links for 2009-02-02

The Mormon Church revealed in a campaign filing Friday that the church spent nearly $190,000 to help pass Proposition 8, the November ballot measure that banned gay marriage in California.

The disclosure comes as the church is being investigated by the state's campaign watchdog agency for violating state laws by not fully disclosing its involvement in the campaign before voters cast ballots on Nov. 4.

While many church members had donated directly to the Yes on 8 campaign – some estimates range as high as $20 million – the church itself had previously reported little direct campaign activity.

But in the filing made Friday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints reported thousands in travel expenses, such as airline tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals for the campaign. The church also reported $96,849.31 worth of "compensated staff time" – hours church employees spent working to pass the gay marriage ban.

The boot camps are an outgrowth of the Courage Campaign, an online hub for liberal Californians, which Jacobs founded after chairing Howard Dean's 2003 presidential campaign in the state.

Since then, the Courage Campaign has rallied support for many Democratic causes. Now the group, which claims 300,000 grass-roots and so-called "netroots" members, is taking a lead role in the fight to repeal Proposition 8.

Opponents of the measure were stunned by exit polls showing that a majority of African Americans and Latinos, after voting for Obama, also voted for the same-sex marriage ban.

Using the same training techniques as Camp Obama, Camp Courage is designed to channel the energy of people who protested the measure's passage into a grass-roots effort to win voters over.

The inaugural boot camp, held at the West Hollywood Park Auditorium, was underwritten by two gay doctors and co-sponsored by SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West, the California Nurses Association and MoveOn.org.

California's horrendous budget crisis has its roots in a 1978 decision by then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature to temporarily shoulder billions of dollars in school and local government costs in response to voters' passage of Proposition 13, which deeply slashed local property taxes.

The prevailing Capitol assumption at the time was that either the courts would overturn Proposition 13 or voters would repeal it. But neither happened. The bailout, especially the state's assumption of basic responsibility for schools, became permanently ingrained in the budget and eventually, at the behest of voters, in the state constitution.

Then as now, the problem is that the state revenue system, primarily sales and personal income taxes, cannot consistently generate enough income to cover all of the state's commitments, especially since Prop 13's passage was followed by state tax cuts, including one that Brown and lawmakers enacted immediately to prove they had gotten voters' anti-tax msg.

Ronald Reagan isn’t just a Republican thing anymore.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of U.S. voters say the Republican Party should return to the views and values of the iconic 40th president of the United States to be successful, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twenty-nine percent (29%) say the GOP should move away from the Reagan legacy, and 15% aren’t sure which is the best course to follow.

Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republican voters believe a return to the two-term president’s views and values are the road to success. Just eight percent (8%) disagree.

Among unaffiliated voters, 61% say the Republican Party should return to Reagan, while 23% think the party should move away from those values.