Free Republic

Homelessness jumped 16 percent in the last two years in Los Angeles County. There are 58,423 homeless people in Los Angeles, which rose from 50,214 in 2011, according to a report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. “Over the past year, we’ve seen a significant reduction in federal resources available to fight homelessness,” said LAHSA executive director Michael Arnold. “The increase we see today in our homeless population demonstrates the direct relationship between resources to address the problem and our ability to have an impact.” Homeless single adults jumped from 35,838 in 2011 to 46,303 in 2013. The number...

A top GOP critic pushed back Sunday on charges that Republican efforts to investigate last year's Benghazi attack are designed to inflict political damage on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Hillary Clinton's not a target," said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on NBC's Meet the Press. "President Obama is not a target." Issa, who heads a panel probing the assault on the diplomatic outpost that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, said he will seek depositions from Benghazi review board heads Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the...

Obama’s “you’re on your own”-attitude toward the DCCC and the DSCC during the 2012 campaign cycle was not particularly appreciated by his very vexed fellow Democrats, but he’s already starting to make good on his Lone-Ranger-no-more promise to help them with the 2014 midterms — he is going to need a fully Democratic Congress to have any hope of securing his legacy, after all. During the first of the at least fourteen promised Democratic campaign swings this year, the president paid the usual lip service to sincerely wanting to work with Republicans (“Look, my intention here is to try to...

Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore had some harsh words for Sen. Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats after they decided not to include an assault weapons ban in gun-control legislation. Moore ranted against the Senate majority leader after Reid removed Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to prohibit military-style weapons from the bill because they wouldn’t have the votes. The director behind “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” said people need to “rise up” against the Nevada senator. “There will be an Aurora next month and there will be a Sandy Hook the month after that,” Moore told CNN.....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, suddenly an expert on the Constitution, said on Wednesday that she and Barack Obama are “honoring the Constitution” in their attacks on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Pelosi pontificated: "And given a choice I think we would all say we’re honoring, as the president does, the Constitution. When you pass a bill in the House, as we did with the health care bill, we made it iron clad constitutionally. You have a responsibility to honor the Constitution. In fact, we take an oath to do just that, and that is the oath that President...

Amazing. I predicted once or twice in writing about the AWB that there might not be 50 votes but I felt silly about it afterwards. Of course there’d be 50 votes. The bill was doomed to be filibustered given the GOP’s solid opposition plus the skittishness of red-state Dems like Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, and Mary Landrieu, but Reid would be able to muster 50 if only because Senate Democrats would want to avoid humiliating Obama after his big gun-control campaign. That way, even when the bill failed on the cloture vote, O could still claim that it had majority...

At a Senate judiciary committee hearing on Thursday, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein shot down a proposed amendment exempting veterans from her “assault weapons” ban, bizarrely arguing that it’s legal to hunt humans with high-capacity magazines. “The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons,” Feinstein said. “The other very important part of this bill is to ban large capacity ammunition feeding devices — those that hold more than 10 rounds. We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round,...

Former McCain aide Steve Schmidt told a apanel on Bill Maher which included California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom that the GOP lags in its tech and internet capability because it can't attract young, cutting edge workers. Why? They don't want to work for a bigoted party. Said Schmidt. "If you look at your first guest on talking about brilliant young people in computers who understand all this stuff [and] be at the cutting edge, it's difficult to make the case to work for a political party that wants to discriminate against their friend who happens to be gay. So we...

Last Thursday, in a sign that the GOP is recalibrating its image after 2012, 100 prominent Republicans (many of whom are no longer serving in office) signed a friend-of-the-court brief seeking to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state shortly after it became legal. The brief states the opinion that marriage is a constitutional right for gay couples—a position that goes beyond even President Obama’s stance on marriage equality. One of the signers, former communications chief for George W. Bush and senior advisor for the McCain–Palin campaign Nicolle Wallace, joined Morning Joe Monday morning to...

For a moment there the other week, I was kind of thrown by President Obama’s SOTU suggestion that we hike the minimum wage, and I chalked it up to just another lame, old-and-tired faux-stimulus type of suggestion for growing the economy. As Allahpundit already pointed out yesterday, however, it’s really so much more than that. In the run-up to the 2006 midterms, a minimum wage increase was one of the specific issues Democrats used in their collective campaign to take over the House — and in their desperate upcoming bid to win back the House in 2014, they are ready...

