There’s a way to sort of excuse Jerry Brown for joining the partisan witch hunt and investigating ACORN, on the grounds that he is also looking into whether the two wingnut-welfare dress-up clowns who filmed the employees broke the law by taping without mutual consent.  It’s somewhat harder to spin away Brown’s attendance at a fundraiser for Republican District Attorney Mike Ramos.

California Attorney General Edmund Brown, Jr. was the guest of honor and introduced District Attorney Mike Ramos at his campaign fundraiser tonight in Ontario. In introducing Ramos, Attorney General Brown said, “Mike Ramos is one of the best prosecutors in California, we served on the statewide Gang and Violent Crime Task Force together … he’s a real fighter.”

It is actually against the bylaws of the Democratic State Central Committee to endorse a Republican in a partisan race.  Some members of the DSCC who want to support Republicans actually resign from the party.  I’m trying without success to determine whether the DA race in San Bernardino County is a non-partisan race; typically, that is the case.

But there are lots of other reasons that a Democrat running in a primary would not necessarily want to endorse a Republican like Mike Ramos.  Beyond the obvious reasons, Ramos has been accused of sexual harrassment by a woman who works in the DA’s office.  Ramos has called it an effort to derail a series of investigations against public officials in the county.  Ramos has also received $30,000 in donations over the years from the business of Mark Leggio, who was indicted on charges of laundering over-the-limit campaign donations to various other candidates for office.  Ramos recused himself from the investigation.  Leggio pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison.  There’s quite a bit of smoke here.

Between this and partying with the Lincoln Club of San Diego, the point is that Jerry Brown has started to run the general election, appealing to the center-right electorate that he feels wins elections.  That may have been true in 1978, but maybe not so much now, given the demographic changes in the state.  What’s more, it’s incredibly disrespectful to a Democratic primary electorate that is really being told they have nowhere else to go.

Allan Hoffenblum is the publisher of the California Target Book and the most-quoted pundit with respect to state elections.  He is a weathervane for party money and which Party is up or down.  He spoke yesterday in Sacramento and was incredibly blunt.

At a conference sponsored by Hoffenblum’s publication, the Republican identified eight congressional seats and 13 state Assembly seats as competitive. Nearly all of those Assembly seats and more than half of the congressional seats are now held by Republicans.

“I think this is going to be when we find out if the Republican Party has any life left in it whatsoever as far as being a statewide competitive party,” said Hoffenblum, whose publication tracks and handicaps races throughout the state.

A drop in Republican registration and an influx in decline-to-state voters who have not traditionally voted with the GOP have put some districts formerly considered “safe” Republican seats into play.

“I think it’s going to be a very, very difficult road on the Republican front if they don’t do something about registration, something to appeal to decline-to-state voters, many of whom are Latinos and Asians who have not been voting Republican for the last four election cycles,” Hoffenblum said.

This actually flies in the face of predictions at the national level of a 1994 redux.  But it does meet with the general trend in California, as a diverse population drops any love for the Republican Party altogether.  As Hoffenblum noted, eight Congressional districts held by Republicans went for Barack Obama over John McCain last November, and 12 Assembly districts held by Republicans share the same trait.  A smart party with targeted resources could easily pick up more Congressional seats and the number in the Assembly needed to secure a 2/3 majority.  In the state Senate, one of the two seats needed for 2/3 looks pretty ripe for takeover – SD-12, where Asm. Anna Caballero is the Dem candidate and Sen. Jeff Denham is termed out.

I actually am not quite as sanguine as Hoffenblum.  There are Democratic-held seats that could face a fight – at the Congressional level, I think Dennis Cardoza might have some trouble with Mike Berryhill, and the swing Assembly districts held by Alyson Huber, Joan Buchanan and possibly others could be threatened.  The demographics of the 2010 midterms will be more favorable to Republicans than the demographics of the 2008 Presidential election.  And the failures on the budget, and the ensuing suffering, could easily resonate with voters against the majority party if Democrats aren’t careful.

