Free Republic

Of course, it was self-defense, but not by George Zimmerman. Let's forget blackness, racism, neighborhood watches and location for a moment and simplify the story. Let's say a person spots someone he has a perceived beef with; maybe this person doesn't like the way the other guy looks, or the way the other guy looked at someone else, or doesn't want him around his neighborhood, or this person is just out for trouble. Now this person follows the other guy slowly in his car for a while, ultimately getting out and confronting him. Maybe he even pushes the other guy...

President Obama’s surprise decision last summer to use executive authority to halt the deportation of some immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children won raves from advocates stung by the defeat of similar legislative proposals in Congress. Since then, the administration has granted more than 400,000 of those young immigrants temporary waivers to live and work in the United States, making Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals one of largest legalization efforts in decades.

As with most things his administration does, I’m sure Obama will be shocked when he reads in the newspapers about the State Dept. declaring a $10 million bounty on the head of what it calls an “enemy of Islam.” From a State Department Press release: The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the cowardly attacks today in Baghdad. These attacks were aimed at families celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The terrorists who committed these acts are enemies of Islam and a shared enemy of the United States,...

Stand Your Ground: A big hypocrite in the IRS scandal targeting Tea Party groups sets his sights on a conservative think tank, asking its suspected supporters: "Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?" Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is on a witch hunt that threatens anew the free speech rights of Americans who don't hold his views or those of the Obama administration. This time he has targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of state legislators who promote free markets, limited government and federalism, ahead of a "stand your ground" hearing Durbin announced after George...

For supporters of the repeal of North Carolina’s estate tax, the passage serves as a big neon "come on home" message to ultra-wealthy individuals who have kept a primary residence in another state to avoid the tax. "A tax that affects somewhere between a dozen and 100 families each year in a state with 9 million-plus people is fundamentally unfair," said Dallas Woodhouse, the director of the N.C. chapter of the conservative advocacy group Americans For Prosperity. For opponents, the repeal – retroactive to Jan. 1 – serves as a prime example of conservative legislators favoring the wealthy few over...

Corona resident Cecilia Reyes, whose 22-year-old son Noel Polanco was fatally shot by an NYPD detective during a traffic stop last year, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against New York City and the officer who gunned down the National Guardsman, according to court documents. A member of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit Apprehension Team, Hassan Hamdy was one of several officers in two unmarked vans driving in the center lane eastbound on the Grand Central Parkway Oct. 4 at 5:15 a.m. when Polanco was seen in his black 2012 Honda Fit Hybrid near Exit 7 in East Elmhurst, the NYPD...

James J. “Whitey” Bulger has been found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy and 11 murders in a split verdict, and his lawyers say he plans to appeal. The indictment accused Bulger of the gangland murders of 19 men and women between 1973 and 1985, money laundering, extortion, drug distribution and illegal firearms possession. He was convicted on two racketeering counts, 11 murders, 3 counts of conspiracy to commit murder, seven extortion counts, one drug count and six money laundering counts.

That's a lie, the anonymous sales clerk says according to the UK Daily Mail, adding she's felt "powerless" as a result of the media barrage following the incident. I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do. 'She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag. 'I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags. 'It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her...

A double shooting that killed one man Saturday night took place along a CPS Safe Passage route on the South Side. Ralph McNeal, 54, and a 26-year-old man were shot in the 2900 block of South State Street around 6:15 p.m. They were taken to the hospital and McNeal was pronounced dead around 7 p.m. Parents of children who will attend Chicago’s Drake Elementary School are on edge because of its location on a designated CPS Safe Passage route. The routes were set up to make the transition to new schools go more smoothly for the students affected by school...

