Jerry Brown’s long interview with Roberts and Trounstine at CalBuzz sums up so much of what is wrong with establishment Sacramento Democrats, I hardly know where to begin.  Essentially he values the need for “practical management” instead of “new ideas” at a time when the old ideas and the old ways of doing business have led us to the worst sustained budget crisis in the state’s history and an unmatched crisis of confidence among the state’s citizens.  But Brown, adopting the high Broderist tone that has failed the state so often of late, thinks that the real problems in Sacramento can be solved through good hard common sense.

We wanted to interview Brown to ask his views on seven key questions we posed to all the candidates in one of our first posts. In his own fashion, he addressed most of them. However, Brown staunchly refused to specify what combination of cuts and tax hikes he would support to deal with chronic deficits, beyond stressing his view that California is a “very high tax” state and dismissing as politically impractical the proposal to amend Proposition 13 by taxing commercial and industrial property at higher rates than residential property.

“Anyone who answers that (tax and cuts question) will never have a chance to be governor,” he said. “It’s very hard to discuss with particularity anything that can be turned into (campaign) fodder.”

Moreover, he added, “dictating from the corner office does not work . . . If eliminating the structural problems in the California budget were easy, Wilson, Davis and Schwarzenegger would have done it.”

How would he deal with fiercely ideological legislators on the left and the right?

“I’m going to become an apostle of common sense,” he said. “I will disabuse them of their ill-conceived predilections.”

“There’s an embedded partisanship that has to become disembedded,” he said. “In my bones, I’m not that partisan. I’m an independent thinker. That’s my tradition. I’ve been wary of ideology since I left the Sacred Heart Novitiate (in 1960).”

So the guy who wants to lead the state thinks that he can show that leadership by avoiding specifics for two years.  Granted, this worked for the current occupant of the Governor’s office, but it’s deeply cynical and the opposite of courage.  In this defensive crouch, Brown shows his fear of the dwindling anti-tax forces in California, and how he still views the state from the lens of Prop. 13 in 1978.  The statement that Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have eliminated the structural problems in the budget if they could, because they’re such a bold crew of reformers, is self-evidently ridiculous.  And I don’t even know what to say about the “apostle of common sense” comment.  He must have shut his eyes for the past decade as the Yacht Party grew more and more ideologically rigid and oriented themselves like a crime family of hijackers and loansharks instead of a political party.  Appeals to common sense to a group that actually favored letting the state fall into bankruptcy makes no sense at all.  Brown huffed that such a “kind of subversive attitude is unacceptable.”  You hear?  Unacceptable!  Or no tea for anyone!

Then there’s this incredible passage:

We asked Brown this key question: What do you want to do as governor?

He quickly ticked off four key concerns with specific ideas in each area: Renewable energy; prison reform; education reform; water policy (we’ll report details on these in future posts).

Prison reform???!?  Jerry Brown has been the poster child for furthering the tough on crime pose in Sacramento, trying to throw out the federal receiver who has been guaranteeing the constitutional right of prisoners to receive health care.  He opposed Prop. 5 last year at the behest of the prison guards who didn’t want to see the nonviolent offenders who overflow our prisons re-routed into treatment.  This post tells you everything you need to know about where Jerry Brown stands on “prison reform.”

Since I am a co-author of Prop. 5, Jerry contacted me a couple of weeks back. Said he wanted to talk about Proposition 5. He called me on my cell phone while I was participating in a panel discussion about California’s prison crisis sponsored by U.C. Berkeley. I decided to duck out of the symposium. Months earlier, I had reached out to Jerry to discuss the details of Prop. 5, but those calls went unreturned. I figured that, if Jerry Brown was now ready to talk about Prop. 5, that would be a good use of my time.

“OK,” I say, “let’s talk.” Turns out, Jerry doesn’t want to chat about public policy. He wants to vent. He lectures me for five minutes about how, when he’s governor, he’ll solve the state’s decades-old prison crisis in his first month in office. He neglects to mention that the roots of the prison crisis date back to his first stint as governor.

