Free Republic

The liberals who run California have long purported that their green policies are a free (organic) lunch, but the bills are coming due. Lo, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25% statewide reduction in water use. Consider this rationing a surcharge for decades of environmental excess.

Jerry Brown, Democrat governor of drought-stricken California, appeared Sunday on ABC's This Week and defended his executive actions that placed mandatory water restrictions on citizens but not on the agriculture industry. "There are farmers who have senior water rights," Brown told guest-host Martha Raddatz. "Some people have a right to more water than others." Of his own actions, Brown stated: This executive order is done under emergency power and it has the force of law. Very unusual. And it's requiring action and changes in behavior from the Oregon border all the way to the Mexican border. It affects lawns. It...

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) said Californians will face heavy fines for taking long showers. Brown said, “This executive order is done under emergency power. It has the force of law. Very unusual. It’s requiring action and changes in behavior from the Oregon border all the way to the Mexican border. It affects lawns. It affects people’s — how long they stay in the shower. How businesses use water.” Brown said to enforce his order, “Each water district that actually delivers waters — water to homes and businesses, they carry it out. We have a state...

There's something very dangerous happening in states across the country. A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors. Some, such as the bill enacted in Indiana last week that drew a national outcry and one passed in Arkansas, say individuals can cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state nondiscrimination law. Others are more transparent in their effort to discriminate. Legislation being considered in Texas would strip the salaries and pensions of clerks who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — even...

Conservative think tank Americans for Prosperity (AFP), co-founded by principals of Koch Industries, sued in federal court to prevent ultra-liberal California Attorney General Kamala Harris from using her office to disclose the names and addresses of their 90,000 donors. Harris may have a problem with AFP being a major force behind the Tea Party movement and its support of free markets, entrepreneurship, lower taxes, and limited government spending and regulation. As a federally registered 501(c)(4), not-for-profit educational organization, Americans for Prosperity is allowed under federal law to raise and spend money educating the public regarding issues associated with political campaigns...

A rather expensive development has surfaced on the way to installing Common Core in California’s hundreds of school districts statewide. Officials have figured out that the big government initiative could collectively cost districts $1 billion every year to set up a new statewide testing system supporting the new curriculum. The question is, who’s going to pay for it? According to the Santa Ana School District, the state, not the district, should foot the bill. Santa Ana along with three other school districts submitted a class action complaint, demanding that California pay for the “next generation” Smarter Balanced Assessments based on...

California governor Jerry Brown said, "Yes, I would" run for president if I were ten years younger. He made the remarks this morning to NBC: Video at source

Sen. Ted Cruz has "rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office" -- let alone president -- by insisting that humans aren't to blame for global warming, California Gov. Jerry Brown says. Brown, a Democrat, took aim at Cruz during a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," the day before Cruz is expected to announce his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination during a speech at Liberty University in Virginia. He blasted Cruz's comment during a late-night television appearance that climate change "alarmists" have a problem. "The science doesn't back them up," Cruz had said on NBC's...

The war of words over climate change is getting blisteringly hot between Gov. Jerry Brown and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, with the Republican presidential candidate blithely dismissing the Democratic governor as one of those “global warming alarmists” who relies on ridicule and insult. A Brown campaign strategist shot back Monday that the “factually irrational” Cruz is apparently now determined to “stand out from a pack of troglodytes in the GOP race for the White House.” The public slap down — and the dis of Brown — came as Cruz formally announced his run for the White House at Liberty University...

When Republican presidential posturing turns into definitive action, the critics come out like clockwork. It happened last week when Donald Trump announced he had formed a presidential exploratory committee and was immediately met with accusations he was disingenuous, unqualified or seeking publicity. Something similar is now underway against Sen. Ted Cruz, who will step before a Liberty University student convocation at precisely 10 a.m. on Monday and reveal he’s running for the White House in 2016. The Texas Republican is skipping the exploratory phase. Caustic headlines have arrived before he even gets to the microphone, these from the last 48...

yes .."why NOT a Jerry Brown Candidacy??"

Environmentalism: Re-upping on delusional climate-change fantasies, "Governor Moonbeam" asked in his inauguration speech Monday for the Golden State to meet half its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. Gov. Jerry Brown, who leads the state that hosted Solyndra, embraces bird-chopping wind turbines and builds crispy critter-producing solar panel farms, is a leading advocate of renewable energy and environmental protection. As pollution from coal-fired plants and industries in China wafted across the Pacific, he took a deep breath at his fourth inauguration as the state's chief executive and doubled down on green energy's failed promise by tasking California to fight...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — As he was sworn in for a record fourth term, Gov. Jerry Brown charted an ambitious new goal on Monday for California in its fight against climate change, challenging the nation's most populous state to increase renewable energy use to 50 percent in the next 15 years.

Forty years after first taking the oath as governor of California, Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in to an historic fourth term Monday, proposing sweeping changes to address global climate change while offering a measured approach to targeting the state’s long-term financial liabilities. Brown said he would push to reduce petroleum use in cars by up to 50 percent; increase from a third to a half the required proportion of electricity produced from renewable energy sources and make heating fuels cleaner – all within 15 years.

Immigration: California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a repeal of 1994's overturned Prop. 187, calling it a law that "has no place on the state's books." What do you call a man who claims voters' choices have no place in government? In most places out there, the name would be "tyrant," even if the word seems a bit fancy for the increasingly unpopular Gov. Brown. Because the hard fact remains that in 1994, millions of California's voters, by a margin of 59% to 41%, voted in favor of denying "free" welfare, education and other benefits to illegal immigrants on the clear...

California Governor Jerry Brown said on Tuesday he would sign a bill requiring businesses to offer paid sick leave to employees, the latest of several moves by Democratic lawmakers to aid low-income workers in the most populous U.S. state.

Gov. Jerry Brown was about to leave Mexico’s capital after four days of talks pressing on the environment, and he wasn’t sure, broadly speaking, how his diplomacy might add up. Meetings held out of public view – dinner with business magnate Carlos Slim and talks with the poet Homero Aridjis and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a founder of Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, among others – were “more critical” on any number of issues, Brown said, than was on display at his official functions. “Some of the more private guys,” Brown said, were “not that optimistic” that people are interested...

On Thursday morning's edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, NBC News White House Correspondent Chuck Todd predicted that California Gov. Jerry Brown would be the "most likely" to challenge frontrunner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016 presidential race. Brown, who is running for a fourth non-consecutive term as governor, has already run for president three times and would be 78 years old in 2017. Todd said that a challenger to Clinton was likely for two reasons: first, a series of stumbles on her troubled book tour; and second, the idea that "[y]ou can't just go unchallenged until...

BEVERLY HILLS (CBSLA.com) — California’s ongoing drought is forcing Governor Jerry Brown to start a so-called “water war” between the north and the south. The governor revealed Wednesday he’s prepared to move water from Southern California to drier areas of the state as conditions worsen. Speaking exclusively to KCAL9 political reporter Dave Bryan outside an engagement in Beverly Hills, Brown said it could be necessary to implement drastic measures to alleviate communities at risk of running out of water.

California’s ludicrously ambitious plan to build a high-speed railway connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco has been besieged with all kinds of problems from almost the moment of its official conception, but let that not restrain California Democrats from doubling down on what they seem to view as their iliadic quest to make high-speed rail happen. Back in August, a judge declared that the project had already violated the 2008 ballot initiative that first authorized the $10 billion in bonds for the 500-mile train, because the state didn’t actually having funding sources on the books for the $31 billion required...