Free Republic

Congress is looking to provide emergency disaster funding to California, where wildfires have left at least 60 people dead, but lawmakers say it will take some time. Returning to Capitol Hill after weeks on the campaign trail, almost all key House and Senate lawmakers this week said California deserved to see a supplemental disaster appropriations bill but couldn’t offer many details on the dollar amount or what shape the legislation would take. What the demo-RATS do not want you to know and will not tell the Californians is that billions in aid for the victims of the wild fires and...

California ranks No. 1 among the 50 states for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 50th for the percentage who have graduated from high school, according to new data from the Census Bureau. Texas ranks No. 2 for the percentage of its residents 25 and older who have never completed ninth grade and 49th for the percentage who have graduated from high school. 9.7 percent of California residents 25 and older, the Census Bureau says, never completed ninth grade. Only 82.5 percent graduated from high school. 8.7 percent of Texas residents...

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill to move California's primary elections in 2020 to the beginning of March, three months ahead of when they were held in 2016.

... GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote ... senator [Kamala Harris ] was either “lying or grossly incompetent.” “No one is buying Kamala Harris’s claim she didn’t know her top aide of 14 yrs was accused of sexual harassment, resulting in a $400K settlement,” .... ... the department was alerted on Oct. 3, 2016 that Hartley will pursue legal action. Hartley had also already requested the right to sue from ... . Her complaint ... detailed the allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation – naming Wallace and “those who worked for him” as the culprit. The lawsuit ... alleged...

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) stated that “trauma is being inflicted” on migrant children in shelters “as part of a political strategy, to hurt children deliberately as part of a political strategy.”

Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tony Evers said Sunday he’s not optimistic that outgoing governor Scott Walker will veto bills approved by the Republican-dominated Legislature that would limit the new governor’s power. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Evers said he talked by telephone with Walker recently and appealed to him to veto the legislation, but that Walker was noncommittal. Evers, who will be sworn in Jan. 7 after narrowly defeating the two-term Republican last month, said Wisconsin voters did not elect him to fight over administrative powers with the GOP legislative majority. He said the lame-duck legislation approved by lawmakers after...

The final votes are being counted from the 2018 election. They confirm that the Democrats crushed Republicans. Let's start in the seat count. Republican Rep. David Valadao of California's 21st District conceded on Thursday to Democrat T.J. Cox. Cox's victory combined with other election results means that Democrats have picked up a net gain of 40 seats. As has oft been repeated, this is the largest Democratic House gain since 1974. It's a larger gain than Democrats had in the wave elections of both 1982 and 2006. We can go back even further and see how unusual it is that...

Rep. Nancy Pelosi is digging in amid the fight over funding for President Trump's long-promised border wall, signaling she won’t accept a deal on DACA in exchange for wall money. Congress on Thursday approved a short-term spending bill to avoid a partial government shutdown, punting the immigration debate and other issues until later in the month. Speaking to reporters at her weekly press briefing Thursday, Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely next House Speaker, said that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border are “two different subjects.” She later said that she and...

I found this very hard to believe: A giant company, whose code of conduct used to be "Don't be evil,” is now working on a censorship and surveillance project for the Chinese government. The communist Chinese government.  The company is Google. Once the darling of technology. Now helping to create China's version of Big Brother. I'll explain. It’s called Project Dragonfly. It’s a search engine designed especially for China.  It would allow the authorities there to exercise strong censorship power. If, for example, someone searched for "human rights" or "protests,” the authorities would be alerted and no search results would be shown. That’s exactly...

In California, bottle recycling is mandatory, except when it’s illegal California requires people to recycle their empty bottles.However, this recent news article from the Merced Sun-Star says that three people have been charged with “recycling fraud” in California, because the bottles they recycled were “smuggled” into California from Arizona. The bottles from both states are physically identical to each other, but the price paid for the bottles is higher in California than in Arizona.In the private sector, this kind of behavior is completely legal, and it’s called “arbitrage.” This is what wikipedia says about it:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArbitrageArbitrageIn economics and finance, arbitrage is the...

