Free Republic

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpgEarlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a...

Board members of California's Oakland Unified School District unanimously voted on Wednesday to cease suspending students for what they call "willful defiance." Those behaviors can include swearing/yelling at teachers, refusing direct orders, texting, and storming out of class, to name a few. The reason? Concern that too many black students are being suspended for willful defiance. One sophomore student, Dan'enicole Williams, told the San Francisco Gate, "They never take time out, if someone is sleeping in class, to ask what’s wrong. They may be acting that way because they didn’t eat the night before.” "We’re getting pushed out of schools,”...

What do you do when you have 30 million young salmon ready for their big journeys downstream, but drought and development have dried your riverbeds to sauna rocks? In California this year, you give the fish a ride. State and federal wildlife agencies in California are deploying what they say is the biggest fish-lift in the state's history through this month, rolling out convoys of tanker trucks to transport a generation of hatchery salmon downstream to the San Francisco Bay.

If liberals want to throw accusations of ‘racism’ into every single debate, where are they when actual circumstances like this arise? Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) made an appearance on the Stephanie Miller Show and mocked Tea Party Conservatives saying “everything to them is unconstitutional” then going on to talk in a ‘red neck’ southern accent. Keep in mind she’s mocking some of her colleagues.

U.S. Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez was criticized Saturday by her chief rival, Attorney General Kamala Harris, after a videotape surfaced showing her making a whooping cry in reference to Native Americans during an apparent joke. Harris called the gesture "shocking.'' A video posted on The Sacramento Bee website shows Sanchez, a 10-term congresswoman, fluttering her hand against her mouth and making a whooping sound while speaking to a group of delegates at a state Democratic Party convention.

Sounding like she’s on the verge of declaring her candidacy for U.S. Senate, Rep. Loretta Sanchez encouraged donors in Orange County to pony up Monday and explained why she would be a better choice than Attorney General Kamala Harris. Sanchez, a Santa Ana Democrat, has been meeting with Democratic and Latino leaders throughout the state as she weighs whether to join Harris, the only major declared Democratic candidate, in the 2016 race to replace retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “We’ve gotten a good reception up and down the state,” Sanchez told the Democratic Foundation of Orange County, a group of...

Even by the low standards of Congress, Loretta Sanchez’s performance ranks as a disgrace. The Democrat from California managed — in just a few minutes — to turn the congressional investigation of the marathon terror bombings into a political hatchet job, while demonstrating her complete ignorance of basic facts of the case. Sanchez somehow butchered the names of the alleged terror bombers not once, but three times, calling the Tsarnaev brothers “Tsarnavar,” then “Tsarnev,” and finally “Tsarnov.” “There are still unanswered questions about the Tsarnavar brothers,” the tongue-tied congresswoman said. Yes, like, how to pronounce the names of the terrorists....

Two days after entering the race for the U.S. Senate, Rep. Loretta Sanchez met with the Asian-Pacific Islander Caucus on Saturday and mimicked a racial stereotype of American Indians. In a video, Sanchez, D-Santa Ana, describes a pending meeting she had with an East Indian. “I am going to his office, thinking that I am going to meet with a,” she said, holding her hand in front of her mouth and making an echo sound. “Right?...because he said Indian American.”

Reason No. 5: Running for his brother’s “third term” is a losing proposition. After finishing the first draft of this piece I received a late night return phone call from a Florida Republican power player (who asked that his name be withheld). He was responding to a question from me earlier about former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s prospects for winning the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Coincidentally, he had just left a high-dollar local fundraiser for Florida Senator Marco Rubio — the reason he gave for calling so late. Here are some direct quotes from our conservation: “Jeb’s people are now...

Democrat Elizabeth Warren warned Saturday that Republican policies being promoted by its emerging presidential field would create an "American nightmare" that would crush opportunities for students and workers, deepen wage inequality and favor Wall Street banks and huge corporations. Warren's speech before several thousand party loyalists at a California Democratic convention in Anaheim was greeted with thunderous cheers while scores of delegates waved signs emblazoned with her name. The Massachusetts senator and favorite of the party's left wing ridiculed the GOP's potential 2016 field, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has proposed a double-digit cut in state aid for higher...