On Jan. 17, I attended the Atascadero Democratic Club business meeting and informational forum at 7:30 p.m. on gun safety which had been announced in the Atascadero News calendar to include a field representative from Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office and a local emergency room doctor, Steven Sainsbury, with 25 years emergency room experience speaking on his perspective regarding gun safety. This program was planned after the Sandy Hook Elementary School killing of 20 first graders and six school personnel trying to protect them. As the gun control/safety issue heated up, the club found itself and meeting date right in the...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday linked outgoing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to one of the “saddest” Senate votes in years and suggested DeMint’s values won't be missed on Capitol Hill. Pelosi criticized the resigning South Carolina lawmaker and other GOP senators for voting Tuesday against Senate ratification of a United Nations treaty on rights for the disabled. “For them [DeMint and other treaty opponents] to slap the face of our veterans, of people with disabilities, of families with children with disabilities, that was one of the saddest days,” Pelosi said in the Capitol, taking care to avoid...

After a Nov. 6 election that saw unprecedented gains in Latino political power, Latino organizations already are organizing voter-registration and citizenship drives aimed at increasing their influence further. Several groups are preparing to fan out to colleges, high schools and churches in coming months to register new voters. Citizenship workshops, including one in San Bernardino on Saturday, Dec. 1, aim to turn legal permanent residents into voter-eligible citizens. “The Latino vote really fulfilled its potential this past election in a way it hadn’t done before,” said Arnulfo De La Cruz, California director for Mi Familia Vota, a six-state voter-registration campaign...

Frank Aquila wasn’t 100 percent positive that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was going to win heading into Tuesday’s election. Despite his strong conservative roots, Aquila – who served as a county chair for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and penned a book about the decision to go with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate – had seen too much transpire over the course of four years to count out to former senator from Illinois that cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago politics. And while certain parts of the election – like the Democrats...

It's not just Democrats making a final push in the state's four competitive Senate seats. Senate GOP leader Bob Huff hit the trail last week to boost candidates he needs to win to prevent Democrats from winning a veto-proof supermajority in the upper house. . . .

ACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California has reached an all-time high of 18.2 million registered voters, while the number of registered Republicans has fallen below 30 percent, signaling a worrisome decline for the state's minority party, officials said Friday. In its final update before Tuesday's general election, the secretary of state's office said the number of registered voters has increased by 950,000 since the 2008 presidential contest. Officials attribute that surge in part to the state's new online registration system, which helped many young, Democratic-leaning Californians sign up to vote this fall. That system was seen as a threat to the...

SAN FRANCISCO – About 30 Filipino-American seniors from all over the Bay Area gathered Thursday morning at a community center in a largely Filipino enclave in the heart of San Francisco’s South of Market district. Along with their regular breakfast and a mental health workshop, Rudy Asercion, who directs the West Bay Filipino Multi-Services Inc., also served up a good dose of politics, rallying them to register and vote. He also invited them to the center that evening to watch the vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in their first and only televised debate. A recent national survey...

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz may be President Barack Obama's worst surrogate, at least according to the Obama campaign's internal polls. But Wasserman Schultz may be campaigning for herself to win an under-the-radar race for a leadership position in her party that may allow her to succeed Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who could retire from Congress next spring. The Democratic Caucus Vice Chair -- the no. 5 leadership post -- is opening up and the National Journal reports Wasserman Schultz may be actively campaigning for the spot. DWS has been soliciting votes from Democrats who could potentially unseat...

In the off chance that Democrats take back the House in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has dreamed up quite a busy first day for her return to the Speaker's podium. After laying out the Democrats' path back to the House Thursday, Pelosi ticked off a bold list of the achievements she most wants to see on day one - including perhaps, a constitutional amendment. First and foremost was a jobs bill, based largely on President Obama's, she said. Second on the list was passing the DISCLOSE Act, a bill introduced in 2010 that would effectively overturn the Supreme Court's...

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has received his first regular intelligence briefing from the Obama administration during a stop in Los Angeles. Romney spokesman Rick Gorka says the former Massachusetts governor met Monday with members of the intelligence community at a federal building. Romney's briefing lasted 2 hours...