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.

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...

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.

MALIBU, Calif. -- Thousands of people in California were under evacuation orders Friday morning because of rushing floodwaters and mudslides. Some areas were already digging out from the muck and debris. Residents of the areas hardest hit by the deadly wildfires are the most at risk of having their homes destroyed. CBS News correspondent Cater Evans said the city of Malibu got a solid day of rain, and more was still on the way in parts of California. That's a big concern in the burn areas. In the mountains around Malibu, there's nothing left on the hillsides to hold the...

--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...