Free Republic

No more partying like it's 2003-2015 on the social network that was once the biggest site in the US. MySpace may have lost your digital memories in a server migration. "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace," it said in a note at the top of the site. "We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com." Andy Baio, one of the people behind Kickstarter, tweeted that...

Many Americans think we live in a country of rights and especially of self protection via the Castle Doctrine. They are wrong. We live in a police state where you pay their wages and they decide if you live or die at their discretion.

Imprisoned former Gov. George Ryan is known around the world for clearing Illinois’ Death Row in 2003 and imposing a moratorium on the death penalty. But the governor who pardoned more than 200 people admitted in a recently released court deposition that he “didn’t understand” the difference between two major types of pardons and that he was declaring a Chicago inmate innocent by the way he pardoned him . . .

<p>Federal officials are hoping film director James Cameron can help them come up with ideas on how to stop the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.</p> <p>The "Avatar" and "Titanic" director was among a group of scientists and other experts who met Tuesday with officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies for a brainstorming session on stopping the massive oil leak.</p>

Under a bombardment of condemnation, Arizona has taken action to address illegal immigration and is fighting back by telling Washington to “do your job.” Meanwhile, on Sunday President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Justice Department was “considering” a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s new immigration law. How did the immigration crisis occur? It happened because Washington didn’t do their job and secure the borders — and because under both Republican and Democratic leadership, the United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), formerly the Immigration Naturalization Services (INS), ran amok. If Americans want to see how broken and incompetent...

LOS ANGELES (CN) - A suicidal woman who had been missing for 9 days was found dead in a hospital gown on the hospital's second-story landing after employees shrugged their shoulders over her disappearance, her children claim in Superior Court. They say the California Hospital Medical Center "repeatedly made contradictory and false assertions regarding the status of their mother, despite knowing that Dee Ann Haas was either dead or critically injured, and nowhere to be found." Haas was found "lying in a crumpled heap" in a hospital gown on a second-story landing of the California Hospital Medical Center. No one...

Why are John McCain and his campaign, the RNC, and even 527 groups ignoring the huge elephant in the room? The extremely great possibility that Barack Hussein Obama will get the opportunity to appoint not 1 but 2 Supreme Court Justices during his 4 year term? We have 1 that is near 90 years old and another that is ill. Wih a Democratic House and Senate are we simply ignoring the biggest issue this campaign that nobody seems to be talking about? This one issue is reason enough to get people back to reality and focus on just what in...

The Ultimate Oxymoron: House Intelligence By James Estrada January 3, 2007 A couple of weeks back Texas Democrat Sylvestre Reyes was appointed to head the House Intelligence Committee by Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi . Reyes was interviewed by a local paper that asked several questions on the make up of Al Qaeda and he missed every one. Once he realized his bad scoring Reyes asked the folks from the paper if they spoke Spanish, citing that his Spanish was better than his English and then in Spanish asked why the paper was asking those questions (1). Reyes was picked over the...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — Mexican criminal syndicates are stepping up their attacks on American agents patrolling the border as officials of the Homeland Security Department intensify efforts to stem the flow of immigrants and drugs into the United States, American officials said this week. In recent months, scores of Border Patrol agents have been fired upon or pelted with large stones as well as with cloth-covered stones that have been doused with flammable liquid and set ablaze. Since October, agents have been attacked in more than 190 cases, officials said on Thursday. Most of the attacks have occurred along the...

One year ago a tsunami walloped a huge swathe of the world from Indonesia all the way to Africa. Some 300,000 people were swept to their deaths, from the grandson of the king of Thailand and the daughter and granddaughter of film director Richard Attenborough to Njoroge, a Nairobi car mechanic, who picked the wrong day for his first visit to the beautiful East African coast and died a statistical fluke, his country's solitary fatality from the disaster. Across the Western world, TV viewers reached into their wallets, chipped in the best part of $5 billion, and left it in...

Gov. Kathleen Blanco has asked for more time to deliver documents to congressional committees concerning her office's role in Hurricane Katrina preparations and emergency response to the storm. The delay would mean it could be December before internal documents reflecting what was going on behind the scenes during key days are be made public. "They have asked for the kitchen sink, which is OK," said Blanco executive counsel Terry Ryder. "But given the fact that we are dealing with Katrina and Rita right now, we have asked for 90 days more." Hurricane Katrina brought widespread devastation to the New Orleans...

Here's a link to a nice aerial image showing about 250 submerged school busses in New Orleans. The image is about 1.5 MB.

GASTONIA, N.C. (AP) - Two local elections officials resigned after investigations revealed mishandling of vote tallies in Gaston County, including more than 13,000 votes that weren't discovered until after Election Day. Sandra Page, elections director, and Tony Branch, chairman of the elections board, resigned Wednesday following a closed-door meeting of the board. The counsel for the state board, Don Wright, had questioned Page for two days about the county's numerous problems on Election Day, including a failure by poll workers to check the number of ballots cast against the number of people recorded as voting. The county failed to include...

NEW YORK -- A book by three current and former U.N. employees about peacekeeping operations portrays wild parties with alcohol and drugs, and convicts and mental-asylum inmates passing as soldiers. Embarrassed U.N. officials have threatened firing or other disciplinary action against two of the authors, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their work without approval, which had been denied in this case. The third author, former U.N. employee Kenneth Cain, works full time as a writer. The book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters," covers the authors' experiences during the mid-1990s in Cambodia, Somalia...

Zero tolerance is the hammer that makes violence prevention programs effective, said Elliott Phelps, chief of school police for the Clark County School District. "If you don't have the hammer, your prevention programs are taken with a grain of salt," Phelps said. "There has to be both prevention and consequence, and there has to be a balance between the two." Like most education officials across the nation, Clark County school leaders have struggled to find that balance. In one extreme, students who pose a potential threat to others by carrying or concealing weapons while on school property face immediate expulsion...

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has come under increasing scrutiny during the last six months.nbsp; When it was found that some of the 09/11 terrorists had overstayed their visas and were on the a list of known terrorists, yet the INS had no idea where they were, it rang alarm bells for many.Listen to this report that contains information on a cover-up by INS officials in Florida and a complaint by irrate INS employees who blew the whistle on the cover-up.nbsp; Then listen as Sixty-Minutes reveals how the official responsible for the cover-up was promoted to a very sensitive position...