Wow -- didn't see this one coming: the recall attempt against Assemblyman Anthony Adams, sparked by his providing the passing vote in the Assembly for the record state tax increase this spring, has failed.

According to the Secretary of State's office, the projected number of valid signatures was 24,579, while the number of valid signatures necessary for qualification is 35,825.

The recall campaign submitted 58,384 signatures. According to the Secretary of State's random sampling, only 24,579 were projected to be valid. Under the Elections Code, if the number of valid signatures is less than 95% of the number necessary for qualification, the recall is considered failed.

I received this press release this morning from my good friend Brad Dacus over at the Pacific Justice Institute.  They are doing great work here in California.

For Immediate Release: Thursday, November 19, 2009
Contact: President Brad Dacus (916) 857-6900

Sacramento, CA – At a packed school board meeting last night, the San Juan Unified School District reversed course and voted 3-2 not to go forward with a proposal to hide information from parents about student absences for so-called "confidential medical services," such as abortions.

Unforced confession: Sometimes I am an idiot.

This article was all written up in the post field here, and ready to post, and my damn browser crashed. Then I got caught up in elections work, and things fell by the wayside. That's all wrapped up, and now I can write again. Here we go:

Money's not everything in politics, but in political campaigns it's a necessary evil, especially as the population of your constituency grows. In a massive state like California with more than ten major TV markets and tens of millions of potential voters, you need tons of money to run a credible statewide campaign. $3 million could run an entire two-year Congressional campaign most anywhere else. In Cali it can buy you maybe a week of TV spots, if that. Besides that, a strong fundraising operation scares away potential primary and general election opponents, and draws in quality staff and earned media exposure that will only improve your fundraising operations down the road.

It's that reality that stands in the face of a lot of good press that's come Chuck DeVore's way in the past few weeks. He's become a second-tier candidate for the Tea Party movement that toppled Dede Scozzafava and is now training its nukes down here in Florida on Governor Charlie Crist. Conservative darling Jim DeMint has become Chuck's biggest fan, and former Hewlett Packard exec Carly Fiorina has seen her Senate campaign stutter a bunch out of the gate. Add to that polls showing him running competitively with Fiorina among California primary voters and performing about equally with Fiorina in head to head matchups with SENATOR Barbara Boxer, and Chuck would appear to have a lot to smile about.

And then you look at the Orange County Assemblyman's campaign balance sheet. At the end of September 2009, his Senatorial campaign committee reported just $56,000 in liquid cash after debts. Two of his state campaign committees are still in the red. His campaign is having a terrible time raising money, and is spending it almost as quickly as it's taking it in. For serious US Senate candidates, the year before an election is the 12 months you need to spend banking cash for next year. At the rate DeVore is running through his money, he's barely going to meet payroll, travel expenses and sales taxes (I would hope candidates in Cali budget for y'alls draconian consumption taxes). Not something you want to be doing going up against a candidate who can still spend $15-20 million to finance a campaign, not to mention SENATOR Boxer and her considerable warchest after the primary election is over.

I got no skin in this game and this election, at least no more than I have an interest in seeing SENATOR Boxer become Ms. Boxer come January 3, 2011. But for this to happen, either Assemblyman DeVore or Ms. Fiorina needs to prove that they can challenge Boxer both ideologically and financially. For now, Chuck DeVore at least seems to be the right ideological opponent to face off against SENATOR Boxer next year, but Fiorina certainly can be a capable campaigner with the right support system and message. But the bottom line is that in the race to finance a strong campaign in California, DeVore has failed to prove he can raise money on par with Ms. Fiorina. The most damning evidence of this is Ms. Fiorina's very declaration to run for Senate, in addition to the sad state of his campaign's bank account.

Don't take this as a belief that we should stick a fork in Chuck DeVore's campaign. There is still a ways to go, and as mentioned above, money isn't everything, even in huge states. But I will go ahead and say time is rapidly running out for DeVore to make a compelling case that he is a top tier candidate. He's got the support amongst conservative voters in Cali and from conservative opinion leaders throughout the country. But with six weeks left in the current fundraising reporting period, they need to implore conservatives to open their wallets as well as their mouths. Marco Rubio raised a mere $1 million last quarter and turned his campaign from an afterthought to a real shot at an upset. A $2-3 million haul for DeVore would force pundits to give him respect and give him the resources to actually communicate with voters in his state. Anything less than that, and at best he treads water to 2010 for a loss. At worst, Ms. Fiorina steamrolls him in the primary and goes on to face SENATOR Boxer in the general. If there is a Doomsday Clock for political campaigns, DeVore's clock is reading Six Weeks Till Midnight. Between now and December 31, he can bring home the bacon and make the case that he can raise money with the big boys, or if he'll keep treading water and slip into the red, and into the defeat column.

