Free Republic

The Rise Up October rally...featured Tarantino as a speaker. The event aimed to call attention to police brutality and its victims. While there, Tarantino said the following: "I’m a human being with a conscience. And when I see murder I cannot stand by. And I have to call the murdered the murdered, and I have to call the murderers the murderers." The quote first received major exposure via the New York Post on the day of the protest. The next day, Patrick J. Lynch, president of New York's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, a labor union representing police, called for a boycott...

The government-backed electric car company Fisker Automotive laid off about 160 workers Friday, or roughly 75 percent of the automaker's staff, as it has struggled to find financial backing that would allow it to continue building its high concept clean cars. The layoff announcement came as the innovative start up faces a looming repayment on a loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, and as reports have swirled that it could be preparing to file for bankruptcy. As with the failed solar firm Solyndra, the green car company was once an early pick by the Obama Administration to be part...

Hit with declines in funding from the economic crisis and the Madoff scandal, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is laying off around 20% of its staff. Roughly 30 people were let go earlier this week, according to a source who works for the nonprofit. Executives at Planned Parenthood confirmed the layoffs, but declined to give more details. “As with many other nonprofit organizations, Planned Parenthood has had to make staff reductions at our headquarters due to the challenging economic times facing our country,” said Maryana Iskander, chief operating officer at the agency. “While taking this action is never easy,...

EL RODEO, Mexico — For years, millions of Mexican migrants working in the United States have sent money back home to villages like this one, money that allows families to pay medical bills and school fees, build houses and buy clothes or, if they save enough, maybe start a tiny business. But after years of strong increases, the amount of migrant money flowing to Mexico has stagnated. From 2000 to 2006, remittances grew to nearly $24 billion a year from $6.6 billion, rising more than 20 percent some years. In 2007, the increase so far has been less than 2...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — A 25-year-old man awaited a lethal injection Wednesday for the torture and slaying of a teenager who was forced to drink hydrochloric acid during a robbery of his home. It was to be the state's first execution in 60 years. Elijah Page, 25, gave up his appeals and asked to die for the 2000 murder of Chester Allan Poage, who was also stabbed, kicked and bashed with large rocks in a torture session that lasted two to three hours. Page was scheduled to be put to death at 10 p.m.

Many illegal immigrants will have to overcome deep-seated fear and distrust of the U.S. government if they are to take advantage of the proposal to emerge from the shadows offered by Senate leaders and the White House. After months of roundups at workplaces and homes, immigrants are now being asked to come forward to authorities, pay $5,000 in fines and return to their homelands to apply for legal residency. Cesar Damian Solis, who earns up to $600 a month laying bricks and pipe in Phoenix, thinks most illegal immigrants would rather have a plan that allows them to remain in...

Buses like this were used by immigration officials to transport undocumented workers, mostly women, to Devens for processing. (ED COLLIER) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enlarge photo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A climate of fear has cast a pall over the local immigrant community in the wake of a government crackdown in a seaport town a hundred miles away. When hundreds of federal agents checked into Fitchburg and Leominster hotels several days before they stormed New Bedford-based Michael Bianco Inc., rumors of a local raid spread quickly. “It is devastating to families,” said Matthew Feinstein of the Worcester Global Action Network. “The police presence caused many to...

Delivering his farewell address today, Sen. Mark Dayton said he was leaving Capitol Hill "with strong feelings of frustration and disappointment," but he thanked his colleagues and the people of Minnesota for giving him the chance to serve six years in the Senate. "I have been unable to pass most of what I believed was most important to Minnesota, to our country and to the world," Dayton, D-Minn., said in his final speech on the Senate floor. "I remain convinced that those policies would improve the lives of most Americans far better than what the Majority here enacted." He lamented...

He had to go - so now he has to go. When cops busted David Rivera Cruzado for urinating on a Queens sidewalk in March, a fingerprint check revealed he had been deported to Peru in 1999 and wasn't supposed to be on Roosevelt Ave. - never mind in the U.S. at all. His weak bladder will cost Cruzado dearly. After pleading guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court to sneaking over the Mexican border into Texas in December 2005, Cruzado is now facing four years in prison before he's booted out of the U.S. a second time. "I want to apologize...

MEXICO CITY -- A Mexican official on Monday struck out at a U.S. anti-illegal-immigrant group for burning the Mexican flag outside a consulate in Tucson. "We consider any provocation or vandalism of national symbols to be unacceptable," Foreign Relations Undersecretary Lourdes Aranda said in a news conference. About 12 people from the Tucson-based Border Guardians burned the flag Sunday on the sidewalk in front of the Mexican Consulate. They carried a sign that read, "Defending American Sovereignty." Group members spoke out against proposed immigration laws and blamed the Mexican government for the number of illegal migrants who enter the United...