But in general, as Hoffenblum said, the trend in California from the standpoint of the electorate is away from conservatism and toward progressivism, and that march will simply be extremely difficult to stop.  Public attitudes have not only been trending against minority rule but against the entire brand of failed conservatism that brought us the tragedy of the Bush years.  While practically every party in the White House loses seats in a midterm election, the peculiar dynamic in California may blunt that impact – and could lead to a better future for California as well.

Musical artist Moby has decided to donate 100% of the proceeds of three upcoming concerts in California, totaling anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000, to help out domestic violence shelters who saw their state funding cut by Governor Schwarzenegger back in July.

Six shelters that temporarily house victims and their families have closed since Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto to eliminate their funding in July. Advocates say dozens more of the 94 agencies that received a total of $20.4 million in state money last year have scaled back services and cuts hours and staff.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot of money,” Moby said about the cuts during a phone interview from Chicago. “But it’s going to directly harm the women who benefit from these programs.”

Moby, whose real name is Richard Melville Hall, said he hopes to generate $75,000 to $100,000 from dates in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco from Oct. 12 through 15 to give to the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

“My mother was in a long relationship with a guy who was very, very abusive and at one point I had to stop him from stabbing her to death,” Moby said.

The money will go to the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

Domestic violence shelters are nothing more than homicide prevention units.  Schwarzenegger’s cuts – made by blue pencil after the Legislature passed a budget agreement – caused a huge threat to public safety that could cost more in court and law enforcement money in the long run.  Republicans like him probably think that, as long as charitable donations have stepped into the breach, the state can be absolved for their efforts to threaten women’s lives.  But the $100,000, while extremely generous, is just a small fraction of the money that was cut.

Maybe some other celebrity could hold events with the proceeds going to domestic violence shelters.  Maybe someone who had a long movie career and has a legion of adoring fans.  Or maybe we can fund government properly and we wouldn’t have to hold fundraisers to save women from being beaten or killed.

Just days after forming an exploratory committee to enter the race for Governor, Jerry Brown has decided to follow the likes of Andrew Breitbart and Arnold Schwarzenegger by opening an investigation into ACORN:

In a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dated Sept. 25, Chief Deputy Attorney General James M. Humes said the office has “opened an investigation of both ACORN and the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped.” The governor had asked Brown two weeks ago to look into the incidents.

The probe was sparked by a series of hidden-camera videos in which a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute are advised on how to set up a prostitution business by people identified as workers for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The videos were taken in Washington D.C., San Diego, San Bernardino and cities in several other states.

There’s at least a nod to the possibility that the videotapes were obtained illegally, although I’m not sure California law mirrors the state of Maryland, where the filmmakers clearly violated the law.  But the tendency for Brown to follow Governor Headline and chase the popular story is pretty lame.  Remember that the Governor specifically called on Brown to investigate ACORN because of the San Bernardino tape, which is full of holes:

Most critically, it is clear that Fox News has made virtually no attempt to verify the authenticity of the tapes before broadcasting them — something no self-respecting journalistic organization would dare do. Consider the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the most recent video to be released. The words of ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke appear to be damning. Not only does she offer assistance to Giles and O’Keefe, but she claims that she murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse […]

The problem, of course, is that Kaelke was deliberately lying. The San Bernardino Police Department itself has now confirmed that her claim regarding her husband was untrue. A department statement released on September 15 reads: “The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”

Furthermore, Kaelke has claimed that when she made the statement, she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of. “They were not believable,” Kaelke is quoted as saying in an ACORN press release. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

But none of these simple facts stopped anyone at Fox from running with the story. Any cub reporter would have thought to actually call the San Bernardino police before effectively alleging that ACORN was staffed by murderers. But such an act never occurred to people like Beck, Hannity, or Carlson. (In her defense, Carlson later added that the husband was still alive, “according to ACORN,” but ignored the police report.)

Let’s be honest.  Fearmongering about ACORN is a cover for a racially tinged agenda by ideological extremists.  If the actions of a couple employees provokes a state Attorney General investigation of entire companies, I eagerly await the investigations into every company in California.  But we don’t have that.  Instead, Jerry Brown has decided to follow the fearmongering, and legitimize it.  Sad.

