Free Republic

Former Los Angeles mayor has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions and other financial support from fossil-fuel interests during his decades in public life. His support of the oil industry illustrates a broader divide in the Democratic Party about wanting to fight climate change, but not to the detriment of low-income Americans. As California positions itself as a leader on climate change, former Los Angeles mayor and gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa is pivoting away from his own track record as an environmental champion to defend the state’s struggling oil industry.Villaraigosa’s work to expand mass transit, plant trees and...

She rose from being a doctor’s assistant to running one of the largest cities in America. But today, embattled Karen Bass, 71, is a lightning rod for anger over her handling of historic wildfires that turned huge swaths of Los Angeles into a charred hellscape. And now her alleged missteps have imperiled her political career and further damaged her crumbling reputation with millions of Angelenos. Last night, in yet another on-air embarrassment, she was taken to task in front of millions by none other than President Trump. He admonished her for her poor handling of the fires disaster, telling her...

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is facing criticism over the timing of her recent overseas trip to Ghana, and budget cuts that hampered the city's fire department from doing its job amid the ongoing citywide blaze. The mayor’s poorly timed foreign travel has raised questions about her priorities and similar past trips. One of the most interesting chapters of Bass’ political career and international travel involves her past excursions to communist Cuba. The former U.S. congresswoman turned metropolitan mayor played a significant role with the Venceremos Brigade —a group linked to Cuba's communist regime.

recent overseas trip to Ghana, and budget cuts that hampered the city's fire department from doing its job amid the ongoing citywide blaze. The mayor’s poorly timed foreign travel has raised questions about her priorities and similar past trips. One of the most interesting chapters of Bass’ political career and international travel involves her past excursions to communist Cuba. The former U.S. congresswoman turned metropolitan mayor played a significant role with the Venceremos Brigade —a group linked to Cuba's communist regime. History of the Venceremos Brigade The Venceremos Brigade, founded in 1969, is a U.S.-based organization that has facilitated trips...

The struggle continues.. It’s worth asking whether LA’s Mayor Karen Bass is still a communist as we try to understand her odd, defensive behavior regarding the ongoing wildfires in her city, also her ill-timed trip to Ghana when the possibility of these fires was already predicted. I recalled she was an admirer of Fidel Castro, but had forgotten how recent her fulsome praise was, less than a decade ago. From left-leaning Politico August 2020 : “Rep. Karen Bass on Sunday walked back 2016 comments praising Cuban leader Fidel Castro, as scrutiny of her views toward the Communist government threatened her...

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said her city is working to make the Summer Olympic games car-free when they’re held in her city in 2028. “We’re already working to create jobs by expanding our public transportation system in order for us to have a no-car Games,” she said in a Saturday release. “And that’s a feat for Los Angeles, as we’ve always been in love with our cars. We’re working to ensure that we can build a greener Los Angeles.”

Some of the anti-Israel protests taking place at U.S. college campuses, including the recent demonstrations at Columbia University, have been supported by organizations that traveled to communist Cuba to receive resistance training, an ADN investigation has uncovered. ADN’s investigation coincides with a recent Sunday report published by the New York Post that revealed a radical NYC based organization known as The People’s Forum familiarized anti-Israel activists with Black Lives Matter protest techniques just hours before they stormed Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, and that the group was incited by Manolo De Los Santos–a radical activist organizer with deep ties to...

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has failed to comment on an antisemitic mob Friday that vandalized walls across from synagogues in Westwood with anti-Israel slogans. As Breitbart News noted: Pro-Palestinian protesters vandalized buildings near synagogues, as well as a nearby church, with anti-Israel graffiti on Friday night after demonstrating against President Joe Biden at a nearby fundraiser on Friday night. As Breitbart News reported, the protesters gathered outside a fundraiser near Beverly Hills, waving signs that included “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a call for Israel to be destroyed.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris jointly endorsed U.S. Rep. Karen Bass on Tuesday to become the next mayor of Los Angeles, providing a boost to her campaign against billionaire developer Rick Caruso and cementing her place as the favorite of the Democratic establishment. In a statement, Biden and Harris said they were eager to work with Bass and her “innovative strategies” to deal with the city’s homeless crisis and rising crime rates. The endorsement was not a surprise. Bass was on Biden’s short list when he was selecting a vice president and Harris,...

