Prop 23, as I’ve blogged previously and Think Progress has enumerated in even greater detail, is an initiative sponsored by Texas independent oil refiners Valero and Tesoro. It has also received a gift of $1 million from Koch Industries. Its goal is to repeal California’s landmark law, AB 32, which seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that both sides of the fight on Prop. 23 are upping their game:

On Tuesday, the president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association solicited financial support for Prop. 23 from the group’s members. “I am pleading with each of you—for our nation’s best interest and for your company’s own self-interest,” wrote Charles Drevna in an email that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. [...]

Meanwhile, a loose coalition of environmental groups and individuals, including clean-technology investors, has geared up to oppose Prop. 23.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz plans this weekend to hold a fund-raising event to fight Prop. 23 at his home near Stanford University. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a vocal opponent of Prop. 23, is expected to attend.

Tom Steyer, a San Francisco hedge-fund manager, has contributed $2.5 million to the opposition campaign, while the National Resources Defense Council has given nearly $1 million. Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr has given $500,000, according to filings.

No matter how you slice it, the environmental groups will be out-financed, but it looks like they have popular opinion among Californians on their side, for now. Meanwhile, WSJ notes that, at least so far, oil companies are divided as to whether they should pour money into the race:

Several big oil companies have steered clear of supporting Prop. 23. Royal Dutch Shell PLC opposes the measure, while Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC and Chevron Corp. remain neutral. Unlike Valero and Tesoro, these oil giants have broader operations, such as finding and pumping oil, in addition to refining and marketing it. AB 32 primarily affects oil refiners, because refining emits far more greenhouse gases than the extraction of oil.

“From the standpoint of the major oil companies, they could benefit if the independents [such as Valero and Tesoro] go out of business,” said Ann Kohler, an energy analyst at Caris & Co. “There’s a sort of chess game going on.”

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“We face increasing demand for services despite the decreasing revenues. Since this recession has begun, we have had a partnership with the federal government to ease the fees we are paying for our hospitals, schools, police and other services. Without this FMAP extension, we will be forced to make deeper cuts when we have less ability to minimize that pain to Coloradans.”

Ritter said in the last two years Colorado has cut $3.5 billion from the state budget. He said lawmakers have so far preserved services Medicaid services but that they would have fallen under the axe had FMAP not passed.

“In the fiscal year beginning tomorrow, I have already reconciled shortfalls of $1.3 billion,” Ritter said, noting that he now has to find another $61 million to cut. “Without the FMAP extension, that $61 million will become $272 million.”

To make up that amount, the burden will again fall schools and on services like job training that the state needs to help it recover from the recession.

Ritter said he cared about the federal deficit but that those concerns are misplaced as a priority just now, that the moment Colorado is bouncing back is the wrong time to pull to pull the plug on federal assitance.

“It is not the time to slow recovery. Now is not the time to risk that progress we have made. Now is not the time to risk further job losses on the part of Congress.”

Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson, a conservative Democrat who used to be a Republican, said he was a businessman who saw the value in FMAP extensions. He said so far he has “cut and cut and cut” his budget to the bone.

“I want to make the point that I am not a spendthrift liberal…nevertheless, I support this FMAP extension.”

The governors said they were each working to convince their delegations in Washington to support the extension. They said partisan politics has gotten in the way of real movement.

“Along with more than 45 of my fellow governors, Democrat and Republican, I want to strongly urge Congress to extend the FMAP program,” California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger said. “The Federal money is critical in preventing deeper pain and deeper job losses.”

Schwarzenegger said the federal government is not cutting money to programs that the state implemented but to programs the states are required by law to provide.

“The federal Government can not have it both ways.” Schwarzenegger said. “I understand the need to restrain federal spending… but for Congress to require states to preserve safety net programs and then to cut the funding for those very programs when it is needed most? It is simply unfair and will have devastating consequences.”

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Faced with the most severe budget crises in decades, state and local policymakers from across the country — including a growing list of prominent Republicans — have been only too happy to accept the additional federal funding that accompanied last year’s $787 billion stimulus bill. Not only did that money prop up job markets, many say, but it kept social-service programs running strong during a period of greatest need. They don’t see stimulus spending as indebting the future. They see it as an investment in the future.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

“I don’t apologize for it at all,” Florida GOP Gov. Charlie Crist said Monday of accepting the federal help. “It was the right thing to do. We needed the money.”

That’s not all. Twelve months later — even as Republicans on Capitol Hill are balking at the new jobs bills being pushed by Democrats — a number of conservative governors have unveiled 2011 budget proposals assuming that billions of dollars more are on the way from Washington. Adding to the sense of urgency, 47 of the nation’s 50 governors on Sunday sent a letter to congressional leaders urging billions of dollars in additional Medicaid funding.