Jerry pounces: “Prop. 5 is anti-democratic,” he complains. I tell him that that’s an odd attack, particularly when Prop. 5 creates an independent citizen’s oversight commission, appointed by the legislature and governor, to bring transparency and change to the state’s prison system. And what could be more democratic than a voter initiative?

Jerry switches tack. He argues that Prop. 5 deprives him — and by “him” it is clear Jerry means the next governor of California — of too much power over prisons. I ask him whether he’s actually read Prop. 5. No response. I note that Prop. 5 in fact allows the governor to appoint two officials to head up the state’s prison and parole agency, not just the one allowed under current law. The governor also gets to appoint more than half the members of new oversight panels that, in turn, must run public hearings, take public comment and publish audits and reports on their activities. These panels provide new levels of transparency and accountability for prisons and for treatment programs statewide […]

Jerry wants off the phone. “Okay. Listen. This thing is complicated,” he says. “I need you to walk me through Prop. 5, line by line, so I can understand what you are doing here.”

Then Abramson, the co-author of Prop. 5, tried to call Brown every day for months with no response.

Here’s Jerry Brown on the reform that would make the greatest difference in Sacramento, the one that would allow elected lawmakers to do their job:

While not a fan of the two-thirds majority vote needed to pass budgets, Brown said he doesn’t think there is a “mechanical” cure to structural financial problems.

Sounding most unlike an old-school Jerry Brown Democrat, he argued repeatedly that regulations making California less competitive than surrounding states must be challenged. “We have to make sure that regulation does not curtail business,” he said, echoing the Chamber of Commerce more than the Sierra Club.

I cannot express enough how wrong it would be to put the fragile state of affairs of California into the hands of someone this afflicted with bipartisan fetishism, and so enamored of himself that he thinks he can bridge partisan divides without fixing the structural problems that exist to wall off those divides.  Jerry Brown is a duplicitous fantasist, simply put.

Yesterday, every living governor in the state stood together at a news event to oppose Prop. 5.  The Yes on 5 campaign had exactly the right response – this shows what a bipartisan failure prison policy has been in California, and continues to be.  Arianna Huffington has a stellar post about this today.

Here is picture that sums up much that is wrong with American politics. Five governors of California, Democrats and Republicans, joining forces to oppose something that is indisputably in the public interest.

This is an image that could be repeated, with different faces, in region after region of our country, involving issue after issue. Public officials standing against the public good, with the disastrous results on display from Detroit to Wall Street. All suffering from the same destructive force: the power of entrenched special interests to cloud the vision of our leaders, causing them to thwart good sense, good legislation, and the will of the people

Huffington rightly points out the horrific state of California prisons.

California’s prisons are a budget-busting debacle. There are currently more than 170,000 inmates crammed into prisons designed to hold 100,000 people. Around 70,000 of these prisoners are nonviolent offenders, with over half of them incarcerated for a drug offense.

A large part of the problem is a parole system the New York Times recently called “perhaps the most counterproductive and ill-conceived” in the U.S.. California’s recidivism rate is 70 percent — twice the national average. This stems in no small measure from the state’s insistence on treating paroled murderers the same way as paroled nonviolent drug offenders. They all spend 3-5 years on parole. This overburdens parole officers, who end up spending very little time with any of their charges — violent or nonviolent (According to the Times, 80 percent of California parolees have fewer than two 15-minute meetings with their parole officer per month.) Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep a closer watch on rapists and killers than on nonviolent drug offenders?

As a result of this dysfunctional system, prison costs have risen 50 percent since 2000, to over $10 billion a year — close to 10% of the state’s budget (and roughly the same amount California spends on higher education). It costs $46,000 a year to keep a nonviolent prisoner in the state behind bars. Is it any wonder California is gushing red ink?

And as bad as this sounds, she leaves something out.  The health care system is so substandard that California is systematically violating the Constitutional rights of everyone it incarcerates, subjecting them to cruel and unusual punishment.  And even after they have been forced by court orders to remedy the situation, the state has refused to do so, setting up a showdown and a possible contempt-of-court order against the Governor himself.  This is how big the failure of leadership is on our prisons.  The only thing politicians can agree on is that we must keep scaring the citizenry into warehousing prisoners over and over, without trying to actually treat and rehabilitate them.

