Free Republic

FULL TITLE: Honour student who works two jobs to support her siblings after her parents split up and left town is put in JAIL for missing school due to exhaustion. Devastated: Diane Tran, 17, has a criminal record and spent a night in jail after being charged with truancy. She works two jobs to support her family Abandoned: Her parents divorced 'out of the blue' and left Tran and her two siblings to fend for themselves Ms Tran said she works a full time job, a part-time job, and takes advancement and dual credit college level courses at Willis High...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A federal judge in Austin has stopped Texas from banning Planned Parenthood from participating in the state's Women's Health Program. Judge Lee Yeakel ruled Monday there is sufficient evidence the state law is unconstitutional. He imposed an injunction against.... The law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Legislature forbids state agencies from providing funds to an organization affiliated with abortion providers.

"For nearly a decade, 2012 contender Newt Gingrich has been floating some controversial ideas aimed at reining in the federal judiciary. He's called that branch of government "grotesquely dictatorial" and elitist. Should he become president, Gingrich says he'll ignore Supreme Court decisions if they don't square with his interpretation of the Constitution or what he believes the country's founders intended." "Gingrich says federal judges should be called before Congress to explain their decisions, suggesting Sunday that he'd even approve of arresting them if they refused to show up." "There are plenty of critics taking aim at Gingrich, including those who...

TORONTO, Ontario, March 22, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Ontario Court of Justice judge erupted in a lengthy, angry tirade against pro-life activist Mary Wagner – and ejected a spectator from the public gallery – in a downtown Toronto courtroom Wednesday. The judge then sent Wagner to jail for an additional 92 days, added to 88 days already served prior to trial, after finding her guilty of mischief and two counts of failing to comply with probation orders. The charges related to Wagner’s November 8 arrest at the site of the Bloor West Village “Women’s Clinic.” Wagner has been arrested on...

Madison - A Dane County judge permanently enjoined the state's new voter ID law on Monday - the second judge in a week to block the requirement that voters show photo identification at the polls. "A government that undermines the very foundation of its existence - the people's inherent, pre-constitutional right to vote - imperils its legitimacy as a government by the people, for the people, and especially of the people," said the eight-page opinion by Dane County Judge Richard Niess. "It sows the seeds for its own demise as a democratic institution. This is precisely what 2011 Wisconsin Act...

Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan, who granted a temporary injunction against Wisconsin's new voter identification law, signed a petition urging the recall of Gov. Scott Walker. *** His clerk called back to say Flanagan would only answer questions submitted in writing at the courthouse. State Republican Party spokesman Ben Sparks said his party will be filing a complaint with the state Judicial Commission asking it to investigate why Flanagan did not recuse himself. "The very fact that Dane County Judge David Flanagan signed a petition to recall Governor Walker calls today's court proceedings regarding Wisconsin's voter ID law into...

A Dane County Judge on Tuesday granted a temporary injunction that bars the enforcement of the state photo ID law at polling places during the general election on April 3. Circuit Judge David Flanagan said that the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP and Voces de la Frontera had demonstrated that their lawsuit against Gov. Scott Walker and the state Government Accountability Board would probably succeed on its merits and had demonstrated the likelihood of irreparable harm if the photo ID law is allowed to stand. Flanagan ordered Walker and the GAB to "cease immediately any effort to enforce or implement...

Unbelievable. Yes, this happened HERE. People who are concerned about the spread of Muslim sharia law into American jurisprudence used to be dismissed as alarmists. That won’t happen again for a while, thanks to a Pennsylvania judge who just dismissed assault charges against a Muslim who was videotaped attacking a man dressed as “Zombie Muhammad” during a Halloween parade. The judge, who is a Muslim, didn’t even care to see the videotape, because the assault was entirely justified under sharia law, so the First Amendment doesn’t apply. In fact, the beaten Zombie Muhammad should just be thankful he wasn’t killed,...

Calling pro-family citizens "rabid," the Maryland Attorney General told a homosexual rally in September that if "the right-wing myopic folks" win a vote to overturn the new "gay marriage" law, then the Governor's newly appointed judges will strike down the current one-man-one-woman marriage law as unconstitutional — "so we will win." That's what Douglas Gansler, Maryland's aggressively pro-homosexual Attorney General, told a rally of homosexual group Equality Maryland back on Sept. 7, 2011. As Gansler has acknowledged, "gay marriage" has been universally rejected across the country, by the will of the people. It's only been instituted by judges or legislatures,...

