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Calif. Lawmakers Want to Radically Change Legal Definition of “Parents”

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California lawmakers are considering an unusual bill that would legalize, in certain cases, more than two parents for a child.

The bill – SB 1476 – proposed by state Sen. Mark Leno, San Francisco Democrat, has passed the Senate but has not come up for a vote in the Assembly.

The bill would allow judges to recognize more than two individuals as parents when separation and custody battles arise in court.

Mr. Leno hopes to override a California appellate court ruling that limited parenthood to two individuals.

That case involved a lesbian couple and their child’s biological father. With one mother hospitalized and the other incarcerated, the biological father wished to gain custody to remove the child from California’s foster care system.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Great Deconstruction of big government and public union

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The economic downturn of 2008 – 2009 has been labeled “The Great Recession” for good reason. Eight million Americans lost their jobs compared to six million in the last four recessions combined dating back to 1980. The jobless recovery may trigger a double dip recession in 2011. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that homeowners’ equity has fallen by over 50 percent, or about six trillion dollars, during this period. Some 22 percent of all mortgages are now under water. And, economists predict that between eight and 13 million homes will have been foreclosed before the crisis ends.

The eight million jobs lost during the Great Recession were primarily in the private sector. While the private sector was ravaged, the public sector was protected and bolstered by the $800 billion Stimulus Bill (3) in 2008 that sent more than $200 billion to the states to keep public sector employees employed. The Stimulus money that California received allowed California to avoid the job cuts demanded by a state budget more that $20 billion out of whack.

Ironically, it will be the actions of the Tea Party, a movement that had no significant affect on California’s 2010 election, that will impact California’s future. While the Tea Party swept more than 60 Democrats out of the Congress in 2010 and replaced them with freshman conservative Republicans, there was no such sweep in California. Democrat Governor Brown easily won his election as did Barbara Boxer and literally every Democrat running for state-wide office.

The vote in the House of Representatives, led by the freshman Republicans, will reduce Federal spending by $2.1 trillion over ten years. The framework would immediately cap domestic and defense spending. These changes will find their way to California and signal the end to Sacramento’s budgetary fiction that the Federal government will bail out the wasteful spending of state politicians. California will be forced to solve its budgetary shortfalls the same way as their federal counterparts – with less money than before.

The period following The Great Recession will be known as “The Great Deconstruction” and will usher in draconian cuts in public sector jobs and a reduction in size of California’ s government. Deconstruction is defined as the wholesale elimination of entire programs, their permanent funding and the jobs involved.

Read More at CA Political Review Robert J. Christiano, California Political Review

Elder: Supreme Court to California – ‘Release the Hounds’

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“Today the court affirms what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” So began Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s enraged dissent.

Release up to 46,000 convicted felons, the court recently ordered the state of California. In a 5-4 decision, the court gave California two years to reduce its prison “overcrowding” — or set tens of thousands free. The ACLU, which brought the suit, successfully argued that poor prison conditions violated the prisoners’ rights as a class, not individually, thus the threat of mass premature release.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, agreed with the lower court, which said that overcrowding and an undermanned medical staff mean “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days.” California houses 143,000 inmates in 33 adult prisons designed for 80,000. The prison conditions, including under-treatment for the mentally ill, wrote Kennedy, “(fall) short of minimum constitutional requirements.”

Where to start with this outrageous decision?

First, elections matter. A Republican president would have seated neither Sonia Sotomayor nor Elena Kagan, who together comprised two-fifths of the majority. President Barack I-look-for-justices-with-empathy Obama filled two liberal vacancies with two liberal justices. Given that the major Republican presidential candidates promised to seat justices in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Sam Alito, this decision would have gone 6-3 the other way.

Read More at GOPUSA

 

Supreme Court’s Scary Power Grab

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The U.S. Supreme Court effectively ordered California on Monday to release 33,000 inmates over two years from an in-state prison population that numbers about 143,000.

Kent Scheidegger of the tough-on-crime Criminal Justice Legal Foundation blogged that Californians shouldn’t “bother investing much in a car. It will be open season on cars, given that car thieves (nonviolent offenders) will never go to prison no matter how many times they are caught.”

The 5-4 Plata decision upheld a federal three-judge panel that in 2009 found that overcrowding in California prisons is “criminogenic” — likely to produce criminals — and ordered state prisons to run at 137.5 percent of design capacity. The state’s prisons are designed to hold 80,000 inmates. (Be it noted, 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell.)

Read More at Real Clear Politics By Debra Saunders, Real Clear Politics