Huffington then describes Prop. 5.

Prop 5 is structured to build on the proven success of Prop 36, a law promoting drug treatment over incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders. It was approved by 61 percent of California voters in 2000, despite almost unanimous opposition from public officials. Since being enacted, Prop 36 has saved California taxpayers $2 billion — and graduated 84,000 people who, according to studies, are far less likely to become repeat offenders […]

Yet Prop 5 is struggling because of a very powerful special interest: the prison guards union. It has funneled $1.8 million into the campaign to derail Prop 5.

For the guards, prison overcrowding means more overtime pay. So the state’s prison industrial complex has unleashed the full force of its financial power — funding an array of ads that blatantly mischaracterize Prop 5. Truth has gone out the window, replaced by overheated claims that the initiative is a “drug dealer’s bill of rights,” “a get out of jail free card” for meth dealers, and a law that will allow parents to abuse their kids and escape punishment.

Goodbye reform, hello fear. The special interests are, once again, overwhelming the public interest.

The prison guards are powerful enough that everyone who might want to be Governor – Jerry Brown, DiFi – would rather break with the stated position of the Democratic Party than defy them.  And so these tough on crime Democrats want to jump back into the rabbit hole and further the absolute and utter failure – maybe the biggest failure in the state, demonstrably so – to stay on the good side of a union who can lavish them with campaign contributions.  It’s utterly disgusting and shameful.

Here’s the latest on the ballot propositions (Remember, you can find the Calitics endorsements here).  

• Prop. 1A & Prop. 3: The California Budget Project put together an analysis of these two bond measures (for some reason they left off Prop. 12).  It’s a decent enough overview, but of course the CBP is aggressively neutral, and the questions they raise have answers they refuse to list.  For example, they ask:

Will high-speed rail gain access to rail corridors used by commercial and commuter trains? High-speed  trains likely will require access to rail corridors – so-called right-of-way – currently used or owned by commercial or commuter train operators. The growth in freight transport at California’s ports and increased ridership on California’s commuter rail lines may mean that high-speed trains may have difficulty gaining required rights-of-way in certain highly trafficked corridors.

Or maybe not!  Let’s not bother to delve into this any further!  

That’s kind of the tone the whole paper takes.  These projects could be laudable!  Then again, they cost money!  Good luck, California!  One would think that some hard numbers about the role of public infrastructure investments during economic downturns or the need for job creation engines or how to reach emissions reductions targets without mass transit improvements could have entered the picture.

• Prop. 2: You know that an issue has gone mainstream when Oprah devotes an hour to it.  Prop. 2 will essentially get an hour-long infomercial on daytime talk today, and that’s as good as gold. Their ads, starkly displaying the effects of animal cruelty, are powerful and effective as well.  But in addition, I hope that Prop. 2 advocates make the argument about a comprehensive food policy that understands the externalities of eating meat ought to be built into the product itself:

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will – as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

This is about stopping brutality, but also about intelligent food policy that would decrease risks and burdens on the environment and public health.

• Prop. 4: A very effective ad from the No on 4 team has returned to the airwaves:

Two years ago, opponents of a parental notification initiative on abortion put out a chilling ad. It depicted a soap bubble floating in the air in a seemingly tranquil setting of a residential backyard. The bubble drifted by windows of a house, where angry voices and rumbling noises suggested violence taking place inside.

Now the bubble commercial that opponents used to defeat Proposition 85 is back. This time, with identical treatment and text, it is being used in the campaign against another parental notification initiative, Proposition 4.

The commercial neglects to mention provisions in the initiative that allow a minor to petition a juvenile court judge to waive the parental notification requirement. It ends (with only the proposition number changed) by saying Prop 4 “would force girls to notify an abusive or violent parent that they are pregnant, and this puts them in real danger. Please think outside your bubble and vote no on Prop. 4.”

The ad is here.  The commercial neglects to mention that provision because it’s a crap provision – the minor has to accuse the parent of mistreatment and claim that she fears physical or emotional abuse, which is really a great position in which to put a minor.  And the idea of a 17 year-old going to a judge is just nonsensical.

