The State of California Audacy

This is “The State, Of California,” Doug Sovern is away, today KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart and Patti Reising are joined by Jared Moffat, Campaign Director for the Alliance for the Safer Use of Psychedelics

As a bill to legalize magic mushrooms and other hallucinogens goes before an Assembly appropriations committee this week, the Alliance for Safer Use of Psychedelics launched today. 

This group is dedicated to facilitating access to psychedelics and enhancing public education on their use in California.

This initiative comes in response to Governor Newsom's veto last fall of a bill that would have decriminalized magic mushrooms for personal use.

Governor Newsom announced a revised budget plan this morning, acknowledging a $28 billion deficit. However, the true deficit could be closer to $45 billion.

This proposal includes significant cuts to both one-time and ongoing spending, with a reduction in state operations and the elimination of 10,000 unfilled positions. Newsom also aims to preserve major initiatives and safety net programs while implementing necessary cuts. For a better understanding of the new budget proposal, KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart and Patti Reising were joined by Chris Hoene, the Executive Director at the California Budget & Policy Center, a non-partisan research and analysis non-profit.

The issue of anti-semitism in the schools took center stage this week as aCongressional subcommittee, controlled by Republicans, summoned thesuperintendents of several K thru 12 school districts to Capitol Hill for a hearing,including the leader of the Berkeley Unified School District, Enikia Ford Morthel.

Berkeley of course has been a hotbed of protest since Hamas attacked Israel lastOctober 7 and Israel retaliated by invading the Gaza Strip. The demonstrationsand walkouts against Israel and in support of the Palestinians have not beenconfined to the Cal campus, they have been common in the public schools too,and while the district says it has been doing everything it can to prevent andrespond to anti-semitism and Islamaphobia in this climate of tension andconfrontation, it is now under investigation, with a federal complaint filed thatalleges it is allowing “severe and persistent” anti-Semitism.

For more on this, we are joined on the KCBS Ring Central Newsline by Ilana Pearlman, a midwife from Berkeley who is the mother of a Berkeley Highstudent who is half-Jewish and half-Black. She is one of the leaders of a groupcalled Berkeley Jews In School and she went to Washington D.C. to attend thehearing and meet with members of Congress.

Two new reports say the city of San Francisco and the state of California are making significant progress in the homelessness crisis, but are things really getting better, or are unhoused people just being shuffled somewhere else, with a shortage of shelter beds still a very real problem?

San Francisco officials declared this week that the number of tents and tent encampments on the streets has dropped significantly, 41% since last summer.

They say that’s proof that the crisis is easing, partly because a federal court ruled that police can take down tents if the people in them are voluntarily refusing shelter, as opposed to having no choice because there are not enough shelter beds available.

Meanwhile, another report said Governor Newsom’s Project Roomkey program did help move more than 60-thousand people off the streets into hotel rooms, declaring it a success as well, but most of those people ended up moving back into homelessness eventually. 

For more KCBS Radio's Doug Sovern, Bret Burkhart, and Patti Reising spoke with Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues his aggressive campaign to shake up the presidential race.

He has qualified for the ballot in at least ten states now, including California.

And in a sign that the Biden and Trump campaigns are no longer dismissing Kennedy as a fringe third party guy who’s no real threat, they are both putting out a lot of opposition research material on him, and attacking him as either a liberal or a conservative in a moderate’s clothing, depending on who’s doing the attacking. 

For more on this, KCBS Radio anchors Bret Burkhart and Patti Reising were joined by KCBS insider Doug Sovern.

There was dancing in the streets in Gaza today, after Hamasannounced that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal in its war with Israel

But it turns out that Hamas has proposed new terms for a deal, thatIsrael is still studying before it decides whether to say yes

Talks had been at an impasse before Hamas’ political leaderannounced the terms his group would accept, which is different from the mostrecent Israeli proposal. Meanwhile, Israel is moving forward with its plan to attackRafah, ordering Palestinians in that city to evacuate before it launches itsoffensive there.

For more on where things stand and what it all means, KCBS Radio's Doug Sovern, Bret Burkhart, and Patti Reising were joined by Amichai Magen, Visiting Professor and Fellow in Israel Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.