Free Republic

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted unanimously last week to ask the City Council to consider "financial incentives, such as a lottery system," to draw voters to the polls. You just know that if the city embraces this new low, then it will spread like a cancer across the land. The City of Angels has a problem. As Ethics Commission President Nathan Hochman put it, campaign "spending is going up, and voter turnout is going down." Last year, 75 percent of registered voters skipped the mayoral race, and less than 10 percent voted in a more recent school board special...

State officials are stepping up their enrollment efforts this month to prepare for open enrollment in October. But some Latino advocates say Covered California, the state’s insurance marketplace, has a long way to go. “Fact sheets in Spanish only became available this month, and events, such as bilingual information sessions, were often not well publicized,” said Sonya Vasquez, policy director of the Community Health Councils of Los Angeles. Getting more Latinos to sign up faster this year is critical. The signup period is three months shorter than last year’s and will run from November 15 to February 15, 2015. Covered...

Curtis last summer attended a Mayors Against Illegal Guns rally, which aimed to pressure then-Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to support expanded background checks. Curtis's brother killed himself playing Russian roulette when he was 16. "If Montana has 2.5 times the suicide rate of states with comprehensive background checks, maybe we should try that out,” she told the Montana Standard at the time. A year later, the Montana Standard wrote an article mentioning that newly christened candidate Curtis had attended the rally. She told them, “I haven’t said anything that average Montanans wouldn’t agree with. I have simply stated that guns...

LAUREL — A judge presiding over a lawsuit that challenges Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s victory in a Republican primary runoff says his intention is to have the case settled in time for the November general election.

Labor unions fear that if Republicans win a majority in the lower house of New Mexico’s legislature, they will push for a right-to-work state. Democrats have only a three-seat majority in the New Mexico House of Representatives and if they lose those seats, the Republicans are more than likely going to make right-to-work a primary issue, Albuquerque Business First reports. Beverlee McClure of the New Mexico Association of Commerce and Industry has said that New Mexico’s lack of right-to-work policies hurt the state’s ability to recruit businesses.

Arkansas has had its share of political dynasties, first and foremost the Clintons. The Pryor family may run a close second.David Pryor was a Democratic fixture in the state, serving in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, and as governor. His son, Mark Pryor, now holds the Senate seat he vacated in 1997 and is seeking a third term.Are Arkansans finally getting Pryor fatigue and ready for a fresh face? If so, few Senate candidates nationwide may be more attractive than Republican challenger Tom Cotton.“Roll Call just came out with an article that rated Pryor as the second-most-vulnerable senator...

Flush with looted weapons, buoyed by sweeping gains in Syria and eager to shock, Islamic State militants have seized four more foreign hostages near Aleppo in recent days, taking to more than 20 the number of foreigners they now hold. The latest captives, two Italian women, a Dane and a Japanese national, were seized in or near Syria's largest city. All held are either reporters, photographers or aid workers taken near Aleppo or Idlib. They have been subsequently moved to Raqqa, the Isis stronghold in north Syria. The abductions have controversially proved good business for Islamic radicals. In the past...

Much too quickly after the death of big Mike Brown in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, the Trayvon Martin dream team -- ambulance chasers Benjamin Crump and Daryl Parks, media hound Al Sharpton -- descended on his still warm body like so many turkey vultures. One would have hoped that their twisted performance in Florida during the previous two years would have taught America’s liberals something -- prudence, restraint, skepticism -- but it did not. Led by their media, liberals once again rushed in where wise men fear to tread. As expected, the media insisted on telling the same embarrassingly...

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned. Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon

.... Obama got down to business Wednesday afternoon, flooring it to the golf course after giving a speedy statement on the beheading of an American journalist and a threat from ISIS to spill more blood. Obama sported a grin the size of Mount Rushmore as he sat behind the wheel of a golf cart in Martha’s Vineyard, where he’s currently vacationing. Donning casual khakis and a white Nike polo, the president enjoyed laughs, and even a fist pound, with ex-NBAer Alonzo Mourning and businessmen Glenn Hutchins and Cyrus Walker. The president didn’t mention Steven Sotloff, a TIME reporter who was...