The saga highlights the expansive divide between GOP leaders on the national stage — who are focused almost exclusively on how many seats the party can pick up in this year’s mid-term elections — and those running the states, where the more pressing issue is how to balance budgets amid the economic chaos.

The two perspectives couldn’t be more different. Washington’s Republicans — who have voted near-unanimously against the Democrats’ stimulus bills — have effectively bet their political fortunes that those efforts would not only anger an American public grown weary of deficit spending, but would also fail to spur a recovery. An economy in turmoil, therefore, will play to their advantage at the polls in November — leaving them in the odd position of hoping the downturn endures until then. State officials, on the other hand, are grappling in real time with pinched budgets, a scarcity of jobs, and safety-net services threatened by increased demand and falling revenues.

The first group is playing election-year politics; the second is wrestling with urgent budget policies — and the source of the funding is beginning to matter less than whether or not it arrives at all.

In Georgia, for example, GOP Gov. Sonny Perdue’s latest budget proposal assumes that extra federal Medicaid funding will be flowing to the state through the end of June 2011, even though that money under current law expires at the end of 2010.

In Alabama, the 2011 budget proposal from Gov. Bob Riley (R) makes similar assumptions. The list goes on.

“If you anticipate something is going to pass, it would be asinine for us to go in and build a budget that would require people maybe to be laid off,” Riley said last month. It makes little sense, he added, “to build a budget based on things that we really don’t think will happen.”

If congressional Republicans had their way, those lay-offs might be forthcoming. Indeed, although most economists agree that more federal spending is necessary to spur hiring, only five Republicans voted in favor of the modest $15 billion jobs bill that jumped a vital procedural hurdle in the Senate on Monday.

In similar fashion, not a single Republican voted for the $154 billion jobs bill that passed the House in December. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) at the time called the legislation “budget-busting,” “fiscally irresponsible” and “unconscionable.”

Yet what’s unconscionable in the eyes of Washington is often economic necessity to many state officials faced with the worst budget crises in generations. In this environment, getting more stabilizing money from Washington is more important than the politically driven crusade against deficit spending.

On Sunday, for example, GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chided the Republicans of Capitol Hill for their anti-stimulus sentiments, urging them to “think about the people rather than politics.”

“Anyone that says that [the stimulus] hasn’t created the jobs,” he said, “should talk to the 150,000 people that have been getting jobs in California.”

A series of recent reports point out the potential perils if congressional leaders fail to pass a new spending package tackling the jobs crisis, which has left roughly 17 percent of the workforce underemployed. Economists at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are warning that, without a new wave of funding for states, an additional 900,000 jobs would be lost. Analysts at the National Employment Law Project caution that 5 million workers will exhaust their unemployment benefits in the next four month without an extension of the filing deadline. And Families USA, a health-care advocacy group, estimates that hundreds of thousands of low-income folks would lose their Medicaid benefits if the extra federal help expires in January as scheduled.

It’s a dynamic that hasn’t been lost on the White House. On Monday, President Obama urged the nation’s governors to support his efforts to improve the economy — deficit spending or none.

“As governors, I know you feel the same responsibility to see the people we serve through difficult times,” Obama said.

State officials, even Republicans who’ve built a career massaging an image of fiscal hawkishness, appear more than willing to oblige.

“Government spending in and of itself is not stimulus,” Florida state Rep. Dean Cannon (R) said in December as lawmakers were fighting to secure $2.5 billion in federal funding for a high-speed rail project. “But where we can draw down more federal dollars and put Floridians to work building something … I think folks are probably more comfortable with that.”

Newly elected Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), a wildcard in the jobs debate, agreed, siding Monday with the Democrats, who needed at least two Republican defectors to pass their $15 billion jobs bill.

“I wish the tax cuts were deeper and broader,” Brown said in a statement issued just before the vote, “but I will vote for it because it contains measures that will help put people back to work.”

Julissa Treviño contributed to this report.

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The San Jose Mercury News last week reported that Whitman, seeking the Republican nomination to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010, filed a 2008 tax return revealing a $1.15 million contribution to the campaign to preserve Telluride Valley Floor.

Anyone familiar with T-Ride knows Valley Floor is the nearly 600-acre parcel that for years was the subject of a bitter battle to either preserve it as open space or develop it in typical resort-town condo-schlock style. Whitman’s campaign swears she only contributed to its preservation after developers had received $50 million for the parcel in town condemnation proceedings.

That’s not a good enough excuse for a government land grab in the opinion of state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, who’s also seeking the GOP nod to replace the term-limited Schwarzenegger. His campaign also pointed to Whitman’s $200,000 contribution to the Environmental Defense Fund for its work in preserving a California river delta while publicly opposing the project.