Is NASCAR negotiating with the Charlotte City Council? Are public officials sweetening the deal to lure the sport's hall of fame to uptown Charlotte? Could the city be promising annual subsidies for the hall? Only a few people know for sure, and they're not talking. The council spent two hours behind closed doors at the start of its Monday meeting, and an hour at the end -- perhaps talking about NASCAR, perhaps not. The council held a long closed session Feb. 13 and a rare closed session before the Feb. 20 zoning meeting. NASCAR sources said Sunday that Charlotte is...

DETROIT - What crime-ridden, boarded-building, automotive-industry-ravaged, snowy Detroit couldn't do, an NFL officiating crew pulled off with relative ease in front of plenty of bored-silly football fans inside beautiful Ford Field. Sports' and television's most indestructible beast - the Super Bowl - met its match in the 40th playing of the game the world stops to watch. The inevitable finally happened. A group of middle-aged executives trying to keep pace with a group of highly trained 20-something athletes destroyed America's sports holiday. Pittsburgh's one-for-the-thumb Super Bowl will be remembered as the game when physically overmatched referees and heads-buried NFL executives...

(Meriden-AP, Jan. 6, 2006 8:01 AM) _ Undocumented immigrants in the New Haven area were ripped off by about $150,000 in an alleged scam run by a New York woman who took their money and never produced the promised paperwork. Maria Agosto was arraigned in Meriden Superior Court yesterday and charged with first-degree larceny and criminal impersonation. She is accused of posing as an immigration official. She lived for a while in Hamden. The arrest warrant says dozens of people each week visited her apartment and were given different prices, depending on the difficulty of their cases. One Colombian man...

And now I think I'm going to leave. Because one my first post I was called a troll, and told by a poster I made them sick. Then some dink corrected my grammar. Are the rest of you nice? PS I voted for GWB last year, (my first time ever voting, I'm 19.)

October 5, 2005 -- THE producer at the center of last year's "Memogate" scandal at CBS News says she was derailed by a vast right-wing conspiracy. The producer, Mary Mapes, is one of four CBS staffers fired last January in the wake of the scandal. She is convinced she was the victim of a group of loosely associated Internet bloggers "with a harsh political bent" who pounced on CBS News minutes after the airing of the now-infamous Texas Air National Guard story on "60 Minutes 2" in September 2004... "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Websites I had...

Wife and daughters of Tariq Aziz in tears as they tell our correspondent of their first prison reunion IT WAS their first meeting in 28 months, and the family of Tariq Aziz, 69, wept as they described their reunion in an American prison outside Baghdad this week with the man who served for more than a decade as the public face of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “He looked like he had turned 80,” his wife, Violette, told The Times. “He was frail and too tired to walk, even inside the small meeting room. He had to lean against his American military...

Zimbabwe is about ready to explode in a nightmare mass murder, or bloody revolution. It's not genocide this time, but democide (government killing massive numbers of its own citizens.) The Zimbabwe government, in power since the country became independent in 1980, dealt with increasing unpopularity by terrorizing political opponents, rigging elections, and paying off supporters by driving its most productive citizens (the white farmers) out of the country and stealing their property. This move made it impossible for the country to feed itself. Relief agencies sent in tons of food, but this was distributed in a punitive fashion, with anti-government...

By Michael Marizco ARIZONA DAILY STAR Federal agents pulled the bodies of an additional four people out of the desert this past weekend, pushing the death toll in Arizona to at least 111 for this federal fiscal year. So far this fiscal year, which runs Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, 96 of the dead were found within the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector. The first to be found was spotted by a Border Patrol pilot near Three Points about 11 a.m. Friday, said sector spokesman Jim Hawkins. A second was found Saturday when a group of seven who had been...

The CBS reality show "The Amazing Race" concluded another contest last night. In an amazing display of p.c. B.S., it jumped the shark, in doing so. In the final leg of the race, the first place team, a white couple, was smart enough to beg their way on to a flight that was 1 hour and 15 minutes ahead of the flight the second place team, a black couple, appeared to have been trapped on to. In an amazing display of See-B.S. bull shiite, the black couple was actually able to get American Airlines to "ask" the captain of the...

I'm from Pittsburgh, PA. I'm not a Jets fan or Chargers fan. But I am absolutely digusted with the bul%^&* officiating in that game. The Jets WON THAT GAME! For those officials to change the outcome of that game on that bull&%@# call on 4th down is disgracefull! They are worthy of being lynched - and I don't mean John Lynch. That arm to the head happened no doubt, but as to the intent - it is far to subjective. They both were falling and it COULD have been an accident. The Chargers did not deserve to win this game,...