California officials are planning to investigate whether the Mormon church gave an accurate accounting of its role in the campaign that succeeded in getting a same-sex marriage ban approved in the state.

The action by the California Fair Political Practices Commission came in response to a complaint filed two weeks ago by a gay rights activist. Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, accuses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of failing to report the value of the work it did to support Proposition 8.

Roman Porter, the agency's executive director, said Monday that the decision to open an investigation does not mean staff members have determined there was any wrongdoing, only that Karger's complaint merits further inquiry.
+++++++
Payback time……

ABC News has learned that Dr. Susan Rice has emerged as the leading candidate to be President-elect Obama's nominee as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Neither Dr. Rice nor the Obama Transition Team had any comment. The usual caveats apply — nothing is yet a done deal, nothing has been officially offered or accepted, national security team announcements will not come until after Thanksgiving.

Dr. Rice, a member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council and a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was involved in President-elect Obama's campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.
++++++
Another Clinton Administration official……

Now, the association says the surprising vice presidential nod Palin received is already helped stimulate interest.

So far responses are up 20 percent from last year.
+++++++
Alaska cruises are spectcular I am told.

FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Alan Colmes will relinquish his role as co-host of Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year.

In announcing his decision, Colmes said, “I approached Bill Shine (FNC’s Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network. Although it’s bittersweet to leave one of the longest marriages on cable news, I’m proud that both Sean (Hannity) and I remained unharmed after sitting side by side, night after night for so many years.”

Colmes will continue to have a presence on FNC as he will serve as a liberal commentator on a variety of FOX News programming, including Foxnews.com’s The Strategy Room and continue hosting his radio program, The Alan Colmes Show on FOX Talk, a division of FOX News Radio. He will also begin developing a weekend program.
Sorry to see him go…..

Channeling her inner rock star, attorney Gloria Allred threw her arms into the air to the cheers of more than a thousand who rallied outside the state Capitol on Saturday in hopes of overturning Proposition 8.

The high-profile lawyer promised she'd help to ensure that same-sex couples have the right to marry by working to invalidate the controversial proposition.

Allred, who declared that gay rights activists had a "good chance" of persuading the state Supreme Court to invalidate Proposition 8, was among several speakers at the Capitol rally.

Saturday's rally – three days after the California court announced it would hear the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8 – was the third in Sacramento in as many weeks. It drew between 1,500 and 1,800 people to the Capitol's west steps.
++++++
Another Flop for a gay marriage rally. No support…..

Opponents of Proposition 8 might have to go back to the ballot to reverse the ban on same-sex marriage, speakers told a crowd of about 5,000 at a loud and enthusiastic gay-rights rally in front of the state Capitol on Saturday.
++++++++
Aniother flop. Flap is e-mailed that there were less than 3000 present.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," David Axelrod, Obama's chief political strategist, said the president-elect is weighing whether to let the cuts for the wealthy expire on Dec. 31, 2010, as provided in current law. Such a delay would permit Obama to avoid raising taxes during a recession.

If accurate, this is fabulous news for several reasons. For starters, it means Obama will be avoiding the bad decision of taking money out of taxpayers' pockets at the exact moment the U.S. economy needs it the most. Second, if you're going to raise taxes, you want to do it far away from Election Day as possible. Obama and the Democrats, politically, would be best off raising taxes as early as possible. Congressional Republicans can, even from the minority, spend much of the summer and fall of 2010 loudly arguing in favor of extending the tax cuts — in what will be, at best, an economy that just emerged from a recession, or an economy still sluggishly plodding or worse.
++++++
Tax cut for whom?

Federal regulators approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank, the government announced late Sunday night.
++++++++
Is Bank of America next?

Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years.
That amount, more than the nation has spent over the past six years in Iraq, would rival the sum Congress committed last month to rescuing the country's financial system. It would also be one of the biggest public spending programs aimed at jolting the economy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
+++++++
And, where is the $$$ coming from?

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday he believed US president-elect Barack Obama could change Washington's position over a hotly contested plan for a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.

Asked if he saw a chance of a shift on the issue under Obama, Medvedev told reporters: "I think there are chances, because if the position of the current administration on this question looks extremely inflexible, the position of the president-elect looks more careful."

It’s still odd that someone would see a battle of wits between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin as a fight Couric would win. Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio.com reported in a brief item that Couric revealed in a panel discussion that she boned up with anti-Palin foreign-policy advisors before interviewing the Alaska governor. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital featured this piece of the Bercovici report:

Couric shed some light on her preparation for the interviews: Beforehand, she sought advice from former senator Sam Nunn and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas [actually, it’s Haass]. They told her to draw Palin out on her geopolitical worldview and urged her to let the governor speak at length without interrupting her. Maybe she should bring them along with her when she takes over at Meet the Press?

Other conservative groups that loudly backed Prop. 8 are being targeted as too extreme and off-putting by ProtectMarriage.com, which put the constitutional amendment on the Nov. 4 ballot and hopes to help persuade the state Supreme Court to uphold the measure.

"We represent the people who got things done, who got Prop. 8 passed," said Andrew Pugno, general counsel for the Yes on Prop. 8 campaign. "An important part of defending Prop. 8 is eliminating arguments not helpful to our concerns."

Pugno, for example, persuaded the Supreme Court last week to bar the Campaign for California Families from intervening in the court case over the validity of Prop. 8 and the same-sex marriage ban.
+++++++
Liberty Counsel is too extreme…..

HH: Rob Neppell, my two ideas, an RNC-approved vendor list, and a requirement no money unless you’ve hired someone from that list. What do you think of that?
++++++
The GOP needs to move now on a coherent message and learn from the Obama campaign on how to deliver it – e.g. You Tube

KR: Well, first of all, let’s put it in perspective. Let’s before the mythology gets out there, Barack Obama got 2.1% more than George Bush got last time, 3.1 points better than Al Gore got in 2000, and 4.6% better than John Kerry got four years ago. I mean, this was, you know, the Electoral College magnified it, but I think a couple of things happened. First of all, there’s a natural desire for change at the end of eight years of one party running the White House. Second of all, our campaign did not inspire people to turn out

In many ways, his point reminds me of a theory I have on how the party’s attitude toward gays will determine our success. It’s not that we’re likely to crack more than 35% of the gay vote (well, maybe 40%). But, to win back the suburbs, Republicans can’t alienate suburbanites. And anti-gay attitudes don’t resonate with families who have known gay people in college –and maybe even in the workplace–and even in their own families.
++++++++
Flap disagrees. The GOP wpuld be better off to disassociate themselves from gay marriage and attempt to attract socon Latinos and African Americans. Gay rights is different from gay marriage.
Suburbanites support gay rights but not redefining marriage.

Reagan established the principle. There are three legs to a successful Republican election. There are social conservatives, there are fiscal conservatives, and there are national security conservatives. And if you chop off one of those legs, the whole things falls down. And the problem at that last election was that all three of those legs became loosened and weakened, and the idea that we can get by without any of them at the moment, I think doesn’t bear scrutiny. But certainly, if Evangelicals don’t show up to the polls, Republicans lose, and Kathleen should bear that in mind.