Written by Mark Bucher

This past week, a growing group of Californians are signing up to support the Citizen Power Campaign, an initiative that will finally pull the plug on the corrupt political machine created by the public employee unions and the Sacramento politicians they own.

Everyone in politics knows that the public employee unions are the most powerful special interest group in this state -- even the L.A. Times' editorial page admitted as much when they endorsed Prop. 75 in 2005. Worse, these union bosses and Sacramento politicians, have rigged the game by essentially funnelling your tax dollars into union political coffers, through the paychecks of public employees. This self-perpetuating cycle gives the unions more pay, perks, and power, while taxpayers are left holding the bag. This simple diagram says is it all.

This campaign is all about returing political power back to California's citizens. To do that, the Lincoln Club of Orange County has stepped up with seed money, while Tea Party Patriots and volunteers from all over the state are spearheading a grassroots effort collect signatures to qualify the initiative for the November 2010 ballot.

Conventional wisdom is that the unions are too powerful to take on, but I can remember when people said the same thing about the Soviet Union, another tyrannical power that fell 20 years ago this week when the Berlin wall came crashing down.

I was in Berlin within two weeks after the wall came down. I flew there because I had to see it for myself. I traveled in the Soviet Union just six months earlier and concluded that the Eastern Bloc countries would never see freedom, at least not in my lifetime. The Soviet Union was just too powerful, or so it seemed.

At the time I was there, soldiers in the East German military were still officially under orders to shoot anyone who came near the wall. The world had completely changed, but no one had made it official. I wanted pieces of the wall so I bought a sledgehammer and chisel and was hacking away when a soldier snuck up on me. I thought for sure I was going to be arrested. Instead, he took the tools, gave them to an East German woman who was standing nearby, and told me to get out of there. He left, and she turned around and said “These aren’t mine” and handed them back to me. I went back to knocking pieces off the wall.

I have seen firsthand the oppression of tyranny and also how the most powerful tyrannies can fall faster than anyone thinks is imaginable. The citizens of this state have more power than they realize – it’s time to take this state back.

Nobody denies that Chuck DeVore is a hard-working candidate. His bid to replace Barbara Boxer as senator is centered on tirelessly driving up and down the state building grassroots support. But he’s also working hard—maybe too hard—at painting his primary opponent, former Hewlett Packard chief Carly Fiorina, as a liberal “Scozzafava” Republican. Being loose with her record simply to score cheap political points threatens to damage his credibility in the long term.

It’s not that DeVore doesn’t have a case to make—he owns the more conservative resume—it’s that in his zeal to cast Fiorina as a moderate he takes artistic license with the facts.

For example, his website claims that Fiorina “supported stimulus for the tech industry”—implying that she wanted general infusions of cash into the entire industry—and helpfully provides a link for reference.  But the article it links to merely states:

Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO and current chair of the board of directors for the Technology Policy Institute, said in a conference call with reporters that she finds it encouraging that Congress is spending substantial amounts of money on broadband infrastructure.  

While it’s true that broadband infrastructure is a component of the tech industry, it’s a leap to imply that she supports stimulus funds for the entire industry just because she supports federal funds for broadband.  What DeVore could have said instead is what he told Eric Hogue last week on his radio show: “She’s a lot more comfortable with the government intervening with the economy than am I.” That simple statement makes his case much more powerfully than exaggerating her position.

DeVore also attacked Fiorina for wanting to tax the internet after she made vague remarks that the Internet can’t remain a “wild, wild west” forever into the future. But she is on the record as saying:

And I remember being in his Senate office and talking with [John McCain] about internet taxation and why that was a bad idea.

Those that accuse Fiorina of moving to the right on some of her positions since she declared her candidacy should know that she said that last year in 2008. Just to remove any doubt, she clarified further and said, “I don’t support additional regulation or taxation on the internet.”

Yet DeVore’s website still contains the allegation.

His campaign was already forced to modify another misleading statement. During the summer, DeVore’s website said, “Carly Fiorina has never said whether she’s pro-life.” But in fact, she’s said it repeatedly.  The website was later changed to say that she’s “suspect” on abortion, implying that while Fiorina is “personally pro-life”, she may not support pro-life legislation for others.