At first I thought that the headline writer was confused.  “California tax reform plan much too bold for Capitol,” it said above George Skelton’s column today.  “Too bold” could maybe have more than one meaning.  Surely Skelton wasn’t throwing in with the idea that massively shifting the tax burden to the lowest income levels in society was too good an idea.  But I think that is, in fact, what he’s saying.

“I would sign it immediately” if it were a bill, Schwarzenegger told reporters. “Without any doubt.”

Of course, this is a governor who constantly seeks out things new and bold. And the tax proposal was all of that — much too new and bold for most Capitol denizens, especially those representing special interests.

As Genest told me: “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that lobbyists in Sacramento are in favor of maintaining the status quo unless they are confident that the change will serve their interests. That’s why they’re called ‘special interests.’ “

Nowhere in Skelton’s article does he quote any figures or statistics citing the practical effect of the Parsky Commission’s plans.  He doesn’t mention that, under the plan, taxpayers making over $1 million dollars a year would save $109,000 annually on average, while taxpayers making between $40,000 and $50,000 would save four bucks.  He doesn’t mention that the proposal would result in a net loss of revenue to the state, causing wider budget deficits.  He does manage to mention critiques of the business net receipt tax from the side of business and industry, but offers no critiques from the opposite end, a la Jean Ross’ statement that “You could not say, ‘We’re going to tax child care so we can lower the income tax on millionaires.’ But that’s what this does.”  The fact that the BNRT would hit business payrolls and disproportionately tax companies in the knowledge economy rather than the service economy also doesn’t make it in.  Skelton never mentions that, by taxing all businesses in the state, the BNRT would effectively tax rents.

He just says it’s “too bold.”

The Parsky Commission was practically designed to shift wealth upward.  It should surprise nobody that this is what it ended up doing.  That is bold, but not in the way that Skelton means it, I don’t think.

He does give voice to where Karen Bass may steer the debate:

Bass was holding her tongue, trying not to express disappointment in the commission. When she first proposed its creation, the speaker envisioned the panel proposing something more practical and simple: reducing the sales tax rate and spreading it to currently untaxed services.

She promised a “thorough and objective public review” of the panel’s recommendations.

Good idea, but don’t stop there.

“My biggest message to dysfunctional Sacramento is to get something done,” Parsky says. “If you’ve got a better idea, get it done.”

There’s no question that flattening and broadening the sales tax base is a decent enough idea.  Under the constraints of minority rule, it may be the best one lawmakers can get, and it would prove popular if enacted.  We’ll see if the Parksy Commission report is dumped in favor of that.

Gavin Newsom did what people commonly expect someone behind in the polls in a campaign to do – challenge the front-runner to a series of debates.  From his press release:

“Our state is in need of real reform-we have a broken system that must be fixed,” said Newsom. “And now that there are two candidates for governor, we owe the Democratic voters of California an opportunity to compare our visions and platforms side-by-side.”

Mayor Newsom faxed a letter to the Brown campaign with a list of suggested ground rules. The memo suggests 11 debates in total-one in each media market in California. Ten debates would focus on one specific issue each, while the final debate would be open to all relevant issues. Newsom for California also made the following format suggestions:

• 90 minutes in length

• Opening and closing statements

• Moderated, town hall-style debates with direct audience participation

• Segments with moderator questions, public questions, and candidate-to-candidate questions

• An opportunity for candidates to respond directly to any assertions made about their record

I’m sure the hard-bitten cynics in the dwindling press corps will see this as a transparent ploy for attention from a trailing candidate.  Nevertheless, my immediate reaction was: “A series of debates.  Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Phil Angelides and Steve Westly held a series of joint appearances and debates in the 2006 primary, and while that primary was in no way a model, it did help to clarify the positions of the candidates on various issues.  The same for the nearly endless series of debates around the 2008 Presidential primary.  I wouldn’t call them all helpful, depending on the peccadilloes of the moderators and the laziness of the questioning.  But in a large state predicated on TV ads and soundbites, 90-minute forums can at least offer a glimpse into the thinking of Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown.