• Prop. 5: Why look at this!  The US Sentencing Commission is considering alternatives to prison for nonviolent drug offenders.

The commission’s consideration of alternatives to incarceration reflects its determination to persuade Congress to ease federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws that contributed to explosive growth in the prison population. The laws were enacted in the mid-1980s, principally to address a crime epidemic related to crack cocaine. But in recent years, federal judges, public defenders and probation officials have argued that mandatory sentences imprison first-time offenders unnecessarily and disproportionately affect minorities.

Don’t these people know that sentencing commissions with expert experience in the issues shouldn’t be trusted to carry out guidelines and recommendations on sentencing?  This of course should only be left to politicians who worry about attack ads claiming that they’re soft on crime!  After all, look how well that’s worked in California: 1,000 straight laws over 30 years increasing sentences, overcrowded prisons, costs of incarceration outpacing education and billions of dollars needed to fix an unconstitutionally cruel prison healthcare system!  Clearly, the legislature has this covered, right?  So there’s no need to vote yes on Prop. 5, because that would be too “risky.”  What we have now is working so well.

• Prop. 8: This being the biggest and most expensive initiative on the ballot, there’s a lot of news here.  Fresno priest Father Geoffrey Farrow took a stand against Prop. 8 recently and it resulted in his firing.  His is a heroic story of someone coming forward at great personal cost to commit to equality and tolerance.  That is the meaning of courage.

Peter Schrag has an article out about the lies of Yes on 8.

The ad, on behalf of Proposition 8, features a law professor from Pepperdine University who cites a federal appellate court decision in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal. The decision affirms a lower court ruling denying parents of a couple of young children the right to be notified when gay marriage is discussed in their classrooms.

“Think it can’t happen?” says the professor. “It’s already happened.”

But the insinuation about what might happen in California is wildly misleading. It relies on a set of leaps likely to land the leaper in a logical ditch. In the case of one of the kids, the court said, “(T)here is no evidence of systemic indoctrination. There is no allegation that Joey was asked to affirm gay marriage.”

If you want to see bigger lies than that, check out this deeply insulting ad targeted to the Chinese community.

On the lighter side, here’s a slick amateur ad for No on 8 playing off the ubiquitous Mac/PC spots.

• Prop. 10: Speaking of lying in campaign ads, have you met T. Boone Pickens?

The ad capitalizes on popular sentiment for clean, efficient and secure energy – and no new taxes. What goes unadvertised might stir the public’s distaste for special interest-driven initiatives, particularly those that increase state debt.

Nearly all $13 million in campaign contributions so far has come from Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who stands to profit from its passage. Pickens is founder of Clean Energy Fuels Corp. of Seal Beach, the nation’s largest supplier of natural gas for fleets of vehicles, including Sacramento city and county garbage trucks.

More than half of the $5 billion would be spent on rebates to companies and consumers that buy environmentally friendlier vehicles. And most of that rebate money is dedicated to heavy-duty trucks and vans, the kind of fleet vehicles that Pickens’ company supplies.

Welcome to a probably not-so-regular feature, offering the latest news on the ballot propositions.  The Calitics Editorial Board will be out with their endorsements on these initiatives sometime next week.

• Prop. 1A: A lot of good stuff on this race at Robert Cruickshank’s California High Speed Rail blog.  For instance, Arnold has come forward with his support:

There is far more economic opportunity in fighting global warming than economic risk….We shouldn’t let the budget crisis hold back good things for the future. 20 years from now you can’t look back and say “well they had a budget crisis so we didn’t do it.” Just because we had a problem with the budget does not mean that people should vote “no” on high speed rail. Our rail system in America is so old, we’re driving the same speed as 100 years ago, the same system as 100 years ago. We should modernize, we should do what other countries do…We should start in this state, we should show leadership.