When DeVore’s campaign strains credulity like that, it makes commentators reluctant to buy its message. In the end, overreaching like this will only serve to undermine his candidacy.

ACORN is doing what it does best: playing the victim, blaming everyone else for its self-inflicted wounds, perpetuating false narratives and defending the entitlement industry to the death.

On Thursday, the disgraced welfare rights organization filed suit over a congressional funding ban passed in September after nationwide undercover sting videos exposed ACORN's criminal element.

The group and its web of nonprofit, tax-exempt affiliates have collected an estimated $53 million in government funds since 1994. This pipeline is apparently a constitutionally protected right. According to ACORN's lawyers at the far-left Center for Constitutional Rights, the congressional funding ban constitutes a "bill of attainder" -- an act of the legislature declaring a person(s) guilty of a crime without trial.

Now cue the world's smallest violin and pass the Kleenex: ACORN's lawyers say the group has suffered cutbacks and layoffs as a result of the punitive funding ban. The congressional persecution means ACORN can no longer teach first-time-homebuyer indoctrination classes and -- gasp -- the loss of an $800,000 contract to conduct "outreach" on "asthma."

Message: The demons in the House who defunded ACORN (345 of them, including 172 Democrats) are cutting off oxygen to poor people!

"It's not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury and executioner," CCR lawyer Jules Lobel moaned as he equated the House's act of fiscal responsibility with the death penalty.

"It is outrageous to see Congress violating the Constitution for purposes of political grandstanding," CCR Legal Director Bill Quigley seethed without a shred of irony.

"Congress bowed to FOX News and joined in the scapegoating of an organization that helps average Americans going through hard times to get homes, pay their taxes and vote. Shame on them," ACORN head Bertha Lewis piled on in an affidavit lamenting the loss of state, local and private foundation grants, which she blamed on the resolution. It "gave the green light for others to terminate our funds, as well."

What ACORN's sob-story tellers leave out is the inconvenient fact that nonprofits were bailing on ACORN long before undercover journalists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe and BigGovernment.com publisher Andrew Breitbart entered the scene. Internal ACORN records from a Washington, D.C., meeting held last August noted that more than $2 million in foundation money was being withheld as a result of the group's embezzlement scandal involving founder Wade Rathke's brother, Dale -- reportedly involving upward of $5 million.

Rathke admitted he suppressed disclosure of his brother's massive theft -- first discovered in 2000 -- because "word of the embezzlement would have put a 'weapon' into the hands of enemies of ACORN." In other words: The protection of ACORN's political viability came before the protection of members' dues (and taxpayers' funds).

A small group of ACORN executives helped cover up Dale Rathke's crime by carrying the amount he embezzled as a "loan" on the books of Citizens Consulting Inc. CCI, the accounting and financial management arm of ACORN and its affiliates, is housed in the same building as the national ACORN headquarters in New Orleans. It's also home to ACORN International, now operating under a different name, which Wade Rathke continues to head.

ACORN brass cooked up a "restitution" plan to allow the Rathkes to pay back a measly $30,000 a year in exchange for secrecy about the deal. ACORN's lawyers issued a decree to its employees to keep their "yaps" shut. Dale Rathke kept his job and his $38,000 annual salary until the story leaked to donors and board members outside the Rathke circle.

In June 2008, the left-wing Catholic Campaign for Human Development cut off grant money to ACORN "because of questions that arose about financial management, fiscal transparency and organizational accountability of the national ACORN structures." In November 2008 -- ahem, more than a year before the congressional ACORN funding ban was passed -- CCHD voted unanimously to extend and make permanent its ban on funding of ACORN organizations. "This decision was made because of serious concerns regarding ACORN's lack of financial transparency, organizational performance and questions surrounding political partisanship," according to Bishop Roger Morin.

Did ACORN's lawyers call that withdrawal of funding "political grandstanding" and "scapegoating," too?

The lawsuit over the congressional funding ban is just the latest desperate legal measure to distract from ACORN's long-festering ethics and financial scandals. ACORN's attorneys have sued Giles, O'Keefe, Breitbart and former ACORN/Project Vote whistleblower Anita MonCrief. And they'll sue anyone else who gets in the way of rehabilitating the scandal-plagued enterprise's image.

It took decades to build up its massive coffers and intricate web of affiliates across the country. It will take months and years to untangle the entire operation. And it will take time, money and relentless sunshine to dismantle the government-subsidized partisan racket.

ACORN can never be "reformed." It is constitutionally corrupt. Sue me.