Free Republic

California announced last week that it has added Iowa to the list of states on its ever-expanding “travel ban” list because of that state’s new prohibition against funding gender-transition surgeries under Medicaid. The announcement by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra means that as of Oct. 4, California will no longer offer taxpayer-funded trips to Iowa for any public employee or student at a state-run university. Becerra’s authority came from a 2016 California law signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown that bars state-funded travel to other states that undercut LGBT rights. The blacklist already included Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma and...

The county sheriff is the problem child among California elected officials. No office is less accountable or more reliable in producing scandal.

California's largest public utility provider could face murder or manslaughter charges if it were found responsible for causing the state's recent deadly wildfires, according to court documents filed by the state attorney general. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., or PG&E, could potentially face a range of criminal offenses if any of the wildfires broke out as a result of the utility failing to properly operate and maintain power lines, per an amicus brief filed in US District Court Friday by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. PG&E, which provides electricity to about 16 million Californians, has been under scrutiny for how...

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...

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown helped make his party even more powerful in California during the last eight years and now, less than a month before leaving office, he predicts that dominance will make it difficult for his successor to control Democrats’ hunger for spending and regulations. The leader of the most populous state has kept Democratic lawmakers in check by limiting spending on social programs in favor of saving it to protect against a future economic downtown. He sometimes butted heads with legislative leaders, warning spending too much now could hurt taxpayers or require budget cuts later. Democrats hold all...

In a rare step, the California Supreme Court has blocked Gov. Jerry Brown’s attempt to issue a pardon to a 37-year-old Cambodian refugee who killed a woman when he was 14 years old. The court gave no reason for the rejection, but earlier noted it only had the authority to do so in the case of an “abuse of power.”Brown’s pardon would have effectively stopped Borey Ai’s deportation to Cambodia, a nation where his mother was born but he has never seen. The governor in the last 10 months has pardoned seven ex-convicts who otherwise faced the threat of deportation...

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...

Christina Taft couldn't persuade her mother to flee the California fire, and she diedAs Christina Taft walks through the chalky rubble and blackened ash strewn on her property in Paradise, Calif., she winces as she tries to make sense of the destruction around her. "This is just completely levelled," she says. "There is nothing here." In the corner of what was once her living room, yellow caution tape ropes off a rectangle on the ground. It looks as if someone was digging in the area, and right away Taft knows why. "This is where they must have found her." This...

Paradise, California has become hell on earth. My thoughts and prayers go out to the thousands of displaced families. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain and devastation they are currently experiencing. Only 80 miles north of my hometown of Sacramento, this has been an issue close to home for me, but the smoky skies we’ve been experiencing here are nothing compared to what the residents of Paradise are now going through. I am so proud of our firefighters, first responders, and many volunteers who have come together during this crisis to do everything they can to alleviate the...

Patrick Rooney of PRRooney.com (Freedom. Rediscovered...) explains the monumental implications of Orange County, California's Congressional districts going TOTALLY Democrat AFTER election day.

In recent days, POTUS Donald Trump was criticized by firefighters, Left-wing Democrats, environmental groups, and #NeverTrump Republicans for daring to state that the wildfires currently burning up California were largely the fault of poor forest management by the state. Early on, the president tweeted there was “no reason for these massive deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” ... California Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, after denouncing...

RUSH: The fires are another raging issue out there. You know, I have never known, I have never known how fires are named. Dawn, have you known how fires are named? Scott, have you known how fires…? You probably know. It’s probably the kind of thing that you’ve known since you were five, right? I have never known how fires were named. Like, we’ve got the Woolsey Fire here, and we’ve got the Camp fire up in Northern California. I’ve never bothered to look into how they’re named. It’s really rather simple, and there’s nothing mysterious about it. They name...

California will reconsider life sentences for up to 4,000 nonviolent third-strike criminals by allowing them to seek parole under a ballot measure approved by voters two years ago, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday. The state will craft new regulations by January to include the repeat offenders in early release provisions. Gov. Jerry Brown also will not appeal a court ruling that the state is illegally excluding the nonviolent career criminals from parole under the 2016 ballot measure he championed to reduce the prison population and encourage rehabilitation. The state parole board estimates between 3,000...

Randall Marquis has lived in California for 31 years, but he knew it was a mistake when he received a notice last month that said he was newly registered to vote. He may have a state driver’s license, but he’s a citizen of Canada. “When I saw that card, I just threw it out,” Marquis said. “I know I’m not going to vote. I’m not allowed to vote, it’s stupid that I should be registered to vote.” The Newport Beach resident, who has a green card and is married to a U.S. citizen, was one of some 1,500 people who...

Public health authorities are investigating an outbreak of flea-borne typhus in downtown Los Angeles. Typhus is a disease caused by bacteria found in infected fleas that can come from many kinds of animals including cats, rats and opossums. Symptoms can include high fever, chills, headaches and rashes. Accumulations of trash that attract animals like rats may increase the risk of exposure. Typhus is treated with antibiotics. It is not transmitted person-to-person.

California has become the first state in the US to require publicly traded companies to include women on their board of directors. Governor Jerry Brown signed the new measure – which necessitates at least one female director on the board of each California-based public operation by the end of 2019 – into law on Sunday. Firms will need up to three female directors by the end of 2021, depending on the size of their boards. Hundreds of companies will be affected by the law and those who violate it can be fined $100,000 (£76,600) for a first violation and $300,000...

It’s taken nearly five years of administrative battles, legislative interference, and lawsuits, but the California state government has finally counted farm workers’ votes in a union election at the state’s largest fruit grower, Fresno-based Gerawan Farming. The final verdict, tallied on Tuesday, explains why the Jerry Brown administration and Democratic statehouse leaders did everything in their power to destroy the votes without counting them. The margin: 1,098 workers voted “no” to the United Farm Workers, with only 197 workers voting in favor of UFW representation. There still are 635 disputed ballots, but even the math geniuses in Sacramento can see...

California Gov. Jerry Brown ramped up his criticism of President Trump in an interview that aired Monday – calling the president a “saboteur” in the fight to combat climate change and saying that “something’s got to happen to this guy.” Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell at an environmental summit in San Francisco last week, Brown tore into Trump for the president’s controversial tweets about the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria and urged voters to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm elections in an effort to thwart Trump’s agenda. “We never had a president who was...

The governor of California, Jerry Brown, announced Saturday that his state would join the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg in a sister-state relationship with the goal of strengthening climate protection and economic ties between the two. The sister-state agreement comes at the tail end of a global climate summit, organized by Brown, which attracted thousands of politicians, activists, business leaders and others from around the world. The premier of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, joined Brown at the summit in San Francisco for the signing of the agreement. […] “The German connection is alive and well in California,” Brown said. “The fact...

"We're going to launch our own satellite — our own damn satellite to figure out where the pollution is and how we’re going to end it," Brown told the audience at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco..."In California, with science under attack, in fact we’re under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing," Brown added. "So, we want to know, what the hell is going on all over the world, all the time?"..."If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite," Brown said back in...