Free Republic

The California Senate on Tuesday voted to pay $300 weekly checks to unemployed illegal immigrants even as the state faces a roughly $31.5 billion deficit and mass illegal immigration. Democratic state senators passed Senate Bill 227 by Sen. María Elena Durazo (D.) with a 30-7 vote, sending the measure to the Assembly for approval. The legislation would offer undocumented aliens up to 20 weeks of unemployment benefits if they meet minimal work requirements. California’s unemployment insurance fund, which was defrauded of some $31 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic, would be in charge of dispensing the checks. California employers are on...

Key Points Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday laid out details of the Trump administration’s plan to send Americans relief money. The White House is talking to congressional leaders of both parties about a massive stimulus package to blunt the impact of the coronavirus crisis. The proposal includes sending payments directly to Americans totaling $500 billion, broken up into two tranches. “The first one would be $1,000 per person, $500 per child,” Mnuchin said. “So for a family of four, that’s a $3,000 payment. ============================================================================= Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday laid out details of the Trump administration’s plan to...

Missouri City native Travis Scott is encouraging people to vote by leaving tickets to his highly anticipated sold out Astroworld Festival at polling locations. The rapper tweeted about it Tuesday afternoon writing," Saved some tix for the city at these voting locations. Go vote." Limit two tickets per person. The Astroworld Fest Twitter account tweeted that the tickets are $150. The tickets have been left at the Frenchy's Chicken at 3919 Scott St. and the Missouri City Community Center at 1522 Missouri City Dr. Scott has been spotted at Rep. Beto O'Rourke's rallies around the Houston area.... ...The Astroworld Festival...

Willie Wilson, the millionaire businessman and candidate for Chicago mayor, handed out cash to potential voters Sunday morning at a church on Chicago’s South Side. An aide to Wilson said the businessman gave away $300,000 to 2,000 people through the Dr. Willie Wilson Foundation, a 501(c)(3). Such organizations are tax-exempt, must not be organized for the benefit of private interests and are restricted in how much political activities they can conduct. Wilson says he organized the giveaway to assist homeowners who are struggling to pay their property tax bills.

Tea Party hopeful Chris McDaniel lost his Republican primary challenge to six-term Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi on June 24. Cochran beat him by about 7,700 votes. On July 7, the state's Republican Party certified Cochran's victory. Six weeks after the run-off election, McDaniel is having a tough time moving on. On Monday, McDaniel, a state senator, announced he was formally challenging the results and asking the Mississippi Republican executive committee to declare him the party's nominee in the November general election. "Justice has no timetable, and yet here we stand," McDaniel, 42, told reporters assembled at a press conference...

A Mississippi man who accused the Thad Cochran campaign of paying African-Americans to vote for the senator in his primary runoff last month is walking back his story. Stevie Fielder told California-based blogger Charles C. Johnson he was asked to buy votes for $15 a pop in the June 24 runoff between Cochran and state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Now, he's saying he never paid anyone to vote, saying the conversations he claimed he had with Cochran campaign staffers Kirk Sims and Amanda Shook were "hypothetical" and the interview with Johnson was edited.

I can't believe I'm writing this sentence, but Obamacare's exchanges appear to somehow be more deeply corrupted and broken than previously known. If there were words more impactful than "meltdown" and "trainwreck," I'd use them. Instead, I'll simply present the facts as they continue to come to light. USA Today: The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY....Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the...

Conservative commentators have had a lot to say over the last 24 hours about the fact that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the only African-American in the Senate, was not invited to yesterday’s March on Washington 50th Anniversary celebration. According to Bill O’Reilly, it was strange that “no Republicans and no conservatives were invited” to the event. As it turns out, that’s just not true.As the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe reported today, “not a single Republican elected official stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Wednesday.” But it’s not because they weren’t invited. While Scott’s office has confirmed...

Amid shaking hands and signing campaign posters, Mitt Romney did something he has never done before on the ropeline: He took out his wallet and handed a wad of cash to a woman waiting to shake his hand. [snip] According to Williams, she followed the campaign bus to the Columbia airport on Wednesday, the same day Romney was arriving from New Hampshire. When Romney wasn’t on the bus, aides told her to go to the rally scheduled in Columbia later that day. When she showed up, Romney found her to say hello and pulled over South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley...

ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC: "What is the secret here to turn out? In the old days, the old machine days, what we called 'walking around money,' handing out money to get people to vote. Is it still the case? What do you do, what is the magic in Philadelphia? REP. ROBERT BRADY (D-PA): "We still have the street money and we're very knowledgeable." Rep. Brady is also the chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic party.