Absolutely, especially when you consider that initiatives which reduce emissions routinely save money and improve quality of life.  A recent study showed that HSR would be a tremendous economic benefit to the Central Valley, with $3 billion in direct benefits and the creation of over 40,000 new construction jobs.  You can add that to the reduction of billions of pounds of CO2 annually, which would be significant in that region at a time where interest groups are successfully suing the city of Fresno for its failure to curb pollution and protect the environment.

In other news, The LA Times has come out in favor, and check out this neat little graphic anticipating the train route.

• Prop. 2: You can see it by clicking on the ad on the side, but, you know, Piggy Wonder deserves some main-page love.  Joe Trippi is apparently involved in the Prop. 2 campaign, which would help stop animal cruelty; I got an email from him promoting this video.

• Prop. 5: The LA Times has a series of profiles on all the propositions, and here’s their edition on Prop. 5, which would finally increase treatment for nonviolent offenders like drug users instead of warehousing them at our overstuffed prisons.  Opponents are smearing this by saying its true intent is to legalize drugs, but the failed Drug War is the great unmentionable sinkhole in state and national budgets, and a smart policy emphasizing rehabilitation is desperately needed, especially in California.  The No on 5 people must have better spinmeisters, however, as most of the newspapers in the state have come out against the measure.  Right, because the policymakers have done such a stellar job in sentencing law, we should just leave it to them.

• Prop. 8: An update on those million yard signs that were “in route” from China to the Yes on 8 campaign: they’re still not here.

It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, didn’t all arrive in time for the September event. And many still haven’t reached supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.

“It takes longer to get a million than we thought,” said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition […]

Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign — a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in “the most unprecedented and largest grass-roots effort ever attempted in California.”

Oh that’s just a FAIL.

Meanwhile, when the most reactionary editorial board in the state, the Orange County Register, comes out against your proposition, you know you’re having a tough time selling it.  As for the right-wing boycott of Google for opposing Prop. 8, the website orchestrating it advises its supporters to follow the fate of the proposition – on Google News.

I think I’m going to miss this initiative, it’s been hilarious so far.

• Everybody’s waiting to see what Sarah Palin will have to say at 7:30PT.  I’m on record; she’s going to do great, and she’ll be feted by the media for it.  Very little of it will be true, but she’s on home court and is an engaging speaker.  Some speech samples here.  The speech is going to be tough and straight-up politics of resentment.  We’ll see if she can channel her anger at being called out for ridicule this week; I think she’s up to the task, and this backlash stuff is standard Republican politics when they are put up against the wall.  Stoller is asking the right question – will this be the right way to introduce yourself to the whole nation, including independents?

• Turning locally, while Arnold missed the festivities in St. Paul to look very serious about the budget, Pete Wilson made it out there in his stead – and he slammed Schwarzenegger’s call for a tax increase, clearly temporarily forgetting the increase of his own.  And when he was reminded, he said, “The situation was very different.”

• Among the bills about to land on the Governor’s desk is an equal pay bill.  This has become a big issue in the Presidential race, and I’m glad to see the legislature on the right side of it.

• This is a good Chris Hayes piece from The Nation about union members at the RNC, but the California-specific part about the SEIU-UHW fight I found just right:

The more I talked to the UHW members and heard their grievances, the more I thought about the fact that organized labor has two goals that can often come into tension: power and dignity. We tend to focus on the power aspect in politics: the power to collectively bargain, to make sure labor captures a fair share of profits, to demand higher wages–all of which have been in sharp decline. That’s the objective nature of unionization. The subjective nature of unionization, though, is dignity. It is the process by which working people come to believe that their views and their ideas and their demands are important. That they should be listened to. These two values can be in tension, as I suspect might be the case in California. Sometimes maximizing power might (I stress might, because the UHW-SEIU situation is very, very complicated) require people to fall in line, but the prerogative of dignity is to speak out and stand up.

• I’m interested in hearing more about Prop. 5.  Anything that rolls back our stupid and shortsighted drug war is positive, in addition to addressing the prison crisis.  Martin Sheen, of all people, has joined up with the No on 5 crowd, being run by the people who brought you the pro-Denham team during the aborted recall.

• Just noting the prison guard payoff to Don Perata because nobody else has.

Open thread time.