Free Republic

House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) this past week again showed he will punish conservative House members for not supporting deals he strikes with President Obama and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). This does not bode well for the package of immigration bills to be debated on the House floor sometime after the July Fourth recess. House Republicans have been writing and “marking up” more than a dozen immigration bills over the past year, and Republican leaders have been promising a “package of little bills” as an alternative to the “comprehensive” bills favored by the amnesty lobby.

Casey Campbell served two tours in Iraq, but the fight of his life is in California. After driving without a seat belt and no front plate, he got a $25 traffic ticket that jumped to $300 with assessments and surcharges. Unable to pay in full, the ticket rose to $600, and then $819 when he missed a court date. The state automatically took his driver's license and turned the ticket over to a collections agency. Police later impounded his car when he drove to work on a suspended license. Unable to make a living, Campbell ended up broke and homeless....

“I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.” Yes, back in 2003, actor turned GOP politician Arnold Schwarzenegger made the aforementioned verbal blunder. He spoke a lot more eloquently on the issue on Friday in Los Angeles. “I’m very happy that they made the right decision because we in California of course are always a step ahead,” he said, giving a self-congratulatory shout-out to the 2008 legalization of same-sex marriage the state passed during his second term in office. “We made that decision already, a long time ago. Our Supreme Court of...

Not all Californians believe that drought is the greatest threat to their state’s future. Early this month, a bipartisan group of current and former local officials filed the “Voter Empowerment Act of 2016,” a statewide ballot measure aimed at reforming the politics of public pensions. Its passage would forbid politicians in California from lavishing expensive retirement benefits on workers without explicit voter approval. The effort is being led by Carl DeMaio, a Republican former member of the San Diego city council, and Chuck Reed, a Democrat and former mayor of San Jose. If they prevail, the effects will be felt...

The Entomology Research Museum at the University of California, Riverside today announced the discovery of a new species of firefly from Southern California, collected by an undergraduate student as part of his semester's insect collection. Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist, said the student, Joshua Oliva, obtained one specimen of the new species while collecting near Topanga, Calif. "He wasn't 100 percent certain it was a firefly, and brought it to me for confirmation," Yanega said. "I know the local fauna well enough that within minutes I was able to tell him he had found something entirely new to science. I...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies were convicted Wednesday in federal court in the beating of a bloody, handcuffed jail visitor and an attempt to cover it up. Sgt. Eric Gonzalez and deputies Sussie Ayala and Fernando Luviano were found guilty of deprivation of civil rights and falsification of records in the 2011 beating of Gabriel Carrillo. Gonzalez and Ayala were also convicted of conspiracy to violate constitutional rights. The three face at least six years in prison when sentenced Nov. 2. "An individual who carries a badge and a gun and who uses their authority...

A California high school where a majority of juniors opted out of Common Core testing has backed off of plans to ban the students from using the school’s parking lot and from taking part in senior class activities after parents and education groups raised a fuss. C.J. Foss, principal of Calabasas High School in Los Angeles County, last week sent an email to seniors-to-be announcing that certain privileges would be withheld from students who skipped the controversial test, which detractors say is an attempt to nationalize America’s public education system. Although the test, which critics say dictates curriculum, is widely...

The decade-long debate over what has caused this country's frightening spike of childhood autism once again is exploding… Reigniting the debate is the much-publicized book "Evidence of Harm" by David Kirby, as well as the report titled "Deadly Immunity" by environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In brief, Kirby and Kennedy argue that federal health officials, with the help of vaccine-makers and some in Congress, have deliberately downplayed, even covered up, evidence that thimerosal - a preservative containing mercury - in childhood vaccines is the prime trigger behind the explosion of autism in U.S. children the last 15 years. Although...

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) – As lawmakers at the State Capitol consider a bill that would no longer allow parents to opt out of vaccinating their children over personal beliefs, vaccination critic Robert Kennedy Jr. waded into the debate at a Sacramento appearance. Kennedy spoke to a crowd Tuesday screening a film that claims a link between autism in children and thimerosal, an ingredient in vaccines, according to the Sacramento Bee. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy reportedly told...

The California Legislature’s debate over whether to make childhood vaccines mandatory has attracted another high-profile personality: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late U.S. senator and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy.

The Kennedy family name is laden with history and brings to mind a definite set of characteristics: glamor, power, intelligence, wealth, influence. Kennedys have had their name on a president, numerous senators, representatives, ambassadors, and other high office holders. The Kennedy dynasty, if you wish to call it that, has seen its share of triumphs and disasters, of course. I need not go into detail; scores of books have been written about them, from putting humans on the Moon and the championing of civil rights to personal tragedies of assassination, death, scandal, and more. Most of these issues are in...

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.

The Wall Street Journal’s influential editorial board rapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on the knuckles for “meandering” on vaccines. “The real public health problem isn’t a lack of parental choice but a lack of common sense about vaccines,” the Journal said in a late-Monday editorial. It added that lawmakers should do more to promote vaccine use.

They refuse to get their kids vaccinated, they are suspicious of fluoridated water and their kids are more likely to be inflicted with ringworm than the average American. Trailer park rednecks? Nope. America’s bobo elites. Scratch a liberal suburbanite and you’re likely to find the modern equivalent of an Appalachian clay chewer underneath. This week Fox 25 interviewed Natalie Norton of the Boston YMCA about “the recent resurgence of measles and whooping cough.” Yesterday CBS reported a whooping cough outbreak on Long Island, in the environs of the Hamptons. And on Tuesday the University of California at Berkeley alerted all...

A Nation of Islam leader believes that the vaccine could harm black boys and compares it to the Tuskegee syphilis study. But a coalition of other black organizations says the vaccines are needed and the fears are unfounded.Nation of Islam Western Regional Minister Tony Muhammad warns members of the California Legislative Black Caucus of a political backlash from their community if they support a bill that would mandate childhood vaccinations, according to the Los Angeles Times. Voting in favor of the bill, which may come up in the Assembly on Thursday, would be “a traitorous act,” Muhammad said, according to...

For the past 11 years, Chief Executive magazine has been polling hundreds of CEOs from across the nation and evaluating state budgetary and economic growth metrics to determine the best and worst states for business. And for the 11th straight year, California has come in dead last. Texas repeated as the best state for business, aided by its lack of corporate or personal income taxes, and Florida, also without an individual income tax, once again finished runner-up. Rounding out the bottom five of the list were New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which remained unchanged from last year’s survey....

While the federal government stalls on immigration reform, some states have begun acting on their own. California has passed more than a dozen laws on immigrant integration between 2001 and the present. In mid-June, the state expanded healthcare access to all undocumented children and boosted spending for naturalization assistance. These various laws collectively produce a kind of state-level citizenship — call it "the California Package." The California Package is innovative in several respects. Not only does it grant rights to immigrants that are restricted at the federal level, but it also tends to blur the distinction between citizens, authorized, and...

Having trotted out just about every conspiracy theory in the book against the tightening of vaccination laws in California, the opponents of Senate Bill 277 have come up with a new and truly cynical angle – race.

The author of a proposed California ballot initiative advocating the murder of gays and lesbians should not be authorized to gather signatures to place it before voters, a judge in the state capital of Sacramento has ruled. "The proposed initiative titled the "Sodomite Suppression Act" ... is patently unconstitutional on its face," Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei wrote in an order released to the public on Tuesday.