Free Republic

San Jose State University in California has intimated Ratio Christi, a grassroots campus student ministry, of its decision to "de-recognized" the campus chapter as punishment for the ministry's "discriminatory" policy for leadership positions. School officials wrote to Ratio Christi, explaining their action is as per a new California State University Executive Order on how an organization selects its officers, the ministry revealed on its website this week. The ministry requires its chapter officers to be Christian and holding biblical beliefs, and the State of California now deems that as "discriminatory." "De-recognition" means the school chapter of the ministry is no...

The Los Angeles Unified School District is declaring itself a safe haven for unauthorized immigrant students and their families who may qualify for relief under President Barack Obama's executive order. At a press conference Tuesday, district officials and union leaders pledged to work together to help students who qualify access the records they need to file their applications.

Gov. Jerry Brown just signed a law requiring that California health care providers be trained to better understand the specific health needs of the LGBT community. The law is meant to target inequities in medical treatment for LGBT patients who, according to the San Francisco Examiner, suffer from a lack of provider understanding of gay and transgendered health issues. Assemblyman Richard Gordon, D-Menlo Park, who authored the original bill AB 496, contends that LGBT patients have a variety of negative experiences with doctors and other healthcare professionals. Lesbian couples complain that they have difficulty finding OB-GYN doctors willing to counsel...

A report released Wednesday by researchers at USC found that immigrants who are in California illegally make up nearly 10% of the state's workforce and contribute $130 billion annually to its gross domestic product. The study, which was conducted in conjunction with the California Immigrant Policy Center, was based on census data and other statistics, including data from the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security. It looked at a variety of ways the estimated 2.6 million immigrants living in California without permission participate in state life. FOR THE RECORD Sept. 3, 4:20 p.m.: An earlier version of...

Three of the 40 members of the California State Senate have been arrested this year, more than double the statewide arrest rate and higher than the rate in any of California's 25 largest cities. State Senator Ron Calderon was arrested in February for allegedly taking bribes. State Senator Leland Yee was arrested in March for allegedly trafficking in firearms and taking bribes. State Senator Ben Hueso was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving charges. A fourth senator, Roderick Wright, was convicted of perjury and voter fraud charges in January but was arrested prior to this year. [SNIP]

People love Sriracha hot sauce, but the CEO of Huy Fong Foods does not love California’s officials. He even compares the state to the the communist nation he fled decades ago. “Today, I feel almost the same,” David Tran told NPR on May 12, referring to when he fled communist Vietnam 35 years ago. “Even now, we live in [the] USA, and my feeling, the government, not a big difference." ...

California faces $340 billion in debts, or more than $8,500 for each of its 38 million residents, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office said Wednesday in recommending that the state set priorities for paying down its key long-term liabilities. The state should first address the $73.7 billion shortfall in the teachers' retirement system, a debt that could cost the state, teachers and school districts a combined $5 billion a year to resolve over 30 years. Without changes, the system serving 868,000 members is projected to run out of money by 2046.

Rick Perry Takes A Victory Lap After Texas Takes Toyota From California Hunter Walker April 28, 2014, 5:04 PM ï‚™ Texas Gov. Rick Perry thinks Texas' "employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations, and world-class workforce" are responsible for Toyota's decision to move its sales headquarters from California to the Lone Star State. "Over the past decade, Texas and Toyota have developed a strong partnership that has resulted in good-paying jobs for thousands of Texans," Perry said in a statement about the automakers move Monday. "Toyota understands that TexasÂ’ employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations...

The town of San Rafael, Calif., has passed a ban on smoking that city officials have called the most stringent in the nation. The new ordinance makes it illegal for residents to smoke in their own homes if they share a wall with another dwelling. The ban applies to owners and renters alike, and it covers condominiums, co-ops, apartments and any multi-family residence containing three or more units. Rebecca Woodbury, an analyst at the San Rafael City Manager's office, helped craft the ban, which took effect Nov.14. "We based it on a county ordinance," she told ABC News, "but we...