Does anyone actually believe this? I guess Kentucky Republicans who don’t pay attention to politics but who’ll end up deciding this year’s Senate race anyway do. To repeat: Does anyone actually believe this? McConnell was one of the sharpest Republican critics of the “defund” strategy that produced a government shutdown last fall. Watch the clip below if you need your memory refreshed. He’s fond of saying about it, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” i.e. the GOP paid a political price for the 1995 shutdown and then foolishly paid the same price again in 2013 (although...

Suddenly, it’s 1964 again. Racial tension is in the air. Cries of “injustice” and “police brutality” occupy the headlines. However, the epicenter has moved from Mississippi and Harlem to Ferguson, Missouri, a small municipality that occupies a slice of northeastern St. Louis County. Unfortunately for the peace-loving citizens in that community, those fanning the flames that have led to the violence are stuck in 1964. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and members of the New Black Panther Party have never moved on. They are in a time warp. In fact, their relevance depends on being able to make disadvantaged blacks believe...

Vote tallies on whether Minnesota home care workers will create a large union should come next week after a federal judge ruled Wednesday that an ongoing union election can continue. In July, nine home care workers brought a challenge in federal court against Gov. Mark Dayton and other state officials, claiming that unionization efforts in the state are violating constitutional guarantees of free expression and association. Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is trying to organize some 27,000 home care workers, also was named as a defendant in the case. Plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction to block a union election...

The Schiller Park, Ill., bakery, where Twinkies were invented in 1930, will close according to an announcement by Hostess Brands on Wednesday....

While we might like to think that voters research the issues, review the candidates, and then vote for the candidate that best reflects their views; the reality, based on political science research, is much different. According to George Washington University Professor Danny Hayes' research paper "When Gender and Party Collide: Stereotyping in Candidate Trait Attribution," "Stereotypes are relevant in politics because citizens are willing to devote only limited time to thinking about political matters. As a result, political judgments -- whether about issues, events or candidates -- are often the result of a few salient cues. Stereotyping is the assignment...

If you study the history of Islam. Our ship captains were getting murdered. The French had to tip us off. I mean these were the days of Thomas Jefferson. They've been doing the same thing. This isn't a surprise. You can't solve it with a dialogue. You can't solve it with a summit. You solve it with a bullet to the head. Its the only thing these people understand. And all we've heard from this president is a case to heap praise on this religion, as if to appease them.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, stopped at a Hobby Lobby store in her district on Wednesday – not to pick up some craft supplies for one of her kid’s school projects, but to alert people to the store’s existence and urge people not to shop there. “I want people to know that this Hobby Lobby is here and they should vote with their purses and their pocketbooks, and women should not shop here. If you didn’t know this Hobby Lobby was here before, know it now and don’t shop here. They don’t...

On Tuesday, Mikki Kendall was in her Chicago home, watching live streams on her laptop as protesters and the police played out a 10th straight day of confrontation in the streets of Ferguson, Mo. On Wednesday, she was on the road, headed 300 miles to offer demonstrators her services as a former Army medic. “I don’t want to take up space or be in the way,” she said. “It’s about making sure people have a steady supply of what they need. I can’t watch this happen night after night and not want to help.” Ms. Kendall, 37, a writer, a...

A brutal natural experiment is underway demonstrating the role of race, riots, and radicals in determining whose death is noted, and whose ignored in racialized America when unarmed young men are shot and killed by police. While American and world media, along with the President and Attorney General of the United States, obsess over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson, Missouri police, few people outside of Utah have heard of the remarkably parallel and contemporaneous death of Dillon Taylor, an unarmed young man (and father-to-be) from a gun shot by a Salt Lake City policeman,...

Last night in Alaska, the choice of both establishment Republican Karl Rove and the free-market Club for Growth won over a tea-party-backed candidate — but not by much. With that result comes some lessons for the future about Democratic interference in GOP primaries. The race against Democratic senator Mark Begich this fall will be close and very hard fought — and could determine overall control of the Senate. Miller’s grassroots support gave him a late surge against Sullivan. But one of the biggest drags on the frontrunner was a series of brutal TV ad attacks against him by Put Alaska...