It’s back. A controversial bill with the potential to add millions of apartments and condominiums near transit — which died in its first committee hearing earlier this year — was resurrected Monday, but with a number of significant changes. Already, some of the changes are raising eyebrows.

Former Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) penned an op-ed Tuesday calling for the Senate to be abolished and for elections to be publicly funded. Dingell, who represented Michigan in the House for over 59 years, wrote for the Atlantic a series of suggestions to address the "unprecedented cynicism about the nobility of public service itself." The former lawmaker noted that in 1958 a survey from the University of Michigan found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” In 2017, the same study conducted by the Pew Research...

TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s newly elected agriculture commissioner is vowing to conduct a “deep dive” into the state’s concealed weapons permit program once she is sworn into office. Nikki Fried, who appeared on South Florida news programs on Sunday, said she has already begun talking about possible changes to the program with employees in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Her push to revamp the program comes amid a likely legislative battle over whether the program should be moved to a different state agency. Earlier this year it was revealed that there were lapses in the program that is currently...

--snip-- Some Republicans have cast a skeptical eye on Democrats’ use of “ballot harvesting” to boost their support. The idea’s backers say it’s just one of several steps California has taken to enable more people to vote. Few people noticed when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the changes in AB1921 into law two years ago. In the past, California allowed only relatives or people living in the same household to drop off mail ballots for another voter. The new law allowed anyone, even a paid political campaign worker, to collect and return ballots — “harvesting” them, in political slang.

House Speaker Paul Ryan questioned California’s ballot-counting process after Democrats were able to flip several GOP-held seats.The state’s election system “defies logic to me,” he said during an interview with the Washington Post’s Paul Kane. “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race. This election system they have, I can’t begin to understand what ballot harvesting is.”“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he continued. “This election system they have — I can’t begin to...

After losing close governor’s races in Georgia and Florida, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are joining other black leaders to oppose one of President Donald Trump’s picks for a lifetime federal judgeship. Abrams and Gillum say in a joint statement Tuesday that the Senate should reject Thomas Farr’s nomination to a district court in North Carolina. The Democrats say Farr has a “discriminatory ideology” that threatens the voting rights of nonwhites. …

Latino comedian and actor Paul Rodriguez said he’s been the target of death threats ever since he voiced support for President Trump earlier this month. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, I’m not in the closet anymore,” Mr. Rodriguez... Mr. Rodriguez, who also chairs the California Latino Water Coalition, said he’s faced a lot of backlash since he praised Mr. Trump for his support for major water projects in California in a Nov. 5 interview with the same outlet. “Even as I did that interview I knew it’d have repercussions … but I stand by what I say,” Mr. Rodriguez said...

Of course the Democrats are still mad for Beto: He is who they are. Some of my conservative friends are mystified by the apparently enduring appeal of Robert Francis O’Rourke, a.k.a. “Beto,” the faux-Hispanic progressive from El Paso who failed to unseat conservative stalwart Senator Ted Cruz in spite of a flood of money and a tsunami of media adulation. “He lost, didn’t he?” they ask, perplexed. There is an answer to this riddle: snobbery. The Democratic party is the political home of snobbery, a word and a concept often misunderstood. Snobbery does not refer to the cultivated preferences of...

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, tweeted Sunday that the use of tear gas against Central American migrants who attempted to enter the U.S. illegally may have been a violation of international agreements governing the use of chemical weapons -- before he backtracked. The Associated Press reported that U.S. agents shot several rounds of the gas after migrants tried to penetrate several points along the border at the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana, Mexico, and California. Migrants sought to squeeze through gaps in wire, climb over fences and peel back metal sheeting to enter. In response to the reports, Schatz initially...

“The Morning Joe’ co-hosts made it official during an intimate Saturday ceremony at the National Archives, in front of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, officiated by Rep. Elijah Cummings,” the publication said. It noted that this is the first time anyone got married in the U.S. National Archives, which was closed to the public Saturday night. It looks like a fancy event indeed. The longtime MSNBC colleagues later enjoyed “caesar salads, acorn squash veloute, and red wine poached eggs, followed by joue de boeuf, sautéed trout, roasted chicken breast, and gnocci Parisienne. Their family and friends raised their...