“Lawmakers in the House passed a bill this week aimed at reforming policing in this country. It's called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act…this bill would ban chokeholds and make it easier to pursue misconduct claims against officers, among other reforms. The lead author is Congresswoman Karen Bass from California,” reported NPR on March 5.Well, Rep. Karen Bass certainly qualifies as an expert on “police misconduct,” considering that for decades she’s been providing aid and comfort to a police state that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror and murdered more...

VIDEO There is a lot of controversy brewing about Joe Biden's possible VP pick Karen Bass praising Fidel Castro as well as her participation in the Venceremos Brigade which supported the communist regime. However, as you can see in this video, Biden's own wife (and Edith Wilson wannabee) Jill Biden also hyped Castro's Cuba without a word of criticism of the brutal government controlling every aspect of life there. Instead, you can see Jill Biden being treated to the rosy Potemkin Village presentation in which she was a very willing participant during her visit to Cuba in 2016. We...

“In the mid-1970s, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who is now under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate, was an organizer for the Venceremos Brigade… An event blurb in an October 1975 issue of the communist Daily World newspaper describes Bass, then 22, as “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California….As a ‘brigadista’ and then organizer for the Venceremos Brigades, Karen visited Cuba every 6 months.” (Tablet magazine, 7/28.) In that heady Age of Aquarius hundreds of starry-eyed college kids were volunteering to “help build Cuban Socialism” and “fight U.S. Imperialism,” mostly by joyfully cutting Cuban sugar cane and...

Even at this late date in the presidential race, a few things stand out to those who have followed Hillary Clinton's career as a Marxist sympathizer and greedy politician/foreign policy Conan "The Destroyer" type. It is the refusal of the mainstream media and even some of the conservative media, to really dig into her past and even open actions to see things that would greatly disturb an honest, educated person, namely her accepting large amounts of money from Organized Crime and her relationship with a woman who gave all appearances of being a Cuban propaganda asset at the least, and...

McDonnell’s body was hit with shrapnel from a pipe bomb and suffered in a hospital for two days. This is why his death is recorded on February 18 and the blast went off on February 16. One of the heavy metal staples from the bomb went through his eye and into his brain. Ayers’ fingerprints were found in a Weather Underground bomb factory discovered by the FBI in San Francisco in 1971. Photographs were taken of the materials, including C-4 plastic explosive. Members of the Weather Underground were taught how to make bombs by the Cuban intelligence service during trips...

Two big questions hang over President Obama's radical "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. Is he still a communist? Is he a security threat? Many have assumed that Van Jones' committment to communism ended when the organization he helped to lead STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) dissolved in 2002. Yet a 2004 treatise Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation, and Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement written and endorsed by a majority of former STORM members makes it clear that most ex STORMers are still committed to the revolutionary movement; From page 49. When...

New details of Moscow's intelligence work in Cuba were disclosed by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. ...Russian KGB officer Nikolai Leonov became "firm friends," with Mr. Castro's younger brother Raul in Prague in 1953 and then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in 1959. The book, the second volume of what is known as the Mitrokhin archive, also reveals how Moscow sought to indirectly defeat the United States during the Cold War through large-scale "disinformation" and influence operations in the developing world. "The KGB really believed they could...

Clinton Judge Emasculates Law Enforcement Agencies as Communist and Anarchist groups Plan Disruptions of Inaugural; Colombian Terrorists Target Bush for Death By Special Reports | January 18, 2005 Rulings by a Clinton-appointed federal judge, Gladys Kessler, have given unprecedented access to protesters to the inaugural parade route so that their "civil rights" may be protected. While the Washington Post and other Bush-bashing media are focusing on the cost of the January 20 Inauguration, a much more serious issue has emerged. Communist and anarchist groups may be planning to disrupt the inaugural and possibly commit violence. One organization sympathetic to a...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Groups of American activists returned Monday without incident to U.S. soil after deliberately defying new rules increasing travel restrictions to Cuba. About 90 members of the Venceremos Brigade re-entered the country on foot in groups of 15, carrying banners and pulling suitcases behind them. “Very smooth,” was how Los Angeles social worker Georgina Peralka, 27, described her passage through a customs checkpoint after walking across the Peace Bridge from Canada into Buffalo. While U.S. citizens have been making such trips for the past 35 years, the latest travelers were the first to directly challenge new rules that...