So CAL's most progressive club backs Jerry Brown for CA Attorney General

[Padme Amidala]

It's great to have Jerry back in politics. He'd be great on the national ticket in 08.

The following is rom the front page of http://patrickhenrythinktank.org/

The Patrick Henry Democratic Club endorses Jerry Brown in his race for California Attorney General.
Seven reasons why Brown is the best candidate for Attorney General:
1). He is honest and has integrity.
2) He is progressive.
3) He is the only candidate personally opposed to terminating people, though he will do his job.
4) He is an environmentalist.
5) He is extremely intelligent and can be trusted to make the right decisions as attorney general.
6) He is committed to vigorously defending our Constitutional rights.
7) He is termed out for governor, a job he did significantly better than either his predecessor or any of his successors.

[Book Lover]

1. I can't agree

As Mayor of Oakland he has done nothing to make fundamental, progressive change. He became very law and order very quickly in Oaktown.

on edit: spelling

[CarolNYC]

2. I admit

I don't know anything about him as mayor of Oakland but I liked him a lot when he was running in 1992.

[genius]

3. That's a vey slanted view of his performance.

He has taken a paternalistic approach to keeping people out of prison and that is viewed as regressive. He is living in one of the worst parts of town and is interacting with the people in the most positive way. On his website he discusses protecting our Constitutional rights against the Bush administration as a top goal in his seeking the job. Most people run for attorney general so they can lock people up not so they can fight the Bush administration.

[Book Lover]

5. You don't have to take my word for it

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=04-08-05&storyID=21125

<snip>

And when there have been articles about Oakland’s problems, at least recently, they manage to put Mr. Brown in the position of the exasperated father who cannot understand why the teenagers have not gone to sleep after he has repeatedly gone up to their room and urged them to do so. In an article this week on reports of Oakland’s 52 percent public school dropout rate, reporter Nanette Asimov of the Chronicle writes: “It’s astounding and unconscionable,” said Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. “It’s a crisis that’s been going on for decades. Oakland is trying hard. They need money. They need leadership. It’s quite daunting, and it’s going to require a lot more truth-telling and honesty than has been forthcoming in recent decades.”

They?

What Ms. Asimov appears to have missed is that for the past five years, since Oakland voters passed Measure D, Mr. Brown has had the privilege of appointing three members to join the seven elected members of the board of directors of the Oakland Unified School District, making him by far the most powerful individual shareholder of that institution (if OUSD were a football team, Mr. Brown would be Al Davis). A fair reading of recent Oakland history might be that before Mr. Brown came on the scene, Oakland schools were solvent and making slow, but steady, progress. After Mr. Brown won the right to make 30 percent of the school board appointments in 2000, the Oakland school system virtually collapsed, went into state receivership, and students and parents are streaming out by the busload. Unconscionable? Yes, indeed. There is an irony there that, apparently, most of our news outlets have not caught.

Other low points of the Brown administration?

If you’re talking development, you might look at the fact that while obsessing with downtown for six years, Mr. Brown has failed to understand where Oakland’s commercial potential actually lies. Oakland has a series of marvelously successful local commercial districts that could have used the “star power” and push that Brown gave to his 10k plan: Piedmont and College Avenues, Grand Avenue and Lakeshore, Montclair Village, Fruitvale, the Laurel District, and Chinatown come immediately to mind (we’ll return to Chinatown in a moment). Meantime, commercial centers like the Jack London Gateway Shopping Center (formerly the Acorn Shopping Center) in West Oakland and the Foothill Center in East Oakland are hanging on, but suffering from neglect (Foothill just announced its losing its anchor supermarket, Albertsons).

Even if you’re talking about downtown development, Mr. Brown’s vision appears to have looked the wrong way. He has focused on uptown, helping to win city subsidies for the Forest City project which is (again) slated to attract a lot of “new” residents into Oakland. Meanwhile Chinatown, which long ago figured out a way to successfully mix commercial and residential in downtown Oakland, gets little official attention or notice. A better plan for the last six years than the uptown dream might have been a project to link lower downtown past the Civic Center with Chinatown and the Jack London Square area, figuring out a way to move the depressed and depressing public buildings (jail, police station, coroner’s office, et. al) in between to another location nearer to the judicial center around the Alameda County Courthouse on Fallon.

[genius]

7. The city's much more solvent under Jerry and crime's gone way down.

Jerry is NOT the head of the school board (so he cannot be blamed for what the school board has or has not done) but he did make sure new schools were built and chartered and a lot of Oakland parents feel good about what is happening there. Every Democrat comes under attack for not being superman but the truth of the matter is that most people (particularly the people who actually live in Oakland) consider Oakland a much better place to live now that Jerry is Mayor.

Jerry is one of the good guys in politics and it always concerns me when people go out of their way to go after the good guys. WE neeed more honest politicians like Jerry.

His opponents plan to allign themselves with Union Oil to go after Rose Bird. Isn't there something immoral about going after a dead woman?

[Book Lover]

8. I'll have to take that

back to my friends who live there for a proper response. How long have you lived there? (No snarkiness, I want to know so I can compare with my friends; 12, 16 and 30 years, respectively, FWIW).

[Albert Einstein]

10. The people of Oakland gladly re-elected him Mayor

It was an easy victory. Your friends must have been among the minority who opposed him.

[genius]

4. Good call. He was the most progressive governor CA ever had.

He vetoed the death penalty. No one has had the courage to do that before or since. All his appointments were people with integrity - not people who would follow a political agenda. He has been fighting for over a decade and a half to rid the California Democratic Party of its reliance on corporate donations. His support for campaign finance reform and for an end to the corporate buying of candidates make him the kind of AG who might arrest Arnold for his illegal electioneering practices.

[MurrayDelph]

6. Funny, I remember a completely different Jerry Brown

The main things I remember about Jerry Brown were his disastrous
CalTrans director Adriana Gianturco who deliberately crippled the
freeway system with the stated attitude that "If we make the private transportation unpleasant enough, people will be forced to use public transportation" (this without noticing that, especially here in L.A., there was no viable public alternative, so it was a lose-lose).

And, after losing the Prop 13 battle, he tried to get on the bandwagon by petulantly cancelling the first cost-of-living raise in three years that the state workers (which, at the time included my future-wife)had just won in negotiations.

He's no hero here.

[David Zephyr]

9. Jerry Will Be the Next California AG.

This one is over already.

[Albert Einstein]

11. I'll feel a lot safer when Jerry becomes attorney general.

I'd rather have him going after the Bush Administration than have the Bush Administration continue its attack on the citizens of California.