For three years in the 90s, former California governor Jerry Brown had a radio program Berkeley's far-left KPFA. Jack Chang of the Sacramento Bee has obtained copies of some of the programs (link, see [1]) and is ready to reveal some of their shocking contents. He speculates that Gavin Newsom (a strong illegal immigration supporter) and the GOP might use the excerpts against Brown. For instance, consider this shocking bit:

[Brown] said U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, had "sold out" U.S. truck drivers by letting their Mexican counterparts drive uninspected vehicles into the United States.

I don't know what we're supposed to be shocked by: whether because Brown called them out, or whether because Brown opposed allowing potentially unsafe Mexican trucks on American roads as part of a NAFTA scheme that would indeed result in truckers' wages trending towards those of their Mexican competitors. If the first, who cares? Next question. If the second, Brown is definitely going against Beltway orthodoxy, but he was right.

Now, that doesn't mean that "Moonbeam" is right on everything; far from it. However, he does have quite a bit more backbone and integrity than Arnold Schwarzenegger and a combination with him and a similar conservative as Lt. Gov. would probably be better than what we have now. And, unless he starts making open borders noises, it would be far preferable to Newsom.

Other shocking! comments follow; for the first, note that the prison guards union and the like are quite powerful. Feel free to be shocked! in comments:

Brown regularly attacked President Bill Clinton as a lackey for business interests and in one excerpt stated, "I don't believe Clinton is different from Richard Nixon."

He called capital punishment "state murder"...

In one of the most controversial excerpts, Brown called the prison system a racket that pumped profits out of the poor's misfortunes and into the pockets of prison guards.

"The big lockup is about drugs," Brown stated in an excerpt from late 1995. "Here's the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners. There's a lot of chemicals out there and when certain ones are made illegal, they become a huge profit opportunity and bring violence, crime and more people to imprison."

..."California Democrats need to ponder very seriously the prospect of putting up a candidate for governor who comes with reams of radio-show rantings and ravings like Brown," (Garry South, a top strategist for Democratic gubernatorial candidate [[Gavin Newsom}}) wrote in an e-mail... "The Republicans will put tens of millions of dollars behind making him look like a conspiracy-spouting fringe lunatic to the average voter."

[1] Apparently Brown deleted them from his site, but Chang got them from archive.org or similar.