Free Republic

Wearing bright orange t-shirts with “undocumented and unafraid” printed on the front, three Mexican illegals, disrupted legislative hearings in North Carolina this Wednesday by yelling at House lawmakers for what they felt were anti-immigration stances. They were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, but proving their t-shirt slogans to be true true, Cynthia Lizabeth Martinez, 21, and Estephania Lizbeth Mijangos-Lopez, 20, were released from jail after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency determined that they didn’t meet "priority criteria," according to an official statement. The third protester, Uriel Alberto, 24, remains in custody because he has a criminal record

The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican group, on Wednesday criticized a new ad from Rick Perry in which the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate suggests "there's something wrong" when gays can serve openly in the military but kids "can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." "Our nation was built upon individual liberty and individual responsibility, and open service by gay and lesbian servicemembers is directly in line with the vision of our Founding Fathers," said R. Clarke Cooper, Executive Director of the Log Cabin Republicans. "It is wrong for Governor Perry to assume being a person of...

The young man in the video pulls in close to his computer camera with the trappings of a typical college dorm room—a loft bed and the clutter of cast-off clothes—piled behind him. Alex Fiorentini isn’t talking about girls, beer or football. Instead, it’s a coming-out moment of sorts. “Is it acceptable to the majority of the population to be an atheist?” he asks the camera. “Nope. Are all of your friends going to accept you as an atheist? Probably not all of them. And yeah, those things are gonna suck. But the real question is, ‘Is it OK to be...

Count your blessings, then get to work. That may be Thanksgiving for more retail workers this year, as stores desperate to pull in buyers on the first weekend of the holiday shopping season push their openings earlier and earlier. Unhappy workers who say the earlier hours ruin their Thanksgiving celebrations are trying to persuade companies to back off, but retailers say they're stuck: It's what customers want. Reporting to work at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving Dayruinswhat issupposed to bea day spent with family, said Anthony Hardwick, who works part time at a Target store in Omaha, Neb., corralling carts.

Protesters have returned to downtown Oakland, California, to demand the resignation of the city's mayor and aninvestigation toexplain how anIraqi war veteran, Scott Olsen, was hit in the head by a teargas canister at close range, leaving him critically injured. About 2,000 people – half as many as Tuesday night – massed in front of City Hall on Wednesday, tearing down a steel barricade intended to keep them off the grass in Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Next month marks the 21st anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's enforced resignation as Prime Minister. It is now more than 30 years since she first gained power. She was not, of course, the first woman to lead a major country. That honour fell to Indira Gandhi in India and Golda Meir in Israel. But along with Gandhi, Thatcher's 11 years at the top make her the longest-serving woman prime minister the world has seen. The strange thing is that despite the advancement of women in business and the professions and the growing numbers of women entering politics in leading Western countries,...

President Obama of late is making the rounds of aggrieved Democratic constituencies. Next up, a Saturday address to the Human Rights Campaign. "Some LGBT rights supporters are hoping that Obama will take advantage of the opportunity to endorse marriage equality and to denounce initiatives that would ban marriage rights for same-sex couples in Minnesota and North Carolina," reports the Washington Blade. Probably not, for at least two reasons: While Obama has said his stance opposing gay marriage is "evolving," he has given no signal it's fully evolved since he declined to endorse gay marriage in June.

Artificial insemination costs vary widely across Sweden, forcing some same-sex couples to pay significantly more than heterosexual couples who save thousands of kronor by bringing their own sperm. “We think that it is discriminatory that there are different prices for insemination,” Ulrika Westerlund of the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter - RFSL) said to the Aftonbladet daily. RFSL would like to see a development of uniform regulations which apply across the country. “But that would be complicated and would require the state to go in and regulate. However, we...

Lots of people adore funky grocer Trader Joe's. Its vegan pad thai is apparently so delicious that it sparked a smackdown between two women in the frozen-food aisle of a Manhattan location in January. However, the activists at Change.org want to pick a much bigger fight with Trader Joe's: They're accusing the chain of wasting food. Their campaign got a kick-start from documentary filmmaker Jeremy Seifert, who recorded Trader Joe's employees trashing huge bins full of salvageable food in his film Dive! Seifert is a self-professed "Dumpster diver," and he feeds his family with the perfectly good food retailers routinely...

