CalWatchdog Morning Read – July 7

07 Jul, 2016 by CalWatchdog Staff

“Parole reform” ballot measure would reduce penalties for sex crimes
Stanford historian burns CA policy making
CA pension fund sucking up tax revenue
Eight things to know about each Senate candidate
May water conservation efforts were “phenomenal”

Proposition 57 — the newly numbered November “parole reform” ballot measure championed by Gov. Jerry Brown — has already proven controversial…

But according to the California District Attorneys Association, the list of “nonviolent felonies” touted by Brown and accepted by (Attorney General Kamala Harris) include crimes of sexual violence — specifically the ones committed by then-Stanford athlete Brock Turner when he sexually violated a passed-out fellow student in January 2015.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:

Victor Davis Hanson, with Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote a searing column in The Washington Times — a takedown of California policy making that describes two Californias. Here are some highlights:
- “One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.”
- “The other is a huge underclass in central, rural and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.”
- “If Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue lecturing Californians about their xenophobia, he at least should stop turning his estates into sanctuaries with walls and security patrols.”
- “And if faculty economists at the University of California at Berkeley keep hectoring the state about fixing income inequality, they might first acknowledge that the state pays them more than $300,000 per year — putting them among the top 2 percent of the university’s salaried employees.”
- Here’s the full column.
California’s pension fund takes a larger share of tax revenue than the national state average, but it’s unclear why, writes Capitol Weekly.
Eight things to know about Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez’s 20-year career in Congress, by the Los Angeles Times.
And here’s eight highlights from the career of her opponent, Attorney General Kamala Harris.
“The California Water Resources Control Board says the 28 percent May water conservation rate, compared to May 2013, was ‘phenomenal,'” writes Capital Public Radio.