By contrast, our recent statewide gubernatorial elections have been characterized by almost no debates between the major candidates.  In 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides held only one debate.  During the recall, Arnold deigned to attend one debate during the recall, despite the other candidates holding several, and he neglected to debate Gray Davis, who asked for debates in the final weeks.  One could hardly sympathize with Davis, as he only held one debate with Bill Simon during their general election in 2002.  As California’s political media has shrunk, so have the opportunities for gubernatorial candidates to offer an unfiltered perspective on their plans for the state.

So while there are political reasons behind this, why not?  I know I have some curiosity about how Brown and Newsom see their roles and what kind of leadership they can offer, and so should everyone.  Fortunately, Brown has responded favorably if enigmatically to this request: “If Attorney General Brown decides to declare his candidacy for Governor, I’m sure he would support the notion of holding debates under terms to be mutually agreed upon by the candidates.”

(Attorney General Brown formally filed to open an exploratory committee for Governor today.)

With the Rasmussen poll numbers filtering through the traditional media, the idea of Jerry Brown being the favorite at this moment to return to the Governor’s mansion is taking hold outside of California. Talking Points Memo has a piece marveling at how strange it is to see the “colorful” Brown back in this position, recalling the time-worn stories about Linda Ronstadt and “Governor Moonbeam,” although they do acknowledge that “this all contributed to a somewhat inaccurate caricature of him as a left-winger.”  Indeed, the TPM profile notes that Brown was a fiscal conservative in office and ran on the flat tax in 1992.  Clearly, the author was informed by Joe Mathews’ cover story in this month’s American Prospect, which delves further into Brown’s un-campaign for Governor and the puzzling question of what in the heck he’s planning to do once he gets there:

But a little talk about the big picture is in order. Outside Brown’s news conferences, California is coming undone. This summer, unemployment reached 11.9 percent. Tens of billions of dollars have been cut from the budget in the past year. Thousands of teachers have been laid off. State offices are now closed three Fridays a month. University tuition has been hiked. Thousands of elderly and disabled people are losing their state-provided health insurance.

The crisis is so profound that it may present an opportunity for California to fix its badly broken government. Coalitions on the left and in the center (the right is sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the Armageddon) are drafting plans to change the way the state is governed. They hope to get several measures on the 2010 ballot that would reshape the state budget, call a state constitutional convention, and perhaps unwind much of Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that severely limited the government’s ability to raise taxes — a major contributing factor to the budget hole California finds itself in today.

If any candidate should be talking about this, it’s Jerry Brown. After all, Prop. 13 passed during his governorship. But Brown has yet to engage the would-be reformers. In the rare moments when he’s asked how the state might be fixed, he talks vaguely of the need to forge compromise and invokes older, better times in California, when he and his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, were in power. “We can talk about ‘restoring the dream,'” he told a union conference in Palo Alto during an explicitly political appearance this summer. “Well, I was around when the dream was here.”

This is a dodge — not only of the present questions about what he might do as governor but also of lasting concerns about Brown’s own role in diminishing the California dream. Pat Brown was a great builder of the highways and waterways and schools that made the state prosperous, but his son Jerry announced “an era of limits.” Since that declaration 33 years ago, the state’s population has grown from 22 million to more than 38 million. The state government has not kept up. If Brown has specific ideas on what to do about all of this, he is keeping them to himself.

Brown clearly has a blueprint for winning the election – say as little as humanly possible about the problems that grip the state, and hope that tangerine dreams of the halcyon 70s push him to victory.  You cannot blame him – it’s a winning formula.  With a pathetically thin state political media, it’s fairly difficult to run on any issues to begin with, at least ones beyond the bumper-sticker variety.  Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected by saying pretty much nothing that wouldn’t fit as a movie slogan, and a celebrity-obsessed media let him get away with it.  So I don’t begrudge Brown the lack of specifics.  That’s the way the game has been played in recent years.

Indeed, I don’t worry about what we don’t know about Brown, but what we do know.

Progressives, both then and now, argue that Brown’s brand of anti-government liberalism fueled the Prop. 13 fire. If government isn’t all that important, what does it matter if you cut taxes? Brown had frozen highway construction, criticized funding for adult education and food stamps, and slashed social services. “I am going to starve the schools financially until I get some educational reforms,” he said in one encounter with reporters.