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a controversial bill into law Monday afternoon allowing the state’s transgender public school students to choose which bathrooms they use and whether they participate in boy or girl sports. The law would cover the state’s 6.2 million elementary and high school kids in public schools. Supporters say the law will help cut down on bullying against transgender students, The families of transgender students have been waging local battles with school districts around the country over what restrooms and locker rooms their children can use

WASHINGTON—If former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is ordered to spend time behind bars, he would like to go to either the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Ala., or the low-security portion of the federal correctional institution in Butner, N.C., one of his lawyers said today. **SNIP** In the request, defense lawyer William Drake said the facility in Alabama is the closest federal prison camp to Washington, D.C., and would “allow Mr. Jackson to maintain contact with his wife and children during incarceration.” The prison in North Carolina is within 500 miles of the nation’s capital and would serve the same...

Senator Rand Paul is one of a handful of members of the Congress that possesses a set of principles. He stands for the principles of the American Revolution -- put simply, human liberty. The result has been vicious attacks by leaders of the Republican side of the ruling cartel. Epic fail presidential candidate John McCain has referred to Senator Paul as a "whacko bird," and Senator Lindsey Graham, who has said he's "glad" that the NSA is spying on every American's calls and emails, has called Senator Paul's concerns for civil liberties "ridiculous." The latest attack has come from Governor...

TALLAHASSEE — Trayvon Martin’s father has been named honorary captain of the FAMU football team after delivering an inspirational speech to the team Sunday. Florida A&M coach Earl Holmes said Tracy Martin, whose son’s shooting death in Sanford drew national attention, called him recently and the coach recently invited the grieving father to address his players. “[We] talked and I told him I’d love him to talk to the team. He came out and he was very, very encouraging,” Holmes said of Tracy Martin. “ . . . [He] got a standing ovation from our guys. He talked about just...

**SNIP** Dear Leader Reid and Leader Pelosi: When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class. **SNIP** Since the ACA was enacted, we have been bringing our deep concerns to the Administration,...

Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner has earned himself a rather undesirable distinction. According to the latest poll from Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., the disgraced former congressman-turned-New York City mayoral candidate has the highest unfavorable rating ever on record for the pollster. Eighty percent of New York state voters have an unfavorable opinion of Weiner, while only 11% saw him in a positive light. That tops the 79% unfavorable rating held by former New York governor-turned-New York City comptroller candidate Eliot Spitzer after he resigned from the governorship in 2008 over his prostitution scandal. Three-quarters of Democrats and New York City...

A U.S. human rights group on Monday delivered a petition with more than 100,000 signatures urging that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize go to Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was convicted on espionage charges last month for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Norman Solomon, the co-founder of RootsAction, delivered the petition in Oslo, Norway, on Monday to the research director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the Nobel Prizes. Solomon said that Manning should receive the prize for exposing government secrecy and wrongdoing in the Iraq War. He argued that the Nobel committee’s selection of Manning...

The Third American Revolution has begun. Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is the revolutionary blueprint millions of Americans have been waiting for. Released today, Levin leads the charge for “restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathan.” Carefully and powerfully written, the book uses the Constitution itself to illustrate how to reform the Constitution itself. To finally turn the tables on progressives and liberals — Statists, to use the term Levin has brought back to life — who have spent the last century slowly and not so slowly...

On Feb. 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida there was a shooting that would, for whatever reason, transfix this country and pressure how we as a nation understand our natural right to self-defense. I am of course referring to the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. It’s not my intention here to pour over the details of this case — I’m sure we have all heard those, time and time again. I personally have no desire to hear them again. Rather, I want to look at what we can learn, as a community of gun owners and concealed carry holders,...

