Act.

By all means, let’s reform the Electoral College. But as we talk about how to do it, let’s use words with their original meanings, not new meanings we’ made up to mask selfish, ulterior motives. Just like fair pay doesn’t mean “slash my wages,” “reform” doesn’t mean “scam the system”.

“Reform” means make it better – for everyone.

That may seem quaint to the creative minds behind crafty tricks like the Presidential Election Reform Act, but it’s what democracy is supposed to be about.

By Zach Friend (chair, Santa Cruz County Democratic Central Committee), Vinz Koller (chair, Monterey County DCC) & Spencer Critchley (spokesman, Monterey County DCC).