Free Republic

Gov. Jerry Brown released an Internet ad the other day, asking voters to embrace his multibillion-dollar tax increase. But the word "tax" is nowhere to be found. The closest Brown or other speakers in the tightly scripted ad come to the T-word is "new revenues." Mostly, it touts Brown's efforts to cut state spending and declares – wrongly – that the state's credit rating has improved. "We've made progress, but we still have very serious budget problems in California," Brown says in the ad. "We simply have to take a stand against further budget cuts for schools or for our...

California's death penalty has been in limbo since 2006, when a federal judge stayed the execution of Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the brutal 1981 murder and rape of 17-year-old Terri Winchell. The judge was fearful lest the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol would cause Morales undue pain. Since then, a number of states have switched to a one-drug protocol. Why hasn't California? The answer could be that Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris don't want the death penalty to work. Brown and Harris are personally opposed to the death penalty, but when they campaigned...

Betrayed by the discovery of $54 million hidden in two state parks accounts, groups that donated money to keep California state parks from closing this year now say they want a refund -- or at least a binding promise from lawmakers to spend the extra money on parks. "They sort of came to us under false pretenses. They cried wolf, and we responded," said Reed Holderman, executive director of the Sempervirens Fund. "An elegant solution would be for them to refund the nonprofits, and put whatever is left into parks." State Parks Director Ruth Coleman resigned Friday and her top...

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will make a rare political public appearance today, with his schedule opening up to join Gov. Jerry Brown in San Diego at the groundbreaking and dedication of the Sunrise Powerlink — a large transmission line project that will run from the Imperial Valley to San Diego. Schwarzenegger promoted and supported that project more than four years ago.

Vice President Joe Biden was in town this afternoon. Here's The Bee's pool report from the event: Vice President Joe Biden arrived before 3 p.m. - a bit earlier than expected - at a fundraiser at the Sutter Club, near the state Capitol in downtown Sacramento. Pool was ushered into the hall about 3:17 p.m., just in time to hear Gov. Jerry Brown at the podium ahead of Biden. Biden started speaking about three minutes later to a crowd of about 130 people. "Nothing has changed," Biden said of Brown, who was governor before from 1975 to 1983. Biden said...

The state budget that the Legislature will enact this week will assume that half of its deficit will be covered by voter approval of new income and sales taxes next November. However, it's looking steadily less like a reasonable assumption and increasingly like just another in a long string of budget gimmicks, not unlike last year's bogus assumption that the tax system would generate an extra $4 billion. Indeed, one could say that Gov. Jerry Brown and fellow Democrats are doubling down on miracle money, from last year's $4 billion to this year's $8.5 billion. History does not favor new...

Democratic lawmakers have vowed all spring to fight spending cuts to programs that serve the poorest Californians, including welfare-to-work and Cal Grant scholarships. In a Capitol where fiscal maneuvers have flourished in recent years, Gov. Jerry Brown says he wants real cuts to health and welfare programs because the state cannot afford what it provides. Facing a Friday deadline to pass a balanced budget, Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg are meeting with Brown behind closed doors to find middle ground. Deal or no deal, it is nearly certain that lawmakers will send the...

As Gov. Jerry Brown barrels ahead with high-speed trains, he could find that his quest for a legacy derails the November tax measure he desperately needs to repair the state budget. For his entire political career, Brown has lived in the shadows of his visionary father, Pat, the governor from 1959-67 who brought us the State Water Project and the master plan for California higher education. The younger Brown has always been a big thinker in search of his own legacy. But, after his first gubernatorial tenure, from 1975-83, he was best remembered as Gov. Moonbeam, the ideas guy who...

Gov. Jerry Brown's tax-raising ballot initiative has the support of a slight majority of registered voters, while a competing measure headed to the November ballot has little chance of passing, according to a Field Poll released Saturday. The poll found 52 percent of those surveyed said they would vote in favor of Brown's initiative, 35 percent were opposed and 13 percent were undecided. The measure would raise the income tax for seven years on individuals making $250,000 or more a year and the sales tax for four years. The money would help fund education, along with a host of other...

After voters in San Jose and San Diego, two of California's largest cities, rolled back public employee pensions in Tuesday's election, pressure is mounting on Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature to take similar action to deal with financial crises that are crippling state and local governments. But don't expect politicians in California to attack the collective bargaining rights of public unions as they did in Wisconsin, experts said Wednesday. The Democratic Party controls both houses of the California Legislature and all of the statewide offices, and left-leaning politicians have little incentive to crack down on labor unions that are...