<p>The judge who ruled that New York’s “stop-and-frisk” practice violated the Constitutional rights of the city’s citizens seemed to have had Trayvon Martin on her mind.</p> <p>Judge Shira Scheindlin references his death three times in her ruling in which she found the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy amounted to racial profiling. Scheindlin refers to Martin as “a black teenager” in the body of the opinion, but then cites his name in the footnotes as she quotes directly from three sources, including President Obama’s remarks following the verdict. She references Martin as a touchstone for the pain and frustration experienced by black men facing constant suspicion by the authorities.</p>

<p>Former Florida Rep. Allen West had some harsh words for nationally known civil rights activists like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who have remained silent on a video showing black teens beating a white boy on a school bus.</p>

This article was originally published by watchdog.org. WASHINGTON – Car and Driver magazine, which generally steers clear of politics, doesn’t like what it sees under the hood of Terry McAuliffe’s GreenTech Automotive.“Investors looking to score on the next Tesla Motors should start slapping themselves back to reality,” the magazine stated this week.The article lists a long line of electric-car companies that are “either dead or barely standing, fettered with poor management, little cash and exaggerated promises.”“Next up, according to our battery-powered crystal ball: GreenTech Automotive,” the magazine predicted.Representatives of GTA did not return requests for comment.McAuliffe, making his second bid...

For a little sneak preview of where our ruling class’ obsession with amnesty for illegal aliens will lead us, take a look at what’s happening on the border right now. An astonishing surge of asylum seekers has literally overwhelmed U.S. Immigration in San Diego, forcing them to rent out hotel rooms to accommodate the overflow, while some aliens were “released to cities around the U.S.,” according to Fox News: Sources say one day last week, 200 border-crossers came through the Otay Mesa Port of Entry claiming asylum while and as many as 550 overflowed inside the processing center there and...

Jurors have reached a verdict in the racketeering trial of James "Whitey" Bulger, and their decision is expected to be announced soon.

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. (CBS Atlanta) - ”At around 1:30am [sic] my family and I were awaken [sic] by the sound of loud and aggressive banging at our front door. The [a]ggressive nature of the banging frightened us so I walked into the guest room that looks over the front of our house and was shocked when I saw 3 large DeKalb County Sheriff SUV’s with large flood lights pointed at our house and windows.” That is the beginning of the description offered for a video posted to YouTube that accuses several officers with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office of harassing...

In 2002, Brian Banks was a successful high school football player, looking forward to playing in the NCAA, and eventually, the NFL. But while he would eventually go on to play for the Atlanta Falcons in 2013, that future looked impossible in 2002 when he faced a sentence of 41 years to life, after being accused of raping a classmate in high school...

"Comprehensive immigration reform," like virtually any initiative containing the magic word "comprehensive," looks good on the surface. But the details of the comprehensive immigration bill passed by the Senate in June by a 68-32 margin reveal a lot gone wrong underneath. Oblivious to this, top union leaders are gearing up for an all-out blitz this fall to secure passage of similar legislation in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (in photo), they are obsessed with providing 11 million or more persons living illegally in this country with amnesty and eventual citizenship, and with enabling millions...

Buried in a lengthy Washington Post article about President Obama’s environmental policy is an illuminating anecdote about just how debatable the administration views climate change — namely, not at all: In an agency-wide address to employees Aug. 1, (Interior Secretary Sally) Jewell took the unusual step of suggesting that no one working for her should challenge the idea that human activity is driving recent warming. “I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior,” she said. The address does not appear to be posted on the department’s website, so the Washington Examiner can only go by the...

The King County Sheriff's Office confirmed Monday morning that a shooting occurred on a Metro bus in downtown Seattle. The suspect, who was shot by officers, is now in custody. The Seattle Police Department tweeted that the shooter fired at a Metro driver....

MIAMI GARDENS – Library closures, treating the mentally ill and the state of the fire-rescue service took center stage Tuesday when Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez hosted a town hall meeting at the North Dade Regional Library to discuss his proposed $6.3 billion budget for the new fiscal year. “What are your priorities and what do we cut?” asked Marilyn Lieberman, a self-styled community activist. . . Linnea Pearson, a Florida International University professor and former teacher of Travon Martin’s brother Jahvaris Fulton, said one of the reasons Trayvon got into trouble was because he was suspended. “As an educator, one...

Thousands of spectators decked out with Dominican flags and blowing whistles lined Sixth Ave. for the boisterous annual celebration. Almost every candidate for New York citywide offices showed up to court the large Dominican vote.