For the second time in the past week, hundreds of laid off state workers rallied in the hot sun on the steps of Minnesota’s closed State Capitol to protest the state government shutdown. Wednesday’s rally again took aim at familiar theme: Taxing the state's wealthiest residents to help solve the state’s $5 billion budget deficit. One man held a sign that took his frustration a step further – he had changed it from “Tax the Rich” to “Eat the Rich.”

Daley: U.S. a 'country of whiners'By Rick Pearson, Tribune reporter 9:36 p.m. CST, March 3, 2011 Retiring Mayor Richard Daley on Thursday contended America is a "country of whiners" that's spent the last four decades fearing the impact of foreign governments on the nation's economy instead of showing the confidence and sacrifice to lead on a global stage. Daley also said he believed taxpayers can no longer finance the current level of government and suggested priorities need to be placed on municipal services that can be privatized or outsourced to cut costs. The comments by the veteran mayor, who is...

The 20th century adage that "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is a myth, according to new research suggesting that our brains are wired exactly the same way when it comes to love. The self-help bestseller, published in 1992, suggested that when it came to relationships men and women thought and acted very differently -- in other words it was as if they came from different planets. But new scientific research shows we actually act very similarly when we are in love -- whether we are male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya at...

Ricky Gervais Was Only as Mean as We’d Hoped He'd Be It was such a refreshing treat watching Ricky Gervais go knives out during last year's Golden Globes, attacking the likes of Mel Gibson, Angelina Jolie and Sir Paul McCartney. Honestly, he didn’t say anything any worse then what is said by millions of viewers on their couches, but Ricky was in the room, looking right at his victims. It was a rush. So when it was announced that Gervais would be coming back for more, the conversation naturally turned to, “Can he top last year’s performance?” The press (guilty)...

Several House and Senate Democrats joined feminists at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to push for the introduction and passage of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s rights. The conference was timed to coincide with the reading of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor, as ordered by the newly elected Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Recently, Supreme Court Justice (Antonin) Scalia stated his opinion that no provision in the Constitution, or the 14th amendment, would provide full and true equality to women and give them protection against sex discrimination,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said....

“[Senators] want to go home,” Burr said. “When you got a process that has a definitive end, you use slippage backward. That’s why all of these things were orchestrated to come up at this time of year.” Burr would have preferred to see the debate continue next session, since “there is no compelling reason that this needs to be done right now.”

Election losers, welcome to Office Space. Some of the most senior and respected members of Congress are among the dozens of outgoing lawmakers whose offices have been crammed into tiny basement cubicles as their old offices are emptied and refurbished. And while nobody seems to be throwing fits about missing red Swingline staplers, the basement bullpen is quite a comedown for some of the most powerful members of Congress, who virtually overnight went from comfortable congressional veterans to homeless on the Hill. Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the transportation committee chairman who championed legislation to fix America’s crowded highways, faces an...

With a title like that, I'm sure I'll have every liberal pundit salivating at the idea of another diehard conservative writer taking the same route as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan. Ms. Noonan recently referred to Palin as a "nincompoop" for a remark she made about Ronald Reagan's legacy. She has made no bones about how little she thought of Sarah Palin as a V.P. pick and she has been highly critical of Palin's decision to quit as governor of Alaska. I worked with Peggy Noonan for a short while at the start of the New York Sun and...

BELLEVUE, Wash., Oct. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Acting on behalf of a Georgia resident and honorably discharged Vietnam War veteran, the Second Amendment Foundation today filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over enforcement of a federal statute that can deny gun rights to someone with a simple misdemeanor conviction on his record. The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia. SAF and co-plaintiff Jefferson Wayne Schrader of Cleveland, GA are represented by attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued both the Heller and McDonald cases before the U.S....

VINALHAVEN, Maine — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on. “In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families...

The wacky dishonest left wants you to believe that their crowd yesterday matched the Glenn Beck rally last month. Well, here’s an overhead shot from yesterday’s astroturfed One Nation rally posted at the left-wing Huffington PostAnd, here is a crowd shot from Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in late August.So who are you going to believe? The leftist media or your lying eyes?