Author: Debra Saunders

Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle

State Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, is pushing legislation to end California’s death penalty. "Capital punishment is an expensive failure and an example of the dysfunction of our prisons," she explained in a statement. "California’s Death Row is the largest and most costly in the United States. It is not helping to protect our state; it is helping to bankrupt us."

You have to hand this to death-penalty opponents: For decades, capital punishment opponents have tried to thwart California’s 1978 death-penalty law with frivolous appeals that clog courts, delay punishment and burn through taxpayers’ dollars. They now have been so successful that they can argue that California’s death penalty doesn’t work and costs too much.

Hancock is right about the dysfunction. Since 1978, California has executed 13 inmates, even though juries have sent close to 800 to Death Row. California’s lethal-injection protocol has been on hold since February 2006 when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel stayed the execution of convicted rapist/murderer Michael Morales lest Morales suffer any pain.

This perspective on the California Budget, written by Debra Saunders, was published today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In Sacramento, the knee-jerk response to any crisis is to blame the Republicans. But if Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders can’t cut a deal to win the two GOP votes in the Assembly and two in the Senate needed to qualify Brown’s tax-increase extension for the June ballot, Democrats must take their share of responsibility for fudging a deal.

First, there’s the original sin: Brown’s decision to stake his budget package on a do-over ballot measure that voters rejected by a 2-1 margin in 2009. Brown knew when he plotted this strategy that it would be career suicide for Republicans to vote for the sort of tax increases that he himself dared not advocate when he ran for governor.

Now the Dems have to give the GOP something in return.

This perspective on the California Budget, written by Debra Saunders, was published today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

I am reluctant to join the chorus of scolds who chide Republicans for opposing Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to put a tax-increase extension on a special election ballot in June.

But I will join the chorus, though first I must point out that GOP Assembly members and senators didn’t spend California to the brink of ruin. The Democrats and nominally Republican former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger share that honor.

I also am reluctant to blame the GOP because I believe that the necessary two GOP votes from both the Assembly and Senate will materialize.

Read full article here.

I saw that Jerry Brown on Tuesday night when he said that he would oppose suspending AB32, the state greenhouse-gas law about to go into effect. "You create uncertainty," Brown explained. "You create doubt for investors."

I think Whitman had it right when she argued for a suspension of the measure in light of the state’s 12.4 percent unemployment rate. Whitman explained, "It’s not fair to the employees in manufacturing, trucking, packaging, all the other industries, to drive those jobs out of state." Amen.