A federal court handed a big defeat to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York Police Department today, ruling that the controversial “stop and frisk� program infringed on constitutional rights. Judge Shira Scheindlin appointed a federal monitor to oversee the NYPD and “reform� the practice, although that might prove impossible: A federal judge appointed an independent monitor Monday to oversee changes to the New York Police Department’s contentious policy known as stop, question and frisk, a significant judicial rebuke for what the mayor and police commissioner have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool. …Four men had sued saying they were...

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms. While the Supreme Court has long recognized the right of police officers to briefly stop and investigate people who are behaving suspiciously, Judge Scheindlin found that the New York police had overstepped that authority. She found that officers were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in...

Bloomberg News caught the Department of Justice in a particularly noteworthy Friday-night news dump over the weekend. The Obama administration, stung by accusations from the Left that it hadn’t gone after fraudulent mortgages and the lenders that helped fuel the bubble, claimed that a year-long initiative run by the Mortgage Fraud Working Group in the DoJ had charged 530 people who had victimized 73,000 people. When Bloomberg’s reporters began digging into the claim, the DoJ stonewalled — and then finally admitted it cooked the books themselves:

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - 450 Lb Grandpa-Stabber Declares: “Allah is My Lawyer�Posted By Daniel Greenfield On August 11, 2013 @ 9:28 pm In The Point | 3 Comments Allah is doing a lot of lawyer duty these days. Not only is he representing Nidal Hasan over in Texas, he’s making an appearance over in New York and now over in Atlanta.Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5 Investigators tracked down and arrested a woman they say killed a 66-year-old local businessman in a brutal attack in his own home, and Thursday she showed in court that...

Five days after tow truck driver David Herr was gunned down during an argument over a car, his colleagues staged a memorial procession of more than 100 wreckers Sunday, a blocks-long tribute to a man said to love his job... Herr, driving one of three trucks that showed up, got into an argument with a man later identified by Broward Sheriff's deputies as Triston Johnson, 31, after he hooked up Johnson's 2001 Jaguar, said police. When Herr turned to walk away from the confrontation, Johnson allegedly shot him in the head and then shot him several more times, police said.

Four young males have been arrested after the senseless, brutal beating of a man on a late-night walk Sunday on St. Paul's East Side, police said Friday. The victim, Ray Widstrand, 26, of St. Paul, reportedly was in critical condition at Regions Hospital with potentially fatal brain swelling.... "He's in the most difficult time right now, as far as swelling and cranial pressure. We're in that critical time," his father, Peter Widstrand, said. According to the complaint, Widstrand was attacked when he tried to walk through a group of 30 to 50 juveniles and young adults fighting near Payne and...

Chanting "sí se puede!" – "Yes we can!" – with their fists and hands raised high, 1,000 people packed Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Sunday to cheer 11 pilgrims who will march 285 miles from Sacramento to Bakersfield calling for a change to immigration law.

It would seem obvious, wouldn't it, that Trayvon Martin is dead because he was a black boy in the wrong part of town? I think most reasonable people know that all blacks are periodically subjected to being stopped for "driving while black" or even "walking while black." There's hardly a study done anywhere by anybody that doesn't show that type of thing to be a common and unfair occurrence in the black community. Statistical abuse of minorities is well-documented. Me, personally, I say Trayvon Martin is dead for two reasons and neither specifically because of his race. He's dead because...

Four years ago, a startup car company announced with great fanfare big plans for the Mississippi Delta: Using money from foreign investors and other sources, it would build a massive auto plant to churn out a new line of energy-efficient cars and bring thousands of jobs to the area. It seemed like a win for everyone involved. … Today, the place where the plant was to be remains mostly vacant except for a temporary construction trailer. The company—GreenTech Automotive Inc.—is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the probe is reverberating well beyond Mississippi’s borders, bringing scrutiny to...

Attorney General Eric Holder is calling for major changes to the nation’s criminal justice system that would scale back the use of harsh prison sentences for certain drug-related crimes, divert people convicted of low-level offenses to drug treatment and community service programs and expand a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, non-violent offenders. In remarks prepared for delivery Monday to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, Holder said he is mandating a change to Justice Department policy so that low-level, non-violent drug offenders with no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs or cartels won’t be charged with...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) continues its epic struggle to understand the First Amendment. In the latest incident, the Muslim civil liberties group has asked government officials in Brevard County, Florida to deny the use of a county-owned meeting room to a group CAIR has tagged as “an anti-Muslim hate group,” reports the Orlando Sentinel.

A St. Paul man is fighting for his life after a brutal beating late last Sunday night. The beating took place a block from a police station.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Even if Ray Widstrand survives he will likely have permanent brain damage. TwinCities.com reported: Four young males have been arrested after the senseless, brutal beating of a man on a late-night walk Sunday on St. Paul’s East Side, police said Friday. The victim, Ray Widstrand, 26, of St. Paul, reportedly was in critical condition at Regions Hospital with potentially fatal brain swelling. Police found Widstrand lying on the ground, bleeding from his nose and...

Aside from the radical illegal immigrant activist movement appropriating the gay culture act of 'coming out' as a tactic, there are, of course, some people who are both illegal immigrants and gay. Identity politics being what they are on the left, it was perhaps inevitable that the two politically-charged movements would come together in the movement known as UndocuQueer. The UndocuQueer movement was deemed significant enough to warrant a full-blown panel discussion at this year's Netroots Nation, the progressive confab put on by DailyKos. As the panel description for UndocuQueer: The Intersectionality of the Undocumented and LGBTIQ Struggles says, organizers...

Just when you thought the Zimmerman case couldn’t get any crazier, here we go. An amicus curiae brief has been filed in support of a motion to re-try George Zimmerman for second-degree murder........... Not only that, the brief argues that the prosecuting team should be found guilty of professional misconduct (no argument there), that they should therefore be disqualified from re-trying the case, and that a new prosecution team should be selected for this re-trial. And by whom should this new team of prosecutors be chosen? Why, by Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump and cohorts. Naturally. [Chris Hansen To The...

Trust Google? The National Security Agency, which routinely collects its data, does. After all, it’s one of the companies from which Washington apparently routinely pulls data about what Americans are reading, doing, seeing, researching, hunting and contemplating. So an entrepreneur says he has started an alternative service, which offers encryption services to keep your details, well, your details. Out of Google’s files. And away from the NSA. The website is called Zeekly.com and founder Jeffrey Sisk explains it doesn’t retain search history, and also runs on 2048-bit SSL encryption to keep private what Internet users don’t want public.

Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid? That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what...

You may find that headline confusing because it is. But remember, Bill Clinton was the first black president. Maybe Anthony Weiner can be the second black mayor. Stranger things have happened. And it turns out that there’s nothing a White Hispanic can’t accomplish for the Democratic Party without even meaning to. Repeated polling has found a racial gap in the races for mayor and comptroller: black voters are far more likely than white voters to view Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Weiner favorably, and more likely to say they deserve a second chance. How big a split is it? Spitzer,...

Vermont authorities have determined that the June 16 shooting death of a Hudson Falls man who was killed as he was stabbing his ex-girlfriend at a home in western Vermont was "justifiable homicide" and no charges will be filed. Vermont State Police announced Friday night that the man who shot 29-year-old Aaron Allen as he stabbed his former girlfriend at her home in Danby, Vt., was "legally justified" to take action as she was attacked. Michael White, 24, of Danby, Vt., shot Allen twice with a .30-06-caliber rifle, and Allen died the next day at Rutland Regional Medical Center in...

Bo, the president's Portuguese Water Dog, arrived separately on one of two MV-22 Ospreys, a hybrid aircraft which takes off like a helicopter but flies like a plane.