What reforms, governor?

“I don’t know yet.” […]

Brown, in the midst of running for re-election, called himself a “born-again tax cutter” and immediately reinvented himself as Prop. 13’s champion. (He maintains now that he had to support 13 after its victory because of his oath to defend the state constitution.) Brown went so far as to befriend the legislation’s co-sponsor, the anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis. “It seemed like he went over to Jarvis’ house frequently,” says Joel Fox, who would later serve as an aide to Jarvis. “Mrs. Jarvis would tell stories about serving lunch to the governor with Howard in his pajamas. Howard voted for him for re-election because Jerry convinced him he would implement Prop. 13 in the right spirit.”

As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation. Brown and the legislature bailed out cities and counties that lost revenues under the law — and thus established the dysfunctional system of budgeting that plagues California to this day. Tax and spending decisions once made by city councils and school boards were centralized in Sacramento. The state Capitol became a giant piggy bank, with interests on the right and left using lobbying muscle — and the initiative process — to carve out special protections for their funds, leaving less for broad public investments. At the rare moments when Democrats tried to make such investments, Prop. 13’s two-thirds requirement for taxes allowed Republicans, even when they were in the minority, to block them.

Indeed, the Jerry Brown of recent public comments shows no sign of understanding the present state of the state.  He has supported the current Governor in various accounting tricks and tough-on-crime stances that have blown a hole in the deficit.  He has stated an unwillingness to take a leadership position on any even remotely controversial issue.  He hasn’t strayed from that “born-again tax-cutter” mantra.  As our own Robert Cruickshank says in this very good article:

“The problem with Brown is that I’m not convinced he’s moved past 1978,” says Robert Cruickshank, who works for the progressive 700,000-member network Courage Campaign and is a frequent contributor to the blog Calitics. “The lesson he drew from that is that he has to adapt to a more conservative reality. … I’m concerned that it’s not going to be the kind of governorship where you see significant changes in the way California operates.”

If this is the Jerry Brown we can expect to “lead” in 2010, I know that progressives will have far better outlets for their advocacy, be it the Lakoff Initiative or the Constitutional convention.  As I’ve said many times, you could elect Noam Chomsky governor and he would still be constrained by the same structural factors that resist true democracy and responsible governance.  And Jerry Brown is most certainly no Noam Chomsky.

This Los Angeles magazine interview with Karen Bass is really illuminating about her life and her early activism, which she says started in middle school during the civil rights movement.  Bass, a student organizer, antiwar activist and advocate for the poor in South LA, has a deep connection to the grassroots world outside Sacramento.  And yet she is boxed in by circumstance and the minority rule in California to do things that directly conflict with her personal interests.  This is a fascinating passage:

Why did you start the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment in South L.A.?

In the ’80s, crack cocaine took off as an epidemic, and I became obsessed by it. It was the first time that a drug impacted across class lines in the African American community, and it was also the first time in history a drug trend impacted both genders equally. It was really beginning to reshape the landscape in the inner city. I wanted to find a way to address the drug problem that did not involve massive incarceration-that could get at the root causes-and at the same time I wanted to build an organization that would help create, recruit, and train a next generation of activists. We’ve been around for 19 years.

Does the coalition show up at your office to protest what you’re doing in the legislature?

Absolutely. They’re organizing a protest right now. They are nice enough to call me up and tell me when they’re going to be protesting.

Would you be out there with them if the job didn’t preclude it?

No question. One thing that’s a little funny, if you don’t mind me going off the record-OK, I’ll say it on the record. I would have been protesting, but even when I was making these decisions, I was still in contact with the groups that protest to tell them to continue, because I understand better than ever how important those protests are. So it is quite interesting to be in a position like this.

There’s a very good reason why Bass’ current position feels unnatural, beyond just the inside v. outside dynamic.  It’s because she thought she was going from a position of weakness, as an outside activist, to a position of strength, as a legislative leader.  However, the truth was the opposite.  At least as an activist she was free to advocate and maybe make substantive gains.  As a leader in this legislature, she cannot.  By rule.  Because the minority holds sway.

Anyway, I found it to be a very interesting article.