Rudy has a firefighter problem, more specifically a NYC 9/11 firefighter problem.  TPMCafe notes that the head of the firefighter's union there has "vowed to sink his candidacy".  Rather than taking shots directly through the press at him, here is my suggestion.

Get the union to pay for a few firefighters to take a leave of absence for the campaign and have them follow Giuliani from event to event.  Get them in their t-shirts, work pants and boots holding signs in front of big fundraisers, or outside of rallies.  Have the local unions in the area send some guys in solidarity and get a whole mess of firefighters protesting.

We used this technique to great effect in the special election in 2005 here in California.  The campaign branded the phrase "teachers, nurses, cops and firefighters" and had people in scrubs and uniform dogging Arnold at every step.  Anytime one of the local stations did a story on an Arnold campaign/official state business stop they had to do an obligatory cut away to the crowds out front.  Even if it was only a handful they had to cover that angle.  The earned media was literally worth millions.

You can do the same thing with these firefighters.  It won't be cheap, but get the International Association of Fire Fighters to pitch in to cover the costs.  The media rewards will be more than worth it.  They won't be able to ignore the story of some 9/11 firefighters protesting their former mayor.

There's more...

It is interesting to see the national trends towards independents Chris just wrote about.  Here in California the trend is more pronounced towards DTS (decline to state).  Democrats are losing a lot more ground than Republicans.  This is the most recent chart from the CA Secretary of State.

DTS is up almost 6 points in 8 years.  Democrats have dropped 4.2% and Republicans 1.1%.  The highest number percentage of DTS voters are in San Francisco (29.13%) Mono (24.34%) and Alpine (22.98%).  

There's more...

bumped - Matt

(cross-posted from Calitics)

And the rest of the resolutions they did not want to have heard...

I learned a lot about the process of how resolutions are dealt with at California Democratic Party Conventions this weekend.  It is not particularly democratic, which is not surprising.  The party leaders decide what has a chance of getting approved and use the process to push off to the side any other proposed resolutions.

Take for instance the net neutrality resolution, which one would think should be heard in front of the Computer and Internet Caucus.  Instead we learned upon arriving at the convention that it has been, along with a bunch of other resolutions, referred to another caucus, thereby eliminating any potential avenue for its viability at this party meeting.  There is no process whereby you can appeal this move by collecting signatures, or any other appeals process.

So how and why did it get referred to the Labor Caucus?

There's more...

(cross-posted from Working Californians)

The dirty tricks have begun again.  We really shouldn't be surprised that the grocery stores would resort to breaking the law, in an attempt to weaken the workers negotiating position.  After all, three years ago Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons entered into an illegal pact to share their profits, in order to outlast the worker strike.    That landed them in court facing anti-trust charges.  And just last year, Ralphs plead guilty to fraud charges and lying to the government.  It was part of their scheme to use fake social security numbers to hire strikebreakers during the last contract dispute.  They paid $70 million in fines and were placed on three years' probation.

Albertson's faced a strike vote Sunday and they immediately dug back into their bag of dirty tricks.  They violated the National Labor Relations Act in the following ways:

There's more...

I find myself wanting to write comment after comment in Jonathan Singer's post on Arnold, so I decided to turn it into a post.  Much of what he has written is true.  If Arnold decided to challenge Boxer for the Senate in 2010, he would have a decent shot at it.  He will be just coming off two terms as governor.  If this second term goes just like 2006, then he would be very formidable.  That is a big if however.

Arnold has bit off a number of huge projects this year, rather than shoot for incremental changes.  Any and all of these have a big risk of falling completely apart.  Nearly everybody can find fault with some aspect of the proposals and they may all end up with the same fate as Hillarycare.

There's more...

This is a great project. Granted, with numbers like these, it won't be a whole-scale takeover, but it will be part of the more gradual silent revolution to simultaneously reform Democratic parties around the country, and to bring in much needed new blood--Chris. Cross-posted from Calitics

The California progressive blogosphere is growing and maturing. One of the more concrete examples is the ongoing organizing around the CDP delegate elections this weekend. Much of December was spent encouraging people to run and now a large number of bloggers have filed their papers and are publicly campaigning for election

Our efforts are building on those of DFA after the 2004 election. A large number of reform oriented activists were elected as delegates. They will now be joined, hopefully, by a number of bloggers. From there they can influence the decisions of the CDP and work their way up in the party structure.

