Free Republic

The Quackenbush .22 rifle was popular a hundred and 20 years ago. Advertisements for the rifles are easily found. They were mostly sold mail order.The prices for the rifles seem modest. A rifle with a wood stock and an 18-inch barrel cost about six dollars. The price of gold was fixed at $20 a Troy ounce. A day laborer might be paid $1 (and fed) for a 12-hour workday. It was the beginning of the petroleum age. While people were far more productive than they had been a hundred years earlier, the industrial age with power machinery, cheap steel, cheap...

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put a key banking oversight agency under the stewardship of an administrator who, according to a bipartisan legislative investigation, helped arrange the misuse of millions of dollars of public funds and steered government contracts to friends. Michael A. Kelley, appointed commissioner of the Department of Financial Services by the governor in December, was a central figure in the scandal that ultimately drove former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush from office in 2000. Kelley, who was Quackenbush's top deputy, was found unanimously by a bipartisan legislative panel to have helped the former insurance commissioner divert public...

Sacramento -- Legislative leaders agreed Wednesday to hire independent counsels to manage an investigation of embattled Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who said through a spokesman that he did not plan to resign. Following the model established in the Legislature's investigation of former state Insurance Commissioner Charles Quackenbush, each party's members on the Joint Legislative Audit Committee will retain their own independent counsel. The agreement on ground rules and procedures came after the investigation got off to a rocky start, with many questioning why the committee chairwoman, Nicole Parra, D-Hanford (Kings County), had called Shelley to testify even before an...

<p>He's vowed to "clean up Sacramento," but Arnold Schwarzenegger has hired a handful of campaign consultants who were heavily involved in the scandal that drove disgraced state Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush from office.</p> <p>One Quackenbush consultant hired by Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign, Jeff Randle, co-wrote a memo outlining how Quackenbush could enhance his image with money from insurance firms that mishandled Northridge earthquake claims.</p>