In a stunning illustration of the attitude taken towards free speech by too many colleges across the United States, Modesto Junior College in California told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013—Constitution Day. Captured on video, college police and administrators demanded that Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college’s tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time. The Foundation for...

If you want to molest children in California, a word of advice: Make sure you have a good union. California has enacted a number of changes — one cannot call them “reforms” with a straight face — to its electoral system of late, notable among them the creation of an “independent commission” to draw up electoral districts and the institution of a top-two primary system, in which primary elections are putatively nonpartisan and the top two vote-getters face off in the general election, regardless of party. The outcome, wholly foreseeable, has been to strengthen the position of Democrats as a...

SACRAMENTO -- California's lowest-paid workers are in store for a 25 percent raise after lawmakers late Thursday boosted the Golden State's minimum wage to the highest of any state in the country. In the final hours of its 2013 regular session, the Legislature voted to hike the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $9 next July and $10 by January 2016 -- a move Democrats praised as a boon to struggling workers and Republicans lambasted as a "job killer." Gov. Jerry Brown has already promised to sign the bill, making California a leader in a growing movement to increase...

There can be no debate about the nation’s anemic economic recovery and its effect on the working poor. While the stock market is soaring again, jobs and wages continue to lag. Democratic leaders and the governor have rightly agreed to raise California’s minimum wage significantly – to $10 over two years. It would increase to $9 on July 1, 2014, and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. In an economy with a record-high income gap (the top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the nation’s total income last year), such an adjustment is justified and long overdue....

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, was it? In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California must reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons, overcrowding so severe that the Court — or five members of it, anyway — found that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the Eighth Amendment. The “Brown” of the case is California Governor Jerry Brown, who when faced with the predictably grim prospects demanded by the decision, saw through the legislation and implementation of what has been labeled “Public Safety Realignment.” This innocuous term is of...

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to let California delay the release of thousands of inmates from state prisons to relieve crowding. In June, a lower court ordered California to release about 10,000 inmates — nearly 8 percent of all state prisoners — by the end of the year to improve to improve medical and mental health treatment. Gov. Jerry Brown last month asked the Supreme Court to delay the order, arguing that it would jeopardize public safety. Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, strongly dissented with the high court's 6-3 one-sentence order Friday, predicting a wave of...

An elementary school in Hayward, Calif. will sponsor a toy gun trade-in, encouraging kids to swap their harmless toy weapons for a chance to win a new bicycle. The purpose of the trade-in is to stop children from playing with toy guns, which may make them more likely to commit violence with real guns, said Strobridge Elementary principal Chris Hill. “Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said in a statement to Mercury News. The trade-in will take place on...

SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers Wednesday advanced a dozen gun-control measures, including background checks for ammunition buyers, and gave early approval to a tax penalty on the Boy Scouts for barring openly gay leaders. Californians who want to buy ammunition would have to submit personal information and a $50 fee for a background check by the state, under a bill passed by the Senate. The Senate also OK'd a bill that would outlaw the sale, purchase and manufacture in California of semiautomatic rifles that can accommodate detachable magazines. The measure, SB 374 by Steinberg, also would require those who own such...

Major gun legislation More than 30 firearms bills have been introduced this year in Sacramento. Here are some of the big ones:

LOS ANGELES — A California law that created an agency to oversee national health care reforms granted it broad authority to conceal spending on the contractors that will perform most of its functions, potentially shielding the public from seeing how hundreds of millions of dollars are spent. The degree of secrecy afforded Covered California appears unique among states attempting to establish their own health insurance exchanges under President Barack Obama's signature health law. An Associated Press review of the 16 other states that have opted for state-run marketplaces shows the California agency was given powers that are the most restrictive...

Have environmentalists already won the war over fracking in California? It’s starting to look that way. A trio of bills swiftly moving through the state’s legislature would ban hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, until the practice is deemed safe. The bills are among nine pieces of legislation currently under consideration that would effectively restrict drilling in the Monterey Shale, a geological formation that holds an estimated 15.4 billion barrels of oil, the largest such reserve in the US. Unreachable by conventional drilling, the Monterey Shale has come into play with advances in fracking, which injects chemical-laced water into wells under...