Jerry Brown, not surprisingly, used a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge to tout his two bids for public works posterity – a north-south bullet train and a tunnel for water to bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. "Suck it in!" Brown said. "We got to build, we got to do it right. And this bridge I think really expresses that sense." Just as the bridge proved to be an economic boon, Brown said, so would a bullet train and a tunnel to improve water supply reliability, adding that just as the Golden Gate Bridge "connects...

Taxes must be raised. Either that, or teachers and cops will be laid-off, and the people of California will suffer. So says Governor Jerry Brown, as he seeks to convince Californians that they should vote themselves higher taxes. The Golden State’s circumstances are dire, yet Jerry Brown is facing the crisis with an approach that’s nearly forty years old. He was saying this same thing – leveling these same threats - back in 1978. We’ll go back to the 70’s in a moment, but first let’s put California in its current context. Despite how anybody feels about our 31st state,...

As the state budget's deficit widens, Gov. Jerry Brown is being thrust into a three-front political battle. He must not only persuade voters to pass his sales and income tax package, but, implicitly, persuade them to reject a rival tax measure just for schools. Meanwhile, Brown is pressing liberal Democratic legislators to ignore their political DNA by making deeper cuts in health and welfare programs, not only to close the deficit but to bolster appeals to voters for new taxes. "It's not easy," Brown told hundreds of business and civic figures gathered Tuesday in Sacramento for the annual Host Breakfast....

Diverse appointments to superior, appeals courts Gov. Jerry Brown appointed a former State Bar leader to a judgeship in Contra Costa County on Friday. He also nominated a former San Francisco school board attorney as the first Latino on the state appeals court in San Jose, and chose a Los Angeles prosecutor as California's first Muslim judge... (snip) Halim Dhanidina, 39, of Los Angeles to the Los Angeles County Superior Court. Dhanidina has been a deputy district attorney since 1998 and will be the first Muslim on the bench in California, said Aziza Hasan of the Muslim Public Affairs Council....

Legislative Democrats aren't organizing a bake sale just yet, but they say they will desperately search for cash in the coming weeks to avoid the most severe cuts proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Saying the state's budget deficit has risen from $9.2 billion to $15.7 billion, the Democratic governor has proposed more cuts to programs that serve the state's poorest residents. Brown has described it as a "day of reckoning" and wants his fellow Democrats to slash as much as possible before he asks voters to hike taxes on sales and high-income earners in November. But Democrats signaled immediately that...

The pile-on was in full effect within hours of Gov. Jerry Brown's announcement this week that California's budget deficit had grown to $15.7 billion, with The Week giving its national audience a summary of the Golden State's financial affairs. "California's financial apocalypse," the magazine offered. "A concise guide." Fox News played the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication," and host Greg Gutfeld proclaimed Brown captain of "the Titanic that is California, a state so broke it may ask Greece for a loan." On Friday, the Democratic governor slapped back on national TV. "This is not Europe," Brown told Charlie Rose on...

Apparently, California Gov. Jerry Brown forgot to rent "The Social Network." In an appearance Friday on "CBS This Morning," the California governor said his state is still the land of innovation and where Facebook was invented. He added: "Not in Texas, not in Arizona, not in Manhattan and certainly not, you know, under the White House or the Congress." . . .

We wrote for the weekend (see our column Sunday morning when it goes up here) that Gov. Jerry Brown is a bad guesser. The ink wasn’t even dry yet – in fact the Sunday paper hasn’t even been printed yet – and we learn that Brown guessed wrong again. Back in January Brown guessed that the state budget would be $9.2 billion in the red. Wrong. Monday Brown revised his estimate. Then he said it would be $15.7 billion in the red. Wrong. Today the independent Legislative Analyst affirmed that Jerry’s wrong again. It will be $17 billion plus some...

Against Gov. Jerry Brown's wishes, the California Public Employees' Retirement System board voted today to phase in a higher cost to the state over two years rather than bill the state immediately in full. In a letter to the board, Brown called that "not a prudent decision." The disagreement was over the pace at which PERS is lowering its assumptions about future investment returns from 7.75 percent to 7.5 percent, called the discount rate. Such changes are intended to compensate for lower market returns. When the rate of return assumption goes down, governments must contribute more. The PERS board agreed...

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg today repeated a pledge to look for budget solutions that would allow lawmakers to preserve some services targeted with steep cuts under Gov. Jerry Brown's revised budget plan. "I said on Monday, I'm not looking for a public fight here," the Sacramento Democrat said this morning. "We're looking to work collaboratively and yet not be afraid to have our differences or air our differences with the other stakeholders, the other parties, but come to a resolution where we can in fact buy out some of the worst cuts." The revised budget proposal released by...