Gansler speaks to Equality Maryland

On February 13, 2012, Representative Bob Evans (District 91) filed a bill in the Mississippi Legislature that would require parents to obtain permission from a judge to homeschool their children. House Bill 464 would impose a duty on school attendance officers to collect and maintain unspecified and unlimited information on all children being homeschooled and to report this information to the judge of the youth court or chancery court. This information would be used “for the purpose of exempting such children from the truancy laws of this state.” There is no requirement in the bill that there be any case...

A family court judge who ruled that a pregnant woman with schizophrenia should undergo an abortion and be sterilized sharply defended her decision yesterday, while denouncing Boston University for withdrawing what she said was a job offer amid the controversy. In a rare personal defense of the reasoning behind a court ruling, Christina Harms, who retired from the bench last month after 23 years, said she concluded that the woman, a 31-year-old who suffered from delusions, would choose to terminate her pregnancy if she were mentally competent, chiefly so that she could resume antipsychotic medication that would have harmed the...

Dear Loyal Supporters of Gov. Scott Walker, . You are not going to believe this one! . A Democratic appointed judge that was supported by AFL-CIO South Federation of Labor and the Madison Teachers Union has denied Gov. Scott Walker the time to verify the recall petitions submitted by the unions and liberal left that are trying to oust him. He essentially ruled that the Recall was inevitable and that we should not waste time actually verifying signatures. . . .. . We have been telling you that we are worried that this will not be a fair fight...

It is certainly no surprise for gun owners to see the New York Times run a story belittling the United States Constitution. After all, the Times has worked for decades to devalue our founding document. "[I]ts influence is waning," opines the Times. It is "terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights." The paper faults the Constitution for being difficult to amend and reflective of the times in which it was written. While the Times does not go so far as to claim the U.S. Constitution has been bad for America, it does lament that it is of "little...

When Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), spoke at CPAC on February 10th, he predicted that if Barack Obama wins a second term it will usher in an all-out attack on the Second Amendment. In so many words, he said the same people who brought us Fast and Furious, “a criminal enterprise” for which there has yet to be prosecutions, will use four more years to gut constitutional protections on the right to keep and bear arms. And anyone who wonders what this assault on the Second Amendment might look like need look no further...

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Tells Egyptians: Look To The Constitutions of South Africa or Canada, Not To The U.S. Constitution

Thinkstock/Comstock(WASHINGTON) -- A federal judge has upheld a rule proposed by the ATF to track multiple gun sales in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico in a lawsuit brought by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and two gun dealers in Arizona. Over the summer the ATF announced that it would seek information in those four states on gun purchasers who buy two or more weapons a week for semi-automatic long guns that have a caliber greater than .22 and a detachable magazine. The ATF would require gun dealers to report the sale of multiple rifles with what ATF was calling...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   Federal Court Upholds Obama/Holder Gun Registration Scheme; Congressional Action Needed   Friday, January 13, 2012   Moments before this alert was to go out, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. issued a ruling upholding an Obama administration policy that requires federally licensed firearms retailers in states bordering Mexico to report multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles.  The case was brought by two NRA-backed firearms retailers and by the National Shooting Sports Foundation acting on behalf of its affected members.  Plaintiffs plan to appeal immediately—but in the meantime, your help is urgently...

OKLAHOMA CITY — An amendment that would ban Oklahoma courts from considering international or Islamic law discriminates against religions and a Muslim community leader has the right to challenge its constitutionality, a federal appeals court said Tuesday. The court in Denver upheld U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange’s order blocking implementation of the amendment shortly after it was approved by 70 percent of Oklahoma voters in November 2010. Muneer Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma, sued to block the law from taking effect, arguing that the Save Our State Amendment violated his First Amendment rights....

Should public school officials have the right to prevent students from wearing pro-American garb on Cinco de Mayo? This question has been at the heart of a California court battle between the Morgan Hill Unified School District and students who were told by a principal and assistant principal that they could not wear American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday back in 2010. Following the incident, a lawsuit against the district was launched by the students and their families. This week, the case came to a close, with a federal judge ruling against the students — a blow that is...