“What we see now is that Meg Whitman is a dishonest billionaire and writes huge checks to opponents of California farmers while telling campaign lies,” Poizner spokesman Jarrod Agen told the Mercury News. “Will the real Meg Whitman please stand up?”

Whitman spokesman Tucker Bounds fired back: “That statement is from a hysterical spokesman of a campaign that’s on the ropes.”

Whitman’s own website claims she’s in a dead heat in polling with the only major Democrat still in the race, former Gov. Jerry Brown.

The Telluride Watch newspaper riffed on the controversy by pointing out that being conservative and supporting conservation are not mutually exclusive. Nor is environmentalism an inherently Democratic value. This from the Watch:

“’The party is coming off of two straight election losses,’ said Jim DiPeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection, who suggested that the GOP is in the midst of trying to figure out whether it’s the ‘big tent of Ronald Reagan’ or a ‘straight jacket’ where only people who adhere to certain strict ideologies need apply.

“’Since when is it not conservative for a Republican to care about land conservation?’ he said.

“’Conservatives pioneered the conservation of open space,’ he continued, noting Republican President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in expanding the national forests, parks and wildlife refuges, and that President Herbert Hoover proclaimed the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument.

“’Clearly Teddy Roosevelt knew that the protection of our natural heritage was important for keeping the country strong,’ he said.

“And not for nothing – Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and also established the Environmental Protection Agency, the REP website notes.”

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Budget reform bill 228 passed the Senate this morning after roughly three hours of back and forth on the chamber floor, where GOP senators renewed the same objections they voiced to no effect during the vote held two weeks ago — objections that the bill is unconstitutional and will lead to greater taxes and big government, et cetera.

Today, though, the GOP refuseniks apparently agreed beforehand to hammer at one specific talking point. They took turns speechifying that 228 would turn Colorado into California by unleashing a mad spending spree on entitlements that would run up a crippling deficit.

California is a fantasy to the GOP senators, a cliche not of beaches and beauties but of irresponsible governance and a disgusting, perhaps contagious, generalized licentiousness. To those of us who have lived in the Golden State — the land of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as well as of the Jerrys Brown and Garcia — the senators’ bogeyman California is a joke.

It might surprise them to learn, for instance, that the famous Austrian-born Republican governor of California does not think the Colorado of formulaic budget-spending limits is the model to follow if he is going to rescue his state. In fact, Schwarzenegger is now on a campaign to save California by trying to rid the state of the Colorado-style budget formulas that have dictated for decades how much California can spend and on what programs, formulas like Colorado’s Arveschoug-Bird provision that prevent saving and smart spending and reduce lawmaker accountability, formulas that put in place general fund caps that have removed flexibility to adapt to changing economic realities.

This morning Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, said SB 228 would “throw the budget open to California-style train wrecks.”

Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray — always Watson to anybody else’s Holmes — said SB 228 would “grow the entitlement side of government — that dependency side, that entitlement side that’s been kept in check … that is what has expanded in California. We cannot have that kind of fiscal train wreck in this state.”

By entitlements Brophy can only mean everything other than roads and capital construction that is financed through the state’s general fund, things like police and fire departments and job training programs and schools — things that have clearly grown and developed beyond all reason in California, as Brophy, who has spent so much time studying California’s school system, surely knows.

This is the release sent out by the Republican governor of California’s office in January, as the ridiculously failed California budget became national news:

FACT SHEET
STABILIZING CALIFORNIA’S BUDGET

California must reform how it budgets and spends taxpayer dollars. For a generation, the state’s budget has swung in and out of balance as a result of discrepancies between fluctuating tax revenues and auto-pilot spending. This system is not stable, responsible or in anyone’s best interest. Since taking office Governor Schwarzenegger has successfully spearheaded efforts to take budget-balancing ploys off the table and increase state savings.

[...]

* California’s budget problem is chronic, and driven by two factors:

1. The state historically spends all the money it takes in during years of high revenue growth, leading to unsustainable spending levels in the long run.

2. California has not slowed spending growth fast enough. Automatic formulas will increase spending in FY 2007-08 by 7.3 percent, unless we take action now. Each month California spends $600 million more than the state takes in.

* The majority of spending in the budget is set on auto-pilot. Currently about 90 percent of the budget is tied up with contracts and statutory requirements.

* This “feast-or-famine” cycle and automatic spending threatens the state’s long-term fiscal stability and leaves the most vulnerable residents victim to erratic, unpredictable assistance. Californians deserve better. Since the system itself is the problem, the system must be changed.

Can someone somehow project this release overhead in the House chamber as Colorado lawmakers arrive to debate SB 228? Hanging it there in the air wouldn’t prevent tired objections, of course, but it might help set apart the performance art from the policy making and take any annoying half-baked California references off the table.