Free Republic

Newly released California Highway Patrol dashcam video shows an impaired California State Senator Ben Hueso undergoing sobriety tests and answering questions before his August arrest. In the footage, the San Diego senator is seen driving the wrong way onto a one-way street in Sacramento on Aug. 22. He quickly U-turns, but a CHP officer is quickly on his tail, pulling him over at a nearby gas station. Hueso gets out of his car and is asked to do field sobriety tests. At the officer’s request, he walks back and forth in a straight line. He is then asked to do...

With lawmakers preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted. “They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wednesday afternoon will see the first hearing for a bill eliminating the personal belief...

U.S. immigration authorities said Monday they have arrested more than 2,000 undocumented immigrants with prior criminal convictions, including 18 in Sacramento and Yolo counties.

t could soon get easier to live on the streets in the Golden State. As controversy swirled around the police shooting of a homeless and mentally ill man on Skid Row in Los Angeles, legislators in California considered a new set of regulations activists said would “decriminalize” homelessness by providing a so-called “right to rest” in public.

<p>A California Democrat has proposed a bill that would raise the state’s minimum smoking age from 18 to 21 in an effort to keep cigarettes out of the hands of teenagers.</p> <p>State Sen. Ed Hernandez introduced Senate Bill 151, which would make California the first state in the country to raise the minimum smoking age to 21. Similar proposals have previously failed in New Jersey, Utah, Colorado and Maryland.</p>

A Jihad Watch reader in the Sacramento area has sent me this flier (click to enlarge), showing that today is NP3 Hijab Day at NP3 High School. NP3 stands for Natomas Pacific Pathways Prep; the school is in the Natomas Unified School District in Sacramento. This all started with a student at NP3 High who is an intern for the Hamas-linked terror organization the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). This student gave a presentation about Islamophobia and Islam at what was a mandatory staff meeting that also included an official CAIR representative. The school then now decided to sponsor an...

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Suspended California state Sen. Leland Yee could face a jury as early as June for charges of political corruption and conspiracy to import guns. At a scheduling conference on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said Yee will be tried along with his political consultant Keith Jackson, who also faces drug and murder-for-hire charges. Breyer said those charges will be tried separately, but lawyers for the defendants, including Yee's lawyer James Lassart, were not satisfied. "The firearms charges are going to be extremely prejudicial. The government has acquired 50 to 70 different firearms that, undoubtedly to...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) —City Council member Angelique Ashby is among the most fiscally conservative of her colleagues, when it comes to spending her discretionary funds. Compared to other City Council members, last year Ashby spent the least -- about $35,000 on community service programs and local events. But that included giving tax dollars to Planned Parenthood Mar Monte. When we asked Ashby about that expenditure, it led to the end of our interview. "I donated to a scholarship. The money that I gave only could go to a scholarship fund for young single moms already selected to go to college,"...

When KCRA 3 asked Ashby about using tax dollars to contribute to Planned Parenthood programs, she defended the contribution, took off the microphone and walked away.

A college art project that had two men hanging from a tree branch with nooses around their necks has outraged and dumbfounded the student-artist's classmates and the outside world. Christina Edwards, a senior at Sacramento State University, defended the Dec. 4 performance/installation that was part of a series called "Restitution." "The purpose of this performance was to bring to light social injustices and the issues of inequality that impact me and my community as a whole," she wrote in an open letter to the school body, obtained by The Campus Culture. Edwards said that, as a young African-American woman, she...

A popular restaurant owned by celebrity chef Guy Fieri went out of business on Monday, leaving dozens of employees out of work. Britton Archie was told not to talk to CBS13, but he did anyway. “I got a phone call that says today’s your last day,” he said.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina on Tuesday rebuked White House officials for their critical stance toward Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, joining a largely GOP chorus that has admonished the Democratic administration. Fiorina, appearing at the Sacramento Press Club, used the episode to demand that Democratic incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer confront President Barack Obama. "Today, I am calling on Barbara Boxer to add her voice to those in the Senate who have challenged the administration on this matter," she said. Boxer spokesman Zachary Coile said in an e-mail response that the senator "has always supported Jerusalem as the undivided...

The Landlady's Tale By SWORDMAKER copyright 2001 Preface The following story was told to me by the woman who rented my parents their first home in California when they moved to Sacramento in 1939. A devout Catholic (so much so that although she had been divorced by her husband, she did not consider the divorce valid and did not remarry until her husband died many years later) the landlady swore on her Bible, in front of my sister and me after she told us the story, that it was absolutely true. She was quite serious about it. In the 1970s,...

Sacramento-Area Cop Shooting Suspect Had Already Been Deported -- Twice by AWR Hawkins 25 Oct 2014 819 post a comment Marcelo Marquez allegedly shot and killed a Sacramento County Sheriff's Deputy and a Placer County Sheriff's Deputy, and also allegedly shot and wounded a second Placer County deputy and a civilian on Friday. On Saturday, authorities revealed that the suspect -- real name, Luis Enrique Monroy-Bracamonte -- had already been deported twice from the United States. According to Sacramento's KCRA, he was "sent back in to Mexico in 1997 and again in 2001."

The California Highway Patrol says at least three officers have been shot in Sacramento and Placer counties by a man and woman who are heavily armed.

You probably know your Social Security number, your driver’s license number and perhaps the latest wrinkle in mattress marketing, your sleep number. But do you know your drought number? The latter represents the amount of water you are allowed to use per day. If you don’t know it, you probably should. Not knowing could cost you money. As California’s severe drought moves into a fourth year, state and local water agencies are working on something called “allocation-based rate structures,” a kind of precursor to water rationing that’s all the rage in Sacramento and in some areas such as Santa Cruz,...

Gov. Jerry Brown signed historic groundwater legislation Tuesday, imposing new rules in the Golden State that could limit how much water commercial and residential users are allowed to pump from underground aquifers — a move decades in the works, spurred this year by California’s drought. The new laws, which take effect in January, will require local government officials to ensure use of groundwater basins is sustainable, protecting underground reserves and averting other environmental damage. The regulations could have a ripple effect on thousands of farmers and ranchers across the North Coast.

On Friday, the California State Assembly outdid itself. You can always count on the leftist leaders of what is supposed to be the “people’s house” never lets a crisis go to waste. With the passage of AB 1739 (Dickinson-D), SB 1168 (Pavley-D), and SB 1319 (Pavley-D), 100 years of history was reversed. The authors painted a grim picture of California’s groundwater future. Most of what they said is true. The only problem they didn’t bother to tell you two key truths: 1.It was these same so-called leaders who give up our seat—the property owner and the farmer’s place at the...

It was not until Thursday night's debate in Sacramento between Gov. Jerry Brown and his GOP rival Neel Kashkari that I realized what a gift the challenger has given the Republican Party. Up until then, he hadn't impressed me much. Had Assemblyman Tim Donnelly won the runoff, he likely would have delivered some bon mots on illegal immigrants that would have dominated debate coverage and sent the rest of the party into a defensive crouch. If Kashkari had amassed the type of country-sized fortune as 2010 GOP nominee Meg Whitman, he likely would have waged a big-money campaign that would...

Boy, am I glad I'm not in college anymore California has become the first state to adopt a "yes means yes" standard for sexual encounters. The law "would require 'affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement' by each party to engage in sexual activity." And not just at the outset of the tryst, as this article in the Washington Post explains: