Free Republic

ILION — Herkimer County officials vowed to help affected Remington Arms employees Monday afternoon as news spread the gun manufacturer will layoff more than 100 of its employees by the end of the week. Herkimer County Legislature Chairman Vincent Bono said he learned about the 105 layoffs through county Administrator James Wallace and then from Karin Zipko of Herkimer County Working Solutions. “We're gearing up our programs that are offered, including retraining and job searches,” said Bono, R-Schuyler, during a telephone interview Monday. “It's unclear whether some will be called back. That's unknown.” “It's unfortunate,” added Bono about the layoffs,...

SELMA, Ala. - An Alabama teacher was suspended without pay after being accused of having sixth-grade students re-enact the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida. The Selma Times-Journal quoted Dallas County School Superintendent Don Willingham as saying the social studies teacher used poor judgment during a lesson on current events. School officials haven't identified the teacher, who works at Brantley Elementary School....

The city of Huntsville has ruled that an abortion facility will remain open and be able to relocate next door to a middle school, although the waiver it is using to get around city ordinances was granted to another owner for another kind of business 16 years ago. In a controversial 3-2 decision, the Huntsville Board of Zoning Adjustment on Tuesday night voted to uphold a city manager’s previous decision to issue a building permit to a local abortion clinic that wants to relocate to a larger facility across the street from a middle school. In response, local pro-life activists...

MOBILE, Alabama – The man police say shot his mother's boyfriend to death will now enter his fourth year of treatment at a psychiatric facility, a judge ruled Wednesday. Dwayne Batice Miller has been at the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility since Oct. 2011, more than a year after he allegedly killed 47-year-old Fredrick Edwards in the west Mobile home they shared. Edwards was shot on July 10, 2010, as he sat in the Vista Bonita Drive East house's front room, according to previous reports. The murder weapon was found at the scene of the crime, police said. Miller, 30,...

At this point, you really have to wonder: Is it still news when a Republican says something asinine? On the off chance it is, let us spend a few moments pondering the strange case of Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who said last week that the Democratic Party is waging a "War on Whites." Yeah, he actually said that. You can look it up if you want. Mr. Brooks was responding to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who had asked him to comment on a remark from National Journal columnist Ron Fournier to the effect that the GOP cannot continue to be competitive in national elections if it...

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., claims liberals are waging a "war on whites." If so, Barack Obama must be at war with himself. That's how goofy Brooks' logic sounds. But he's not nuts. It is an old reflex, when cornered in politics, to lash back with the same charge others have leveled at you — or, put another way, to project your own flaws onto other people. What's sad about Brooks' claim is his feeble attempt to play the white victim card, plucking the strings of white nationalism, just to have his way with the nation's immigration policy.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama --Immigration detainees housed at the Etowah County Jail went on a brief hunger strike Thursday and today to protest the poor quality of food they are served, an immigrant rights group said. But an Etowah County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman said the protest was not a hunger strike because it did not last 72 hours."Several detainees refused three meals, which does not constitute a hunger strike, beginning Thursday ... today, Friday, August 8, 2014, the detainees accepted and ate lunch," spokeswoman Natalie Barton said. "Etowah County Detention Center staff quickly resolved the refusal of food and addressed the detainees...

FULL TITLE: ICE seeks public's help to locate Alabama felon wanted for child pornography Matthew Chase Harbin, convicted sex offender, may be hiding in Alabama or Florida HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) urgently seeks the public's help to locate a convicted Alabama sex offender wanted on a federal arrest warrant issued in June for receipt of child pornography in the Northern District of Alabama. Matthew C. Harbin, 28, of Arab, Alabama, is a convicted felon who pleaded guilty in 2009 to state charges of transmitting obscene material to a minor. He is...

The ashes were being kept in a plastic box, not a metal urn.Vietnam War veteran Phillip McMullen likely saw some bad things during his time in the service, but what he saw when returned to his Alabama home ranks right up there. McMullen came back to his Citronelle residence after visiting some friends out of town and discovered that his home had been burglarized. The gun safe at McMullen's house had been damaged, but it wasn't broken into. The same could not be said for the plastic box which held his deceased wife's ashes. "They even took my wife's ashes...

Jeff Sessions is the safest bet this year in the U.S. congressional midterm elections. The incumbent U.S. senator from Mobile was unopposed in the Republican primary on June 3. And on Nov. 4, he will be unopposed in the general election. That's a historic first, according to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, a publication Winger has edited since 1985. A Republican has always been opposed by a Democrat for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama since selection of U.S. senators was given to the voters in 1914, said Winger, 70, of San Francisco. (SNIP) Sessions mocked Adelson and former...

MOBILE, Alabama – One minute the son of a prominent Alabama judge was rolling a marijuana cigar on his couch; the next he was shotgunning the mother of his infant child to death, a detective testified on Wednesday. With a packed courtroom listening intently, Prichard Police Cpl. Robert Martin chronicled an eye-witness account of how Richardson Johnson Kennedy, 22, allegedly killed Tylandria Rivers over prescription pain medicine. According to Martin, the only other person at the Jarrett Road home near Prichard Municipal Park on July 6 told police the defendant was "rolling a blunt" in the living room of the...

Twelve states filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Friday seeking to block an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to regulate coal-fired power plants in an effort to stem climate change. The plaintiffs are led by West Virginia and include states that are home to some of the largest producers of coal and consumers of coal-fired electricity. The suit was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The other plaintiffs are Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The E.P.A. rule, announced by President Obama on June...

This will be fun. It was announced Wednesday that Alabama and Southern California will square off to kick off the 2016 season with a neutral site game. The game will be played as a part of the eighth annual Cowboys Classic at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on September 3.

Conservative policy analyst Gary Palmer has come from behind to defeat state Rep. Paul DeMarco in the Republican runoff in Alabama’s 6th District congressional race. With 53 percent of the precincts reporting Tuesday, Palmer led DeMarco with 62 percent. He was far ahead in all six counties in the central Alabama district. The results are a turnaround from the primary, when DeMarco easily outdistanced Palmer and five other candidates.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has warned all of his colleagues in Congress that President Barack Obama’s new immigration strategy—his plans to legalize millions of illegal alien adults through executive power—could destroy America as we know it. “I write to inform you of a development that threatens the foundation of our constitutional Republic,” Sessions, Congress’s top immigration hawk, wrote in a letter that was hand-delivered to all 535 members of Congress on Monday and provided exclusively to Breitbart News. Sessions cites a recent report from the National Journal, in which reporter Major Garrett detailed how, despite...

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said President Obama would rather play politics than follow the law to remedy the humanitarian crisis festering at the southern border. “This is a direct failure of presidential leadership,” Sessions said Thursday at the Eagle Forum’s annual leadership conference. “I’ve never seen anything like this steadfast refusal to follow the law.” Session said the president’s refusal to deport young illegal immigrants gathering at the border lends credence to the amnesty rumors in Central America that fuel the crises. He said if Obama instead would “establish clarity,” it would cause all the “anger and frustration would go...

Alabama's senior Senator said he is concerned the White House's request for billions of dollars to care for illegal children flooding across America's border may be just the first such request made by the Obama administration. Shelby spoke to Fox News before Senate hearings related to the growing crisis on the border, where as many as 50,000 young illegal aliens have crossed into the U.S. since October. The children are being detained at U.S. military bases and President Barack Obama is asking for $3.7 billion for housing and increased border security. Shelby, R-AL, said the government will have to borrow...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) responded today to a New York Times Op-Ed promoting amnesty by billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Sessions said the billionaires' opinion piece shows they're clueless about the obligations of Congress to the American people: "It is clear that three of the richest billionaires in the world have no clue what Congress 'owe[s] to the 318 million who employ them'. "We owe them our loyalty, our compassion, our devotion. It is precisely because of our duty to the working people of this country that we must stop legislation that would import tens of millions...

New research takes a look at decades of corruption convictions to find the crookedest states in the union. When we think of government corruption (as one tends to do), our biased minds often gravitate to thoughts of military juntas and third world governments. But, of course, corruption is everywhere, in one form or another. And it’s costing U.S. citizens big time. A new study from researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Indiana University estimates that corruption on the state level is costing Americans in the 10 most corrupt states an average of $1,308 per year, or 5.2% of...

Getting packages in the mail is always fun but delivering them  is probably a pain.  A USPS worker in Alabama proved just how much he hates giving rather than receiving when he started chucking packages into a ravine on his route. It was all caught on video by a resident in Birmingham.