“Parole reform” ballot measure would reduce penalties for sex crimes

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. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August.

Gov. Brown:

• On vacation.

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“The reason that Obamacare is going to fail, it is not just a symbol of this radical liberalism, it is the embodiment of it,” said Krauthammer, who also is a medical doctor and psychiatrist. His column runs in the Orange County Register and his new book, “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics,” has sold more than 1 million copies.

“It is not just an aspiration, they finally achieved something they wanted to do for a hundred years, and they finally enlisted the United States in the roster of enlightened countries that have nationalized health care. Now everybody can see it and everybody can feel it. Five million Americans have already lost their insurance over this. Others have been thrown into all kinds of disarray. And health care itself is in disarray.”

Optimistic

Although quipping that after the Republicans lost the presidency in Nov. 2012 he had to put on his psychiatrist’s hat and prescribe anti-depressants to some in the GOP, Krauthammer remained optimistic, “We have institutions like PRI that can prepare, the same way the think tanks in England prepared for that generation [of Baroness Thatcher]. Now it turns out that everything that you predicted here at PRI about Obamacare is coming true. And we also have the fact that we have a center-right country.”

Before Krauthammer spoke, PRI Chairman of the Board Clark Judge brought up how PRI President and CEO Sally Pipes “is the one who has formulated the alternative to Obamacare that almost surely will be enacted the next few years. Sally has been a national force, and with that PRI.” Pipes, who has headed PRI for more than two decades, is the author of three books critiquing Obamacare, most recently, “The Cure for Obamacare.”

Judge also praised the work of Lance Izumi, PRI Koret senior fellow and senior director of education studies, in particular for the film, “Not As Good As You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School.”

And Judge commended CalWatchdog.com Editor-in-Chief Brian Calle and Managing Editor John Seiler for reversing “the decline of reporting in Sacramento.  They have broken story after story. They are bringing investigative reporting back to California.”

Bill Simon

The dinner gave its Second Annual Baroness Thatcher award, named after the late prime minister of the United Kingdom, to William E. Simon, the Republican nominee for governor in 2002. The award was presented by James Piereson, the president of the William E. Simon Foundation.

Piereson pointed to Simon as “a leader in the world of philanthropy, who climbs mountains and runs marathons.” Simon also is a visiting professor at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.