LOS ANGELES - Police beating victim Rodney King is engaged to one of the jurors who awarded him a $3.8 million settlement, RadarOnline reported Tuesday. King and Cynthia Kelley said they first felt a romantic spark when they met in a Newport Beach pizzeria the day after the controversial 1994 jury award. Both were married at the time, which complicated the blossoming relationship. They later separated when King joined the cast of VH1's "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew" after multiple arrests for being under the influence of PCP. Four months ago, King, 44, called Kelley on a whim.

On April 27, 2010, I got a job with the United States Census Bureau in New Jersey. With a hidden camera, I caught four Census supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify information on their time sheets. Over the course of two days of training, I was paid for four hours of work I never did. I was told to take a 70 minute lunch break, was given an hour of travel time to drive 10 minutes, and was told to leave work at 3:30pm. I resigned prior to doing any data collection but confronted Census supervisors who assured me, “no one...

It seems like only a week ago that The Ticket was whining about Barack Obama whining that after raising $605 million through September to buy the presidency, he was asking all of us one last time for just $10 more for some reason. And we figured out that, October money aside, he'd have to spend $12.5 million a day just to unload September's haul by Nov. 4. The Democrat is already outspending the Republican by three and four-to-one, which if it was the other way around would surely be unconscionable. So last night Obama dumped several million bucks on several...

When the Philadelphia Democratic Party's faithful gathered for their pre-election fundraiser last night, conversation among many anxious ward leaders kept coming back to the same question: Would Barack Obama come up with street money? Street money, typically between $100 and $300 per voting division, is used to pay expenses such as meals and transportation and sometimes pay election workers for their day's work. Many thought Obama had changed his mind and would provide street money for the general election, but ward leaders said last night that they still hadn't heard of a commitment from the campaign. "Honestly, they'd be crazy...

In the threadbare border towns of South Texas, one of the country’s poorest regions, enterprising locals like Candelaria Espinoza have long been paid to round up votes for candidates on Election Day. There is even a name for these electoral soldiers of fortune: politiqueras. So when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign arrived in South Texas in February seeking an edge in its uphill battle against Senator Barack Obama, Ms. Espinoza was happy to oblige, for a price. The campaign paid her and seven other members of her family $100 to $200 each to knock on doors, deliver fliers and...

Fourteen months into a campaign that has the feel of a movement, Sen. Barack Obama has collided with the gritty political traditions of Philadelphia, where ward bosses love their candidates, but also expect them to pay up. The dispute centers on the dispensing of "street money," a long-standing Philadelphia ritual in which candidates deliver cash to the city's Democratic operatives in return for getting out the vote. Flush with payments from well-funded campaigns, the ward leaders and Democratic Party bosses typically spread out the cash in the days before the election, handing $10, $20 and $50 bills to the foot...

The fate of $600-$1,200 rebate checks for more than 100 million Americans is in limbo after Senate Republicans blocked a bid by Democrats to add $44 billion in help for the elderly, disabled veterans, the unemployed and businesses to the House-passed economic aid package. GOP senators banded together Wednesday to thwart the $205 billion plan, leaving Democrats with a difficult choice either to quickly accept a House bill they have said is inadequate or risk being blamed for delaying a measure designed as a swift shot in the arm for the lagging economy. The tally was 58-41 to end debate...

In what may be the most important voting case since Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court in January will hear a challenge to Indiana’s 2006 law requiring a voter ID to vote. If the court rules against the law, 22 state voter ID laws that were designed to prevent voter fraud could be eliminated. Democrats and so-called voting rights groups such as ACORN, the ACLU and the League of Women Voters (all of whom are challenging the law) claim there has been little actual voter fraud, few federal prosecutions and convictions, and that the purpose of the Indiana law...

Unofficial 2005 election results for NJ Governor Follow the money. (Look at Essex.) NOTE: Newark, the 'drag and drop' capital of NJ, is in Essex County Corzine "walking around money" is virtually unlimited (source: Chris Matthews) Calculating a black man's worth to be 5/3 of a vote is no less racist, and arguably more so, than calculating his worth to be 3/5 of a white man; the latter is demeaning, but the former is dehumanizing. THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT? clinton legacy of lynching update

As the days dwindle down to a precious few leading up to November second, the big three branches of the Liberal election machine have kicked into high gear. Charges have been leveled by the political, entertainment and news divisions. Tales of galloping woe fill the crisp autumn air as accusations of repression, suppression and downright aggression emanate daily from the Left. Out on the hustings, at the obligatory Democratic pander-stop at a black church in Cleveland, John Kerry said, "We're seeing efforts by the Republicans, unfortunately, in various parts of the country to suppress votes and intimidate people, to do...