Below the fold is a list of all of the bloggers running, the district and their real names as available and a link to their statements. The chart may be incomplete. There are 2021 people running across the state, which is a fantastic start! If I have missed anyone please let me know.

Update [2007-1-11 0:31:48 by juls]: I added Erik Love of the Courage Campaign to the list. 21 aah aah aah (/count)

Update [2007-1-11 3:4:39 by juls]: Two more changes. I took off Eden because he got an appointment as delegate and thus will be withdrawing his name to open up another slot. So we already have one in there. On that note Randy Bayne and his wife Marcy are already serving as delegates down in AD 10. Randy is the Amador Co. Central Committee Vice-Chair. h/t to blogswarm for letting me know about Ellen who is a new addition to the list.

Update [2007-1-11 3:26:19 by juls]: Last one before I go to bed. These come from the comments on the Calitics post. I have added EDN and Chris to the list. Also, Steve Maviglio just lobbied me, so he is going up too. Even though he is a professional hack, he still qualifies as a blogger and is one of the good guys. I will be personally voting for him this weekend in the 9th.

Update [2007-1-11 13:37:37 by juls]: Couple of changes. Predictors real name is up there. gjones has pulled out, so she is off the list. Two new additions Kai and Jen. That makes 25 fabulous bloggers.

There's more...

This is an important story - Matt

Think of this as a follow up post to Matt's post on wasted money in CA, why we came close to losing a seat and why Arnold's landslide victory didn't come with coattails.

In the year and a half I have spent out here in California, I have learned a lot of things.  One of the biggest lesson is that politics is just bigger here, especially the money.  $646,091,654 was hauled in by all campaigns in California this year alone.  One person can give $100,000 to governors races.  Anyone with $1 million can pay people to gather signatures and get an initiative on the ballot.  Once it is up there they can collect unlimited sums to pass it.

Yeah, I know all of this sounds like an endorsement for Prop. 89, but it isn't.  That initiative was way before its time and tried to do to much at once.  The way to campaign finance reform in California is public financing of elections that does not just rely on corporate taxes to finance it.  Reforming the ballot process needs to be dealt with separately.  The attempt this year to do both at the same time and make corporations pay the biggest burden allowed way to many people who should be endorsing public financing to work for its defeat.  It should help kick off a discussion of the next attempt at reform, but that was not the vehicle.  It will take a number of years of coalition building to get it passed.

The other thing I have learned, particularly this year is that the California Democratic Party is pretty ineffective.  Here is the Courage Campaign's Rick Jacobs writing over at the insider CA Majority Report.

There's more...

(cross-posted on dkos)

The California Majority Report launched at midnight after a swanky insider fest at a Sacramento club.  This is the mother of all insider blog.  The vast majority of contributors are Sacramento based consultants.  The three lead guys are Steve Maviglio, chief of staff for Assembly Speaker Nunez, Roger Salazar of Acosta|Salazar, currently who is working for the party and Jason Kinney of California Strategies and Communications LLC.  The three of them worked together in the Davis Administration.  Here is the list of some of the other contributors.

There's more...

Bumped. This is what happens when large companies control networks. They tend to not allow things they don't like, including political speech that causes them problems. - Matt

Looks like Murdock's MySpace finds Sen. Steven's infamous "tubes" speech remix unacceptable.  Andrew Raff sang Steven's words and laid it over a folksy song and put it up on MySpace.  About 2,5000 people saw it before MySpace pulled the plug and deleted the page.  From Wired.com:

On Tuesday, MySpace canceled the TedStevensFanClub account, telling Raff that the social-networking site, now owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., had received a "credible complaint of your violation of the MySpace Terms of Services."

The e-mail referenced a number of prohibited activities, including trademark and copyright violations. MySpace also reserves the right to remove any profile for any reason.

There's more...

Once Matt and crew save the Net we are left with one big unsolved question.  How do we get broadband penetration nationwide?  It is completely impractical to lay fiber across the country.  The only practical solution is to do it wirelessly.  It is still expensive and it would be hard for anyone to turn a profit, especially in the rural areas.  All of this has been known for years, but not much has happened.  Sure the big cities are working on their own MuniWiFi, but the rural areas are still stuck on dialup.

My uncle (not Jay) just sent me a link to a potential solution to the problem.  It is very intriguing and I am interested in knowing what people think of the concept.

There's more...