“Dam [thumbs up]… Train [thumbs down]… Governor, put our water before your train,” reads a billboard message erected by Fresno City Councilman Steve Brandau, revealed this week in California’s Central Valley. “We don’t have a train shortage, we have a water shortage,” Brandau told Breitbart California. His message comes as California is in serious, extended drought, while Governor Jerry Brown has made it his priority to push forward the troubled high-speed rail project. The “Dam” references the proposed Temperance Flat Dam. In 2014, Californians were sold on passing the Proposition 1 water bond on the premise that funds would be...

Nancy Pelosi is now predicting that Republicans will “rue the day” that the Supreme Court guts Obamacare subsidies for millions in three dozen states. “They’re going to then go out and say we’re going to take subsidies away from people who have health care? No, I don’t think so,” says Pelosi. “It would be really bad news for them.” Meanwhile, if anything, Republicans may be moving away from their previously-stated vow to participate in providing a contingency fix to temporarily keep those millions covered. The Hill reports that GOP Rep. Tom Price, the chairman of the House budget committee and...

MENIFEE, Calif. (KABC) -- A man allegedly walked across the 215 Freeway in Menifee and stabbed an 18-month-old baby while his mother and several other family members attempted to change a flat tire on their disabled vehicle early Monday, California Highway Patrol officials said. The family-of-five pulled over on the right shoulder of the northbound 215 Freeway, just south of Newport Road, at about 1:20 a.m. Monday to change a flat tire on their 1990 Mazda hatchback. That's when 44-year-old Nicolas Lopez Garcia, who was walking along the opposite side of the freeway, crossed all lanes of traffic toward the...

The field for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is as flat as any in modern memory—pretty remarkable for a party that usually has a fight but almost invariably ends up nominating whoever's turn it is. While nomination trial-heat polling tells us very little this early, there are some poll questions that are better measurements of at least where these candidates are starting out, before the campaigning, debates, and advertising begin in earnest.An April 26 to April 30 NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll asked Republican primary voters whether they could or could not see themselves voting for each of 10 different...

Drudge really outdid himself the other day. He and his chief aggregator very effectively nailed America’s crisis in angst with their one page headline parse of the news. Just looking at America’s first couple, we see our First Lady giving her husband the SIDE EYE for which she now is famous among female pundits. Gotta love giving men the side eye. Hey, I’ve done it more than a few times when I didn’t feel very comfortable with what he was saying or doing. When we have Drudge showing Obama opening up on his fellow lib/Dems with friendly fire, we next...

One hundred and fifty members of Congress – all Democrats and, among them, most of the small group of bitterly anti-Israel lawmakers – signed a letter supporting President Obama’s diplomatic efforts vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Authored by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (Illinois), Lloyd Doggett (Texas), and David Price (North Carolina), the letter exemplifies the hyper-partisanship that has driven the left wing of the Democrat party on this issue even as that wing has cried “partisan extremism” at the responses from Republicans. As if trying to prove Churchill right, this Iran Surrender Caucus, whenever presented with a choice between dishonor...

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

Presidential politics first captured Heidi Nelson Cruz’s attention in the 1980s, when the 12-year-old read a Time magazine piece about the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale race while working at her San Luis Obispo bread stand. She would later become a Capitol Hill intern, a policy aide on the George W. Bush campaign and economic director for the Western Hemisphere with the National Security Council. But while government and politics might have been her calling at one time, nothing in her background could have prepared her for the summer of 2013, when her husband, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, helped force a shutdown...

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The government of Colombia on Thursday night rejected a major tool in the American-backed antidrug campaign — ordering a halt to the aerial spraying of the country’s vast illegal plantings of coca, the crop used to make cocaine, citing concerns that the spray causes cancer. The decision ends a program that has continued for more than two decades, raising questions about the viability of long-accepted strategies in the war on drugs in the region. Colombia is one of the closest allies of the United States in Latin America and its most stalwart partner on antidrug policy, but...

It’s even more dire in unincorporated East Porterville than the last time CBS13 was there. Tulare County buys and trucks in water to refill tanks in people’s front yards. In a sign of increasing desperation, some have resorted to stealing bottled water from their neighbors. A woman CBS13 spoke to says thieves ripped off the water pump she uses to wash her clothes and take showers that was hooked up to her tank. Thankfully the county replaced it. Andrew Lockman with Tulare County Office of Emergency Services says some go to nearby communities that have water and just help themselves.